Grid Beam is Minecraft for real life

SUBHEAD: Grid Beam is a kind of LEGO, or Erector Set, for grownups who want to build real things.

By Kirsten Dirksen on 17 September 2017 for -
(https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDsElQQt_gCZ9LgnW-7v-cQ)


Image above: A computer workstation built by the Jergensons using the wooden Grid Beam system. Still frame from video below.

[IB Publishers note: The Unistrut metal framing system similar in application to the metal Grid Beam system. Unistrut was invented around 1920 by Charles Attwoodand is still widely used in the building industry for everything from hanging pipes above ceilings to framing out engineering projects. There are a myriad of components built for the 1 5/8" Unistrut beams. The big difference is unlike Grid Beam you cannot make the Unistrut beams is a home shop.]

Grid Beam is a kind of LEGO, or Erector Set, for grownups who want to build real things.

Its creators, brothers Phil and Richard Jergenson, have used it to create tiny houses, furniture, electric vehicles, bicycles and even a solar train car that made a 44-mile run on working rail.

The Jergensons grew up playing with modular toys- LEGOs, Meccano, Erector Sets, Lincoln Logs- and wanted to apply this technology to help people construct their own environments, whether car, bike or bed.

Phil’s daughter, Rona, grew up with a set of Grid Beam (then called Box Beam) and constantly re-modeled her room.

“My bed, I changed it out every week, my dad would come in and one time I would have a bunk bed with a slide, the next day I”d say I don’t really want another bed let me put a desk underneath it.”

The Grid Beam brothers operate an off-grid, solar-powered shop in Willits, CA (Mendocino County) where they manufacture and sell the hardware: 2x2 wood (or aluminium) beams with holes drilled through every 1 ½ inches, as well as, standard furniture bolts and accessories like wheels, bicycle pedals or feet for tiny houses.



Video above: A 28 minute video explaining Grid Beam system and examples of things the Jergenson brothers have constructed with it. From (https://youtu.be/PIMESt9iLYg).

And given the consistent pattern of the Grid Beams, designs are easily replicated.

“If you just count the holes you can duplicate these frames just by looking at a couple of photos,” explains Phil.

“You can do anything for a fraction of the price. I see people being able to build their own tiny house and tiny electric car for easily 2 or 3 thousand dollars because that’s the cost of the components,” argues Phil.

“And when you build it yourself, if something should go wrong, you are the specialist and you are the one who can fix it.”

Visit:
http://www.gridbeam.com/

Read:
“How to Build with Grid Beams” https://www.amazon.com/How-Build-Grid...

.

Review of "The One Device"

SUBHEAD: A new book on the birth and manufacture of Apple's now ten year old iPhone. 

By Les Grossman on 19 June 2017 for the New York Times -
(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/books/review/one-device-secret-history-iphone-brian-merchant.html)


Image above: Apple CEO Steve Jobs introducing the first iPhone at the Macworld Conference in January 2007. From original article.

[IB Publisher's note:  In regards to President Trump's "Muslim Ban" on Syrians entering America - it should be remembered that Steve Jobs was the son of Syrian immigrants.]

Before anybody outside Apple was aware of it, the project that would become the iPhone was referred to internally by the code name Purple. No one seems to remember exactly why; it may have been named after a toy purple kangaroo that belonged to one of the engineers.

Purple was so secret that even inside Apple hardly anybody knew about it. It was developed in a lab sealed tight behind badge readers and a metal door. Employees had to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements for their Non-Disclosure Agreements.

The lab became known as the Purple Dorm because people worked there round the clock, through weekends, holidays, vacations, honeymoons.

They ate there. They slept there. It smelled bad.

In fact, although it would eventually emerge as the gleaming quintessence of the collaboration between the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Apple’s design magus, Jony Ive, Purple could seem like a nightmare of overwork, insoluble technical tarballs and political infighting.

“You created a pressure cooker of a bunch of really smart people with an impossible deadline, an impossible mission, and then you hear that the future of the entire company is resting on it,”

Andy Grignon, one of the iPhone’s key engineers, has said. “It was just like this soup of misery.” The Purple Dorm will no doubt one day be the setting of a taut claustrophobic drama by some future Aaron Sorkin.

If it does, that drama may well be based on “The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone,” a new book by Brian Merchant, an editor at Motherboard, the science and technology division of Vice.

Merchant does the important work of excavating and compiling large numbers of details and anecdotes about the development of the iPhone, many of them previously unrecorded. It’s important because along with being splash-, water- and dust-resistant, the iPhone is resistant to history.

The iPhone dwells among us, but it looks — it’s designed to look — as if it just moments ago entered our world from some higher, more ideal plane of existence. Just as its flat black face makes no compromise with the contours of the human skull, its gleaming, lickable surface offers no clues about where and when it was made, or by whom, or how.

You can’t even open it without a special proprietary screwdriver called a Pentalobe. This is an effect not just of the iPhone’s physical design but of the strange culture of reverence and secrecy that Apple has created around its products. The iPhone knows everything about us, but we know very little about it.

An example: multitouch, the technology that allows the iPhone’s touch-screen to track several fingertips at once — it’s why you can pinch to zoom. Where does it come from? Jobs always maintained that multitouch was invented at Apple. It wasn’t.

As Merchant demonstrates, it was actually invented several different times, including in the 1960s at England’s Royal Radar Establishment and in the 1970s at CERN. The specific multitouch technology that went into the iPhone was pioneered around the turn of the millennium by a man you’ve almost certainly never heard of named Wayne Westerman.

A brilliant engineering Ph.D. at the University of Delaware, Westerman worked on multitouch in part because he suffered from severe repetitive strain injury, which made conventional keyboard interfaces agony. Apple acquired Westerman’s company, FingerWorks, in 2005 — whereupon it and Westerman disappeared behind Apple’s Titanium Curtain.

The rest is, and isn’t, history. (Apple wouldn’t let Merchant interview Westerman, or any current Apple employee, for “The One Device.” Merchant did, with characteristic thoroughness, track down Westerman’s sister.)

The iPhone is designed for maximum efficiency and compactness. “The One Device” isn’t. The three chapters on the development of the iPhone are the heart of the book, but there’s some filler too.

It’s curiously unilluminating to read a metallurgical analysis of a pulverized iPhone, or to watch Merchant trudge around the globe on a kind of iCalvary in search of the raw materials Apple uses — through a Stygian Bolivian tin mine and a lithium mine in the Chilean desert and an e-waste dump in Nairobi where many iPhones end up.
This kind of hacker tourism can be done well — the gold standard is Neal Stephenson’s epic 1996 Wired article “Mother Earth Mother Board".

His one conspicuous success in this line is his visit to a Foxconn factory outside Shenzhen, China, where iPhones are manufactured.

Foxconn has a reputation for bad labor conditions, and visiting Westerners are generally closely chaperoned, but during a trip to the bathroom Merchant manages to ditch his minders and take a stroll through the vast, dystopian facility. “It is factories all the way down,” he writes, “a million consumer electronics being threaded together in identically drab monoliths.

You feel tiny among them, like a brief spit of organic matter between aircraft-carrier-size engines of industry.” It’s a palpable glimpse of the way the iPhone has, like a shiny glossy virus, physically reshaped the world to produce copies of itself.

Merchant also tells the origin stories of the technologies that converged into the iPhone: Gorilla Glass, motion sensors, lithium-ion batteries, ARM chips, wireless technology and so on.

He shows how many people’s work went into the creation of the iPhone, as a counterweight to “the myth of the lone inventor — the notion that after countless hours of toiling, one man can conjure up an invention that changes the course of history.”

The lone inventor starts showing his straw stuffing after a couple of paragraphs, but Merchant spends entire chapters chatting with people like Mitsuaki Oshima, the father of image stabilization.

Oshima undoubtedly has hidden depths, but as an interviewer Merchant is powerless to reveal them. (“Even with a shake of the camera, the image did not blur at all. It was too good to be true!” etc.)

Even worse is Merchant’s ghastly time-traveling habit. In order to talk about magnetometers we first have to sit still for a history lesson (“compasses can be traced back at least as far as the Han dynasty, around 206 B.C.”).

