Paxus's blog

If Mitt Romney loses this election, it will likely be because women who have even the most modest sense of self interest came out and voted against him and the other “Rape Republicans”

When Steven Colbert did his piece on Republicans saying incredible misogynistic, stupid and presumable vote loosing things about rape the final quote (not listed above) was so over the top, i needed to fact check it myself. Apparently, Roger Riverd a state legislator in Wisconsin said last December that “some girls rape easy.” Riverd decided that he would clarify his nearly year old remarks shortly before his election with the following statement:

“He also told me one thing, ‘If you do (have premarital sex), just remember, consensual sex can turn into rape in an awful hurry,’” Rivard said. “Because all of a sudden a young lady gets pregnant and the parents are madder than a wet hen and she’s not going to say, ‘Oh, yeah, I was part of the program.’ All that she has to say or the parents have to say is it was rape because she’s underage. And he just said, ‘Remember, Roger, if you go down that road, some girls,’ he said, ‘they rape so easy.’

“What the whole genesis of it was, it was advice to me, telling me, ‘If you’re going to go down that road, you may have consensual sex that night and then the next morning it may be rape.’ So the way he said it was, ‘Just remember, Roger, some girls, they rape so easy. It may be rape the next morning.’

Shortly after the Berlin Wall fell, I went to eastern Europe to talk with the people who had made the revolution happen. I was advised to get there quickly because “once the history books are written, the truth will be lost forever.” I fell in love with then Czechoslovakia. The revolutionary spirit was still vibrant, everything seemed possible and the motivated and talented Czechs seemed to be just the right people to share my organizing skills with.

When I promoted my campaigning, fund raising and media skills in service of their post revolutionary efforts I was told politely “We have so many westerners here we dont know what to do with them. Go back to the west and if we need you we will call you.” Dissatisfied with the terrorist regime which had recently taken over the US (George Bush I), I embraced my refugee status and settle in the Netherlands where I had a lovely new girlfriend and political work to do.

Soon I would volunteer for the Amsterdam anti-nuclear group WISE (the World Information Service on Energy). Some months after I arrived Honza Beranek (whose house Christina and i are now staying at in Am*dam) from the Czechoslovakia arrived for an internship. When WISE asked me to leave the collective for being too much of a campaigner, which was not their mission, Honza who was upset with the collectives choice that he made me an offer “Come to Czechoslovakia, we are fighting the Americans who want to build reactors in our country and we dont know how. You’re an American, you can help.”

So I had my invitation and I went for what would be 7 or the most exciting and satisfying years of my activist life. The point is with my invitation I stopped being a tourist and started being a traveler.

Just as you would be a fool to generalize about the US by spending a week exclusively in Manhattan, I was equally foolish thinking I understood much about life in Egypt after a week in Cairo/Giza. Coming to the small city of Qena opened my eyes to several other sides of this country on the Nile. My journey started at the Giza train station where I said good bye to my overly protective handlers that included my first driver in Cairo and my first tour guide.

Missing are the camels, children and horses which make it worse

And my train was an hour late in arriving, so unsurprisingly the locals started chatting me up. This does not happen much in my experience in the US, where someone from clearly a different race and culture is approached by friendly Americans who ask if they can help. In Egypt, it is common place and has happened to me repeatedly. A financial analyst and an Egyptian cop (just returning from a UN peacekeeping expedition to the Conga) were more than happy to talk about both the revolution and how I was going to get off at the right stop, which no doubt had no signs I could read. In the end the friendly cop rescued me from my train wagon and took me off the train in the lovely town of Qena.

Generally, i dislike museums.  The Egyptian museum in Cairo where i spent a couple of hours recently was worse than most.  As Sky described it aptly, it is more of a warehouse than a museum.  It is poorly lit, there are lots of displays with no descriptions on them at all.  There are so many objects in it (140K our guide says) that it feels endless and impossible to experience in any way except the most cursory.  [If you spent 10 seconds in front of each exhibition, you would be there for 9 days straight]

In Athens recently we went to the New Acropolis Museum and this is one of the very few adult museums in the world i actually like (the others are the now closed holography museum in NYC and the Dali Museum outside Barcelona).  The New Acropolis Museum is big and well lit and has a quite manageable collection of items to see and a good mixed of multimedia exhibits as well as “static” ones.  It is also an attractive modern building.

