Stormy Weather

Where I live.  It has been storming since Monday.  I am believing in the sympathetic fallacy.  Stormy times, stormy weather here.  I watch the garbage truck drive by, but I am not about to run out to put my can on the curb.  I will have to live with garbage for some days.

The distribution of wealth gets a lot of press now that the gulf is so clear, so wide.  But no one is talking about the distribution of knowledge.  The press covers the crisis in education, but nobody is pointing out that Obama is is supporting the sort of trade skills and online MBA education for--the disadvantaged.  This is O.K. in that people need to work.  They need to have skills and we all need jobs.  But my father got a more stimulating education in high school than we are offering students in many college diploma mills just now.  High schools avoid the humanities like a plague.  In my own state, the Governor has said that art has no place in education. Who will counter that?  People who have been educated under such a system?  Critical thinking skills have been left out of the program.  The sort of relaxed education that encourages students to think and wonder, ponder and solve, is only for the children of the elite.  I guess it is about the distribution of wealth after all.

The press has finally caught up with Cafe Selavy, though.  From today's CNN online:

Officials have downplayed the potential perils posed by this isotope, since it loses half of its radiation every eight days.

Yet amounts of the cesium-137 isotope -- which, by comparison, has a 30-year "half life" -- have also soared, with a Wednesday afternoon sample showing levels 527 times the standard.

"That's the one I am worried about," said Michael Friedlander, a U.S.-based nuclear engineer, explaining cesium might linger much longer in the ecosystem. "Plankton absorbs the cesium, the fish eat the plankton, the bigger fish eat smaller fish -- so every step you go up the food chain, the concentration of cesium gets higher."

And what the hell does this tell anyone?  It is blather.  It is obfuscation.  Might as well tell parents that four hours of watching television each day is no more harmful for children than playing with sticks ten hours a week.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is increasing its nationwide monitoring of radiation as two states reported very low levels of radiation in milk.

"According to them [EPA and FDA], a pint of milk at these levels would expose an individual to less radiation than would a five-hour airplane flight."

It rains and rains.  The thunder and lightning are ceaseless.  No light penetrates the clouds.  I am called to action.  I possess only lethargy.