Does a Second Korean War mean we'll get a gritty M*A*S*H reboot?

Alright, this is probably much ado about nothing, but . . . 

During a live-fire exercise being conducted Tuesday morning on the island of Yeonpyeong, artillery units of the South Korean Army fell under attack by nearby North Korean units, sited on the nearby coastline.  The South Korean artillerymen were targeted by about 50 or 60 rounds, and returned fire with about 80, according to various sources.  During the hour-long exchange, some houses and light infrastructure were damaged, and two marines were killed.  There were three separate rounds of firing from the North Korean guns, each one retaliated to and each one weaker than the last, according to some sources.  

Okay, those are the facts as reported.  Now let's make some deductions, shall we?  We'll start by pointing out the obvious: the South Korean artillerymen are quite well drilled, while the North needs some new gunsights.  An American or NATO artillery battalion can do quite a lot of damage to an enemy with a well-targeted 80 rounds.  Because we trained them, and they listened well, the South Korean army is probably almost as good - and the fact that they were in the middle of a live-fire exercise of their own (aimed safely out into international waters), just means that they'd spent the night before studying their duties.  

So basically imagine spending all night studying for a calculus exam, and then the next day your test was interrupted by a guy waving a gun in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other while screaming, "I'm gonna start killing motherfuckers unless someone solves this differential equation!!"  Assuming the student body isn't completely full of assholes, at least someone studied the night before and could step in to save the day.  The South Koreans were fresh off their own targeting practice, and responded with vigor.  It's likely that the North Koreans stopped so soon because they had taken significant losses in the exchange.  

On the other hand, I might be giving those kids too much credit . . .

Next, we can deduce that the South Koreans still like to stir things up.  Yes, the live-fire exercise involved shooting blank rounds to the west, out to international waters.  However, the island of Yeonpyeong lies behind a line claimed by North Korea as it's maritime boundary.  In reality, the actual boundary was set at the armistice in 1953, which hit a three generation "pause" button on the Korean War.  In real life, the South Koreans own the island.  However, real life does not often sync up with the magical world that Kim Jong-Il resides in most of his days, so that means the island is "disputed".  The same way if I decide I want to own your swimming pool, I can just redraw my property line to include the diving board and the shallow end . . oh, and that sturdy plastic trunk with all the goggles and pool toys inside.  Hell yes!

"Yeah, that one."

However, it's well-known by both nations that the island is considered disputed by Kim Jong-Il.  To go back to the backyard pool scenario (like we ever left), imagine that you know your neighbor is just crazy enough to think that he actually has a fair stake in your pool, and also reacts poorly to loud noises.  Now imagine you decide to throw a party, and in the middle of that party you start launching fireworks when you know your neighbor is standing on his back porch staring at you with a gun in his hand.  Now I'm not saying the North Koreans were at all justified - I'm simply proposing that the South decided to kick it up a bit and give them something to think about that morning, and the North decided to do much more than think.

The third and final deduction I offer from this episode is that neither side is willing to back down.  The South Koreans are still pissed off about the sinking of the Cheonan, a patrol frigate of the South Korean navy, by a suspected North Korean submarine.  The frigate was sunk in late March, barely 75 miles from the site of today's incident, and 46 South Korean sailors perished in the attack.  Though investigation of the wreckage seems to confirm that the frigate was sunk by an enemy torpedo, the North denies responsibility and blames the South for violating it's territorial waters - which again, is a completely fictional claim.  So when the South Korean gunners got a chance to take revenge on their opponents yesterday morning, they did so with gusto, and probably under fairly recent orders to react with force to any attack.  This is a good tactic, because if the South backs down from a confrontation, Uncle Kim is just crazy enough to think this means open season.  

On the other hand, the North Koreans are showing signs of going balls-to-the-wall in their effort to provoke the South, or incite an incident large and ambiguous enough to use as pretense for war.  In other words, the North is playing a game of brinksmanship, but doing so with strong-arm tactics.  These are the kind of tactics that, when applied consistently within most conflict scenarios, generally end up leading to war.  And this is a bad thing.

