sphere

With the world waiting to see if any of the four nuclear reactors go into meltdown phase, the right is using this as a reason to stress the importance and safety of nuclear energy. Over at Right Wing News, we see this:

Obviously, as one cruises around the Liberal-o-sphere, this means that all nuclear power is bad and that is should all be stopped, and, instead, we can go with wind and solar for all our power. If they left those methods get beyond the planning/implementation stages.

We hear constantly that nuclear energy is the “safest”. In most senses that is true, but one accident at a plant can have greater catastrophic repercussions than accidents at 1,000 coal or oil plants.

Another thing, which  I mentioned yesterday, is the very high safety standards Japan enforces. Those standards are probably a big reason why we didn’t see a meltdown occur when the quake hit yesterday. Here in the United States, where one of the biggest agendas of the Republican Party is doing away with government regulation, you got to wonder if we would have seen the same outcome? I can hear the arguments now; “let’s build a reactor in Ohio. They only get minor earthquakes, so we don’t have to be as safe”. Of course that is until a big one hits.

Then in the same post at Right Wing News, we get to this example of pure rubbish:

Of course, I wonder how those methods would have stood up with an earthquake and tsunami knocking them down, breaking the wind turbines and solar panels, covering them with water, and flooding the storage batteries.

This will be the first year that we have a Democrat in the White House in the modern blogging age, and with that I do have a rather dire prediction. As the year progresses and we start seeing exactly how soon to be President Obama governs, some of the groups and organizations we all cherished for their work these past several years will quickly turn into something we can’t understand, maybe even bordering on entering the wingnut-o-sphere.

I predict this will start when/if Obama decides to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan. People quickly forget the key points of campaigns, and bloggers are no exception. We will hear a big out cry from some bloggers screaming that Obama is breaking campaign promises on Afghanistan, when in fact he will be doing exactly what he said.

As these groups transcend the depths, teetering on being progressive or just noise makers, make no mistake that they have some underlying drives to do so. One of the biggest is greed. We haven’t had a Democrat in the White House since blogging became an actual business and the sudden explosion of PACs. Don’t be confused on the greed though, a lot of it won’t be tied to money. Instead what we will see is a lot of greed tied to recognition and traffic. If you follow the blogosphere as closely as I do you can see this already evident, and a lot of blogs, which have transformed into a sole source of income, already fight for the almighty click. Clicks do lead to money also in the world of online advertising.