排便 Happens

Help wanted--Immediate Opening: Nuclear Heroes.

Maintenance and repair workers needed for nuclear power plant at seaside location in beautiful Pacific archipelago. Record earthquake and Tusnami have created need for emergency workers to prevent catastrophic meltdown. Preference given older workers, who will probably die of something else before the cancer risks from radiation exposure.

Japan consists of 6,852 islands located in a volcanic zone of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Earthquakes pulled Japan away from the mainland of Asia about 15 million years ago.

The word Tsunami is Japanese for “harbor wave“ or “wave train.” Japan has experienced 195 Tsunami in its recorded history. Before Westerners learned about Tsunami, the same event was called a Tidal Wave. Television taught us the word Tsunami when one killed a quarter of a million people in Asia just a few years ago. During WWII, New Zealand attempted and failed to create with explosives a Tsunami for use as a weapon.

In addition to earthquakes and Tsunami, Japan has a vivid nuclear history and involuntary experience with radiation poisoning from Ground Zero at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So why did Japan build a nuclear reactor in an earthquake zone with an ocean view? Somebody forgot the famous maxim from the Shinto shrine: "排便 Happens." It does indeed. Serious 排便.

One good thing to result from the current disaster in Japan is the sudden appearance on television of people who actually know their isotopes from a hole in the ground, intelligent gray haired people who went to math and science classes in their youth.

Here’s a lesson from one of those classes:

About 70,000 years ago, a volcano erupted at Lake Toba, Sumatra, Indonesia, one of the earth’s largest known eruptions. It deposited a layer of ash throughout Asia. The climate effects of the Toba eruption triggered a global ecological disaster, including worldwide vegetation destruction, and severe drought. Famine and a 6-to-10-year volcanic winter reduced the world's human population to 10,000 survivors or perhaps a mere 1,000 breeding pairs.

The Lake Toba super volcano eruption was two orders of magnitude greater than the largest volcanic eruption in recorded historic times, at Mount Tambora, Indonesia, which caused 1816 to be the "Year Without a Summer" in the northern hemisphere

Volt Waggin

On this Labor Day, let us pause to eulogize the 1,500 jobs at the General Motors Assembly Plant in Doraville, Georgia, jobs at American-dream wages that once paid 30-year mortgages without gimmicks or foreclosures, sent kids to college, and, yes, deluded UAW members into mistaking themselves for Republicans. Since 1947, your fathers’ Buicks, Oldsmobiles, and Pontiacs rolled off the assembly line in Doraville. For much of that time, General Motors made more than half the cars on the road in the United States. Then things changed. Look around today. In your driveway. Cars made in Japan, Korea, Germany, Sweeden.

The Doraville GM Assembly Plant will close down this month, and the 165 acre site it occupies will become prime real estate for For Sale. It is within easy walking distance of an existing station of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority north-south line. During any morning or evening rush-hour you can safely direct your gaze on the location as you sit hopelessly in gridlocked traffic on I-285, near Spaghetti Junction. GM is in the market for a real estate venturer with deep pockets and experience redeveloping “brownfields,” a charming invention to describe abandoned industrial carcasses likely containing pollution hazards. Potential developers see the site as another Atlantic Station, mixed-use urban commercial, residential, shopping, and entertainment. Lame duck DeKalb County CEO Vernon Jones expects the redevelopment to create several thousand more jobs than the 1,500 lost. Get a clue, Mr. Jones. Service jobs. No unions.

Corporate clowns at GM clung to their BOPs and SUVs till gas prices skyrocketed out the sun-roof and profits fell through the floorboard. The suits in Detroit never saw the train coming and are still in denial. Now GM plans to make the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in electric hybrid, due to be in the showroom of your nearest Chevrolet dealership on a timetable by the end of 2010 or at the latest George Bush’s time horizon for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq six months later. However, the Chevy Volt will be made at the Detroit plant, not in Doraville. GM does not want to call the new Volt a hybrid, preferring instead extended-range electric vehicle. The Volt will run on batteries for up to 40 miles, the distance of 75 percent of U.S. daily commutes, which average about 33 miles. On the open highway, the potential range increases to 360 miles by using a small internal combustion engine to run a generator to resupply the batteries. Overnight recharge using a standard 120-volt, 15-amp household outlet will take a 10 hour plug-in at home. A half charge can be accomplished in 50 minutes.

