"Ignorance! Hysteria!" is the battle cry of the New Knights Against Benightedness: cant and cowardice is being pilloried by such champions of enlightenment as Newsweek, the San Francisco City Council, Gov. Cuomo, and the poetic musicians of porn rock.
The cause of this sudden turn-around is the as yet incurable disease AIDS, which is spread overwhelmingly by homosexuals
¾called "gay" in Newspeak, just as their aberration is termed a "preference."It's all fear and ignorance, charges the cover story of Newsweek, the well known scourge of hysteria that, like its fellow fountain of truth Time, has been screaming about the "near meltdown" at TMI for six years. Both have valiantly combatted ignorance by censoring any connection between lung cancer and radon trapped in energy-conserving homes since it was discovered in 1979.
The torch of enlightenment is held high by the Great American Media Machine, the gallant witch-hunt killer that has made radioactive into a word of horror that chills the blood
¾and the potassium 40 in it.But the real Fighters Fighting Fear emerged from the pinnacle of the human spirit, the studios of Hollywood. The people who brought you werewolves, vampires, flesheaters, King Kong and Ed Asner, who have graced the boob toob with Jane Fonda's China Syndrome and countless other antinuclear horror scares, are outraged by something as hateful as fear mongering.
A child afflicted with AIDS can spread the disease only if it bites another child so that saliva contacts blood. Says who? Say the network sages who take Dr Sternglass's word on other scientific matters. "Such a bite is very improbable," they assure us. Is that what they said when the Rasmussen study, now known to have been overly pessimistic, calculated probabilities equal to that of a large meteor striking the earth?
Transmission by casual contact is "virtually impossible," they tell us, meaning that as yet no such transmission has been demonstrated. And what did they say about ionizing radiation, in which man grew up over the past million years, and which has been studied for close to a century with a thoroughness accorded few other subjects? "Not enough experience."
Don't get me wrong: I am not trying to replace one kind of fearmongering with another; I am trying to show the media's selective morality.
Of this there is no there is no better example than TMI-1, which at long last went on line in early October. The carnage is over: in the 6 years and 7 months in which TMI-1 lay idle, the substitute non-nuclear power caused the premature deaths of some 350 nameless people, most of them through air pollution by fossil fuels. They were killed by the NRC and government regulation gone berserk, their deaths aided and abetted by breast-beaters such as Gov. Thornburgh, such as the ignorant scare peddlers of ABC and PBS, and such as the moral outcasts of the Union of Unconcerned Ex-Scientists
¾all of them enthusiastically supported by the censorship and fearmongering of the press.But TMI-1 is symbolic: clean kilowatt-hour by clean kilowatt-hour, it will decimate the power of the hysteria fanners, now posturing as born-again Knights Against Hysteria.
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Vol. 13, No. 3
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 13, No. 3 Date: November 29, 2004 03:44 PM (For actual publication date see newsletter.) Title: Witch Hunters Against Superstition
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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