White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Twitter Rides to the Aid of Britain’s Gossip Press

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A mighty battle is shaping up between the British government and the American-controlled social networking sites, primarily Twitter and Facebook.

The government of Prime Minister David Cameron is committed to extending the harsh libel and privacy laws, with which it attempts to control the notorious tabloids, to social networking sites. The sites not only carry salacious gossip, but also provide tools for circumventing laws on the books for newspapers.

This state of hostilities between the government and the social media is a new front in a war that has raged in Britain since the first tabloids appeared in the 1920s.

The appetite for gossip in Britain is at the heart of the government's schemes to discipline the media, or at least hold it accountable, for the violation of the privacy of the famous, infamous and titled. Notwithstanding Lindsay Lohan, Charlie Sheen, Jennifer Aniston and assorted American glitterati adorning the supermarket tabloids, the British passion for the sex lives of the rich and famous dwarfs its American equivalents by orders of magnitude.

In turn the energy, resourcefulness, deceit and intrusion of the British tabloids is appalling. No electronic device, trick or bribe is overlooked in the endless campaigns to shame the famous, embarrass the wayward and, in general, romp around their boudoirs and places of assignation.

The tradition of paying informants – maids, butlers, nurses and old lovers –handsomely for lurid details (or anything that can be made to sound lurid) means that the prominent love at their own risk. Yes, it is sex, far more than money or corruption, that sells the British tabloids; and sales push up the revenues. The ability with modern technology to eavesdrop on private conversations has made things worse.

Despite the toughness of British libel law, the battle rages, led by two of a bunch of tabloids, the daily Sun and the weekly News of the World, both owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, the parent company of Fox and The Wall Street Journal in the United States.

It is not that these two are more amoral than the rest, but rather they are better at the game than their competitors. They pay more to informants and the paparazzi than the rest.

For these scoundrels, the United Kingdom in general and England in particular, are target-rich. It starts at the top with the monarchy. Yes, the tabloids cheered the royal wedding but they are ready – indeed, anxious – for the first hint of an indiscretion, domestic discord or even wardrobe malfunction. Then there are the aristocrats, often ignored, but center stage at the suggestion of sexual impropriety.

On to the rest, the footballers, the television personalities, the movie stars. Know what “bonking” is? It is the word favored by the tabloids for sex, as in footballer Y is bonking actress X.

No detail is too private or sick-making not to be rushed to millions of breakfast tables. To keep things spiced up, The Sun has a young, busty woman, naked to the waist on Page Three most days. Helps the corn flakes go down.

To protect the private lives of public figures, the British courts enjoin newspapers from publishing specific reports, if the victim is forewarned — and the preemptive “gagging” orders are feared and loathed in the media. They are so restrictive that it is illegal even to say that one has been taken out. But these themselves may have rebounded against the government the courts and the celebrities.

Frustrated journalists and gossip lovers have taken to Twitter and sometimes Facebook to list, often erroneously, which celebrities are hiding behind preemptive injunctions. The implication of such outing is that there are dark goings on.

Now celebrities are taking to the Internet to deny that they have taken out restraining orders or have a need to. So the government is ham-fistedly going after the social networks. It wants them to reveal the names of the Twitter and Facebook account holders.

As with a lot of regulation, the government and courts have made things worse. But if it goes after the American firms that provide Internet services in American courts, they will run into the First Amendment.

Even the European Court has sided in the past with the press. Generally governments are suspected of wanting to curb political speech and investigation, not tales from the bedchamber. Britain rules the sheets, apparently. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

The Joy of Natural Gas, It’s Here Aplenty

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Tired of high gasoline pump prices? Wondering why, with our fearsome energy hunger, all the energy seems to be in the Middle East?

That was yesterday's story.

Almost overnight — well, in a few short years — the energy picture has been changing. We are not energy beggars anymore. We have energy bounty — and that does not include the energy from wind and sun, or the controversial energy from the atom.

Now we have plenty of the most versatile of the hydrocarbons — more versatile than coal, and oil. It is natural gas; and it is going to change the face of America remarkably quickly, whether it is used to make electricity for electric cars or is burned directly in cars.

Natural gas is the new oil, maybe the new gold, and certainly the most exciting energy development in a long time.

