Thursday, July 19, 2007

Articles

Some articles that I read recently and thought were truly excellent ones. Please read them.

1.) Reasons not to glow
A wonderfully well written article arguing against nuclear power. Some excerpts...

The Navajo are fighting right now to prevent uranium mining from resuming on their land, which was severely contaminated by the postwar uranium boom of the 1940s and 1950s. The miners got lung cancer. The children in the area got birth defects and a 1,500 percent increase in ovarian and testicular cancer. And the slag heaps and contaminated pools that were left behind will be radioactive for millennia.

... this has always been one of the prime problems of nuclear energy: the same general processes that produce fuel for power can produce it for bombs. In India. Or Pakistan. Or Iran. The waste from nuclear plants is now the subject of much fretting about terrorists obtaining it for dirty bombs—and with a few hundred thousand tons of high-level waste in the form of spent fuel and a whole lot more low-level waste in the U.S. alone

Sure, you can say nuclear power is somewhat less carbon-intensive than burning fossil fuels for energy; beating your children to death with a club will prevent them from getting hit by a car. Ravaging the Earth by one irreparable means is not a sensible way to prevent it from being destroyed by another.

2.) Medicine after oil
Quite scary to know that we might not be able to get even the simplest analgesic easily after oil. And the problem is not because it cannot be shipped. It is because it cannot be manufactured. Some excerpts...

armed guards at gated medical facilities—for the few able to pay, while the rest of Americans are relegated to the jalopy and faced with overt rationing, triage, and curtailment of medical care.

health care is a human right, not a privilege awarded those with higher income.

3.) A dead iraqi is just another dead iraqi
A mind numbing and chilling report on the atrocities committed by a good number of the american armed men in Iraq. The realities of war are crystal clear. Once the violence and fear in a man have been unleashed in the form of war, any act of atrocity becomes just another act.

The article is not a US army basher. It takes us through the psychology of the soldiers in Iraq. They are afterall pawns in the game played by the big shots in Washington. A link to the original article is available from the page to which I have linked. Some excerpts...

...of the Colorado National Guard described a hit-and-run in which a military convoy ran over a 10-year-old boy and his three donkeys, killing them all. “Judging by the skid marks, they hardly even slowed down. But, I mean…

...described her squad leader shooting an Iraqi civilian in the back in 2003. “The mentality of my squad leader was like, ‘Oh, we have to kill them over here so I don’t have to kill them back in Colorado’,” she said. “He just seemed to view every Iraqi as a potential terrorist."

...And this baby looked at me… like asking me why. You know, ‘Why do I have a bullet in my leg?’… I was just like, ‘This is, this is it. This is ridiculous’.”...

...“The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population…”...

2 comments:

BadhriNath said...

This post talks about ills of nuclear power. now take of nuclear power and the polluting coal power from the power grid.

Think of the cancer, coma, heart patients and those on life saving instruments. Take of power and you take of their lives. Wind, tidal, geothermic, hydel have not grown to become matured.

:(

Partha said...

when compared with the prospect of nuclear meltdown, coal power plants are a better option...

what percentage of power that is produced is used by cancer, coma and heart patients? 0.00001%?? I guess that says a lot about the issue.