Now that I have Nucleotides back up and running (two worthwhile posts in ten days certainly beats what had come before), I was about to make an announcement. It's a good thing, though, that I didn't say anything too hastily.
I was going to announce my candidacy for the United States Senate in 2006, and it seemed wise to investigate the matter before telling the entire internet about it. Well, this helpful page from the New York State Board of Elections informed me of something that I needed to know, yet didn't want to hear.
I had known that a candidate for president must be 35 years old, but I had believed that there were no age restrictions on other elected federal offices. The president is, after all, unique in having to be born a US citizen. It turns out, though, that Article I of the Constitution itself says that you have to be 30 to be a senator.
Inconveniently, I won't be. Seven months shy, if you use election day (November) as the yardstick. Congresspersons are sworn in in January, so that won't do, either.
And I would have gotten away with it, if not for those meddling Founding Fathers...
I drive a truck, of all possible glamorous occupations, and I almost always haul scrap metal. Very thick metal, like railroad rails and bulldozer parts, will go to certain destinations. More common scrap-- such as cars, washing machines, and that steel sheet found on modern barns-- goes to places that have scrap shredders.
A shredder is a large structure, with engines supplying thousands of horsepower to turn a massive rotor approximately eight feet wide, which is lined with dozens of swinging hammers weighing a couple hundred pounds each. After being battered into fist-sized chunks, the scrap is sent to conveyors and magnets and such, with the end result being three piles: iron and steel (ferrous metal), non-ferrous metal (like aluminum and copper), and "fluff" (everything else). Fluff contains seat cushions, rubber, glass, plastic, dirt-- anything that doesn't conduct electricity. So, yes, some parts of it are fluffy, but it wouldn't be very comfortable.
Some materials are not acceptable to be shredded. Actually, there's quite a list, though some of the banned items are winked at. Lead-acid batteries (like in your car) are forbidden, as are the large capacitors that serve microwaves and fluorescent lights-- unless a label says they are free of PCB's. Cars must be drained of their oil and coolant, and stripped of as many tires as possible. Propane and gasoline tanks are strictly forbidden. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to picture what bad things might happen to a volatile fuel container suddenly ripped apart in a shower of sparks. I haven't seen a bad one, but I hear that the fires can be impressive.
Now, since I've been hauling junk most every day for the last sixteen months, I've seen quite a few things junked that I was sad to see go. Classic cars, still-good equipment from Kodak and Xerox, useful truck components, farm machinery from the first half of the 20th century-- all sorts of things. Some smaller things can be saved-- indeed, over half of the hand tools that I carry in the truck were rescued. Sometimes, though, the metal recycling business just breaks your heart.
Yesterday was one of those times. Yesterday was the worst ever.
I had unloaded my 9 or so tons of various shreddable scrap, received my paperwork, and already begun to drive away... just like any other day, going past the shredder. There was another big truck backed in, and the grapple crane had pulled a car out of that truck, wending its way through to air toward noisy and brutal destruction.
Something about the tail of the car caught my eye instantly. It was a small car, but the trunk looked a bit too narrow, and that set off mental warning bells. Next, my eye swept over the rear fenders-- or, perhaps, the lack of fenders. The car featured a smooth cover over the top half of the rear wheel, and no fender bulge at all. No, I thought, it couldn't be...
And then I looked at the wheels. Those unique aluminum wheels, with a design that reminds you of a printed circuit board.
No! ...but it was. It was an EV1, the completely electric car designed by AreoVironment and General Motors. Among other feats, the most aerodynamic production car ever.
After seeing the innocent vehicle swung to its doom, I spotted one of my friends who works at the facility. I parked the truck, grabbed my hard hat, and hopped out. My associate was familiar with the EV1, it seems, because they get them coming in to shred "all the time." That entire truckload was nothing but EV1's. Aah! Not much steel in them, he said. Aluminum, copper, fiberglass, and such. The situation seemed odd, so I inquired if they were legally barred from salvaging from the EV1's.
Sure enough, there was a guy from GM sitting in a Saturn SUV, watching. The scrap guys weren't allowed to remove a car from that truck unless it went directly into the shredder. Because, you see, every EV1 is owned by GM, and only leased to drivers. Apparently, the car is considered to be an engineering test, and now they're being destroyed. Here's GM's "lessons learned" page about the EV1 project.
Now, normal cars have to be stripped of a lot of things, but these still had the tires on, which made me wonder. What could or couldn't be shredded? What might or might not still be in there? He did list copper, after all, and copper... Oh, no! So, I asked if the motors and such had been removed, and they were just shredding the hull.
No, he said, "they have the motors in them." Egad. "They have everything in them."
Now, I can only recall so much as the car's detailed specifications, but that's a hundred-plus horsepower three-phase electric motor, with three inverters to run it from the battery, no doubt rectifiers to recharge the battery... and, if they're OK to shred, half a ton of nickel-metal hydride batteries.
After I learned about the guts of the EV1, a couple-few years ago, I immediately drew up a plan for a hybrid diesel-electric heavy truck-- based on the motor from an EV1, because I knew its basic specs, and it seemed decent for the job. Of course, I would never be able to get my hands on one, but at least my plan called for a device that I knew to exist. It's not easy to find electric motors that large.
