Contamination

Fracking sarcoma

David Benfell

There is a new blog post entitled, “The theory of the morality of polarization.” It fills in some theoretical background for an older blog post entitled, “The morality of polarization” from over a year ago, on a topic I wound up presenting impromptu at a Human Science Institute conference.

Pennsylvania

I live near Washington County, where some of the larger clusters of Ewing’s sarcoma have been diagnosed.[1]

Kris Maher, “After String of Rare Cancer Cases, Pennsylvania Investigates Potential Link to Fracking,” Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/after-string-of-rare-cancer-cases-pennsylvania-investigates-potential-link-to-fracking-11576837802

  1. [1]Kris Maher, “After String of Rare Cancer Cases, Pennsylvania Investigates Potential Link to Fracking,” Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/after-string-of-rare-cancer-cases-pennsylvania-investigates-potential-link-to-fracking-11576837802↩

Let’s see just how much nuclear fallout we can spread over just how large an area with just how many people. Oh, a hurricane! What a spectacular idea!

David Benfell

Hurricanes

What people near the president do is they say ‘I love a president who asks questions like that [about nuking a hurricane], who’s willing to ask tough questions.’ … It takes strong people to respond to him in the right way when stuff like this comes up. For me, alarm bells weren’t going off when I heard about it, but I did think somebody is going to use this to feed into ‘the president is crazy’ narrative.[1]

Um, no, “unnamed senior administration official,” this isn’t a “tough question.” It’s a really asinine question[2] from an asinine president who finds divine inspiration in his own used toilet paper, then denies it when enough folks point and sneer.[3] After all, he’s “really, bigly smart,” remember?[4]

But like clockwork, the question seems to resurface every few years. In 2004, during a particularly deadly hurricane season, Mary Aiken, an elected member of the Hernando County, Fla., commission, called on NASA to find a way to stop the storms before they could reach Florida, and likened Mother Nature to a terrorist.

“These storms infuriate me,” she said, according to the Tampa Bay Times. “There must be something that can be done. It’s like a war. This state looks like Iraq.”

Informed by the county attorney that government scientists had researched that question before, only to realize that they ran the risk of combining a hurricane’s powerful wallop with deadly nuclear fallout, Aiken wasn’t satisfied. The agency, she declared, simply hadn’t been trying hard enough.[5]

It’s like that really huge shit you took that won’t flush. (Hint: Go vegan. And pay the fuck attention in class.)

Antonia Noori Farzan, “Trump denies that he suggested nuking hurricanes. But the government once studied the idea,” Washington Post, August 26, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/08/26/trump-nuclear-weapons-hurricane/

Jonathan Swan and Margaret Talev, “Trump suggested nuking hurricanes to stop them from hitting U.S.,” Axios, August 25, 2019, https://www.axios.com/trump-nuclear-bombs-hurricanes-97231f38-2394-4120-a3fa-8c9cf0e3f51c.html

Gig economy

Dhruv Mehrotra and Aaron Gordon, “Uber And Lyft Take A Lot More From Drivers Than They Say,” Jalopnik, August 26, 2019, https://jalopnik.com/uber-and-lyft-take-a-lot-more-from-drivers-than-they-sa-1837450373

University of California, Hastings College of the Law, “UC Hastings Professor, Academic Leaders Call for Support of AB5,” August 26, 2019, https://www.uchastings.edu/2019/08/26/uc-hastings-professor-academic-leaders-call-for-support-of-ab5/

  1. [1]Unnamed “senior administration official,” quoted in Jonathan Swan and Margaret Talev, “Trump suggested nuking hurricanes to stop them from hitting U.S.,” Axios, August 25, 2019, https://www.axios.com/trump-nuclear-bombs-hurricanes-97231f38-2394-4120-a3fa-8c9cf0e3f51c.html↩
  2. [2]Mark Strauss, “Nuking Hurricanes: The Surprising History of a Really Bad Idea,” National Geographic, November 30, 2016, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/11/hurricanes-weather-history-nuclear-weapons/↩
  3. [3]Antonia Noori Farzan, “Trump denies that he suggested nuking hurricanes. But the government once studied the idea,” Washington Post, August 26, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/08/26/trump-nuclear-weapons-hurricane/↩
  4. [4]Jeff Mangiat was being facetious in “Business Schools Have No Business in the University,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 20, 2018, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Business-Schools-Have-No/242563↩
  5. [5]Antonia Noori Farzan, “Trump denies that he suggested nuking hurricanes. But the government once studied the idea,” Washington Post, August 26, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/08/26/trump-nuclear-weapons-hurricane/↩