King’s Commentaries

What Makes a President: Fallacies about Business, Markets

February 28, 2012 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

Come walk in the garden where the fallacies grow. Today, we’ll examine two varieties that are enjoying strong growth: the businessus presidentus and themarketus perfectus.

The first fallacy (businessus presidentus) is that a business person, presumably Mitt Romney, is better equipped to run the government than a professional politician. This is an idea as old as anything in the garden. The supposition is that business people are organized, understand the economy and are less prone make decisions based on politics. It also suggests that as a species they are innovative, strategic thinkers and have an acquired understanding people.

Well let's see: The purpose of business is business; in short, to make money. Romantics of the right like to credit it with virtues it doesn't have and doesn't want.

Business is about the numbers, and making the numbers. It’s not intrinsically wise, nor is it necessarily more inventive than government.

It’s true that business innovates; but only when it’s forced to by competition and disruptive technologies. Coca-Cola was supposed to be the smartest company on the planet until it introduced New Coke and had to beat an ignominious retreat. Many old and new businesses simply can't change fast enough. We’ve seen the demise of Kodak, Polaroid and Borders and the emasculation of Western Union. The American car companies had to be rescued — especially General Motors which was a model of management structure, celebrated by Peter Drucker, until its management choked the life out of it.

If Romney has the skills to be a good president, he didn't learn them in the wheeler-dealer world of investment banking – Remember Lehman? – but rather in the statehouse in Boston. By and large, business success prepares a man or a woman for retirement and maybe volunteer work, not political office.

The Washington trade associations periodically decide what they need is “kick-ass” business person. In time, they find someone who knows the ways of Congress to be a lot more effective than someone who can read a balance sheet.

Then there’s the workforce difference. Management controls the workforce in private industry, but the workforce often controls the management in government. Only the military is exempt from this rule. Presidents down to junior political operatives chafe under this reality.

The second fallacy (marketus perfectus) is about markets being next to godliness. Markets are an efficient way to distribute goods and services at affordable prices. But they are as cruel as they are efficient. They exterminate and reward.

It’s a heresy in conservative circles to point out that national interest and market interest do not always coincide. But among treasured companies that have been saved by government intervention in the market are Harley-Davidson (price barriers), Lockheed (loans), Chrysler (twice with loans, and later part of the great Detroit bailout).

It can be argued that some of our current economic woes are the market doing what it does best: seeking the lowest-cost, competent production. It was that which lead to the export of our manufacturing. Companies flooded China because they got the three things they sought and which they sought to satisfy the marketplace: low wages, talent and reliability. They didn’t flood to other cheap-labor places like sub-Saharan Africa, but to China which knew how to please.

People who have really changed the political landscape in Washington have been professional politicians, or those who have embraced politics as a second career, like Ronald Reagan. Richard Nixon changed it not by his misdeeds, but by creating the Office of Management and Budget from its predecessor the Bureau of the Budget. In so doing, he increased the power of the presidency and downgraded the Cabinet. And the consummate Washington insider, Lyndon Johnson, enhanced the president's war-making prerogatives — even though it would’ve been better for him and the nation if he hadn't.

If Romney makes it to the Oval Office, he'll have Massachusetts on his mind not Bain & Co. You won't get the garden to bloom with the wrong seed. –For the Hearst-New York Times syndicate.

The Technological Revolution So Great We Forget It

February 28, 2012 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

What are the achievements of Western civilization?

The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the spread of democracy and a free press tower on the intellectual side of the ledger. But they didn't happen in a vacuum; they needed coincidental technological advances.

The printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1450, made the Enlightenment possible. Shaft horsepower, invented by Thomas Newcomen in 1712 and developed by James Watt into a practical steam engine, enabled the Industrial Revolution to get off the ground and make the first great change in how people lived by substituting mechanical energy for human and animal energy.

For all the downsides of the Industrial Revolution, it was the dawn of the possibility of an improvement in the lives of most people. It hinted, even with the horrors of the exploitation of workers and miners by their employers, that life could be lived without relentless drudgery.

Recently Brian Wolff, senior vice president of the Edison Electric Institute, told security analysts in New York that the trade association is launching a campaign to celebrate the value of electricity.

Bravo and about time; for it is electricity that has done more to improve the livability of human life than any other product or service.

