A Strong Coward

It was a day when I was considering, intermittently, Brené Brown, a social worker and researcher in the topics of vulnerability and shame. She went viral a year or two ago when she did a TED talk, during which she mentioned that she had had  breakdown, at one point on her in her life. She even had a slide—with the very word BREAKDOWN in 52-point font. She then stayed home, mortified that she had outed herself in front of 500 people! 500 people—complete strangers—all walking around with the news: Brené had cracked up.

What saved her? It might well be her humor, but perhaps it was something greater—if possible. Because she’s not afraid to use her insight, even when it is not entirely blowing in her favor. There was the time, for example, when a man brought three of her books at a book signing, and provided the names of his wife and two daughters. The man then expressed interest that Brown, in her work on invulnerability, didn’t discuss men.

“I don’t work with men,” said Brown.

“How convenient,“ said the man, “because my wife and two children would rather see me die on top of my white horse than see me fall.” He went on to say: it’s not other guys, not the coaches, not the dads who tell us to suck it up, go on with our lives. It’s the women.

Not that men don’t have their problems, too. What women grapple with—their own Mt. Everest—is to be the perfect woman: nice, sweet, athletic, head of a major corporation, still finding time to take the children to school and the zoo and attend EVERY school performance, and ohh…a sexual tiger in bed for her husband. When, completely inexplicably, the woman stumbles under all of this weight, what do guys tend to say? “Don’t look at me! I emptied the dishwasher last week!” (Note to guys: the right answer is, “I know honey, I know. You’re doing an awful lot. No wonder you’re tired…”)

Well, did I get that message? Was I willing to put my vulnerability out there? Because I had to have a cataract surgery, yesterday, and they had told me: call your doctor to find out what time you’re supposed to be there, Did I call on Friday, the day I had done the preadmission? Nah, I waited for Monday, the day before the surgery. Surely, the office would be open, someone would answer the phone and have the answer.

Were they at the beach? Paying dominoes and drinking beer? So was I on for surgery or was I not? And what was going to happen if I dragged an adult with me, and then the whole thing was off?

And the adult thing pissed me off, because I had been the adult in the very same place when Raf had his knee done. And there are only two things you need to know: the clinic has found a way of funneling arctic jet streams directly into their waiting room, and they have extensively worked and succeeded at proving the relativity of time, if not space. This they do, by seating the “adults” in an uncomfortable room and providing them with a blaring television, which is showing variants of murder or violence.

“November 4^th, that’s a bad day for me,” said Mr. Fernández, who has a dislike of hospitals. So then the question became: tell him, hey, it’s not gonna be so great a day for me, too, and I did it for you, you’ll do it for me! Alternative: find someone else, and give Raf a break.

Guys discount their feelings: it’s part of what we learned growing up. So given that the surgery obviously wasn’t going to start until at least 10—in fact, it started at about 11:30—why was I going to ask Lady from the coffee shop to be with me at 8:30, which I had finally learned from the papers I had signed was the time I was to arrive? I knew—from peering at the schedule sheet at the doctor’s  office that I was number three—and I knew from speaking to the doctor that the operation took 30 minutes. So I told Lady to come in at 10—she’d still have to wait too long, but at least not as long.

This was a problem from the moment I walked in the door—how had I gotten there? Well, I had taken then bus. And if my friend didn’t come? Well, they couldn’t operate without my friend being there.

“Yes, you can,” I said. “there are things called cabs, and anyway, you’re giving me instructions, which I can read, and there’s also that fact that I’m a nurse, and quite capable of assuming my own care once I get home. And if you’d like, I’ll speak to the legal division of the hospital and sign a waiver absolving you corporately and professionally and personally from any damage resulting from not having any of my friends waiting for hours in the waiting room.”

They dug their heels in, I dug my heels in. And I had learned—again—the real power of hospitals. This was an eye surgery, but I still had to put on that blue gown, that ties in the back but not low enough so that everyone can see your butt as you go to the bathroom. So we had a little fight about that—during which I pointed out that if they needed to do CPR—they could grab hold of the front of my shirt, and pop all the buttons open faster than they could untie the strings behind my back.

I also learned, of course, after the first stranger passed and put drops in my eyes, that it was time to do some patient activism. So the second time around? I reached out my hand, stated my name, and said I was glad to meet him.

This worked—since it’s how the world outside works. I then asked what drops he proposed to put in my eye were, inquired what their purpose was, and mentioned that another gentleman had already done so. Right—so everyone got the hint.

I was, in short, assuming charge of my health care, but was I assuming charge of myself? Because I was now in the third stretcher from the door, and it was clear—first it would be the stretcher closest to the door, then number two, then number three.

Which is what I was, and which was a good thing and a bad thing. Because this was a normal day for everybody—I remembered the banter among the nurses quite well, as well as the habitual actions that were almost bored. The nurse taking my blood pressure? It wasn’t her first time….

And so I relived the whole thing from the other side, being the horizontal one, the one with too much time, instead of being the vertical one, rushing to get everything done.

I was wheeled out of the recovery room to the operating room but not into the operating room, since the surgeon and anesthesiologist were discussing: what to have for lunch. It was after eleven, at that point, and I was still without my breakfast. So I protested that, and they had to agree: it was a bit unfair.

“You remember what you said, just before surgery,” said my ophthalmologist, when I saw him today. Well, I took a chance and told him what I had been planning to say:

You have done this surgery before, haven’t you doctor?

Right—gotta keep the troops entertained….

Did I pass, or did I fail? All of the personnel found it astounding that I was willing to be picked up by a friend, but not willing to put her through five hours of pointless waiting. For Lady, when she came, spent fifteen minutes reading and signing a form saying that I should rest, not pick up heavy objects, put medicines in my eyes every four hours, and not rub my eye vigorously. All the stuff, in fact, that I had agreed to do—and signed off on—the week before the surgery.

I had decided to be strong, to ride that white horse, not to show my feelings, not to demand that Raf come, or that Lady pick me, my blanket in my hands to fend off the cold. She and I could have chatted and laughed in the waiting room, but not in the recovering room, where I spent a good hour and a half before and after surgery. And that is where the demons occur. Yes, you know that every consent form ends in “possible complications may include mild irritation…. anaphylaxis and death.” And yes, you know that the mild irritation is 80% of patients and the anaphylaxis is about 0.008%. But these numbers are for the nurses whizzing past you.

So I did it, mostly, alone. Also true, everyone does it mostly alone. At least us guys, who were sitting with their wives in the waiting room. And yes, Brené, they were not expressing their fear, worrying about death, telling their wives—just in case the worst happened—that she had been the light of his light, he had never stopped loving her.

The conclusion is obvious: I could face down a surgery without family and friends. But tell people I was scared and needed someone there?

Didn’t have the balls!

         

On Opera and Courage

Anxious Readers, I bring you a sigh of relief: The Metropolitan Operas high definition broadcast of Carmen did not disappoint. Yes, we’re three of ten: the opera was set in the 1930’s.

And guess what? It’s now something of a relief, this surety that I have when I walk into the movies to see the opera. There will be popcorn, to which I will succumb. There’s the illicit Coca-Cola—more a tankful than a glassful—which I can slurp despite the disapproving eyes of Mr. Fernández, because guess who bought the tickets? And then the opera will start, and do I have to worry about seeing Egyptians and pyramids—that’s Aida—or poppies and the steppes of Central Asia (Prince Igor)? Absolutely not—the elephants will be strolling down Broadway, as happy to be out of that hot dusty desert as all of us men-of-a-certain-inclination were to escape our dreary Midwestern towns. Even elephants deserve a chance at the Big Apple!

So really, it has a certain comfort, like eating your mother’s tuna fish casserole—you remember, the noodles, the can of tuna, the can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, the soggy potato chips on top. Oh, sorry, forgot the frozen peas: that’s the vegetable! You wouldn’t, of course, ever make the damn thing, but you if your mother came out of the kitchen bearing mussels lightly sautéed in virgin olive oil dressed with raspberry vinaigrette on a bed of radicchio? Please.

Nor is having Prince Igor being Al Capone the worst that could happen, since here is what The New York Times had to say about a production by Peter Sellars of Don Giovanni:

YOU remember Mozart's ''Don Giovanni.'' That's the opera in which the Don Juan of the slums interrupts his singing of the Champagne Aria to take a heroin hit in the arm from his pimp and connection, Leporello. Donna Anna also requires a quick needle during her ''Non mi dir'' before she can launch into the coloratura section of that aria. Elvira, a Madonna clone, rolls back and forth across the stage like a bowling ball while making a hash of ''Mi tradi.'' And you certainly will recall how Giovanni sits on a stoop outside a slum building in what may be Spanish Harlem, enjoying his last supper (a Big Mac and fries) as a big-box radio pumps out those great 18th-century dance tunes. That, of course, leads up to the famous ''Stoned Guest'' scene in which the dissolute Don is pulled down into a sewer by a small girl, playing Lolita to his Humbert Humbert.

Full confession: small hailstorms of resentment have occasionally afflicted my days, when I realize that absolutely everybody in the world has had their book reviewed by The New York Times. But me and my iguanas? Are we so trifling, so insignificant? Mere chopped liver?

Now I see that there may have been that silver lining, because here’s a summation from the same review:

Evidently operating under the assumption that this 200-year-old work cannot speak to a modern audience unless it is trashed, trivialized and sensationalized, Mr. Sellars turns it into a depressing parade of easy jokes and vaudeville turns.

And here I have to say: however much that review ruined his day, Sellars had it coming. Because I checked out the first twenty minutes or so of the production—for this did God make YouTube—and yes, it made me remember my happy years in New York in the rough parts of Spanish Harlem. But the music of the time was hardly Mozartian, nor were the plots of the lives any of us were living at the time.

What was it like? Take a look!

So if we didn’t get Carmen as Lady Gaga or José as a character from Almodovar, we were lucky. It has to be said, though, that seeing that twenty-minute distillation of 1980’s New York made me nostalgic. The city was gritty, ugly, dangerous, and alive. If you were gay, and if you had any kind of a spine, you were protesting—if you weren’t emptying bedpans and putting cold compresses on your lover’s brow. Or often, your best friend or even just a friend, because who knew when it was going to be you—there in that bed with the pneumonia—and who knew when the disease would have so ravaged the city that there were no lovers, no best friends, but no one, nobody, to do for you what you were doing for others. Which is why you were throwing blood on the steps of the New York City Department of Health, throwing ashes of dead AIDS victims on the White House lawn, doing sit-ins at the CDC.

Maybe that’s why I’m a little underwhelmed that Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, came out as a gay man. Here’s The New York Times in gushing-effusion mode:

I give Tim tremendous credit for finally coming out publicly. None of us can know how personally difficult this may have been for him. But for someone of his age (he turns 54 on Saturday), from the Deep South (Alabama), who’s chief executive of what’s probably the most obsessively followed company in the world and who purports to be a private person, it couldn’t have been easy.

Know what? Coming out is easy, since you do it every day, virtually. I did it last Friday, when I wrote down Mr. Fernández’s name as my husband on a preadmission form—or rather, about thirty of them. So I sat back, and wondered which María or which José would have an issue with it. And—surprise—nobody did! Damn, I was spoiling for that fight.

So we always do this thing—Marc and Raf came out and cleared the way for a whole bunch of other people, including people like Tim Cook and Ricky Martin. And then, when they finally join the rest of us, we have to applaud? Look, at age 54 he’s younger than I am, and sure, the Deep South was a more daunting place for gay people than Madison, Wisconsin. But where is Cook now? In California—and his industry is hardly the most homophobic. If Cook were 80 and coming out in rural Alabama, I’d paid full tribute.

And isn’t there something a bit classist, this assumption that the rich and famous are risking more and thus more worthy of applause when they come out? Suppose Cook had had to resign, as did the gay CEO of British Petroleum, John Browne. Cook would still have—I presume—more cash than most of us, more resources than the rest of us, a softer fall than the rest of us. I doubt if Cook would have landed in a soup kitchen, but for many ordinary gay people living in places where they can lose their jobs and their housing for being gay? The soup kitchen is their only recourse….

In fact, I don’t have much issue with Cook, who at least had the grace to say:

I don’t consider myself an activist, but I realize how much I’ve benefited from the sacrifice of others.

Right—it was something we all heard in those days: I’m not an activist, I’m not really a political person….. Want the translation? I’ll just hide here in my closet, until you guys make it safe enough to come out. The answer to that idea, by the way, is that as long as there’s a chance you or anyone could get AIDS, you’re a political person. So get over it, sweetheart.

It’s totally amazing that 32 states have marriage equality, and I’m thrilled that—perhaps—I can get married in Wisconsin. But I’m worried that in Ladysmith, Wisconsin, there probably is some kid who is terrified—with very good reason—of coming out. There are always more fights than there is energy or time to fight them, which is why we have to choose the fight well.

Did we?    

        

A Day of Shining Eyes

Well, he was a gentleman who came into my life at a time when—as he would put it—my eyes were not shining. How could they? I was waking at five every morning, serving the Gods of corporate America, and straggling home at six or seven, to eat dinner, wash dishes, and put myself to bed. So after five days of that, how was I doing on Saturdays?

Wait—according to policy, I had to work every other Saturday morning, since I was “management,” which meant that I had an entirely different view about the time clock. Why? Because if you were paid by the hour, you had to punch in. Right—but you also got to punch out! To be management meant that you had to arrive earlier than your boss, and stay later. So in fact, you never punched out.

Saturdays? Well, I son learned that I couldn’t go to the movies, since I had no emotional reserves left. And that meant that a sad movie would plunge into an abyss of despair, and anything remotely funny would shoot me into a stratosphere of hilarity.

Do I have to tell you about Sundays?

So I had happened, in my Walmart years, on Ben Zander giving a TED talk about shining eyes, and I had been impressed, so much so that I sent a link to the director of Human Resources, my big boss. Characteristically, this was ignored, and I went on my way: willingly putting myself on the treadmill, until it was decreed that I got off. The severance pay was good; the freedom was better.

Confession—I was both in and out of corporate America, since my job was to hide myself in a room upstairs—away from almost everybody—and convince little groups of people that they could speak English. This, of course, was a joke—since I had no formal training as a teacher, only ten or fifteen years of teaching, during which I had convinced everybody that I was an excellent teacher. Oh, everybody but me.

I had, you see, disproved Barnum and Bailey, or whoever it was: I had fooled everybody all of the time! Wow! So what to do, that first Monday morning, when I woke up jobless? Lie on the couch? Watch some TV? I opted for the beach.

Well, that meant a walk, and that meant seeing people, and that meant saying hello to people—people whom I would see every day, so they became, well, not friends, but friendly faces. If you smile and say buenos dias about thirty times in the morning, eventually your day becomes a buen dia.

So the exercise stimulated the brain, and I would be writing as I trotted home (I didn’t really swim, I plunged into the ocean and paddled about for five minutes—just enough time to become part of the blue sky, the green water, the golden sand….) So I would write and go off to a teaching gig I had picked up.

Two things happened: I encountered the most difficult student of my twenty-year career. The student ended up teaching me more than I did her, since she put me to the test at every turn: did I really believe that I don’t teach, but instead create a space where learning can occur? Every other student had met me, if not halfway, at least part of the way. This student—though perfectly nice and quite motivated—could be derailed but the slightest mote of dust that I blew in her path. Nor could I lift her back onto the track—that she had to do herself.

In the end, she ended up speaking quite well: another person who had proved me wrong that I was a failure as a teacher.

Well, there was work to do: I had put in my 10,000 hours of practice at the cello, so in theory I should have been quite proficient. Was I? Yes, at home, alone. But with other people around? I travelled through performance anxiety and was firmly entrenched in performance panic.

I’m lucky—however much I piss and moan about the things I have had to do in life—who else do you know who has delivered death to his mother?—I have a lot of energy. After a week of intense struggle, I came out the other side. I was and wasn’t a musician; rather, I leant my body and my fingers to the cello, and something or somebody played. And the less I got in the way, the better it would all be. I had gotten to that Zen state: the playing is good today, GREAT! The playing is bad today, GREAT!

I was treating myself—and gee, it only took five decades!—as well as I had treated my students. And with much the same results: when I play Bach suites in the café in  the afternoon, it always comes out OK. Some days it takes a bit longer, but it always comes. And if people drift in and listen? Perfect!

Well, I spent the morning getting pre-admitted for a cataract surgery next week. Right, it took four hours, during which—typical gringo—I had completely streamlined the process in my head so that I, and everybody else, could have sailed in and out in an hour. Then I began chatting with a woman, and telling her the story of my father: he had had to have the same operation, and had a particular terror of anybody doing anything to his eyes. He was, in fact, panicking, when he called the nurse to confess and plead for more time. Fortunately, the nurse knew just what to say…

“…Jack, we’re gonna give you so much Valium, you won’t give a shit!”

So we laughed about that, and then I spoke to the anesthesiologist. He asked: what did I do?

So I told him: I’m a writer, I wrote a memoir of my mother, and how she died. Actually, I just told him: she was old and feeble and losing her mind, so she stopped eating and drinking, and died a wonderful death at home, with the cat on her bed. So the doctor’s eyes shot up, and he wanted to read the book. Hey, good deal!

Then I went to the café, where I told Amir what Jorge, the manager, had said about him: he’s an excellent worker, he wants to learn everything, he really helps a lot. So Amir was so pleased he sold me coffee to go, but then realized his mistake. I told him: I’ve had a lot worse things happen to me.

Then I watched Ben Zander and realized: it’s been a day of shining eyes!

Mine included…. 

    

Out in the Corporate World

So today’s news?

“Man, this is the third time I’ve spoken to these people in Mexico, and I keep telling them, ‘hey, this is a business, and I’m alone here, so I’ve gotta take care of customers. And so whatever you gotta do to get the Internet faster, you gotta do it….”

That’s Jorge, the manager of the café, and on whose shoulders many things fall. Actually, from one point of view, everything. Consider, for example, that it’s slow season, so he should be getting a break, right? But people have quit, and on one occasion have been fired, and nobody wants to hire anybody in slow season. So Jorge? He’s working harder than ever, and hasn’t had two consecutive days off for months.

“I could go home right now,” he told me, a little after ten this morning, as he was opening the shop. “But once the customers come in, I’ll get my energy back….”

It’s a curious thing, how technology has enriched and enslaved us. Last night, for example, I was watching the encore performance of Figaro, which took pace a week and a half ago on a stage in New York City, got shot up to a satellite, and then got beamed down to movie theaters in 66 different countries. For Montalvo, this is an ordinary state of affairs. For me?

My father once explained the essential workings of the internal combustion engine, which—since I am Internetless—I can only say that I think is what propels your car. And though I’ve retained absolutely none of what he said, it dawned on me at the time: he was the last generation of guys who knew how everything worked. They could fix toasters and cars and lawn mowers, and if they didn’t know how to do it? They could figure it out.

But now we have a satellite that is enjoying Mozart somewhere up there, and then willing to share it with the rest of us. And there obviously is a satellite wizard at the Met. Or maybe the wizard is in Mexico, or India, and is doing his magic from home. But when the wizard’s car breaks down? He’s probably as lost as the rest of us.

And lost is what I am, because I have just tried to get on the Internet, and the little bar that tells how the loading is going goes speedily up to the mid-point, the screen changes and obviously wants to become The New York Times, but then what happens? Well, it’s obvious what’s happening, because I am hearing 80% of a loud conversation in Russian. And the other 20%? Presumably in Russia, though it could be anywhere, since the Russians have stopped being in Russia—where they should be—and have instead been sent out to all the cafés in the Western world, expressly to soak up the Internet!

Hah—it’s clear. The Cold War never ended, and guess who won? Because while he is shouting Russian and peering computeristically at his beloved, this is what I’m seeing!

   

So I’m completely unable to tell you anything interesting: no worrying about Wisconsin, no wondering about the Japanese and their inability to acknowledge to the rest of the world that they’ve screwed up and can’t figure out what to do about their damned nuclear plant, which if it falls down  in the next earthquake will be hasta la vista, baby for pretty much everybody (one view) or absolutely no problem (the opposing view)!

Of course, if the Internet agreed to hop tables and spend some time on my screen, I could give you the full report on Tim Cook, who got outed in a TV show, and then—oh so bravely—came out publically today in Bloomberg Business.

And who is Cook? A native of Alabama, 53-years old, and the CEO of Apple. Oh—and the first CEO of a public company to come out. Where’s he been all this time? Essentially doing a Ricky Martin, by guarding his privacy and not wanting to draw attention away from all the incredible people and products of Apple.

And if memory serves, 83% of gay people do this to some extent in the work force. I should know: I did, and now feel bad about it. Because really, how many people didn’t know? And isn’t it strange  that gay people will be a distraction, but straight people won’t? Because in every office, in every cubicle, there was a picture of the husband, the wife, the girlfriend. What was there on my desk, in those receding days when I worked at Walmart? A picture of Raf, my mother, and me: he was there, yes, but my mother took the sting off. What would have happened if I had put a picture of the two of us, dressed in tuxedos, cutting our wedding cake?

Nothing, officially: Human Resources was smarter than that, and since I had come out and told the CEO that I was gay, and then written to the Senior Vice President of Human Resources that I was gay… well, they would have figured out: I was able to stand up for myself. Of course, people would have whispered; the more religious would have—perhaps—tried to proselytize. But after a week? Old news!

That’s what happened to the first CEO to get outed: John Browne, whose 23-year old rent boy turned nasty—ah, reportedly they do!—, and ratted to the tabloids about their affair. Browne was then CEO of British Petroleum and in his fifties; now he is a Member of Parliament, and chairman of the trustees of the Tate Galleries. According to the New York Times, Lee Scott, then CEO of Walmart, called Browne and rescinded the offer to be on the board of directors of Walmart. Why? Browne says that Scott told him that Arkansas wasn’t ready for a gay board member; Walmart says that Browne was being investigated by BP for misuse of corporate funds (so said—here he is again!—the rent boy, but the company checked it out and cleared Browne).

What happened to Browne? Well, all of the stuff he feared didn’t happen. Yes, he resigned, but all his friends rallied, and those who didn’t? Ahhh, the bliss of knowing who your friends are!

That’s the thing about the corporate world: the pressure to conform, not to rock the boat, is amazing. Every day, I used to see about twenty people whom everybody feared: people who could make an entire division disappear. And those twenty people? Strong, rich, powerful—emperors, but without a stitch of clothes.

So fearful were we, that things didn’t get said. And where weren’t they said? Not at the bottom—well, not always at the bottom—but more often at the top. Nobody could tell Bentonville, Arkansas, that Puerto Rico wasn’t Mexico. So the little store with the rice and beans and some cans and some personal items? That store that had no parking? Well, we had to open it, pretend it was a success, and then close it. Because people in Mexico may travel by burros down the mountain to do their shopping, but  everybody, everybody in Puerto Rico has a car! And nobody is going to walk in the tropical heat to get to a neighborhood market.

Had I Internet, I could tell you the story I read in a Malcolm Gladwell book about the program to train pilots how to communicate, since a Chinese or a Japanese copilot would obediently fly the plane into the mountain, if his pilot mistakenly ordered him to do so. Dying with decorum intact is better, apparently, than living with the disgrace of telling your superior he’s full of shit.

Unless, of course, you’re running a business, or answering to the Board of Directors who are—isn’t this the way it’s supposed to work?—answering to the investors. So why it the corporate world so screwed up?

Because for all the talk about diversity, they never got it. The females in top management had to be tougher than the males, the Puerto Ricans more gringo, and gay? Gay???

Well, it’s happened. The first Fortune 500 company to have a gay CEO.

Wait—500 companies? 500 CEO’s?

Stay tuned! 

   

Wednesday Paranoia

It happens every day at 2PM: Google alerts sends me the latest news from Fukushima. So I peer at it, ponder the improbable but apparently true fact that a disaster is unfolding before our blind eyes, and that life is obliviously going on. In the meantime, we are worried about Ebola! And here’s the latest news:

Tokyo Electric Power Company [TEPCO] says it has found high levels of radioactive cesium in groundwater in the compound. Officials at TEPCO say a recent typhoon may be the cause… TEPCO officials say water taken on Wednesday from a well had 460,000 becquerels of cesium per liter (Bq/l)… another well contained 424,000 becquerels. Officials say those levels are 800 to 900 times the previous peak.

Right—definite fodder for a blogger whittling away his Wednesday. So then I came to this:

What? Steel can be radioactive? But wait, there’s no time to worry about that because what in the world is happening to the horses in California? Why is their skin falling off?

But there’s not a moment to stress out about that, since there’s the pressing fact that ENEnews is reporting that “Radiation Levels have Surged Around Fukushima…100,000% of the Previous Record High…Officials Say They Don’t Know the Cause…Recent Typhoon May Be to Blame”

But before I concern myself about that, I really have to think about that weird cloud that appeared over the famed Venice Beach in California, and isn’t it strange that it produced thunder and lightening, since normally the ocean’s cooling effect prevents formation of lightening?

Then it was time to look in on Dr. Helen Caldicott, the founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility and what she is saying, which is that there’s a huge cover up in the United States, since the nuclear industry has bought Obama and Hillary as well.

Well, before I could digest all of that, there was this, from the Associated Press:

Craig Welch, July 24, 2014: Once-common marine birds disappearing from our coast [...] a significant ecological shift in our region — a major decline in once-abundant marine birds. [...] the number of everyday marine birds here has plummeted dramatically in recent decades. [...] several new studies now also link many dwindling marine bird populations to what they eat — especially herring, anchovies, sand lance [...] Some forage-fish species, such as herring, are a fraction of what they once were. [...] There’s certainly no shortage of crashes [...] “It’s one thing to have a rare species decline,” said Joe Gaydos, with the SeaDoc Society. “[...] We’re talking about big, common species, and a lot of them.” [...] it wasn’t clear whether this was a local or continental- scale problem, said Scott Wilson, a biologist with Environment Canada. It’s both: Up and down the West Coast, the winter breeding population [of Western grebes] is half what it was in 1975. [...] since 1970 [Puget Sound's biggest] herring stock has crashed, with more than 90 percent of the population all but gone. [...] some scientists believe the herring problem itself may be far worse than others acknowledge. [...] Wayne Landis, at Western Washington University [...] found that while Puget Sound herring used to live eight to 10 years, they now survive only to age 3 or 4. [...] “They don’t get. That old anymore,” he said. That could be the result of disease or toxic contamination or other changes [...] Usually after a bust, herring eventually recolonize, Landis said. The question now: Is this bust different [...] “Something’s happening on a big level,” [Gaydos] said. “But what is it?”

Indeed, what is it? Because I’m either supposed to stop eating hazelnuts—so says Dr. Caldicott, since hazelnuts come from Chernobyl-affected Turkey—or everything is just fine. That’s what the BBC says in an article titled, “Fukushima: Is Fear of Radiation the Real Killer?”

Right, but then it’s time to consider that a former mayor in the Fukushima prefecture is alleging that the kids are dying of thyroid cancer, and the government is covering it up. And it’s certainly true that TEPCO hasn’t exactly welcomed any help in solving what they themselves say could be a forty-year cleanup.

The real question is whether this is a matter for TEPCO at all: if I were living on the West Coast, seeing the marine birds die off and watching my horses lose the skins…well, I’d be howling for an international team to address the situation. But who’s working in the plant? According to The New York Times, it’s a motley group of homeless / drunk / mentally impaired guys picked up off the street and bused to the plant. Oh, and did I mention the mafia?

Any way you look at it, it’s a bizarre situation, made worse by a relative lack of openness. True, as you can see in the video below, they allowed the BBC in, but what the BBC found is even more frightening: nobody really knows what’s going on in key parts of the reactor, since nobody can get in to see. So they’re relying on an improvised boat with a camera to go about the core of the reactor, trying to figure out where the leaks are. And you can see it quite well: water is gushing into the core of the reactor.

As if that weren’t bad enough, my real worry is that North America—OK, the US and Canada—has discovered that it’s sitting on tremendous amounts of shale oil, so for the first time in decades, we’re starting to export oil. The problem? All of that oil needs to be released by fracking, at huge environmental cost, so what’s going to happen to all the alternative, clean energy sources that we should have been developing for the last fifty years? If oil drops down to 20$ a barrel, is a windmill going to look so attractive?

Well, we’ve been sharpening both sides of the sword for centuries, now: we’ve moved from sword to gun to bomb to nuclear warheads. And now, Dr. Caldicott raises the possibility that with the advent of artificial intelligence, computers could reproduce themselves and as well…

…start a nuclear war and annihilate the planet.

Why do I think they might do a better job of things?