To get to assembly-line production, a concept with which most readers are already pretty familiar, we have to slog back to the Pleistocene Era (“Homo erectus, which emerged 1.7 million years ago, were the first species to widely adopt tools.…”).

And so on. The origin of this kind of writing can be traced back at least as far as the Undergraduate Era, to those leaden essays that begin, “Since the dawn of time, mankind has wondered.…”

But when he gets back to the actual iPhone’s creation, Merchant tells a far richer story than I — having covered Apple for years as a journalist — have seen before. If you’ve ever worked on a hopeless project that felt like it was going nowhere, you will draw spiritual strength from Merchant’s account of life in the Purple trenches.

It includes fascinating dead ends and might-have- beens (a prototype based on the original iPod’s click wheel, backlit in blue and orange); personal sacrifices (“The iPhone is the reason I’m divorced”).

There were obscure technical hurdles (the phone’s infrared proximity sensor, which turns the screen off when it’s near your head, wouldn’t recognize dark hair)

And there was the backstage tension at the launch (I was actually there, watching Jobs rehearse the famous iPhone keynote, but apparently missed everything); even a symbolic onstage assassination (when Jobs publicly demonstrated swiping to delete a contact, he used Apple vice president Tony Fadell’s name, foreshadowing Fadell’s imminent departure).

The iPhone masquerades as a thing not made by human hands. Merchant’s book makes visible that human labor, and in the process dispels some of the fog and reality distortion that surround the iPhone. “The One Device” isn’t definitive, but it’s a start.

What we need is the critical equivalent of a Pentalobe, a book that will crack open the meaning of the iPhone, to properly interrogate this digital symbiont, or parasite, that has introduced new kinds of both connection and disconnection into our lives.

If the iPhone was a revolution, who or what exactly was overthrown? One of the stories Merchant tells comes from Grignon, who was the first person to receive a call on the iPhone.

“Instead of being this awesome Alexander Graham Bell moment, it was just like, ‘Yeah,… go to voice mail,’” Grignon says. “I think it’s very apropos, given where we are now.”

THE ONE DEVICE
The Secret History of the iPhone
By Brian Merchant
Illustrated. 407 pp.
Little, Brown & Company. $28.

.

A houseboat that sails

SUBHEAD: Progress report on the design and engineering of the future home of Dmitry Orlov.

By Dmitry Orlov on 9 July 2016 for Club Orlov -
(http://quidnon.blogspot.com/2016/07/progress-report.html)


Image above: Starboard side elevation of the Quidnon houseboat. From original article.

Much of the design work has been completed over the past few months. The 3D model, drafted in Rhino 3D, is largely complete. Construction techniques, including materials selection, joinery techniques and order of assembly have been largely worked out.

The cockpit design, the deck arches, the tiller linkage, tanks and lockers and many other details have been worked out in detail. We have designed a very strong structure for stepping the mast tabernacles, constructed out of 4x4 hardwood timbers glued and bolted together.

This structure, fastened and glued to the deck, bottom and sides of the hull, will also provide plenty of resistance to torsional loads, side loads when docked and strengthen the foredeck.

We are still working out such minor details as tiller design, hatches, interior cabinetry, wiring and plumbing, and running rigging.

The model has been hydrostatically tested using Orca3D software. (We are very grateful that Orca3D has agreed to sponsor our project, and has donated two seats of their excellent software for our use.) Hydrodynamic tests will have to wait until we build a 1:12 scale model, and conduct towing tests and other types of in-the-water testing.

The good news is: there are no surprises at all. The hydrostatic tests have confirmed the initial calculations: QUIDNON, ballasted as initially designed, is going to be seaworthy and reasonably fast.

Moreover, it will be able to carry considerable freight. Here is a table of draft (with centerboards and rudder blades retracted) vs. load.

Load		Draft
0		12.9 inches
10 tons		25.3 inches
20 tons		34.6 inches

Image above: Computer generated perspective of the cockpit of Quidnon. From original article.

At the stern are two 20 lb. propane cylinders in an ABYC-compliant propane locker with an overboard drain, a 100-gallon gasoline tank below it, and a 40 hp outboard engine forward of it in an inboard outboard well.

According to results from Orca3D analysis, fuel consumption and speed will be as expected. As the above chart shows, even when loaded with 20 tons of freight, QUIDNON will do a comfortable 7 knots with a 40hp outboard at half-throttle, burning 2 gallons per hour, for a 350 nm cruising range. Without freight, its cruising range increases to over 600 nm.

It is interesting to note that when QUIDNON isn't loaded, as speed increases from 7 kt, power requirement shoots up. This is because the hull form is a compromise, and at 0 load the transom bogs down faster than when loaded. But this effect will be pronounced mostly when motoring; when sailing the center of force will be further forward, keeping the bow down and presenting a smaller profile to the water.

And so it is safe to conclude that QUIDNON will work very well as a live-aboard boat. You pay for a 36-foot slip and you get around 540 square feet of interior living space, plus just as much space on deck, which is plenty of space for living aboard and for throwing dockside parties. It is fast and economical enough to make a good canal boat, and with a 20-ton cargo capacity it can be used to bring back a year’s worth of harvest from wherever you hunt, gather or grow it back to your winter quarters.


Image above: Computer generated perspective of stern of Quidnon. From original article.

But is it seaworthy?

But, you probably still want to know, Is it seaworthy? To an engineer, this is a fairly annoying question, because there is no technical definition of seaworthiness. And so I will apply my own definition. Seaworthiness is the ability to survive arbitrary conditions at sea. By “arbitrary conditions” I mean something that includes arbitrarily high, almost vertical walls of very angry water, with spindrift blowing from the wave tops at well over 100 miles an hour.

By this standard, few boats are actually seaworthy. We can immediately rule out all catamarans and trimarans: they are more stable floating upside-down than right-side-up, and once a rogue wave flips them over, it’s game over every time.

We can also rule out most yachts, large and small, with tall masts: once the masts hit the water, more often than not they snap off, and, again, it’s game over, every time. So masts have to kept quite stubby. In QUIDNON’s case, the masts measure exactly 36 feet from the mast tabernacle hinges, because they can’t overhang the bow or the transom when the masts are dropped and secured to the deck arches (for canal work, to pass under bridges). And the reason they can’t overhang is because that would increase QUIDNON’s overall length (LOA), incurring increased slip fees at marinas, and we can’t have that.

Secondly, we can rule out all large commercial ships: tankers, cruise ships, dry bulk carriers, container ships, etc. All of them are designed for a maximum wave height, and a big enough wave will capsize them, break them in half, or both. Over a hundred ships are lost every year in just this manner. But “fixing” this problem would be too expensive, and rogue waves are rare enough to keep marine insurers in business.

But we who sail around in small boats do like them to be able to survive almost arbitrary sea conditions. And if you try to design something that is completely seaworthy, by this definition, you end up with a coconut every time. But who wants to sail around in a coconut? (Actually, QUIDNON’s hull shape comes pretty close.)


Image above: Computer generated perspective of bow of Quidnon. From original article.

Hydrostatic analysis shows that QUIDNON is self-righting up to 130º. It is very tender when level, and just walking across the deck is enough to make it list a few degrees. But beyond 10º it puts up a very serious fight. In fact, while sailing, it is probably not possible to make it list more than about 25º, in any sort of useful wind. It continues to put up a very serious fight until about 70º. Thus, any sort of sudden squall will lay it over for a bit, but with no serious consequences (unless you fall overboard, but that's verboten).

At around 90º, it gets ready for Round Two, because at that point the masts are in the water, and they are buoyant because they are filled with foam, weighing in at negative 8.5 lb. per foot of length, with a huge lever arm. Only beyond 130º does QUIDNON develop a propensity to turn turtle and settle.

When inverted, it is only about half as stable as when it is floating right-side-up, and if it lists by more than 50º it will right itself. Thus, if a big enough wave flips it over, leaving it floating at some arbitrary angle, there is only a 27% chance that it will be left floating upside-down.