New Acropolis Museum in Athens

We often play 20 questions.  Willow is pretty good at it, in that deductive reasoning approach which might lead him to be a computer programmer one day.

Willow: Is it bigger than a breadbox?

Me: No

Willow: Is it smaller than a breadbox

Me: Yes

Willow: Is it a breadbox?

Me: How can it be a breadbox if it is smaller than a breadbox?

Willow: It  can be a smaller breadbox

The master at play

When we were in the a small neighborhood park near our flat in Athens, there was a bust with indecipherable Greek text on it.  “I wonder who that is?” i said

“It is a statue of George Park, you know, the guy they named this place after.”

It is the things i did not know until recently that determine legal cannabis’s availability nationally.  At the center of this debate is the scheduling by the US government of marijuana and hashish as schedule 1 drug.  This means they have no known medical value and thus can not be prescribed by a doctor, they can only be recommended.

Back in September, i went to the Harborside Health Center, which is Oakland’s largest medical marijuana dispensary. One of the two founders and the current operations manager is my old friend dave wedding dress, who prefers to simply be called “dress”. He gave us the grand tour both of the dispensary and the issue. Good capitalists are making bank on marijuana distribution, dress and Stephen from Harborside are doing more important stuff.

dress in a tie

The good news is the reactor most likely to be hit hardest by hurricane Sandy, Oyster Creek in NJ is already powered down for refueling. The bad news is that even powered down reactors are potential hazards if they loose off site power. Reactor must cool their fresh and especially spent fuel pools cool, even when they are not producing power.

NYC climate activists use Sandy as a wake up call

Sandy is unlikely to cause a serious nuclear accident in the US.  First off, despite its tremendous size, Sandy is a weak hurricane (Category 1) in sharp contrast to Katrina which destroyed so much of the New Orleans area (Category 5).  This can be crudely likened to driving.  At Cat 1 you are less than 95 mph and it is tricky, but you can hold it together.  At Cat 5 you are over 157 mph and things are pretty terrifying and dangerous.

We are in Giza, but i am only getting to the photos from our previous stop in Rome

Star boys like the Colosseum

Rome is the capital of smart cars and innovative parking

Willow hangs with big friend – Roman Piazza

Death takes a break to chat with friends on cell phone

My son is a ham

killer’s vicious dog violates leash laws, attacks elderly woman

Thanks to Keenan for caption

Our tour guide explains that Napoleon shot off the nose of the Sphinx during the French campaign in Egypt (1798-1801).  I had heard this before and was not surprised.  The nose was in the Louvre in Paris, so the story made sense.

The Sphinx is between Willow and Hawina

However, like many good stories, it was not true.  There are numerous drawings of the Sphinx from hundreds of years before Napoleon showed up that have the nose missing.   And this lead us on an internet chase as to what had happened to the nose.

One of the more interesting twists lead to a website dedicated to Napoleon stories:

A poll conducted on the Internet found that fully 21% of respondents believed Napoleon was responsible for the Sphinx’s missing nose. One of the most recent examples of the persistence of this falsehood was Louis Farrakhan’s “Million Man March” speech where he said: “White supremacy caused Napoleon to blow the nose off the Sphinx because it reminded you [sic] too much of the Black man’s majesty.” And the perpetuation of this myth in “Afrocentric” circles was even the subject of a segment of the U.S. television investigative journalism program “60 Minutes.”

Wikipedia attributes the loss of the nose to a 14th century Sufi Muslim, who upon finding the peasants making offerings to the Sphinx in the hope of increasing their harvest, was so outraged that he destroyed the nose, and was hung for vandalism.  But then goes on to say a citation is needed.

3A. ESSAY:

IN ORDER FOR THE ADMISSIONS STAFF OF OUR COLLEGE TO GET TO KNOW YOU, THE APPLICANT, BETTER, WE ASK THAT YOU ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION: ARE THERE ANY SIGNIFICANT EXPERIENCES YOU HAVE HAD, OR ACCOMPLISHMENTS YOU HAVE REALIZED, THAT HAVE HELPED TO DEFINE YOU AS A PERSON?

I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have
been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more
efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban
refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently.
Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.

I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot
bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute
Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and
an outlaw in Peru.

Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended
a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants.
I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of
numerous documentaries. When I’m bored, I build large suspension bridges in
my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair
electrical appliances free of charge.

One of the nice things about living at Twin Oaks is the visitors who come through invite you to their homes and offer to share their friends with you.  Shortly before we left on this trip, Margarita from Greece suggested we contact her friend Marinos when we arrived in Athens, we did and he invited us to this alternative economy festival.

The organizers of this event were very welcoming of our suggestion that we present about Twin Oaks.  Sky and i gave a 40 minute presentation which was followed by 2 full hours of questions.   The presentation was the slide show that Sky and Kassia designed.  The event was done with alternating translation into Greek, which despite the fact that it slows things down significantly, we still help most of our audience of over 60 people for the whole time.  Sky did have to stop me a couple of times as i went into rants about things i was excited about.

In one case we were asked about the composition of the community in terms of race, class, age and gender and i said that Twin Oaks had largely failed in recruiting people of color.  The translator said in such a way that some people in the audience thought we were excluding non-whites.  Which came up in a subsequent question and i got upset that they thought that this was what we were doing.

One of the nice things about living at Twin Oaks is the visitors who come through invite you to their homes and offer to share their friends with you.  Shortly before we left on this trip, Margarita from Greece suggested we contact her friend Marinos when we arrived in Athens, we did and he invited us to this alternative economy festival.

The organizers of this event were very welcoming of our suggestion that we present about Twin Oaks.  Sky and i gave a 40 minute presentation which was followed by 2 full hours of questions.   The presentation was the slide show that Sky and Kassia designed.  The event was done with alternating translation into Greek, which despite the fact that it slows things down significantly, we still help most of our audience of over 60 people for the whole time.  Sky did have to stop me a couple of times as i went into rants about things i was excited about.

In one case we were asked about the composition of the community in terms of race, class, age and gender and i said that Twin Oaks had largely failed in recruiting people of color.  The translator said in such a way that some people in the audience thought we were excluding non-whites.  Which came up in a subsequent question and i got upset that they thought that this was what we were doing.

Hawina did a bunch of research before we came on this trip and found us a number of wonderful places to stay.  My favorite tho is the Pyramid View Inn in Giza.  The first nice touch is they sent us a driver to pick us up at the airport.

the view from our hotel

On the way from Cairo International to Giza there was an accident in the adjacent lane.  The car, which at it’s closest was less than 50? from us and still moving, completely flipped upside down and was skidding at 70 mph on the highway inverted.  Our driver deftly navigated the traffic which momentarily became even more erratic as it slowed and swerved to avoid a pile up.   The westerners in the care were stunned and silent for a few moments.  Our driver also said nothing.

When i asked about it after a few moments, he was dismissive of the event saying simply “it happens all the time”.

I’ve been in a lot of wild traffic.  I was in Managua Nicaragua in 1975, where i could swear that the only functioning controls to the taxis were the accelerator and the horn.  We had to jump into and out of cabs which never came to a complete stop.  In 1991 in Shanghai China i made the mistake of telling a cab driver that there was an extra $5 in it if he got us to the train station on time.  The driver immediately got off the road and started driving down the bike path which pedestrians and bike riders had to leap out of his way.  But i have never seen traffic like Cairo and Giza.

a letter from the future has these stamps

There are three common lies you hear about why renewables can not replace nuclear power:

1. They dont run 24/7 like reactors and you dont want to be without power just because the wind stopped blowing or the sun dipped behind a cloud.
2. They are too expensive (require too great govt subsidy) to run
3. They can not be put in place fast enough and represent only a tiny fraction (excluding large hydro) of the most countries energy mix.

If you read the comments on articles about nuclear power you will hear these reasons repeatedly, they are the backbone of the opposition to real renewables.  Today, these paragraphs appeared in BusinessWeek:

“Utilities are pulling out of nuclear projects across Europe as uncertainty over energy prices makes them too risky. EON’s withdrawal from Finland follows its decision in September 2011, along with SSE Plc and RWE AG (RWE), to give up building nuclear plants in the U.K.

German 2013 power dropped to a record 46.90 euros ($60.85) a megawatt-hour on Oct. 15 as output from wind and solar cuts usage of gas and coal plants.”

On July 25 of this year 40 riot gear clad FBI agents and Joint Terrorism Task Force officers from the Seattle/Portland region broke down the door of this of the house of three activists.  They handcuffed them and held them at gun point.

