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Sy Hersh and Bob Woodward, America’s last two celebrity newspaper reporters, have made a long and good living off anonymous sources. In the house of mirrors that is spy stories, they have somehow avoided bashing their brains out against the glass, although any sophisticated reader has every right to be skeptical about their navigation. Hersh’s […] The long reach of the far right into the current U.S. Congress is evident in a recent directive from the House Armed Services Committee telling the Secretary of Defense to identify “inefficiencies” in the declassification process. The committee is not interested in casting daylight upon the billions of censored pages that might help hold the […] The Energy Department’s National Laboratories, which have stoked the American nuclear arsenal since Manhattan Project days, get some free advertising today from William Broad (who should know better) and David Sanger in The New York Times. At a moment when their budgets, which account for about a third of the $30 billion DOE total, are […] The Japanese government ministry that supports the country’s nuclear power industry is revising its estimate of the risk of a major disaster from once-in-40-years to once in 80. If and when reactors that have been idle since March 2011 go back on line, they will be operating under stricter safety standards–hence the new educated guess […] Woods Hole scientists and citizen volunteers have detected the first traces of cesium-134 and -137 from the 2011 Fukushima disaster on the shores of North America. The concentrations are too low to worry about healthwise (unless you’re that impossible-to-pinpoint incredibly unlucky surfer dude whose gonads are rail banged by those gamma rays–when you’re stochasticallyGinkgo has […] Physicist Ken Ford’s new memoir about helping to build the first H-bomb is a heart-rending story of youthful naiveté placed in the service of mass destruction. Describing himself as “interested in square dancing, cars, and girls (as we called them then) as well as physics,” Ford recalls believing as a 24-year-old student that “the world […] The fourth anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear power disaster was marked by an announcement from the plant’s operator of another massive leak of highly radioactive water into the ground. It is obvious by now that there will be no end to this, that the site is a permanent wound on a small country’s coastline that […] A remarkable new highway sign graces the recently completed Joban Expressway in Japan, which connects Tokyo and coastal regions near Fukushima. Instead of giving drivers information about traffic or weather, it tells them how much radiation they’re being exposed to as they pass through areas that will be unliveably hot for the foreseeable future. The […] There is no rational explanation for why American intelligence services continue to tout “lie-detector” polygraph exams for employee screening, despite broad scientific consensus that they are worthless. Intimidation of the ignorant is their primary impact, perhaps along with maintaining a docile workforce, neither of which has anything to do with national security. The myth of […] The Washington Post‘s rather hook-line-and-sinker feature about a Dutch entrepreneur’s “plan” for a one-way trip to Mars in 2024 is one more piece of evidence of the damage that people with more money than they know what to do with can inflict on the rest of us (or at least on the 202,583Healthy lifestyle means […] |