The four-door sedan is expected to get 150 miles per gallon if the battery is fully charged every 60 miles. It will be capable of speeds up to 120 miles per hour. According to GM, the sticker price of the Volt will be in "the mid to high 30's," although some other estimates say more like $48,000. Maybe you better plan to get two of those new jobs at the mixed-use development that will replace the Doraville assembly plant. Nissan , Toyota, and Mitsubishi also have announced their own electric cars. If they can’t undercut GM’s price, the Chinese or somebody will.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Not-So-Easy Pickens

I’m already driving a Honda Civic, but when I fill my gas tank lately, I pay with Ulysses S. Grant and get back change in George Washingtons. According to T. Boone Pickens, “this is one crisis we can’t drill our way out of,” and he has been an oil-man his whole life. Except when he was a natural gas man, a corporate raider and hostile-takeover pirate, and hedge-fund douser. Now he is a prairie wind man and a solar energy man. He wants to build a nationwide network of filling stations pumping All-American natural gas, generate electricity with wind, solar, and other technologies, like nuclear power plants. Pickens has long been active in Texas Republican politics and was a major money source for the candidacies of George Bush, both for Governor and President. T. Boone Pickens staked the Swift Boat squads against John Kerry.

Pickens is 80. His first entrepreneurial enterprise was as an eleven-year-old newspaper delivery boy, taking a route of 28 subscribers and building it to 156, an early introduction to "expanding quickly by acquisition," he explains. My buddy Luther did the same thing when we were kids. My first job was helping Luther deliver his Atlanta Journal paper route on our bicycles. He paid me 25-cents per day. In two years Luther doubled the size of his paper route and my pay. Every job I’ve ever had since was one working for somebody who had more money and was better at making it than I was. T. Boone Pickens has described his business philosophy as, “Anybody made money today … Anybody got an idea for how we can make any money … Am I the only one trying to make money around here?” I have to confess, I have more faith that the current energy crisis is more likely to be addressed by the itch to make a buck than to make a law. This faith is not worship of unbridled laissez-faire capitalism; it is just reality.

T. Boone Pickens promotes alternatives to oil. He wants to use windmills to generate the 22 percent of U.S. electricity currently provided by natural gas, then burn that natural gas in our cars and trucks instead of 38 percent of imported foreign oil. Pickens is spending many millions on television advertising, probably more money than all the Presidential candidates will have at their disposal for campaign advertising. Pickens personal wealth is estimated in the billions. Maybe T. Boone Pickens will give us a better shake than the sheiks of Araby. I can just hear some wisecracker standing in the Oklahoma-Texas border country dust, “If we could figure a way to make money out of the whirling wind and blistering sun, we’d be rich.” And T. Boone Pickens’ eyes light up.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

SUV Wars

I may be coming down with something. My head is swimming. I am hallucinating. I have the uncontrollable appetite to run out and buy a new car. I think I’ve got SUV fever. On the television this morning, the ad wars announced one dealer was offering $6,000 cash back on a brand new Chevy Tahoe.

I’m an environmentalist, like John McCain. So I immediately calculate $6,000 at $4 per gallon can buy me about 1,500 gallons of gasoline, as long as the current price of gas holds. Let’s see, if we take that trip we’ve always wanted to the Grand Canyon, at 12 miles per gallon, well, anyway, I can get back and forth to work, for a couple of months at least.

I know President Bush recently went to visit his pal the King of Arabia. Bush, whose daddy was President before him, asked the king, whose daddy was king before him, wasn’t there some sort of pal deal we could come to, so the king would help lower the price of gasoline? This is not appeasement. Republicans do not do appeasement. Bush, whose daddy was also formerly head of the CIA, looked the king right in the eye and saw deep in his soul, just like he did Vladimir Putin, the once and future Russian KGB assassin. Basically, the King of Arabia said, “Stuff it up your galabaya.”

We’ve already got one SUV war going in the Middle East. Maybe the next one should be against that guy Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. He’s such a jerk. Who does he think he is, just because he’s sitting on an oil field? He needs to think about what happened to Saddam Hussein.

I know there’s already talk in the U.S. Congress about opening up restrictions on drilling for oil in our own country, in our ocean shorelines and in protected wilderness. It won’t be like the Alaska Pipeline. Fool me once, shame on you. Alaska Pipeline oil was supposed to be used by Pacific Coast Americans in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. Instead, it got shipped overseas, where it could fetch a higher price. You think $4 a gallon is top dollar? Ask the French, Germans, Italians, Sweedish, and Japanese. They don’t make those cars that get great gas mileage just because they can’t control wanton and selfish hankering to squeeze grandma and the kids into the cramped back seat of an oversized turtle shell with a lawnmower engine.

When I drive U.S. Highway 78 through Loganville, I pass one of the biggest Chevrolet dealerships imaginable, maybe in the entire state of Georgia. Acres of new SUV’s and Pickup Trucks. My heart pounds, and I get short of breath. Chevrolet offers seven automobile models that get 30 MPG or better gas mileage. Unfortunately, the Tahoe and the Silverado are not among them, but they do get the best gas mileage in their class, the dealer points out. I’m thinking white with red leather seats. Sunroof. Dual Control Air Conditioning. Automatic Transmission. Power Steering. Power Windows. Cruise Control. V-8 engine. And HORSEPOWER.

If I can just hold out for a few more months, maybe the price of gas will rise to $6, $7 per gallon. By then, they’ll be giving those V-8 beauties away. Name your own price. Think of the SUV wars.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter