Correspondence
Correspondence REVOKE THE PRIZE THE WEEKLY STANDARD's April 1 feature about Yasser Arafat ("The Winner") highlights the need for Nobel officials to take back the Peace Prize they awarded Arafat...
...JAMES BOVARD Rockville, MD NIETZSCHE'S RIGHT SIDE I AM AFRAID I MUST TAKE issue with James W. Ceaser's rather shallow characterization of Friedrich Nietzsche's position on the genealogy of the concepts of "good and bad" versus "good and evil" in "Bush vs...
...Readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD who share the view that Yasser Arafat should be held accountable for his actions should sign the petition online...
...Chum denied carrying excessive cash...
...Some [federal] prosecutors now say they are concerned about whether the seizure cases will hold up in court...
...The first is that the new site proves to be safer from natural disturbances and human intrusions than the scattered ones at which the wastes are now stored...
...At least some of the financial crackdowns on groups with suspected terrorist ties, resulting in the freezing of tens of millions of dollars in assets, were launched prematurely or based on insufficient evidence...
...Yasser Arafat is a murderer, a terrorist...
...And with what results...
...Some 50 million people live within three miles of one of those shipping lanes...
...But the vast majority of the people of Nevada are apprehensive, and the rest of us have good reason to be...
...What this means as a practical matter is that shipments of radioactive waste will average more than 2,000 miles in length and will pass as closely as human ingenuity allows to the largest numbers of people possible...
...But the roads leading to Nevada, like all roads, were built for the express purpose of moving people and goods from one densely populated location to another...
...Police even shot Carlson in the back after he had given up his gun and was lying wounded on his bedroom floor...
...I've had hotel managers give me upgrades when all I really wanted was an apology...
...The federal plan as of this writing is for the wastes to be transported to Nevada on flatbed trucks...
...An honor that is given to peacemakers should be taken away from terrorists...
...And to make matters worse, Yucca Mountain itself will become a prime target as soon as wastes begin to accumulate there in any quantity...
...But until then, the agency deserves the vigorous scrutiny it has earned from its long history of abuses...
...For example, on August 25, 1992, Customs Service, drug enforcement agents, and local police raided the San Diego home of businessman Donald Carlson...
...The government has refused to share their knowledge of the events with us...
...Nietzsche is constantly abused by those of us on the right for his supposed moral relativism as if he were in line with today's politically correct moral arbiters on the left...
...Even if they don't want to say "I'm sorry, we made a mistake" for legal or other reasons, why not at least say "I'm sorry you were inconvenienced...
...Given the geological uncertainties of the Yucca Mountain site and the potential problems involved in bringing wastes to it from around the country, most specialists I know think that leaving those hazardous materials right where they are is the safest, most sensible, and far away the least expensive policy of all...
...The subtitle of Hayes's article asks, "What better place to store radioactive waste than the middle of nowhere...
...Nietzsche" (April 1...
...Arlington, VA NUCLEAR TRUCK BOMBS IN HIS RECENT REPORT from Yucca Mountain, Stephen IF Hayes writes: "common sense tells us that we're better off with highly radioactive waste stored 1,000 feet underground at one heavily-protected remote location . . . than we are with that same waste in dozens of above-ground pools" ("Nevada Goes Nuclear," April 1...
...There is a website dedicated to this purpose, www.revoketheprize.org...
...Walls were destroyed, apparently as part of the government's investigation...
...My house was riddled with bullet holes...
...GLENN HOLCOMBE Coos Bay, OR...
...Alas, it does...
...a subsequent search turned up $77,452—money she was taking back to "rebuild a Buddhist temple and assist relatives in their ravaged homeland...
...In the early phases of the project some 3,000 to 4,000 shipments will take to the highways every year, making their way through 44 states and over 100 cities with populations of more than 100,000, including places like Chicago, Indianapolis, Atlanta, St...
...WILLIAM R. HARRISON JR...
...Nobel Peace Prize officials could make their award more meaningful by revoking the prize for past winners who are no longer role models...
...In February 1996, an agent dressed in blue jeans approached Cambodian refugee Malis Chum as she waited to catch a flight back to her homeland from New York's JFK airport...
...That sounds so sensible that one might think the argument closed...
...It will take nearly 40 years to move the present stocks of waste, an estimated 100,000 individual shipments...
...Perhaps the Customs Service will be able to present strong cases in federal court against the organizations and individuals that it raided...
...The Customs Service believed there were four machine guns and a massive cache of illegal narcotics in Carlson's home, but no drugs or illegal weapons were found...
...We have no way of knowing that, of course, but what do you suppose the odds are that a private insurer would be willing to underwrite such a program...
...The feds eventually paid Carlson a large sum to settle his lawsuit against them...
...I believe he was quite prescient in this regard as we view the decline of the Anglican church in England and the Episcopal church in America into the near death of the faith in England and the fall of Episcopalianism in this country into a PC gobbledygook of moral confusion...
