For more than 30 years, one of the arguments I’ve made against nuclear power is the chilling effect on our freedom.

Now, it seems that Japan may have passed a law heading down that slippery slope. Or not—I am not so far convinced that the claims are accurate.

A blogger for the UK Progressive put up a rambling, jumbled article claiming that Japan has passed a law giving sweeping powers to shut down bloggers, people who post videos on Youtube, etc. when they’re critical of the government and/or TEPCO.

I did a bit of Googling and found dozens of other blogs basing their story on that same article, which I consider unreliable. But I did find this in the Tokyo Times, which seems to be a genuine news organization that fact-checks and posts corrections. The Tokyo Times article says the Computer Network Monitoring Law was passed on June 17.

It also says that during March and April, even before the law was passed, government agents sent 41

“letters of request” to internet providers, telecom companies, cable TV stations and others to take measures in order to respond to illegal information, including erasing any information from the Internet that can be seen as harmful to morality and public order.

However, this article links back to coverage in the Examiner which again ties back to the original, untrustworthy blog post. I certainly am not going to pore over all 6000 citations to see whether this story is legitimate. But it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on.

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Here’s one for the Encyclopedia Idiotica: Entergy, owner of the sorely troubled Vermont Yankee nuclear plant (with a history of safety issues going back at least to 1974 when the plant was quite new),

Cooling tower failure, Vermont Yankee
Vermont Yankee cooling tower fails, 2008. Photo by ISC ALC, Creative Commons license

just spent $50 million on new fuel and committed another $42 million to installing that fuel, knowing full well that the state will consider any operation beyond March, 2012 illegal. And this doesn’t count $100 million in post-Fukushma upgrades that will be required in the next few years.

The issue of whether Vermont Yankee will be bound by state law and forced to shut down March 21, 2012 will be adjudicated in court this September: a lawsuit brought on by Entergy’s attempt to torpedo its 2006 agreement to abide by the state’s decision, once it became obvious that the vote was not going Entergy’s way.

Add to this a few other factors:

  • Vermont Yankee is one of 23 reactors in the US that use essentially the same design as Fukushima; it’s not out of the question that the federal government could unilaterally shut all those plants down.
  • The year-long Associated Press study on nuclear power safety showed glaring holes in the entire industry; a new citizen action network, like the one of the late 70s, could revitalize the safe energy/no nukes movement and bring enormous pressure to close all the nuclear plants in the US.
  • In New England, opposition to nuclear power is already deeply entrenched and fairly well organized. It was New England’s Clamshell Alliance, after all, that gave birth to the national nuclear shutdown movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Even if Entergy manages to win in court, it’s obvious that any attempt to keep the plant running will be met with massive citizen opposition including very public protests and civil disobedience. This will inevitably make keeping the plant open a very expensive and slow operation.

And I’ll bet that Entergy will raise an argument on the order of “you can’t make us shut down, we just spent $92 million to refuel.” Since the company knew full well that this money could be completely wasted and went ahead anyway, I hope that Judge Murtha not only refuses to consider that line of “reasoning,” but makes sure the entire cost is borne not by innocent taxpayers and ratepayers of Vermont, not even by stockhoders who had nothing to do with this decision, but by the members of the Board of Directors who voted to squander this money, and to the executives that pushed for this vote.

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Watching the fireworks from my lawn last night, I found myself thinking about a long-ago July 4th, and how it helped shape who I am today.

The year was 1976. I was a scrawny, long-haired, 19-year-old peace and human rights activist who had just finished my senior term at Antioch College.

I was broke and jobless. And, not having any better plan, I was going to hitchhike around the United States for the summer, shifting my itinerary depending on where the rides were going. Though I was pretty sure I wanted to see Denver and San Francisco, at least, I knew it was a big country with lots to explore, and I hadn’t seen very much of it so far. I didn’t know a thing about hitchhiking, and I hadn’t done any research about what to bring—though I did hook up briefly with a friend who was a very experienced hitchhiker, who showed me the basics of where to stand safely.