Electricity has many fathers, going back to 600 B.C., when Thales of Miletus wrote about static electricity. In 1600, the English scientist William Gilbert gave us the name “electricity,” derived from the Greek word for amber: Early experiments consisted of rubbing amber to produce static electricity.

Investigator after investigator added to the knowledge of electricity. In 1745, it was discovered that electricity was controllable and the first electrical capacitor, the Leyden jar, was invented.

Then came Benjamin Franklin, who popularized concepts of electricity with his key on the kite and his invention of the lightening rod. The first battery was invented by Alessandro Volta, who also proved that electricity can travel over wires, in 1800.

Technology moved way ahead in 1821, when the great English scientist Michael Faraday outlined the concept of the electric motor. Six years later another Englishman, Joseph Henry, built one of the first motors.

All of this paved the way for Thomas Edison, who founded the Edison Electric Light Company in 1878. A year later, the first commercial power station opened in San Francisco and the first commercial arc lighting system was installed in Cleveland.

But it was Edison's demonstration of the incandescent light bulb in 1879 that raised the possibility that human life could get easier. From then on, electricity was deployed at an astounding rate; despite excursions and disputes, like those between Edison and George Westinghouse and Westinghouse and Nicola Tesla.

And what a boon electricity has been. It has made the home life safer, eliminating open flames for heat and light, and more convenient. At various times, as a boy in Africa, I lived in homes without electricity. It's not an experience that I'd voluntarily repeat – no light after dark to read by, little heating, no cooling and immense drudgery to heat water and build a cooking fire.

Electricity has effectively liberated women from the slavery of the home and given then an equal role in society, and has made life in inhospitable climates, including the U.S. South, agreeable. And it's enabled whole technological revolutions to take place: broadcasting, recorded music multistory building, computing, health, refrigeration, transportation and just about anything one can name.

Electricity is ubiquitous and the single-greatest contributor to our quality of life. In our fascinating with computer technology and the Internet, it is forgotten that it rests on an earlier harnessing of electrons by a plethora of scientists down the centuries.

Of all the things invented by the peoples on both sides of the Atlantic, nothing has been such a gift to humanity as electricity. It's appropriate that it should be celebrated and find a prominent place in the pantheon of human achievement.

Flip that switch and marvel. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

PBS Hasn’t Kept Up

February 20, 2012 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

Things are tough in the world of public television.

State budgets for local stations are being slashed or eliminated, as in Rhode Island where Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee has proposed to fund Channel 36 through Dec. 31 and then eliminate state funding.

Five states have eliminated funding and others have cut contributions.

In Washington the federal contribution, through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is under constant attack from Republicans who believe that PBS is biased and that it shouldn't receive any public money whatsoever.

Mitt Romney says no to federal money.

But a larger problem for PBS and its stations is one of mission.

When the service was created in 1970, the mission was apparent: Create quality programming that couldn't be found elsewhere. As PBS was cobbled together from a collection of educational stations, children's programming was always an important element and remains so; also books, cooking, political talk, business, interviews, documentaries, music and drama.

Over time, the television landscape has changed out of recognition.

Competing broadcasters, to say nothing of the Internet, have eroded the once solid franchises that were the backbone of PBS broadcasting.

Books have been largely ceded to C-SPAN and the ever-creative Brian Lamb. Cooking, far from the glory days when the only place you could find out how to make a roux was from Julia Child, is now the theme of two cable cooking channels that are creating new stars.

Political talk, which in its modern incarnation was born on PBS with "The McLaughlin Group" and "Firing Line," is now a staple of commercial television. Likewise, cable has pushed ahead of PBS in developing business (Remember "Wall Street Week"?), interview, history and arts channels. Other PBS innovations like "Motor Week" and "This Old House" are also under attack on cable.

Running down the list of what PBS does that no one else is doing brings one to the last franchise that PBS still dominates, and that might be called the "British bonanza." PBS has been mining effectively the output of both the BBC and the commercial British television channels with great effect since the days of "Upstairs Downstairs" (commercial in Britain).

Today, in its struggle for audience, another British import, "Downton Abbey," is the brightest star in PBS's dimming firmament.

If PBS is to again command the community loyalty it once enjoyed, if it is to answer its political foes, if it is to be a decisive force in television and perhaps on the Web, it needs to stop whining about money – now part of its demeanor – and to ask itself, "Is it new?" Is it bringing in and developing young talent? Is it doing something, anything, that will be imitated around the world? Is it creating programs that will bring in dollars in syndication and entice sponsors to be associated with the excitement?

