I bet it has something to do with seniors. Generally, if a widowed senior on Soc Sec marries, he or she (usually the woman) loses the benefits of their deceased spouse. In California, it’s the reason they’ll register as Domestic Partners instead of marry, since it carries all the inheritance and visitation rights as marriage in this state, but is not recognized by the Feds. But in a state with no domestic partner laws, it looks like their trying to engineer a loophole – and Dobson is probably supporting it for the sake of his aging followers – which helps keep them sending *him* the extra cash, naturally. And presumably send Alan Keys the cash too.

As Deep Throat said, “follow the money”.

I was so inspired by Mr. Longman’s first installment that I had to do some more research on the nuclear flash blinding cows at 300 miles.

I knew an odd bit of trivia that line of sight for a man is about 6 miles–further than that the curvature of the earth blocks vision. So I suckered my mathemetician-husband to run the numbers, and he tells me that at 300 miles, a fireball would have to be at least 300 feet high to clear the horizon line.

A significant amount of Googling about the effects of nuclear blasts (for which I surely have landed on a watch list), I found that a 5 kiloton explosion can produce a fireball about 300 feet in diameter. Now, if it’s a surface explosion, only half of that distance (about) will go “up” so we need to cut the fireball radius in half.

So by my inexpert and inexperienced calculations, it would take at least a 20-kiloton explosion to produce a flash visible from 300 miles away. I wonder if anyone knows how big a 20 kiloton nuke? I mean, are we talking suitcase nuke? Steamer-trunk nuke? Or shipping container nuke?

Doubtless that’s so, but remember the length of the piece? It was nearly a novella of wingnuttery.

“But getting back to the topic of nuclear apocalypse, Reagan’s dire predictions are as nothing when compared to the terror Bush is trying to inspire.”

No doubt, but the reason for the terror under Reagan was appreciably more understandable; not so under Bush.

This is a fair criticism, but I don’t think he was consciously trying to do that. In fact, I suspect he was trying for the opposite.

I think you should be more charitable towards Longman: he’s not a talented wordsmith by any measure, but I’ve seen better writers out-due him in shear stupidity.

As proof, I submit exhibit A: every piece that appears on Fred Phelps’ website.

You’ll find exhibit B if you look up “Prairie Muffin Manifesto� on the internets. I especially like how the “prairie Muffins� – most of them are suburb-bound soccer moms – identify so strongly with their wagonering foremothers that they call themselves by a prairie slang term that means, “cow patty.�

But getting back to the topic of nuclear apocalypse, Reagan’s dire predictions are as nothing when compared to the terror Bush is trying to inspire. The Cold War had a definite end; this one won’t.

Demystify?

The most ‘realistic’ scenario regarding nukes and terrorism is a dirty bomb, which, in almost NO way resembles the Soviet-style nuking he was puttering on about (Rule 1: Drive away from the blast).

A dirty bomb is basically a fertilzer bomb with radioactive debris embedded in it. It sucks, it’s ‘radioactive’ and scary as shit, but it ain’t a nuke.

It sounds like what he was really trying to do was conflate terror with the Day After.

That’s a fuck of a way to calm down a bunch of 6th graders.

“Poorly”? How’s that for understatement of the year. The guy’s piece was the longest I’ve ever seen brainlessness sustained.

“…to over-dramatizing them in the 1980s with an assful of nuclear-themed disaster fiction.”

And not just with fiction. Let’s remember Reagan’s fear-mongering at the time, shall we?

When I think of the shock and horror and sadness I felt on the morning of September 11th, 2001 — when I think about it really hard, I still don’t recall feeling as underoo-shittingly frightened as I did when I was a child in the 80s.

Mebbe, but I’m one of the few people on Earth prepared to defend the spirit of Longman’s piece on surviving a nuclear war. He was attempting – poorly, I’ll grant – to demystify a topic few people understand. I have a dilettante’s interest in the effects of a nuclear blast; it takes the edge off any uneasiness I might feel about this subject.

‘The media’ went from oversimplifying the consequences of nuclear war in the 1950s, by advising people that “duck and cover� could serve as protection; to over-dramatizing them in the 1980s with an assful of nuclear-themed disaster fiction.

And now, in the early 21st Century, a lot of people are especially concerned about the effects of a dirty bomb when, in reality, such a device isn’t a whole lot more deadly than a regular bomb. The unique danger of a dirty bomb is psychological, not physical.

If Longman were a better writer, he could have conveyed that message to his audience. I suspect regular readers of Renew America are more likely than the general population to obsess about dirty bombs or nuclear war.

(Or was that just Kaye firing a warning shot?)

It’s like Keyes is just saying to the Renew America readership that Dobson’s rep is more important than them surviving a Nuclear Holocaust.