tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post114866816083127748..comments2024-03-28T08:37:58.136+01:00Comments on Limited, Inc.: skepticism and scienceRoger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-1148705521742648172006-05-27T06:52:00.000+02:002006-05-27T06:52:00.000+02:00Mr. NYP, no, I haven't read Dead Cities. Wow, I'll...Mr. NYP, no, I haven't read Dead Cities. Wow, I'll have to check that out. Thanks for the tip.<BR/><BR/>Here's a tip for you: if you haven't read it, look at the Gallagher book I mention. A photographer who did an eight year project in and about the downwind area. Obviously, the photos are influenced by Out West, but Gallegher doesn't have Avedon's coldness.<BR/><BR/>And I will also, it looks like, have to trash and repost my comment from above, since I put a link that goes to the end of the page. Oops!Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-1148702485454150842006-05-27T06:01:00.000+02:002006-05-27T06:01:00.000+02:00enough hogging for one night after this brief smal...enough hogging for one night after this brief small nugget: that same DoJ I requoted from your post also reminds me very much of the intercepted Enron calls--first time I'd heard of anything with this particular sound. DeLillo describes a scene toward the end of 'Underworld' about trashing places for money, but I don't remember any dialogue that was quite like this thrill of cheating people thing.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-1148702182283222442006-05-27T05:56:00.000+02:002006-05-27T05:56:00.000+02:00'They [(the DOJ employees)] actually bragged about...'They [(the DOJ employees)] actually bragged about the fact that they set up courses to train health physicists and lawyers on how to keep injured parties, injured from radiation, from getting any benefits!'<BR/><BR/>Yes, that's become clearly the practice in all departments. 'Corporate welfare' may have been one of the first phrases that pointed to this, but in the early 90's I noticed that when 'human rights' was reduced to a small category, I also noticed that it had been accepted as small for some time. Anyway, DOJ, but sounds just like Rumsfeld early on when, after the casualties were announced, he described the way you see the war as 'according to where you are sitting.' They've all learned to concoct these formulae, but what's interesting is that they may have a creeping suspicion that it can't work indefinitely, but that still the other way would mean their immediate ouster, so that all they are in is a delaying game. I wonder if maybe they've been shrewd because they were lucky that the chips fell nicely enough for them, but I'm not at all convinced they can prevail as actually being 'smart.' We'll see, and possibly soon.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-1148700463899764832006-05-27T05:27:00.000+02:002006-05-27T05:27:00.000+02:00Yes, they are only good at covering up catastrophe...Yes, they are only good at covering up catastrophe, and it's regressing because simply because there are too many of them to cover up all of them. So you see them literally imploding in Washington. They're so ingrown they probably haven't even noticed that the sleights of hand are increasing in number, since they don't have time to look outside their own most recent scandal and the sleights of hand they need to find to slip through to the next level of riffraff. It's actually riveting as long as explosions don't occur--not to say there's a thing admirable about it, but it's getting opaque almost to the point of being art the way Artaud talked about it.<BR/><BR/>There's a lot more about St. George and downwinders in Mike Davis's 'Dead Cities' which you've probably read. I thought it was his best book, having read 4 or 5--those about LA have problems in that the disasters he talks about really don't seem to happen in LA on the schedules he darkly gives them. In 'ecology of Fear' he talks about tornadoes occurring in DT Los Angeles, but I haven't ever heard about this anywhere else, and there really isn't any reason to hide it unless it's, as he even admits, that they're not big spectacular ones like in the midwest and south. In 'Dead Cities' he talks about govt. 'weather control' and how it's been around as a possible weapon for maybe 40 years (I don't have the book here), but this I also have never heard of again. He always has the look of being extremely well-researched, but I don't know whether he may not be defeated by wanting certain things to be facts, even though in another sense he couldn't want them, because they're undesirable. The 'certain huge quakes' for downtown LA and Beverly Hills, though, have definitely not happened.<BR/><BR/>I had no idea Thomson had written this sort of book. I've read huge swaths of the Film Encyclopedia at the library, and this is a peculiar document of himself. He has some bizarre phrases, as when he'll talk about how an actor 'lost his talent'. This book is embarassing in many ways because it's so pompous, but it's one of the best for unusual information in one place--things I wouldn't have known about like a clique consisting of Katharine Hepburn, George Cukor, Garson Kanin and Judy Holliday.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-1148695825699350972006-05-27T04:10:00.000+02:002006-05-27T04:10:00.000+02:00This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-1148694747975495862006-05-27T03:52:00.000+02:002006-05-27T03:52:00.000+02:00Mr. NYP - You know, as I was writing this up in my...Mr. NYP - You know, as I was writing this up in my half put on rage -- the rage of the ape before the computer screen - I looked at that map. And then I looked at it again. And I read the states about thyroid cancer. And I thought, my God. You'll notice that, due to the windpattern, there's a heavy laydown of Cesium 137 in Western New York. Where I was born. And a person near and dear to me who was living there at that time in the fifties when the tests were going on, did die of thyroid cancer - a singleton, in her family, in that way. <BR/><BR/>I found this in the Albany, NY paper from 1997: <BR/><BR/>"A 1953 thunderstorm is believed to have rained down radiation from a Nevada bomb test<BR/><BR/>The Albany area in 1953 was among the places hardest hit by fallout from a nuclear test conducted more than 2,000 miles away in the Nevada desert, according to government data only now revealed.<BR/><BR/>{The data show that young Capital Region children may have been exposed to 10 times the average adult dose in the worst hot spots, the Associated Press reported.<BR/><BR/>No one knows whether the exposures were enough to cause thyroid cancer. But some of those hot spots may have exposed Americans to as much radiation as residents directly downwind from the Nevada blasts, the National Cancer Institute said Friday.