Subject: Hold your breath

From: Jack Rowe <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Oct 1997 11:36:51 -0400

There’s a big fuss -- rightly -- finally -- about a rocket to go up soon
with 72 pounds of plutonium on board... about the 200th such
usually-military payload in orbit... orbit is NOT stable or a static
situation, it is slow FREEFALL while travelling sideways really-fast. ALL
orbits "decay" or slowly run out of energy... the satellites -- ALL OF THEM
-- WILL return to earth unless we go back and physically collect each of
them (do we know where they all are? Sure, SURE, we do... the check is in
the mail). On reentry the plutonium (10K-yr half-life) in these satellites
will be turned to fine ash and spread by the jet streams in a streak that,
as with Chernobyl's bad breath, will circle the globe about 3 times before
coming to rest on our gardens. The quantities of plutonium involved will
make many of the less-radioative elements spread by Chernobyl (strontium,
thorium, iodine... evil stuff) look like vitamins! Unless we go retrieve
ALL such satellites, this WILL happen -- many, many times. 

So how was this fact treated on the television news? The “reporters”
(sorry, Mr. Webster) were interviewing the Mayor of Cape Canaveral!
Hiz'onor's problem seems to be that the rocket may blow up, droppong the
plutonium in a single, coherent blob into his nearby ocean, to join the
fair number of nuclear reactors and other radioactive materials already
resting on the ocean floor in the form of sunken subs and dumped waste
(“safely” contained, of course, in containers whose half-life WISHED it
approached 10K). The mayor is in as safe a place as any of the rest of
us... even if the rocket immediately reentered and burned to ash over his
town, the jet streams would carry the plutonium ash AWAY from him. He’d
likely be in one of the safest places to sit, right on the upwind side of
the tail of “eternal” (close enough) destruction. So the anchor person (so
called because of his apparent mental resemblance to a dead weight) asked
the mayor of Cape Canaveral if he were letting his family stay in town
during the lift-off... yeah, right... a better question... “Do you plan to
allow your family to stay here on the planet during the next century?”...
“No, John, we’re moving to Mars as soon as the condo is finished.” Good,
glad to be rid of them.

Damn, I hate white people... I’m thinking of having a full-body tattoo and
a pre-frontal lobotomy (another one?!?) to remove all traces of Caucasian
Western “Civilization” from myself... 

Reporter to Ghandi, “What are your feelings regarding Western
Civilization?”; Ghandi to Reporter “I think it would be a great idea.”