So off I went, with $200 in travelers checks in my pocket, and a bunch of inappropriate stuff packed in three inappropriate daypacks. I didn’t have a traveler’s frame pack, a sleeping bag, decent rain protection, a sun hat, or a lot of other things I should have thought about. Instead, I had an entire daypack filled with my creative output: poetry notebooks, my dream journal, and such. Plus a bare minimum of clothing and a bit of food.

I did, however, have a supply of thick markers for making hitchhiking signs that people could read at 60 miles per hour; even back then, I understood some basic marketing principles. 🙂

Setting off from my college town, Yellow Springs, Ohio, in late June, I stopped to visit family in New York before heading to Washington for the Bicentennial.

For weeks, I’d been growing more and more disgusted with the insane commercialism around the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—stuff like “Happy birthday, America, we’re having a sale on our new Fords because it’s your birthday,” accompanied by various patriotic songs.

I was, at that time, very alienated from mainstream American culture. The United States had finally pulled its last soldiers out of the Vietnam quagmire (which I’d been actively protesting since 1969), and Saigon had fallen only 14 months earlier. Examples of racism and sexism and homophobia and oppression of various minorities were easy to find. Police violence against progressives and racial minorities was a part of daily life, and we assumed we were being spied on.

I’d recently completed an internship at a socialist newspaper in Georgia, where the sense of “us against them” was palpable—and where the advertising base had largely abandoned the paper as soon as a safe, bourgeois counterculture paper started publishing, providing access to the lucrative hippie market around Atlanta without funding anti-government journalism. I saw business as the enemy of progress, and could not have named a single example of a business trying to do good, other than a couple of leftist bookstores and healthfood co-ops. I’d been a vegetarian for almost three years, and had discovered that this made me unwelcome in many restaurants.

In short, I was disenfranchised, cynical, militant, and even hostile. I had a pretty big chip on my shoulder.

There were a lot of events in Washington on July 4, 1976, including the grand opening of Union Station as a National Visitors Center, and of course, a huge birthday celebration. As I recall, there were several large public events around different parts of the Mall.

The one I was there to attend was a peace and take-back-the-government rally called by the People’s Bicentennial Commission—and organized, interestingly enough, under the “Don’t Tread on Me” rattlesnake banner that we’ve seen at a lot of Tea Party events in the past few years.

Aside: Columnist Ed Tant, who covered the event for the Athens, GA Observer, remembers the flag as quite integral to the demonstration:

The People’s Bicentennial rally 34 years ago still stands out in my memory for its hopeful patriotism and its message against the predations of plutocracy symbolized by the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag flying from the stage and from the crowd more than a generation before the same flag was appropriated by the tea party crew.

The Gadsden flag was named for Christopher Gadsden, a Revolutionary War hero from South Carolina. It was flown by American sailors and marines during the revolution, but the first political group to feature the rattlesnake flag at a Washington rally was the People’s Bicentennial Commission that flew the flag to warn against the growing power of multinational corporations…

During the People’s Bicentennial rally in 1976, activist Mary Murphy explained the symbolism of the rattlesnake flag, saying, “The rattlesnake has no eyelids, so it is ever-vigilant. Also, it never attacks without warning.”

I seem to remember seeing it at many rallies over the early 1970s, but it may be that the July 4, 1976 demonstration was the first to make it the rally’s official symbol. Somewhere, I might still have my copy of that button.[Aside ends]

Although some conservatives had worried publicly that this anniversary would be a magnet for terrorism and violence, what impressed me above all was the lack of that kind of drama. Only a few years after hard-hat construction workers had attacked war protestors in New York, after Chicago police had attacked protestors at the Democratic Convention, and after the country had been split into opposing camps on so many issues—multiple large gatherings, each representing a different segment of the political landscape from ultraprogressive to ultraconservative, and a huge apolitical middle that was just there to party out on the Bicentennial, all coexisting. All peacefully listening to their own sets of speakers and performers, sometimes coming into contact with each other at the edges, and even sharing food. As far as I could tell, there was no violence, no overt conflict at all, even as hippies in torn flag t-shirts encountered flag-waving conservatives.

And then, after all the rallies were over, we all left our separate public events and gathered around the Washington Monument—to peacefully watch one of the best fireworks displays I’ve ever seen. For one magical night, there seemed to be no great divide. Just a whole lot of people watching a grand fireworks display.

