Idiocracy, nucleocracy

Donald Trump’s infamous campaign for president has coincided with the 10th anniversary of the crude satirical film Idiocracy, an event which prompted its co-writer Etan Cohen to comment on twitter “I never expected Idiocracy to become a documentary.” Indeed, some to the utterances of Donald Trump and his supporters rival the stunning idiocy portrayed in the film.

Mike Judge (director), Idiocracy, Twentieth Century Fox, 2006

The story begins with army private Joe Bauer who has been chosen for a special military project because he is perfectly average, having an IQ of exactly 100. Along with a female specimen, the army puts him to sleep for a year in a suspended animation experiment, but the program is shut down after he is put in the box, and he is forgotten. When his container falls from a garbage heap 500 years later and pops open, he finds himself in a post-apocalyptic world where all the intelligent work is done by machines and humans have gone through an extreme dumbing-down process. Everyone Joe encounters finds him to be suspiciously much too smart, talking way too fancy with his “fag talk.” But he eventually comes to the attention of the president, who is also a moron but just smart enough to realize that Joe might have an idea about how to make the crops grow again. They nourish the crops with sports drinks promoted by agribusiness, and Joe helps them figure out they should use water, “like they use in the toilet.” He’s the smartest person in the world.

The story’s resemblance to the Trump campaign has been picked up by numerous writers who have recently celebrated the virtues of the sleeper hit that went straight to DVD in 2006, after a short run in cinemas, and went on to earn millions of dollars for 20th Century Fox.

One commentary on Alternet took exception to the film’s suggestion that the dumbing-down of society was due to the declining frequency of genes for intelligence. The opening sequence shows a couple with high IQs explaining their reasons for delaying having children, and then failing to have children later when they eventually wanted them. This is contrasted with characters living in poverty who are breeding like rabbits, and thus the decline of civilization is put down to the reversal of the traditional rule of the survival of the fittest and the most intelligent.

However, if one listens carefully to the narration and dialog, a more sympathetic interpretation is possible. Genes for intelligence are never mentioned, and we could assume that the high-IQ couple became intelligent because of the social capital of their families and the society they grew up in. The theory of evolution includes the theory of cultural evolution that holds that those whose heritage is good education and a developed social consciousness will thrive and contribute to building a thriving society. Genes play only a small part in human potential.

The critique expressed by the film could be that the highly educated and intelligent have squandered their cultural capital through laziness and individualism, while those who have lost advantages have been left in ignorance to become slaves to their baser instincts. From this perspective, the story is not an endorsement of eugenics. It fits very well within leftist theory. When the perfectly average protagonist (Joe) thinks that his partner in the adventure (Rita), will have an opportunity to time travel back to the past, he tells her, "Go back. Tell people to read books. Tell people to stay in school. Tell people to use their brains, or something. I think maybe the world got like this because of people like me. I never did anything with my life." This point is clear by the end of the film when he concludes, very intelligently, that even the idiots in the idiocracy just have to use their brains and figure out how to solve their problems. It is a matter of communal effort and struggle, not natural endowment.

One of the most poignant, cutting and unfunny jokes in the story comes toward the end when Joe announces he wants to look for a time machine that he assumes might have been invented sometime before everything collapsed. He wants to go back and leave behind the friends he has saved from big agribusiness’ electrolyte drinks but...

Idiot 1: But we still got all these problems.

Joe Bauers: Look, you’re just going to have to solve them yourselves.

Idiot 2: What about the nuc… nucular reactor in Florida? It’s broke and leaky and something’s happening.

Idiot 1: I thought it was in Georgia.

Idiot 2: Georgia is in Florida, dumb ass.

Idiot 1: Hey, I know. Let’s put toilet water on it, huh? Like we did on the crops.

Idiocracy 1:14:50~

Until this point, the characters have been shown to be extremely ignorant of the civilization that preceded them. They think something called the UN (which they pronounce like the word prefix un) “un-nazied the world forever.” But the one thing they do know is that the “nucular” plant built in Florida 500 years ago is still a serious problem they need to deal with. This is only slightly funny because one thing the nuclear industry is seriously concerned with these days is the “loss of competence” within the industry.

As the nuclear industry seems to have no prospects for future growth, it cannot attract young people into nuclear careers. Furthermore, hundreds of nuclear plants in the Western world are to be decommissioned in the coming decades, but who will do this work and who is going to pay for it? There is consumer demand for the electricity produced by a power plant, and this makes it a viable business, but there is no consumer demand involved in cleanup operations. Finally, nuclear accident sites and nuclear waste repositories pose questions about how to inform people of the deep future about what we have left for them. We may easily laugh at the cretins in Idiocracy, but we in contemporary society have nothing to feel smug about. The handling of the Fukushima catastrophe has been pathetic, and recent headlines about “the nucular reactor in Florida” provide their own grim humor:

Scuba diver somehow survives being sucked into Florida nuclear power plant through pipe

Florida nuclear plant that sucked in scuba diver has violated law for a decade
"A Florida nuclear power plant that sucked a scuba diver through its unprotected cooling intake pipe is in ongoing violation of the Endangered Species Act... the plant’s intake system has for decades routinely captured, harmed and killed thousands of marine animals, most notably endangered and threatened species of sea turtle as well as manatees and other protected species."

Study confirms FPL nuclear plant canals leaking into Biscayne Bay
"According to a study released Monday by Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez, water sampling in December and January found tritium levels up to 215 times higher than normal in ocean water."

Other sources:

David Lauchbaum, “Turkey Point Nuclear Plant in Hot Water,” Fission Stories #179, January 6, 2015.

David Lauchbaum, “Hurricane Andrew vs. Turkey Point,” Fission Stories #48, July 12, 2011.

Revelation: I am the alpha, the beta and the gamma

Revelation: I am the alpha, the beta and the gamma--

the basics of "health physics" that the nuclear industry would rather you not know about

Stage 1: Ignore. Deflect. Distract. Do not acknowledge.

Stage 2: Deny. Explain. Rationalize. Justify.

Skillful politicians and lawyers know that the art of public relations is to employ Stage 1 tactics so well that Stage 2 tactics will never be needed. If one is forced to use Stage 2 tactics, one is on his heels, on the defensive and headed for a fall. Representatives of the civilian and military nuclear programs have always tried to use Stage 1 tactics to keep public attention off of what matters. Whenever there has been a nuclear accident, or whenever the effects of nuclear bomb tests have had to be discussed, official discourse has always focused on external gamma radiation.

This started with the first studies done on the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it continued throughout the period of nuclear weapons testing. Gamma dose rates were measured with Geiger counters and cumulative dose badges, but there was no official interest in gathering information on alpha and beta particles deposited in the environment or absorbed in living tissue. Even though this flaw in the methodology has been pointed out repeatedly, every time a new incident occurs, the nuclear industry resorts to Stage 1 tactics of public relations. Questions about beta particles will be deflected or ignored.

Thus Fukushima prefecture in 2011 got hundreds of radiation monitoring posts, all set two meters above ground, to measure the gamma dose, and children got their “glass badges” to measure their cumulative gamma dose. All the while there was no talk about alpha and beta particles, internal contamination, or the chemical toxicity (aside from the radiological toxicity) of the nuclear industry garbage that was now in the environment where people have to live.

To illustrate the long history of these deflection and denial tactics, the rest of this article discusses two documentaries that were produced by regional television channels in the United Kingdom in 1990-91. Both films can be viewed online at the links given. The text below consists of transcripts of segments that highlight the main themes and conclusions of these reports.

The Truth of Christmas Island relates what was revealed then about the consequences of ignoring beta particle contamination among the veterans of Britain’s nuclear tests. Children of the Bomb reveals a secondary consequence of this neglect: the lasting effect on the gene pool of the human species. One would think that such damning revelations would have led all nations to shut down their nuclear industries, but instead these reports caused no great political upheaval. It is just interesting to note now that the official reaction to such research findings was not to say, “Yes, but we think the death, suffering and damage to the gene pool were, are and will be the price we have to pay for our security.” The strategy still in place is to ignore, deflect, distract and not acknowledge.

Gamma radiation data was broadcast on Japanese weather reports during 2011.

1. The Truth of Christmas Island

Ross Wilson (director) Paul Murricane (producer), Dispatches: The Truth of Christmas Island, Scottish Television Productions, 1991, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc3_GRMHdlU

32:24~

NARRATOR: They [the British Ministry of Defense] measured only gamma radiation which came from the bomb blasts, the other form of radiation from beta particles suspended in the fallout and causing longer term exposure was not measured.

DR. KARL MORGAN (US health physics advisor to the British military, participant in the earlier US Bikini Islands nuclear tests): The beta could have been predominant in this fallout and yet the meters which measured only gamma radiation might have shown nothing at all.

NARRATOR: Karl Morgan was a lone voice warning of the dangers of beta radiation. What he found suggests that the New Zealand Navy personnel on ships were in the greatest danger.

DR. KARL MORGAN: Years before the British tests when we were testing the weapons at Bikini, Dr. Colonel Stafford Warren was in charge of the health effects there, and there again our military did not measure the beta dose, and so I insisted on making measurements. Finally, I was loaned a group of servicemen. We went out in the small boats, boarded the target ships, went to the islands and other places, and we found on average the beta dose was about five times the gamma dose, and on some materials, like boat rust and paint and so on, the beta dose was as much as 600 times the gamma dose. So if our instruments, our film badges, were only measuring the gamma dose, that was all that went on the record. It could be that this poor guy received 600 hundred times this dose of beta radiation.

DR. JOHN LARGE (independent nuclear consultant): If the servicemen did receive high doses—and that’s not just external doses—that’s internal doses which they carry around with them for the rest of their lives, then the damage has been done.

DR. KARL MORGAN: Looking at the particles that might be rained out… Just one of these particles could contain enough strontium 90, cesium 137 or plutonium to be the source of a malignancy that would show up maybe 10, 20, 30, 50 years later.

NARRATOR: In May 1990, the Community Health Department at Wellington School of Medicine in New Zealand published an exhaustive study into the health into the health of the New Zealand personnel [who participated in the Christmas Island nuclear tests]. By following up on 528 men who had taken part in the tests, they found five and half times the expected rate of leukemia. Their conclusion: some leukemias and possibly some other hematological cancers may have resulted from participation in this program. This confirms a previous study carried out in Britain by the National Radiological Protection Board [NRPB] into a much larger sample of British servicemen two years previously.

DR. TOM SORAHAN (Birmingham University): Well, the NRPB report in fact found a statistically significant difference in leukemia and multiple myeloma between the test participants and the control group. In the participants there were 28 deaths from leukemia and multiple myeloma; whereas in the comparison group there were only 6. This was a very significant finding.

2. Children of the Bomb

Paul Dicken (director), Children of the Bomb: A Northern Eye Investigation, Tyne Tees Television (United Kingdom), 1990. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRJLkSjcIAU&feature=share

00:00~

SHEILA GRAY, secretary of the British Nuclear Test Veterans’ Association:

I know of a grandchild who was born with its stomach in its lung. They saved her, but now she’s hyperactive. She’s going deaf. There are others with their feet sticking out at their knees. People with hearts on the wrong side, extra digits on their hands… asthma, leukemia in the children, you could go on forever… I know of one boy who was born—he was ten days old—and other than having webbed feet he was perfectly normal to look at. He died unexpectedly and of course we had to hold a post-mortem. Each of his organs weighed twice what they should, and he was dual-sexed inside. That was my first introduction to that. That was in 1983 when I first got involved, and since then they’ve come along with varying details. We know of a veteran’s daughter who was born with dual sex and they had to build her into a woman. We have veterans’ children—grown up, second generation. They ring me up and say, “My father was at such and such a test. I want to get married. Dare I have children?”

34:19~

JOURNALIST: What did the survey reveal about the children?

JOHN URCOTT, statistician: We had a problem. We didn’t know whether these families had joined [the BNTVA study] because they had malformed children, so we looked at the problem in another way. We looked at the children who were the first child to be conceived after the [nuclear] tests and we looked at subsequent children. And what we found was—and this is a very important result—we found that the first child to be conceived after the tests had a much greater chance of one of these illnesses than subsequent children.

NARRATOR: Last year, Professor Martin Gardener had linked radiation to leukemias in the children of Sellafield [nuclear fuel processing center] workers. His theory was that a high dosage of radiation damaged a father’s sperm. Northern Eye’s investigation suggests something even worse. The children conceived soon after their father’s return from the bomb tests may be suffering from a whole range of diseases and deformities.

JOHN URCOTT: We had this increase in congenital malformation and other genetically linked diseases in the first child after the tests, and that is very, very important. Not only is it important for the families who are worried and want to know why their children have got these genetic effects, but from a scientific point of view it advances the argument.

JOHN URCOTT: For a second expert opinion, Northern Eye took its findings to the Center for Industrial Safety and Health in London. The center does research into the health risks faced by groups of workers and their children. We asked Claire Marie Fortin to investigate the rare cancers we found among the veterans’ children, and analyze the wide range of congenital conditions found in our study.

CLAIRE MARIE FORTIN: There appeared to be in this data an unusually high occurrence of congenital malformations. We know that congenital malformations happen, sadly, in the general population. We know that cancer is a disease of the 20th century, and we all know someone who has died of it. So there are cases of cancer, congenital malformations, diseases, you name it, that already exist as part of the background of our lives. So what I was actually looking for was an increased occurrence of those particular events.

NARRATOR: Fortin tested our findings on congenital abnormalities to make sure they weren’t biased. Our results came from the children of 1,100 veterans. Fortin studied those results as if they had come from the children of all 27,000 veterans. This meant the number of abnormalities was diluted over twenty times. She still found the rate of most abnormalities was higher than normal.

CLAIRE MARIE FORTIN: I thought, “What if this had come from another occupational group?” I would have been shocked. I wouldn’t have expected that scale—that range actually of experience amongst the offspring.

JOURNALIST: What stood out in the results of the survey?

CLAIRE MARIE FORTIN: I think the most significant result in that survey are in fact the adrenal cancers. There were four adrenal cancers, two of which were neuroblastomas. Now they are actually quite rare amongst children, and as a result, the fact that there were four in such a small group is quite astonishing, and so I wanted to test that and see if it was really as astonishing as it seemed.

NARRATOR: Again, Fortin applied the severest test to Northern Eye’s figures, in case our sample was biased. We had found four adrenal cancers in just 2,500 children. Fortin assumed those four rare cancers had been found in a study of all the veterans’ children, 67,500 of them. This number of children was a deliberate overestimate. Even when measured in that much bigger group of children, the number of adrenal cancers was eight times higher than normal.

CLAIRE MARIE FORTIN: That’s an amazing statistic. Now, again, one has to be very careful because we don’t know if these adrenal cancers were primary cancers or secondary cancers. A lot of research has got to go into this. But just on the face of it those cancers are quite alarming. Bells should be ringing somewhere that there is a real problem here.

Further reading:

Chris Busby, “Bomb Test Veterans’ Grandchildren Suffer Health Effects,” The Ecologist, October 16, 2014.

Susie Boniface, “Nuclear Test Veterans scandal continues as children are STILL being born with medical defects three generations on, The Mirror Online, April 5, 2014.

Professor Chris Busby: “The main finding is that the grandchildren are suffering at almost the same rate as the children of veterans. In normal genetics, with each generation the effects would be less as new DNA is added to the family line. But with radiation exposure, a kind of instability is passed down – like an alarming message in a bottle passed from mother to child. It tells the child to scramble its genes randomly in all directions, so you get many children with strange deformities. The genes do it in order to evolve around the radiation. But it is terrible that women have this fear hanging over their heads because of what happened to their fathers. And yet there is no concession from the government or military that it happened at all.”

Marc Meneaud, “Mother fears her father’s deadly illness has passed to her son,” The Sunday Post, January 26, 2014.

Title alludes to:
Revelation 22:13 "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End." (http://biblehub.com/revelation/22-13.htm)