Vibiant

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The guns stopped in Gaza for the Inauguration. Both sides did this, perhaps, to see if they would get better treatment under the new administration, as if President Obama has nothing more important to attend to than a bunch of extremists shooting at each other in a tiny section of the world’s armpit, better known as the Middle East.

The line score thus far? About 1000 Palestinians killed, 13 Israelis killed. The supposed provocation for this? 3 of those 13 were killed by Hamas-fired [we think] Kaytuscha rockets. If any country other than Israel killed roughly 300 people for every one of its own citizens killed, there would be global retributions not seen since the apartheid days in South Africa. But no, the billions in weapons and aid the US gives Israel flows unabated.

But take the Kaytuscha. Please. It is only called a rocket because those brightly colored cardboard tubes made by Estes are also called rockets. Developed by the Russians in WW2, it is about the size of a large firework, and almost as dangerous. They usually launch when fired, and sometimes even explode when they hit something. They are aimed by guesswork and experience, but are incapable of hitting a specific target. They are meant to be scary, a terror weapon, of a kind, though about the same level of terror as scuffing your feet on the carpet on a winter day and chasing your little sister around the living room trying to zap her. Or an Indian burn.

The Israelis have better terror weapons. White phosphorus, for one, according the UN. White phosphorus burns so hot and with so little provocation that not can really put it out; get any on you and it burns right through you. According to the Rules of War, it can be used for signal flares or for illumination but not as offensive weapon, certainly not in an area dense with civilians [Gaza is one of the most densely populated spaces on earth, hundreds of thousands in a few square miles] so when a UN compound was struck with a white phosphorus artillery shell, it naturally burned the women and children seeking shelter there and, as of yesterday, continues to burn in places.

I’m not holding the Palestinians blameless, much less Hamas, the political arm of the Islamic Brotherhood, an organization that was built on the model of Hitler’s Fascism and funded by Iran to attack Israel whenever possible, though their method of attack is pathetic [perhaps on purpose, Hamas knowing full well it doesn’t need much to set Israel off] the collective punishment practiced by Israel on the Palestinian civilians of Gaza might makes sense in a boot camp or 4^th grade classroom setting, but to do that to what is a separate country in all but name beggars belief. This is not the behavior of a civilized nation. Aside from this it will not have the intended effect, the Gazans won’t overthrow Hamas, they’ve spent so many years beat down, economically and physically and trammeled into the tiny cage of the Gaza Strip that they cling to any security they see, in this case, the security that Hamas will still be there for them [so they say].

One wonders what the Command and Control situation is within the Israeli military, in essence, whose in charge there? At what level are the decisions being made to pound the Gazan population into dust in order to punish a small number of Hamas ringleaders who don’t even live there. Or the small number of rocket launchers who do, when the ordinary citizens of Gaza would happily give these people up if they had jobs and trade with other countries that didn’t have to be conducted by secret tunnel and enough personal security that they knew they weren’t in any given week mere seconds away from having the shit bombed out of them. Opening up trade with them would do this. Opening up the border checkpoints would do this. Treating the people of Gaza like human beings and not some problem in need of a final solutions would do this as well.

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I am no fan of nuclear power. It’s not the safety that concerns me, the plants are safe, by and large, and the worst a nuclear plant can do is melt down. This is far less bad than a nuclear explosion, and there’s been a couple hundred of those since 1945, so I can live with that part. My main concern is nuclear waste. A coal fired power plant produces waste, and while it laced with toxic compounds and heavy metals, even when a dam breaks and a tidal wave of it washes over rural Tennessee, aside from some property damage, not much else dangerous happens. Dirty as that is, its waste is cleaner than nuclear waste, which will kill you even if you’re just sitting in the same room with it. The stuff is radioactive for more than ten thousand years. We hope that the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository will last that long, but no one knows for sure since we as a civilization have not yet managed to build anything that has lasted intact for ten thousand years at a stretch. This is of course assuming that we’re ever going to use the Yucca Mountain facility at all. It may leak too much, [Yucca Mountain isn’t so much a mountain as much as it is a gigantic pile of petrified volcanic ash from an eruption millions of years ago. As such, it has no water table, which is good, but apparently, rainwater flows right through it, top to bottom, which is bad.] there may be too much public opposition in Nevada, there certainly is a great deal of opposition in the surrounding states that the nuclear waste would have to travel through to get there.

The solution would be to turn the nuclear waste, the used up fuel rods in this case, back into fresh fuel rods that could be used again. Oh, wait, you say, I left my magic wand in my other pants. No, really, this is real and well established technology.

To make fuel for a nuclear power plant, you can’t just throw freshly mined uranium into the reactor. It needs to be refined, so there are enough of the right kinds of isotopes to make the fission reaction work. There are a couple of ways to do this, using chemicals, or centrifuges, like Iran is doing for their nuclear program, or inside a special type of reactor called a breeder reactor. Breeder reactors create new, fissionable isotopes, new elements, actually, which is why the Periodic Table extends past 92, the heaviest naturally occurring element, Uranium. Breeder reactors are generally tuned to generate Plutonium, which works in nuclear power plants just fine, however they can generate any number of radioactive elements. By doing to such reactors rejuvenate spent nuclear fuel rods so that they can be used again instead of being thrown away, inasmuch as you can throw away nuclear waste.

Recycling nuclear waste means that there’s less of it, and more fuel for more reactors, which means fewer coal fired power plants and less greenhouse gas produced. This is all good. It does mean more nuclear power plants and reminding people the reason breeder reactors were built in the first place: To make weapons grade fissile material for nuclear weapons. If you refine the spent fuel a little, you fresh fuel. If you refine it a lot, you get nuclear weapon material. People who like to worry about terrorism say that building breeder reactors, like the plan to build one in Southern Ohio, say that they could become targets for terrorists. So could a lot of things that terrorists could target. American nuclear plants would be a fairly hard target, though. They have proven so far. It would be nice if we didn’t have any nuclear plants at all, or any waste to have to store until the next two or three human civilizations rise and fall. But we’re stuck with what we’ve got. That being the case, then it seems the very least we could do would be to make as little nuclear waste as possible, and recycle the fuel as much as possible,

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My neighbor has a patio set. Nothing especially spectacular or unusual about this, a table, some benches, and an umbrella to top it off. What do they call these things “market umbrellas?” I’ve been to my share of markets and have yet to see one there, unless they’re talking about those small town flea markets held in the parking lots of the local shopping plazas, where the wiry men in tobacco T shirts and wide women in muumuus sit under loud-printed patio umbrellas stuck into sockets bolted to the side of their 1978 Dodge Tradesman 300 out the back of which they sell a variety of faded baseball cards, abstract rusted shapes that used to be tools in the time of Teddy Roosevelt and Chinese pocketknives by the 12 pack.

I see it from time to time, while I’m washing the dishes or walking to my car, in the sense that I generally don’t see it there at all, it’s part of the local landscape, and I take it for granted that it’s there.

Christmas Eve was windy. Very windy, 45 mph gusts making the whole house creak and me glad that I was inside. I thought about tree branches breaking, but didn’t hear anything besides the wind.

The next day, Christmas Day, I was on the phone with my mother, looking idly out the front window since I had wandered there while in my on-the-phone-orbit, I see that the people across the street have put a brown market umbrella on their tree lawn for trash day. Except that trash day is Monday and this is Thursday. And the umbrella is completely open and apparently missing its shaft. The color and the style of the umbrella also look a little too familiar, so I walk to the kitchen and look out the windows again at the neighbor’s backyard. Lo and behold, his 7umbrella was missing, the shaft was still there, but the rest of it was gone. My neighbor is out of town for the holiday so there was no one but his cat to notice the umbrella’s absence.

Later, I put on a coat and crossed the street to fetch it for him. As I walked over, I looked around for any obvious signs of a path of destruction the umbrella had made along its journey, about 250 feet from its origin, who knows how far it had traveled through the sky first. I didn’t see anything. I went to pick it up and discovered it had been stuck to the ground with its remaining bit of shaft like a giant push pin. I don’t know if the wind had done this, or someone had caught it and pushed it into the ground to keep it from traveling any farther. I did eventually pull it free and walked it, open, back to where it was supposed to go, the broken end of the shaft had prevented me from being able to close it. It had snapped, actually, in the cast metal hinge that allowed you to tilt the thing to block the sun. It had the classic, crystalline look of metal fatigue [well, duh].

I tried sticking into the ground myself, but the ground was frozen, and far too hard to attempt it. I began to wonder just how it got stuck in the ground in the first place. There was little wind, but as insurance I wedged it under a couple of the benches to make sure that it wont run away again.

My neighbor isn’t back in town yet, and I’ll be leaving town myself in a couple of hours, so I wonder when It will be when I next bump into him to explain the curious tableau I left in his backyard.