BBC Criticizes Itself, but not for Criticizing Israel

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | BBC must become more impartial

The BBC is among a very small handful of news outlets that spend considerable resources on introspection. The results are published and highly publicized, and this year’s results are summarized in the above article from–who else?–the BBC itself. This self-examination has led the BBC to conclude that it could profit from less partial, less biased reportage.

The “innately liberal” bias is apparently the BBC’s greatest shortcoming, of course. It seems as if the BBC is paying too much attention to human rights and poverty, and this is a bent that it ought to temper because the 2008 Olympic Games will take place in a country whose government is a bit sensitive to Western coverage of its pathetic human rights record.

And, it’s just not right to criticize China. Israel, however, is a perfect subject for criticism because it gives BBC journalists total access to Israel, the Palestinian territories and Southern Lebanon. The fact that Palestinians are willing to kidnap and to threaten to kill BBC reporters apparently exempts them from any criticism. This might be an implicit statement by the BBC that they hold barbarians to lower standards than civilized democracies, but no such implication can ever be found in their reportage on Israel. Certainly, none of this fighting could be framed in the context of the borders drawn by British authorities in 1948.

In light of the British government’s foray into Shariah compliant bonds, its less than outraged reaction to the kidnapping of its reporters by Palestinian authorities, its less than vigilant reporting on Tony Blair’s halting of a government investigation into corrupt deals with Saudi Arabia, its hard line against Israel, and its total lack of vigilance in reporting the disastrous consequences of the Iraqi campaign betray something other than an “innately liberal” tilt. A slavish obedience to the Blair government is perhaps a better assessment of the BBC “impartiality”.

Markets Bigger than the American Market

BBC SPORT | Motorsport | Formula One | United States loses F1 Grand Prix

The Formula One Grand Prix circuit will not include the United States in 2008. The organizers feel that it is more worthwhile, i.e., profitable, to erase the lone stop in the US from the schedule and add events in East Asia. 

One wonders when Americans will realize that they have lost the prestige of being the largest, most lucrative market in the world.

  

Frankentomatoes not as Good as Organic Ones

The New Scientist reports that an upcoming scientific article shows that genetically modified tomatoes are not as rich in key nutrients and supplements as organically grown tomatoes. The reason why the comparison was so late in coming was that it was difficult to control all the conditions that factor into plant cultivation: quality of soil, type of air, irrigation schedule, fertilizer type, etc., etc.

It seems as if some researchers have managed to control all these conditions in order to make a valid comparison between these two types of plants, and they have found that the organic variety have more of the dietary components (e.g., antioxidants) for which tomatoes are presently prized.

Whether this finding is followed by additional evidence that man has yet “to improve” upon nature’s original design is doubtful, but it would not be entirely surprising if thiss study were the first drop in a torrent of evidence against the wisdom of genetic modification of plants.

Nucular Nirvana: Reasons to Mistrust the US Government on Nuclear Energy

Chemical & Engineering News: Government & Policy – Reprocessing Key To Nuclear Plan (html, requires American Chemical Society membership)

Chemical & Engineering News, Vol. 85, No. 25, June 8, 2007 (pdf, no membership required)

What is GNEP? It stands for Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. Should you care about it? You bet! GNEP is perhaps the most ill-advised of the many pathetically formulated energy policies put forth by the current White House. It is undoubtedly the most dangerous energy policy put forth by the White House.

GNEP is a program for the reprocessing of nuclear waste. This is a regime that Bush appointees of the Department of Energy are pushing adamantly. It is also a program that is staunchly opposed by proponents of nuclear energy from Jimmy Carter to the current leading government advisers.

It would be foolish to attempt to summarize or otherwise plagiarize this fine article by Jeff Johnson of Chemical & Engineering News, but it is worthwhile to whet the reader’s appetite to read to the article. This article is a must read. Here are a few highlights.

The DoE undersecretary pushing GNEP is named Clay Sell. Sell advocates “we do not need six new nuclear power plants in this country. We need 60, and the world needs 600. And, we need them all in a fairly short period of time.” It is difficult to tell whether Sell is doing what his name implies, or whether he is sounding a legitimate alarm. After all, 600 power plants will produce a huge amount of nuclear waste, and the US currently lacks sufficient storage for all this waste.

That is why Sell is advocating GNEP, a global regime for reprocessing spent fuel into more energetic, more radioactive, more dangerous and more toxic plutonium for future “breeder” plants. Thus, the program will (theoretically) reduce the amount of (more toxic) waste by using existing nuclear waste further for energy. This proposal sounds nice, until one reads the article further to realize that there are more than a few holes in this proposal.

First, the Yucca Mountain facility has sufficient capacity to store the nuclear waste being generated for years to come.