I will go ahead and make a controversial claim - that if a war between the North and South should happen, let it happen now.  God forbid we wait another decade, because by that time the North will likely have mastered the technology to throw live warheads at the West coast of the continental United States.  They already have nukes, and though their long range missiles keep blowing up shortly past liftoff, it's only a matter of time before they get things right.  As it is, they probably do not have many nuclear weapons in their current arsenal, but every passing day brings the chance that more will be hoisted off the assembly line.  As a matter of fact, the simple existence in this world of a state like North Korea is a travesty of epic proportions.  The entire world knows the North Koreans are a starving people, subjugated into what is essentially slave labor at the whims of a tin-pot dictator in a shiny palace.  It's no secret that Kim Jong-Il is a horrible sexual pervert, a deviant and sadomasochist of the worst sort, with a collection of eccentricities that would make even the English look twice.  The man has kidnapped people, including Japanese film director Shin Sang-ok, who was held for eight years and forced to direct films for the Dear Leader.  Clearly this is not a man fit to run a Boy Scout troop, much less a nation of 24,000,000 people.

" . . . and after the soda-drinking contest, we'll play king of the hill.  With hunting knives."

The other problem is that his regime is propped up by China, which keeps him there in full view and knowledge of the world, to act as a puppet - pulling the strings of war and peace to the tune they dictate, and sometimes on his own.  It doesn't stay that way for long though, because the puppeteers in Beijing know exactly what they're doing.  If and when they need a war to be fought, they can count on Kim to pull it off.  Though he is thought to be giving up power to his son, Kim Jong-un, sometime soon, as long as he remains the leader the Chinese have their man.

Of course, this shootout is all malarkey.  This latest incident is no more likely to lead to a large-scale war than any of the dozens of other small skirmishes that have happened in the past between North and South, and neither side seems truly eager to start one up.  Though this latest incident is troubling, it's not even close to being war-worthy, even by Uncle Kim's mystery metrics.  Let this serve instead as a clear warning to all of us.  The world is a fucked-up place, and there is the chance of something popping off within this next decade - hell, within this next election cycle - between the Koreas.  If it does, we should bear in mind that the North has it's own nuclear arsenal, and whether we admit it or not we have nukes there too, defending South Korea at their request.  Our military has several brigades on the DMZ, the heavily mined and guarded land border between the North and South.  Should an attack happen, there would be little warning, and the result of massive surprise on the North, and high technology weapons and training on the South, could be an unwelcome exchange of megatonnage across the DMZ. The part that makes this scenario especially bad is there is no way to bet on cooler heads prevailing on the North Korean side of the curtain.

So if it does lead to a M*A*S*H reboot, you can bet it'll be quite maudlin the whole way through.

Nuclear Power: Safety and Security

For the next installment of my analysis of the future of nuclear power in America, we're going to take a quick look at some of the questions regarding it's safety, and it's vulnerability in the event of a terrorist attack.

Perhaps the biggest concern that the public has about nuclear power is the threat of a catastrophic disaster, like a meltdown or a core breach. A meltdown is the technical term for when the reactions inside of a nuclear reactor go out of control. As some of you may know, a nuclear reactor uses fissile (radioactive) material to generate heat in a slow, controlled way. Just like an atomic bomb releases a great deal of heat, radiation, and energy in an instantaneous blast, a nuclear reactor is designed to release the equivalent amount of energy over the course of years, even decades, using the same physical process: fission. Fission is the splitting of a large atom into smaller components - a heavy metal like Uranium or Plutonium is generally the fuel source for a fission reactor. These metals are made of atoms that, compared to other elements on the Periodic Table, are extremely heavy and large. This makes them easy to split. Splitting these atoms generates a great deal of energy, which is turned into heat, which is then used to boil water to drive a steam-turbine. This turbine is connected to a generator, which cranks out the volts that light up our world.