And if a wave big enough to capsize it comes along, there is about a 50% chance that the following wave will be at least half as big, enough to lean it over by at least 65º, and since 65>50, QUIDNON will then right itself. And so the chance of QUIDNON remaining bottoms-up after a rogue wave event is no more than 15%.

This, I would think, is quite seaworthy—for a houseboat. However, we must keep in mind that it is a houseboat, and even though we can take it out on the Big Wobbly with quite a lot of confidence, we should still remember that we are just moving house, not embarking on an extreme survivalist adventure at sea. And so, we should take certain precautions. These are divided into strategy and tactics.

The strategy is to avoid storms by carefully picking weather windows. For longer passages, on which storms are impossible to avoid completely, the strategy is to carefully pick weather windows for getting away from land, and for making landfall. The idea is to be nowhere near anything at all when bad weather hits. Rocks and shoals kill boats; wind and water—not so much. This is the sort of advice you can get from any number of books.

Another part of the strategy is preparing QUIDNON for bad weather, and it is QUIDNON-specific. QUIDNON can sail just fine with unstayed masts, but when making ready for the open ocean a bit of standing rigging makes a lot of sense.

A triatic line is connected between the mast-tops, and two running stays are connected to each of the mast-tops and tensioned, the two from the foremast running forward, and the two from the mainmast running back. This set-up is traditional; Tom Colvin had lots of luck with this arrangement. Also, obviously, anything that could possibly shift in a capsize should be secured, both above and below deck.

The tactic is simply to ride out the weather, in the usual sequence: heave to, lie ahull, lie to a drogue, scud off under bare poles. Make a pot of stew, batten down the hatches and hunker down. Again, you can get this sort of advice from any number of books. Unless you are particularly unlucky, seriously bad weather generally passes in 2-3 days, and so with QUIDNON drifting at about 1 knot you’ll need about a 100 nautical mile offing from the nearest hard object to drift safely.

Since this is much more seaworthiness than one has any right to expect from a houseboat, and since it comes at very little additional expense (filling the masts with foam and rigging some running stays is pretty cheap) we will consider this aspect of the design handled.


Image above: A Philip C. Bolger designed "Box Boat", the Luna. She was an inspiration for Quidnon. From (http://islandbreath.org/2008Year/09-access_transport/0809-08Sailing_Ships.html).

Excerpt below is from article by Dmitry Orlov from 15 August 2006  about boxboats like his former Hogfish From (http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=151&Itemid=43).

The Simplest Solution that Works
Since almost all contemporary sailboats are designed for either sport or luxury, we can start with a blank slate, and dispense with most of the preconceived notions of what a sailboat must be like. However, there is an established style of boat that is so close to what we want that there seems to be no reason not to start with it. It is called the square boat, or the Bolger Box, after Phil Bolger, a naval architect from Gloucester, Massachusetts, who is a renowned designer of square boats and other unusual craft.

See also:
Club Orlov: Hogfish for sale 11/13/13
Club Orlov: Boat Bits 10/15/13
Club Orlov: Our Brave Experiment 6/12/12
Club Orlov: Sailing craft for a post-collapse world 6/8/11
Club Orlov: Ocean voyaging for the accident prone 3/7/11
Ea O Ka Aina: A solution to Brexit? - Tall ships 6/26/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Delivering freight by schooner 8/7/15
Ea O Ka Aina: Captain Erikson's Equation 3/29/14
Ea O Ka Aina: Moving local goods by boat 3/7/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Polyneisans again tour the Pacific 8/15/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Clear Sky over Polynesian canoes 7/12/11
Ea O Ka Aina: The Sail Transport Network 6/4/11
Island Breath: Sail Technology Reemerges 12/25/07
Island Breath: THe Polynesian Package 8/24/07
Island Breath: The Future of Ocean Sailing 8/15/06

.

Trouble with the King's english

SUBHEAD: What ever language you speak should be spoken with some mastery and art. 

By Juan Wilson on 2 November 2015 for Island Breaeth -
(http://www.countercurrents.org/irwin021115.htm)


Image above: Graphic for Cab Calloway's "Are You Hip to the Jive" record set with 22 tracks.  From (http://region5.herbzinser08.com/dir/index.php/blog28/hydrocarbon-gasoline-asks-carbon-black).

I read the two articles below this morning with some amusement. Jerome Irwin and James Kunstler are both correct in thinking that using English without some mastery of grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation leads to weakened ability to communicate as well as think clearly. In Irwin's example it is the drunken slur of Australian whites, and in Kunslter's case it is the jive street talk of American blacks.

The mastery out English language leads to higher education, professional accreditation, solid employment. The lack thereof leads not only to fuzzy thinking, but poverty.

However, neither Irwin or Kunstler address issue of any cultural or social advantages to those populations that speak a dialect. Nor due they evaluate in any depth the culture identity of those who speak a dialect. Both the Briritish whites originally exiled to Australia and the African blacks brought to slavery in America have been   "associated with "violent criminality and other anti-social behaviors."

Both the Australian criminals and African blacks had a reason to have their own "secret" language.

Another point not mentioned is that other languages than English describe other realities for other cultures. Those who identify as Americans here in Hawaii often complain about Pigeon English spoken by Polynesians and their descendants.

A bit like Spanglish,  Pigeon English is a mixture of English and another language - here in Hawaii that language would be Hawaiian.

The Hawaiian culture was one carried by the spoken word - without a written language.  It was a rich culture that mastered sailing the Pacific Ocean a millennium before English the speaking British and Americans.

That meant that all their culture as well as technology was carried through the spoken word - navigation, engineering, agricultural practice, etc. The Polynesians thrived on the Pacific Ocean islands for centuries without bringing on the level of destruction we see today.

The little I know of the Hawaiian language has shown me that every word seems to have several meanings even in context, thus mixing the profane with the spiritual and the serious with the amusing.

It does pay to know your own language and speak it with some mastery and art.

---

Linguistic Attack In Australia

SUBHEAD: Linguistic and Cultural Diversity Under Attack in Australia

By Jerome Irwin on 2 November 201 for Counter Culture -
(http://www.countercurrents.org/irwin021115.htm)

Dean Frenkel – a singer, voice coach and public speaking-communication lecturer at Melbourne Australia’s Victoria University – is on the hot seat for a controversial theory he recently put forth (“Australia, we need to talk about the way we speak”, The Age, October 26th, 2015).

The gist of Frenkel’s theory is that the by now infamous “G’Day Mate” drawl, that has come to embody the essence of Australian culture, is actually nothing more than a ‘lazy’ accent caused by the ‘alcoholic state’ of Australia’s heavy rum-drinking early settlers who regularly got drunk together on their new-found Down Under continent.

According to the laments of Frenkel, this original drunk-induced linguistic trait has since been passed down from generation to generation by all those descendants who, whether drunk or sober, have unknowingly added an alcoholic slur to the fact that they only use two-thirds of their mouth to speak and hence has become part of the Aussie national speech pattern.

Frankel contends that consequent sweeping effects have occurred as a result: poor communications is evident among all sectors of Australian society; a gaping hole in rhetorical training has been created in the Australian educational system; a subsequent diminishment has occurred in critical thought-processes, problem-solving, judgment and poor speech skills that have led to a lack of confidence and the internalization of emotions and thoughts that have contributed to difficulties in relationships, loneliness and stalled development.

In short, Frenkel’s theories hold that Australia’s linguistic accents, moulded by booze, have led to a general inarticulateness among the people as a result.

By contrast, Frenkel holds up the example of the ancient history of Australia’s aboriginal peoples spoken word and storytelling abilities that otherwise artfully uses rhetoric as an integral part of the recounting of the Australian Dreamtime to pass on to each generation their special spiritual and survival knowledge.

He contends that Australia’s western-centric civilization has instead created a “dumbing down” of speech in Australia that has “created holes in our education system that reflects holes in our culture.” Frankel declares, “Australia, It is time to take our beer goggles off. It’s no longer acceptable to be smarter than we sound.”

Yet whether Frenkel, as essentially a singer and voice coach, is qualified to theorize on such sweeping historical-sociological-psychological matters is a bone of contention.

