White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

For a Man of My Age, I’m OK

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I know the exact day and time I grew old. It didn't happen slowly, I didn't ever so gently slide into the age of slippers and healthful toddies.
 
My arrival was sudden; brutal, you might say. One second I was going about my business, just like anyone else; the next I was an old man going about my business, just like any old man.
 
It happened on July 25, 2006 at the Amtrak station on the complex of Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. The young woman selling tickets looked at me and said, “You get the senior discount, right?” I looked over my shoulder to see whom she might be addressing, but I was alone in the ticket counter. In a small voice, I confessed that I was entitled to Amtrak's pity.
 
I had almost forgotten that encounter when my health insurer wrote to tell me that it wasn't their policy to insure people my age and it was time to accept Medicare's fatal embrace – fatal because no one leaves Medicare without the aid of a box and mourners.
 
A helpful woman at the Social Security Administration recommended that I start drawing immediately because, as she said so sweetly, “You never know what's going to happen.” Any thoughts of getting a bit more down the road evaporated. Persian poet Omar Khayyam's stricture “take the cash and wave the rest” was clearly written for me.
 
I had just gotten to feel that time was not of the essence when my doctors piled on a veritable regiment of fatalistic hand-wringers and the heartless phrase “a man of your age.”
 
It started with the orthopedic surgeon: “Your knees are not too bad for a man of your age.”
 
The cardiologist said, “I recommend a light exercise regimen and some medication for a man of your age.”
 
The internist said, “Do you want us to screen your prostate for cancer? For a man of your age, we don't usually do anything even if it is positive.”
 
To cheer me, he added: “If you get cancer there, it progresses very slowly and you'll probably be gone before it's a problem. That's my advice to a man of your age.”
 
The final medical insulter is my dentist. During a recent appointment, I wanted to discuss implants. But clearly, he's a man of fiscal rectitude. “We shouldn't really undertake too much on a man of your age,” he said.
 
I think, in his heart of hearts, he's leaning toward dentures. How in God's name does a dentist know how long someone is going to live? Maybe he's had several patients keel over on getting their bill — that sort of thing can be detrimental to a man of my age.
 
Social events are not where you can look for the milk of human kindness. A hostess introduced me this way, “He has known everyone who is anyone over the past — How long is it? — 60 years.”
 
For that kind of thing, I start shaking my quite firm hand and douse her white tablecloth in red wine. What can you expect from a man of my age?
 
People expect older men to be in the bathroom every five minutes, and I don't like to let them down. Trouble is the mirror. There's a man with white hair – what hair there is — starring out of it whom I don't know.
 
Like Henry V addressing Falstaff, I tell the apparition, “I know thee not, old man.” Actually I don't look too bad, for a man of my age. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Power Africa: The Grass Is Singing

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It is a lasting memory of Africa: men walking dozens of miles searching for firewood. No stick is dismissed and is added to a bundle, mostly carried on the head.
 
In most of Africa, all 54 countries lying south of the Sahara Desert, food is a problem and so is something to cook it with. As populations have grown, so has destructive deforestation.
 
The problem is not confined to rural areas. It spreads out from the shanty towns that surround the cities. There is no electricity, so something must be burned. Of course, it means dismal living conditions. Life without electricity fits Hobbes' description of life after war: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
 
Against this background, President Barack Obama has proposed a $7 billion electrification initiative. To use an expression adopted from T.S. Eliot but popular in Africa, the grass must be singing.
 
It is the right proposal at the right time, but it is also fraught with huge difficulties of implementation.
 
The administration is quick to admit that to bring electricity to the 70 percent of Africans who do not have it will cost $300 billion, more to maintain the deteriorating electric systems that already exist in and around the cities.
 
Barry Worthington, executive director of the United States Energy Association, part of the World Energy Council (WEC), and an expert on African energy, says the president is to be commended “at least for raising the issue of the people who have no electricity and what that does to economies as well as the lives of the people.”
 
For years, Worthington says, the WEC and organizations like the World Bank have been trying to draw attention to the pitiable electric supply situation in Africa.
 
But he also says the fix will not be quick. The 54 countries that make up Africa south of Sahara Desert are among the most difficult in which to do business.
 
To start, there is something a little dreamy about Obama's belief that the task will be undertaken by public-private partnerships. This is a concept more alluring in theory than in practice.
 
Obama will find that before they invest, corporations need to know what their chances of making money commensurate with the risks will be be. To do this they need political stability, respect for property rights, and a legal system where they can seek redress if things go wrong. These basics are in short supply in nearly all over Sub-Saharan Africa, with the possible exception of South Africa.
 
But looming above all is the destructive force of corruption. Corruption in Africa is interpreted as capitalism in practice. It has no shame; it is the way of the world.
 
In Zambia, for example, western mining companies that had operated copper mines there before and after a period of nationalization pulled out a decade ago abandoning hundreds of millions in new investment because corruption — sometimes operating as a kind of political protection money – became so severe that the mines could not operate and needed investment was wasted. The Chinese became major players.
 
Two years ago, it appeared the Chinese had found new ways of dealing with the corruption issue but that seems to be faltering. Ghana is awash with Chinese freelance gold prospectors, who were initially encouraged to come and pan for alluvial gold; now they are being driven from the mining claims by corrupt licensing officials and gangs of thugs. China is not exempt.
 
Africa is rich in energy with coal, gas, oil, rivers suitable for hydroelectrical development, sunshine and uranium. Yet global non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have a proprietorial attitude to Africa, and they subscribe to a kind of environmental imperialism in which only “renewable” technologies that get their seal of approval should be pursued.
 
Hardly had Obama finished his speech than Emira Woods of the Institute for Policy Studies was on the PBS NewsHour denouncing coal, gas and hydro as environmentally unacceptable African power systems. One assumes that leaves wind and solar; not enough heft there to lift up a continent.
 
There have been electric power successes in countries like Botswana, Cameroon and Tanzania. Worthington says: “At least the president has shone a light on the crisis. The need is great.”
 
The grass may indeed be singing, but softly. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

The Forces that Made Mandela, Africa’s Greatest Son

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It has been said that Nelson Mandela, when he was young, aspired to be an English gentleman, and that is very likely. Mandela was a nobleman from Thembu royal family of the Xhosa people. In understanding Africa's greatest son, this is important. Mandela derived his fortitude from knowing who he was. That sense of place never left him in 27 years of prison or in the years of adulation that followed.
 
I believe that Mandela was sustained by three forces: his British Methodist education, his ancestry and his Christian faith, also given him in the Eastern Cape Province by Methodist missionaries and teachers.
 
Throughout his life, Mandela conducted himself as that mythical English gentleman with an innate sense of justice, knowing his place in the scheme of things — even a lifelong love of gardening. Just being was mission to Mandela. It won over jailers and eventually enemies.
 
Even when it seemed he would never know a day in the sunlight of freedom, that inner dignity remained intact. He said: “We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.”
 
He was magnanimous in victory and conservative in battle. He opposed excesses in the African National Congress (ANC), which he headed before and after his imprisonment and which he inspired during his 27 years of captivity. He was especially critical of the incipient racism in the ANC and of its disinclination to recognize the efforts of white liberals, particularly South African Jews, in the struggle against apartheid, first in the courts, then through civil disobedience and finally through violence.
 
Mandela was born to social position. He could have been the king of the Thembu. if it had not be for a lineage issue with his mother. He was brought up after his father's death by the the tribal regent and Methodist missionaries.
 
The youthful belief in Britishness as a fount of social justice and decency, evaporated when he got to the gold-boom city of Johannesburg. Yet, like Gandhi, he treasured some of the British values all his life. Also, they were in competition with Afrikaans values which were more extreme with regard to race.
 
I know something about English education in Africa during the days of empire because I was lectured with the same theories by British teachers in the neighboring country of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Albeit two decades later than Mandela's schooling, the creed was the same. It went like this: We were a chosen people, kind but paternal, fair and enlightened and we are the gold standard for gentlemen. It was the glorious myth of those times, as heady as it was false.
 