Nuclear reactors are designed with failure possibilities in mind. There are many complex safeguards in place to deal with almost any event. For example, if the core temperature rises to dangerous levels in a classic "meltdown" scenario, the computer is designed to automatically insert rods of control material into the reaction chamber. These rods are made of material that absorbs radiation and prevents it from spreading. The details aren't critical*, but the basic result is this: the nuclear fuel rods exchange radioactive particles, causing atoms to split at a controlled rate. The control rods keep the reaction from getting too hot or too intense. If the reaction does get too intense, the control rods are inserted by machines in groups to lessen the transfer of radiation and nuclear energy in the core of the reactor. This slows the reaction down to safer levels.

The control rods are spaced around the radioactive fuel rods - as they are inserted into the reactor, more and more neutrons are absorbed by the material, preventing a chain reaction.

There are other safeguards as well, including a last-ditch measure that in practice is basically foolproof. This is called the SCRAM, and the acronym has a funny origin. At the University of Chicago in 1942, during tests of the first ever nuclear reactor (sometimes called the Chicago Pile), a procedure called SCRAM was invented.  The acronym stood for Safety Control Rod Axe Man, and it refers to the act of cutting a rope from which a high-absorption control rod is suspended.  Cutting the rope causes the rod to drop into the reactor, and the reason the scientists set it up this way is so they could shut down the reactor even if the power failed.  Of course nowadays this system is laughably obsolete, but the term SCRAM remains in use to denote a full emergency shutdown of the power plant.  Modern reactors are designed in even more ingenious ways - some use battery powered pumps to inject liquid into the reactor core.  This liquid has the same radiation absorbing properties of the control rods (insiders call them neutron poisons, because they poison the chain reaction by starving it of neutrons), and when it is squirted into the core, immediately bring the chain reaction to a halt.  Other systems use pressurized gas, like inert nitrogen or argon, to drive pistons that insert the control rods as a backup.

These systems can be designed to be as foolproof as any technology built by man can possibly be.  The US Navy, which has been operating nuclear powered warships since the submarine USS. Nautilus was launched in 1954, has spent billions of dollars over the past half-century designing and testing reactor control equipment that is built to withstand the rigors of combat on the high seas - or in the case of Nautilus, under the high seas.  Naval reactors are hardened against shock damage, and are built with layered redundancy that has influenced reactor design on the civilian market.  For all this time, the Nuclear Navy has operated without a single radiation accident, or a single nuclear reactor meltdown.  The small reactor inside of a modern nuclear submarine, like the USS. Seawolf, is capable of putting out enough power to light up a city the size of Albany, NY.  At the same time, that same reactor is designed to survive enemy torpedoes, depth charges, and all sorts of other nasty weaponry in times of war.  The safeguards introduced into the Nuclear Navy by Admiral Hyman Rickover (yes, that is his real name) have made our naval reactors as foolproof as technology can allow - there is no reason why similar measures (or even directly copied designs) could not be introduced into the civilian power market.

Funny name for a serious business.

 Safeguards like these mean that modern reactors are almost impossible to meltdown in a catastrophic accident.  Even the control system failure at Three Mile Island back in March of 1979 was only a partial meltdown, and it was the result of a series of errors that are unlikely to occur in sequence ever again.  Let's say you happen to slip and fall down the stairs.  That's a pretty common occurrence in the world - probably happens a dozen times a minute.  Now let's say you slip and fall down the stairs while delicately carrying an armful of barbed wire.  That is obviously going to be a much less common occurrence, right?  Well, the chain of events in the Three Mile Island accident would be like falling down the stairs with an armload of barbed wire, while naked, and also while suffering from hemophilia.  Again, that's pretty damn unlikely.  And now imagine that you not only survive the fall without a scratch, but get right back up and keep walking with barely a bruise.  Yeah - that's cuz nobody died at Three Mile Island, and the average dose of radiation received in the surrounding community was equivalent to getting a chest x-ray at the doctor's office. 

And yes, Chernobyl was a different story.  But that's a Russian reactor, with Russian safeguards, operated by Soviet authorities, with nuclear engineers who probably earned more selling patent Glowing Vodka on the black market than they did while sitting in the control room of the power plant.  And that disaster was similarly hyped.  I'll discuss that in another post later on.

Typical Soviet-era safety protocols in action.

 Finally, we have the potential of a terrorist attack on a reactor complex.  While this would undoubtedly be a disaster, what exactly would it accomplish?  Even a powerful car or truck bomb would probably not breach the thick concrete walls that house the reactor, and even if they did, the reactor itself is a large steel cask inside of those walls, with the radioactive material and it's control equipment located within.  Assuming the car bomber got through the guarded gates of the nuclear complex, it is highly unlikely that they would be able to do serious or threatening damage to the reactor core.  These facilities are built to withstand explosions - some were built to withstand atomic bombardment during the Cold War - and it would take an extremely powerful bomb to cause any sort of damage.  But even then, it's probable that the safety systems, independent of the atomic core, would be able to prevent a meltdown.  In some cases, these systems are designed so that in the event of a disabling explosion, the neutron poison only needs gravity to bring it into the reactor core, stanching the neutron exchange and cutting off the chain reaction.  Even flying an airplane into the reactor dome would probably not cause any kind of serious meltdown - though exposing radioactive material to the surrounding air could cause contamination on a local level if the emergency response is not rapid enough.

Or maybe not, as the following video shows . . .

As you can see, the plane is going 500 miles per hour and still fails to penetrate the thick concrete blast barrier. That's pretty impressive - and remember, beyond that concrete would be a high-yield steel containment vessel housing the actual nasty radioactive bits of the reactor.

In any case, it's absurd to stop building nuclear power plants because of what might happen in the event of a random terror attack.  It's much better to continue thinking up creative ways to protect them in the event of such an attack.  Heightened security, including military forces on alert in times of dangerous signals from the international terrorist community about impending attacks, is probably all that would be realistically needed, but the government and private industry have explored other options as well.  Anti-aircraft missiles, or even laser systems, could prove to be the new-wave in nuclear security, and some firms are already marketing electronic weapons to power plant operators.  None of this is even strictly necessary - if it seemed that a hijacked or erratic airliner was making a beeline towards a nuclear facility, there are protocols in place that involve the FAA alerting the facility in question, giving them enough time to safeguard the reactor, either by shutting it down entirely or programming it to skip the secondary and tertiary safeguards and go straight to total SCRAM in the case of a malfunction or actual attack. 

In summation, the risk of a nuclear accident or meltdown, by either a system failure, power failure, or determined terrorist attack, are almost all anticipated in the construction and engineering of modern reactor plants.  If the military can build reactors that operate under the threat of war, there is no realistic reason why the civilian market cannot be supplied with the same technology and apply it to providing power to consumers nationwide.  Only fears stoked by environmental activists, liberals who watched The China Syndrome and had nightmares, and even oil companies afraid of market competition, are what prevents us from becoming a truly atomic-powered nation

Saturday Wakeup Call

The Tsunami Trip Turn

In 1995, following the GOP takeover of the House and Senate in the midterms a year before, five Federal congressmen and one US Senator switched parties from Democrat to Republican.  Each had narrowly held onto conservative districts in their state against determined opposition, and had made the decision to switch parties to preserve their seat.  All but one of them won it again in the 1996 midterms - and the one who lost was Rep. Greg Laughlin of Texas' 14th District.  His primary opponent in 1996 was an actual Republican, albeit a slightly crazy one - Dr. Ron Paul.  Laughlin lost the primary to Paul, who went on to win the general election and has held the seat ever since.   One of these party switchers, then Rep. Nathan Deal, is now the Governor-elect of Georgia.  Each of these politicians had held conservative views on most issues while members of the Democratic Party earlier in their careers, and the districts that they served evidently believed their change of heart to be real - or at least as real as a politician can be.

There's not much of what I consider realistic talk of that this time around.  Though the net gain for the Republican Party in the House was of historic proportions, and the gains in Senate were pleasing to say the least, the GOP is not yet magnetic enough to be attracting serious talk of party switching.  What allowed the right to prevail in this midterm was the cohesion displayed by the disparate Tea Party organizations, along with the catch-up ball played by mainstream and old-boy Republicans once the writing had been on the wall for the apparently requisite six months or so.  Keeping the momentum going by spreading and repeating the messages of fiscal responsibility in an exercise of mass emotional manipulation, and having groups doing this in all segments of the nation, was quite effective.  Now, these feelings were and are totally real and mostly justified - after all, the United States currently on a course to be fully owned by China in about three decades.  But the way the anger at the absurdity of our federal budget situation was developed, led, and eventually harnessed, was a masterpiece.  Kudos to the Tea Party for that act.

However, in truth the best that can be realistically analyzed about this election was that the GOP won over the larger segments of the base and a big slice of the Independents that voted this time.  Budget hawks came to the polls driven by the fact that the right kept the controversies and dilemmas of the Obama Administration in the news - much the same way that the mainstream media did this fully automatically during the Bush years.  This time around, they had to go off the script, and disable the autopilot, because the narrative was no longer under their control.  The result: scandals and retirements, Rick Sanchez axed, Olbermann suspended from the network that literally lives and dies on his ratings, and major media outlets turning out less profit than a lemonade stand in a snowstorm.  Of course, in these times the Fox News Channel is booming, but that's truly nothing new since they've been on top for years now.

Democrats in general were not truly magnetized by the GOP.  In fact, pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that 54% of Republican favored analyzing the results as a loss for Democrats rather than as a win for the GOP.  The message is clear but shallow - a "D" made one into a target.  Being bestowed with an "R" simply made one the lesser of two evils.  In fact, across party lines distrust of government is at an all time high, and for good reason.  After two years of insufferably patronizing speeches from President Obama, the prospect of continued borrowing and spending under an agenda of "Marx Lite", the GOP base was sick and tired and the liberals had lost their pep.  And the net result is an imbalance in the statehouses, with the Republican Party now in control of the legislature and executive of fully 20 states, and a slight imbalance in the House (this was exacerbated by Walker Hines, a State congressman from Louisiana's 95th District, switching parties to the GOP - his departure is most likely due to being the son of a powerful attorney and thus the automatic possessor of political will of the slimiest sort). This being a center-right nation, this may not correct itself right away, but in 2012 or 2014 a correction will come around.  So the Democrats took a thumping - but that's all.  There was no real switching of base voters, and less conversion of independents than most pundits had predicted.

This could happen to either party, is what I'm saying . . .

Let the pundits talk about Senator Jim Webb possibly crossing the aisle to the GOP side, or Governor-elect Joe Manchin heading the same way.  I doubt if either will do it this time around, and I'd be surprised to see more than one or two defections in the House in the coming eighteen months or so.  Analysis of the midterms reinforces the strategy for Republicans moving forward: Do not get complacent.  A fitting subtitle to that strategy would be: Conservatives - shout if the GOP swerves to the Left, and vote 'em out if they fail to meet our standards of fiscal conservatism.  And written in invisible ink under all that would be the closer: Memo to the religious right - please, please, please, let's keep these races about economic and fiscal issues and foreign policy.  If the right wants to get sneaky later on about abortion or protections for faith speech, then they'll be smart to let those be the nails that don't stick up.  

The winning issues are the wallet issues, and the security issues, and the issues that affect America's measurable standings in the world.   Hammering these issues, with tangible results, could make 2012 a legitimate victory for the GOP, and not just a repudiation of socialism. 

The True Victors of 2010: Obama, Pelosi, and the Democrats

Two-thousand and ten was not a year for the Grand Old Party, and let nobody try to tell you otherwise.  Yes, an historic gain in the House of Representatives is nice, and I sure am glad we flipped all those statehouses and even some state legislatures, and of course the infusion of the Tea Party spirit and Sarah Palin's strategic move to resign as Governor of Alaska (which happened before the Fourth of July in 2009 but was made with 2010 in mind) so she could help fire up the true base for the midterms was all just so wonderful.  But the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which is going to end up becoming basically the opposite of it's own title, was passed on March 23, 2010, and that means that this year goes to the Dems.

It really is pretty simple, when you break it down.  Sure, the move cost Obama quite a bit of political capital.  Horror stories of socialized medicine elsewhere in the world, some true, some exaggerated, suddenly got real attention, even in forgotten corners of the mainstream media.  People began to wonder just how intrusive this law would allow the government to become in private healthcare choices.  Seniors, worried about Medicare cuts and cycles of drug or therapy rationing, began to form their own Tea Party groups and PACs.  Working class Americans began to worry about the taxes that would soon follow.  And the world began worrying about what a new step in entitlements would do for American borrowing and spending, given that 59% of our FY2010 budget already goes to other entitlements like SCHIP, WIC, unemployment, etc.

25 years old = still a child in Obama's world . . .

The move cost the Democrats in the House and Senate too.  Opposition to the bill was bipartisan in the House, and the GOP stood fast in the Senate, but without enough votes to hold a filibuster, the Senate passed the measure with high drama on Christmas Eve in 2009.  After three months of political wrangling that saw Scott Brown elected to Ted Kennedy's vacant Senate seat, two major conferences at the end of February 2010 to reconcile the bill with the House, and Rep. Bart Stupak's coalition forming to amend the bill to falsely appease pro-lifers, the bill passed the House and was signed into law two days later.  Stupak wisely retired at the end of his term this year, and many other Senators and Congressmen were shown the door by voters in this latest electoral avalanche.  Blue Dog Democrats, some of whom voted against the bill on conscience (and some for pure political reasons - your vote isn't needed, you're in a red district, etc), held on decently in the House, and the GOP gained 6 seats in the Senate.  And all of this is good.

But the damage is done.  The bill is passed.  And repeal, if it's even possible when the time comes, will likely never be complete.  The halfhearted dismantlement of Obamacare will be a disappointment for most Tea Partiers and fiscally conservative Republicans if it ever happens.  Now that the bill exists, it will follow the golden path of entitlement programs: grow, suck, grow some more, someone makes a halfhearted attempt to fix, grow, suck, and grow some more.  And lets not forget the virtual nationalizing of the college loan industry, the financial reforms pressed on by Bawney Fwank (who, BTW, kept his seat in the House despite high hopes he could be dethroned), and the new US nuclear posture, all of which Obama managed to squeak through while our economy has stagnated and unemployment is at record highs.  Hell, even most of the seats that the Republicans won in the House this last round were seats that had been pretty solidly red for a while before 2006 and/or 2008.  And while I'm sure our new majority in the House will be an important factor in the two years between election cycles, the fact remains that the Democrats are going to be calling most of the shots from now until then, and all the GOP has done is turn up it's volume a little.  Depending on the outcome of 2012, conservatism might continue to rally.  But 2012 could also yield a death knell, the ancient Mayan Prophecies come to life against the Right wing of American politics.  Unless the GOP can continue to leverage it's grassroots enthusiasm for the next 24 months, we're going back to the 1970's - and that won't be a good thing.

At least it got a cool logo.

While it's nice to see this election as a polar shift back to the Right in America, the fact is we've always been a center-right nation at heart.  But the calamity of the 2006 and 2008 elections has left it's mark.  Despite all the hard work done by the Right since then to rebuild, restructure, and regain a competitive footing in the grassroots of our free soil, it is too soon to rejoice.

And potentially too late.

Thirty-First Calypso

With apologies to Kurt Vonnegut:

"My baby flipped a district.
Baby brought to R from  D.
And me so proud of baby,
Until baby she flipped me."

- Kyzernick

Why We Choose the Free Market

Just a short one this time.  I'll be returning to my previous topic of nuclear power soon - and I haven't forgotten my promise to revisit the various trade war scenarios either.  A story flew under the radar recently that I think deserves a little attention.  The folks at the Legatum Institute have been producing the World Prosperity Index since 2007.  This is a comprehensive report that ranks nations based on 89 different criteria that relate to the relative prosperity and security of the nation in question.  For the past three years, the United States has been in the Top 10 (for 2010, the US comes in at #10), and the top 15 for 2010 is comprised exclusively of nations that are considered part of the global free market economy.

Also known as "English speaking nations".

This is an important question: what drives free markets to the top of the prosperity list?  Is it the very essence of economic and political freedom that these nations embody?  Or perhaps the population is simply happier in these nations, since the human condition - the very soul of man - yearns for the experience of freedom.  Or perhaps it is because many of these nations were the first to rise to power in the industrial age, and managed to secure a solid foundation for themselves before the turmoil of the 20th century.

It is often noted that the United States was herself extremely lucky to have been separated by wide oceans from both of it's principal opponents during the Second World War.  With no bombs raining down on Providence or Wichita or San Diego, the US survived the war with it's national grid largely untouched.  In fact, it was improved tenfold during the war due to the needs of the wartime economy and military production demands.  Bomber factories, chemical plants, and the top-secret Manhattan Project, all demanded new and greater infrastructure and power generation to support their operations, and American industry was up to the task. Because of our relative isolation, we managed to avoid difficulties like constant rebuilding and the growing fear of invasion that nations such as Australia and England were facing.

Much more than safety and solidity was involved in the success of the United States and other free nations.  After all, Europe was devastated during the war, but many of the top ranked nations are European free-markets.  Freedom drives innovation, the undisputed spark of humanity.  Innovation breeds progress, as ideas are grown, cultured, and harvested to be put to the test in the real world - the world of the free marketplace.  This exposes the idea, or invention, or product, or service to the scrutiny of those who participate in the economy.  These consumers can choose whether the idea is worth investing in, and choose when and how much to invest.  Ultimately, it will be the consumers who will judge the inherent value of the idea, or product, or service.  Lacking the threat of force compelling one to submit to this idea, it can be discarded or cherished, forgotten or memorialized, ignored or institutionalized - all at the whim of it's various consumers.  As the idea lives or dies under the peering eye of the marketplace, a new idea - either replacement or complement - will eventually be born.

And sometimes this happens . . .

The creation and success of ideas also depends on the marketplace, and it's oft-mentioned variables of supply and demand.  The "invisible hand" of the free market is not invisible at all.  It's all around us, or at least all around the residents of those lucky nations with free market economies.  My wallet may only be a single mitochondria inside a single lowly cell of this "invisible hand", but in biology as well as economics, sometimes a single bad gene can cause a cataclysm - or a single antibody can save a life.  Somebody had to be first to purchase an automobile, or a telephone, or a drive-thru wedding, or a compact disc.  Somewhere out there is the first person ever to pay money for a Swiffer.  In each of these cases, the idea won.  Not every idea is fortunate or relevant enough to receive a jumpstart such as those products enjoyed, but this can be true for many reasons.  Ideas that are not marketed persuasively, or produced in line with an existing need, often sputter and die.  Sometimes, when the market realizes what it has lost, they are resurrected; sooner or later, good ideas will prevail.

I'm not going to try and analyze all the resultant data from the Index in this post - I'll leave that for the math professors who enjoy using Excel even when they're not being paid.  However, I strongly encourage you to check it out and drill down into some of the categories that are covered.  Different data points for healthcare, personal income and sense of well-being, and political stability are all broken down into nice, neat numbers and percentages.  Most of the figures are unsurprising.  A well-researched compilation, the Prosperity Index is the best proof yet that free markets and free people are the best choice for the future of human development.

Some good ideas really enhance human development . . .

Nuclear Power - Now or Never? (Part 1)

I look back on the post World War Two history of America with a special fondness.  It's often described as a simpler time - to our world-weary eyes, often invaded by the relentless 24-hour news cycle and the information monsoon we wade through each day, it certainly seems like it was.  The reality is different, because a nation coming out of a devastating war with a world-leading economy takes on a pressing responsibility.  The penalty of leadership is the charge of innovation, but we came through in strides in those years.  And no breakthroughs carried more national importance than those in atomic power generation.  A thriving nation demands new sources of energy, and the potential to tap into the realm of physics for this power demanded immediate action.

In those days everything was "Atomic" - submarines, airplanes, the Batmobile's batteries, and random spiders on high school field trips.  Atomic ray guns, stamped sheetmetal affairs shooting sparks from an internal revolving flint, sold for 10 cents in the back of comic books, and Ford built their Seattle-ite Atomic Concept Car, which has the dual distinction of being a supremely cool set of wheels somehow graced with the most nonsensical name since the Edsel. 

Six wheels, heated seats, flux capacitor . . .

Back then, the word "atomic" seemed to embody a future of near endless supplies of cheap electricity.  It was almost a symbol of hope for the future, with stories about a lump of uranium the size of a softball powering huge cities for years on end.  Despite the associated fears of atomic war, the optimism was real and grew - for a time.

Environmental groups, activists like Jane Fonda, and mostly left of center politicians managed to, in the ensuing decades, put a stop to this wonderful tale.  Through controversial legislation called the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 the government abolished the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission), which had been originally created during the war to produce and test nuclear material, safety techniques, and handling procedures.  In 1954, Congress passed a replacement to the Atomic Energy Act which gave the AEC more autonomy in safeguarding nuclear power plants, and also allowed them to promote atomic energy and the nuclear economy.  This did not sit well with the left, and the legal actions they began in the late '60s to triple the licensure burden on fission-plant operators culminated with the new laws of 1974, which created in it's place the NRC, or Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Full stop.  Notice the change in name.  Is it semantics, or does Atomic Energy Commission sound just a little bit more hopeful and positive than Nuclear Regulatory Commission?  The first is a bunch of scientists in lab coats, holding Tesla coils and talking excitedly about their latest breakthroughs; the second sounds like a group of elderly bankers on vicodin sitting at a boardroom table staring at each other.

In any case, the regulatory burden on American nuclear power is such that it often takes upwards of three years to obtain even a license renewal on an existing, safe, nuke plant.  The NRC implemented a new license process in 1992 called "Part 52", which is supposed to be a one-step operation that replaces the two-step procedure of the old "Part 50" license process.  In reality, the licensing process is still a swamp filled with red tape, endless draining legal challenges, and construction delays due to last minute protests and injunctions.  From the time a license is sought to the time construction begins on a new site for nuclear power can be as much as 10 years, which means in that time the financing could dry up, legal challenges could be lost or reversed on appeal, and the politics around the building site could shift dramatically, taking public opinion with it.

One of the creeping problems generated by liberalism is the energy crisis we find ourselves on the verge of facing.  Between drilling moratoriums and stifling regulation on atomic energy, America finds herself running on a pretty short fuse as far as energy reserves go.  Even when we release oil from our national defense reserve in largely symbolic moves when the price at the gas pump rises, we often are forced to ship it overseas simply to be refined fast enough to meet the demand of the economy.  Rolling blackouts in New York City and the Southwest are a symptom of a national energy policy that seems to be positioned around the "evil" nature of energy companies.  The power that America needs is being held in limbo by liberal interests and politicians, and meanwhile nations like France enjoy over 70% reliance on atomic energy.  Here in America, especially in Vermont and Michigan, there are cries for nuclear shutdown and halting construction of new plants. 

In my opinion, one of the priorities for the new Congress to pursue is just as important as rolling back Obama's agenda, and goes beyond Cap and Trade.  We need to wrap up a new energy policy that allows nuclear operators to get their foot in the door faster and protects them from frivolous and repetitive legal challenges from left-wing organizations.  There is too much at stake to allow the government to roadblock our energy future.