 …a study by the nuclear industry’s research arm, the Electric Power Research Institute… estimated [that] the area that includes Yucca Mountain is sufficient to store 260,000 to 570,000 tons of spent fuel–far more than the 63,000 metric-ton legal cap for commercial reactors and two to five times the amount that will be generated by the current operating U.S. power reactors.

Hence, the first premise is patently false. The other premises in Sell’s argument are also false.Breeder plants are not worthwhile or economical:

 As it turns out, breeder reactors could, by tapping the energy in U-238 [Uranium 238], produce more plutonium than was used to fuel the initial reactions. Now, fewer than a half-dozen reprocessing and demonstration breeder reactor facilities operate worldwide.

Reprocessing poses a huge national security risk. That’s why Jimmy Carter stopped it.

Carter’s concern was heightened following India’s detonation of a nuclear bomb in 1974. That bomb was made from plutonium that was reprocessed from an Indian civilian reactor provided by Canada with U.S. technical support.

Reprocessing is environmentally unsafe. (This point is perhaps obvious, but still worth making.)

 The countries [that have already reprocessed nuclear waste] have stockpiled the plutonium but are not close to building a system of reactors to recycle the plutonium or a permanent waste repository. Reprocessing for some of these countries, particularly the U.K., has also resulted in extensive radioactivity pollution problems.

And, the following are choice words from nuclear energy advocates.

 “GNEP is a waste of money,” said Richard Garwin, a nuclear physicist and frequent government adviser on nuclear issues…He urged the U.S. to continue on its current path of storing the waste on-site while developing a geological repository. This strategy is far cheaper as well as more proliferation-resistant than reprocessing, he added.

Garwin is joined by Ernest Moniz and John Deutch,Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors, nuclear power advocates, and authors of an influential report on nuclear power. They, too, oppose GNEP’s size and scope. Moniz warned that the U.S. has done far too little reprocessing research over the past 20-plus years to lay the groundwork for a commercial-scale facility. He noted as well that there is no uranium shortage to justify reprocessing and reusing spent fuel in the first place.

 …

Frank von Hippel, a physicist, former White ouse official, and international affairs professor at Princeton University…[says] “We need to focus on what we are doing now and do it better,” …”I’ve got no problem with nuclear power. The problem is a group of people have been bitten by the plutonium breeder reactor bug and want to keep the R&D money flowing. This is a wasteful program and a dangerous one with regard to weapons material proliferation.”

Suffice it to say that the above quotes represent a very small fraction of the shocking revelations in this article. So, please, read it!

The scientific, engineering and energy policy communities are in general agreement. The short term imperative is efficient use of fossil fuels with the gradual mixing in of electricity generated by solar, wind and other alternative sources. The long term imperative is an electric economy powered by a large variety of renewable sources.

One must wonder, therefore, why the current White House and Department of Energy insist on funding projects that are known to be energetic and economic duds, like fuel cells and nuclear reprocessing. It seems as if money is being wasted on useless research in order to keep oil scarce and valuable.

hmmmm…..

Shining Light on Dubious Theories

Temperature rises ‘not caused by sun’ | Climate change | Guardian Unlimited Environment

Anyone who has viewed and/or forwarded links to this controversial “documentary”, The Great Global Warming Swindle, must read the above Guardian article and forward it to all the people to whom they forwarded the original misleading documentary. Yet again, another argument against global warming force-fed to the public by biased sources has been proven wrong by raw data–not models, not hypotheses, and not theories. By raw data, which is to say, by reality.

The latest line of sophistry from the oil industry that was disseminated by the fraudulent British documentary went as follows: global warming is not caused by human activity, but by changes in solar activity. The sun is putting out more rays, the shysters claim, and that is why the earth is getting warmer. The shysters theorized this claim with the awareness that the general public lacks the technical wisdom and resourcefulness to know that this appealing theory can be tested with real data. The scientific community is not as naive.

Mike Lockwood, a physicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK and Claus Frohlich of the World Radiation Centre in Davos, Switzerland, compared temperature and solar data for the past 100 years. Lockwood concluded

It is absolutely clear that the sun is nothing to do with the recent warming.This doesn’t rely on models, it uses real data and it shows that all the solar trends have been going in the opposite direction [toward less radiation and, hence, global cooling] for the last 20 years. 

The two scientists conclude their upcoming communication (to be published by the Royal Society)

Our results show that the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability, whichever mechanism is invoked. 

Carl Wunsch, a professor at MIT, was duped into giving an interview to the makers of  Swindle, and he later called the movie propaganda. The film’s claims have been meticulously documented as false by many sites, including this one and this one. UK Channel 4, which aired the documentary, decided to distance itself from the production after discovering that the primary graph used by the program was fabricated by the right-wing agencies that funded the production. And now, we even know that the phenomenon proposed by the program never happened in reality. In fact, we now know that reality is diametrically opposed to the claims of the program. Will this be enough to kill this piece of propaganda?

Ford, General Motors, Chrysler Crumbling

BBC NEWS | Business | Ford and GM see US sales decline

When the competition is out-designing, out-marketing and out-hustling you, outcomes like Ford and GM’s are entirely predictable. That the executives at these companies failed to see what consumers and analysts were seeing decades ago is reprehensible. That they managed to award themselves untold millions in bonuses is unconscionable. That they do not react to it is, frankly, criminal.

My old 1.6 L, 16-valve base model Nissan Sentra is running great after 13 years and 120,000 miles. The fact that GM, Chrysler and Ford cannot build a small car with this much endurance explains a lot. And, the fact that these monsters of American industry still do not offer any fuel efficient cars explains the rest:

Ford’s sales of traditional cars fell 24.6% last month.

By contrast, sales of its light trucks, which includes its sports utility vehicles, added 2.9%.

GM’s passenger car sales lost 22.3%, while its light trucks lost 25.6%.

It’s almost as if some very powerful people have a very high stakes bet about which company is going to go bankrupt first, and they are pulling every string they can to win the bet.

A Good Day in Paris

BBC NEWS | Business | Blackstone buys Hilton for $26bn

Paris Hilton might donate $50 of her profits from this sale to relieve the misery she encountered in prison.

Brooklyn Cheese

I have no inkling as to why Brooklyn cheese is in any form a desirable variety of cheese, but this pizza delivery outfit that services Beverly Hills felt it was necessary to boast about its use of “Brooklyn Cheese” on it’s New York style thin pizzas.

It is a sign, indeed, that one is living in the primordial soup. WhereFlyer from local Pizza delivery restaurant in Beverly Hills else would those who have boasted about the California style brick oven pizza express any desire for a style of pizza that is outdated and, in this instance, clearly artificial. As expected, the people in a state where the dairy industry has spent billions advertising California cheese are craving more and more cheese from places that are known for cheese: Spain, France, the Netherlands. Yet, there are so many who crave a cheese with no pedigree, no reputation and no real existence. And, they descend upon Los Angeles–the primordial soup that accommodates them–in droves.

Stay tuned for kosher pork.

Neoconservative Political Correctness Recognized by Court

Chemical & Engineering News, June 18, 2007

The final piece in the above linked pdf file is yet another instance of the Bush Administration’s failure to reclassify certain activities ostensibly in order to embellish or to hide its failure or to appease its supporters.

In this instance, the EPA had reclassified waste incinerators as less polluting devices. Thus, it had exempted them from stricter emission standards and, presumably, saved the companies that operate such incinerators considerable time and money. Fortunately, a panel of Federal judges overturned this reclassification.

The agency had argued that it could set less stringent controls for these incinerators by treating them as though they were “boilers” or “process heaters” that burn only fossil fuels. The court rejected that argument, stating that facilities that burn waste are incinerators and must meet the Clean Air Act’s strictest emissions standard. The panel denied petitions by EPA and industry groups for a rehearing, and sent the incinerator rule back for “wholesale revision.”

It is difficult to frame such a reclassification in anything other than politics. After all, the reason something that boils water is called a boiler and something that burns non-flammable organic materials at absurdly high temperatures is called an incinerator is that these are fundamentally different processes. If burning oil was the same as burning trash, then engineers would certainly not have gone through the trouble of re-engineering a new operation and Christening it with a different name.

Furthermore, the chemical signatures of these two devices are radically different because the boiler only uses hydrocarbons as fuel but the incinerator uses, well, anything. This is why they come under different emission rules.

This reclassification is as absurd as the reclassification of fast food jobs (such as assembling a burger at McDonald’s) as manufacturing jobs by the Economic Report of the President in 2004. It’s enough to make one want to shout “go reclassify yourself, pal”.

Paper Cups, Tinsel Reputation

Starbucks reputation on line in court case | | Guardian Unlimited Business

I can’t say that I am particularly passionate about the unionization of Starbuck’s employees. It would be nice, perhaps, because it might bring greater consistency to the Starbuck’s experience. The Starbucks union organizing web site claims that they wish to have:

  • Increased pay and raises
  • Guaranteed hours with the option of full-time status
  • An end to understaffing
  • A healthier and safer workplace

Those all sound like reasonable demands. On those rare occasions when I have entered a Starbucks, I have wished that the cafe were in a slightly greater state of order and cleanliness. It seems as if the staff are always struggling to balance their time between cleaning and fulfilling orders, but they just don’t seem to have enough time to clean because customers are perennially queued to order. Of course, some locations are better than others, and some times of the day are better than others. Nevertheless, it does make sense that a large corporation should have sufficient resources to make every moment that they are open to business fairly consistent.

Despite all this, the reason I hate going to Starbucks is that they do not serve their drinks in real porcelain cups. I am told that certain locations will do so if I request it, but why the hell would I need to request a real cup of coffee?

And, no, playing Paul McCartney for 24 hours non-stop is no incentive for me.