In 2011, Aidan Wilson, a PHD graduate student at the University of Melbourne, challenged Frenkel’s qualifications to assess Australian politician’s qualities based upon their accents (“Beware of speech experts bearing science”, Crikey, Nov 2, 2011 & Oct 29th, 2015). At the time, this spawned a language blog debate between the two. (“A Reply from Dean Frenkel”, Crikey, Nov 7th, 2011).

Yet a far more important question exists behind such professed theories.

Is the ultimate objective in Australia, or wherever else in the world, to eventually get the entire world’s populace to speak in some uniform, standardized, sanitized “General Australian”, “General American”, or “General Whatever” way?

The obvious continuing mass disappearances of regional accents worldwide, and the negative attitudes of lower social class status and inferior traits that are often attributed to regional accents, symbolize what is a constant attempt by certain controlling forces in the world who are intent upon constantly reducing or utterly eliminating all such cultural human uniqueness or biological diversity on the planet.

During the 19th & 20th centuries, in Australia in particular, the attempt was made by still others to perpetuate an inferior cultural mentality in the people in relationship to their original British origins. Those who ever attempted to excel in whatever endeavour were shown resentment or ridicule with such pejorative terms as, “stop trying to be a tall poppy” or “you’re just another Plastic Brit.”

From the very beginning of the literary arts, Australian writers were decried as mere plagiarists of some Rudyard Kipling or Robbie Burns.

In 1950, A.A. Phillips, the Melbourne critic and social commentator, coined the term “cultural cringe” to describe the post-colonial literary arts in Australia as being deficient when compared to the work of their British and European counterparts.

Back then, Australia was being made out to be synonymous with failure, just as theorists like Frenkel now attempt to reduce Australian’s speech patterns down to the level of the hard-drinking drunkards of Australia’s early colonial days.

Apparently, as some would have us believe, the only way that Australian’s now can build themselves up in the eyes of the world, and especially in the ears of elocution experts like Frenkel who speak the British mother tongue, is to learn to pronounce proper “King’s English”. Is the intended net effect to encourage Australian’s to once again redefine their cultural heritage not only as convict stained but now as drunken stained?

---

Good Little Maoists

SUBHEAD:American education does not put enough emphasis on teaching standard spoken English.

By James Kunstler on 2 November 2015 for Kunstler.com - 
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/good-little-maoists/)


Image above: From ().

ometimes societies just go batshit crazy. For ten years, 1966 to 1976, China slid into the chaotic maw of Mao Zedong’s “cultural revolution.” 

A youth army called the Red Guard was given license to terrorize authorities all over the nation — teachers, scientists, government officials, really just about anyone in charge of anything. They destroyed lives and families and killed quite a few of their victims. 

They paralyzed the country with their persecutions against “bourgeois elements” and “capitalist roaders,” reaching as deep into the top leadership as Deng Xiaoping, who was paraded in public wearing a dunce-cap, but eventually was able to put an end to all the insanity after Mao’s death.

America’s own cultural revolution has worked differently. It was mostly limited to the hermetically-sealed hot-house world of the universities, where new species of hierophants and mystagogues were busy constructing a crypto-political dogma aimed at redefining status arrangements among the various diverse ethnic and sexual “multi-cultures” of the land.

There is no American Mao, but there are millions of good little Maoists all over America bent on persecuting anyone who departs from a party line that now dominates the bubble of campus life. It’s a weird home-grown mixture of Puritan witch-hunting, racial paranoia, and sexual hysteria, and it comes loaded with a lexicon of jargon — “micro-aggression,” “trigger warnings,” “speech codes,” etc — designed to enforce uniformity in thinking, and to punish departures from it.

At a moment in history when the US is beset by epochal problems of economy, energy, ecology, and foreign relations, campus life is preoccupied with handwringing over the hurt feelings of every imaginable ethnic and sexual group and just as earnestly with the suppression of ideological trespassers who don’t go along with the program of exorcisms. 

A comprehensive history of this unfortunate campaign has yet to be written, but by the time it is, higher education may lie in ruins. It is already burdened and beset by the unintended consequences of the financial racketeering so pervasive across American life these days. But in promoting the official suppression of ideas, it is really committing intellectual suicide, disgracing its mission to civilized life.

I had my own brush with this evil empire last week when I gave a talk at Boston College, a general briefing on the progress of long emergency. The audience was sparse. It was pouring rain. The World Series was on TV. People are not so interested in these issues since the Federal Reserve saved the world with free money, and what I had to say did not include anything on race, gender, and white privilege.

However, after the talk, I went out for dinner with four faculty members and one friend-of-faculty. Three of them were English profs. One was an urban planner and one was an ecology prof. All of the English profs were specialists in race, gender, and privilege. Imagine that. You’d think that the college was a little overloaded there, but it speaks for the current academic obsessive-compulsive neurosis with these matters. 

Anyway, on the way to restaurant I was chatting in the car with one of the English profs about a particular angle on race, since this was his focus and he tended to view things through that lens. The discussion continued at the dinner table and this is what ensued on the Internet (an email to me the next morning):  On Oct 29, 2015, at 4:37 PM, Rhonda Frederick wrote:

Jim— This is what I posted on my social medias, am sharing with you and your agent. Yesterday, novelist/journalist James Howard Kunstler was invited to give a talk at BC (see his bio at http://www.bc.edu/offices/lowellhs/calendar.html#1028). At the post-talk dinner, he said “the great problem facing African Americans is that they aren’t taught proper English, and that … academics are too preoccupied with privilege and political correctness to admit this obvious fact.” No black people (I presume he used “African American” when he meant “black”) were present at the dinner. I was not at the dinner, but two of my friends/colleagues were; I trust their recollections implicitly. Whether Kunstler was using stereotypes about black people to be provocative, or whether he believed the ignorance he spouted, my response is the same: I cannot allow this kind of ignorance into my space and I am not the one to cast what he said as a “teachable moment.” I do think there should be a BC response to this, as the university paid his honorarium and for his meal. Here’s some contact information for anyone interested in sharing your thoughts on how BC should spend its money: Lowell Humanities Series at Boston College (http://www.bc.edu/offices/lowellhs/about.html)

Rhonda— That is not quite what I said. I said that teaching black Americans how to speak English correctly ought to be the most important mission of primary and secondary education for blacks in order for them to function successfully in our economy. Moreover, I said that anyone mounting an argument against this was hurting the very people they pretend to help. I stand by those statements. Your attempt at Stalinist thought policing is emblematic of something terribly wrong in higher education, especially since you were not present. James Howard Kunstler “It’s All Good”

So I was subjected to attempted character assassination via social media by this Rhonda Frederick person — faculty or student, she did not say — who admits to not having been present at the incident in question. This is the new fashion in academia: slander by Twitter and Facebook. It is fully supported by the faculty and administration. While they have been super-busy constructing speech codes and sex protocols, it seems they haven’t had any time for establishing ethical norms in the use of the Internet. 

As it happened, I offered to come back and publically debate my statements about the benefits of teaching spoken English to black primary and secondary students — they’d have to pay me, of course — but received no reply on that from Rhonda Frederick. I also received no reply from James Smith (smithbt@bc.edu), director of the Lowell Lecture Series, when I emailed my objection to being vilified on the Web by his colleague.

Now, as to the substance of what I said to this table of college professors. I’ve written before in books and blogs about the issue of spoken English and the black underclass, but for the record I will try to summarize some of my thoughts about it (trigger warning).

True, there are various dialects of English among us, but it must be obvious that they have different merits and disadvantages. There is such a thing as standard grammatical English. It evolves over generations, for sure, but it shows a certain conservative stability, like the rule of law. It tends to be spoken by educated people and by people in authority. 

This implies people in power, of course, people who run things, but also people at large in the professions (medicine, engineering, etc.) and the arenas of business and government. Standard grammatical English tends to be higher status because competence in it tends to confer the benefits of higher living standards.

It also must be self-evident that there is such a thing as a black English dialect in America. With perhaps a few lingering regional differences, it is remarkably uniform from Miami, Florida, to Rochester, New York, to Fresno, California. It prevails among the so-called black underclass, the cohort that continues to struggle economically. 

