Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Why We Should Withdraw from the UN and Terminate Their Lease

The Deep, Virulent Evil of the United Nations

· Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Blood on the bed. That's what 12-year-old Tamar Fogel saw last week when she opened the door to her parents' bedroom in Itamar, Israel. The blood covered the blankets and the bodies of her father, Rabbi Udi Fogel, and her 3-month-old sister, Hadas. In the other room, her mother, Ruth, lay murdered. So did her brothers, Yoav, 11, and Elad, 4.
Five members of the Fogel family were slaughtered in their home last week because they dared to live on historic Jewish land. They were not murderers and were not occupiers. They were people who simply wished to leave in peace and be left alone to bring up their children. Now those children have been buried along with their parents.
And the Arab Palestinian populace, which by and large constitutes the most evil population on the face of the planet, celebrated. Residents of Gaza -- an area already handed over to the Arab Palestinians by the Israeli government, supposedly in the interests of peace -- handed out candy in exultation over the crimes. These are the same people who train their small children to wear suicide vests and force them to watch propaganda about Muslims dying to "liberate" Jerusalem.
Hamas, naturally, cheered wildly and suggested that the murder of a 3-month-old fell short of Muslim expectations: "The report of five murdered Israelis is not enough to punish someone," said the Hamas spokesperson. The leader of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad, was slightly subtler, equating instead the murder of children in their beds with Israeli anti-terrorism military action.
The world community parroted Fayyad's line, with the United Nations, European Union, Russian Federation and United States condemning the attack by stating, "Attacks on any civilians are completely unacceptable in any circumstance" -- code for equating Israeli military action and Palestinian Arab thuggery.
Just to clarify their position, the United Nations held a very special event last Monday night. No, it wasn't a fundraiser to benefit the orphaned children of the Fogel family. It was a premiere screening of "Miral," a film by Julian Schnabel, a self-hating Jew and world-famous director; it's based on a book by his Arab Palestinian girlfriend, Rula Jebreal. "Miral" is a virulently anti-Israel movie casting the state of Israel in the worst possible light. Every Israeli soldier is a brutal murderer; every Palestinian is a wounded innocent; Jews are usurpers of Arab Palestinian property rights. Every anti-Israel trope is employed. "These settlers living here are our real cancer," says one Arab Palestinian character. A cancer, presumably, that must be cut out by force or stabbed to death in its bed.
"I expect to be told that the other side of the coin is not represented," Schnabel told the press several months ago. "It was not my task to tell the whole story." That purposefully one-sided treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict brought out the stars Monday night. Al Pacino, who apparently learned nothing from playing Shylock, showed up. So did Sean Penn, the useful idiot that terrorist group Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade once asked to "represent our pain and our cause." Josh Brolin and Robert De Niro also came out to support the newest anti-Israel smear campaign.
This is what the United Nations does when faced by implacable evil: it reverses the roles. Israel is always the bully, and those who slit children's throats and soak their toys in blood are the victims. Jewish blood is cheap at the U.N. But it isn't cheap for Americans, who foot the taxpayer bill for that stinking, festering pustule of moral incoherence. We pay for the red carpet that welcomes the moronic actors who present public cover for knife-wielding child-killers. We pay for the conversion of the U.N. into an Arab Palestinian propaganda movie theater.
The U.N. has no authority, legal or ethical. Any legislator who votes for further funding for that perverse institution has blood on his or her hands.
COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Japan's Nuclear "Crisis"

This article is from the Wall Street Journal.  This is personal use and non-commercial.....I just think that it explains the situation better than I can.

 

 

Japan Does Not Face Another Chernobyl

The containment structures appear to be working, and the latest reactor designs aren't vulnerable to the coolant problem at issue here.


Even while thousands of people are reported dead or missing, whole neighborhoods lie in ruins, and gas and oil fires rage out of control, press coverage of the Japanese earthquake has quickly settled on the troubles at two nuclear reactors as the center of the catastrophe.
Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.), a longtime opponent of nuclear power, has warned of "another Chernobyl" and predicted "the same thing could happen here." In response, he has called for an immediate suspension of licensing procedures for the Westinghouse AP1000, a "Generation III" reactor that has been laboring through design review at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for seven years.
Author William Tucker explains why the danger is limited at Japan's nuclear reactors.
Before we respond with such panic, though, it would be useful to review exactly what is happening in Japan and what we have to fear from it.
The core of a nuclear reactor operates at about 550 degrees Fahrenheit, well below the temperature of a coal furnace and only slightly hotter than a kitchen oven. If anything unusual occurs, the control rods immediately drop, shutting off the nuclear reaction. You can't have a "runaway reactor," nor can a reactor explode like a nuclear bomb. A commercial reactor is to a bomb what Vaseline is to napalm. Although both are made from petroleum jelly, only one of them has potentially explosive material.
Once the reactor has shut down, there remains "decay heat" from traces of other radioactive isotopes. This can take more than a week to cool down, and the rods must be continually bathed in cooling waters to keep them from overheating.
On all Generation II reactors—the ones currently in operation—the cooling water is circulated by electric pumps. The new Generation III reactors such as the AP1000 have a simplified "passive" cooling system where the water circulates by natural convection with no pumping required.
If the pumps are knocked out in a Generation II reactor—as they were at Fukushima Daiichi by the tsunami—the water in the cooling system can overheat and evaporate. The resulting steam increases internal pressure that must be vented. There was a small release of radioactive steam at Three Mile Island in 1979, and there have also been a few releases at Fukushima Daiichi. These produce radiation at about the level of one dental X-ray in the immediate vicinity and quickly dissipate.
Editorial Board Member Mary Kissel explains the Japanese response to the quake.
If the coolant continues to evaporate, the water level can fall below the level of the fuel rods, exposing them. This will cause a meltdown, meaning the fuel rods melt to the bottom of the steel pressure vessel.
Early speculation was that in a case like this the fuel might continue melting right through the steel and perhaps even through the concrete containment structure—the so-called China syndrome, where the fuel would melt all the way to China. But Three Mile Island proved this doesn't happen. The melted fuel rods simply aren't hot enough to melt steel or concrete.
The decay heat must still be absorbed, however, and as a last-ditch effort the emergency core cooling system can be activated to flood the entire containment structure with water. This will do considerable damage to the reactor but will prevent any further steam releases. The Japanese have now reportedly done this using seawater in at least two of the troubled reactors. These reactors will never be restarted.
Getty Images
None of this amounts to "another Chernobyl." The Chernobyl reactor had two crucial design flaws. First, it used graphite (carbon) instead of water to "moderate" the neutrons, which makes possible the nuclear reaction. The graphite caught fire in April 1986 and burned for four days. Water does not catch fire.
Second, Chernobyl had no containment structure. When the graphite caught fire, it spouted a plume of radioactive smoke that spread across the globe. A containment structure would have both smothered the fire and contained the radioactivity.
If a meltdown does occur in Japan, it will be a disaster for the Tokyo Electric Power Company but not for the general public. Whatever steam releases occur will have a negligible impact. Researchers have spent 30 years trying to find health effects from the steam releases at Three Mile Island and have come up with nothing. With all the death, devastation and disease now threatening tens of thousands in Japan, it is trivializing and almost obscene to spend so much time worrying about damage to a nuclear reactor.
What the Japanese earthquake has proved is that even the oldest containment structures can withstand the impact of one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history. The problem has been with the electrical pumps required to operate the cooling system. It would be tragic if the result of the Japanese accident were to prevent development of Generation III reactors, which eliminate this design flaw.
Mr. Tucker is author of "Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America's Energy Odyssey" (Bartleby Press, 2010).

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Another Perspective

  Yes, I copied this from The American Spectator.  

I listened to a radio show, Janet Parshall, last week I believe, on this very subject.  You must know that I hold Janet Parshall in the highest regard and think that her show "In the Market Place" is the best.  I was also very much swayed by her and her guest's argument for the SCOTUS decision on the Westboro case.  I also want to mention that I find that group's philosophy and actions despicable.  There is no honor, truth or honesty within their ranks as they only seek to promote disharmony that will result in their filing lawsuits for the primary purpose of funding their nefarious activities.

That being said, I present this because it has convinced me that Justice Samuel Alito, although being the lone dissenter, is in reality the only one that is right.  This is a person who has gained my wholehearted respect and admiration.  This is truly a patriot and a person who has "man-ed up" and wrote an opinion that is full of truth in an era that has fully rejected it, irrespective of the wrath of opinion that may be launched against him.

 

Another Perspective

Justice Alito Was Right

It fell to Justice Samuel Alito the other day to remind Americans how far their culture of liberation has veered from common sense and appreciation of the small decencies that undergird civilization.
On a question of "free speech" -- at its center a claimed right to begrime with taunts and insults the funeral of a U.S. Marine -- the four members of the U.S. Supreme Court's liberal-permissivist bloc weren't likely to find against the jeer leaders. It was the conservative bloc whose behavior startled. Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Antonin Scalia, and Justice Clarence Thomas went along with the permissivists, in the name of "robust, uninhibited, and wide-open" debate. As if the honored word "debate" applied to placards exhorting onlookers to "Thank God for Dead Soldiers."
Against his eight colleagues, Sam Alito stood in lonely, honorable dissent. "Our profound national commitment to free and open debate," he wrote, "is not a license for the vicious verbal assault that occurred in this case." Alito saw no free speech deprivation in the judgment a district court had levied against the traveling freak show known as Westboro Baptist Church, in Kansas: a gang keener on disrupting military funerals than on preaching the redemptive love of Jesus.
The picketers could have picketed almost anywhere in America, said Alito. Why at the church where the funeral of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder was being held? From the claim of free speech rights there was no logical pathway to the intentional infliction of "severe emotional injury on private persons at a time of intense emotional sensitivity.'"
Among the judicial precedents Alito noted was a 1942 case in which the high court called attention to "the social interest in order and morality." That was of course back when American culture accorded order and morality a higher seat in national proceedings than was due trash-talking and narcissistic chest-thumping. The debasement of traditional norms of respect and civility, from the 1960s forward, accompanied cultural grants of latitude to do anything that resembled self-expression: burn a U.S. flag, swear on the air, publish pornography, insult or howl down a speaker.
Daniel Webster crying "Liberty and Union, now and forever," the Westboro wackos proclaiming, at military funerals, God's hatred of "fags" -- both are the same, it seems. Except they aren't. Not according to right reason they aren't.
I trust, after 47 years in the media, teaching and talking and writing, I needn't protest my devotion to "freedom of speech, or of the press," as the Founding Fathers referred to it. I am bound to add that free speech obtained its dignity and cultural warrant through the importance that earlier generations attributed to that "robust" debate praised by the court's 8-1 majority. That "God Hates Dead Soldiers" should be considered an idea on the same plane as "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" is further evidence that modern society barely knows up from down.
When I taught journalism at a major university, I thrust Milton's "Areopagitica" in my students' faces. Here! Look! This is what free speech is about -- the quest for Truth! "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience above all liberties," Milton had written. Yes! Yes!
Accordingly, we bind ourselves to put up with a fair amount of nonsense -- but not all nonsense, because no morally healthy society accords unlimited living space to the ugly, the twisted, the debased. Perhaps our own society just doesn't know anymore, due in part to Supreme Court tutelage, what real debasement looks like. We might get up a good debate on that topic, assuming the Westboro wackos and their pious defenders could be kept at bay.
Mr. Murchison is completing a biography of the founding father John Dickinson. An earlier version of this column appeared in the Dallas Morning News.