Hitching out of Washington on my way west the next morning, I encountered the generosity of people from both the protests and the parties. I made it back to Yellow Springs in three rides, with very little waiting time. It took only about a half-hour longer than driving would have taken.

And that was the beginning of my summer-long lesson that most Americans are good people who want to do the right thing…that the world is abundant and people will help others when they need it…and that the hostility I thought mainstream America had felt toward the counterculture was at least in large measure, confined to my own imagination.

I have taken the lessons of that day of unity and that summer of hope with me for 35 years now, and I trace a lot of who I am today and how I act in the world to the revelations of that time.

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In this Web 2.0 Age of Transparency, being stupid about being criticized is, well, more stupid than it used to be. Word gets around. Fast.

A Seattle organization called Reel Grrls, which teaches teens how to become filmmakers, criticized the revolving-door hiring by Comcast of FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker. (Lots of other people raised a public eyebrow on this one.)

In a truly idiotic move, Comcast then announced it was yanking $18,000 it had planned to fund Real Grrls’ summer camp to teach filmmaking, editing and screenwriting. Then, when the media got hold of the story and the public squawked, Comcast recanted and said the fund withdrawal was unauthorized.

But then Real Grrls said it didn’t want the money if there were going to be issues about corporate censorship. They’re using Web 2.0 channels, including a fundraising blast from media watchdog FreePress.net, to raise the money from outside  the corporate world.

With 42,600 Google search results for “reel grrls” comcast as of Monday when I’m actually writing this, Comcast’s PR is clearly taking a hit.One it could have avoided completely by not doing something stupid.

Want to help? Here’s the link to donate.

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It is now illegal in france to hide your face in a public place—a clear assault on very religious Muslims. Freedom of religion often involves particular manners of dress or hair, and prohibiting them is an act of bigotry. (There is one good thing in the law that I do support: it is now illegal to force someone else to veil herself).

The solution to religious fundamentalism is not religious bigotry. Would there be a protest about banning yarmulkas (the skullcaps Orthodox Jews wear) or crucifix necklaces?

I hope some non-Muslim French citizens organize massive solidarity actions with hundreds or thousands wearing a veil in public—kind of like the King of Denmark donning a yellow star during the Nazi occupation.

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TorrentFreak reports that the US Department of Homeland Security did a little sting on child pornography websites–but in addition to the 10 actual perpetrators they shut down, they managed to shut down 84,000 sites that were completely innocent! They all happened to use the same free webhost.

I have never been an advocate of free webhosts, and one of the many reasons I’ve often cited is that spammers, etc. can contaminate a server and bring you down on a blacklist. But even I never imagined that sites would greet visitors witha very official-looking graphic bearing this text:

Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution.

I’m also a long-time advocate of open Internet. We’ve seen in countries from Egypt to Iran to China what happens when governments interfere with Internet access, and how shutting the Internet has been used to protect totalitarianism.

Mind you, I’m not saying the US government is totalitarian, but it certainly overreached this time (and not the first time, by a long shot). If you haven’t yet signed Free Press’s petition against the “Internet kill switch,” I suggest you go there right now and add your name.

(Thanks to Michelle Shaeffer for alerting me to this.)

Shel Horowitz’s latest book is Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson)

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Nuclear Information and Resource Service reports in a recent newsletter that Congress received 15,000 letters and countless phone calls opposing the inclusion of $8 billion in bailouts (a/k/a “loan guarantees”) for new nuclear plant construction—and that the final interim funding bill to keep the government running did NOT include this boondoggle. The item is not on the NIRS website but you can find the entire newsletter reprinted here.

In other words, the power of an organized populace resulted in a victory, something that’s getting less frequent all the time but is still very much possible. Let’s hope for many more in the coming year.

Do not let anyone try to tell you that nuclear fission is in any way green. It’s an environmental disaster under the best of circumstances, and at its worst, it could make the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico look like a spilled cup of coffee. Here’s a post I wrote some time back that gives some among many reasons to oppose nuclear power (scroll past the feed from this blog).

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Today marks the 47th anniversary of the March on Washington, and of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Right-wing extremists Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin will dishonor King’s memory by having a rally on the same site, opposed to all the values King held dear.

I’m okay with that, actually. I’d never go, other than to hold a counterprotest sign—but I believe strongly in the 1st Amendment rights of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. As did King, by the way.

I think Beck and Palin are despicable. I also think they have every right to hold their gathering of the lunatic fringe. And I’m aware that I’ve taken plenty of stands over my career for which others would paint me as “lunatic fringe.” Some of them are now mainstream, such as aiming for zero waste, repurposing rooftop space into food and energy collectors, and getting the heck off fossil and nuclear power sources—but they sure weren’t 30 or 40 years ago. I would not have granted then, and don’t grant now, the right of others to tell me how to think, and I don’t claim that same privilege against others whom I disagree with. The right to try to convince them, certainly—but NEVER to dictate what is or is not acceptable thought.

I remember holding a lone protest in front of the local courthouse when the U.S. bombed Lybia. The first day, I got a lot of middle fingers and angry shouts. By the second day, a few people had joined me. On the third day, with a larger crowd, we were getting mostly thumbs ups and supportive honks. It was hard, on that first day. But I remembered my favorite Abraham Lincoln quote, “It is a sin to be silent when it is your duty to protest.” Taking an unpopular position didn’t take the burden off me to take a stand.

And some of my positions are still out of the mainstream—so far. One such is that a Muslim group has every right to practice that other First Amendment right, freedom of worship—even two blocks from Ground Zero. As Keith Olbermann pointed out recently, there’s already been an Islamic center coexisting in that neighborhood since before the World Trade Center was even built. But even if there weren’t, this country was founded on the principle that people can peaceably assemble, worship the God of our choice (or no God, if we choose), and say what we want to say even if it makes others unhappy. That’s what made us the shining light of Democracy for the world, the example that so many other nations wanted to follow. Those are American values that I hold dear. And I predict that they will once again return to the mainstream of an America that seems to have forgotten its proud heritage.

It means the right to build an Islamic Center—a gathering place for peaceful worship and community activities—on an abandoned site a few blocks from Ground Zero, and it means that Beck and Palin are appropriately permitted for their disgusting festival of intolerance. The appropriate reaction is boycott or counterprotest, not an attempt to silence those we disagree with.

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Rarely do I open up my morning paper and see even one positive story among the day’s major news. Today—though I already knew about two of them from other sources—there were three:

1. The Wall Street Reform Bill has passed both houses of Congress. Is it everything I want? Of course not. Is it more than I expected from this stalemated Congress? You betcha.

2. BP finally seems to have capped the torrent of oil from Deepwater Horizon. A lot of wait-and-see before claiming victory, but at least for the moment, no oil is pouring out.

3. Overwhelmingly Catholic Argentina passed same-sex marriage rights legislation, striking a major blow for equality and human rights. The bill, according to NPR’s All Things Considered last night, has the support of an astonishing 70 percent of the population. Major demonstrations helped sway the legislators.

A very good news day, all in all.

Footnote: My local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, ran all these stories in today’s first section. But its news pages are only open to paid subscribers, so I’ve linked to other sources.

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Oy, a few more like this and we’re really in trouble:

  • Death toll in Haiti climbed above 200,000, millions more injured and/or homeless.
  • Supreme Court removed restrictions on corporate campaign contributions, and this could have severe consequences for our democracy (I particularly like Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s commentary on this).
  • Not that they were using it anyway, but the Democrats not only lost their supermajority without passing very much important legislation, but they managed to lose it in my own state of Massachusetts. Since the Republicans have made very plain their policy of dragging almost every initiative into the swamp-of-no-return, this could cripple the already fading hopes that we’d make some progress, or at least back away from the tyrannical policies of the GWB-coup administration.
  • The renegade coup government in Honduras ran out the clock to the end of its predecessor Manuel Zelaya’s legitimate term, and Zelaya is leaving for exile as a private citizen. This makes at least three right-wing national coups that have succeeded in the Western Hemisphere in the first decade of the 21st century: Honduras, Haiti, and the non-military, non-violent election theft by GWB in the US.
  • Despite the popularity of outgoing President Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s newly elected president is a right-winger with some possible ties to the brutal Pinochet coup government of the 1970s

    At least there are bright spots in my own life, including the release this week of my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson).

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