Their warrant was for computers, black clothes and anarchist literature.  There was no warrant for their arrests.  There still is not one.  Yet all of them were imprisoned and placed in solitary confinement initially.  Now they have been moved into general population and they are being greeted like heroes by the other inmates.

Leah Lynn has since been released, without testifying, likely because she was suffering from serious mental health problems in solitary and the state did not want even more bad press.  But Matt and KteeO could be there for 18 months.

I was quite pleased to find out today that the Kewaunee nuclear-power plant in Wisconsin will close next year.  Partly i was happy because the owner of this plant is Dominion Resources which is trying to decide if it wants to build another reactors near my home in Louisa County Virginia. Dominion stepping out of Kewaunee increases the chances they will never build North Anna 3 for several reasons:

1. Their own nuclear staff and expertise is diminishing
2. It means they can be convinced a reactor with lots of license life should be closed
3. They bought this reactor in 2005, hoping to buy more reactors in the region
4. Dominion tried to resell the plant and no one wanted it

If you cant make the economics of an already operating plant, which has a license to run until 2033, how is it going to make economic sense to build a brand new expensive plant, with all the new reactors running wildly over budget and years delayed?

Another one bites the dust

Riding in Style – Maastricht 2012

Willow and I have lots of physical contact. While we have been wandering around the streets of Maastricht, Am*dam, Rome and Athens I carry him about ¼ of the time. “Can’t he walk himself?” Sure he can, but I like to carry him. I like to feel him against me, I like to play the game where we are looking for things he can climb onto and then jump onto me from. We rate his jumps, whether they are real jumps or flops (when he just falls on me from a height), or flys (see the video below) or fails (jumps where if I did not help he would have ended up on the ground). He is happy not to walk, I am happy to get more exercise than I am these days.

About half the nights we spend together we sleep in the same bed. I get that this is odd for a 10 year old. That most of his peers are sleeping by themselves in their own rooms at this age. Turns out we are not especially interested in raising a “normal” kid. Turns out some flavors of extraordinary are crafted by parents showing their affection to their kids physically long after the social norms around them say they should not be in contact. My model is Misty and Emma from Woodfolk, who are cuddled up together virtually every other time I see them. Happy as clams, fully expressing their affection and appreciation for each other. Emma is 16 and Misty is her mom. If I had to guess, I would say this is what a healthy family relationship looks like.

The more one studies the behavior of the NRC, the more worried you get about this regulators behavior.    Of course, was can start with the fact that the Nuclear Regulator Commission has never denied a reactor license to anyone how applies for one.  Does not matter if the selected site is on an earthquake fault or down river from an degraded dam or has an evacuation planning area which includes impossible sites like Manhattan. You want to build a reactor, they will work with you till the opposition is worn down and then grant you the license. From many anti-nuclear activists perspective, having fought the agency long and hard, this is exactly what their purpose is – to shield the industry from criticism and give it what ever it needs to function, at the cost of public safety.

The latest in the long line of NRC scandals is about dams.  On March 6th of this year, the NRC issued a redacted report on nuclear safety near dams in the US.  While reporting on over 30 reactors in danger of flooding (including not surprisingly Fort Calhoun which nearly melted down last summer from flooding), the NRC redacted (left out) the following information about the Jocassee Dam in in South Carolina.

A more recent NRC letter (USNRC 2009) indicates that the NRC staff’s position is that a Jocassee Dam failure is a credible event and needs to be addressed deterministically. In the same letter, NRC staff expressed concerns that Duke has not demonstrated that the Oconee Nuclear Station units will be adequately protected.

Vandana Shiva is a hero of mine.  So i was doubly pleased to get an email from her today.  It was not personal, we have never met and i have not even seen her speak live.  [Tho here is her recent TED talk on the food crisis and solutions.], but i was happy none-the-less to know that some group which she works with has me on their mailing list and thus i am getting stuff from her.

Vandana Shiva on Corporations and their danger

More important than my ego gratification was the content of her message, which said that her group has petitioned the Indian Supreme Court and they have ruled in her favor banning the release of GMOs.  This is not forever and for always, but until at least long term studies can be done on rats and there is a regime in place for controlling the releases and selecting the sites which releases are made from by the government.  This is a significant win.

What is especially encouraging about this ruling is that it sites the precautionary principal as central to its decision making.  The precautionary principal is: