This is more evidence that the whole flap is a hoax.
True to form, several birther and other conspiracy paranoiac sites claim that these plants in Nebraska are gone, in flames, or leaking water that nearly glows.
Can’t Sarah Palin point her bus to Nebraska and let her press entourage get the real story?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
A shocking report prepared by Russia’s Federal Atomic Energy Agency (FAAE) on information provided to them by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) states that the Obama regime has ordered a “total and complete” news blackout relating to any information regarding the near catastrophic meltdown of the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant located in Nebraska.
According to this report, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant suffered a “catastrophic loss of cooling” to one of its idle spent fuel rod pools on 7 June after this plant was deluged with water caused by the historic flooding of the Missouri River which resulted in a fire causing the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) to issue a “no-fly ban” over the area.
Located about 20 minutes outside downtown Omaha, the largest city in Nebraska, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant is owned by Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) who on their website denies their plant is at a “Level 4” emergency by stating: “This terminology is not accurate, and is not how emergencies at nuclear power plants are classified.”
So, we have some questions to deal with:
Is there a serious incident at the Fort Calhoun facility?
Has anyone ordered a news blackout, and if so, why?
Is it likely that a Pakistani newspaper relying on Russian sources can better report on a nuclear power plant in Nebraska than, say, the local Omaha newspaper?
As much as we might like to give The Nation a chance at being accurate, how likely is it that a U.S. president could order a complete revocation of emergency safety plans for a nuclear facility, when, by law and regulation, those plans are designed to protect the public? The story smells bad from the start, just on government processes in the U.S.
This is the photograph used by The Nation to illustrate its online article claiming a meltdown at the Fort Calhoun nuclear power station in Nebraska. It shows a flooded nuclear power station, Fort Calhoun we might assume. Is it? Does the photograph show any problem besides the flooding?
The Russian report is too strong, probably. First, there’s no news blackout, as evidenced by local reporting. Second, our American “be-too-conservative-by-a-factor-of-ten” safety standards make piffles sound like major problems. The story’s being filtered through a Pakistani newspaper should give us further pause in taking things at face value.
Cooper Nuclear Station near Brownville, Neb., declared a “Notification of Unusual Event” about 4 a.m. Sunday when the Missouri River there reached a height of 42.5 feet.
The declaration, which has been anticipated by the power plant’s operators, was made as part of safety and emergency preparedness plan the station follows when flooding conditions are in effect.
The plan’s procedures dictate when the Missouri River’s water level reaches 42.5 feet, or greater than 899 feet above sea level, a notification of unusual event is declared. If the river’s level increases to 45.5 feet or 902 feet above sea level, plant operators are instructed take the station offline as a safety measure.
FORT CALHOUN, Neb. — Despite the stunning sight of the Fort Calhoun nuclear reactor surrounded by water and the weeks of flooding that lie ahead, the plant is in a safe cold shutdown and can remain so indefinitely, the reactor’s owners and federal regulators say.
“We think they’ve taken adequate steps to protect the plant and to assure continued safety,” Victor Dricks, spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said Thursday.
Tim Burke, vice president at Omaha Public Power District, said the plant’s flood barriers are being built to a level that will protect against rain and the release of record amounts of water from upstream dams on the Missouri River.
“We don’t see any concerns around the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station,” Burke said at a briefing in Omaha Mayor Jim Suttle’s office.
The nuclear plant, 20 miles north of Omaha, was shut down April 9 for refueling. It has not been restarted because of the imminent flooding.
Who do we believe, a Russian report issued more than 6,000 miles from Nebraska, reported in a newspaper in Pakistan, or the local reporters on the beat?
Photo caption from the Omaha World-Herald: "The Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station from the air Thursday. OPPD was putting the finishing touches on federally ordered flood-defense improvements before flooding began. MATT MILLER/THE WORLD-HERALD"
Current Reactor Status page from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) (This page is updated daily, and includes the power output from each nuclear power generating station in the United States; as of June 20, 2011, it’s showing zero output from Fort Calhoun, and 100% from Cooper (see Region 4 listing))
Idaho Samizdat: Nuke Notes provides more coverage from a well-informed view (the writer purports to be a former nuclear industry worker and insider), for example: “Also, there are concerns because the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a ‘no fly‘ zone over the reactor. (Complete FAA NOTAM image)(large) What the FAA did is remind pilots of the ban which has been in place for all nuclear reactor sites since 2001.” [Dan Yurman is the author — see his comment, below.]