In the 1960s the BBC, which had become a national treasure during World War II, had lost its way. Commercial television was eroding its audience and pirate broadcasters were attacking its radio franchise. The BBC got off the couch and joined the creative fray, especially the satirical revolution. Bam! It was back.

Of course, the BBC with its private tax, called a licensing fee, had a lot of money to spend. But it wasn't money that saved the BBC from ignoble decline – it was unleashing creative forces in post-Empire Britain.

Particularly, the BBC encouraged young writers and producers. It worked.

PBS should think of itself as an incubator, not as a roost for the old, the tired and the timid. Had PBS, or rather one of its bigger stations, been offered "The Daily Show" or its stable mate "The Colbert Report," it's hard to imagine that they would've been welcomed.

Yes, PBS, those retread English comedies and Lawrence Welk won't cut it going forward. –For the Hearst-New York Times syndicate

What Makes a President: Fallacies about Business, Markets

February 16, 2012 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

Come walk in the garden where the fallacies grow. Today, we’ll examine two varieties that are enjoying strong growth: the businessus presidentus and the marketus perfectus.

Well let's see: The purpose of business is business; in short, to make money. Romantics of the right like to credit it with virtues it doesn't have and doesn't want.

Business is about the numbers, and making the numbers. It’s not intrinsically wise, nor is it necessarily more inventive than government.

If Romney makes it to the Oval Office, he'll have Massachusetts on his mind not Bain & Co. You won't get the garden to bloom with the wrong seed. –For the Hearst-New York Times syndicate.

Democracy Has a Tentative Start in Kazakhstan

February 6, 2012 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

Is it the felt revolution or the fur revolution? Or is it a revolution at all? (In Kazakhstan, nomads still use felt to build their tents, called yurts, and to wear a fur coat in Astana, the modern capital, is not a luxury because temperatures can plummet to -40 C in winter.)

But political change – slow, to be sure – is taking place in Kazakhstan: a vast oil-rich and landlocked country in Central Asia, which gained its independence in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. The Russians had both tried to colonize (22.8 percent of the population is Russian) and use Kazakhstan as a dumping place for prisoners, for nuclear facilities and for some of the worst environmental experiments, particularly dooming the Aral Sea by reversing the rivers that once fed it.

In mid-January, Kazakhs went to the polls for an election that could be the beginning – just the glimmering of a beginning — of a new era of democracy in Central Asia. In itself, this election was a small affair and was criticized as such by observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Myself and a colleague were invited as journalistic observers. We stayed in Astana and observed voting in just two locales, which were orderly and had a movie-set feel to them. We even got to watch President Nursultan Nazarbayev enter the voting booth, exit it and drop his ballot into a transparent box.

Fur-wearing voters drop their ballots into a box at the National Academic Library polling station in Astana. Photo: Linda Gasparello

The OSCE observers were critical of the way the government determined which parties could participate. They were also critical of the high polling numbers provided by the government, which claimed 80.7 percent support for Nur Otan, the party of the president, a former Soviet official who moved quickly from communism to capitalism but hesitatingly to democracy.

Yet in his 20 years of near absolute power, Nazarbayev has been popular. He has had the unique good fortune of being able to deliver above the expectations of his people.

Nazarbayev has been skillful in positioning Kazakhstan as a friend to everyone. By doing so, he has cultivated comity with his some of his irascible neighbors, including Russia, China, Iran, as well as the less-friendly other “stans” that border his sprawling, underpopulated country (about 16.5 million people).

He also has fostered good relations with ethnic minorities, including Uzbeks, Ukrainians, Uighurs, and many more. Likewise, with 40 religious groups: Kazakhstan is a predominantly Muslim country (70 percent, 26 percent Christian) with a secular tradition. Muslim women do not cover their heads; men are clean-shaven; the call to prayer does not ring out over Astana; and minority religions are permitted, including Buddhism and Judaism.

Cleverly, Nazarbayev has also given his people a shiny bauble to be dazzled by: Astana. In a little more than eight years, this architectural extravaganza has risen on the Central Asian steppe. Astana is spectacular and incorporates a kind of World's Fair-meets-The Emerald City architecture: There is a building that looks like giant golden egg in a white-branched nest, one that opens like a flower's petals, and one that looks like a yurt. The best architects in the world, like Britain's Norman Foster, have been invited to play – and they have let loose.

