As a second nuclear plant in Nebraska issued a “notification of unusual event” because of rising floodwaters, right-wingers are spreading the Pakistani story of a “news blackout” around the Ft. Calhoun nuclear plant…for no reason other than that it gives them an excuse to hate the government and be paranoid.
The “notification of unusual event” came from Cooper Nuclear Station operated by the Nebraska Public Power District — about 70 miles south of Omaha. It is a level 1 alert, which occured simply because the floodwaters reached a certain level. There has been no operational deviation within the plant itself. On the U.S. NRC’s scale, level 1 is the first of four levels of alerts for nuclear plants, and it means nothing in operational terms. The only thing that’s being done is that the plant operators have stacked sandbags and done other flood-preparedness activities. There is no “meltdown,” “nuclear disaster,” or “nuclear event.” There are only the rising waters.
Specifically, the notification was triggered because floodwaters surrounding the plant reached a level of 42.5 feet, and are expected to reach 42.7 feet (90 feet above sea level) this afternoon. If they rise another three feet, the plant goes offline — it’s currently online and generating power.
There’s no news on the Ft. Calhoun nuclear plant itself other than that I found this really freaky photo gallery of the workers there, on Nukeworker.com. Looks to me like those kids have been having a good time…
But it should be no surprise to me that “gun owners” in forums like this one right chere don’t care that no news is good news, or understand how to limit their Google searches to the latest results. Some anti-government conspiracy theorists — have seized on yesterday’s hysterical, fanatical report from a country whose rogue intelligence agency is currently waging a de facto proxy war with the United States in Afghanistan.
They do this without, apparently, being able to tell the difference between Pakistan’s The Nation and the U.S. “progressive” magazine The Nation (which also doesn’t like nukes all that much.)
No, this shouldn’t surprise me…I’ve been reading gun forums for years now, and the posters there are a bizarre mix of borderline-genius highly-functioning lunatics, garden-variety reasonable people and start raving mad fuckwads. Whenever the tone of the discussion migrates away from specific gun-related facts and experiences, the overheated core of roadside-attraction weirdness that forms the guns-and-butter heart of Bitterly Clinging America begins to puke forth its molten zirconium. Wanna know the terminal ballistics of a thirty-ought-six round in a deer’s ass or a human chest cavity? No problem, son, pull up a notepad and get ready for a six-hour lecture, with diagrams. Wanna know what’s going on in politics? Obama’s trying to take away our guns. Sometimes it seems like that’s all you need to know to talk politics on a gun forum…and all you ever need to know.
The same inexplicably credulous and stumblingly pro-Pakistan paranoia is true of these foaming-at-the-mouth right-wingers “inspired” by the supposedly “Libertarian” Gentleman from Texas at The Daily Paul, which repeated theclaim of a “news blackout.” The Daily Paul essentially republished without commentary the Pakistani article, which incidentally I already pissed on from a great height here, in case you missed it.
Out in liberal Oregon, Salem-News.com spread the anti-Barack yowls of certain doom, even going so far as to poop out a paranoid, deceitful and blatantly ignorant paragraph like this one:
US Orders News Blackout Over Crippled Nebraska Nuclear Plant
Report notes the “cover-up” of this nuclear disaster by President Obama is based on his “fantasy” of creating so-called green jobs which he (strangely) includes nuclear power into.
(MOSCOW ) – Editor’s note: I am about to approve a comment on this story that claims it is a hoax, in fact it is not a hoax, it possibly may not be entirely accurate, but this piece has been carried by many agencies already. There are so-called ‘Citizen Journalism’ sites that sometimes strike it with groundbreaking news, so the fact that they allow people to post their own stories means they need disclaimers, unlike Salem-News.com which is staffed by working news editors and other personnel
Now the fact that it is on Wikipedia does not make it true, but I think if that information were blatantly false, the nuclear plant’s publicists would have instantly stripped from the pages of the world’s online public encyclopedia.
This “editor” had the gall to add the “crippled” moniker to Ft. Calhoun — apparently by making it up wholesale. Maybe he wanted to make the situation seem worse than it is to attack Obama’s attempt at creating “green jobs” — without looking critically at whether Obama’s political opponents are also supporting nuclear…or, if they’re opposing it, looking at if they’re opposing it because they’re in bed with Big Oil and Big Coal, which never did anything to fuck us, did they?
Then again, maybe the need to leap on the conspiracy-theory bandwagon is just a desire to justify in right-wing anti-Democratic terms the verbatim reposting of an article that seems obviously, to me, written by a hostile foreign country’s intelligence service to discredit the the United States.
Here’s where I get mad. Here’s where I go screaming into I-Love-America territory. Here’s where I look suspiciously like the rednecks looked thirty-five years ago before Carter, before Reagan. Here’s where I start to look, if I may, like the crazed prospector stock character in a Western movie, with Tabasco on his butt plug.
Here’s where I hate on the gun nuts.
Look, I know full well that I am a howling-mad socialist liberal on the domestic front, except for the most part on gun control (which I think is a turd-sniffing straw-man the Left should forget about). But in international terms, I’m actually a bit of a policy hawk. I think it’s a pretty fucked world out there, and if the U.S. helped make it that way…well, that blows, but it sure as hell doesn’t mean I’m going to “blame America first.” It means I think most governments blow steaming chunks, and America should be blamed when it’s culpable.
But let’s blame Pakistan when it’s culpable, shall we?
My problem with certain born-again anti-taxation pasty-faced right-wingers who name their rotary-magazine shotguns things like Lucille and their Chris Crafts things like the Freedom Isn’t Free is not so much when they’re anti-intellectual, xenophobic assholes who hate the rest of the world and any Americans who think differently than them. It’s when they do it badly. People should refrain from making paranoid anti-government posts online if they can’t be bothered to figure out the international political playing field before they start believing anti-American stories that seem almost certainly promulgated by the sworn enemies of the United States they claim to love so much (except on April 15).
No, when I refer to the “sworn enemies of the United States,” I’m not referring the people of Pakistan — many Pakistanis and Pakistani-Americans are not anti-American, even remotely. Others are, sure; you don’t have to work to find anti-Americans in most part of the world, alongside people who support the U.S. (everywhere — including Iran).
Pakistan is a big frickin’ place. I would never make the kind of generalizations about the population of Pakistan that I read in gun forums routinely — where posters often can’t be bothered to know the difference between, say, the terms “Muslim” and “Arab,” which are completely unrelated descriptors. The result is that bizarre paranoid statements
Mind you, I’m not claiming that the majority of the Pakistani population in Pakistan loves the United States — as George W. Bush claimed the population of Iraq did. In fact, the nuclear scientist and entrepreneur A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani who pseudo-stole nuclear weapons technology from the Dutch and then sold it to Libya and North Korea and tried to sell it to Iran, remains a national hero in Pakistan. But it’s not just the people — many of whom are astonishingly underprivileged — who raise Khan to the level of a national saint. It was the government of Pakistan, which without question knew about Khan’s activities in selling nuclear weapons technology to three “rogue” nations…and then claimed not to. The government hung Khan out to dry and made him issue a broad confession of his crimes in public…in English…a language most people in Pakistan do not speak. In case anyone’s wondering who really sold North Korea those nukes probably aimed at Tokyo, it almost surely wasn’t Khan…at least, not acting alone. He had the support of some elements of the Pakistani government. Which ones? Fuck if I know — people who have worked for the CIA can’t keep that shit straight in Pakistan right now! Which is probably one of the many reasons they had no idea North Korea had a nuke until they detonated one.
As a liberal, I’ve been accused of being anti-America. I’m anti-America? I’m not going to claim that my fellow left-of-centers weren’t posting some serious jackass shit in the wake of the Fukushima crisis, but at least their information didn’t come from fucking Pakistan!
Anti-Obama right-wingers: You love America, right? You love the Second Amendment? Do you love the First Amendment? Do you think they have freedom of the press in Pakistan? Do you think that something published in TheNation.com.pk is unlikely to be vetted by the ISI — the Pakistani intelligence service? Do you credit for an instant — or even know about — the claims of American military intelligence operatives that one of the biggest problems of the war in Afghanistan is separating out “insurgents” from the Pakistani ISI itself? That it’s not just that the ISI is supporting anti-US Afghan rebels, but that they’re the same goddamn people?!?
Whether those facts (covered in some detail in this book by Army Reserve intelligence officer Lt. Col. Anthony Schaffer) are credible I don’t really know; I found the book far more convincing than the claims of the DOD that went out of its way to censor it.
But I sure as hell am aware of those claims. I know that I’m going to question a report coming out of Pakistan about a broad Obama-based conspiracy to hide a major disaster in Omaha from the American people — when Obama made himself the explicit enemy of the Pakistani government by making the first real overtures in years toward Pakistan’s nemesis, India, including advocating India getting a seat on the U.N. Security Council!! Do you think maybe there’s an anti-American slant going on here, from the government-controlled press of a nation whose government is waging a war against the U.S.???
Or could the Pakistani ISI and Afghan anti-American forces even be conspiring to keep the heroin flowing to Europe and the U.S. both to screw the US attempt to hold on to its role as the defining regional power in Central, South and Southwest Asia, and because dope is profitable?
Nah, what are the chances of that?
For fuck’s sake, all you Goldwaterites and concealed-carry lunatics out there!!! Get your sources straight!!! URLs do not stop at the dot!!!! TheNation.com.pk is not the same as TheNation.com!!!!! Russia provoked a war with U.S. regional ally Georgia just to warn Ukraine not to join NATO!!!! The Pakistani ISI is in a proxy war with the United States, people!!!It has been since at least 2001!!!! Get with the program!!! Just because it’s anti-Obama doesn’t mean it’s true!! Put down the shotgun and read a fuckin’ book once in a while, people!!!!