<BR/><BR/>The NCI refused to disclose its list of the 24 U.S. counties that had the most fallout until some maps are released with a summary of the 100,000-page report on Wednesday. But sources familiar with portions of the secret report said that areas with the highest fallout include Albany and parts of Massachusetts, Missouri, Tennessee, North and South Dakota, Idaho and Montana.}<BR/><BR/>The Nevada-Albany link had been exposed earlier when a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor, Herbert Clark, unexpectedly discovered that a freak thunderstorm doused the area with radiation fallout in 1953. But the government has never revealed the extent of potential exposure in Albany and other hot spots. Several experts said it is unlikely that 40 years later local residents exposed to the radiation would develop cancer as a result. But Dr. James Figge, director of the thyroid cancer program at St. Peter's Hospital, on Saturday recommended that anyone who was between infancy and 18 years of age during 1953 in the Albany area get a thyroid examination. "It's a lifelong risk," he said." <BR/><BR/>This has shocked me that I don't know what to think about it, but I do wish I could put up the maps I found in the American science article, or even the article itself, which is a PDF file, on my other geocities site, so that everybody could read it. <BR/><BR/>You are right, this is about an ongoing culture of power, Alabama or D.C. or Nevada, who get to select the members of the low use segment of the population. But it is a mistake to think those who did the selection had any fucking control over what was happening. They only thing they are good at is hiding the information after they make a catastrophic blunder -- and that talent, lately, has been regressing. <BR/><BR/>Why, though, I wonder, has there been no widespread publication of these kinds of maps? Why is there no complete medical survey, one that includes both carcinogens and the results of immune system failure -- and why has the latter, in spite of being highlighted by people like Sakharov, been given such a low level of publicity? After all, it is the latter which causes chronic failure of Quality of Life. I'm simply amazed at the way they play this game -- you segregate out the direst illness, cancer, and then put the penumbra of other diseases into a box and bury it in Oak Ridge, or something. Unfuckingbelievable, Mr. NYP.Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-1148685836999445042006-05-27T01:23:00.000+02:002006-05-27T01:23:00.000+02:00The reason things are clogged is because of litera...The reason things are clogged is because of literal Fear of God. The arrogant ones do not want to solve problems not so much because they hate to do good, as Krugman says, but because they do not want to really take the step to real power, which would seem very human, overly courageous and overstepping polite boundaries owned by invisible entities. While there is exuded an attitude that they want to at least propagate themselves, they only want to do this up to a certain point, a point they are running up to--and at which they will be scared. Running the government as a for-profit business is very much a part of Christian practice and as long as that part works, they will keep playing these little incestuous musical chairses and Simon Sayses. Just now Gonzales and Frist went to a shower together. Bush postponed the Coke Party for 45 days (that's as in Coca-cola for Southern Belles) irrelevant government branches all of a sudden saw pressing need for.<BR/><BR/>This has always been the way Deep South politics and social oppression has been run. It just hadn't occurred to anyone that when the South Rose Again there would be no whiff of the real Confederacy in it, and there would, in fact, be the destruction of the single place that defied Cash's 'de trop' condemnation of the 'Southern Myth' (sorry, but it existed, just not nearly everywhere, but New Orleans still embodied the essence of the best of it as recently as 8 months ago.) What 'rose again' had never risen: It was the backwoods Southerners' ethos, the just-folks pride of primitive littleness as carried out in the small Baptist and Methodist churches that would rise for the first time as a real Southern power. It was built up in so paranoid and threatened a way, that the fact that there is a lot of cracking going on is still like scratching the surface, due to volume of ironclad and single-minded purpose meant only for these government businesses, and I don't just meant the Halliburtons themselves: Those are at least called businesses, whereas the White House and Congress are not. <BR/><BR/>Anyway, I don't get as worked up about these things because of purely selfish reasons. I lived in the most extreme redneck part of the South till I was 17, and then escaped to a place that still has a metropolis, a metropolitan center to it still, no matter how outmoded and in process of dismantling (of course, it's mostly or even entirely because it's already there). So that temporarily I don't have to feel it directly any more. But the reason I think I can see how the government runs things is because that is how all aspects of everything were run in the Alabama that I grew up in--and they still are. But I had no idea that all that hayseed was going to supersede week after week of Village Voice radical chic and even lead to the firing of so much of its personnel that it's not even the recognizable journal it was even very recently. This is but one example, surely, but they fired Richard Goldstein after decades 2 years ago, then recently got rid of Ward Harkavy's BushBeat and fired James Ridgeway after some 30 years (I think.) It's a bit breathtaking, but again, it was always like this in the Deep South, alternating with schizophrenic bursts of mostly inelegant hedonism. I think it's precisely that which has become writ large on the entire world. In this sense, Cash was write: part of the Southern ethos was that it was the greatest and most important civilization in history, and the belief in this has gotten it its warped day in the sun. With warps and refusal to tolerate any vertical, non-hysterical kind of deliberate thinking and action, anything can happen, but there's no knowing what most fascinates people. It seems to me that it's the ghoulish and slop, so that if I'm wrong, it'll require more proof, which I'll be glad to make room for.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-1148671318451373632006-05-26T21:21:00.000+02:002006-05-26T21:21:00.000+02:00Note: I'm not going to tussle with Blogger anymore...Note: I'm not going to tussle with Blogger anymore about editing this post. The paragraph reading<BR/><BR/>"This is from the article" should be below, not above, this paragraph, which is mine:<BR/><BR/>The cancer risks are, of course, the most publicized of the spectrum of ills resulting from scientific carelessness about exploding big dangerous toys to see what would happen. The less publicized of those ills is immune deficiencies of various kinds.Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.com