Passive Agressive

Took the family to see Mel Gibson in Edge of Darkness yesterday evening. Ross wanted to see Mel Gibson getting in people's faces, and he did that. There were any number of holes in the plot, but over all it was very satisfying. The bad guys were appropriately smarmy, and they got theirs. The clean up man almost stole the show, especially when he wraps the whole thing up. That's not giving away anything, is it?

It was a remake of an old BBC movie that starred Joe Don Baker. There was an excellent scene in the original where Joe has brought a couple of bars of plutonium in a briefcase to a conference on nuclear something-er-other. In the briefcase the bars are packed in foam that keeps them about a foot apart. At the meeting he takes the briefcase up to the dias, opens it, takes out the two bars of plutonium and brings them together in his hands. The bars get excited and start shooting out light and presumably lethal radiation. Joe doesn't care, he's already received a fatal dose, and these people at the conference, well, they are responsible for the whole mess he's been trying to sort out. Needless to say, the people in the conference hall get very excited and start heading for the doors.

So back when I was looking at Jack's failed smoke detector (more here:

• Velocity,
• Velocity, Detour,
• Velocity, Detour, Part 2,
• Velocity, Part 2 and
  
• Velocity, Part 3)

I did a little reading about plutonium. Seems there are several isotopes. Some are fairly inert and can be handled safely with nothing more than a pair of gloves. Others are highly radioactive and just being in the same room can be very unhealthy. Funny thing is, the safe-to-handle stuff is what gets used in bombs and reactors, while the dangerous forms are not good for much of anything. Just the opposite of what you might think.

To get radioactive material to do anything useful, you need to have a large enough concentration that the radiation it gives off finds enough targets to start a chain reaction. The amount of the material controls how fast the reaction procedes. Smaller amounts in nuclear reactors give you useful heat, larger amounts give you runaway reactions: i.e. a bomb.

Question I have is would Joe Don Baker's stunt have produced any visual effects? Or would everyone in the room have just fallen over dead?

And then there is radiation poisoning. There is radiation wherever you go, you are constantly exposed to it. Normally it is at a very low level and it doesn't appear to have any detrimental effect on a person. Man made radioactive material can be much more dangerous. We can generate enough radiation to kill a person in short order. The amount of radiation you receive determines how sick you will get.

If you get some radioactive material in your body, that's a different issue. Most radioactive materials are heavy metals, and heavy metals are poisonous all by themselves. Just look at mercury and lead. Don't look at gold or silver. They're special. If you happen to swallow some radioactive material, that's not too bad. What's bad is what happens afterward. If it just passes through you, not too much harm done, but if it gets absorbed by your body, then it's in there permanently, and it will continue to give off damaging radiation. That way even a small amount can become fatal.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

My wife told me about an elementary school kid getting suspended for bringing a two inch long G.I. Joe gun to school.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Then we have a case here at PSU in Portland where a tenured economics professor has been suspended for accusing one of his students of being a spy for the FBI. As usual, it's a little hard to tell from the story in the paper just what's going on, but it kind of smells like politically correct anti-gun pacifist meets imprudent gun evangelist.

----------------------------------------------------------------

What these stories all have in common is small people getting fed up with the way things are going, no one is listening to them, so by God they are going to do something about it.

I hear about all the crap going on in the world all the time. The corruption, the stupidity, the arrogance of those in power and I think: geez , what is wrong with people? Well, the simple answer is that they're corrupt, stupid and arrogant. Not to mention greedy. In other words, they are people. And it doesn't have to be everyone. One bad apple can upset the whole applecart, to mix my metaphors. Who shall I blame? Do you blame the guilty parties for being scumbags? Or do you blame the "good guys" for not putting a stop to it? It's just the way it is. I like to think that in general (taking the whole world in consideration), things are getting better. America seems to be suffering right now, but I'm pretty sure we can still put a chicken in every pot on Sunday.

But consider this: it costs a million dollars to keep a US soldier in the field for a year. One hundred thousand soldiers will cost one hundred billion dollars. Do this for ten years and you've spent a trillion dollars. Now most of that money ends up as wages paid to people who provide the goods and services used to support the troops in the field, so that money goes back into the economy. But those goods and services? They are gone, consumed, ate up. Is Iraq ever going to be a stable, contributing member of the world community? Who knows, but by the way we conduct our foreign policy, I doubt it.

I read a story in The New Yorker last week about Haiti that ended with saying it was going to take billions of dollars of nation building to get Haiti to the point where they could take care of themselves. That is absolutely the wrong approach. The West has poured billions in Africa, and Africa is a bigger mess than ever. I suppose there is some improvement, but for every country that manages to make some headway towards being civilized, another one seems to slip back into anarchy.

The only kind of foreign aid we should be giving to other countries is education, and we shouldn't expect any results for 50 or 100 years.