My Log 556 August 15 2017: The hopelessness of the NDP

Last night, having contributed my $15 for membership of the NDP because I approve of Niki Ashton’s attitude towards the Palestine-Israeli imbroglio --- she supports the Palestinians, which raises the question, what the hell is wrong with her party that they don’t do the same?---  I walked over to St Laurent boulevard where she was reputed to be having a meeting at 7 pm.

I eventually found the place, a nightclub, upstairs, almost unsignalled at street level, with no sign indicating Ms Ashton was to be expected. The place was occupied by  a group of very loud rock musicians rehearsing for a concert scheduled to start at 9 pm, according to my internet research.  Eventually quite a few people arrived and occupied the seats that were scattered around as is usual in a nightclub, and waited.

Then, I waited.

And waited. At 7.30 I indicated to someone sitting at my table that she was running late.

So, I waited. And waited. At 7.35, growing impatient, I waited some more, reflecting on the fact that during my days as an active journalist I operated by a rule of thumb, that anyone who has not arrived for an appointment within 20 minutes of the agreed time is not coming, causing me to abandon the appointment.

At 7.45, convinced that if Niki Ashton  cannot keep an appointment, she is unlikely to be able to run the country, I left, asking my question of the guy at the door, who could not tell me when things were going to start,  and replied, “Good question.”

So much for my fancied candidate for Prime Minister.

THE STITCHED UP CASE AGAINST PRESIDENT LULA IN BRAZIL

Link of the day August 14 2017: THE STITCHED UP CASE AGAINST PRESIDENT LULA IN BRAZIL: I have always believed that the dismissal of Dilma Rousseff from the presidency of Brazil was stitched up by the relentless economic elite of that country, offended that a Workers Party should have had power. Even more suspicious has been the recent conviction of the former President Lula Da Silva on corruption charges. My suspicions on this account are confirmed by an article by Mark Weisbrot in a recent issue of The Nation. The judge was also the prosecutor, the so-called offence never happened, and in any case was alleged to have taken  place years after Lula had left office. Readthe article here, and realize that things have not really changed so much in Latin America, for so many centuries the exploited satrap of American and European money.

My Log 555 August 11 2017: Nuclear power: the force that could destroy our world, and that already has come within a whisker of doing so

I heard some commentators on television the other day say that for human beings to maintain nuclear weapons is equivalent to leaving a loaded shotgun in a kindergarten.

I thought when I heard it that it is a totally apt comparison, but it seems even more appropriate since the extraordinary statement by the nuclear-warrior-number-one, the United States president, that he is ready to load on to North Korea fire and fury “such as the world has ever seen before.” This can mean only one thing: nuclear war.

It happens I had been thinking about this recently, after having viewed an extraordinary film called Command and Control, made by PBS, the American TV channel, about a nuclear accident that occurred in Arkansas in 1980.This film confirmed all the doubts I have carried with me through my entire life about nuclear power, and (let me get this off my chest right here) this is a film that I believe every person in the world should see, and that should be required viewing in every high school on earth. It lasts for 91 minutes, was issued in 2012, and was directed by Robert Kenner.

I remember most clearly  putting pen to paper to oppose nuclear power when I had briefly returned to New Zealand to live in the 1970s. Before that, I remember in 1950 in Montreal covering a luncheon address by the man in charge of nuclear research in Canada, who airily dismissed all objections based on the lack of control of the waste products, by uttering the infamous lie, that they had the waste disposal problem totally  under control.  Of course, it is so far from being under control, that they still have no idea how to dispose safely of the waste products, and it is known that leaks are occurring in many places from these supposedly safe storage places.

I 1975 I wrote an impassioned article opposing the proposal of the New Zealand government of the day to build a nuclear power station at the foot of one of the two harbours around whose shores is built the city of Auckland, with a quarter of the nation’s population. Of course, in response to my article the pro-nuclear people trotted out all their comforting bromides, but in the end the proposal was defeated by a combination of pressures brought by environmentalists in alliance with the indigenous Maori people, whose first objection was the simple but convincing fear that the power station would invade and ruin the bed of the shell fish they had always --- and in this case “always” means, for many, many centuries --- depended on.  New Zealand is still free of nuclear power to this day, and is still refusing to admit into its ports American warships carrying nuclear power, a policy that is so popular that it has even survived a series of conservative governments.

