Dear Reader (and those of you who would have made good on your threats to leave if I didn’t restore this parenthetical gag),
Last week, I got a nice e-mail from a friend and G-File subscriber who also happens to be a high-level editorial muckety-muck at another publication. He complimented me on a passage from last week’s G-File, and I wrote back that I was just flattered he even subscribed. He responded, “I don’t get what it is, but I subscribe.”
And you know what? That’s exactly what I’m going for.
Yuccan’t Take the Nukes Out of Yucca
First of all, the science is settled: You can’t be 20 on Yucca Mountain. Oh wait, wrong mountain. On Yucca Mountain, you can’t be 10,000. Or something like that.
I bring this up because there’s news on the Yucca front. A judicial panel held that the law requires the application process go forward even though the Obama administration has decided to kill the project. Yucca will probably still never open, but as fate would have it, the Yucca process has a half-life all its own.
Which brings me back to this 10,000 years thing. I’m not going to get deep in the weeds on Yucca mountain (where I’ve been and reported from). Suffice it to say, a strange coalition of Nevada tourism officials, nimbyers, casino owners, national environmental groups, the Democratic party, and American liberals generally all conspired to kill Yucca Mountain. I don’t think all of the arguments against Yucca are idiotic, but many of them are for a simple reason: Who the Hell cares if it will work 10,000 years from now?
Much of the debate over Yucca Mountain has revolved around this absolutely batty issue. Here’s how I put it in the magazine eight years ago:
Seriously: Critics of constructing a subterranean repository for nuclear waste in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain argue that if the fictional Lothar decides to live in this godforsaken patch of desert 100 centuries from now, he must not be exposed to more radiation per year than you or I receive from a single chest x-ray. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission agree: Their minimum standard is for containment of the waste for no less than 10,000 years — at which point, even if the waste did seep into the groundwater and make its way back into the environment, its radioactivity would have decayed enough to be safe.]
But here’s the thing: Who cares whether it will be safe 10,000 years from now? The question is: Would it be safe 50 years from now? A hundred years from now? Five hundred years from now? And the answers to all of these questions is: Yes. Perfectly safe? No, of course not. But nuclear waste is not perfectly safe in the dozens of messy stockpiles scattered across the U.S. now. Does anyone doubt that, a century from now, we’ll be unable to fix this stuff? We can recycle some of it now. All we need Yucca Mountain for is to leapfrog our current ignorance. In 10,000 years, we’ll either all be dead (well, you folks will be dead – my un-frozen head will be doing just fine) or we’ll consider radiation sickness one of those ancient problems, like the mercury poisoning that once gave us “mad hatters” and Helen Thomas.
Meanwhile, there are serious people who think the Yucca project was ill-conceived from the start because the waste won’t be safe for a million years. A million years! In a million years, humans will have giant foreheads shaped like Jennifer Lopez’s ass and we’ll be able to turn plutonium into Nutter Butter with our minds. We won’t even be on earth; we’ll have leased it out to super-intelligent bees – and even they won’t be worried about Yucca Mountain.
The Butlerian Jihad Begins
The backdrop for the Dune novels is something called the Butlerian Jihad. You can read all about it here, if you like, but the basic idea is that, in the far flung future, computers are given too much control over humanity. A self-aware computer orders the abortion of a healthy child for its own reasons, and the resulting backlash leads to an intergalactic religious upheaval and reformation ultimately leading to the banning of “thinking machines.” The chief commandment of the new faith holds that “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
This immediately came to mind yesterday when I was driving back from a Fox News appearance. (Yes, Megyn Kelley is terribly distracted by my stunning good looks. Oh wait, it’s the other way around.) On my car radio, I heard the tail end of a commercial for an outfit called the Women’s Surgery Center. Apparently, they offer OBGYN-related surgeries by actual surgeons instead of the “robotic surgeries” offered at other hospitals.
The tagline was something like “Don’t let a robot get between you and your doctor.”
Of course, a Butlerian Jihad may not be in our future; the gyno-robot might in fact be a Cylon.
Either way, vigilance!
On Elena Kagan
So Elena Kagan will be confirmed, and the Supreme Court’s ideological balance will remain relatively unchanged, but it will have become markedly sexier. So are the days of our lives.
I find the whole thing depressing, not because she is a liberal and will vote as a liberal — with markedly little of the moderation, evenhandedness, and objectivity she touted this week — though that hardly cheers me up. No, I find it depressing because Kagan epitomizes the kind of careerism I loathe. She has almost always talked as if she knew there was a tape recorder in the room and has always maneuvered as if her road map was her permanent record. Her whole career has been an act of self-grooming. Kagan is not a major legal scholar. Rather, she has published just enough stuff to allow her to claim to be a scholar and for her supporters, in and out of the press, to say she’s a scholar with a straight face. She’s never been a judge, and her litigation record as solicitor general, while impressive, mostly amounted to checking off another box to get her on the court. Nobody really doubts that she’s going to be a reliable, partisan liberal vote (like Sotomayor) for the rest of her life on the bench.
I don’t blame Kagan too much. There are worse ways for a person to organize her life than doing everything she can to get on the Supreme Court (and I’m hardly one to talk, as I’ve lived my life with the single-minded goal of winning the World’s Strongest Man competition). What I find so distasteful is the way the “system” works so hard to advance people like Kagan. As I noted in my column, in her now-famous book review, she denounced the confirmation process and celebrated Robert Bork at precisely the moment when it cost her nothing to do so and gained her much. But now she repudiates all of that, and the system – and her conscience – lets her get away with it. Meanwhile, Shannen Coffin has revealed that she behaved very, very badly when she worked for Bill Clinton, and no one in the mainstream media cares. I don’t know whether this anecdote should disqualify her from the Court or not. But I do think it would be a near fatal blow for a Republican nominee to have done the same thing. Anyway, you get all this, I just find it depressing.
So let’s turn to something cheerier: A Kitten Cannon!
Random Stuff A great letter from the coroner on CSI.
My response to Matt Continetti’s tea-party article. Continetti responds here, Ross Douthat here. I haven’t responded yet (crazy busy week).
I’ll be debating the merits of patriotism, happiness, and liberaltarianism with Cato’s Will Wilkinson for Bloggingheads later today. Video should be up by the weekend.
Speaking of liberaltarianism, I have a response to Brink Lindsey’s latest effort on that front in the current issue of Reason. It’s not online yet, but I’ve gotten some great feedback from the print edition already.
I saw Toy Story 3. I liked it a lot.
On Father’s Day, my lovely wife let me go to the movies by myself. It was awesome. I saw The A-Team. I thought it was really a lot of fun and even a tiny bit less stupid than I thought it would be.
Have a great Fourth of July. I hope everyone takes the time to read Calvin Coolidge on the subject. Just about the best thing ever written for or about Independence Day, save the Declaration itself.