UPDATE, June 20, 2011: Let’s call it a hoax
I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb to call the claims of a serious accident, emergency and potential disaster at the Fort Calhoun site, a hoax. The Russian report — if it exists — may not have been intended as a hoax, but coupled with filtering through the credulous and gullible foreign press (we’re looking at you, Pakistan’s The Nation), it has risen to hoax level, to be debunked. Sure, you should be concerned about safety and security at Fort Calhoun and Cooper — but you should be concerned about safety and security at every nuclear power plant around the world, all the time. This may be a good time for you to reread John McPhee’s brilliant Curve of Binding Energy. It’s dated — Ted Taylor died October 28, 2004 (was his autobiography ever published?) — but still accurate and informative, plus, any excuse to read any work of McPhee is a great one.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
3:30 p.m. Central Daylight Time. In Barcelona, Spain, London’s Wembley Stadium, Manchester United and Barcelona(Spain) tangle for the Champions’ League trophy.
BBC News? This is the order of the stories:
In Afghanistan, the national police chief was murdered by a suicide bomber
In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak was fined $90 million for interfering with business by cutting phones and internet
Yemen’s got trouble
Palestinian independence got support from the Arab League, meeting in Doha, Qatr
U.S. President Obama ended his tour of Europe in Poland, with a pledge of friendship
In Moscow, Russian, gay rights demonstrators were attacked by a mob led by people who said they are members of the Russian Orthodox Church
Barcelona leads Manchester, 3 to 1, with minutes to play
I’m not usually one to complain, but doesn’t it appear BBC News has its priorities wrong in this order of stories?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
BusinessWeek cover, April 18-24, 2011 - Don't play chicken with debt ceiling; chicken image by Jan Hamus/Alamy
Not every one of the Bloomberg Businessweek covers has been a hit, but a lot of them are — vastly more entertaining since Bloomberg took over the old workhorse magazine.
This one packs a political punch along with visual excitement.
And it’s right. Do any Republicans pay attention to the finance and business worlds anymore?
Mr. Johnson says that most of the people responding have been conservatives. This is fine as far as that goes, but they’d like to balance it out so the survey is more representative of the full electorate.
The survey should take between about 15 – 20 minutes to complete.
You might also wish to consider passing along the link to the survey on Facebook or Twitter.
Thank you.
Don’t hope that your assisting with Dr. Johnson’s research will improve the writing or accuracy of anything you get on line, though. It’s research, not miracle working.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Do you care? At least 16 members of Congress passed up on the government-sponsored health care plans, trying to be true to their campaign promises to repeal similar care for all citizens, a plan they try to ridicule as Obamacare. Some of them discovered other plans “available from the market” are expensive, don’t cover pre-existing conditions, and generally don’t meet their needs. Crooks and Liars explains:
Nevertheless, Republicans are discovering the truth: The status quo is unsustainable, unaffordable, and discriminatory. Now what will they do about that? And how will they appease their angry hordes of Tea Party members being stoked daily via email and fear campaigns?
Arctic Ice disappears, and so does the evidence — Tim Lambert notes that those wacky pranksters at the Heartland Institute managed to find one small part of a chart to make a case that Arctic ice is increasing, even as Russia and China prepare to beat the U.S. to trans-Arctic shipping when the ice disappears. Whose side is the Heartland Institute on, again? It’s a new propaganda tactic: The Small Lie.
There are people who need to soak their crania. Back to work, here.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
That’s not just irresponsible and sloppy: Boortz clearly has a grudge and will tell any falsehood to push his agenda of hatred.
Birds of a feather: Texas deficit champion Rick Perry, who refused to talk about his $18 billion deficit in Texas, with Neil Boortz, who spread a hoax about Hillary Clinton in 2008, and now spreads old hoaxes about President Obama.
Boortz posts this at his site, probably as a warning for what his philosophy of reporting is:
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it.”
Frederic Bastiat
Just before Thanksgiving last year, a J. P. Morgan official wrote a humorous piece of conjecture for his weekly newsletter — a week when most of the markets in the U.S. were closed, and so there was little news. Michael Cembalest, the chief investment officer for J. P. Morgan, without serious research wrote a piece wondering about what he saw as a lack of private sector experience in Obama’s cabinet in those positions in Cembalest’s view that are concerned most with job creation.
The spin meisters at American Enterprise Institute abused Cembalest’s rank conjectures as a “research report,” created a hoax saying Obama’s cabinet is the least qualified in history, and the thing went viral among otherwise ungainfully-employed bloggers (a lot like Neil Boortz).
Last year J.P. Morgan thought it might be interesting to look into the private sector experience of Obama’s Cabinet. America, after all, was in the middle of an economic disaster and the thought was that the president might actually look to some people with a record of success in the private sector for advice. So a study is done comparing Obama’s Cabinet to the cabinets of presidents going back to 1900. secretaries of State, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Energy and Housing and Urban Development were included. The J.P Morgan study looked at the percentages of cabinet members with prior private sector experience, and the results were amazing.
The presidential cabinet with the highest percentage of private sector experience was that of Dwight Eisenhower at around 58%. The lowest — until Obama — was Kennedy at about 28%. The average ran between 35% and 40% … until, as I said, Obama. Care to guess what percentage of Obama’s cabinet has prior private sector experience? Try 7%.
All totaled, Obama’s cabinet is one of the certifiably most brainy, most successful and most decorated of any president at any time. His cabinet brings extensive and extremely successful private sector experience coupled with outstanding and considerable successful experience in government and elective politics.
AEI’s claim that the cabinet lacks private sector experience is astoundingly in error, with 77% of the 22 members showing private sector experience — according to the [standards of the] bizarre chart [from AEI], putting Obama’s cabinet in the premiere levels of private sector experience. The chart looks more and more like a hoax that AEI fell sucker to — and so did others.
Boortz is eight months late, and the whole truth short. Shame on him.
Not just false stuff — old, moldy false stuff. Atlantans, and all Americans, deserve better reporting, even from hack commentators.
_____________
Coda: Sage advice, but . . .
Boortz includes this warning on his website:
ALWAYS REMEMBER
Don’t believe anything you read on this web page, or, for that matter, anything you hear on The Neal Boortz Show, unless it is consistent with what you already know to be true, or unless you have taken the time to research the matter to prove its accuracy to your satisfaction. This is known as “doing your homework.”
Great advice — but no excuse for sloppy reporting. He should follow his own rule. On this piece, Boortz didn’t do his homework in any fashion. He’s turning in somebody else’s crap, without reading it in advance, it appears.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
As Scott points out in the post immediately below, the news that President Obama tasked NASA head Bolden, as perhaps his foremost mission, with raising Muslim self-esteem is entirely absent from the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as the nightly newscasts of ABC, NBC, and CBS. Why?
It might be, as Mirengoff goes on to speculate wildly and without reason, because the news agencies are taking payoffs from Obama, or just so enthralled with him that they can’t bring themselves to report bad news.
Think about that for a moment: News agencies unwilling to report bad news? Is your Hemingway Sh__ Detector working yet? Mine’s clanging something fierce.
Does Mirengoff seriously think the Poobahs at Disney sit around issuing orders that ABC news gatherers ignore bad news about Obama? Has Mirengoff been in some sort of plastic bubble, deprived of newspapers and television for the past four years?
Why the silent treatment? Because it’s very much a not-much-news story, Paul. It doesn’t say what you think it says, or worse, what you know it doesn’t say, but claim it does for whatever trouble you can stir up.
Charles Bolden, NASA’s administrator, explained for a news channel that broadcasts to the Middle East, what his job is with regard to the Arabic and Islamic populations (this is the version reported by York):
“When I became the NASA administrator, [Obama] charged me with three things,” NASA head Charles Bolden said in a recent interview with the Middle Eastern news network al-Jazeera. “One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.”
Good reporters would look at the interview, and realize the PowerLine guys got the story dead wrong. Not bothering to speculate on why part-time yahoos misreported the story, they’d go on to real news.
Note carefully what Bolden said, and then note carefully what he did not say. Bolden didn’t say the mission of NASA had changed. Bolden didn’t say Obama told him to ignore the mission of NASA. Bolden said NASA, arguably our nation’s most famous and vanguard science agency, has a top duty to inspire children to do well in science in math, to cooperate with other nations in exploring space as we have done since at least the Reagan administration, and, for audiences in Arabic nations, to help them understand Arabic contributions to science.
“Let go of the power line, step back, and no one else will get hurt.” Downed powerline in New Jersey, in summer 2011. Photo by Saed Hindash, The Star-Ledger
Bolden did not say, as Hot Air misreported, “NASA’s spaced-out mission no longer includes . . . space.” Hot Air isn’t reporting. This is a time-tested propaganda technique they engage in: MSU, “making [stuff] up.”
Which of those goals does Power Line disagree with? Each of them is a noble enterprise on its own.
But, pausing for just a moment to make liars out of Power Line and the Examiner, and others, ABC News got it right. How soon do you think Mirengoff or Scott Johnson at Power Line will update their story to note ABC reported it? How much longer before others do?
If ABC can get it right, why not these other guys?
Yellow journalism was bad enough the first time around. PowerLine, could you at least take the time to get the story right? If you don’t have a Hemingway to help you out, you can always use the old Cheech and Chong Excrement Detection Method. I don’t recommend it, but it tends to make reporters more careful if they ever use it once.
You gotta wonder why these people spread easily-falsified, malignant rumors. Who are they working for? It’s pretty clear they don’t have much respect for their readers.
This is a hoax, people. NASA has not changed its mission. The president cannot change NASA’s mission since that is dictated by law (it requires an “act of Congress,” literally). NASA’s chief did not say that stupid thing others claim — he’s not stupid. Don’t pretend it’s news, don’t pretend it’s a problem when the head of NASA says he’s trying to promote interest in science, math and history, and international cooperation. That’s his job.
No one was assigned the job to get the story wrong. I wish people would quit working so hard at it.
Pam Geller at Atlas Shrugged stumbled into the error, too (When Geller reports such a story, that’s often a clue that what she claims is dead wrong; any reporter worth her or his salt would have to be putting the Hemingway on “vibrate only” at this point.)
Rand Simberg at Pajamas Media got it wrong –– but that doesn’t stop him from waxing malevolently about the problems with things, had he been accurate (can we really trust someone who doesn’t spell it “pyjamas?”)
At the Fort Wayne (Indiana) News-Sentinel, columnist Kevin Leininger not only didn’t listen to the entire interview (and so get the story wrong), he reaches back to add the racist complaint that Obama put Martin Luther King, Jr.’s bust in the Oval Office, replacing a bust of Churchill borrowed from England. Leininger appears to be anti-American and racist both with that one, and now he shows religious intolerance. Somebody will send me a copy of Leininger’s column and say, “See, this is why we need to license journalists.” Hey, Leininger — why shouldn’t America honor American heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr.?
What about that impeachment trial, eh? Planning to watch it?
Your best bet might be C-SPAN, but I wouldn’t wager the mortgage were I you.
Impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson in the U.S. Senate, 1868; from Harper's Weekly, April 11, 1868 - public domain
Federal Judge Thomas Porteous of New Orleans got four articles of impeachment approved against him by the U.S. House of Representatives on March 10. The first article got a nearly unanimous vote — who says the House is divided? — 412 to 0. Three other articles got similar margins, 410-0, 416-0, and 423-0.
Under its own special rules of impeachment, the Senate appointed a committee led by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, which will hold the actual trial and report results to the full Senate for action. Sen. McCaskill said she expects the trial to begin in early August, and that the report to the full Senate could come as soon as September.
While news media and bloggers chase ghosts and hoaxes, real work continues in Washington, D.C. You just don’t hear much about it.
You likely have not heard of Judge Proteous’s troubles, though they are long-standing, because the issue was a local, Louisiana and New Orleans affair. Heaven knows New Orleans has had its share of other stories to knock off the front pages the ethical lapses of a sitting federal judge who was once a promising attorney.
Should you have heard? How can we judge? Should we not be concerned when a relatively important story is not only bumped to the back pages of newspapers, but bumped completely out of them, and off the radar of people who need to be informed about how well our government works?
My alert to this story came through a back-door route. On the list-serv for AP Government, someone asked who presides at the impeachment trial of the Chief Justice — remember, the Constitution spells out that the Chief Justice is the presiding officer in the impeachment of the President or Vice President. My memory is that the Senate rules on impeachments, and there is a committee that effectively presides, and that the impeachment of a Vice President or President merits special attention because the Vice President is the official, Constitutionally-mentioned presiding officer. We can’t have the vice president presiding at the trial of himself or herself, nor of the president. Looking up impeachment procedures, I stumbled across the pending impeachment of Judge Porteous. I don’t think it has appeared in our local newspaper, The Dallas Morning News.
Other judges have been impeached. Here in Texas, within the past three years, we had a federal judge impeached, Samuel Kent. You’d think Texas media would be sensitive to such stories. (Kent resigned before the trial could begin.)
I perceive that media are ignoring several important areas of federal governing, not necessarily intentionally, but instead by being distracted by nonentity stories or stories that just don’t deserve the inflated coverage they get. Among undercovered areas are the environment, energy research, higher education, foreign aid, management of public lands and justice, including indictments, trials and convictions. A vast gray hole where should be the news of Judge Porteous’s pending impeachment is just one symptom.
Yeah, this has already gone viral, and well it should. Chris Clarke and Charlie Brooker have each captured the essence of knowledge and information passing in different realms. Journalism schools should pay attention.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Media Check carries edited excerpts from a book by Daniel Gutstein from last year, Not A Conspiracy Theory: How Business Propaganda Hijacks Democracy (Key Porter, 2009) by Donald Gutstein, Key Porter (2009).
The problem with the coverage of the DDT issue and with the eco-imperialism charge is that they are based on falsehoods that the media did not investigate. Former CBC-TV National News anchor Knowlton Nash once said that “…our job in the media… is to… provide a searchlight probing for truth through the confusing, complicated, cascading avalanche of fact and fiction.” In this case, the media let their audiences down; fiction prevailed over fact.
Despite what the pro-DDT organizations alleged, DDT was not banned for use in mosquito control and could continue to be used in 25 countries in malarial regions. In these countries, limited amounts of DDT can be sprayed on the inside walls of houses to combat malaria-carrying mosquitoes. “The environmental community is collaborating with the World Health Organization to ensure that the phase-out of the remaining uses of DDT does not undermine the battle against malaria and the well-being of people living in malarial zones,” the United Nations Environmental Programme reported when the treaty came into force.
Has anyone read the book? Has anyone seen it? (So what if it’s aimed at Canada?)
More thoughts: Years ago, when Jan Brunvand first achieved some fame cataloging urban myths, it occurred to me that his books should be required reading in the very first survey classes in journalism school. Maybe they should be required reading in political science, rhetoric, and philosophy, too.
Gutstein’s book would be a good reader for a class on reporting, or investigative reporting, or science reporting, or political reporting. I’m not sure where it would fit in to a science curriculum, but I wish more scientists came out of undergraduate years aware that they can get hammered by these hoax-selling, axe-grinding disinformation machines. All those reports about how Rachel Carson is the “murderer of millions?” They coarsen dialog, they misinform, disinform and malinform the public. They do great disservice to citizenship and voters, and ultimately, to our democratic institutions.
It’s not enough to have a counter, good-information plan. These people must be convinced to stop.
Of course, I read it too fast, and skipped over the word “visits.” I had to click on the story to see whether they were going to tell the prisoners to stay at home for a week, like the Fort Worth, Texas, school district did. I suppose, after a fashion, that was exactly the message.
At the Officer of the Receiver for California Prison Health Care Services, spokesman Luis Patino said Sunday that an inmate in Centinela State Prison in Imperial County was diagnosed as probable for the H1N1 virus, or swine flu.
“The inmate and his cellmate have been isolated, Patino said. “They remain at the prison.”
Maybe we’d be better off if the kids remained in school, as well as keeping the convicts in the prisons.
Is the panic over swine flu too much? If we go back to the week ending March 21, 2009, we find that there were already more than 22,000 cases of influenza in the U.S., with 35 pediatric deaths. Has the swine flu added to either the rates of infection or the rates of death? If the dramatic steps, the event cancellations and school closings, are appropriate for the swine flu, shouldn’t they have been appropriate for the other flu viruses, too?
Do we really need to close schools? What do you think — tell us in comments.
See the CDC’s report on swine flu at their site: H1N1 (Swine Flu)
Oh, yeah, we expected a few religious nuts to claim it was the end times when an interesting, but so far harmless swarm of small earthquakes hit the Yellowstone Caldera again.
But who expected such nuttiness?
Legal action is being taken against a Web site operator who has misrepresented the U.S. Geological Survey in a warning that the area around Yellowstone National Park should be evacuated out of concern that the park’s supervolcano could erupt.
“We started to take action as soon as we found out about it,” said Jessica Robertson of the USGS, adding that the agency was notified on Friday.
The issue has been referred to the USGS’s solicitor’s office which is pursuing charges of impersonating a federal official as well as violation of the agency’s trademark.
It’s a hoax, but a very pernicious hoax. In a world where people believe in all sorts of things that do not happen and take actions that hurt themselves and others as a result, hoaxing is not a good game to play.
(Update, evening of January 11, 2009: Here’s the site complained about; it appears he’s removed material that would make the site look like a USGS site.)
Was this guy under a belief that what he said was correct?
The issue highlights Nash’s concerns about where people get their news.
“There is a legitimate place to get this information; this is not it,” Nash said of the Web site [ Al Nash, the Yellowstone National Park’s chief of public affairs]. “The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory is out there. You can find it. It is run by three really bright geologists. There’s really good monitoring in the park. Our offices would be the secondary place to go for information.”
Robertson said this isn’t the first time USGS has been falsely used in such claims. She said in June a YouTube video used the agency’s logo to lend legitimacy to a claim about the end of the world.
Earthquakes are very interesting. The Yellowstone is fascinating. These are good reasons to study the facts and events of nature. Hoaxes like this one, urging people to panic, play on the wealth of ignorance about science and nature, and scientists.
The only firm defense is good education and good information.
Resources:
From the Billings Gazette’s sidebar on good information:
“Latest quake info
“According to the latest information from the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, about 900 earthquakes occurred between Dec. 26 and Jan. 8 in the Yellowstone Lake area.
“Five hundred of the earthquakes (including all greater than magnitude 2.0) have been reviewed by seismologists. There were 111 earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 2.0 and 18 earthquakes greater than 3.0. About 400 smaller earthquakes have yet to be reviewed.
“The largest earthquake during the swarm was a magnitude 3.9 on Dec. 28. One of the analyses seismologists use to talk about earthquakes and swarms is the cumulative seismic moment, which is a measure of the earthquake energy. The cumulative moment (the energy from all the analyzed earthquakes in the swarm) for the Yellowstone Lake Swarm is equal to the energy of a single magnitude 4.5 earthquake.
“Earthquakes with magnitudes less than 3.4 are generally not felt by people unless they are very shallow and you are standing very close to the epicenter. For perspective, earthquakes of magnitude 3.4 to 4.5 are often felt and there were multiple reports of felt earthquakes during this swarm. A magnitude 5 or greater is generally required to produce damage to buildings or other structures.
“For more information, log onto the observatory’s Web site at: http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/ “
Powell (Wyoming) Tribune blog, with an e-mail interview with the hoax perpetrator — note the nonchalance with which Chris Sanders, who appears to be the perpetrator, acknowledges his pirating of the USGS log, claims connections to soon-to-be-President Obama, and otherwise suggests he’s the smartest scientist even touching geology in the U.S.
Missed this one. But contrary to what most of my journalism profs said, I think news is news so long as people don’t know it.
Walter Cronkite - undated photo via Mediabistro
Walter Cronkite turned 92 on election day, November 4.
Astounding. He’s still active in news, though heaven knows CBS doesn’t use him as they should (where was he on election night?).
I’ve been interested to see the prominence he gets, now, in history accounts of the Vietnam war. At the same time, it’s painful that we have students whose parents didn’t grow up with Cronkite on the air. They’re a generation removed from knowing what they missed.
My one brief Cronkite story: Late one afternoon I was preparing for a hearing at the Senate Labor Committee for the next morning, preparations that had been slowed by a fair deal of breaking news around Reagan’s Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan, whose potential links to crime organizations had been hidden from the committee during his nomination hearings (Donovan was acquitted of wrongdoing in a later trial). Chaos might be the best way to describe the events, especially in the news area. A lot of misinformation was passed around, about what were the position and concerns of Labor Committee Chairman, Sen. Orrin Hatch (my boss), what was the position of the White House, what was the evidence and what wasn’t the evidence on Donovan, etc.
I turned on the television to catch Cronkite’s broadcast. About five minutes in, the phone rang. It was Rita Braver, then a CBS producer, and she really gave me the third degree about some minor point on the Donovan story — a minor point, but one that had been reported incorrectly by others (I forget now what the issue was). I had known Braver, chiefly on the phone, for some time. I found her extremely careful with the facts, which was comfortable considering where she sat in CBS’s ranks; the stuff she worked on was on the evening news regularly. We talked for a few minutes, and then rather abruptly she yelled “Hang on!” and put me on hold. The newscast I was watching went to a commercial break, and as sometimes happened, the camera pulled away, and Cronkite on the air reached for the telephone on his desk. The commercial came on simultaneously with the voice on the phone: “This is Walter Cronkite. Mr. Darrell, I have a question about this report I’m holding. I think Rita has spoken with you about it.” We talked about the issue for just about a minute, he thanked me. As the show came out of the break, Cronkite read the news about Ray Donovan that day, with Hatch’s views. He got it right, of course.
Do most people realize how intensely most news operations work to get even the small stuff right?
It was really odd watching Cronkite reach for the phone, and then hear him on my phone.
Cronkite found time to go sailing on his birthday – recalling the old CBS joke that his boat was named “On Assignment.” Whenever Cronkite was away from the anchor desk, the substitutes explained he was “on assignment.”
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 