However, back to this film which reveals, in its last moments  after a  harrowing hour-and-a-half in which it describes the horrors of a nuclear accident, that thousands --- I’ll repeat that, thousands --- of such accidents have occurred in the more than half a century that nuclear power and the weapon systems it has spawned have been bestriding the world.

The accident occurred to a Titan II, an immense underground missile that was armed with the most powerful of all  hydrogen bombs, said to contain three times more explosive power than all the bombs used by all nations of both sides during World War II, including the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan, and all this power was aimed at the Soviet Union. One of the men interviewed in the film said it was assumed in the early days of nuclear weapons, that it would take between 50 and 200 nuclear bombs to completely annihilate the Soviet Union, which apparently was the objective of the system, but by the mid-1960s, the US had 32,000 of them and for those working on building them the “money was free”. They had bombers carrying nuclear bombs in the air at all times, and submarines around the world were armed with bombs ready to be fired at a moment’s notice.  One of the former workers in the maintenance system says in the film that whenever he entered the missile silo, his team was in charge of it, and they had to be ready to discharge the missile on notice. He said, “I had no problem with that, even though I would be killing ten million people in seconds, I would never have hesitated.” It was being done in defence of his country, he argued, it was a deterrent, and to be convincing, “we had to show that we were ready to use it.”

I pause here to remark that merely to describe this programme must surely indicate to any sane person that the world has gone mad, and that especially lunatic are the persons who have undertaken to carry out these functions.   One thing I have noticed throughout my life is that no matter how horrendous the ideas of certain leaders may be --- think Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, Emperor for Life Bokassa in the murderous Central African Republic, as well as a succession of American presidents (as well, I suppose, as the leaders of the Soviet Union, France, the United Kingdom) and there are plenty of others who could be cited --- these leaders always find people willing to carry out their orders.

The accident was caused by the simplest little thing: one of the maintenance teams that were constantly working to keep the missile in  order was advised at the end of their shift of some trouble with the pressure in the oxidizer tank,  which contained one of the two elements needed to fire the missile, the other being kept in an interlocking fuel tank. One member of the team who was interviewed said that before they entered the silo to examine this routine problem he had forgotten to take a torque wrench from his truck. He was not worried because this was a recent change in procedure: “I had spent three years using a ratchet, so instead of sending someone back to get the wrench, I grabbed the ratchet.” Of such small human errors are accidents caused. Using the ratchet, three feet long, with which he was completely familiar, when his hand slipped, a small but solid eight-pound metal socket attached to the ratchet fell and went hurtling down the seventy foot length of the several-stories-high missile, landed on the side of the fuel tank, making a small hole in it, and allowing a stream of fuel to eject.  The fuel system required that the oxidizer and fuel be mixed to create the explosion that would launch the missile, and the worker was aware that they could not stop what was happening.

The rest of the film is a detailed account of the efforts made to save the missile from exploding, because the nuclear weapon already armed on the head of the missile was of such force that it could possibly have devastated almost the whole of the eastern seaboard of the US including doing grave damage to most of its big cities, and killing, certainly, hundreds of thousands of people.

The film describes an accident that occurred in North Carolina in 1961 when a B52 bomber carrying two hydrogen bombs broke up, and the two bombs were released. One of them on hitting the ground went through all its arming steps and a firing signal was sent, and the only thing that prevented a four megaton explosion was a single switch, just like a light switch on the living room wall.  “If the right two wires had touched,” explains one worker in the system, “the bomb would have detonated, period.” At that time the number of nuclear accidents was increasing, and the same man said, “I read through all the known accident reports, and it scared the hell out of me.” They were shocked     when they realized the weapons they had always said were safe were not nearly as safe as had been assumed. They now realized that thousands of American nuclear weapons were vulnerable in case of accident, including the biggest one of all, the very one sitting on top of the Titan II missile in Arkansas.

The alarm went off at 6.35 pm, and it took some hours before effective action could be organized to deal with the problem. Indeed, the story appears to be one of mistaken orders, mostly given by people higher up in the chain of command who were not that familiar with the circumstances of the maintenance teams on the ground. At one point the only man in the team who seemed to have a practical idea of what to do was ordered not to go into the silo. An early mistake was to abandon the control room, so that they did not have available to them only way of dealing with the problem. Eventually they had to go back in, but by that time it was too late, and at least one of the team was incinerated when eventually the missile site exploded with a monstrous roar.

It seems that the warhead was not ignited, but instead was blown off its place at the head of the missile to land more or less harmlessly outside the site. But the entire missile site was destroyed by the explosion and fire that followed.

This film is the most graphic I have seen demonstrating the dangers of nuclear power, but it is a wonder that we need to be reminded of these dangers. The Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986 sent its effects over all of Western Europe, and it was just a simple nuclear power generating station. More recently the Fukushima plant in Japan, carelessly sited in the path of a tsunami following a huge nearby undersea earthquake, is still, six years after the event, apparently still forty years from being normalized. I remember years ago passing by the Three Mile station in Pennsylvania that had a meltdown in 1979, which brought a sort of freeze to all future nuclear projects in the United States.  All the bromides delivered by the nuclear apologists pale into insignificance beside the massive record of nuclear accidents, more than 100 in eleven countries according to the latest Wikipedia count. And they, of course, exclude the “thousands” that were admitted to in this film in relation to weapons systems.

We just can’t believe in nuclear power as one of the elements for beating our climate change problem. The sooner we shut down every nuclear power station, the safer we will be.

My Log 554 August 5 2017: My confession: I have always loved sports, and --- though it is getting tougher all the time, since money took over --- this is my rationale for doing so.

Among that circle of people in Canada whom I would call my friends, I have always known that I am regarded as rather peculiar because of my fondness for sport. I tell them, I’m sorry, I know that what you say --- that sport is the opiate of the masses, an important component of the bread and circuses by which the ruling elite, the governing wealth-owners, keep the populace diverted  --- is quite true. But the fact is I have been interested in sport ever since I was a kid, and until I stopped buying newspapers a few years ago, the sports pages were always the first I read.

Pathetic, I know, but it is an ingrained habit, and I feel I have good reason for it. I grew up in a country, New Zealand, in which it was customary for all children --- or almost all --- to play games, and play them on the amazingly extensive playing grounds provided for the purpose. The two primary --- known here as elementary --- schools I attended had playing grounds big enough for two football fields. And when I went to high school we not only had a field large enough for three or four football grounds in the winter, and for several cricket pitches and a running track in the summer, in addition to an outdoor fives court, but every Wednesday afternoon was set aside not for classroom learning, but for playing games, in addition to our regular classes in the gym as part of the learning curriculum. I took to playing rugby, cricket, tennis, running and jumping even before I hit high school, and once there my dearest wish every morning was to get to school as early as possible so I could get be sure of getting in up to an hour playing fives against all-comers before the 9 am whistle blew for assembly.

This was the sport of which I grew to be so fond. And I was still in my early teens when my weekends were occupied with cricket matches played against local teams in a junior league, and Rugby against similarly matched outsiders of appropriate size.  In both of these we played against the local Borstal, with its preponderance of young Maori inmates who scared the bejesus out of us with their pre-game hakas --- a useful element in our education about the realities of our society.

In my spare time I spent many hours at the local tennis courts, where our presence was accepted without any suggestion we must pay, and we were even allowed to sneak on to the local golf course so long as we did not interrupt the games of the adults --- once again, without any whiff of money entering the matter. In fact, I still find I odd, the very idea that one has to pay for exercise.

I turned out to be pretty good at most of these games, and I can honestly admit that until I was about nineteen or so these sports were what occupied most of my mind most of the time. I felt like I had read almost every book written on cricket, which has a very rich literature, let me assure you, and I could recite the scores of titanic Test matches between Australia and England for years back. I remember on one occasion being taken by my Dad to see an All Blacks Rugby match, and murmuring to him, I would die to be an All Black.” (The All Blacks, for those who do not know, are the representative Rugby team of New Zealand, a team which, among all the world’s games, still has the highest percentage of winning games of any team in the world.) As a kid I had pictures on my bedroom wall of every All Black team from 1905 up to 1937.

This, of course was not sport as it is known now. Even at international level, the teams were all amateur in those days: the All Blacks would undertake a six month tour of Britain and France, and the players would get a few dollars a day as an allowance. Their jobs would be held open for them by sympathetic employers.  I remember the greatest cricket batsman of all time, Don Bradman, of Australia,  telling of how he would go into his office to do a couple of hours’ work before getting to the cricket ground in time for the 11 pm start of a Test match on whose outcome the entire nation might be hanging.

In our own small city of 26,000, my older brothers played on club teams with guys who had been chosen for the All Blacks: they were not only national figures, but our local heroes, who went to the Saturday night dances with my brothers and their girl friends.

I had to give up playing all these games when I quit high school after four years, and got a job in the local newspaper, where I had to be available to  collect the results of the myriad of games played across the city every Saturday. I wrote about sports, too. Of course in our day we never thought of interviewing the players. They were never on that kind of pedestal: after all, they were just guys from around the road who played the games for love of them. 

I left that country when I was 22. I went back after 25 years with four children, some of whom settled down into the sporting life described above. I didn't stay long, a mere eighteen months, having discovered that not only had I changed, but so had the country, and we were no longer a perfect fit.  But since then I have the strong impression that the eighteen months they spent in New Zealand were among he happiest my children have ever known. They revelled in the relaxed atmosphere of the schools, which still seemed dedicated to developing them both in their intellects and in their bodies.

And when one of my sons accompanied me back on a holiday 30 years later, and we stayed briefly with my brother in a small country town in the North Island, we had occasion to see the sports system, the all-inclusive sports system which makes room for everyone who wants to play a game, still operating at full bore throughout the country. In my day there was no such thing as “not making the team”: they would make as many teams as were needed.  My brother’s daughter was a pre-teen, but she was a member of a netball team that took part in a regular Saturday morning event in which teams from many schools were engaged, an event  in which the two races, Maori and pakehas were mixed as if there were no difference between them, and in which those adults directing the event and managing it were also racially mixed just as were the players.

This is why I have always loved sports. Even today, when the sport that comes to us through our electronic connections is totally controlled by money, and is in so many ways despicable, nevertheless, in spite of everything, the contests between the players themselves are usually genuine, and worth watching. (Dull would he be of soul, as Wordsworth might have remarked, who could not be stirred by the spectacle of Roger Federer in full flight winning his eighth Wimbledon title last month.)

What has sparked this piece is that I have just sat all day watching first, a Rugby game played in South Africa, and secondly, an international athletics meet held in London, England. Both have been richly rewarding, in my opinion (though I am ready to concede the argument that they may operate as opiates in my life.) The first was the final match in a long tournament known as the Super 15 in which top teams from New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Argentina and Japan compete. The New Zealand teams usually fall afoul of the 1700 metres elevation of Johannesberg, especially in the high-pressure of a big final. But on this occasion they held tough, and won narrowly.  Rugby was the last major sport to go professional, but they have managed to retain some nice touches, especially one by which the losing team of an international lines up to applaud the victors as they pass between them off the field. The winning New Zealand coach at the last World Cup kept reminding his team and their supporters that, after all, it was only a game, they were playing a game, and that was not an important matter in the affairs of the world.  

In London it was the last race of Usain Bolt, one of the most extraordinary athletes ever to have graced any sport. Until his arrival on the scene, the world of big-time sprinting was dominated by a pack of snarling, bad-mannered and unsportsmanlike American runners, who were totally disarmed by this smiling jokester, talking away to them before the race, joking and striking silly poses, and then finally demolishing them all by running faster --- very much faster --- than anyone has ever run in the history of running.

In this his last race, there was an enormous amount of hype, which Bolt good-humoredly played along with: he said he would retire undefeated, unvanquished. but in the event, he managed, for the first time in his career of important races, only third.  It didn’t seem to diminish his spirit in any way: he hugged and celebrated the winners, and laughed and joked his way around the track as he said farewell to the sport and the crowds who like me, have adored him.

Like most opiates, I guess, this one can make you feel awfully good at times.