Quote of the Day
It isn't really important to decide when you are very young just exactly what you want to become when you grow up. It is much more important to decide on the way you want to live.
Golda Meir
Supreme Court Rules 5-4 in Favor of Education Choice: Thumbs UP!
Let me try to summarize the basics for those of us whom are not lawyers. The Establishment Clause forbids the US government from establishing an official religion (separation) or showing undue preference to specific religions (non-preference). There is also the concept of legal standing: a person's right to sue. To have standing, one has to show how he or she has been personally affected in a demonstrable, not simply speculative manner; the courts generally do not recognize a taxpayer's standing in opposition to taxes or spending (Frothingham v Mellon). One Supreme Court case, Flast v Cohen, allows an exception when the legislation bears upon the Establishment Clause.
Arizona fashioned a tuition tax credit law designed to work around legal issues for education choices involving church-affiliated providers. Organizations like the ACLU are opposed to anything they see as infringing upon the separation of church and state. (In fact, my maternal uncle, who was pastor of several churches during his career as a priest, wasn't a fan of Catholic schools from a cash-strapped financial standpoint: tuition doesn't cover costs and hence must be heavily subsidized. I attended both public and Catholic schools during elementary and middle schools. I had non-Catholic fellow students and even teachers; the religious content was minimal (I remember attending optional daily mass before classes, and the teacher letting us go outside to pray the rosary during a national tragedy). The things that stand out in my memory include school uniforms, no-nonsense discipline, and social justice projects.)
I saw an ACLU legal official Steven Shapiro's comment: "Today's decision ignores precedent, defies logic and undermines the role of the courts in preserving the core constitutional principle that government may not subsidize religion." False on all counts, but the point I particularly want to address is the last allegation that government is subsidizing religion. The fact is that faith-sponsored private schools are subsidizing government. Each child is guaranteed a free public education; the government would be forced to sharply increase outlays to accommodate children whom receive alternative education, including private schools or homeschooling. Second, Catholic schools do not bar children from other faiths and do not discriminate against families based on ability to pay. Third, parents who pay for their children to attend private school get hit twice--first, through their taxes (supporting public schools), second through public school education. Fourth, many private (including Catholic) colleges and universities provide government-subsidized loans and grants. From my perspective, the attack against faith-sponsored schools is arbitrary and discriminatory against the free expression of religious speech. If my child is achieving educational objectives through whatever school or means, why should government care, if along the way student gets occasional exposure to optional religious speech?
In this case, the Arizona law was implemented in a way a parent was entitled up to a $500 tax credit towards the tuition cost of a private school, including a faith-sponsored school. (This is different than a voucher system, which is an interesting distinction that the majority opinion recognized. The opposition can't claim their own money is at stake.) In essence, the opposition to the tax credit law is arguing this is a gimmick and pressed the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which agreed that the Flast decision applied in this case, giving the opponents standing. Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion which disagreed with the Court of Appeals; I leave it to the reader to read the decision, but among other things, the justice argues that a tuition tax credit is no more an unconstitutional subsidy of religion than a charitable deduction. The state never sees the money in the deduction or credit.
Justices Scalia and Thomas make it clear they consider the Flast exception to Frothingham to be an infringement of an overreaching judiciary on the constitutional power vested in the legislative branch. I agree.
Readership Anomaly
As I write this, today's readership is off about 80% since Friday and half since the weekend (normally slow days): in fact, a new 10-month low. Perhaps it had to do with my call yesterday for the US to withdraw from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. I've been signaling this stand for some time: I've been talking about across-the-board cuts; I've been criticizing nation building and the fact that we have a disproportionate amount of our military pinned down to countries of dubious strategic import. (I'm also not obsessing over Iran's nuclear ambitions, although a regional arms race does concern me.)
I think I do have a rather distinctive set of beliefs. I differ from libertarians on some issues, e.g., drug legalization. I do find it odd that we should be able to regulate pharmaceutical drugs for safety, but not illicit drugs (sources, purity, standard measurements, etc.) At the same time, I think there is a need for some legal reforms to the status quo that sends a disproportionate number of people to prison.
Blog Post Format Change
For the past 3 weeks I've been leading off my posts with statuses on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear incident. Whereas scaremongering continues, the situation is stabilizing. We are likely in a prolonged period (meaning months versus days) before the first 3 reactors are in cold shutdown as repairs or replacement of equipment and components must be rolled out. I don't want to place undue emphasis on the Fukushima story. Hence, I will continue to follow this story on a regular basis until further notice, but I will reposition the feature in my posts just above my humor feature. I will only escalate as circumstances warrant.
Why am I covering this story in a political blog (versus a separate science blog)? There are a variety of reasons. First, I have been a fairly consistent conservative critic of media conservatives (e.g., Rush Limbaugh) and Fox News, both in terms of news coverage and commentaries. This story is particularly telling, because I'm providing specific feedback on Fox News coverage, not the usual ad hominem attacks from liberals/progressives. Second, one can be scientifically-literate and a conservative. I would like to bury the stereotypes that conservatives are in denial about scientific theories and evidence, the theory of evolution, etc. In terms of climate change and other scientific issues, there are problems of a robust scientific environment (i.e., Climategate and similar threats to academic freedom), and scientists blurring the line in terms of a policy agenda (hence, my repeated reference to Michio Kaku during Fox News coverage). Third, I believe I'm providing a highly readable alternative to technical blogs; I do cite a number of more technical blogs which the interested reader can read more directly, but for the most part one is wading into discussions of specific temperature, pressure or radiation readings, detailed discussions of alternative pumps and equipment used, and other technical details.
Green Hype and Academic Freedom
A UCLA professor whose more comprehensive research on certain truck fumes has refuted certain politically correct environmentalist claims of death counts is seeing action taken against his job. Among other things, the research which the UCLA professor refuted was written by researcher falsely claiming to be a PhD. (His "degree" came from an Internet diploma mill.) He has been demoted, but the whistleblowing professor may lose his job...
Fukushima Nuclear Incident Update
Fox News once again promotes a non-issue story (remember the Spokane milk story over this past week?) Once again teleprompter-reading anchors (no doubt seeing themselves qualified to succeed Obama one day) cite "disturbing" stories of tons of collected contaminated water in the process of being dumped into the Pacific. Roger Ailes, why don't you at least hire a retired nuclear operator or a nuclear engineering student from MIT to clear your stories for scientific merit? At least three-quarters of Fox News' conservative and liberal contributors never go beyond the typically political spin one can find copiously reproduced throughout the Internet (I'm more original than the sum of them), but they can't hire one decent scientist or engineer to filter through this nonsense? I understand promoting scaremongering stories makes for good ratings, and the mainstream media types are also doing something similar, but I'm convinced it's more responsible to appeal to the public's intellect, not emotions...
Atomic Power Review blog notes:
- morning: The above referenced contaminated water is roughly 100 times normal safety thresholds (recall also that radioactive iodine has a half-life of 8 days). This is clearly not the higher iodine concentration mistakenly reported last week from seawater samples, thought to originate from reactor 2. Bottom line, my conclusion: whatever mitigated strength of this water, it will have no material affect on the environment. Davis discusses the difficulty of finding the seawater-relevant leaks, which he speculates may reflect multiple low-level cracks caused by earthquake damage and the leak problem probably won't stabilize until we have reactor components like the residual heat removal pumps operational.
- Fukushima expansion cancelled: TEPCO announced that the pending site expansion to reactors 7 and 8 have been cancelled. Davis also guesses that the stabilized reactors 5 and 6 will be eventually shuttered. I agree: my reasoning is that Daiichi has become a political, not technical problem (in the long term). The first 4 reactors are likely done once the situation has stabilized with serious damage to reactor infrastructure. Whatever the economy of scale of the Daiichi site, it would make more sense to operate out of the site with 4 reactors (versus 2 reactors) Whatever the factors driving the cancellation of the last two plants will probably do the same with the remaining two. I could be wrong, though: is TEPCO willing to write off 6 reactors versus 4? And no doubt, construction costs given the level of radiation at the site would be very expensive.
- afternoon: The motivation for dumping the water into the sea (see above) was to make room for more contaminated water, i.e., from the reactor 2 turbine building basement.
NEI notes:
- daily: Freshwater injections to the 3 reactors and sprays of the 4 spent fuel pools continue. Ambient radiation levels continue to drop, a good sign. Two Japanese government nuclear power-related groups have estimated it will likely take months before the three problem reactors are in cold shutdown. Patches of the cable pit discussed over the weekend have failed. Dye tests mentioned in yesterday's post have revealed multiple sources. Attempts to patch the power cable pit discussed over the weekend failed. Underwater silt barriers will be installed near intake for reactor 2 in an attempt to control contamination.
IAEA notes:
- In the most recent rolling 3-day sample, 133 of 134 food samples in the Fukushima region were within Japanese safety benchmarks, except for one sample of mushrooms.
The Hiroshima Syndrome blogger focuses on related topics discussed above; he did indicate TEPCO was going to put a different dye into the pit to see if it shows up in the sea. He's also concerned about a sticking status which implies half the fuel is uncovered; he says there's a conceptual error there, that they're reporting on water level ABOVE the fuel rod assembly (I agree), but it's this sort of miscommunication which can give laymen a false impression. He also doesn't like how the proposed contaminated water dump is being handled in terms of press releases and Western news agencies. And he points out that the anti-nuke ECRR group is out with a scaremongering headline predicting at least 200,000 cancer deaths attributed to Fukushima Daiichi. He's afraid people will call him unprofessional if he calls them crackpots. Okay, I have so few readers I seriously doubt ECRR will ever read this blog, but since many people think I am unprofessional anyway, I'll go ahead and say it: ECRR is full of crackpots.
Political Humor
A man in Ohio received a cable bill for $16 million. When he called customer service, they told him that for another $8, he could get the NFL package. - Jay Leno
[Clearly the cable system was testing its billing system under hyperinflation, Fed Reserve Chair "Helicopter Ben" Bernanke edition...]
President Obama called Vice President Joe Biden into the Oval Office to get his advice about Libya. Then he said, “April Fools’!” - Jay Leno
[Speaker of the House John Boehner got an official invitation on White House stationery, saying that President Obama wanted to consult with him on the Libyan engagement. Suspicious, Boehner looked at the back of the memo and read "April Fools'! Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel"]
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Beach Boys, "Dance, Dance, Dance"
