Arizona On My Mind

So, is Arizona really a state? Or are they a 5 million strong sketch-comedy group? I ask because this new anti-immigration law of theirs just begs to not be taken seriously. It would actually be hilarious if it wasn't a real thing. Read this quotation I lifted from the Boston Globe's website and drink in the comedy, "The measure requires authorities to question people about their immigration status — and allows authorities to arrest them without a warrant — if law enforcement officials have a 'reasonable suspicion' that they are in the country illegally. It also requires immigrants to carry proof of legal status at all times or risk being arrested, jailed, and fined".

Haha, hysterical, right? I didn't think it would be possible to cram so many violations of the 4th Amendment into so few sentences. For the benefit of people from Arizona, here's the actual text of the 4th Amendment to avoid confusion, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized".

So, this new law gets off to a bad start right away, requiring authorities to question people about their immigration status. That's an unreasonable seizure right there. What do the authorities do if the person refuses to answer questions about their immigration status? Are they free to go? Then what's the point? If the new law just requires authorities to ask while leaving people free to answer "fuck you" if they feel like it, why bother wasting the paper to print it on? If, on the other hand, the police can restrain you from leaving until you answer the questions, or haul you off to the precinct or jail until you decide to answer, then you've been seized under the definition of the 4th amendment, which requires probable cause under that same 4th amendment. And probable cause doesn't mean "they're brown and they were speaking Spanish".

Next, allowing people to be arrested without a warrant... wow. You can be arrested without a warrant, generally speaking, in only two instances. A police officer actually witnesses you committing a misdemeanor, or the officer has probable cause to suspect you've committed a felony. Again, probable cause doesn't mean you're wearing a T-shirt with the Mexican flag on it. Or it's not supposed to anyway.

Then the capper, requiring LEGAL immigrants to carry around their proof of legal status at all times or be arrested and go to jail, with a hefty fine on top. How do the police know whether or not you're carrying around your proof like you're supposed to? Obviously, they'll have to stop you and ask you to drag it out for inspection. That's a search, people. The cops don't have the right to stop you on the street and demand to see your high school diploma, your credit score, or your copy of Sammy Davis Jr.'s biography; but now it's okay for them to insist you show them your birth certificate or naturalization papers or go to jail?

Look, if the cops come across you while you're fishing on public property, it's reasonable for them to ask to see your fishing license, because if you don't have one you're committing a crime. It's reasonable for them to ask to see your drivers license if they stop you while you're driving on the public roads, because, again, if you don't have one what you're doing is illegal. But if you're just walking down the street, breathing in and out, thinking about what to have for lunch, then you have the right to be secure in your person, papers, and effects from unreasonable search and seizure. In the first two examples up there, you applied for a license and part of the application was agreeing to carry the license with you and allow the authorities to inspect it on request. In the last example, well, not so much.

If you own property with a pond on it, you can fish in that pond all you want. If the cops ask to see your fishing license, tell them to fuck their mothers. When my brother's family and I went to visit our uncle, we let my 7 year old niece drive a golf cart around the golf course he's a member of, because it's private property and it's not the police or the government's damn business if we let her drive a golf cart there. She doesn't need a driver's license to drive on private roads on private property. You don't need a breathing license to walk around and consume oxygen. Not even if you're brown, speak Spanish, wear a sombrero, say "ay-yi-yi" a lot, etc. It is not reasonable for the cops to walk around assuming people are not citizens. There's no such thing as probable cause in this case, or at least I can't think of a real life situation in which a reasonable person could say that they have probable cause to suspect another person is not a legal immigrant.

When that law talks about "reasonable suspicion" (warning flags should go up right there, by the way), what it's really talking about is racism. Gov. Brewer said during the ceremony in which she signed the bill into law that "We must enforce the law evenly, and without regard to skin color, accent, or social status. We must prove the alarmists and the cynics wrong." She has also stated that she would not tolerate racial profiling. Well, that's certainly a load off my mind. I was worried that this law was a laughably transparent excuse to harass anyone that looked like they might be an illegal immigrant, but the governor's statements have reassured me that they will only be questioning people that their tricorders detect to be in the country illegally. Seriously? Did she seriously say that bullshit with a straight face? Is she making fun of us?

It is complete nonsense to assert that anybody can be trained to tell legal immigrants from illegal immigrants. Or even illegal immigrants from natural born citizens who happen to have a latino background and speak Spanish in their daily lives. Or really tan people going to a costume party. If you could, it wouldn't be necessary to pass a law allowing you to violate their 4th amendment rights to make sure. It is very, very obvious to anyone that isn't either retarded or gleefully winking at the racism shown here that what this law REALLY says is "If you look hispanic, it is open season. Papers please."

Obviously Arizona and the other border states have genuine problems resulting from immigration. Arizona in particular is transitioning from a low population state that's all white people to at least a moderate population state with a multi-ethnic composition. This transition looks to be getting ugly. But, ultimately, this law and other like it are dead ends. What happens if this law is upheld in the inevitable legal challenge (it won't be)? Are they going to systematically use this law to track down and deport every illegal immigrant in the state? That's supposed to be about 460,000 people. Sounds expensive to me. And won't they just slip back across the border? I mean they did it at least once already... Maybe put them all in prison? Taking 460,000 low wage workers and putting them in prison (paying for their room and board) for however long... sounds really, really expensive. Why not just take the money you'd use to do that and spend it on education and health care, since the major complaint seems to be that illegals are taking all the resources in those areas? Since Arizona's population is over 5 million it seems unlikely that a group less than 10% that big could be taking ALL the education and health care, but whatevs. Oh and spend some on police if drug cartels (NOT illegal immigrants, by the way) are murdering people.

Problems need solutions, not scapegoats. If you don't want to pony up the money it takes to solve your problems, fine. Start screaming to the federal government to pick up your slack and pass a bunch of racist, xenophobic laws to fill the rest of your time. It just seems strange that the same people that want the federal government to butt out of their state's affairs when they don't agree with federal policy are the very first to run screaming to that same federal government when they want brown people shot on sight if they're trying to cross the border. Or when they want a series of castles connected by walls built along the border. Or when they're huckstering for a national ID card so they can tell who's a proud american and who's a godless commie. A godless, immigrant commie. Wouldn't all of that stuff significantly increase the size and powers of the federal government?

The disconnect in their heads always amazes me. There's always unlimited money for shooting brown people, the deficit is never a problem when it comes to rounding up support for shooting brown people appropiations bills. You can't imagine a big enough government to suit them when it's time to shoot the brown people. But when it comes time to pay for anything that might improve peoples' lives, like a national health care system, suddenly we have to watch every penny, the federal budget deficit is the greatest threat to our way of life that has ever existed and we need to shrink government small enough that it will never be able to tyrannize us with free flu shots or yearly checkups. Is it ignorance? Hypocrisy? A simple hatred of brown people? I honestly don't know.

But the benefit of the doubt over here is starting to wear very, very thin.

Nuclear Power

Listening to the radio the other day (this will probably be the first of several "Listening to the Radio the Other Day" posts if I ever get around to writing them), technically it was probably a week ago or longer at this point, and some panel on some show was discussing Prez Obama's energy bill. Which, as the savvier of you may have picked up from the title of this post, includes several provisions to increase the number of nuclear power plants in the US. This really makes no sense to me at all. And the more I read, the less sense it makes. And if it started out making no sense at all... Yeah. It kind of is that bad.

Leaving aside the various environmental/public health objections to nuclear power plants, for now anyway, these plants make very little sense economically. Apparently one of the reasons nuclear power is more prevalent in other countries, for instance France, is that their utility companies are a lot more massive than ours are. So, they can undertake 10 billion dollar construction projects without really breaking too much of a sweat. For one of our utilities, that's a large chunk of their net worth, so they're reluctant to borrow the amounts necessary. Apparently, owing more than your company is worth makes it harder and more expensive to borrow any more money, should you need to. You read that right earlier, by the way, a nuclear power plant is a 10 billion dollar investment. Which is freaking insane. 10 billion dollars!!!!??? But it gets better.

According to the discussion on the radio, the utilities think it would be awesome if the government guaranteed about 90% of the loans they need. So, for every 10 billion dollar nuclear plant out there, we'd be getting a bill for about 9 billion dollars. True, the money would presumably eventually be paid back. In theory. And really, we'd probably only get the bill in the first place if the project failed. Which, it turns out, most of them have in this country for the last 30 years or so. People just aren't keen to have nuclear plants in their back yards these days.

But let's consider the pro-nuclear argument for a few moments, forgetting the total absurdity of it for a bit and look at the upside. Yes, a nuclear plant costs 10 billion dollars, but you get a lot for that money. Typical nuclear plants that I've looked at seem to have two units with an installed capacity of about 1,000-3,000MW per unit. Nuclear plants are licensed to run for 60 years or so with proper maintenance and unlike solar or wind power plants they are up and running, producing electricity, for about 90% of that time. Not just during the day or while the wind blows. You can get similar, or even better results from much cheaper fossil fuel burning plants, but properly-run nuclear plants have no environmental impact and don't contribute to global warming. In addition, they are less expensive to run then fossil fuel plants as they require less fuel.

That's it, as far as I can determine. That's the entire case for nuclear power. It combines the generation capacity of a fossil fuel plant with the environmental friendliness of renewable energy plants, while still being incredibly fucking expensive. And the 10 billion dollars is only the beginning. Running a nuclear plant is a lot like running a fossil fuel plant, you still need fuel, you still need water for the turbines, cooling, etc. Over 60 years nuclear plants may prove to be as cost effective because the lower operating (fuel) costs eventually make up for the incredibly high initial investment. HOWEVER, we have finally arrived at the point where we have to acknowledge the 800 lb gorilla in the room - the radioactive waste generated by nuclear plants. All of the analysis of nuclear power cost-effectiveness and low environmental impact, by necessity, completely ignore this incredibly dangerous radioactive waste.

Now, I'm not trying to make nuclear waste a boogey-man or get hysterical about how it's a threat to all life on this planet or blah-blah-blah. I'm sure that eventually a practical solution will be developed to let us get rid of it. But we don't have one yet, and that solution won't be free. Which is my main problem with the idea of new nuclear power plants right now. Every analysis of comparative energy costs I'm aware of basically ignores nuclear waste. For some reason it is somebody else's problem. Storing it is not free, transporting it is not free; when we eventually figure out a way to get rid of it, that won't be free either. Yet everybody apparently assumes that this stuff is just going to vanish on its own, for free, at some point. Now, a little speculation, the government guarantees a 10 billion loan for the poor little electrical utility, for free - no interest. Then the government eventually takes charge of all the waste generated by that plant, for free - no charge. Then when gravity slingshots are developed capable of hurling shit into the sun, the government oversees the design construction and operation of these slingshots and the disposal of all nuclear waste via this method, all for free. I'm about 99.99% positive it won't be the utilities paying for all this shit. Nuclear waste is somebody else's problem, after all. They just make it.

Well, it won't be free. It will all have to be paid for somehow. I'm not against the government spending money. I'm not against the government spending a shitload of money. I wish they'd spend it on me instead of big corporations all the time, but that's another argument. I am against the government spending money just for the opportunity to spend even more money later, just so some electrical company can make money now. Especially when we could spend that money on something else and get the same result, without all the radioactive waste that's just piling up in various rural areas all over the country that we have no plan for. Gravity slingshots don't exist yet, you'll recall. Right now our "plan" is to just dump it all in a big hole somewhere. Which would probably work if we did it right, but, predictably, no one wants to host the big hole anywhere near where they live.

Suppose, just suppose now, that instead of spending 10 billion dollars on a nuclear power plant, or 60 billion dollars on 6 nuclear plants (this is the number of loan guarantee packages apparently included in this energy bill), what if we spent that money on renewable energy power plants? We could build a lot more than 6, let me tell you. And while it might take 10 solar plants to equal one nuclear plant right now, guess what? With 10 billion dollars you could build between 10-20 solar plants, depending on exactly how you went about it. Or about 10 wind farms as big as the biggest there is right now. And it would still be electrical utilities making the money. Don't worry about that. You will not make a dime from this. Big corporations will still be the ones making the profits, so relax. It's not like money from renewable energy power plants goes straight into Cuba's bank account or something.

Granted, solar and wind have their own problems. They take up more room than nuclear plants, that biggest wind farm I mentioned is several times the size of Manhattan. With our current technology, they generate less electricity, plant for plant, then nuclear plants. We can't just flip a switch and get power the way we can with nuclear plants, which means we'd have to upgrade the electrical grid to store power during surplus periods for use during peak usage times.

But every wind and solar plant (or wave power plant, or geothermal, or biomass, or whatever) has several advantages in terms of economics and environmental concerns, that nuclear and fossil plants just can't match. Firstly, building one of these plants is cheap, at least comparatively speaking. And once they're built they are hands down the cheapest to run. No fuel costs, vastly less water for solar plants and NO water for wind farms. Basically you just watch the things run, and fix something when it breaks. And when something does break in a solar plant or wind farm it doesn't have as much impact as in a traditional power plant. When you have to shut down a fossil plant or nuclear plant for any kind of maintenance, it is shut down. Producing zero, or else vastly reduced, electricity. If you have to take a wind turbine or two off line for repairs, big deal, all the rest are still working. Ditto if you get a couple of cracked mirrors in a solar plant. Oh, and they generate no pollution, no greenhouse gases and, hey check this out, no radioactive wastes that will be horribly dangerous to humans for thousands and thousands of years.

Anyway, my point is that it turns out that there is a ton of free electricity out there, just waiting for us to harness it. Why should we spend money on nuclear plants, and then MORE money cleaning up after the nuclear plants, when we could spend it on free electricity?