Such a waste. A horrible, awful waste. I, no doubt among other people, would pay thousands of dollars for the innards of that car. Heck-- there might be enough people willing to outbid me that there wouldn't be enough EV1's to dismantle for me to afford one.
Smash! Rumble! Rend!
Or that next car. Crash! Destroy! Or that one...
On Monday, the daily PBS program "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" had a video interview with John Burns of the New York Times, who is currently in Baghdad, Iraq. Indeed, he reports directly from Iraq quite often, and has been doing so for a very long time.
The news on Monday (transcript) was that "after many weeks of waiting, the first live witnesses took the stand in testimony against Saddam Hussein and his fellow defendants."
JOHN BURNS: It was really the most extraordinary day. You have to remember that this trial has been 20 months in preparation since this special Iraqi court was established. It's been in session, the court, for seven weeks but has only managed to meet three times, the third time today. They've never got, until today, to the heart of the matter, the case against Saddam Hussein, the case that is the first of many that is going to tell us the story of how as many as two million people died here during his 24 years in power. And it was the most wrenching experience to hear this first live witness speaking of the torture, speaking of babies being thrown out of windows, of human grinding machines at the headquarters of the secret police, of fathers watching their sons being tortured.
I'm sure much of this is in the evening television news in the United States but the effect has been quite electric across Iraq as we can measure it. People who have until know - people that I know who have until now seemed indifferent in some ways to the terrible things that were done here under Saddam Hussein-- I'm talking for the most part about Sunni Arabs who were the principal beneficiaries of Saddam's rules -- were absolutely mortified by what they heard today.
You have to consider that Saddam's Iraq had extreme restrictions on the press. Certainly many Iraqis were aware that they were living under a reign of terror, and rumors of horrible things done to others are key to making a reign of terror effective. There were not, however, actual accounts of crimes against humanity. Westerners such as myself needed only to watch the news in order to have heard about the former Iraqi secret police throwing humans into industrial plastic shredders. In Iraq, such things would only be known by whispers from terrified witnesses.
Monday changed all of that. It was only the tip of the iceberg of inhumanity that spanned decades, yet this first testimony had the power to shatter all illusions.
I must admit, though, that I can't really conceive of two million dead. Stalin was wrong-- a huge number of deaths is a tragedy. It's just more than a mind can understand.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, as these wrenching details were being revealed, what was the former president of Iraq's demeanor? JOHN BURNS: Well, that was very much part of the drama. As we have seen on his previous appearances in court: Defiant, indignant at the indignities, as he sees them that were visited upon him.
In the midst of the witness telling this tale so difficult for him in the telling that he broke down and sobbed several times, Saddam was continuously complaining that he didn't have a paper and pen, that he had to write his notes on his hand.
His attitude seemed to be in effect how dare you, Mr. Mohammed, and who are you anyway, to make these kinds of accusations against me? The other person who was notable in this respect was Saddam's half brother, Bazan al-Takriti, who was in some ways being more defiant today. He's the former head of the secret police at the time of the events charged in this trial which was an assassination attempt against Saddam in 1982 which was followed by the execution of 148 men and teen-aged boys from the town Dujail where that happened.
And the attitude seemed to vary on the part of the defendants, Saddam and his half brother in particular, from indifference to indignation. But at no point did you see anything reproaching pity or remorse.
Not that I expected Saddam Hussein to express (let alone feel) any remorse or pity. Having 148 people killed just to send a message was simply the way he operated.
Saddam is trying to complain about his treatment at every opportunity. Nevermind that whatever the conditions are, they are fantastically humane compared to anything that his prisoners faced. And he actually is writing notes on his hand, to go with the complaint about the lack of paper. Of course, to a totalitarian dictator who had several palaces, being treated like a crminal-- no matter how fairly it is done-- is going to seem extremely degrading. I sincerely hope that Saddam is being handled in a scrupulously fair manner. Since there's plenty of evidence to result in a scrupulously fair execution, and that's punishment enough. Even for him.
I don't know if he's just running a bluff, or if he's still in some mental playground whereby he doesn't realize that, this time, he's in trouble up to his facial hair, and that nothing is going to save his evil hide from the hangman.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, you talk about the people of Iraq wanting justice. What do they make of this whole spectacle that they're able to see on TV? JOHN BURNS: I think I'd have to say that they, like us, find it is most astonishing spectacle. And I'm talking here not just the communities that were the principal victims of Saddam: The Shiites and the Kurds and the Turkmens and others but also the Sunni-Arab minority that ruled through Saddam Hussein, in fact, ruled here for centuries.
I think they find it extremely arresting. I would say the net of it all today after listening to this gut-wrenching testimony, the most important thing that happened today was there was finally after all this wait, there was an accounting of sorts.
The horrors through which people were subjected by Saddam's secret police were finally being laid out to the evident astonishment even of people who until very recently were telling me that Saddam Hussein was a hero and hoped for his restoration.
This is fantastic news. It just hadn't occurred to me, before this story, that some of the people of Iraq might not realize what bad things had been done to other Iraqis. Sure, it's obvious now that it's been pointed out, but I knew about the atrocities before now, and I'm thousands of miles away. That's what a free press can do for you-- and do to your perceptions of what other people "must" know.
Now that the dirty laundry is being aired, it can only erode support for the old regime. And that is a good thing for decent humans everywhere.