Matus1976 - Philosophy, Science, Politics,Art,History

Here in south eastern CT, one of the most heavily traveled corridors of the nation sitting squarely between Boston and NYC, a battle is being waged between rational progress and environmentalist paranoia. In the early 70’s a highway was constructed which connected route 2 near Hartford, the capital of CT and major business center, with south eastern CT. Before that the highway route required traveling the edges of a box, north to Norwich area of CT and then west to Hartford. Route 11 was supposed to be a nice diagonal connecting the two corners of this important exchange, instead the project lost funding in 1974 half way through completion and stopped at the interchange with Route 85. South eastern CT is home to Pfizer Pharmaceuticals Global Central Research headquarters, General Dynamics Electric Boat submarine building facility, a large Navy base, and the US Coast Guard academy. So commuters heading here from all central and western parts of Massachusetts and New York enjoy highway for the majority of the journey, only to get off and travel on a rural undivided tree lined winding route for the last 10 miles. A route where giant signs demand headlights to be on at all times, where joggers and bicyclists have abandoned for fear of their lives, residents pray before they pull out of their driveways, and where this 10 miles stretch averages 1 fatality per year.

A recent front page story ran in The Day, the largest local newspaper. Did it run a profile on each person that has been killed on that road commuting to work? Did it show how much money is lost to the area on that road in damages from non fatal accidents? No, it featured a pretty waterfall, a beautiful wooded landscape, and some pictures of rabbits; revealing a very obvious bias on the project. For 20 years the state of CT has repeatedly attempted to get Route 11 completed, which would bypass the dangerous Route 85 and save lives, and it has been repeatedly blocked. This time the EPA is at it again arresting any progress or development. The EPA has publicly stated that in general it opposes all new roads and it is given virtually limitless power to stop new road construction. Is this reasonable? It opposes ALL NEW ROADS? Is this the way to progress? Is this the way to strengthening our economy?

In a story that ran on June 26, 2006 on Route 11 The Day reports: Environmental Concerns Could Derail Route 11 Plan

"Bartlett contends that the road designs would “cause or contribute to significant degradation of waters of the United States, ” and he and the top U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official call the most recent assessment of the project’s environmental impact inadequate"

And really now, an 8.5 mile highway will cause SIGNIFICANT DEGRADATION OF THE WATERS OF THE [ENTIRE?] UNITED STATES. Are they serious? More delays and studies, favorite tactics of the EPA.

The article quotes a lone voice of reason:

"The agency has been studying whether building the road could deplete the habitat of the New England cottontail rabbit, which is being considered for endangered species status. U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons, R-Connecticut, has ridiculed the study, contending the agency is more concerned with rabbits than the human lives lost because of accidents on Route 85."

In 1919 future president and then solder Dwight D. Eisenhower traveled with a military caravan on a cross country trip. The journey was torturous and took months to complete, with horses and wagons and trucks routinely getting trapped in muddy ravines and overburdened roads. There is no doubt this terrible experience played a role in his future advocacy of a national interstate highway system. From 1956 to 1975 the Federal Highway Act created 35,000 miles of it’s planned 42,000 miles of highways. In the subsequent 20 years from 1975 to 1995 only the remaining 7,000 miles were built. In the latest 10 years from 1995 to today, a mere 4,000 more miles have been paved, a 10% percent increase. According the Bureau of Transportation Statistics the number of vehicle miles traveled in 1975 was 1.4 trillion miles, in 1995 was 2.4 trillion miles while in 2005 that number was 3 trillion. Today highways represent less than one percent of the nation’s total road mileage yet carry over 20 percent of the nations traffic. We see barely 20% more highway travel lanes than in 1975, while the number of vehicle miles traveled has doubled, and the number of cars on the road continues to sky rocket.

Interstate 95, which goes from the Florida Keys to the cost of Maine, through Atlantic City, New York city, and Boston, also passes through Connecticut on it’s southern coast. Most of 95 through CT is two lanes, and the Stretch of 95 that goes from Danbury CT (near the New York border) to Old Saybrook is one of the busiest exchanges in the country. Recently a plan was unveiled to add one single lane on the north and south bound parts of 95 in CT, along 65 mile stretch. The estimates for the cost and time frame? 20 billion dollars and 20 years! Are you kidding me, we paved half the nation in that time and cost.

In 1991 work began in Hong Kong on the most ambitious civil engineering project of the 21st century. In the following 7 years, and at a cost of 20 billion dollars, a six lane one mile tunnel, two bridges, one of which was the worlds longest double decker suspension bridge, the other the worlds longest cable-stayed bridge, twenty-two miles of an elevated superhighway, much of it built over an existing fourteen lane highway which remained opened, a high speed rail along that highway, an artificial island and on top of it a new airport with the worlds largest passenger terminal in history were built. Yet it takes the US 20 years and 20 billion dollars to add one lane to 65 miles of highway!

(Learn all about Hong Kong’s mega engineering project - here)

This is completely absurd. Our interstate highways are the lifeblood of our economy. They are not called major arteries for nothing, if you choke of a major highway, all transportation suffers, all manufactured goods, fuels, and foods are delayed. Everything is more expensive. Sitting in endless traffic jams with engines idling for hours on end. The nation suffers as a whole. America has the majority of its population on opposing costs separated by a thousand miles of nothing except massive farms. The greater metropolitan area of New York contains an estimated 21 million people, people who get their food, goods, and fuel primary by vehicles traveling on highways. The greater metropolitan area of Los Angeles is home to 18 million people, again all fed, clothed, and fueled primarily through highways. The greater metropolitan area of Chicago, the 3rd largest in the US and the only major one in the middle of the east and west coasts, is home to 10 million people. Together these three cities make up almost 50 million people and contain 1/6 of the nations population. A cursory look at any population density map shows that the majority of the US’s population lies on opposing costs, with huge swaths of land in between with population densities of 1 – 5 people per square mile. This area, of course, is where much of our food, and a significant portion of the worlds food supply, is produced. Roads and highways are the only way to get these goods to their destinations. Our entire economy and livelihood center on fast, efficient, and smooth transportation, with the interstate highways at the core. Yet we would rather pull our teeth out than build new roads, and when we do they cost an absurd amount of money and take decades to construct. What is going on here? Have we lost our minds?

You Are the Investigator

5 You’re independent - and a logical analytical thinker. You love learning and ideas… and know things no one else does. Bored by small talk, you refuse to participate in boring conversations. You are open minded. A visionary. You understand the world and may change it.

Interesting personal assessment, though I felt many of the questions didn’t have the answer that most suited me. Mostly it’s accurate (as all these self pyschologizing things tend to be) with the glaring exception of the ‘Bored by small talk’ which could not be farther from the truth. Small talk is the way we start to get to know people.

Most people react with vile disdain when they see a Nazi flag, and rightly so. Nazism killed 20 million people, an estimated 6 million Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, communists, unfit laborers, and physically deformed people intentionally in prison camps.  However, how many people share the same disdain for Communism?  Even though it has killed almost ten times as many people as Nazism did, it still it is looked on by most people in a favorable, or at least forgiving light.  It is taught by history professors with an �unbiased account�, considered �good in theory� (is Nazism �good in theory�?) and as of yet just incorrectly implemented.  Communism has killed 170 million people this century, according to Political Scientist, Nobel Peace Prize runner up and author of the most cited historical book, R.J Rummel.

From R.J Rummels site -
For perspective on Mao’s most bloody rule, all wars 1900-1987 cost in combat dead 34,021,000 — including WWI and II, Vietnam, Korea, and the Mexican and Russian Revolutions. Mao alone murdered over twice as many as were killed in combat in all these wars. Think about that. One man. Only one man did that much killing. If anything should cause us to avoid anyone having such power at any cost, here it is.

By 1950 alone that number was in the dozens of millions, many millions in China and may millions in the Soviet Union. Given that by the 50�s communism had all ready killed millions of people, it was right to be very weary of any communist political officer of influence.  Rational people in this nation were more than justified in attempting to route out communists from government positions.  Usually this defensiveness is derided as �McCarthyism�, while McCarthy�s outstanding attribute was his Anti-communism, the real ill of his ways lied in his attack of private citizens with scare mongering and politicizing rivaled today only by the global warming dystopians.  Yet cables and messages released after the fall of the Soviet Union revealed that most of the people McCarthy accused of being communist spies actually were, including Alger Hiss.

Communism is no laughing matter, as it’s death toll attests. In that regard I highly recommend checking out R.J. Rummels site, Power Kills, http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html which documents murders committed by governments, left and right. Governments have killed more than four times the number of people that have been killed in wars this century, and the overwhelming majority of those murders were committed by communist governments.

20th Century Democide
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH_C_MORTACRACIES.GIF

The typical cultural tendency today regarding communism is to A) completely downplay it’s historical atrocities B) ridicule the concern individuals had with it at the height of the Cold War (i.e. derogatory comments about "The Red Scare" "McCarthyism" and the "Domino Theory" ) C) and laugh at how the Soviet Union fell without a single shot being fired, disregarding the millions of battle dead in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Korea, South America, etc.

I am a great admirer of the philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand, and when she was asked what her political position was, she stated "Anti-Communist" but then recanted, refusing to define herself with a negative. During the height of the �Red Scare� this brilliant Russian immigrant testified for the House Un-American Activities Committee as a friendly witness.