Palace of Peace and Harmony in Astana Photo: Linda Gasparello

But Nazarbayev's days as the Wizard of Oz may be drawing to a close, and the tentative nod to democracy may be an acknowledgment of that. He is 71.

A new generation of ambitious, gifted and well-educated men and women now walks the streets of the capital; young people who wonder about the paternalism, want to play on a world stage, and do not remember the bad old days of Soviet domination. They worry about the pipelines that take Kazakh oil in many directions – at present, mostly into Russia and China. Especially, they worry what will happen when their president passes from the scene.

After the disappointment of the Arab Spring, dare the world hope for a democratic birth on the Central Asian steppe? I think so. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Fasten Your Seat Belt, Obama’s Driving Energy Policy

January 20, 2012 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

By Llewellyn King

If President Obama were driving an automobile the way he's driving energy policy, he'd be stopped and breathalyzed.

The president’s latest decision to defer a decision on TransCanada's Keystone XL oil pipeline is a sudden swerve to the left, after his sharp right turn in curbing the enthusiasm of the Environmental Protection Agency for limiting electric utility emissions.

Similarly Obama has supported some new drilling for oil, but not in all the areas the industry would like to drill. He's in the middle of the road on this one, and no one is happy.

On nuclear power, Obama signaled a right turn and veered left. He came to office endorsing the nuclear option, including loan guarantees. But in a tip of the hat to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, the president opposed the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, and undermined the case he was making for nuclear.

The mischief did not end there. Obama appointed Reid’s man, Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to end the Yucca project and entomb, in effect, the $9 billion to $15 billion (depending on who is counting) in its abandoned tunnels. But because the government has longstanding legal commitments to take the waste, and has taken the money charged utilities (about $900 million a year) and treated it like tax revenue, the whole project has torn up the commission and landed it in court.

Jaczko, a former Reid aide, has riled the other four commissioners and the NRC staff to such an extent that the four went to the then White House chief of staff to complain about the chairman. An act of frustration totally unprecedented and deeply damaging to the credibility of the commission. Nobody resigned and a damaged regulatory body is now passing on the safety of the nation’s nuclear fleet. To all appearances, the chairman’s remit was to tear things up in the commission; that he has done.

In particular, the issue of licensing of Yucca Mountain has caused ructions. Jaczko has stopped the licensing in what the quasi-judicial Atomic Safety and Licensing Board in the case considers an illegal act. According to Marvin Fertel, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry wants the licensing to proceed if only to establish that Yucca was the right way to go and that it can stand the scrutiny that the NRC would give it in licensing. Fertel says that it's a marker for the future.

Opponents of Yucca, presumably including Jaczko, fear that a license would pave the way for the Yucca project to come back to life under a different administration. Did Obama, a lawyer, not know that political brute force in a regulatory agency is bound to throw it into disarray, and to leave its decisions to be impugned in court later? So why did he do it?

When it comes to alternative energy, Obama positively drove on to the left shoulder. The administration has promised wonders from wind, solar and advanced coal combustion. It has thrown money at these as though it were rice at a wedding. The most conspicuous of this mind-over-matter exercise was, of course, Solyndra. But the spending has been lavish, indeed promiscuous, and the bankruptcies are filling up court dockets and right-wing Web sites.

Yet, the gods have smiled on the Obama administration. A boom in natural gas, brought on by new technologies, and enhanced oil production, fathered by the same technological improvements, have brought oil imports down below 50 percent for the first time in 20 years. Electricity supply is holding.

Environmental organizations, having been cold-shouldered on climate change by the world in a time of economic upset, picked on the Keystone pipeline with fury. Particularly apoplectic about it has been the Natural Resources Defense Council, which hopes that by canceling the project, Canada would stop developing its oil sands.

No, says Canada. I spoke with Canadian Natural Resource Minister Joe Oliver shortly before Obama's first decision to delay the pipeline. Oliver said that if the decision weren't favorable, Canada would build a pipeline across the Rockies to British Columbia and export to China.

The latest setback has infuriated Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government, which now says it will no longer rely almost entirely on the U.S. market for its hydrocarbon sales.

So Obama’s latest swerve has angered our best ally and good neighbor, denied American workers thousands of jobs and will oblige refineries on the Gulf Coast to buy oil from unfriendly places on the world market.

He has also given the Republicans a handsome gift in an election year. Masterful! – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Winding Down the Nomination Show

January 13, 2012 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

Now that Mitt Romney is pulling ahead, I’m saddened to see the greatest political show in years drawing to a close. When will we again thrill to the way Texas Gov. Rick Perry parachuted into Iowa and eclipsed Michele Bachmann briefly?

At that moment the nomination was Perry’s to lose, and he wasted no time in losing it. He entered stage right with Texas panache. Writers and broadcasters, including myself, who had the temerity to question the Texas mystique – that famous swagger – got an earful from Lone Star loyalists. One thought that I should be roped and dragged behind a cutting horse. Another volunteered to do it.

Texans with six-shooters on their hips were ready to defend the honor of their state with cordite. That was until their leader drew a bead on his own foot and fired.

It wasn’t so much that Perry forgot the government department that was bringing down the United States, but that he gave the impression he had never heard of any of his targets before they were whispered to him seconds before he walked to the podium. One prefers one’s political heroes to explode rather than implode. We want to be able to laugh out loud, not feel terribly sorry.

Poor Perry. When he had to substitute piety for swagger, it was over. We want our Texans loud and brash with belt buckles as big as lesser states.

A personal favorite of mine was Herman Cain. Damn it. I liked him; an original by any measure, I’d say. But he was brought down by something less than original: a roving eye directing a roving hand. Jobs-for-sex would not, one feels, solve the unemployment crisis.

I didn’t care that Herman the Lover didn’t know where Libya was. If it had had a Godfather’s Pizza franchise, things would have been different.

The guy was appealing. While pizza may not have the same ring as computers or pharmaceuticals, he had a great resume as a mathematician and naval officer.

It could be argued that Cain and that other roguish aspirant for high office, Newt Gingrich, at least have standard-issue libidos. The rest were, well, a little sexually hung up.

The lovely Michele Bachmann, the righteous Rick Santorum and oh-so-pure Romney, who apparently has been untouched by human temptation or anything else as messy as human beings and their needs, all suffer from moral fundamentalism. It’s hard to imagine Romney as evincing passion of any kind, even though he is the father of five.

Santorum is the most fanatically puritanical about sex. Especially gay sex. To Santorum, the family is the triumph of human achievement. Not since Oliver Cromwell, apparently, has anyone cared as much about the family or its sexuality as Santorum. For him it’s not the individual that builds the state, but only the family — unless it’s the gay family. Indubitably big government is dandy, so long as it’s in someone else’s bedroom.

The same anti-gay fundamentalism animates Bachmann and, apparently, her husband who has a clinic to “cure” homosexuals. What is it about these people that has them so frothed up about other people’s private acts?

Oh, let it go if they froth in private. Who cares now that the race is narrowing?

When Gingrich goes, I’ll be shattered. Gingrich and his wife Calista standing by him as immobile as a cigar-store mannequin, belong on the high shelf of American political bric-a-brac. Gingrich sprouting his version of history, his version of his own role in history; Newt magnanimous in his brief ascendency and bitter as oblivion threatened. This was the Man Who Would Be President unmasked. The consolation prize of National Grouch surely belongs to Newt.

Of course there was a bit player, an understudy, someone qualified but unsung: enter, stage center, Jon Huntsman. A brief appearance, exit stage left. No applause, no mention in the program even.

So dim the lights, bring down the curtain, strike the set – never have so many outrageous eccentrics so unsuited the highest office in the world so entertained so many of us for so long. Sadly, the long national farce is over. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Shakespeare Said It: ‘All That Glitters Is Not Gold’

January 9, 2012 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

“There's gold in them thar hills,” goes the old saying. There’s also human blood and nerve damage in that gold. And there's dying animals and destroyed rivers.

The greatest gold rush in all of human history is on. It's not a pretty, a romantic or a benign business. Indeed, it's a catastrophe for the environment and for human and animal health.

The high price of gold – it has tripled since 2000 – is such that every gold-bearing plot of land and river is being ravaged in more than 70 countries. As many as 50 million of the world’s poorest people now depend on this kind of plunder for a living.

It's the mining equivalent of subsistence farming, but it's lethal in the cruelest ways. Mercury is used to identify the gold (2 grams of mercury for 1 gram of gold) to which it adheres. With each use, some of the mercury is washed away and vapor escapes into the air. In another variant of this practice, cyanide is used to leach gold out of ore in vats or ponds. Either way, two deadly substances are released without control into the environment.