Indeed, it is a Cinderella story: a hopeless orphan who is now the belle of the ball. Originally, natural gas was found in conjunction with oil and was regarded as something of a nuisance. It was mostly cursed and “flared” or burned at the well; and it is still flared when there is no way of moving it to market, either in a pipe or as a liquid. Cities favored a low-grade gas made from coal for lamps and heating because coal could be transported by rail.

But natural gas turned out to be a wonderful feedstock for fertilizers and many other manufactures and chemicals. It also demonstrated its superiority over coal gas for heating and cooking, and a network of pipelines spread across the nation.

Even as the usefulness of natural gas spread, so did the political desire to control it. The Federal Power Commission, the predecessor of today's Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, issued what became known infamously as the Permian Basin decision. It said that natural gas in interstate commerce had to have the price regulated by the federal government.

The result was two classes of gas, interstate and intrastate. It was a disaster, coming as the demand for gas was rising.

Then came the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, which meant that gas was wanted for things oil had been used for up until then. Growing gas demand coincided with severe shortage not only in the pipelines, but also in proven reserves in the ground — low regulated prices had cut into exploration. The outlook for gas was bleak.

By 1977, the Carter administration had declared natural gas a “depleted resource.” There was panic. Newspapers listed all the good things we got from natural gas. Congress decided it was too useful to be burned, and it passed the Fuel Use Act.

Henceforth, gas was to be husbanded. Pilot lights on domestic cooking stoves were banned, as were all decorative uses of flames. Even the eternal flame at Arlington National Cemetery was nearly extinguished.

In 1987 natural gas was deregulated, and the companies started exploring and drilling again. The gas shortage transformed itself into a “gas bubble.” When I told a meeting of Wall Street analysts in the early-1980s that natural gas would again be used for electric generation they were disbelieving. As I left the building, one analyst said to another, “Very droll, but he doesn't know what he's talking about.”

But it did happen, and in a big way; not only was more natural gas being sought, but technology was set to change the amount of gas available and the way it could be used.

The first technological advance was a very efficient, gas-burning machine for utilities, the aeroderivitive turbine. Then came horizontal drilling, which allows a single gas or oil well to stretch out tentacles for miles in every direction. This drilling technology opened up old gas and oil fields for further exploitation and made new ones very profitable.

The final jewel in the natural gas crown was the ability of drillers to start breaking up rocks in the shale band — between 6,000 and 9,000 feet below the surface — in areas that were not before thought to contain gas. The Marcellus field, extending through Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia and Ohio, may turn out to be the largest shale field currently being developed.

El Dorado enow — except for environmental concern about the chemicals used to break the rock, in a process called fracking. Also, groundwater has been affected in many locations; and there is video of tap water burning.

But proponents of natural gas point out that it has half the greenhouse emissions of coal, and few or no nitrous oxides. Natural gas is set to do for the United States what North Sea oil has done for Britain and Norway.  — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

How Fear, Greed Factor into the Price of Gasoline

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The fate of the Obama presidency hangs not on a birth certificate or the red ink on the federal budget but by the hose nozzle of your local gas station.

Electoral discontent is measured by the price of a gallon of gasoline. Heading past $4 toward $5, that is a lethal trajectory for President Obama.

Enter the demagogues, especially the clown-in-a-business-suit, Donald Trump. Unfettered by the gravity that goes with facts, Trump says that he would fix the oil price — now around $110 a barrel — by facing down the producers, particularly the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). He told an interviewer on television that he would call OPEC and tell them to pump more or face the consequences. The latter, he did not specify. War? Against whom?

In a compelling book by Leah McGrath Goodman, "The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World’s Oil Market," the author lays out the ugly fact that often — in fact, more often as not — the price of oil is set not in Vienna at the headquarters of OPEC, but in downtown Manhattan at the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX).

Tens of thousands of future contracts are traded in nanoseconds at the NYMEX, and the price of oil is set. This price affects not only the price that will be paid when these contracts expire and delivery takes place, but also, according to Goodman, the all-important over-the-counter market, where sellers trade more directly with buyers without government oversight.

Goodman contends that there is little oversight of the NYMEX because the agency charged with the role is the weak and ineffectual Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), where many staff and commissioners are busy burnishing their resumes so they can cash in later as market executives.

The over-the-counter market is not regulated at all because of a pernicious interference from Congress known as the “Enron Loophole.” How did it get into law? It is one of those pieces of special-interest protection that owes its existence to legislative immaculate conception. It was not in the committee version of the bill; it slipped in along the way without parenthood, but is largely believed to be the work of former Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, whose wife, Wendy, was chair of the CFTC.

In classic theory, a market is where a willing buyer and a willing seller strike a price. In the world of traders, it is something else: It is where volatility is rewarded and myths hold sway.

Today there is no actual shortage of crude oil. Supply and demand, according to those who monitor these things, is in balance. But fear stalks the trading floors because fear is good for traders; and fear is a critical part of the oil price.

Wars and rumors of wars are relished in trading pits. They raise the specter of coming shortage and introduce the instability the traders love. During the electricity shortage in California in 2001, traders, particularly at Enron, sought not only to capitalize on fears of shortage, but also to guarantee shortage by taking generating equipment off line.

Of course, reality must eventually catch up with speculation. The production of oil must meet demand and the price will briefly reach real world equilibrium. This happened in 1986, when the price collapsed because Saudi Arabia opened its spigots after the volatility of the 1970s. Many traders were wiped out and speculative billions were lost.

Some oil industry observers believe that the market is trading on a “fear premium” of about $1 per gallon of gasoline, spooked by the uncertainty in the Middle East and traders exploiting that fear.

Good for Obama. Time for the president to engage in a little market manipulation of his own.

The nation has about eight months of supply of crude oil saved in salt domes, in what is called the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. There is more oil available in the Naval Petroleum Reserve, a set-aside of oil in the ground. Obama needs to say that we are going to start using this oil as soon as it can reach the refineries.

He has to go the whole hog — to set the machinery of using our special reserves in motion. That will humble the traders.

However, any new wars in the Middle East, and all bets are off. Poltergeists would stalk lower Manhattan. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate





More White Mischief

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From the Romans on, wise men, including American humorist Mark Twain and French humanist Michel de Montaigne, have advised: Don't lie unless you have a good memory. This could be updated for conspiracy theorists this way: Don't spout theories of conspiracy unless you have the mind of an historian. Take note, Donald Trump.

Now back to Aug. 4, 1961 and the birth of Barack Hussein Obama in a faraway place, Kenya Colony in East Africa. It is a part of the British Empire that knows that its days as a playground for the English upper class — and often aristocratic playboys and playgirls – is limited. A year and a half earlier, their life in the sun was challenged and the future revealed when Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told the South African parliament on Feb. 3 that “winds of change” were blowing through Africa.

The settlers on the famous “White Highlands” of Kenya Colony had survived the scandals of the 1930s and early 1940s, when the lover of a particularly beautiful woman, Lady Diana Broughton, was believed to have been murdered by her husband, Sir John Broughton, 30 years her senior. The murder of Josslyn Hay, the Earl of Erroll, took the cover off the aristocrats cavorting in Happy Valley and the famous Muthaiga Club in the capital, Nairobi.

Back in England, where the dark days of World War II were raging, the fun-in-the-sun frolickers were pilloried as a dissolute lot with servants, booze, drugs and a penchant for wife-swapping.

In the 1950s, the brutal Mau Mau uprising by Kenya's Kikuyu led to a loss of faith in the future in all of colonial Africa, including Southern Rhodesia, another British colony with a small white population. Unlike Kenya, which was governed from London, Southern Rhodesia had a greater degree of self- government and was less a playground for wild exiles.

The tone of life in Kenya was summed up by the title of a book about the colony's most famous murder, “White Mischief,” later a movie. Anyway by the time Obama was born, things in Kenya were getting tense.

So in this environment of racial sensitivity, imagine a white American giving birth to a child fathered by an African. The local newspaper, The East African Standard, would have been aghast. Blimpy club men would have sputtered over their Scotch and sodas and their wives would have spilled their tea and moved forward the hour for their evening cocktails, known as sundowners.

The settlers in Kenya may have lived fast but, as in Southern Rhodesia, no issue was more sensitive than white women and black men. In 1957 there was a celebrated case in Southern Rhodesia of a black man, Patrick Matimba, who, while studying in England, had married a white woman from the Netherlands and took her to live in his homeland. The white Southern Rhodesians were enraged. While there might have been many white men who were coupling with black women, the reverse was not tolerated. It terrified the settlers.

Uncomfortably the Matimbas set up house in the only place that they were allowed to, church property in the farming hamlet of Rusape. When Mrs. Matimba suffered a miscarriage, her husband could not visit her in the local white hospital. Around this time a white widow, Mrs. Fletcher Lowe, who had an affair with her African servant, was imprisoned. I covered both stories and knew the players well.

So to those of us who grew up in colonial Africa, it is inconceivable that Obama's mother gave birth to him in Nairobi and that his step-grandmother watched the birth.

More intriguing is how birthers believe that not one but two birth notices were placed in Honolulu newspapers within nine days of Obama's birth. How could that be done without credit cards; the Internet; or in the probability that outside of the American Embassy, not too many people in Kenya knew anything about Hawaii? After all, Hawaii had only been a state for two years and the people of Kenya had other things on their minds, let alone how to post birth notices across two oceans.

No, Donald Trump. The kind of disinformation pedaled by the birthers had a name in Kenya: white mischief.  – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

 

Danger in the Market: The Sharks Have Computers Now

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Jim McTague, Washington bureau chief of Barron's, the stock market newspaper, is as gentle a journalist as pads the halls of Congress or pops into the briefing room of the White House. But he has chosen to poke a tiger with a short stick in his new book, “Crapshoot Investing: How Tech-Savvy Traders and Clueless Regulators Turned the Stock Market into a Casino.”

The book is likely to stir regulators, legislators and traders. It tells a sad and frightening story of inept regulation, congressional good intentions gone wrong, and technological excess.

McTague says a very small number of trading firms, using highly sophisticated computer programs, have upended a once efficient market for the allocation of capital and turned it into a casino operating at electron speed. The losers, he says, are traditional brokers and small investors who

do not stand a chance in a market dominated by trading that moves faster than information can be released to the public. The much-loved New York Stock Exchange “ticker” now lags actual computer trading, McTague says.

Currently, 70 percent of all trades are executed by hugely complex algorithms written in computer code by mathematicians and physicists, who have abandoned their traditional lines of employment for the gigantic rewards of Wall Street.

In a chapter headed “The Road to Ruin,” McTague says, “The history of U.S. investors and their experiences in the equities market has all the earmarks of an abusive relationship, and it will require an eminent psychiatrist several hundred pages to explain why the battered investors return to the market time after time after their previous drubbing, knowing in their hearts that they eventually will be brutalized again.”

The great example of how dysfunctional and dangerous the markets have become is May 6, 2010. It is the day of the “flash crash,” when the so-called high-frequency trading computers lost their electronic minds

There are stories about what triggered that day of disaster; but, in the end, the thing is that it did happen. Computer trading ran away with the market and nearly sank it. In a 10-minute period, many classy blue-chip stocks were nearly wiped out. For example, Accenture, trading at around $42 was reduced to a penny.

When trading was suspended that day, the crafty computers simply moved the trades to other exchanges, such as Frankfurt and London. Eventually most of the lost value was restored, but not the lost confidence.

The computers had outsmarted themselves. Their programs rely not only current trading conditions and knowledge of specific stocks, but also on historical data. “The computers read the newspapers and they have information from historical reporting as well as today's business pages,” McTague says. The problem is they do not have any newspapers from the 1920s; and when the crisis of May 6, 2010 hit, “the computers did not know what to do, so they began liquidating.”

This sad tale begins in the 1970s when Congress, with good intentions, sought to make all stock markets more competitive and the New York Stock Exchange in particular a more open and consumer-accessible place.

In 1975, the reforms were enacted as amendments to the basic securities law of the country. Over the years, the regulatory agencies implemented these reforms. According to McTague, they botched the job.

The reformers also misjudged the impact of computers. Their idea was that they were going to make the markets more egalitarian. Instead, they have favored the greedy few at the expense of the small investor, broker and 401K pensioner.

McTague has no magic solutions, nor does he suggest that people with excess cash stuff it in their mattresses. But he has some tips which he follows himself, including:

  • Do not trade early in the day because that is when most small investors put in their orders, and the sharks are waiting to eat them in the afternoon.

  • Do not leave your research to other people.

  • Be brave and hold on, if you are confident in the stock you have invested in. But do not hesitate to sell it if necessary.

In the short term, computers are making nonsense of the old advice to buy and hold, so investors have to watch their stocks carefully and do their own homework.

Broker-turned-journalist McTague is still trading himself, aware of the dangers. He concludes, “… there is no sure-fire method for a retail investor to beat the market. It has become a shark tank and we are the anchovies. Every time you buy or sell a stock, you are rolling the dice and hoping for a good outcome.” — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Lives Interrupted

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In 2010, I made more friends than in all of my life. They are scattered across the United States and around the world. But for their sake, I wish they had never heard of me.

Sadly, my new friends know me only because I have taken up their cause. I have written and broadcast about their plight, and they have responded by pouring out their hearts to me.

For very minor service, I have received more gratitude, more praise and more life stories than from anything I have written or broadcast in five decades in journalism.

My sad, suffering new friends are victims of a grossly misnamed disease: chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). It was once known more robustly as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), which at least suggests seriousness even if it isn't quite accurate. Myalgic describes pain in the joints and encephalomyelitis, inflammation in the brain and spinal cord. CFS has no known cure, and varies in intensity during the sufferer's lifetime.

In 1988, the Centers for Disease Control named the disease chronic fatigue syndrome after an outbreak in 1985 at the Incline Village resort on Lake Tahoe, Nev.

As far back as the 18th century there were recorded outbreaks of the disease, which was given various given names. In 1955, there was a major outbreak at the Royal Free Hospital in London.

The 300-case cluster in Nevada is generally recognized to be the largest in the United States. The second-largest cluster occurred in Lyndonville, NY, a northwestern hamlet where 216 cases were confirmed in a population of fewer than 1,000, also in l985.

A Lyndonville physician, David Bell, is regarded as one of the true experts on CFS, as well as one of the most dispassionate in the controversies that swirl around the disease. Bell has resisted pressure from both the medical establishment and patients' groups while retaining their respect.

As I see it, there are four controversies that plague discussion, research and therapies:

  • Is it a psychological disease with severe physical manifestations (a diagnosis favored by the British medical establishment)?

  • Is it caused by the new retrovirus XMRV (first spotted in prostate cancers) as some researchers believe, and nearly all the 1 million patients in the United States pray will lead to a cure?

  • Some charge there is a conspiracy in the medical establishment to downplay CFS out of guilt over past indifference, or pressure from the psychiatric practitioners who are reluctant to surrender jurisdiction.

  • Others fear a threat to the general population — clusters confirm CFS is contagious. But the pathway of the pathogen (air, blood, sexual intercourse, surfaces, food) or how great the risk is unknown.

Thanks to the Harvey Whittemore family — daughter Andrea Whittemore Goad has been a CFS sufferer since childhood — some serious, privately-funded research is being done at the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI) in Reno, Nev.

It is from this institute that the most compelling evidence of a retroviral role in CFS has originated. But recently, it has been refuted by British scientists who claim there was contamination in the tests, skewing the results.

Dr. Judith Mikovits of WPI rejects the British conclusions of contamination. She is very confident that she has found XMRV present in a majority of CFS patients, contending that she has used four methods of analysis against one in Britain.

Bell, the hands-on doctor from New York, told me he believes the virus is present. Yet only when XMRV is irrefutably proven to be to blame can the search for a cure take shape.

These are among issues that will be discussed on April 6-7 at a “state of the science” meeting at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. But there is no expectation that anything very new will be revealed as the debate rages daily on the Internet.

Deborah Waroff, a gifted New York City author, former securities analyst and CFS sufferer for 22 years, tells the story of her first attack this way: “I have no idea how I got it. I had the symptoms of flu. After a week, thinking I was pretty well, I went back to my normal activities like biking and tennis. Then after a week, I was sick again. This repeated several times that summer [1989], until I got to a point where I was never well again. After a little activity, I would collapse, fold up.” Often, Waroff is bedridden, and nothing has improved permanently.

Her symptoms were classic; fever, dizziness, stomach upset, swollen lymph glands and frequent headaches. She developed cognitive problems such as putting the wrong words in sentences, known as dysphasia.

Waroff introduced me to my new friends and their terrible witness to suffering, abandonment and medical indifference. Their families break up, their spouses and lovers drift off. Infected parents worry for their children. One correspondent told me that they are the “unburied dead.” Others said they were “living in coffins.”

They have no celebrity spokesperson. They have no Washington lobby fighting for research dollars. They have no hope that a cure is just around the corner; and little confidence that government research organizations are trying hard enough, if at all, to find one. To know them is to peer into hell. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate



Obama’s Empty Gasoline Tank

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There is a piece of doggerel which goes:

They said it couldn’t be done.

So I went right to it — that thing they said

Couldn’t be done.

And I couldn’t do it.

And that is the way it has been with presidents since the 1973 oil crisis. All of them – from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, who has just joined the club — have wrung their hands and exhorted us to use less oil in general and less foreign oil in particular.

Nixon had his commerce secretary, Peter G. Peterson (he of enormous wealth these days), promise far reaching and revolutionary “initiatives” to tame our thirst for oil. But Nixon was out of office before these palliatives were revealed.

Gerald Ford, caught up in vicious inflation, partly linked to the cost of oil, launched the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), combining the Atomic Energy Commission, the Office of Coal Research and other energy entities in the federal government. ERDA initiated many programs, while politicians invoked the Manhattan Project and the Apollo 11 moon landing. But the search for the Fountain of Eternal Energy failed.

Jimmy Carter wanted not only to solve the energy challenge, but to be seen to be solving it. Ergo, he expanded ERDA into the Department of Energy (DOE) and created a separate Synthetic Fuels Corporation. The latter failed after a short and unhappy life. No oil reached the pumps.

When the price of oil collapsed in the 1980s, so did hopes for many of the alternative energy sources, including ocean thermal gradients and flywheel energy storage.

To its credit, though at great cost, DOE, through its chain of national laboratories, kept searching. The result has been evolutionary improvements in many fields, and some really revolutionary ones in how we find oil and drill for it; these include seismic mapping, new drill bits and horizontal drilling.

These evolutionary developments brought more oil to market and have contributed to the recent improvement in domestic production that Obama likes to point out. It has enabled us to cut our imports slightly, so they now stand at 11 million barrels per day out of consumption of 20 million barrels per day.

Obama wants us to cut those imports by a third. To do this, he has no magic bullet.

In fact, he has no ammunition: solid numbers and research. His speech at Georgetown University was founded more on hearsay than science or economics.

Because he criticized them for taking out leases they have not drilled, the oil industry disliked the oil component of the speech, but thrilled at the emphasis on natural gas. When it comes to leases, the industry hankers not for those it holds, but for the plums that have not been leased for political reasons:  the eastern Gulf of Mexico and Alaska.

Sadly, Obama seemed to have learned the wrong lesson on his recent trip to Brazil because he is brimming with enthusiasm for ethanol. In Brazil, this is made from sugar cane, of which the Brazilians have a lot and cheap labor to farm it. Here, it is made from corn with devastating results on all the food products that come from corn. George W. Bush shoved the country down that slippery slope, and Obama wants to add more lubricant.

Another Obama tool is mandated fuel-economy standards. Problem is the market will start circumventing the regulations. It works like this: If you mandate 40-miles-per-gallon fleet average instead of floods of new small hybrids of the Toyota Prius type, the market will supply small, regular cars and large, luxury hybrids. Better, but not everything the president might want.

Real oil savings come with high prices dictated either by taxes or shortage. Presidents, however, have to placate voters by holding down the price of oil, signaling that it is all right to consume. That leaves presidents — and Obama has just proved it — with that last resort of the impotent in office: exhortation. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate


 

Taylor and Burton: In Love for All of Us

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I don't believe I've ever seen two people so in love as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. I was a young reporter in London when the lovers were staying at the luxurious Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane.

My assignment from one of those notorious British tabloids, where more good journalism than bad actually takes place, was to go up to the hotel and track them down; maybe get an interview; certainly tell the world everything that you could about their accommodations, what they were eating, and when they came and left.

The hotel, as you might expect, skillfully frustrated my efforts and those of my competitors. They guided us to the bar and an endless supply of Champagne — Veuve Clicquot, as I recall.

Meanwhile, the lovers came and went by side doors and back entrances. Day after day, I went to the Dorchester; and day after day, my prey avoided me.

All I really needed was to see them and extract a few words. Even if they'd said, “Go away and stop following us,” it would've been enough.

I can see the piece I would've written even now, “The world's most famous lovers pleaded yesterday for privacy as they sallied forth from their love nest at the posh Dorchester Hotel. … ” One would've noted their clothes; the car they got into; possibly the doorman, for a consideration, would've told me where they were headed.

But alas, no: It was not to be. And then, a miracle.

I was living in the south London suburb of Dulwich, famous for its college, its art gallery and as the birthplace of the novelist Raymond Chandler. A block or two from where my wife and I lived was a pretty decent pub with a good dining room. We often went there for lunch on Sunday. After a dispiriting week of failing to even see the Taylor-Burton duo, I was looking forward to forgetting them over a good lunch and bottle of wine.

I can't remember if we were shown to a table or if we took the table because it was the only remaining one, but we sat down without looking around. And when we did, there they were: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton at the next table, only feet away.

They were so beautiful. Never do I recall seeing any couple so in love. They glowed. They stared at each other. They talked softly to each other. They smiled and they laughed, oblivious to the room and the two journalists sitting next to them.

My wife, a fine journalist herself, whispered: “Are you going to speak to them or call the office [for a photographer]?”

The mere place where they were lunching — a bit off the beaten track, as it was — would've made an item in the paper; a chat would've produced a career-building, mini-scoop. But there was something about the joy emanating from the next table that stayed my hand and my wife's. We let our opportunity slide away because of the palpable joy coming from the Burton table.

The chase could resume the next day. Maybe we had a second bottle.

Over years, I've always wondered what it was about Taylor, great actress, great beauty, great lover, great humanitarian, that caused her to be more admired by women than men, the way Marilyn Monroe or Ava Gardner were. Conversely it is men who really revered Burton, identified with him.

Maybe that made their love affair our love affair. I, for one, think it was.

Taylor, who has died at age 79, shone even brighter in the firmament than Burton. But together they lit up the world. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

Nuclear Still the Best Power for a Great Future

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For 40 years I've written about nuclear power, defended it and believed, as I still do, that it offers the best signpost to a great future, to what Churchill called the 'sunlit uplands' — in short, to utopia.

I regard electricity as one of mankind's great achievements, saving people from the menial, painful drudgery that marks daily existence without it. Growing up in Africa, I'd see men and women walking miles, many miles, barefoot across the savanna, looking for a few pieces of wood to burn for cooking and hot water.

Electricity, I've believed for these four decades, is assured for thousands of years through nuclear. With advanced breeder reactors and with the energy stored in weapons plutonium, it comes close to perpetual motion: So much energy from so little fuel.

The alternative is to burn up the Earth, fossil fuel by fossil fuel, until we are searching, like the people of the African savanna, for something that is left to burn.

Wind and solar are defined by their geography and limited by their scattered nature. Their place at the table is assured but not dominant. Industrial societies need large, centralized energy sources.

Yet a nuclear tragedy of almost immeasurable proportions is unfolding in Japan. The sum of all the fears about nuclear is being realized. Hades and Poseidon have joined to cut nuclear down.

Do disasters, like the Japanese nuclear one, really kill technologies? Mostly, obsolescence does that, but their demise can be accelerated by a last huge mishap.

While the Hindenburg disaster at Lakehurst, N.J., in 1937 didn't end lighter-than-air aircraft for passenger travel, it drew the curtains: Fixed-wing airplanes were doing a better job. The Concorde supersonic jet didn't leave the skies because of a fatal accident at Paris-Charles De Gaulle Airport in 2000, but it did make the Concorde's planned retirement immediate.

Conversely, Titanic's sinking in 1912 didn't put an end to ocean liners: They got safer. Throughout the 19th century boilers were constantly blowing up, not the least on the stern-wheelers plying the Mississippi. Boats kept working and the technology — primarily safety valves — got better. Bad technologies are replaced by safer ones and good ones with flaws were improved upon.

That is the history of boats, cars, planes and, yes, resoundingly yes, of nuclear power.

After the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979, a new word, "passive," began to dominate reactor design and construction, but maybe too late for the General Electric Mark 1 boiling water reactors ordered so long ago. Passive, as it sounds, is a design in which cooling pumps are not as important. The idea is to depend more on gravity feeds and convective cooling. These are featured in newer designs, and there has been some back-fitting. Things were moving in the right direction, but not fast enough.

The story of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi site is a story of success and failure. They were designed 40 years ago to meet what in advanced design is known as a "maximum" credible accident. That was, in that location, an earthquake of a magnitude which had never occurred there. Excluded from this calculation of credible — i.e. it could happen — was the tsunami.