Despite its verve and inventiveness, this black dialect tends to confer low status and lower standards of living on those who speak it. In popular mythology and culture, it is associated with violent criminality and other anti-social behaviors. If you don’t believe this, turn on HBO sometime.

I argue that black people who seek to succeed socially and economically would benefit from learning to speak standard grammatical English, not solely because it is associated with higher status and living standards, but because proficiency with grammar, tenses, and a rich vocabulary helps people think better. 

After all, if you employ only the present tense in all your doings and dealings, how would you truly understand the difference between now, tomorrow, and yesterday? I submit that it becomes problematical. You may not be able to show up on time, among other things.

Some of my auditors have argued that “code switching” allows black Americans to easily turn back and forth for convenience between two modes of speech, black and “white” (i.e standard grammatical English). I’d argue that this is not as common as it is made out to be. 

Not everybody has the skill of entertainer Dave Chapelle, a master amateur linguist (whose parents were both college professors).

It’s my opinion that American primary and secondary education does not put enough emphasis on teaching standard spoken English to those deficient in it. The pedagogues have been hectored and browbeaten by the hierophants in higher ed not to press the matter. It is not regarded as important (probably because the task seems too painful and embarrassing and may hurt some feelings). The results are plain to see: academic failure among black Americans. (Not total but broad.) 

Instead, we concoct endless excuses to explain this failure and the related economic failures, the favorite by far being “structural racism” (despite having elected a black president who speaks standard grammatical English).

Now to the touchier question as to why this is. After all, other ethnic groups in America are eager to fully participate in the national life. For example, I gave a talk to a large honors freshman class at Rutgers University a year ago. 

Due to the current demographics of New Jersey, the class was overwhelming composed of Indian (Asian, that is) youngsters, many of them as dark-skinned as Americans of African ancestry. They had uniformly opted to speak standard grammatical English. 

They were all succeeding academically (it was an honors class, after all). They were on a trajectory to succeed in adult life. What does this suggest? To me it says that maybe some behavioral choices are better than others and the color of your skin is not the primary determinant in the matter.

Here’s what I think has happened to get us where we are today (second trigger warning). I think the civil rights victories of the mid 1960s generated enormous anxiety among black Americans, who were thereby invited to participate more fully in the national life after many generations of hardship and abuse. (If you argue that this was not the sum, substance, and intention of the Voting Rights Act and Public Accommodations Act of 1964-65, then you are being disingenuous.) 

However, they were not comfortable with the prospect of assimilating into the mainstream culture of the day. They either didn’t believe in it, or feared it, or despised it, or worried about being able to perform in it.

Many would attribute this anxiety to the legacy of slavery. Can a people get over a particular historical injury? American blacks are not the only group traumatized by circumstance. 

When do you decide to move forward? Or do you nurse a grievance forever? Anyway, it was not a coincidence that in the mid 1960s a new wave of black separatist avatars arose around the time of the civil rights legislative victories. Malcolm X, Stokely Charmichael, the Black Panthers, to name a few. 

That was the moment when much of the black population slid into what has become essentially an oppositional culture, determined to remain separate. Language is part of that picture.

The diversity cult of the day is a smokescreen to disguise this fundamental fact of American life: much of black America has simply opted out. They don’t want to assimilate into a common culture — so common culture has been deemed dispensable by the confounded keepers of the common culture’s flame, the university faculty. 

Much of black America doesn’t want to play along with the speech, manners, rules, or laws of whatever remains of that common culture after its systematic disassembly by the professors, the deans, and their handmaidens in progressive politics — heedless of the damage to the basic social contract. We remain very much a house divided, as Lincoln put it, and he could see clearly what the consequences would be.

Is it racist to try to air these abiding quandaries in the public arena? Apparently so. And why is that? Because of the awful embarrassment of political progressives over the disappointing outcome of the civil rights project. 

Black news pundits such as Charles Blow of The New York Times constantly call for “an honest conversation about race,” but they don’t mean it. Any public intellectual who ventures to start that conversation is automatically branded a racist. 

Hey, I couldn’t even have a conversation at a private dinner on the merits of speaking standard English with three college professors whose life-work centers on race. They had a melt-down and used a proxy (who wasn’t even there) to slander me on the Internet.

They are cowards and I am their enemy.
.

European nuke policy collapses

SUBHEAD: Plans for a worldwide fleet of huge new nuclear reactors have collapsed, with the cancellation of a major project.

By Paul Brown on 28 May 2015 for Climate Network News -
(http://www.climatenewsnetwork.net/new-energy-policy-needed-as-nuclear-giants-take-a-hit/)


Image above: GreenPeace members preparing for demonstration against European Pressurized Reaactor in Flamanville. From original article.

[IB Piublisher's note: After realizing that there is no way we can contain or clean up the Fukushima Daiichi triple meltdown that is killing the Pacific Ocean it should be a no-brainer that expanding reliance on nuclear energy is worse than a deadend - it's suicide. Yet we carry on.]

Plans for a worldwide fleet of huge new nuclear reactors have collapsed, with the cancellation of a major project and no new orders being placed.

The European nuclear industry, led by France, seems to be in terminal decline as a result of the cancellation of a new Finnish reactor, technical faults in stations already under construction, and severe financial problems.

The French government owns 85% of both of the country’s two premier nuclear companies – Areva, which designs the reactors, and Électricité de France (EDF), which builds and manages them. Now it is amalgamating the two giants in a bid to rescue the industry.

Even if the vast financial losses involved in building new nuclear stations can be stemmed, there is still a big question mark over whether either company can win any new orders.

Their flagship project, the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR), billed as the most powerful reactor in the world, has two prototypes under construction − one in Finland and the second in France. Both of the 1,650 megawatt reactors are years late and billions of  Euros over budget, with no sign of either being completed.

Enthusiastic cheerleader
The Finnish government, once the most enthusiastic nuclear cheerleader in Europe, has lost patience with Areva, and the Finnish electricity company TVO has scrapped plans to build a second EPR in Finland.

This is because the first one, under construction at Olkiluoto since 2005, and which was supposed to be finished by 2009, is not expected to be producing electricity until 2018 – and even that may yet prove optimistic. It was intended  to be the first of a “worldwide fleet”.

The second EPR under construction, at Flamanville in France, is also seriously delayed, and possibly in even deeper trouble because of concerns about the quality of steel in the pressure vessel.

The components, forged in France by Areva, were already in place in the half-built reactor before questions over the carbon content of the vessel and its safety were raised and work was halted.
The knock-on effect of the inquiry into this safety glitch is that the Flamanville reactor will be delayed again. In a worst-case scenario, it would have to be part-dismantled or scrapped altogether.

The French government is keen to rescue
the industry, but had already decided against
ordering any more reactors after the fiasco
in building Flamanville

This has also raised queries over the French company’s biggest potential export market, China. Two EPRs are being built in China, but checks are being made there too because these reactors may also have excess carbon in the steel. The suspect parts were made in France in the same forge as the Flamanville pressure vessel.

These delays and cancellations have placed a severe strain on Areva’s finances. In 2014, on revenues of €8.3 billion ($9.2 billion), it lost €4.8 billion. Hence, the French government’s move to amalgamate the two companies to try to make one viable unit. In fact, EDF will take over Areva, which has not sold a new reactor since 2007.

Serious blow
This is a serious blow to the pride of a country that is seen as the world leader in nuclear energy, with 75% of its electricity coming from 58 reactors.

The French government is keen to rescue the industry, but had already decided against ordering any more reactors after the fiasco in building Flamanville, which was years late and over budget even before the latest hiccup.

All this leaves the UK as the last country in the world anxious to buy a French reactor. With a new Conservative government in power for less than a month, its energy policy is already in disarray.

Plans to build four 1,650 megawatt EPRs in Britain to produce 14% of the country’s electricity − announced before this month’s general election − look ever more unlikely.

Even with the first two at Hinkley Point in the west of England − where site preparations have been made, and a final agreement was expected with EDF this summer − nothing is likely to happen for months. The most likely course must now be cancellation.

Plans have been put on hold while EDF and Areva sort out the problems at Flamanville, and then try to find a way of financing the project. Four hundred workers on the Hinkley Point project have already been laid off.

Unfair state aid
The new British government is already facing legal challenges from Austria and Luxembourg and from various renewable energy groups for unfair state aid for this nuclear project.

Even if ministers see these threats off, it seems unlikely that anyone will commit to building new EPRs in the UK until at least one of the four reactors under construction in China, Finland and France is actually shown to work.

There is no guarantee that will happen in the next three years, so the chances of Britain getting any new nuclear power stations before 2030 are close to zero.

Currently, the UK is closing coal-fired stations to comply with European Union directives to combat climate change, but it has not developed renewables as fast as Germany and other European neighbours − claiming that new nuclear build would fill the gap.

It now looks as though the government will urgently need to rethink its energy policy.
.

The Transforming Castle Truck

SUBHEAD: New Zealanders Jola and Justin have created a three level road worthy house truck with its own turrets!

By Andrew Martin 15 May 2015 for Onenes Publishing -
(http://onenesspublishing.com/2015/05/seeing-is-believing-the-transforming-castle-house-truck/)


Image above: Exterior of road legal truck before its transformation into a castle home. Still shot from video below.

With the average size of houses having increased over recent decades, there is a growing movement for people seeking alternatives to large, expensive, energy intensive housing. Australia currently holds the record for the country with the largest homes.

The average size of a new Australian house increased from 162.2 square metres (1742 sq feet) in 1984 to 227.6 square metres (2444 sq feet) in 2003. The average new Australian home is now 10% bigger than even its U.S. equivalent [1].

Australian is closely followed by the U.S., Canada and New Zealand all having homes either over 200 metres squared or just under 200 metres squared (2200 feet squared). In contrast other countries have significantly smaller houses such as Germany (109 m2), Japan (95 m2), Sweden (83 m2), UK (76 m2), China (60 m2) and Hong Kong (45 m2).


Image above: Exterior of castle during transformation from truck. Still shot from video below.

While the trend over the last decade has been for larger homes, the tiny house movement is becoming popular among those wishing to be more sustainable and wanting to live simpler less consumerist lifestyles. The small house movement is about reducing the overall size of dwellings to less than 1,000 square feet or approximately 93 square metres.

Following the Global Financial Crisis and Hurricane Katrina both of which helped spark interest in the small home movement, there is a small but growing younger demographic moving toward living with less. While still a relatively small sector, the tiny house market is set to see more interest over the coming decades. As housing affordability deteriorates along with economic conditions people will seek alternative ways of living [2].

One such couple who have embraced the tiny house movement with their passion and skills are Jola and Justin from New Zealand. They have combined functional and practical with quirky and fun. They have created a three level road worthy house truck with its own turrets! The 40 square meter ‘Castle’ truck is an engineering masterpiece.


Image above: Interior of kitchen area of castle truck. Still shot from video below.

The Castle truck includes biofold doors, a loft, a rooftop bathtub, a large food dehydrator, a full working kitchen complete with oven cook top and refrigerator. The bathroom facilities include a shower (within one of the turrets) and composting toilet (in the other turret) and a washing machine. Solar panels pull out to provide power for the family and recycled materials have been used throughout the vehicle [3].

Don’t take my word for it see for yourself what the team over at Living Big in a Tiny House have done to showcase this quirky, fun and functional engineering masterpiece.


Video above: Unbelievable house truck transforms into fantasy castle. From (https://youtu.be/CnHGKUh-5O4).

Article compiled by Andrew Martin editor of onenesspublishing and author of One ~ A Survival Guide for the Future… and the JUST RELEASED Rethink…Your World, Your Future.




.

Japan OKs Unit 4 fuel removal

SUBHEAD: To make room for the Unit 4 fuel rods, Tepco has been moving rods in the Common Pool to safer storage offsite.

By Mari Yamaguchi on 30 October 2013 for Associated Press -
(http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_JAPAN_NUCLEAR)

[IB Publisher's note: The risk to the world has not been reduced. This attempt at removing fuel from Unit #4 cooling pool is fraught with danger, but there appears to be little else that can be done at this juncture to decommission the Fukushima Daiichi site. We had hoped all transportable nuclear material would have been removed from the site before defueing #4. This is a pivotal moment in the nuclear power industry. One way or another it should end the dream of "free and endless" energy from the atom.]


Image above: Aerial photo of cover for fuel removal equipment at Fukushima Daiichi Unit #4.  From (http://www.fukushima-blog.com/les-risques-de-la-r%C3%A9cup%C3%A9ration-du-combustible-de-l%E2%80%99unit%C3%A9-4-%C3%A0-fukushima). Note this source is in French and has been translated. The report is a detailed description of engineering of fuel rod removal procedure and expectations.

Japanese regulators on Wednesday formally approved the removal of fuel rods from an uncontained cooling pool at a damaged reactor building considered the highest risk at a crippled nuclear plant.

Removing the fuel rods from the Unit 4 cooling pool is the first major step in a decommissioning process that is expected to last decades at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, where three reactors melted down after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

The Nuclear Regulation Authority said at its weekly meeting that the proposal by the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., is appropriate and that the removal can start in November as planned, following an on-site inspection by regulators. Japanese public broadcaster NHK said the removal would start as early as Nov. 8, but TEPCO said it may not announce the date in advance, citing security reasons.

"It's a major step toward decommissioning," said Toyoshi Fuketa, one of the authority's five commissioners. "Moving the fuel rods out of Unit 4 can significantly reduce the risk at the plant."

The Unit 4 reactor was offline when the plant was hit by the disasters, but the building was damaged by hydrogen explosions and fire. Fuel rods in the pool, however, have since been properly cooled and are safe enough to remove, officials said.

TEPCO has reinforced the structure around the pool and says the Unit 4 building can survive a major earthquake, but the unenclosed pool on the unit's top floor, which contains 1,533 fuel rods, has caused international concern. About 200 of the rods that are unused and safer are expected to be the first to be removed.

The Unit 4 cooling pool has attracted international attention in part because early in the crisis it was suspected to have dried up, when in fact there was enough water to cover the rods, keeping them from melting. TEPCO last year plucked two unused fuel rod units out of the pool and said no major corrosion or damage was found in them.


Image above: Cross section diagram of Unit #4 and nuclear defueling structure. It is approximately 17 stories tall with a 30' deep concrete foundation.

Nuclear regulatory chairman Shunichi Tanaka, however, warned that removing the fuel rods from Unit 4 would be difficult because of the risk posed by debris that fell into the pool during the explosions.

"It's a totally different operation than removing normal fuel rods from a spent fuel pool," Tanaka said at a regular news conference. "They need to be handled extremely carefully and closely monitored. You should never rush or force them out, or they may break."

He said it would be a disaster if fuel rods are pulled forcibly and are damaged or break open when dropped from the pool, located about 30 meters (100 feet) above ground, releasing highly radioactive material. "I'm much more worried about this than contaminated water," Tanaka said.

TEPCO has prepared a massive steel structure that comes with a remote-controlled crane to remove the fuel rods, which will be placed into a protective cask and transferred to a joint cooling pool inside a nearby building. To make room for the Unit 4 fuel rods, the company has been moving those already in the joint pool to safer storage in dry casks at a separate plant location.

The utility plans to empty the Unit 4 pool by end of 2014, and remove fuel rods from other pools at three other wrecked reactors over several years before digging into their melted cores around 2020.

The Fukushima plant has had a series of mishaps in recent months, including radioactive contaminated water leaks from storage tanks, adding to concerns about TEPCO's ability to safely close down the plant.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Remove Fuel Rods from Fukushima 10/19/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima and poisoned fish 10/3/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Fuel Danger at Fukushima 9/26/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Dear Ban Ki Moon - About Fukushima 9/23/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Reactor #4 Spent Fuel Pool 9/16/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima is Not Going Away  9/9/13
Ea O Ka Aina: X-Men like Ice Wall for Fukushima  9/3/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima out of control 9/2/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima Radioactive Dust 8/20/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima Apocalypse  8/21/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima House of Horrors  8/21/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima radiation coverup 8/12/13
Ea O Ka Aina: G20 Agenda Item #1 - Fix Fukushima  8/7/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Leakage at Fukushima an emergency 8/5/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima Burns on and On 7/26/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima Unit 4 Danger  7/22/13
Ea O Ka Aina: What the Fukashima? 7/24/13
Ea O Ka Aina: What the Fukushima? 7/11/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima Spiking 7/12/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Nuclear Power on the Run 7/18/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Techno-optiminst & Nuke Flack views 7/26/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima & Hypothyroid in Hawaii 4/1/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima Fallout  9/14/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima worse than Chernobyl  4/24/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Japan condemns Fukushima children 3/8/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima fights chain reaction 2/7/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima dangers continue  12/4/11
Ea O Ka Aina: The Non Battle for Fukushima 11/10/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima Debris near Midway 10/13/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Deadly Radiation at Fukushima 8/3/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima Radiation Danger 7/10/11
Ea O Ka Aina: New Fukushima data discomforting 6/7/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima #2 & #3 meltdown 5/17/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima sustained chain reaction 5/3/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Chernobyl & Fukushima 4/26/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Ocean Radioactivity in Fukushima 4/16/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima No Go Zone Expanding  4/11/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima Abandoned 4/8/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima Poisons Fish 4/6/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima Leak goes Unplugged 4/3/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima reactors reach criticality 3/31/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima Non-Containment 3/30/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Fukushima Water Blessing & Curse 3/28/11
.

The Weakest Link

SUBHEAD: Connecticut Yankee & Fukushima share design and the fate delivered by their weakest link - humans.

Intro by Juan Wilson on 27 October 2012 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-weakest-link.html)


Image above:Workmen on the steel reinforcement of the containment building Unit #1 of the Salem Nuclear Power Plant in Hancock's Bridge, NJ. From (http://spoonsenergymatters.wordpress.com/2010/09/05/graceless-ageing-at-salem/).

This is a long intro. You can just skip down to the articles about the weaknesses of General Electic (GE) Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) design. What I wanted to demonstrate with my personal experience was how large complicated human endeavors often rely on the least experienced worker at the bottom of the design chain for their integrity.

In high-school I had shown some talent for painting and drafting. After winning a few local blue ribbons for painting, I decided that was my calling. So, before I ever studied architecture I began the study of painting at Boston University. I dropped out after a year, and moved to New York City.

After waxing floors for three months I got a job working for Morris G. Weiss in Murry Hill, on Lexington Avenue, south of 39th Street. Moe had an art gallery there. He also had an interior design business that designed showrooms and factory cutting rooms for the garment district clothing companies. I drafted interior plans, did sketches of the showroom booths and served Moe coffee in the morning and scotch in the afternoon.

I learned a lot from MGW Interior Design... But what I did not learn about, however was reinforced structural concrete. After a year with Moe I moved back to Boston to be with the friends I had there. However, I needed a job. Back in 1964 the state of Massachusetts was a place with a lot of jobs. I went to the State Unemployment Office to register. They gave me a list of job offers for someone with drafting experience.

The Job
The first place I had an interview with hired me. My boss was a Lithuanian named Apolinnaris Treinys. We was a structural engineer whose firm's name was Litas Engineering. That was the equivalent of calling it Dollar Engineering as the "Litas" was the denomination of Lithuanian currency.

The structural engineering specialty of Litas Engineering was detailing. For Apolinnaris Treinys that required he hire three or four young men at low wages. He then showed them enough to read a structural design plan for reinforced poured concrete. The job requirement was to determine the exact number, size, length, and possible bends for each steel reinforcement bar (rebar) on the drawing.

The information for each bar was entered onto a line on large paper form created by IBM for doing a "take-off" of rebars. Each form was for a specific part of one concrete structural element. They were divided into sections like vertical front bars or horizontal back bars, etc.

Mostly we did Interstate Highway structures. Litas had a contract for all the concrete box-culverts, bridge abutments, spanning decks in Massachusetts. Most of the rebars we specked were #4, #6 of #8 bars (that's a measure of eighths of an inch wide). Litas did a lot of the I-95 and I-495 bridges in the region.

These "take-off" sheets were hand written. When a section was done all the IBM form sheets were sent to Bethlehem Steel in Pennsylvania. There a key punch operator made a IBM punchcard for rebars in groups. The punchcards could then be run through an IBM computer instructing a machine to automatically cut/bend the reinforcing rods as specified. Groups of bars would be wrapped with a colorcoded band identifying the specific structure and where the bars went.

At first Apolinnaris looked closely at my work before passing it on. After a few weeks I could do rebar take-offs as fast as my two co-workers in our small 5th floor office at 5 State Street in down town Boston. Mr. Treinys didn't look at my work much after that. It was just too boring to bear.

The Nuke Plant
Sometime in 1965 we had a big new contract come into Litas. It was the take-off of the rebars for the containment building for the yet to be built Connecticut Yankee Nuclear Power Plant. The containment walls were four-foot thick concrete that was reinforced with the largest standard-run bars rolled by Bethlehem Steel, #18s. These were 2 1/4" thick bars placed so close together both vertically and horizontally that you could hardly see through the cage before the forms were in and the concrete poured.

The point I'm making is that the safety of the nuclear power plant was based on the nuclear engineering firms specs that were implemented with the concrete structural design firm's ability that relied on the structural detailer's correct take-offs (me), and then counted on the keypunch operator's accuracy reading the IBM forms and then the correct bundling, unloading and placement of the rebars in the nuclear containment wall... and that just doesn't seem quite good enough. Even if everybody tries to do their job right, there will still be mistakes that nobody knows about,  - or if they did - would have a powerful inclination to cover up.

We kid ourselves into complacency about how things get done in this world. Doing rebar take-offs was mind numbingly dull. I did the work, but, as a twenty-year-old working in Beantown, all I could think about what college aged girl I might be going out with that night... not the possible failure of the Connecticut Yankee plant when I was an old man and the plant was past its shelf-life.

---

Too Much Radioactive Sea Water

By Staff on 25 October 2012 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/10/25-6)

Operators of Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi plant are having trouble storing a perpetual accumulation of radioactive cooling water from the plant's broken reactors, the plant's water-treatment manager, Yuichi Okamura, told the Associated Press in an interview this week.

The plant currently holds 200,000 tonnes of highly contaminated waste water, used to cool the broken reactors, but operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, continues to struggle to find ways to store the toxic substance. TEPCO has said they are running out of room to build more storage tanks and the volume of water will more than triple within three years. Okamura said:

"It's a time-pressing issue because the storage of contaminated water has its limits, there is only limited storage space."

After the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe of 2011, the plant's broken reactors have needed constant cooling and maintenance, including the dumping of massive amounts of water into the melting reactors -- the only way to avoid another complete meltdown.

Adding to the excessive amounts of cooling water is ground water, which continues to leak into the reactor facilities because of structural damage.

"There are pools of some 10,000 or 20,000 tonnes of contaminated water in each plant, and there are many of these, and to bring all these to one place would mean you would have to treat hundreds of thousands of tons of contaminated water which is mind-blowing in itself," Masashi Goto, nuclear engineer and college lecturer, stated, adding the problem is a massive public health concern.
"It's an outrageous amount, truly outrageous" Goto added.

---

Fukushima & Connecticut Yankee
By William Boardman on 11 October 2012 for Newswax -
(http://world.hawaiinewsdaily.com/2012/10/what-the-fukushima/)

What the Fukashima?” and dozens of other anti-nuclear messages graced the bridges of the Interstate Highway from Northampton, Massachusetts, to Burlington, Vermont, reminding Columbus Day weekend leaf peepers that were passing close to the evacuation zone of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, still operating past it’s 40-year design life.

“What the Fukushima?” refers to the basic design of  the 1972 Vermont Yankee, which used the same General Electric boiling water reactor technology as the 1971 Fukushima plants that failed in Japan in March 2011.

Vermont Yankee’s original license expired on March 2012, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already granted a 20-year license renewal to the plant’s owner, Entergy Corp. of Louisiana.  The Fukushima #1 plant had been scheduled for decommissioning in 2011, but had been granted a ten-year renewal before the tsunami hit.

Although it continues to keep operating effectively most of the time, Vermont Yankee remains entangled in legal, political, and environmental disputes, in the context of a largely hostile public. The State of Vermont is fighting Entergy in federal court.  The Vermont Legislature has already voted once to close the plant and has passed a tax bill to make up for revenue Entergy presently refuses to pay.

Environmentally, Vermont Yankee has suffered a long string of “events,” including the collapse of a heating tower, various leaks of radioactivity, and seasonal overheating of the water in the Connecticut River.

In September, Vermont started shipping low level radioactive waste from the University of Vermont and a Burlington hospital to Andrews County, Texas, by trucks using public highways. This is the first such shipment under an agreement approved 20 years earlier, the Texas-Vermont Low-Level Radioactive Waste Compact.  Vermont Yankee has also shipped some its radioactive waste to the same dump, a 15,000 acre site in a poor area that straddles the Texas-New Mexico border.

The unguarded transport of nuclear waste on public highways has been controversial in the past in relation to nuclear weapons waste.  In Texas, early alarms have been sounded about the safety of shipping this waste to the remote site owned by Harold Simmons, a Dallas billionaire and heavy Republican bankroller, as described in the Dallas-Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

The paper also reported: “In the past eight years, 72 incidents nationwide involving trucks carrying radioactive material on highways have caused $2.4 million in damage and one death, the Transportation Department’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration says.”

The Texas dump expects to receive radioactive waste from 36 states, including Vermont, but this wasn’t the direct target of the holiday weekend banner drop along the Interstate.

“Shut down Before Meltdown” was the message on the bridge in South Royalton, home of the Vermont Law School.  “You Are In A Nuclear Reactor Zone” is said on the Bridge in Bernardston, just over the Massachusetts border from Yankee’s location next to the Connecticut River in Vernon.  Yankee is Vermont’s only nuclear power plant.

The bridge banners were the work of anti-nuclear affinity groups from both states, part of regional resistance to nuclear power older than the plant itself.  Members of the Sage Alliance, the affinity groups’ names include “Shut It Down,” “Sunflower Brigade,” “Downstreamers” and the “VT Yankee Decommissioning Alliance.”



.

Don't trust Army Corps of Engineers

SUBHEAD: This kind of waste erodes trust in our government and makes our already difficult fiscal situation that much worse. By Juan Wilson on 6 October 2011 for Island Breath - (http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2011/10/dont-trust-army-corps-of-engineers.html) Image above: Surf crashes on revetment wall along Kuamualii Highway near west of Catholic church in Kekaha. From (http://www.poh.usace.army.mil/CW/CWPhotos-HIKa.htm). If you remember back to the analysis of damage caused by hurricane Katrina when it hit New Orleans you probably recall that major factors for the failure of the levees and the subsequent flooding that killed almost 2000 people and did over $80 billion in property damage was laid at the feet of the Army Corp of Engineers. First - they cut the wetlands to the south of the city into ribbons by slicing channels for large vessels that wanted shortcuts to the gulf waters. These water highways eroded the grassland and marshes that buffered the mainland from storm surges. These wetlands have been a living filter protecting both the gulf and the city. They were critically damaged by the projects of the Army Corps. Second - the Corps badly designed and under maintained the levees that were needed to protect parts of the city most likely to be flooded when a storm surge from the gulf, or high water from the Mississippi came. Those lowest lying areas where the dykes were, of course, were where the poorest people (read black) lived. Here on Kauai they have been busy and have plans. I am most familiar with their efforts to "improve" the Hanapepe River Levee system. I live inside the protection of that levee on the west side of the river. My conclusion after watching the efforts since 2006 to improve the system is that the Army Corps of Engineers is a mechanistic and unimaginative design and build contracting outfit with the power of god and little care about the environment of the people that live in the path of their work. They don't get the living system here, and don't care about it. They have insisted that all living grass, plants and trees be stripped from the levee (since 2006). The Kauai County Public Works were the Corps army in the field enlisted to do the work. They employed chainsaws and backhoes and pesticides. They would spray Round-Up at 7am within 25ft of residents asleep in their beds. At least two women were badly affected by the poison gases. One suffered an asthmatic attack and could not breathe afterwards. She was in her 70's. The other was pregnant in her 20's and became ill. She miscarried within 48 hours. At a recent meeting in Hanapepe the Army Corps informed the community of the timeline for their project. I won't go into the details but they are horrible. I asked the Corps representative from Honolulu what research they had done on the best species of grasses and plants that could be placed on the sides of the levee once rebuilt. He didn't have a clue nor did he know of anyone who did. I'd rather live with no flood insurance and no levee and take a chance with the ebb and flow of nature like people did here before 1965. Has anyone noticed that since the Army Corps has been involved with "saving" Kekaha's small boat harbor and beaches that the erosion there seems to have accelerated?

---

Staggering Army Corps Fraud By John Rudolf on 5 October 2011 for Huffington Post - (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/05/army-corps-engineers-fraud-eyaktek_n_996442.html) Image above: The Army Corps idea of a shoreline along the Industrial Canal in New Orleans, after hurricane Katrina. From (http://www.tulane.edu/~sanelson/Katrina/katrina_images.htm).

Two senior employees at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers bilked the government out of $20 million through a "brazen" bribery and kickback scheme, federal prosecutors charged Tuesday afternoon.

Prosecutors identified the mastermind of the scheme as Kerry F. Khan, 53, of Alexandria, Va., a program manager at the Army Corps' Washington, D.C., headquarters. According to the 42-page indictment, Khan controlled a dizzying array of shell companies, which were used to mask millions of dollars being skimmed off inflated federal contracts paid to a Dulles, Va., technology firm.

Khan, who is charged with bribery, money laundering and wire fraud, pocketed roughly $18 million from the scheme over four years, prosecutors said. He allegedly spent the money on Rolex watches, BMW sports cars, designer clothes, first-class travel and properties around the globe.

The fraud was "staggering in scope," said Ronald Machen Jr., the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, at a news conference announcing the arrests.

"This indictment alleges one of the most brazen corruption schemes in the history of federal contracting," Machen said.

Harold F. Babb, the contracts director at Virginia tech firm EyakTek, was also charged with multiple felonies, along with Michael A. Alexander, a program director at the Army Corps, and Lee A. Khan, Kerry Khan's son, who controlled a consulting company allegedly involved in the scheme. The four men were arraigned in federal district court in Washington, D.C., where their lawyers entered pleas of not guilty to all charges.

A hearing is scheduled for Thursday to determine whether the men will be detained until trial, according to the Associated Press. Prosecutors called the men a flight risk.

As outlined in the indictment, the fraud scheme was simple enough, if breathtaking in scope. It began with a $1 billion Army Corps contract awarded to EyakTek, which subcontracted work out to another, unnamed Virginia tech firm. In a conspiracy with employees at the two companies, Kerry Khan and Alexander, who oversaw the contract, added millions of dollars in phony expenses to invoices sent to the government. Those funds were then allegedly skimmed from checks paid out by the agency and funneled back to the conspirators through a series of shell companies.

When arrested, the conspirators were planning a similar scheme, prosecutors said. According to recorded conversations and intercepted emails, the men were attempting to steer a $780 million technology contract to the unnamed Virginia technology firm, which could also be skimmed for profit. The only major hurdle would be clearing a government selection committee.

"Our biggest thing is being able to stack the board," Babb said during a March 2011 meeting with an unindicted co-conspirator, according to the indictment. "That's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to stack it in our favor."

On Wednesday, several leading Democrats in Congress called on the Pentagon to improve the oversight of its more than $600 billion annual budget.

In a letter sent to Ashton Carter, Deputy Secretary of Defense, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) called the latest scam part of an ongoing pattern of fraud and waste that has drained billions of dollars from federal coffers. In particular, she pointed to a September report from the Commission on Wartime Contracting that found up to $60 billion lost to contract waste and abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We cannot allow this kind of fraud to run unchecked," Shaheen said. "This kind of waste erodes trust in our government and makes our already difficult fiscal situation that much worse."

.