...To store immense quantities of the most dangerous substances on Earth in a single spot makes sense only on two conditions...
...Two of Hayes's most widely cited sources were the operator of a gas station and the manager of a brothel, both living in the shadow of Yucca Mountain...
...All of that would be cause for alarm even if human malice was not factored into our calculations, but September 11 taught us clearly that we can no longer afford that luxury...
...Hayes reports that neither of them seemed very apprehensive...
...All one can say on that score is that the scientific evidence gathered on Yucca Mountain so far is wholly inconclusive, to say the very least...
...7 million people live within 900 yards...
...I didn't know whether I should tell the truth...
...PAUL FEINER Greenburgh, NY BUMBLING BUREAUCRATS IN "Propaganda by the Column Inch" (April 8), Christopher Caldwell warns that a Financial Times article on the impact of Customs Service raids on Muslim groups somehow insults "the common sense of the American people" in a way that threatens to place our democracy in "peril...
...Correspondence REVOKE THE PRIZE THE WEEKLY STANDARD's April 1 feature about Yasser Arafat ("The Winner") highlights the need for Nobel officials to take back the Peace Prize they awarded Arafat seven years ago...
...Customs agents have also long abused travelers who fail to fill out federal forms telling the government that they are transporting $10,000 or more into or from the country...
...Nietzsche was a proponent of classical virtue perhaps unmatched in the modern age...
...Louis, and Omaha...
...Finally, after the New York Law Journal contacted Customs about the seizure almost three years later, the agency returned the cash to Chum...
...That doesn't even imply responsibility, but it would go a long way toward letting me know that my troubles at your hotel (or with your airline) are of concern to you...
...The police set off a bomb in his backyard, smashed through his front door, and shot him three times after he tried to defend himself with a gun...
...Dangerous wastes will be removed from the plants near which they are stored if the plan goes into effect, but the fact is that those plants will continue to generate wastes until the day they are decommissioned—at which point, of course, they will become a form of waste themselves...
...To suggest as Ceaser does that he had no firm moral universe is to miss the point entirely...
...Formidable is the only answer...
...Carlson testified to Congress that he and his lawyer "have been forced to conduct an expensive investigation of the underlying facts of this nightmare...
...KAI ERIKSON Professor of Sociology, Emeritus Yale University New Haven, CT MISS MANNERS RETIRES CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL hits it on the head with his Casual about service workers never uttering the words "I'm sorry" ("A Sorry State," April 15...
...Customs' raids on Muslim groups may be as flawed as its previous crackdowns...
...But it is not...
...Good for them...
...This is because the main security problem for the next half century or so will not reside in the high deserts of Nevada but on the highways that lead to them...
...The second is that the process of transporting the wastes from their present locations to the new site does not in itself add substantially to the dangers of handling the wastes...
...Chum later explained: "I don't know the person...
...What are the odds of an accident over that span of time...
...Nothing could be further from the truth...
...The raid was launched in response to a tip from a paid informant, who later stated he had never identified any specific house to be searched...
...Their job, so to speak, is to seek out heavy concentrations of people...
...Caldwell derides the Financial Times's piece as "terrorist propaganda...
...A news analysis in the Los Angeles Times on April 7 concluded that the Customs Service was using "questionable evidence against targeted Middle Eastern groups...
...Caldwell ignores the Customs Service's long history of fiascoes, botched "raids," and plundering...
...In his famous line regarding the "death of God," Nietzsche was prophesying what would come of Christian morality should the transcendent nature on which it relied (namely belief in God) be undermined by its professed adherents...
...So every functioning nuclear reactor in the country will continue to be a target for sabotage whether or not Yucca Mountain goes on line, and the result of activating the repository will only be to add to the already long list of opportunities now available for terrorist attack some 3,000 to 4,000 mobile targets passing through the most heavily populated traffic corridors...
...Apologies are a lost concept in the world of service...
...Though Customs had no reason to suspect that Chum had acquired the money illegally, the agency stalled the efforts of a New York Legal Aid Society lawyer to recover Chum's money...
...In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche sought to limn the competing visions of "good and bad" (as exemplified in classical antiquity, of which he was one of the greatest scholars of his day) and "good and evil" (as put forth in Christian theology...
...The reason why Nevada was chosen for this honor, obviously has to do with its remoteness and its low population density...
...He looked kind of weird, make me suspect...
...At current accident rates, some 400 trucks will collide with other vehicles or overturn or burst into flames or become involved in some other serious mishap...
...A San Diego Union-Tribune analysis concluded the raid occurred partly as a result of "heavy pressure from Customs managers—who stand to gain professionally by generating arrests and big caseloads—on street agents to produce headline-grabbing cases...
Vol. 7 • April 2002 • No. 31