That exceeded the imagination of catastrophe to that point in time. Within the credible design envelope, the plants performed flawlessly, just as they were supposed to: The plants shut down; the emergency cooling pumps started up in fractions of a second; and when they failed, batteries took over. The problem was the tsunami destroyed the diesel generators, and the whole sequence of disaster began.

The opponents of nuclear power — and they have been pathological in opposition for more than 40 years — have their footwear on and are ready to dance on the grave of nuclear. They might want to unlace and take a seat: Nuclear power does not have an alternative.

Big demand for new energy (ideally carbon-free energy) around the globe, and especially in India and China, can't be satisfied without nuclear. Abundance of natural gas in the United States already has reduced the demand for new nuclear reactors to four or five plants. We'll be OK for a while. –– For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

When the Environmental Remedy Is the Problem

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In the Dr. Dolittle children’s books, written by Hugh Lofting, there appears a strange creature called the pushmi-pullyu. It is a gazelle-unicorn cross with two heads (one of each) at opposite ends of its body. Push-pull is its problem.

One might have thought that the lovable creature, featured in two movie versions of the classic series, might have been interred with it inventor. Alas, no. It has been seen around the White House, haunting many of President Obama’s policies — stimulate and cut; withdraw and fight on (Afghanistan); propose and abandon (Guantanamo); and not least the mixed signals he sends on energy, especially nuclear energy.

Obama often endorses nuclear power, but he has frustrated its development in the United States, and wasted $10 billion, by reversing longstanding U.S. policy at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. After exhaustive scientific analysis, and some of the best civil engineering on earth, he came out against Yucca in his presidential campaign. The nuclear waste repository is being abandoned without an alternative site. Not having one makes nuclear a harder sell to the public.

Now there is fear throughout the electric industry that the energy-loving administration is about to deal a body blow to the energy generators.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is about to issue a rule that would force more than 400 hundred electric-generating plants, along with other industrial entities, which use river, bay or ocean water for cooling, to abandon decades-old practices and build expensive, unsightly cooling towers. The nuclear operators, in particular, feel vulnerable because environmentalists often attack nuclear power in roundabout ways.

The legal challenge to using river and bay water goes back to the Clean Water Act of 1972, as amended, which, in the event of industrial use of water for cooling demands the use of “best available technology” to reduce the impact marine life, especially fish.

EPA is on the threshold, somewhat delayed, of publishing new regulations which it is believed will force nuclear power plants using once-through cooling to abandon it and install cooling towers. Pressure on the agency to revisit the seemingly settled, once-through practice in plants has come as a result of pressure from the Waterkeeper Alliance, Riverkeeper and other water-use advocacy groups.

According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a lobbying group for nuclear power, it would cost $95 billion to build all the requested cooling towers.

Nuclear groups feel they are most vulnerable because of the longstanding opposition to nuclear power by many environmental groups. If the economics of the times preclude backfitting many cooling towers, the threat that new plants will be forced backward is very real.

But some observers believe that the defenders of waterways may be hoisted this time on their own petard.

Cooling towers are those giant structures of the kind shown around the world at the time of the Three Mile Island accident. They are also employed by other power plants, mostly coal-burners. And they are very old technology.

Over the decades, the engineering of water intakes has evolved from a simple, large pipe with a screen on it to complex layers of baffles and other devices to keep fish in the main stream of a river and away from away from the intakes. Other devices involve lights, music, and a conveyor which returns the fish to their habitat in buckets on a wheel. Another solution is to sink wells under the surface of the water, pumping only water which has been screened naturally by the bottom of the waterway and is free of fish and most microbial life.

In short “best available technology” may now be at the intake, not in the towers which embody technology dating from the 1920s.

Also, towers present an environmental problem. In their vapor clouds they distribute all the impurities that might be in the water, including heavy concentrations of salt. At the Indian Point nuclear plant on the Hudson River in New York, the plumes the proposed cooling towers will contain some sea salt and river impurities, the operators claim. Worse the operators claim, the visual impact on the beautiful Hudson Valley will be unacceptable.

There is an irony here: For a long time, the cry “not in my backyard” belonged to the environmentalists. Now it can be heard from local communities, like Buchanan, near the Indian Point nuclear plant.

The worm may be turning; but nonetheless, the utilities fear EPA and the years of litigation and expense which is at hand. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate