Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Yesterday, Alon asked for responses to his post about statistics that make it appear that coal is worse than nuclear when it comes to radiation emissions and health risks. Here are my views.

Mark Twain said, “There are three kinds of lies – lies, damn lies, and statistics.” I have taken a year of graduate-level stats and I can verify that you can choose your methods to show almost whatever it is you want from a given set of numbers. This is what people do who have an agenda to forward other than just getting the truth out.

Back in the days when George H.W. Bush was president, he said in a speech: “More low income people will benefit from these tax cuts than high income people.” Well, that was technically true. It’s just that the “low income” people benefited by about ten dollars, while the “high income” people benefited by the tens of thousands of dollars. It’s a lot like how a magician uses misdirection – making you look over here at this hand while the other hand slips a pigeon out of a pocket.

Death stats are often used to downplay some danger or another. The reason more people have not died from radiation (lately) is that nuclear accidents are still seen as serious and people get the hell away from them. If the Japanese government had not evacuated the area around Fukushima, the stats would look a whole lot worse.

Plus, nuclear advocates (who seem inexplicably to have some hold over our news media) just love to point out that the reason that a person died could have been anything – not necessarily radiation. It’s actually somewhat difficult to “prove” that someone died of radiation poisoning, unless it was a severe and obvious case.

Another important fact is that radiation is essentially forever. If you were to pee in a lake, the urine would not only dissipate, but biological processes would act on the urine to essentially make it really go away – change form, etc. Radiation does dissipate, but it’s still there, at least until well beyond its half-life.

Accidents like Fukushima are the gifts that keep on giving for a long time. Fukushima is FAR from over and the radiation coming out of there is not slowing down but is in fact probably speeding up. It’s flowing into the air and the ocean.

Nukeys also love to tell you about how you get more radiation from sunbathing or whatever. But it’s the TYPE of radiation that matters. Here’s a hint, nuclear accident release the bad type.

Furthermore, compared to coal-fired plants, nuclear power plants don’t release much radiation on site when everything is working properly and no mistakes are made. But mistakes and accidents happen much too often for my comfort. The latest accident, Fukushima, has released thousands of times the radiation from any pile of coal sludge.

As I’ve said before, nuclear is not cost efficient, nor is it safe. Nukeys love to tell you that, with the development of new technology, nuclear will get safer and safer. This, of course, will happen given time and lots of money. And in the process, there will be some accidents, radiation leakage, health issues and possibly lives lost.

What would happen if we instead took that time and money and put it into developing solar, wind, wave, and geothermal energy? I guarantee that, at the end of the same time period and with the same expense, we would be many times better off by going the renewable energy route.

But there is a danger with, specifically, solar power. The most efficient way to utilize solar power is to produce it yourself, at your own house (and in reality the old-fashioned solar water heater roof units are the best thing you can do). This means that you would buy the equipment, which is manufactured by companies competing for business – largely on price. Then, your energy would be pretty much free. So there is a  danger…

…to corporate profits.

-Tom Rossi

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Tom Rossi is a commentator on politics and social issues. He is a Ph.D. student in International Sustainable Development, concentrating in natural resource and economic policy. Tom greatly enjoys a hearty debate, especially over a hearty pint of Guinness.

Tom also posts on thrustblog.blogspot.com

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The N Word Revisted

A couple of days ago I wrote about the controversy surrounding the new edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn that has changed the N-word for slave.

I wrote that I wasn’t comfortable as it is not for a white person to decide how a person of color feels when they hear the word in the context of literature. I have been thinking about this ever since. Before I share my own thoughts, I want to give the floor to Suzanna La Rosa, co-founder and publisher of NewSouth Books. While admitting their offices have been flooded with negative e-mails and phone calls, she states:

“We didn’t undertake this lightly. If our publication fosters good discussion about how language affects learning and certainly the nature of censorship, then difficult as it is likely to be, it’s a good thing.”

Others, however, have attacked the publishers for “censorship” and “political correctness,” or simply for the perceived sin of altering the words of a literary icon. The hefty “Autobiography of Mark Twain,” published last year, has become a best seller.

English teachers have also expressed their objection to the idea of cleaning up the novel. Elizabeth Absher, an English teacher at South Mountain High School in Arizona, says:

“I’m not offended by anything in ‘Huck Finn.’ I am a big fan of Mark Twain, and I hear a lot worse in the hallway in front of my class.”

Ms. Absher does not teach ‘Huck Finn’ because it is a long book. She does, however teach many of  Twain’s short stories and makes “Huck Finn” available for students.

“I think authors’ language should be left alone,” she said. “If it’s too offensive, it doesn’t belong in school, but if it expresses the way people felt about race or slavery in the context of their time, that’s something I’d talk about in teaching it.”

In another New York Times editorial, That’s Not Twain, the opinion was made very clear.

“When “Huckleberry Finn” was published, Mark Twain appended a note on his effort to reproduce “painstakingly” the dialects in the book, including several backwoods dialects and “the Missouri negro dialect.” What makes “Huckleberry Finn” so important in American literature isn’t just the story, it’s the richness, the detail, the unprecedented accuracy of its spoken language. There is no way to “clean up” Twain without doing irreparable harm to the truth of his work.”

I am not going into the sanctity of literature or the censorship of authors. There is plenty of such reactions on the blogosphere. But, in my previous post, I wrote about how as a white person and even as a Jew, I felt this was for African-Americans to decide. If I am offending them by reading such words and having our children read them.

This is what has been on my mind. As a Jew, I resent when people use the word Holocaust freely. I believe it cheapens what the Nazis did to my people. I think where anti-Semitic words are used in a historical context, I want them to remain so. When my son heard the N-word being used in the audio book I was listening to, he challenged me. What came out of that was a discussion of slavery, of racism, and of the way we can hurt people by using offensive words.

If literature can facilitate such discussions and empower a greater understanding of slavery and racism, I think I side with those who want the N-word left in Twain’s work. Nothing will come out of burying our sins. We need to face them, admit to them, and ensure they will never happen again.
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Alon Shalev is the author of The Accidental Activist (now available on Kindle) and A Gardener’s Tale. He is the Executive Director of the San Francisco Hillel Foundation, a non-profit that provides spiritual and social justice opportunities to Jewish students in the Bay Area. More on Alon Shalev at www.alonshalev.com