There was no place for a black gentleman in that scheme of things.
 
Mandela studied law but was drawn into politics, always tempered by his Christianity and that sense of noblesse oblige that his heritage and schooling had imbued him with. He was a restrained revolutionary; but when he saw that legal maneuvering and civil disobedience were not going to succeed, he was bravely the public defender of the anti-apartheid cause. Mandela admired Gandhi and would have done it without violence if he had thought there was a chance. He advocated sabotage not murder. His terrorism was against property rather than people.
 
As Mandela was growing into a revolutionary, agreeing to political violence to overthrow the regime only as a last resort, apartheid was growing. Racial segregation was not a new idea, but its rigid enforcement with the massive relocation of people into “homelands,” or Bantustans, was. About 3.5 million people were moved to what the government said were their traditional homelands. Cities were cut up without regard to property rights, family ties or tradition. Whites got the good parts, Coloreds (mixed-race people) a sliver and blacks got the slums with some state improvements. It was as rigid as it was diabolical. Blacks had to carry “passes” when out of their designated area for work or other reasons.
 
In and out of prison, Mandela was a brave light in a dark place. The miraculous thing is that he never grew bitter; he sought reconciliation not revenge. He said: “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.”
 
“Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrica” is the anthem of the ANC and much of Africa. It means “God Bless Africa.” South Africa has been blessed with Mandela. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 

Disruptive Technology Hits Electric Industry

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If you are reading this by electric light, you are connected to the electric grid Unless, that is, you are one of an infinitesimal number of home owners who installed solar panels.
 
The penetration of solar panels may be statistically insignificant today, but to the electric industry these panels, and other self-generating schemes, are like dry rot: a threat to the whole edifice.
 
It is not just those panels that are beginning to disrupt the electrical grid, but the whole panoply of alternative technology; wind, geothermal heat, micro-hydro turbines and scattered natural gas turbines all fit into a new category of electric generation known as “distributed generation.”
 
The change is so threatening to the investor-owned electric utilities and their not-for-profit colleagues in the public power sector that it has begun to dominate discussions on the Web and wherever utility executives gather.
 
Early this year the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), which represents the investor-owned utilities that provide 70 percent of U.S. electricity, issued a white paper discussing the disruptive changes that are beginning to threaten the old electric paradigm. The theme of change also dominated the EEI annual convention in San Francisco earlier this month, with CEOs talking about a “new business model,” although they were hard put to say what this will be.
 
The root cause of the problem is that the new entrants into generating treat the grid as kind of open marriage: there when it suits them. A home owner, might be self-sufficient in electricity, and even generate enough to sell a small portion back, to the grid 90 percent of the time; but during prolonged bad weather, or if the home system is down for maintenance, that home owner expects to flip a switch and go back on the grid. The local utility, all the while, has been standing by hoping to sell that home owner a few watts until the home system returns to power.
 
This applies even more so to large users of electricity, including factories and big retailers. Many of the factory customers generate nearly all of their own electricity already and big retailers are getting in the game. Walmart is covering its store roofs with solar cells. McDonalds has eyed self-generating for years, but not without the comforting assurance that the grid will always be there.
 
All of this distorts the financial as well as the physical infrastructure of the utility industry and produces social problems as well. Ted Craver, CEO of Edison International, the parent company of Southern California Edison, told the EEI conference that as California is “ground zero” for rooftop solar, you have to ask “are you creating a system of those who have means for self- generating and shifting the burden to the have-nots? It is a social fairness question.”
 
The system is also skewed, Craver noted, by subsidies for alternative generation. He called for a flexible system that allows for these new realities.
 
Another threat, according to Tom Fanning, CEO of the giant Southern Company, comes to the ability of utilities — one of the most capital-intensive industries is the world– to raise money. “Our industry raises about $90 billion a year and we need policies that support that,” he said.
 
There are other problems facing the electricity industry, which are cataloged in an amusing and readable book by economist Steven Mitnick, “Lines Down.” While Mitnick is more optimistic about the future of the grid than many, he says it needs fixing. It has been starved of investment and needs upgrading, particularly hardening against the storm outages that are standard in America but not in Europe, Japan and South Korea.
 
The future of the grid is not in the hands of the utilities alone, but also the regulators, federal and state, and politicians. That means that the new paradigm may be a long time in coming, while another aspect of the U.S. infrastructure deteriorates. — For the Hearst New York Times Syndicate

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Sorry I’m not the President, but Can I Help?

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The calls come in all day and night. They come from all over the country, and from all kinds of people, and they've all dialed the wrong number. They think they've dialed the White House; instead they've dialed the office of “White House Chronicle,” a television program produced in Washington.
 
I've answered some of those calls, and they've given me an idea of public thinking.
 
Some callers, of course, are not in their right mind. They are usually the dead-of-night callers, oblivious to times of day and zones, who say they need to speak with the president urgently.
 
A recent caller from North Dakota, left a discombobulated voicemail message about her uncle, the gunning down of members of her family, and her “real need”to get in touch with the FBI. She was a caller with a soft voice and a real need for mental health care.
 
Then there are the daytime callers, mostly concerned citizens, who want to give President Obama a piece of their mind. I give many of them the White House switchboard and comment line numbers.
 
In mid-April, I spoke with a woman from Southern California who was mad as hell that the Senate had rejected a bipartisan plan to expand background checks for gun buyers, crippling the president's campaign to curb gun violence after the massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
 
“The president needs to know about what my friend, a mother who lost her child in a shooting, is doing to stop gun violence in California. She is a really remarkable woman,” she told me.
 
Last week, I answered a call from David in New Orleans. He said, quite certainly, “I've finally reached you.” When I tried to tell him he hadn't reached the White House, he said, “Can I just ask you something?” I replied, “Sure.”
 
He said he was a former inmate and while he was incarcerated, he wrote lots of letters to the president. “But he never answered any of them. How long do I have to wait to get an answer? All I want is a pardon.” I told him that the White House gets thousands of letters a day, and he might have quite a wait. But I didn't want to tell him that “Obama has the stingiest pardon record of any modern president,” which San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra J. Saunders wrote on May 21.
 
This week, I hung up on a screamer for the first time. An agitated man from Brainerd, Minn., called about his school-skipping,19-year-old daughter.
 
“I'm not her guardian,” he said. “She lives with her mother, but her mother doesn't care if she goes to school. I say she has to go to school. What do you think?” I said I thought it's a family matter.
 
Then he started screaming, “So you're the White House, and you don't care about education! You don't care about my daughter! Do I have to go to the Supreme Court now?”
 
I cut him off. I didn't know whether he was a crazy or a concerned parent at the end of his tether, like a lot of parents these days.
 
Here's what I think: Citizens both on and off their rockers should exercise their free-speech rights. But please call the White House switchboard operators — described by the late chief switchboard operator Mary Crowe Burns, who answered the phones for seven presidents, as "part diplomat, part psychologist and part security guard” — at 202-456-1414. Operators are standing by.

A Young Man, a Big Disease and a Big Idea

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We expect big ideas to come from young people in computers, social networking and music. In medicine, less so.
 
So meet Ryan Prior, age 23, of Atlanta, Ga. He suffers from a little understood but ghastly disease of the immune system known in the United States as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), and in the rest of the world as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME).
 
The disease is mostly incurable; affects men and women, but more women than men are recorded; and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta says there are 1 million victims in the United States and 17 million worldwide.
 
Its impact is horrific; confiscating lives, wrecking homes, sundering love affairs and grinding down caregivers and families. For the most part, the sick are sick until they die. Some are bedridden for years. Advocacy groups say suicide is high. I have received many letters from patients who say they can't take the pain, the helplessness and the stigma any longer, and beg for a quick release.
 
Despite all this, the disease gets short shrift from the National Institutes of Health and the CDC, although patients say they get a better hearing at the Food and Drug Administration.
 
Enter the over-achieving young patient, Ryan Prior. His story begins on Oct. 22, 2006. Like many victims he knows exactly when he was felled, when normal life had to be abandoned. He entered a dark world where good times are marked in hours; where bad times are days, weeks or months in darkened, silent rooms.
 
Prior was student president at Warner Robins High School in Warner Robins, Ga. (about 90 miles south of Atlanta), captain of the cross-country team and was taking three advanced placement courses. “My goal was to attend Duke University or West Point with the ultimate goal of becoming an Army Ranger,” he said.
 
By Nov. 15, 2006, Prior had to quit school. Under a Georgia plan for educating sick students, “my physics teacher taught me heat transfer while I was lying on the couch,” he said. But he slept through calculus.
 
Ryan still hoped to make it as an athlete. During a brief respite, he was back on his soccer varsity squad. But it was a disaster. He had been put on a drug that provided a short energy boost. “I went to a practice and played for about five minutes. I did OK for the first minute. After five minutes, I realized I had to stagger off the field as soon as possible. If I didn't get off voluntarily, I knew I would have to be carried off soon after.”
 
After seeing 15 doctors, who knew little or nothing about the disease, Prior found one who has helped him. Now, he says, he functions 90 percent of the time if he takes 15 to 20 pills a day and avoids overdoing it. Ultimately, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Georgia.
 
But it's the almost complete ignorance of CFS by most doctors that has set Prior on his big idea project. He is making a documentary film about the disease with young filmmakers, and with a $12,000 budget. He hopes the film will lead to $50,000 in funding to create “an eight-week summer fellowship program” for medical students, between their first and second years, to study with recognized experts in CFS. They would, according to Prior, provide each student with a stipend of $5,000 for the eight weeks.
 
Prior has compiled a list of nine doctors or clinics preeminent in the field who he believes would accept the fellows. The end result: a flow of young doctors with a knowledge of CFS and new ideas.
 
I can attest that this is desperately needed. As far as I have been able to determine there are many states, including West Virginia and Rhode Island, where there are no doctors with specialized knowledge of the disease. One woman travels from Delaware to Manhattan for treatment with Dr. Derek Enlander, and many have moved Nevada to be near Dr. Dan Peterson in Incline Village and the Whittemore-Peterson Clinic in Reno.
 
If Prior's plan works, it may lead to a much larger training effort in the United States and across the world.
 
“The message is simple: American history has progressed in a logical line from women's rights, through civil rights, then to gay rights,” Prior says, adding, “Medical history has a similar process of ridicule, repression and ultimate acceptance: MS, AIDS, and now we want CFS to be the next step.”
 

London Murder May Move History

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The murder of a British soldier in Woolwich, the working-class district of London, may be one of those murders that move history. The repercussions will echo down through the years affecting British politics, immigration, attitudes to Europe, possibly the survival of the United Kingdom as now constituted and the social progress of Asian and African minorities there. Immigrants now comprise 11.9 percent of the population.

These things, which were in flux, may now transit to turmoil. And Prime Minister David Cameron's differences with his own Conservative Party could lead to his ouster, unless he can use the murder as a kind of call to order in his rebellious ranks.

There are two big but related issues that have already roiled British politics and now may be forced to a head. The first is immigration. Always a thorny issue for Conservatives, it has been front and center since a big victory in local elections this month by the upstart United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) led by Nigel Farage.

Farage's platform is anti-immigration, not only from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean but also from the European Union. He calls for Britain to the leave the European Union and essentially seal Britain's borders against all comers.

UKIP's local government success led to backbench Conservatives — more than 100 of them — to seek an immediate referendum on Britain’s leaving Europe. They were joined in public support by Tory grandees, who had heretofore supported the prime minister.

One way or another, things will be harder for immigrants no matter when their families arrived in Britain. These divide essentially into longtime immigrant groups from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, and eastern Europeans, allowed in as a result of European Union labor law.

There is also a sharp division between Muslim immigrants and those who practice other religions. Muslim immigration has grown to the point of domination in some areas – like Bradford, in the north of England, and Birmingham in the Midlands. Muslim immigrants — now 4.8 percent of the population, and Islam the second-largest religion after Christianity in the United Kingdom — have established states within their adopted state with Islamic education, very visible mosques, and a palpable sense of their homelands being where they came from ancestrally rather than where they live now.

The Internet and cell phones have made this duality easier to practice. Sadly, the Muslim community in the United Kingdom has prospered far less than the Hindu community, where millionaires and some billionaires abound.

British resentment of the Muslims extends to the treatment of women, halal slaughter of animals, instances of honor killings and many foiled terrorist plots since the subway bombing of 2005.

In Qatar, I ran into a young English Muslim woman wearing a veil and dressed in traditional Arabic clothing. Hearing her speak, I said: “Hi, you’re English.” She rounded on me, replying angrily that although she was born and raised in England that did not make her English.

Understandably, this active refusal to assimilate breeds resentment among the Anglos. The trouble is everyone of color is assumed to be Muslim in the eyes of the Anglos, and the working class in particular.

Hence the rise of right-wing extremists, like the skinheads and the fascistic British National Party, and the more seductive UKIP. The Labor and Liberal parties are sidelined for now, without the visceral appeal that the Tories feel they may ceded to the UKIP.

Meanwhile, there is another shadow on the horizon: Scottish nationalists may push their own referendum on whether to leave the United Kingdom. Their leader, Alex Salmond, sees trouble in the south as opportunity in the north.
 
 
If things go really badly, Cameron could be seen in history as the prime minister who lost both Europe and Scotland – or rallied the country and saved the day. The murder in Woolwich, ghastly in its barbarity, will have consequences beyond that place. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

How to Move the Nuclear Project Forward

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Nuclear power ought to have everything going for it. It has worked extremely well for more than 60 years — a fact that will be celebrated at the Nuclear Energy Institute’s annual meeting in Washington this week.

Yet there is a somber sense about civil nuclear power in the United States that its race is run; that, as in other things, the United States has lost control of a technology it invented.

Consider: There are more than 70 reactors under construction worldwide, but only five of those are in the United States. They are in Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee. Even so, costs are rising and rest of the electric utility industry is resolutely committed to natural gas, which is cheap these days.

Once nuclear power plants are up and running, they tend do so seamlessly for decades, often operating above their original design output. It is clean power, unaffected by fuel prices, doing no damage to the air and very little to the earth, except in the mining of uranium or in immediate contact with the used radioactive fuel, when it is finally disposed of — an issue made thorny by two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.

Carter banned nuclear reprocessing just as it was about to be commercialized, and Obama nixed the Yucca Mountain waste repository in Nevada. The trigger for his devastating decision was the opposition of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), thought to be acting on behalf of the gaming interests of Las Vegas. Talk about wheels of fortune — a great technology endangered by legions of slot machines.

Overlooked when the nuclear titans gather in Washington will be two of nuclear’s greatest achievements: the nuclear Navy and the transformation of medicine. The Navy is largest maritime war machine in history with its aircraft carriers that can stay on station for more than a year and submarines that can go under the icecaps and stay submerged for months.

The utility industry seeks stability in all things, ergo it is not scientifically entrepreneurial. It embraces risk reluctantly. It accepts new technology when it is delivered with limited or shared risk.

It was that way with nuclear power, where the risk was shared with the government and sometimes the vendors. Likewise, with the development of today’s aero-derivative gas turbines, the military did the work and took the risk.

In this atmosphere it is easy to forget that nuclear is not a mature technology, but that it belongs at the frontiers of science. Today’s nuclear power plant is analogous to the black rotary phone — there is room for improvement.

But as there is no competition between electricity supplying entities, the impetus must come from elsewhere: government and incentivized private companies. Some like the General Atomics Corp. in San Diego, Calif., have reaped huge benefits by exploring the scientific frontier. While they are known mostly for the Predator drone, General Atomics' work on nuclear fusion has provided the building blocks for magnetic resonance imaging and tissue welding among dozens of medical advances and has enabled the company to use fusion science to develop the electromagnetic catapults for launching aircraft from carriers. If you get to ride a levitating train, it may be because it is suspended by electromagnetic forces pioneered in nuclear research by General Atomics.

Nuclear waste – the industry hates that term because of potential energy left in spent fuel — is the sad story of nuclear: too much yesterday (ideas codified and frozen 60 years ago), not enough tomorrow.

When aviation science has been stuck in the past, it has leaped forward by offering prizes to unleash invention: the first flight across the English Channel, the first Atlantic crossing, and now the first commercial foray into space, were inspired by prizes.

The good burghers of the nuclear industry might with their government allies think of cobbling together a really big prize that will change the thinking about how we deal with used nuclear fuel. At present, there are only two options: reducing the volume by cutting it up, leaching the useful stuff out and making glass out of the rest, and burying that or everything in a place like Yucca Mountain.

Generally in life and science, when there are only two options, there is a deficit of thinking. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

Amtrak at 42: Making the Grade

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Two cheers for Amtrak, which celebrated its 42nd anniversary on May 1. The nation's only intercity passenger rail service, derided by its critics and begrudged funding by Congress, is providing improved service and reliability.

But this service is lopsided, favoring the Northeast Corridor — the electrified route from Washington to Boston. Here, you have a choice of two levels of service. The premier level is the Acela Express, a Swedish import. Reaching speeds of 150 mph, the Acela trains compensate for tight curves with sophisticated tilting technology. The second level is the Northeast Regional with traditional trains running up to 125 mph, but mostly traveling much slower and with frequent stops. In both levels of service, the trains seem to be clean and well-maintained.

The two principal Northeast stations, Penn Station in New York and Union Station in Washington, are a different story. They are both horrific in their own way, and both are maintained by Amtrak.

Penn Station has a lot of low-grade retailing that seems to attract people who have no plan to ride the train and add to the sense of urban threat.

Union Station is less threatening, but it seems to have given itself over to chain retailing. The grandeur of this architectural masterpiece has been undermined by a proliferation of chain stores. Passenger accommodation is an afterthought: The restrooms are inadequate and too few, seating is scarce and often shabby, and passengers stand in long lines waiting to board their trains. This gives the feeling that the trains are as bad as the stations; they are not.

Outside of the prized Northeast Corridor, Amtrak shows decades of underinvestment. It tries to deliver rail service across 46 states. Correspondents tell me that this is often inadequate and is a last resort. I've been told horror stories about delays in Florida and the Midwest and breakdowns in California. One has to think seriously about whether one wants to take a long-haul train, even a sleeper, outside of the Northeast Corridor.

Amtrak came into being 42 years ago because passenger rail service from commercial railroads had collapsed and Congress felt that the United States couldn't be without passenger rail service. In those days, it was thought that Amtrak would serve those who couldn't afford to fly and those who simply didn't like flying. Amtrak wasn't set up as a government department but rather as a business, although it was understood that government funding would be necessary.

So began a long struggle; ostensibly over money, but more so over ideology. Conservatives in Congress have never liked Amtrak, and have believed that it should either perish or survive without government funding. Amtrak initiated relentless mallification of its station properties and predatory pricing in the Northeast Corridor, euphemistically called revenue management. Here Amtrak, like the airlines, charges what the traffic will bear. The Acela between Washington and New York and between New York and Boston is fast, elegant transportation for those who can afford it. The Northeast Regional uses the same revenue-management pricing, but charges somewhat less for slower rail service.

By means of its commercial struggling, Amtrak says it is able to cover 88 percent of its costs from revenue. The government subsidy amounts to $1.3 billion — $443 million for operations and $705 million for capital improvement. The total Amtrak budget is around $4 billion. By comparison, the much-admired European rail systems, with their sleek trains that run at 220 mph, have huge subsidies amounting to about 50 percent of the ticket price. In that sense, Amtrak may be a model performer.

As a passenger, someone who is infused with a sublime sense of well-being when a train pulls out of a station, I'm glad to report that despite its limitations, its chaotic terminals, its gotcha pricing, Amtrak has rolled into middle age, proving that rail transportation is still the most civilized way to travel and should have a bright future. Will Congress get smart and take the train? — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Making of McPaper

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Before the Internet laid siege to the well-being of newspapers, there was television, which made substantial inroads. It killed off evening

newspapers across the country, including famous ones like The Washington
Evening Star and The Chicago Daily News.

Morning newspapers with a more elite, less blue-collar readership,
thrived, although often their front pages were curiously long-winded
and out-of-date. They told people what they already had learned the
night before, but in greater detail — sometimes mind-numbingly so.

Al Neuharth, who died last week, had the courage to take on television
head-to-head with the first newspaper totally designed for the fight
against television: USA Today. It mimicked television with fact
boxes, short breezy stories and scads of weather coverage. It employed
color with a confidence that few newspapers had done. Other newspapers
followed its lead.

Critics dubbed the newspaper “McPaper,” which might actually have
pleased Neuharth, who had an eye for the bottom line. Looking at the
success of McDonalds, Neuharth might have thought to himself that if
his newspaper sold like hamburgers, well, that wouldn’t be so bad.

Noel Coward, the British playwright and entertainer, when asked what
he thought about his last musical “Sail Away” drawing vast crowds and
scornful critiques told a reporter: “Once again, I shall have to
comfort myself with the bitter palliative of commercial success.”
Those words might well have belonged to Neuharth as, after a 10-
year struggle, the newspaper broke through to real profitability, even
while the critics, inside and outside Gannett, scoffed.

For Neuharth, USA Today was the jewel in his crown. It was the one
achievement that redeemed his status as a newspaperman rather than a
corporate titan.

At Gannett he grew the company, taking over whole newspaper chains,
but not its journalistic renown. Papers like The Louisville Courier-
Journal were seen to deteriorate under a regime of relentless cost
control which homogenized and standardized the newspapers as
products, like hamburgers. All 75 papers in the chain were driven to make money not stars. It was the rank and file of the Gannett papers that might have been given the sobriquet “McPapers.”


With USA Today, Neuharth relied heavily on a new technology that
enabled the papers to be printed across the country. He accepted that
readers of the paper might already know the bare bones of the news, and
so he gave them that in short form and reserved longer pieces for the
lead in each section and the “cover story” on Page One. These were not
the news of the day, but news behind some aspect of American life. He abandoned the habit of “jumping” stories off Page One to an inside page. Only the cover story got this treatment.

Neuharth realized that to succeed, he would have to do something that Gannett papers did not do: spend money. He did so on talent, news bureaus and offices.

Jan Neuharth, one of two children from Neuharth’s first marriage,
operated an equestrian center in Middleburg, about 50
miles from Washington in Virginia's famed Hunt Country. It was there that she married Joseph Keusch, in a wedding that demonstrated her father’s organizational genius.

Neuharth was a great businessman, a great newspaperman, but most importantly he was a great organizer – whether he organized the growth of Gannett or the production and distribution of USA Today. Remember how you could not check into a hotel without a copy of USA Today appearing in front of the door in the morning? That was Neuharth the Organizer at work.

At his daughter’s wedding Neuharth did it all: tents for the members
of the wedding to get their hair and makeup done, a leafy chapel that was
transformed into a dance floor after the ceremony. But above all
Neuharth made sure that everyone, from the great and famous of the
Hunt Country, like NBC's Willard Scott and a scattering of senators and
billionaires, to the lowliest stable hand was there. He had grown up poor in South Dakota and hadn’t forgotten.


Maybe that’s how he knew what people wanted in his newspaper and why,
late in his life, he and his third wife adopted six children, across
the spectrum of ethnicity.

And to the end, he hadn't forgotten his old newspapering skills: he wrote his column on a manual typewriter. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate