that's gotta be the most concise, precise, summary of the human condition i ever read in a blog comment....wow...amazing, thanks.

that's harsh speaking for a guy[?] called 'melo' -- whether it means "mellow" or not...

some days it does, some days it's more of an affirmation, such as when i read this diary!
mostly, it's italian for 'apple tree', but i like the connection to 'melograno' (pomegranate, favourite fruit juice) too, and as perhaps you all have noticed by now, an occasional irascible penchant for melodrama, lol!

working on that...dalai lama, help me attain the supreme calm cheerfulness that is true compassion.

years in california, oregon and hawaii, have given me a deeper understanding of 'mellow' than the average europerson, though.
one person's 'chilled' is another's 'spaced', is another's 'out to pranzo'; next to hawaiians, europe hums along powered by a low-level angst (half guilt, half restless escapism!)

there is a joyful curiosity too of course, principally in the young ...

i am mostly male, btw.

what we do know from an increasing number of studies is that notions of a linear dosage effect are, to say the least, quaint.  the human body is not a simple mechanism, it's a complex living system (like the climate) and has nonlinearities, critical paths, and tipping points.  a toxic exposure that would be nearly harmless at week N of fetal development may be nearly guaranteed to cause serious damage at week N+1.  people can survive higher doses of some toxins than we think, and yet succumb to far lower doses of other toxins than are conventionally held to be "dangerous."  and individuals vary widely.  the world of living things is not reductionist: it is synergistic, symbiotic, complex, entangled, nonlinear.  and we don't have the tools or the knowledge or the political or scientific will to attempt to understand such subtleties and complexities.  we want simple linear rules and one-size-fits-all.

you are some writer, madame...

it is not at all difficult to understand the fundamental meaning of a cancer cluster:  it means we're doing something wrong, something stupid, something that is injuring people -- in a very horrible way.  and we should stop.

it appears to be well above the level of intelligence required to arrest it, though the media's doing its best to ensure our continuing to be dumbed down, egged on by right-wingers, who never met a central-control model they didn't envy and/or abuse.

I think what can be said about the nuke industry is that the consequences of malfeasance and incompetence in their operations has the potential to be far greater, more devastating, more permanent, more irrevocable than most other corporate/industrial actors -- other than the weapons industry to which they are so intimately wedded.  and their operating environment, their institutional culture, is even more conducive to malfeasance, secrecy, the covering-up of incompetence, than most.  and they have a documented track record of living up to that promise.  they are a ripe source of deniable slow poisoning as well as major catastrophe, and they have this perfect institutional culture -- as in Petri dish -- for lying, denying, and taxpayer-subsidised risk displacement.

you can say that again, so i did! 

the nuclear industry does seem well positioned to compete for a gold medal among the great criminal enterprises of this fraught chapter, the endgame of C19 industrial capitalism...  they have what every serious competitor needs:  muscle, will, and Attitude.

..., possibly most important of all, private CONNECTIONS.
 

imho it's way past time to leapfrog -- skip the land lines and leapfrog to cell phones.  skip the nukes and leapfrog to non (or least) toxic power generation, less lethal, more distributed, and more opensource.  ontology doesn't have to recapitulate phylogeny... we could ffwd through the deadends.

 

maybe we are the mutated generation, turning, singed, to say 'that way be dragons', to those younger and less informed.
if so, and only, then it was worth it.

those 'dragons' are really 'drags'-... on evolution

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty