What about that Japanese water?

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve been hearing a lot about radioactive water in Japan: dangerous for babies, thyroid cancer. What parent wouldn’t be panicked?

Almost nowhere do we read answers to the following rather mundane and obvious questions: how are the standards for levels of radiation in water set? What do the present levels actually mean in terms of health consequences and risk?

One place we can learn some relevant facts is in this WSJ piece. The environmental paranoia of many people is so high, however, that they wouldn’t believe the following even if they did manage to read it:

Tests Thursday showed a sharply lower level of radioactive material at one water-purifying plant of 79 becquerels per kilogram, less than the 100 becquerels per kilogram level considered acceptable for infants. Tests at the same plant Tuesday and Wednesday showed levels roughly twice those recommended for infants. Tokyo officials Thursday lifted the city’s warning about consumption by infants.

Tokyo’s air Thursday showed radiation lingered at nearly four times the normal level, though still less than a thousandth of what a patient receives in a typical chest X-ray.

Read that last sentence again, and ponder it.

More change stories

The New Neo Posted on by

Lee Stranahan’s change-story-in-the-making has garnered a certain amount of attention lately around the blogosphere, including a post at Ace’s that has inspired a number of people to write about their own political change. That comments thread caught my eye for obvious reasons, and I hereby offer two of the more interesting tales:

My breakthrough moment? Aimlessly surfing the intarwebz in 2004 or so, and clicked on a link to Townhall.com. Started reading Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell and Michelle Malkin and finally hit the Ace O’ Spades jackpot. Mission Accomplished! But really, I previously never considered myself a news junkie or was ever remotely interested in politics or economics. I remember having a token aversion to Regan without knowing why, just because all the other college kids around me did. I spent months pondering the epiphany I had, because I lost some friends and somewhat alienated myself from my family due to my changed viewpoint. But I came to the conclusion that the honesty and internal consistency of conservatism was more than worth it. Time to go punch a hippie….

I remember having my own little epiphany in my 20s when I had been sure for years that Rush Limbaugh was nothing but a ***hole and the conservatives just wanted to bible thump me into submission. You know, like my parents. Then one day I was stuck on a 12 hour road trip with a broken tape player (yeah, no cd, that long ago) and nothing but talk radio. Spun the dial a lot and then came across some guy just GOING OFF on things I wish I had heard someone say for years. The funny part was I assumed it was some local guy, so I kept listening. I was 15 minutes into the show before he identified himself as Rush. So I had this insane “Hey wait a minute, this guy is smart and spot on” moment. I kept listening. And learning. And expanded my sources and got a grip on things.

You don’t know you are spoonfed liberal lies until some fact or logic, well put, breaks through. When it does, it is astonishing. But I can honestly say if I had known it was Rush when I first tuned in I would have turned the dial and missed the moment. I hated him, and had never actually listened to him.

Unhappy first birthday, Obamacare

The New Neo Posted on by

The disapproving polls haven’t budged. Familiarity has not made the heart grow fonder. Some people hate the bill because it’s not liberal enough (mostly women, it turns out), but they are far outnumbered by those who hate it for the opposite reason. Although I’m a woman, I’m with that latter group, and I also hate the bill because of the way it was passed, and the fact that it won’t even accomplish what it purports to.

RIP Elizabeth Taylor

The New Neo Posted on by

Those of you who are below a certain age may wonder what all the fuss was about. Now that Elizabeth Taylor has died of heart failure at 79, it’s almost hard to remember what a huge celebrity she was. She had kept a much lower profile in recent years, but in decades past her beauty and her escapades kept enormous numbers of fans on the edges of their worshipful seats.

Not only was Taylor a rare beauty—even as a child, when she began acting—but she lived large, partied hard, spoke her mind, loved tempestuously and often (eight marriages to seven people, Burton twice), and had enough substances to abuse and illnesses to weather and causes to foster that she could have supported an entire tabloid industry all on her own.

My favorite Taylor movie was “Jane Eyre,” in which she played the doomed and saintly Helen, a child who dies young. Fortunately, Taylor herself went on to live a long life, but her co-star Peggy Ann Garner, an astoundingly brilliant child actress who appears as Jane in this scene, never really transitioned to adult roles, had an adult life marked by tragedy, and died at 52. Here they are in their glowing, gifted youth:

The Newsweek quiz: who was buried in Grant’s tomb?

The New Neo Posted on by

Lincoln? Princess Diana? Elvis?

It’s a joke of a question, so easy almost no one could miss the answer. And yet some of the sample questions on Newsweek’s citizen quiz were just about as easy, and an astounding number of respondents failed to come up with the correct answer.

Take Question 2, for example, “What happened at the Constitutional Convention?” The answer (drum roll, please): the Founders wrote the Constitution (correct variant: the Constitution was written). Only 35% of respondents got it right. Even guessing should have yielded a much higher correct percentage than that.

More of the quiz’s depressing statistics:

80% did not know who was President during WWI.

73% did not know that the Cold War involved fighting communism.

On the other hand, I’m surprised that as many as 14% knew that there are 435 voting members in the House. I didn’t know the exact number of representatives. And 41% knew John Boehner is Speaker, a level of recognition that surprised me as well. Did Jon Stewart make fun of him or something?

A question for Obama: why Libya, why now?

The New Neo Posted on by

It used to be fairly easy to determine why the US decided to intervene in conflicts in the third world. Whether a person agreed with such actions or supported a more isolationist policy, the answer to the question “why?” was more simple during the Cold War: much of the time, we backed the side the Soviet Union was against.

Those hot wars around the globe very often were used as proxies for the larger war known as Cold. Because it would have been way too lethal and destructive for the US and USSR to duke it out directly, and each country had allied itself with different factions around the globe, this was the way such conflicts tended to play out.

In the the case of Libya today, if one looks at Qaddafi’s history, he’s a sort of idiosyncratic socialist as well as an all-around bad guy who has offended nearly everyone with whom he’s dealt over the many decades he’s been in power. There is indeed some history of cooperation between Qaddafi and the Soviets, especially during the 1980s when there were many arms sales by Russia and a host of “advisers.”

That’s certainly not what’s in Obama’s mind these days, however. What is? Obama himself says he’s intervening in Libya because (a) the international community decided it was a good idea, and (b) it is for humanitarian reasons. I would even believe him, since these are the two traditional reasons for the left to support a military intervention, except that of course both were also highly true in Iraq (in fact, see this), and we know that not only did Obama oppose that war but he even opposed the surge after it was successful. But hey, consistency is not his bag.

John Hawkins has seven questions for liberals about Obama and Libya, but they really pretty much boil down to one: why aren’t you mounting the same criticisms against Obama that you used to hurl at Bush for Iraq?

It’s rhetorical, of course. Hawkins knows why, and is calling them to task for hypocrisy. On the other hand, I have been surprised at the fact that, although the vitriol is nothing like that generated for Bush, quite a few liberals are indeed angry at Obama for Libya and some have even called for his impeachment over this.

Another reason Obama is intervening now in Libya might be that he got tired of all the previous criticism for doing nothing in Iran as well as for his early hands-off policy in Libya. In Egypt he spoke up against Mubarak, and probably feels a bit heady at the fact that he got what he wanted, easy as pie. Qaddafi is another breed of cat entirely, one who may end up having nine lives.

David Warren on Libya: “we don’t know what we are doing”

The New Neo Posted on by

David Warren isn’t exactly a fan of the intervention in Libya.

However, he provides an answer (but is it true?) to my oft-repeated question about who the Libyan “rebels” might be:

…[I]n point of fact, the most promising internal opponents of Gadhafi’s regime are thuggish tribal chiefs and Islamist ideologues we have no reason to prefer to the monster with whom we are overfamiliar.

Here’s more:

In a way almost touching, the Bush administration tried to meet all the criteria of a just war, when invading Afghanistan, then Iraq. They tried to meet the Powell maxims, too. They went to elaborate and exhausting lengths to leave “democratic” and constitutional regimes, in a most unfavourable region. For this, especially, they endured the contempt of the world’s most aggressively self-righteous people.

Who, in turn, seem to be rallying behind the Security Council resolution of Thursday night, which “authorizes” the enforcement not only of no-fly zones over Libya, but any other uses to which military forces may be put, short of a decisive ground invasion.

The very fact that Russia and China failed to veto this resolution, speaks against it. That it fails not on one, but on every single criterion of a just war, should be noted. That it fails the Powell test is a matter of course…

We don’t know what we are doing. We only know that we have moral support for it on paper, from an international organization that is utterly corrupt, wherein members who do not wish us well are pleased to grant us permission to blunder.

[NOTE: Michael Walzer of TNR agrees, for somewhat different reasons. Max Boot disagrees. Ross Douthat analyzes what makes this the very model of a modern liberal war, and what’s wrong with that.]

The effect of the Japan disaster

The New Neo Posted on by

This AP article just may be the stupidest article on the Japanese earthquake and tsunami that I’ve read so far.

Anyone who never realized that industrialized, organized, complex nations are most vulnerable of all to such threats simply does not think. Every science fiction writer knows better.

Anyone who equates the nuclear part of this disaster with the other two parts simply does not think, or is pushing an anti-nuclear power agenda (sometimes it’s hard to know where the first leaves off and the second begins). But suffice to say that no disaster has happened in the nuclear sense (except an economic one), and it is highly unlikely that one will happen except in the eyes of the press and its readership.

It is especially ironic that AP author Joji Sakurai cites the Lisbon earthquake as a predecessor to the Japan earthquake in changing hearts and minds. I’ve written about the Lisbon earthquake before, here. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 struck the city on a Sunday morning (All Saints Day) when many believers were in church at worship, and its particular horror was that a great many of the dead were among those people. The Lisbon earthquake acted as a death knell to the Age of Faith–how could a benevolent deity have allowed this to happen?–and ushered in a trend towards skepticism, science, and the Enlightenment. The irony is that, if the Japan earthquake does as Joji Sakurai suggests and ends nuclear power (“Is even minimal risk, as with nuclear power, too much risk?”), it will represent a return to an age of faith and the decline of science—in this case, not faith in organized religion, but faith in what Carl Sagan called “the demon-haunted world.”

[NOTE: If you look at the comments section at the AP article (there are over a thousand) and scan the ones that are not just expressions of support for the Japanese people, you’ll find a great deal of evidence that people haven’t a clue what’s going on and are scared out of their wits about the power plant and are demanding the closure of other nuclear power plants. The coverage has had the desired effect. (Although this Fox News poll is a bit reassuring. Older people, men, and Republicans seem to get it.)]