You gotta love truth in advertising.
If I were opposed to a new power station no matter how safe, clean, reliable, or necessary it were, no matter how much benefit it brought to a community, how could I chose a name for an organization that would communicate exactly that?
How, for that matter, could I get people to rally to my cause?
Could I make frightening insinuations without actually making any false accusations?
Could I put up a website introduced with a bunch of ominous questions, to encourage my readers to reach my own scary conclusions, absent any facts?
Could I come up with a name for my new organization that made it clear I planned to deal in fear-mongering rather than facts?
Could I tell people the site was run by anonymous concerned citizens (sounds friendly and credible enough) rather than use any names that people could associate with a history, bias, or performance?
Maybe none of these questions matter, really. Or maybe someone at Panic Calvert Cliffs.org would have some reasoned, rational, factual answers to these questions. I'm guessing those answers would put to rest any concerns you could have that any group of people would try to ban together in order to generate dialogue based on fear rather than information. No one would trade in fear and emotion when the factual information supported their cause, and then hope to be taken seriously on ... anything.
You think?
I do not doubt his/her/their sincerity. It is possible to be deeply, entirely sincere and still be mistaken. I know I have been so, in the past. But here in this blog you can see what I've had to say, because my name is attached to all my blog posts. As of this writing, you cannot see who might claim responsibility for the new organizaion named PANIC.
As most of the people of Southern Maryland already know, there is a simple response for this (as well as a good reason the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy outsold the Encyclopedia Galactica):
As most of the people of Southern Maryland already know, there is a simple response for this (as well as a good reason the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy outsold the Encyclopedia Galactica):
(but the rest of my advice is always, of course, check the accuracy of the information available to you, by independent sources, whenever possible)
Labels: electricity, energy, Nuclear Energy, nuclear power
Comments
I think that PANIC's first question - "Why is the cancer rate so high in Southern Maryland?" - has a rather simple, old fashioned answer. After all, Southern Maryland is still a tobacco growing region that includes a town named Marlboro! I travel through that region fairly regularly and drive past the tobacco barns and the trading houses. Fortunately, many of those are abandoned now, but the lingering effects of that cash crop will remain for quite some time.
The cancer rate might also be affected by the enormous coal fired power plant on the northern side of the Nice Bridge where Route 301 crosses the Potomac. It could also be affected by the fact that Maryland is downwind of a lot of West Virginia and Virginia based coal plants and has one of the worst "non attainment" records of any state on the east coast.