Tasteless taken to a new level
March 19th, 2008
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I’ve seen a lot of extremist appeals to emotion to cover for lack of scientific data. However, for absolute blatant bad taste, offensiveness and mind-numbingly stupid use of shocking and disgusting images, this takes things to a new level. The anti-nuclear movement has it’s share of sickening and exploitive propaganda that I’ve dealt with before.
This surprised even me. These people should be ashamed of themselves:
The Indian Point Dead Baby World Tour
It’s apparently affiliated with the semi-dead anti-science web blog “Green Nuclear Butterfly.” Which has been whining and accomplishing next to nothing for about a year. It’s not that I’m a fan of name-calling or the moral highbrow stand, but these guys really should be ashamed of themselves for this sickening and disgraceful ploy.
By the way, I’d like to make a point of two things that set this website apart from them:
First, comments are never censored for opinion or informational content. The only time a comment is held for approval is if there are a large number of links or words which trigger the automated spam guard. Comments are never removed because they are disagreed with. They may be refuted or argued against, but they won’t be taken down. The only comments that will be edited or taken down are outright vulgarity or obvious spam. (stuff like “Free Viagra” or “Girls take it off click here”). On the other hand I’ve tried to comment on the above blogs and the comments are “held in moderation” and never approved. I’ve yet to see a comment on those weblogs which disagrees with the point made.
Secondly, this website does not ask for handouts or financial contributions. It is run generally at a loss due to a motivation to contribute to discussion and information avaliable. Only small and unobtrusive advertisements are ever placed on this page.
Those who support the messages here are strongly encouraged to work on their own to promote the causes and messages of this page. This includes linking back, recommending the site and of course, working in one’s own community and local and national political movements to further good science and worthwhile causes. The other thing which visitors can do to help is to e-mail or contact or to leave informed comments. This is especially appreciated from people who have expertise or experience in relevant fields or pursuits. The information and discussion here has been tremendous thanks to those who have commented.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, Nuclear, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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March 19th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
“Dead Baby Tour”
Real classy. Hopefully this kind of tastlessness will actually help people see these idiots for what they are.
The openness of this website to opposing comments and the fact that they are refuted – even if sometimes it gets a little “spirited” and maybe a bit personel – it is a sign of intellectual honesty that is appreciated.
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March 19th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Yeah, it’s pretty low. No real evidence or science just dominated with “dead babies” “dead babies” “babies are killed” “murder”
at least it hasn’t been updated in a long time so I guess it’s dead. The movement that uses this kind of crap sure isn’t though.
BTW: I like the new “FarkIt” button
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March 19th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
The driving force behind Green Nuclear Butterfly is one Porgie Tirebiter, Royce Penstinger and Pinto Bean Yes, these are all three one and the same, a career coffee-gofer in political campaigns and sometimes limo driver named Sherwood Martinelli.
Martinelli, with free time provided by his wife Pina’s job in Bronx Community College, has a history of radicalism going back 20 years in a vagabond life spread between failed marriages, and a dozen transient residences throughout Ohio, West Virginia, upstate New York, and currently Peekskill. He has at last count 18 blogs with names like “Washington Scandal” , “John Hall Congressional Blog”, “NYDreamDragon”, “Westchester Rent-a-Husband”, “Porgies news & views”, ” Porgies Bullsheet”, “world hot docs”, “finkon energy”, and I now suspect, “The Indian Point Dead Baby World Tour,” among others in which he happily cross-quotes as if an unseen groundswell of consensus was leading others to agree with him.
He has advertised himself as a “Husband for Hire” as having an “open marriage”, and as the CEO of the “International Tantric Society” all of which shows that a 35+ year career of substance abuse has taken its inevitable psychic and physical toll, making him in my opinion, clinically insane.
I suspect he will show up in comments here, as he always does whenever one of his sites are mentioned. I just thought everyone should know how they are dealing with.
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March 19th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Well not all green blogs censor comments DrBuzzo, We’ve both posted disparaging comments on Treehugger (about Jumilla solar plant in Spain). I saw your comments there and mine got through as well(after 2 days admittedly, but they did get through). I think it’s just an overly agressive spam checking system.
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March 19th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
metatron said:
That’s true. I don’t have a problem with all “green” blogs even if I disagree with them. I was focused more on the radical anti-nuclear blogs. No there are plenty of enviornmental blogs and forums which are honest and respect opposing oppinions even if they are not in agreement.
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March 19th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
There are a lot of enviornmental websites which either don’t make nuclear energy an issue or might be opposed to it and ill-informed or maybe are pro-nuclear. I don’t actually think treehugger is that bad a site because they’re pretty reasonable and open.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with these people and I hope they can be reached. It’s the fanatical “OH MY GOD YOU KILL BABIES” kind of sites which disgust me and those generally want nothing to do with decanting opinion. (If you disagree you must be getting paid by the big bad corporations)
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March 19th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Yeah, of websites I’ve seen that one is just over the top. Pretty sickening if you ask me, but also it’s so over the top it comes off as a sick joke.
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March 19th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
I’m telling you guys – it’s the product of a single sick mind.
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March 19th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
The irony of an antinuclear site talking about killing babies is that coal fired plants literally pour tons of toxins in the air every day. If you left one of those dolls next to a nuclear plant for 100 years it would only have the dirt from the weather and still be good as new whereas a doll left next to a coal fired plant for even 100 days would be a blackened mess. If Indian Point is shut down now the only way to effectively replace is first going to be with expensive combined cycle gas turbines and later with several large coal fired plants. What this will do to the ratepayers of NYC I can only imagine.
As for radiation damage, well the National Geographic Channel has been running a movie about wildlife near Chernobyl that has wildlife doing just fine in spite of the constant reminders of the toxic radiation, leaving me to believe that NG’s scriptwriters need an education in nuclear physics and the half lives of radioactive isotopes. What bothers me about sites like this is that consistently they are ignorant about basic science, yet by virtue of the noise they can make they get taken seriously.
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March 20th, 2008 at 3:53 am
The Savannah river nuclear site in the USA has been sequestered since WWII , and likewise has become the one remaining repository of archaic flora and fauna of the now-extinct eastern American forest. Although other preserves, like the Nantahala & Great Smoky parks exist, they are glutted with discarded beer cans, fishing line, campfire sites, expended hunting ammo, and all the detritus of good ol boy recreational use. So an administrative sequestration, for whatever reason, turns out to be a good thing.As far as half lives, or whatever, just google Kerala India, where native sand deposits radiate far more than Chernobyl or Savannah River do…. these people have 20% fewer cancers than the surrounding populace.This is not a propaganda myth, go look it up.
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March 20th, 2008 at 8:42 am
Dave G said:
No.
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March 20th, 2008 at 9:18 am
Johnboy, I googled “Kerala India” and then, after all I got were tourist leaflets, “Kerala India radioactivity”. A number of papers were approaching this phenomenon from entirely the wrongheaded opposite direction, basically starting with “radiation is scary dangerous”, going on to “Kerala has high radioactivity” and concluding something like “what can be done to change things”: pole-vaulting to conclusions instead of learning from the real situation.
Fortunately there were also a few sensible papers. The abstracts usually include something like “There was no evidence that the cancer rate was elevated.” which slightly misses the opportunity to put a strong upper limit on the effect.
There’s also a lot of single-cell response work out there, useful I’m sure, but open to misinterpretation simply because we human organisms survive longer than any of our cells.
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March 20th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Alexey Goldin said:
Don’t be too glum, Alexey; I’m sure [i]some[/i] people (or even most) will see this for the nonsense it is.
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March 20th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Joffan – try to use the search term ‘radioactive sands India’ for a broader look at the subject as there are several monazite placer deposits in the sub-continent. Kalingapatnam on the Baruva coast, and Andhra Pradesh on the east coast are other examples.
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March 20th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
One of the problems, which IMHO causes these fears of radioactivity by the uninformed, is the linear model. Using the same linear model for another situation as analogy shows how flawed it is:
If 200 people drive a car at 60 mph into a wall, 50% of them will die from the impact.
With the linear model it follows, that if those 200 people drive their cars at 0.6 mph into a wall, at least one will die from the impact (at 1/10th walking speed !!!).
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March 20th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
The linear-nonthreshold dose-response hypothesis is getting tired. It’s is misleading and quite provably invalid, yet because public agencies don’t want to be accused of hiding risk, it still forms the backbone of policy.
The best argument against LNTH is that it is statistically so unlikely to have a single sub-atomic particle initiate
cancer that we must reject the hypothesis right there. It is ludicrous on its face.
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March 20th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
The thing about LNT is that even if you stick with it as your hypothesis you then find two things happen:
1. You end up being a lot less concerned about nuclear power plants and more concerned about airline passengers, building granite structures, using natural gas for indoor cooking, using a lot of substitute salt (as people with high blood pressure do), mining and quarying for almost anything and so on. If you are going with the “radiation must be reduced as much as possible” idea then the local granite library can rank higher on the list of concerns than the nuclear plant. And furthermore: Coal power plants and basements with a bit of radon are just about reason for panic.
2. If you follow the probability based on a linear function all the way down to the millirem per year level you find the risk probability to the population is so low that it’s lifetime-reduction less than the risk of each person spending a half an hour in a smokey tavern or eating an extra order of frenchfries per year. It’s literally so low it’s on par with a few high calorie meals. You also would calculate a much higher number of lives saved from something like doing a few extra DWI road checks or passing a law that all new bathtubs have non-skid textures or giving out a few dozen free fire extinguishers or smoke detectors.
Even by LNT standards the risk is infinitesimally small!
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March 20th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
The linear nonthreshold dose-response model was originally used to provide an upper limit estimate of the risk, with zero being the lower limit, of low level irradiation since the dose-response curve could not be determined at low dose levels. In essence, the model is based upon the assumption that all radiation causes biological damage which, if unrepaired, could lead to cancer.
However because no human data provides direct support for the linear nonthreshold hypothesis , confidence in LNT is based on the biophysical concept that the passage of a single charged particle could cause damage to DNA that would result in cancer. Several statistically significant epidemiologic studies contradict the validity of this concept, yet it persists. The silliness of this stand is illustrated by the fact that they are regulating doses that are lower than the natural background radiation.
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March 20th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
They used to think radiation wasn’t going to kill people but it’s totally proven how bad it is. There was that lady a long time ago who discovered it and killed herself with radiation. Coal doesn’t make radiation but just smoke that gets soaked up by trees. If you want coal to be clean just plant trees. radiation is forever or at least for billions of years.
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March 20th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
WarOnManIsReal said:
The average background radiation dose about is 3 mSv annually and a routine chest x-ray gives an effective dose of 0.08 mSv, this is about 370 mrem per year. This varies widely depending on where someone lives, and their occupation, in some parts of the world 50 mSv/yr is average.
We live in a sea of radiation and evolved in it. Sunlight is a form of radiation and life would not be possible without it. Too much sunlight will hurt you, it is true, but not enough and you will get sick. Radiation of all sorts is not harmful in small amounts.
BTW – Radiation, as used in physics, is energy in the form of waves or moving subatomic particles. As a consequence it is a transient phenomenon and can’t be ‘forever’.
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March 20th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
I’m not talking about the sun. I’m talking about uranium and plutonium and all the stuff your friends made and are using to destroy humans in war and all over the world. They killed a guy in london because he was a spy and was going to talk about what they do with uranium so they fed it to him or something and he died. It only made the point more!
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March 20th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
It was polonium jackass, not plutonium or uranium that was used in the U.K. hit. Lead, which is not radioactive can kill too when it comes out of a gun barrel, it really doesn’t matter what they use if you are the target.
Frankly it appears you haven’t the faintest idea what you are talking about.
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March 21st, 2008 at 12:17 am
WarOnManIsReal said:
All I should really have to do to dismiss the poster is to qoute him/her, but WOMIR probably wouldn’t understand what I was getting at, so:
That “smoke” consists of particulate pollution which contains a ****tail of very nasty chemicals known beyond a shadow of a doubt to be responsible for tens of thousands of deaths each year throughout the industrialised world and beyond. It also contains considerable levels of radioactive uranium and thorium, in far larger quantities than ever get released from the normal operation of a nuclear power plant. the radiation from that contamination by coal plants isn’t really all that dangerous though, at least nowhere near as dangerous as the mercury and sulphur compounds released into the air, never mind the carbon dioxide emissions.
The radioactive waste from a well-run nuclear power industry should remain dangerous for about 300 years, not thousands, millions or billions. Three hundred years is a time span that is easily planned for.
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March 21st, 2008 at 11:08 am
The uranium and thorium from coal power exposes both the local and world population to many times and increased level of radiation. The only reason nobody makes a big deal about it is that it’s actually not that high on the chart of risks coal causes. U and Th in coal pales in comparison to mercury, lead, thallium and all kinds of transitional combustion products, dioxins. It’s a foul witches brew and nobody can seriously argue that coal contributes to at least tens of thousands of premature deaths annually.
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