Monday 23rd of December 2024
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Reactor For Spaceport

Who's involved in an unexpected consortium proposal for a nuclear reactor at Woomera? 

Australian foundation member of the International Nuclear Energy Academy Professor Leslie Kememy has spearheaded a push for a reactor near South Australia's Spaceport, and a feasibility study for a three billion dollar reactor was being conducted.

Leslie, who told Adelaide's Advertiser that he had been hired by a consortium as a technical consultant, but declined to give their name

By any chance could this be relevant to using nuclear propulsion in extraterristrial excursions?

Acting Premier Foley rejected the proposal last night, but as the decision will no doubt be made at Federal level, he's piddling into the wind.


Truck'n' fees

If Prof Kemeny is pushing a barrow for, say, Halliburton, I suggest he upgrades his license. The KBR drivers in Iraq are having fun:

... Austin Dunn said the truckers might have been more understanding if it weren't for the fleets of luxury SUVs that KBR brought in for other employees.

"What in the world do you need a $55,000 Ford Excursion for one guy to drive from his office to the PX to the chow hall back to his office?" Dunn says. "It's just amazing the kind of money they were wasting. They could have been using that money to armor-plate our trucks."

Contractors 'Not Appreciated'

After 15 months driving a truck for KBR, Jim Bob Murray returned from Iraq. He says too many of his friends were getting killed, and he didn't like the way the company treated the drivers.

"The nickname we had for KBR was Kill 'em, Bag 'em and Replace 'em. ...

Now, since Bush claims Nuke industry over-regulated, I expect The Little Digger to heartily concur, push through some legislation, and be turning the first sod somewhere in SA, WA or NT before Xmas. 

Howard has prob'ly been looking at how Bush Hands Over Unprecedented Power To Security Tzar and figuring out how to craft the East Timor situation into a state of emergency for Oz.

As he said, "fossil fuels are very bad", except when they are turning into obscene profits for George & Dick.


Tough talk ...

Oops ... wrong signal. Duh! Juan Cole points out that Bush's admission of boneheadedness came a little short of an honest mea culpa. 

Today has lacked something, and I think it's because Howard & his loyal dupes haven't been heard to demonise something. So, here's a suggestion. Maybe one for Father Abbott  - get into Dan Brown! That Da Vinci Code is a grave risk to all the other fantasies and corruption in the established hierarchies.  

This was encouraging, from "My name is Legion"

Jason Berry: Oh, I think it’s a corrupt organisation. It’s a money machine. And the legion has used the image; the photographs, the video of Maciel and John Paul together as the central force, the persona, the identity of their image as a movement and religious order. Using seminarians to go out with priests to make calls on wealthy benefactors and widows and old men on pensions who then give money to them. There’s been litigation on this in the United States, and never would I be able to imagine Jesuits or Dominicans or Franciscans going out with young seminarians and sitting there in living rooms of wealthy people and making these pitches so that this young man can finish his studies. It’s coarse, it’s unbecoming. I suspect we’re going to see more and more about this organisation that will raise even starker questions about the founder and the imprint of his pathology upon the movement itself.

An interview with Aleksandar Hemon from the Sydney Writers' Festival was broadcast an ABC radio. Hemon has a natty website, where he has made a couple of his short stories available in an ingenious format so the pages can be folded and cut into a small book. One of the stories, from his 'Nowhere Man (The "Lost" Pronek Fantasies)' collection is 'Dawn', about an Austrian landscape painter called Adolf:

... "I hope you don't mind me asking," he says, "but are you Jewish?"
"Oh, I am many things," Pronek says and opens the door. "More than I can handle." ... 

During the interview, Ramona Koval asked Hemon about the importance of writing. He said some profound things - "engaging with the world", "entering the space and sharing it with others", "a different kind of empathy".

He went on to describe a passage from Hannah Arendt's 'Eichmann in Jerusalem'. Eichmann was telling his interrogator, a German whose family was murdered by the Nazis, about a point in his career when he was severely disappointed. He had been doing his job in the ranks of the exterminators, doing it well, he thought, but was passed over in a promotion. Arendt said that glimpse into Eichmann, in his complete inability to understand how the other person may feel, revealed the banality, in a moment.

Bush, likewise.


More nook'lar lies

From "Nobody was killed at Abu Ghraib":

Retired Brig. Gen. David M. Brahms is quoted in the Washington Post about the Haditha massacre (item below): "When these investigations come out, there's going to be a firestorm. It will be worse than Abu Ghraib -- nobody was killed at Abu Ghraib." I heard this exact same line--"nobody was killed at Abu Ghraib"--several times yesterday from various pundits and news anchors. This is absolutely untrue. ...

Fast talk from the Fast Food Nation. "Would you like more bullshit with our Peace'n Order?"