The problem isn't with the deep mines of Australia, Canada, South Africa and the United States – the hard-rock mines. It's with two other categories of mining that use mercury or cyanide: alluvial and artisan.

Alluvial is working a river with pans and sluice tables, which are primitive devices that trap gold granules in a blanket or grease. Artisan – a term used by the United Nations and environmental groups — uses bigger machines and expensive “shaker tables,” which process earth by the ton rather than the bucket. These can be found in surface gold deposits in rivers and farther away. This is a mechanized version of finding gold that is not deep in the ground.

While artisan mining may conjure images of dedicated craftsmen coaxing gold out of rock with love and skill, don’t be deceived. The activity is savage and brutal; the plundered rock and soil is left to wash away, causing death and destruction over many years.

The Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, and its cohorts at the U.N. Development Program and the World Bank, consider cyanide to be the lesser of the two threats. Maybe. But I've seen great piles of mining spoil which the cyanide has rendered lifeless. Nothing lives in it or grows on it.

Certainly, mercury is the largest of the real-and-present danger of subsistence mining. In Indonesia, men stand in rivers with their hands in buckets of water, muck and mercury, according to one Associated Press report. The BBC also has reported promiscuous use of mercury in Indonesia and Peru.

From China to Romania, in much of Latin America and throughout Africa, there is extensive mining on the surface — and that means mercury use. Miners in these countries are well aware of the dangers — miners often are. But the economics of their lives dictate that they mine until it kills them, or the food chain collapses and their families are poisoned, or the operation has to move to a pristine area to be repeated.

The economic life that sustains also destroys.

The United States and the European Union have restricted the export of mercury. But that's only increased the price, while there appears to be plenty in international trade – enough for the nomadic miners of those 70 or so countries.

I have to declare a personal interest in alluvial gold mining at its simplest: panning and sluicing. My father, whenever his many little business endeavors failed, headed for the beautiful Angwa River in Zimbabwe, both before and after World War II, to look for gold. He mined it with picks, shovels, pans and sluices. The activity was so minor it left no lasting mark. In those days gold fetched $35 an ounce, hardly enough to sustain him and his family, but better than nothing. Now it's about $1,600 an ounce.

My father loved that river. He often spoke about its beauty and tranquility. I've been reviewing photographs of it today: a ravaged moonscape of pits and waste piles. Crime is unchecked, murder is common.

Shakespeare said it: “All that glisters is not gold.” Indeed not. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Nuclear Power’s Undeserved Bad Year

December 31, 2011 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

The great event of the nuclear calendar for 2011 was the earthquake and tsunami that hammered three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan.

If you are a nuclear power believer, these sturdy old machines proved their mettle. They withstood all that nature could throw at them; although terrible damage resulted from the loss of external power and the swamping of the emergency diesel generators. The result was core melting and trouble in the used fuel storage pools.

If you are doubtful about nuclear power, or you are simply a political opportunist, this event was the final nail in the coffin, the proof that the end had arrived. For you, it provided more evidence that nuclear power is inherently unsafe and that its use, as American scientist Alvin Weinberg once said, is a Faustian bargain. (It was a remark that Weinberg wished he had not made and which his staff and supporters tried to justify by explaining that in the German legend, Faust finally gets his soul back, having foolishly pledged it to the devil.)

Such nonsense aside, the extraordinary thing about Fukushima is that although almost 25,000 Japanese died as the result of the earthquake and tsunami, no one died directly from the nuclear accident or from the release of radioactivity. The buildings and containment structures survived as they were designed to 40 years ago. This, despite a wall of water 45 feet high with incalculable force.

Each year, thousands of people are killed in coal mine accidents around the world. In 2010, 2,433 people were killed in China’s mines, the world’s deadliest.

Yet it was nuclear that had the world holding its breath. As with all accidents or even incidents, nuclear is held to a standard of safety orders of magnitude stricter than is applied to any other industrial activity, including other big energy undertakings, like oil refining, chemical production and transportation, and aviation.

The suspicion that falls upon nuclear technology is not only unfair – it is uneven.

The peace has been kept for five decades by the U.S. nuclear navy. In home waters and ports, nuclear ships and submarines sail without criticism.

Even the two organizations which appear to make their livings from relentless attacks on nuclear, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, have not dared to attack the nuclear navy. They do not protest, say, the USS Enterprise, when the great aircraft carrier sails blithely into domestic ports with eight reactors at work.

No one raises issues of waste, terrorist attacks or the consequences of military action. Those who make a living out of opposing nuclear power do not have the temerity to go after nuclear propulsion in warships. The public would not tolerate the disarmament that that would entail.

So the opponents go after nuclear’s soft underbelly: civilian power. It is hard to imagine that it is more dangerous to operate a nuclear facility built to be safe on land than one built for war-fighting on the high seas and in ports and harbors.

There are times in history when triumph is recorded as failure. The British and the Prussians finished off Napoleon in the Belgian town of Waterloo. But in the English Language, “Waterloo” — a British victory – is a synonym for catastrophic defeat. Americans believe the Tet Offensive was the turning point in the Vietnam War, even though the combined forces of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army were roundly defeated by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces.

Fukushima, a once-in-history accident, was a victory of design and construction for its time. Even the radiation releases are now found to be lower than expected, even those in the exclusion zone are surprisingly low. Despite eager attempts to find a surge in new cancers around the plant, none has shown up.

The lessons are to incorporate more passive features, better power supply and to protect the emergency generators. Newer designs already incorporate some of these features — and all will going forward. The industry has reacted with unusual alacrity in the past to new lessons, something uncommon across the broad range of industrial endeavor from aircraft to automobiles. As with aviation, nuclear safety is always a work in progress, a striving.

To my mind, after 40 years of chronicling nuclear power, the industry makes a mistake in rushing to advertise the safety of nuclear power plants. That way the seeds of doubt are sown.

Aircraft makers learned that lesson back in the 1930s. They learned that the trick was to shut up and do better.

If nuclear plants are unsafe, they should be closed down. Now. Today.

If not, their virtues should be trumpeted. Now. Today. Where are the trumpets? – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

A Cotton Wool Christmas

December 23, 2011 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

It wasn’t the Grinch who stole Christmas; it was Northern Europe.

As a child born and raised in Central Africa, I was very aware of this confiscation. It outraged my mother, who was also born and raised in Africa.

We lived in British colony of Southern Rhodesia; and we were dominated by British immigrants who insisted on “dreaming of a white Christmas.” Well, tough luck.

As my mother liked to point out, not one more flake of snow fell in Central Africa than fell in the Holy Land, where Jesus Christ was born.

But we were — indigenous Africans and settlers alike — in the thrall of snow imperialism.

Being so close to the equator, snowfall was a meteorological impossibility. So those under the European cultural thumb decorated everything in sight with cotton wool. We could only dream of a cotton-wool Christmas.

Unlike my mother, my father felt no pressure from the European and North American inauthentic portrayal of Christmas as a white, cold affair. He didn't mind that the retailers edged their windows in cotton wool or that the Anglican Church went along with the Northern Hemisphere’s implication that Joseph and Mary struggled through the snow to get to the manger in Bethlehem.

The one thing my parents agreed upon was that Christmas began on December 24 and lasted for the traditional 12 days.

Not only was no snow substitute allowed in our house, but also no commercially produced ornaments; flowers and greenery were fine. As a result the whole family would go to a marshy area, known as a vlei, on Christmas Eve and cut great quantities of ferns which would be strung along the picture rails.

Decorations could be added to the green frieze, but only if we made them out of painted paper. Mostly, we stuck fresh flowers in it. It was a green Christmas.

When it came to food, my mother relented completely and we made English Christmas pudding (boiled for hours in muslin), fruit cake and pies made with mincemeat (an all-fruit mixture).

We weren't a drinking family, but a bottle of sweet sherry appeared at Christmas. My mother — who otherwise drank only tea and sometimes coffee (no water, milk, alcohol or sodas) — would take, ostentatiously, a very small glass of sherry. Having downed this half-ounce or so of fortified wine, she'd announce that she wasn't responsible for her actions, that she could feel her legs getting heavy and that she was drunk.

My brother and I watched Christmas after Christmas to see if there was any sign that there had been a physiological or psychological change in Mamma, but none was recorded.

We then ate a very English meal and listened to very English Christmas carols, like “The Holly and the Ivy” and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” My mother, who hadn’t signed her separate peace treaty with Germany, wasn’t too keen on “Silent Night.”

It wasn't until I had turned 20 and was working in London at United Press International that I saw real snow. Sorry, Mamma, it beats cotton wool and it makes for a splendid Christmas, even if things were a bit different in Royal David’s City two millennia ago.

Now for some wassail. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate