Wednesday Open Thread

If CNN's reporting is accurate....

At issue is an international court's ruling that Medellin and about 50 other Mexicans have been illegally denied access to their home country's consul. Allowing travelers such access when they are arrested abroad is common practice.

... then is a person really "traveling" if they've been "traveling" for 15 of their 18 years alive in one "foreign" country.

Not that it mattered in that case, since it appears the that convictions under state laws are not bound by the treaty in question.

In our society, people are rewarded for pretending to be certain about things they're clearly not certain about. -- Sam Harris,

Via Secrecy News:

Rather unexpectedly, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is asking for public comment on whether and how it should disclose more information to the public on the security of nuclear power plants and other facilities.

“We view nuclear regulation as the public’s business and believe it should be transacted as openly and candidly as possible,” said NRC Executive Director of Operations Bill Borchardt.

Among other things, the NRC wants to know what currently undisclosed information members of the public would like to have released: “What specific details would increase your level of satisfaction in our regulatory oversight of licensed facilities?”

The NRC published a request for comment in the Federal Register on July 29 (pdf), along with related background material (pdf).

Are your spider senses tingling? Should be...

It is practically a law of bureaucratic physics that government agencies do not spontaneously seek to become more transparent and accountable absent some significant change in personnel or other triggering event.

According to David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, the triggering event in this case was congressional outrage at the NRC’s concealment of a major “nuclear safety event” in 2006 at the Nuclear Fuel Services plant in Erwin, Tennessee.

In that case, approximately 35 liters of highly enriched uranium solution leaked and spilled, creating the possibility of a criticality accident, i.e. an uncontrolled chain reaction. Yet “NRC failed to notify the public or Congress for 13 months regarding this serious incident,” complained Rep. John Dingell in a July 3, 2007 letter (pdf) to NRC Chairman Dale E. Klein.

...

The current NRC request for public comment on ways to increase openness, Mr. Lochbaum told Secrecy News, “is the agency’s bureaucratic effort to extricate themselves from the hole they dug.”

But of course with the spotless safety record of nuclear power we should be building the approximately 4000 new plants we'd need to provide enough power to replace fossil fuel usage...

I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.

fighting over. Out here in CA, we never have enough water. The South of the state particularly. If the north let them, the south would suck every river and valley dry just like they did with Owens Valley . As such I was so happy to read that California was close to agreeing to approve & build a desalinization plant that would produce 50 M gallons of drinking water from the Pacific daily. If the plant worked well as many as 12 more could be built.

Up till now, it's always been cheapest to pillage the rest of the state for water. Now, the rest of the state doesn't have the water to pillage, so they finally turn to this. Yea, desalination is more expensive and isn't completely environmentally friendly, but I think the environmental issues could be addressed to satisfy, and it is certainly better than wiping out all the rivers and aquifers.

Money was the past devil. Now it's the commodity itself. We see the same thing across the board though. Petroleum, food products, raw materials....We're going through a time where decisions made have major repercussions on many surrounding issues of significant impact on tangential issues. Let's all just hope that responsible adults make those decisions based on all the facts involved.

The Department of Health and Human Services is circulating a draft of a regulation that would allow health care professionals and institutions to refuse to provide women access to some of the most common forms of contraception , "under the auspices that such contraception is a form of abortion. The purpose of the draft rule is to pre-empt state laws that have protected women's ability to get birth control at pharmacies where a particular pharmacist refuses to fill these prescriptions."

It would classify the pill, IUD's, depro-provera as abortifacts and as such would allow individuals, pharmacies and companies to be able to refuse to supply a woman such birth control.

Now listen....all these items are not abortifacts. In order to be an abortifact the fertilized zygote must already be implanted in the uterus' wall. Fertalization alone is not enough. These birth control methods all prevent the zygote from implanting.

I tell you these folk are working on the same level as the Taliban. I mean that. They don't care what concensus is or even a vast majority of citizens think:

"HHS is moving stealthily because it knows that there's no public support for such reactionary regulations - 73 percent of voters believe strongly in making contraception easier for women of all incomes to obtain. But the impact of this ruling could be huge. If it passes, women seeking health care at a center that receives HHS funds - and there are nearly 504,000 of them - will no longer be assured of access to birth control and other contraceptives."

The current drug policy sucks.

...sort of smells like a texas sized lump of manure.

Depending on how much attention you pay to both energy matters and conservative websites you may or may not be aware that T. Boone Pickens has been shilling his own energy plan.

This energy plan involves wind power primarily would be interesting if the plan weren't, you know, a complete scam. Pickens has exactly zero interest in alternative energy or energy independence. Instead the wind farm he plans is just a way to try and grab up some water rights as well as a way to funnel cash to Natural gas plants he owns an interest in.

Kevin Drum has the details.

Now is it any wonder that I have a few reservations about the ability of the market to make the changes we so desperately need in a timely and efficient fashion?

I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.

Methinks its a little heavy handed and paints with very broad strokes, but generally right on point.

“Black in America”: The war against fascism in 2008

In our society, people are rewarded for pretending to be certain about things they're clearly not certain about. -- Sam Harris,