But I can not re-iterate this part of the story as well as Kelley Ross can, from http://www.friesian.com/rand.htm

"Another of Rand’s sins against the Left and still of current interest was her willingness to testify as a "friendly witness" in the 1947 hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) on Communist infiltration of Hollywood. Rand’s only complaint was that they didn’t let her testify enough. She was the only person at the hearings who had actually lived under Communism, indeed been a witness to the entire Russian Revolution and Civil War, and she wanted to explain how anti-capitalist messages were included in many mainstream Hollywood movies. It may not be remembered much now that Rand got her real start in America working in Hollywood, living for many years in the San Fernando Valley. �

While Communism failed and fell in the real world, in the make-believe world of Hollywood Communist propaganda succeeded quite nicely, and many people still believe that the HUAC investigations were "witch hunts" for non-existent enemies or well-meaning idealists. Well meaning idealists there were, but they were not the targets of the Committee. Instead, they became the "useful idiot" liberals, in Lenin’s words, who whitewashed all the real Communists and their activities. The useful idiots are still at it, though since the 60’s many of them, as anti-anti-Communists, have been all but indistinguishable from their Communist friends in Vietnam, Cuba, and Nicaragua. As it turned out, the easiest way to find the Communists in Hollywood was just to subpoena all the suspects. Almost everyone who then refused to testify or took the Fifth Amendment, it happened, actually were Party members (acting on Party orders) or fellow travelers, as we know now from many sources, including the Soviet archives that also reveal the Soviet funding and direction of the Communist Party USA and its activities in Hollywood. These were not idealists but willing agents of tyranny, murder, and crimes against humanity. Rand would have no more patience now with leftists whining about "McCarthyism" than she did in 1947 with the lying and dissimulating agents of the living mass murderer Josef Stalin."

You can read Rand’s HUAC testimony here -
http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/texts/huac.htm

Given the massive amount of murders committed by Communist nations, their typical political tendency to undermine intellectually non-communist nations (the first phase of the typical plan, the last of which being targeted executions of intellectuals in opposition to them) and the fact that most of these people actually were communist spies, it is incredibly disingenuous to deride McCarthy and HUAC in the manner that is so common today. 

Perhaps in my assessment of communism is an instance where my thinking is much more black and white than is typically espoused today, with communism viewed with much more forgiveness and diminished moral condemnation.  I can certainly understand what might drive individuals to communism, especially in the ratty shit-holes and murderously oppressive right wing nationalist nations that spawned communism in many cases; even if it was with a lot of Soviet help.  However in every case those far left governments killed many more then even the worst of the far right governments. While I certainly understand and empathize with the struggles an individual must face in a situation like that, I have absolutely no tolerance for those who simply want to make slaves out of every free man on earth.

In one sad case often cited as part of the �Red Scare� Physicists and head of the Manhattan Project Robert J Oppenheimer was accused of being a communist spy and some former members of his team, such as Edward Teller, testified against him.  Oppenheimer was a very sad victim in this and I am a great admirer of him and, in fact, Edward Teller as well.  The accusations and subsequent loss of security clearance shocked the scientific community and often made the accusers outcasts.  Teller, a Hungarian immigrant of Jewish descent, fled the communist revolutions in Hungary, and consequently developed a deep disdain for communism and fascism.  Testifying against Oppenheimer made him an outcast in much of the scientific community but in the light of his history it was more than understandable.  And it remains that in all of this there was indeed a spy at the Manhattan Project in the form of Klaus Fuchs, who handed over the plans for an atomic bomb to Henry Gold, who then handed them to the Rosenberg’s.  Many people claim that the information provided by Fuchs was vital in the Soviet’s achievement of a nuclear bomb, although some claim it was of little use.

I suspect from discussions of communism I have had that to many people black and what thinking equates with absolutist assessments of things, like my consideration of communism as evil or wrong, while others might search through all of it for some good.  But it is fallacious to assert that in all things or people there is some good, because it simultaneously asserts that in all people there must be some bad, and consequently that no matter how hard one tries to be good they could never attain that, and no matter how evil someone or something is, like Stalin, Mao, Hitler, or communism, it has some good in it.  I have no doubt that Stalin was probably nice to his dog, and that a few peasants were helped out by communism, but the overwhelming majority of horrific pain and suffering that communism caused could never even remotely be blemished by whatever miniscule good that came from it.

Many people strive to find value in divergent ideas and try to examine them from every possible angle, perspective, and scale, but to any value system based on the life of an individual, communism can have *no value* whatsoever.  Communism is the absolute logical extension of anti-life, anti-human, anti-mind, anti-individual, and anti-progress.  My love of books would have gotten me immediately purged, hung, smashed, or sent off to a gulag in very nearly every single communist nation.  Simply having books *at all* was a death sentence to many people in Cambodia and in China.  My love of ideas, and of self expression, would have gotten me, and probably my family, rapidly killed in these countries.  If this is not a living objective embodiment, of evil where *thinking* is a crime punishable by death, *then what is?*

[Tan Samay’s] pupils hanged him. A noose was passed around his neck; then the rope was passed over the branch of a tree. Half a dozen children between eight and ten years old held the loose end of the rope, pulling it sharply three or four times, dropping it in between. All the while they were shouting, "Unfit teacher! Unfit teacher!" until Tan Samay was dead. The worst was that the children took obvious pleasure in killing.
—-A Khmer Rouge execution � From R.J. Rummel�s �Power Kills� site

In the case of communism, gray or non-linear thinking seems to be a desire to avoid making moral judgments.  When we consider again Nazism, there is no question about it�s moral stature.  Can the same people that say they can find some good in communism legitimately say that can find no good in Nazism?  Having read a great book on Hitler�s rise to power I can understand how individuals in pre-Nazi Germany could have felt oppressed and overburdened by the allies of WWI, and how these people who just wanted to have a decent life for themselves could end up promulgating on of the most murderous regimes in history.  I also understand how with only minor changes our modern professors �non partisan� lectures on the cold war would read just like modern neo-nazi propaganda blaming the push of Germany into war on a hyper vigilant anti-German Europe and the Jews.  It�s all context, and from the perspective of the German people leading up to 1935 it was not their fault!  But they could not have done that without deliberately avoiding passing moral judgments on their own system, without deliberately dehumanizing their victims or opponents, or avoiding at all possible costs making moral assessments.  There is no possible way a German citizen could have honestly morally defended Nazi policies so the only way for this rise to power to occur was to abdicate moral absolutism to vagueness, moral relativism, and evasion.  The same is absolutely true of communism, which abdicates life, mind, and self to the collective and the state. 

In cases where it is a life and death issue, one *must* pass moral judgment, moral indifference or agnosticism rewards immorality, just as absolute pacifism actually rewards violent and oppressive regimes by easily succumbing to their initiations of force.  Pacifism in moral condemnation rewards murderous brutality.  It is depraved indifference.
 
It�s always good to be vigilantly skeptical of any kind of dichotomous us vs. them thinking.  The vast majority of it is baseless and arbitrary.  But just because right and wrong / good and evil / and us vs. them has been hijacked by every ethnicity, nationality, special interest group, and collectivist ideal, does not mean that the concepts of right and wrong and us vs. them are invalid.  There are certain fundamentals of human standards by which every culture and individual action must be judged against, and that is the respect of life and individuality.  Non judgment is the height of moral relativism and means anything goes, whether it is simply a disingenuous white lie or an attempted genocide. 

Yes, most forms of partisanship are worthless and arbitrary, but that does not mean that holding oneself and others to certain moral ideals and ethical basics is wrong  Many African cultures mutilate young women�s genitalia is this right or wrong?  Many Islamic cultures stone adulterers to death, is this right or wrong?  Many traditionalist Chinese cultures used to bind young women�s feet was this right or wrong?  Many western Christian nations still mutilate male genitalia at birth is this right or wrong? 

Witness the indifference today to the brutal oppression of Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea.  Witness the callous disregard for genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda and today in Darfur.  Witness the left, our alleged defenders of human rights, and their complete and utter indifference in most cases, or worst, opposition to, the removal of one of the most brutal dictators of our time who slaughtered gay men and women and their families, executed dissidents and their families, and held the world hostage.  Witness that same callous disregard for the deaths and flagrant violation of every human right that permeates the dictatorships and theocracies in the Arab sea of tyranny in the middle east, and that same indifference to the tens of millions of deaths from Malaria the modern environmentalism movement has spawned by banning DDT.  These are the fruits of moral relativism.

There are only two ways to completely end partisanship; to abolish all ideals, ethics, and moral codes which generate an us for them attitude (the liberal multi-culturalist moral relativist approach)  or to abolish one side of the us vs. them conflict.  In all these scenarios, the smallest minority are the defenders of the fundamental rights of sentient beings, the advocates of objective reality, those who base ethics on life.  To deny any concept of moral foundation is to side indirectly and implicitly with the most brutal and murderous side of the us vs. them conflict.  One may ask �when does this partisanship stop, when everyone embraces one ideology?�  Yes, it stops when they all embrace fundamental rights, when all the other ideologies stop murdering and enslaving people who disagree with them.  When they all accept, as a component and a foundation of their ideology, a respect for individualism, for life, and for freedom.  Either that or it stops when every one accepts any murder, oppression, slavery or assault as just someone else�s culture and equally valid.  Where do you stand? 

I can understand people�s hesitance to make any absolute moral declarations, but just because vile anti-individualist brain washing cults hi jack absolutism morality with their own morally arbitrary pronouncements doesn�t mean that a moral foundation in objective reality, life, and individuality is wrong, or that morally condemning those ideologies opposed to those things is wrong. 

We are rarely hesitant in defending our right to self, individuality, and life, but are easily dismissive of everyone else�s to such an extent that we are hesitant to morally condemn the most anti-self, anti-individuality, and anti-life ideology ever existed on this planet.  I have no doubt that nearly every single one of those 170 million people loved their lives much as I do mine, and you do yours, where is our compassion for them?  Our vigilant defense of our own self and individuality is nothing less than an extremely dogmatic ideological stand, and in this we are the essence of black and white.  We must presume axiomatically that everyone deserves that same amount of respect and thus rightly and justly morally condemn those ideologies which murder, enslave, and imprison people for nothing more than living, breathing, and thinking.

I am a strong advocate of productive value affirming behavior.  I frequently have discussions with Objectivists and Extropians holding them accountable to their own professed highest value, that of their own life.  Most professed life loving secularists are content to sit idly by while they age, wither, and eventually die.  They deride cryogenic preservation, life extension technologies, and often justify their attitudes with appeals to wildly dystopian futures sprung right from the caves of revelations. 

Often, *death* itself, is cited as a source of value, e.g. Death gives life meaning, death is the end to a beginning, death is the closing of the story, death lets us have our chance and clear the way for later life, death is an escape from suffering and living, etc.  Death is none of these things, it is the cessation of all existence, it is the end of all values.  Dying is not selfish as it is the complete destruction of the self. 

These people who attach a value to death are what I tend to call religious deathists and just as many secularists share this view as do professed religionists.  But when mans productive and inventive forces are fully unleashed, death from aging and disease will likely be completely conquered.  These religious deathists will still cling to their views and will grow old and die, but their children will be raised in a society which accepts indefinite life spans.  The ones who had the integrity, rationality, and proper internal conviction will live to be the first generation enjoying indefinite life spans.  It is hard to guess when this will happen, it could be this generation or the next or 10 generations down the line.  But we can all help to bring this about faster.

To those objectivists out there, who profess to hold their own life as their highest value, why are you not acting in accordance with your values?  You should be acting rationally and productively to fight your worst enemy, which will kill you, your loved ones, and end everything and everyone you care about.  Most people balk at this call to arms, as it demands unwavering integrity and complete adherence to your fundamental convictions evasion is much easier.  Escapism is simpler.  Blank out to get through the rough times.  Objectivists, who profess that all the great advances of humanity sprung forth from the minds of individuals, that profess that a man of rationality with conviction and integrity is a virtually unstoppable creative and inventive force, that profess that one man even if the face of the greatest and most overwhelming odds can accomplish the most monumental feats are the first to bow down, give up, apologize for their own existence, and excuse themselves from ever needing to do anything productive to fight aging, disease, and death.

Now no one is demanding that we drop everything we are doing and make studying senescence the only thing we live, breathe, and think, but first and foremost we all need to drop the philosophical acceptance of death; all else fallows naturally.  Death is not OK, it never is, never has been, and never will be.  It is not an escape or a relief, we are not resting or in a better place this is all hogwash people adopt in order to not have to come to fully face the inevitability of their own demise.  But just like a drunkard who convinces himself that its just who he is and thus absolves himself of the responsibility of ever trying to change himself, the religious escapist completely absolve themselves of the compulsion and obligation to their own deepest values to ever do anything about death, and it is why this world of 3 billion profoundly intelligent beings can not muster up enough motivation or dedication to defeat even a modicum of the diseases which kill them. 

It would be great if all people, everywhere, identified their most fundamental values and started acting in rational accordance with them.  If all people everywhere (who were not just merely struggling to survive under whatever murderous brute happens to rule them) turned off the TV, the video games, the fashion and gossip mags and their IPODs, and started studying, learning, and thinking.  If all people begin to actualize their potential, to at first believe they are capable of great things, and then realize they in fact were able, with dedication and perseverance to actually achieve many of these great things.  But in lieu of that, first and foremost discard your philosophical acceptance of death.  It is not OK.  Secondly, take a look at any of the numerous charities dedicated to bringing about this world, and think about dedicating even just your idle CPU cycles to the Protein Folding at home project, or even better some time or money to any of the various organizations dedicated to saving your life and the life of everyone you love.     

Donating Idle CPU Cycles (full list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects)

Protein folding @ home - http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/
Proteins are biology’s workhorses…The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.  Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

Orbit@Home - http://orbit.psi.edu/
is a project which uses the Orbit Reconstruction, Simulation and Analysis framework to monitor the impact hazard posed by Near-Earth objects

SETI@home - http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/
SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data

Fight AIDS @ Home - http://fightaidsathome.scripps.edu/index.html
captures the otherwise wasted cycles of your computer and applies them to model the evolution of drug resistance and to design drugs necessary to fight AIDS 

United Devices Cancer Research Project -   http://www.grid.org/projects/cancer/
The United Devices Cancer Research Project is asking you to volunteer your PC to help process molecular research being conducted by the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford in England and the National Foundation for Cancer Research

Charities / Institutions

Lifeboat Foundation www.lifeboat.com

- Future Studies -
Foundation for the Future http://www.futurefoundation.org/

Foresight Institute http://www.foresight.org

- Life Extension -
Methuselah Mouse Prize http://www.mprize.org
Immortality Institute http://www.imminst.org

- Intelligence Increase -
Singularity Institute http://www.singinst.org

- Other -
WTA http://transhumanism.org
Extropy Institute http://extropy.org
TV 2005 Scholarship Fund http://www.transhumanismo.org/tv05/registration.htm

- Social Sciences -
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology http://CRNano.org/support.htm
Grameen Foundation USA http://www.gfusa.org/microcredit.html

- Space Migration -
National Space Society http://www.nss.org
Planetary Society http://www.planetary.org/home/
Mars Society http://chapters.marssociety.org/
Saturn V Restoration http://www.saturnrestoration.org/donate/index.html

Prizes
Elevator 2010 http://www.elevator2010.org/site/donate.html
X-Prize Foundation http://www.xprize.org

[List taken from an Extropy list post]

Many people consider Uranium and subsequently nuclear power to be worse, over all, than coal or other fossil fuels.  They claim, for various reasons, including mining, refining, storage, and disposal; that nuclear power is worse than coal, but the reality is that in all areas Uranium and Fission power far outshine coal power.

Lets take a quick look at the Energy Density of these sources of energy to start with.

Coal - ~6,150 kilowatt-hours (kWh)/ton
 Uranium – 2,000,000,000 kWh/ton
 Uranium, Fast Breeder reactors (up to 100x more) - 200,000,000,000 kWh/ton

Energy density is measured in power divided by mass of a material, so when we say that Coal has 6,150 Kilowatt-hours per ton, it means that one ton of coal will produce 6,150 kW for one hour, or 615 kW for 10 hours, etc.  To compare this with a typical piece of home equipment, say a television, a television might consume 500W of power when in operation, if run for one hour that would be 500 watt – hours.  Two televisions would then be 1 kilowatt – hour.  So one ton of coal would power 12,300 televisions for 1 hour.  Current energy costs (which you can read in your electric bill) hover around 10 – 15 cents per kilowatt hour.

As noted above, Uranium, per ton, produces more than 300,000 times the amount of energy that coal does.  What, exactly, makes a material with 300,000  times as much energy as coal ‘uneconomical’ then?  Is uranium 300,000 times more difficult to mine and obtain? 300,000 times more expensive to dispose of? Will it kill 300,000 times more people?  The answer, of course, even combining all the complexities of nuclear power, is a resounding NO.  Lets compare Uranium Fission, which generates about 15% of US power, with Coal generated power, which generated 80% of the US’s power.

Claim: Coal poses almost  no hazard for human health, except when swallowed or hit on the head and therefore doesn’t have to be kept safe and secured at all times.-
Certainly NOT true, the atmospheric irritants emitted by the combustion of coal and their effects include:
 - Sulphur dioxide (SO2) - respiratory disorders, impaired breathing
 - Nitrous oxide (NOx) - respiratory disorders, infections, pulmonary diseases
 - Carbon monoxide (CO) - fatal angina, various other effects
 - Ozone (O3) - respiratory disorders, impaired breathing, asthma, edema
 - Particulate matter (PM10) - various toxic particle (organic matter, carbon, mineral dusts, metal oxides and sulphates and nitrate salts) effects, main
 mortality factor due to fossil fuels
 - Toxic substances, heavy metals - specific substance effects

All of these combustion products of fossil fuels are estimated by the WHO in its 1997 report on sustainable development, to account for 6% of the total 50 million annual global deaths. That’s approximately 3 million deaths *every year* from atmospheric pollutants released from the combustion of fossil fuels.  These are real people dying painful deaths every year. 3 million. Outdoor air pollution in the U.S. due to particulate pollution alone was estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1997 to cause at least 20,000 premature deaths each year. 3rd world countries, many of which cook on wood on dung fired stoves, fare much worse, and are some of the places that would benefit most from cheap electricity generated by a full fledged global nuclear infrastructure.

Claim: Coal is not suitable for deadly weapons and therefore of no value for villains of any kind, including despotic dictators - 
True of course, coal has little intrinsic value to oppressive regimes, unlike Nuclear power which is a stepping stone to nuclear weapons.  If ’suitability for deadly weapons’ was the only consideration of what type of power source should be utilized, you could make a strong case against nuclear and for coal. However, other factors include a) cost b) number of people it kills every year d) monopolistic domination potentials etc. etc.  Because Uranium fission holds 300,000 times as much energy, it is far more cost effective, makes electricity available to more people at less of a cost, and consequently directly raises their standards of living.  Coal kills many people per year, not only in frequent large accidents (which happen most often in mines) but slowly and spread out over the globe. Coal and oil, because they are present in small areas in dense qualities and require little technology to utilize, easily facilitate the rise to power of oppressive regimes.  Most of the worlds Oil is in the middle east, where the exports have financially supported the oppressive rulers of that region, every single one of which is a brutal oppressive dictatorship or theocracy.  Luckily for many people the worlds largest coal deposits happened to be in the lands that were free-er earlier on, in the UK and in the US.  The US alone has a coal field that is the size of the UK.  However the vast coal fields in Europe fueled the Nazi war machine.  So while it is more difficult for an individual to utilize any aspect of coal as a weapon, it’s extraordinarily easy for governments to do so, and history shows us that governments have killed far more people than individual terrorists and even wars have

Claim: The by-products of coal can be put back without any hazard for the biosphere. Coal ashes are not dangerous and does not need to be kept off our biosphere for thousands of years.-
Again, certainly NOT true.  Billions of tons of harmful chemicals and radioactive uranium are dumped into the air during the process of burning coal, even in highly advanced modern coal burning plants. Additionally other heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, lead, mercury, nickel and vanadium are present in coal ash. In fact living near a coal burning power plant, even a modern hi tech one, is far more hazardous to your health than living near a nuclear power plant.  The background radiation levels are always higher around coal plants than nuclear plants specifically because coal plants are allowed to dump their waste into the air, which, again, includes radioactive uranium ash.  In fact a typical coal plant actually chemically burns and releases into the air more Uranium than is used in a comparable nuclear reactor, as fuel.  Indeed, you could put a nuclear reactor on the smokestack of a coal plant and generate more power than the was generated from the coal.  Remember, one pound of Uranium generates as much energy as more than 300,000 pounds of coal.

Claim: Even a very large malfunction in a coal fired power plant could not devastate a large area, cost millions of lives and billions of Euros (please read about the effects of Tschernobyl ‘86 in FSU and Europe).
Anti Nuclear advocates love to point to Chernobyl as an example of the dangers posed by nuclear reactors.  However Chernobyl killed 31 people when a pressurized steam channel blew (which was not even a chemical explosion, let alone a nuclear one) and released approx 6% of the radioactive contents of the reactor. The accident resulted in 31 short term deaths, with 28 due to extremely high radiation exposures. Additionally, some 200,000 clean up workers received average exposures of twice the yearly permitted, and a few thousand more received ten times the permitted yearly doses. Of the 116,000 nearby residents evacuated, 95% received less than the average of the fist group of cleanup workers. A remaining 400,000 received significantly less than that. For the 1,116,000 total affected out of the workers, evacuees, and nearby residents, the predicted long term radiation induced cancer deaths and normally non-fatal thyroid cancers are projected to be some 3,500. Mostly later in life. A terrible toll of course, but this is about how many people are killed from the combustion products of fossil fuels every 12 hours.  Most of these deaths from the Chernobyl incident could have been avoided had the Soviet government acknowledged the nuclear nature of the accident and administered the iodide pills it had all ready stockpiled for just such an incident. Additionally, this reactor would have never been built, licensed, or operated in any country that actually cared about its people, unlike the Soviet Union, which had a long track record of sacrificing millions for ‘the good of the state’.

In addition to the estimated 3 million annual deaths from atmospheric pollutants many people are killed from coal mining explosions, natural gas explosions, and obviously the many wars fought over and related to Oil, which in fact runs most of the world.  Here are some of the worst coal mining disasters.

-Liaoning mine disaster, Fuxin, People’s Republic of China (February 14, 2005), 210 reported killed.
-Sunshine Mine disaster, Kellogg, Idaho, United States, 91 killed (May, 1972)
-Buffalo Creek flood, Logan County, West Virginia, United States, 125 killed (February 26, 1972)
-Mina de Barroterán Coal Mine disaster, Coahuila, Mexico, (March 31, 1969), 176 died. Mexico’s second worst coal mine disaster.
-Luisenthal Mine disaster (near Völklingen), Germany (February 7, 1962), 299 killed
-Marcinelle, Belgium, 262 killed (August 8, 1956)
-Gresford, Wrexham, 266 killed (September 1934)
-Hillcrest mine disaster, Hillcrest, Alberta, Canada, 189 killed (June 19, 1914). Canada’s worst mine disaster
-Courrières mine disaster, Courrière, France, 1099 killed (March, 1906)
-Hanna, Wyoming, United States, Union Pacific Coal Company, Mine No. 1, 234 killed (June 30, 1903)

See a full list at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters#Mining_disasters

Consider also

-Dam failures and overtopping have caused thousands of deaths and massive disruption in social and economic activities with the displacement of entire towns - the Varont dam overtopping in Italy and dam failures in Gujarat and Orissa in India are three such examples, each with several thousand fatalities.
-Explosions and major fires in the oil and gas industry have involved both occupational and public fatalities and injuries. A pipeline gas leak  explosion in the Urals involved 500 fatalities.
-There are estimated to be a few hundred CO related deaths every year in the US due to faulty or inefficient fossil fuel burning home heating systems.

At this point, one might suggest that while nuclear energy production is relatively the safest form of energy, the weapons made from nuclear power have killed 100,000’s of thousands.  True enough, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts killed an estimated 400,000 people.  But in considering these deaths as a consequence of nuclear power, we must all consider the deaths that came from the utilization of fossil fuels.  How many people have been killed by  conventional explosives in all wars in all of history?  How many have been killed by the military industrial segments of brutal nations that run on these fossil fuels? The Japanese invasion of Manchuria, very obviously powered by Oil, Coal, and gunpowder, saw 400,000 people killed in the infamous "Rape of Nanking" alone.  In fact, all throughout history we have seen a continual rise in the number of people killed in war, both as an absolute and as a percentage of the population, until 1945, when the number plummeted.  Even after the use of nuclear weapons in war, and many subsequent brutal wars, the number of war dead still continues to fall.  Fortunately, Nuclear weapons have had the effect of taming wars so far.

Claim: The byproducts of Nuclear power can be used for Terrorism
Indeed, and many many things can be used for Terrorism.  Oil Wells, for instance, can be set ablaze, burning self sufficiently for months or years with devastating environmental effects.  A typical Liquefied Natural Gas tanker has the explosive capacity of a small nuclear bomb.  How difficult does one really think it would be to detonate a single hulled tanker full of LNG which contains hundreds of thousands of tons of fuel?  How many of these tankers sit unguarded in ports all over the world? Which is more rational to protect against terrorism, a few well designed and guarded nuclear power plants, which can even be moved underground, or tens of thousands of gigantic bombs in the form of gas lines, gas tanks, tankers, and fuel storage facilities? Nuclear plants generate so much power that an entire nations energy supply can come from a few dozen of them set in areas far from dense population centers and well guarded.

Consider that unused, uranium still sits in the earth undergoing fission anyway, producing radioactive elements and heat, which is part of what warms the internal parts of the earth.  In fact, a host of still unexplained observations about the Earth has led some physicists to suggest the core of the earth is actually a giant nuclear fission reactor.  The theory was a cover feature in Discover magazine in August 2002.  http://www.discover.com/issues/aug-02/cover/

Additionally, many technological developments have occurred in nuclear reactor design, including ceramic coated uranium pellets, which keep the uranium spaced out far enough to generate a controlled amount of eat and which can not be melted by the temperatures produced, completely negating the need for any active cooling system and making ‘meltdowns’ a physical impossibility.  Further, other types of reactors, called "Fast Breeder" reactors can create more fuel from the waste products of the nuclear fission reaction, so much so that some physicists estimate that up to 100 times as much energy can be generated, meaning entire nations could be run on a handful of nuclear power plants.

Coal generated power kills thousands of people every year directly, and millions of people indirectly.  It is far more dangerous, hazardous, and environmentally devastating than Nuclear power; generating essentially more than 300,000 times as much pollution as a comparable amount of energy generated from Nuclear sources does.  If you are concerned about global warming from man made carbon dioxide, then Nuclear power is the only way to generate power without generating green houses gases.  This is why world renowned environmentalist James Lovelock cites Nuclear power as one of the key solutions to global warming and why Greenpeace founding member Patrick Moore now says he was wrong about opposing nuclear power for the past 30 years and is now a nuclear power advocate.

Compared with every other form of wide scale energy production (hydro-electric, oil, coal) Nuclear is by far the safest form of energy creation yet used by man.  So where is our Nuclear infrastructure?  If Nuclear power makes so much more sense, why does it not supply the majority of our energy?  Instead we are dependant on Coal and imported Oil supplies from brutally oppressive and murderous terrorist sponsoring regimes all over the world, who sustain their oppression only from their global oil proceeds.  The reason is that an irrational and unscientific fear of Nuclear power was promulgated by a handful of influential public figures.  While a healthy scientific assessment of things is always valid, this has gone overboard and has, literally, scared millions of people to death about nuclear power.  We have been scared so much with the unscientific claims of potential deaths caused by nuclear power that it has been illegal to build any new nuclear power plants in this nation since the Carter administration, all the while millions of people worldwide choke on the soot, heavy metals, and radioactive ash pumped into the air because of the scare mongering of unscientific environmentalists, who while hyping up invalid fears of the environmental impact of nuclear plants are ignoring the millions of deaths caused by the inhalation from the combustion products of fossil fuels.

We need to wake up and smell the collective radioactive ash.  Nuclear power is safe, reliable, and will free the western world from the tyrannical noose of the murderously brutal middle east.  A few well guarded breeder reactor plants could provide a majority of the worlds power. These same plants could electrolyze water to provide clean drinking water and hydrogen as fuel for a ‘hydrogen economy’ or, at least, create synthetic fuels through sabatier cells and use existing hydrocarbon infrastructures but not contribute to greenhouse gas increases, as the sabatier cell needs CO2 from the atmosphere.

Implementing such at system until fusion becomes viable is the only real, viable, practical method of maintaining exceptional standards of living and a healthy environment.  Reducing the global standard of living is not an option, as many millions in third world countries need energy, and lots of it, to get out of poverty. Even small increases in the costs of energy will have devastating impacts on the poverty stricken 3rd world which depends on cheap food generated from the energy intensive agricultural industry to survive  The ideological intellectually dishonest endorsement of fossil fuels over nuclear power leads to millions of deaths every year, continues to perpetuate global instability through propping up murderous regimes, and destroys the environment through a flagrant un scientific hysteria.  Nuclear power is clean, safe, and cheap.