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Op-Ed

Open Letter To Senator Lamar Alexander Regarding His Vote Not To Impeach

(Letter to the Knoxville News Sentinel, 10 February 2020, which as usual was not published even though similar letters by others were published before and after I submitted this)

(This is an open letter to Senator Lamar Alexander.) Regarding your votes not to allow more witnesses at the impeachment hearings and not to impeach President Trump:  Sir, you are a moral coward.

Many important actors had not been interviewed during the House inquiry, but you didn’t think any witnesses needed to be heard or questioned by senators. Your reason for not voting to impeach was that although you recognized that Trump had actually done what he was accused of, you did not think that it was an impeachable offense. Trump’s using the power of his office for his own personal political gain, against the interests of the United States and its promises to its ally, Ukraine, was not impeachable?

You said, “The question then is not whether the president did it, but whether the United States Senate or the American people should decide what to do about what he did. I believe that the Constitution clearly provides that the people should make that decision in the presidential election.” No, the Constitution clearly provides for impeachment by the House and trial by the Senate. So to cast this as a decision that the American people and not Congress should make is ludicrous.

This statement is consistent with your whole career in public service. Over and over, in whatever capacity you happened to be working in (governor, president of UT, senator, and especially presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000), when presented with a knotty decision that some influential group wanted you to make to their benefit you would natter on about objectivity, fairness, and doing what was best for everybody. But then, often at the last minute, you would come down on the side that everybody knew you would all along, i.e., that of the special interest or political favor-giver. Clearly you did this in the case of the impeachment trial.

You are not running for reelection and you could well have voted your conscience. That is, if you had one.

Op-Ed

Professional Thoughts on the Tennessee Coal Ash Release and Cleanup Event

[Below is an op-ed piece that I sent to The Knoxville News Sentinel, 8 December 2019. The coal ash release event occurred in December 2008 when a TVA coal ash (fly ash) sludge pond in the Kingston, Tennessee area failed and sludge flowed out over a large area of land. TVA hired Jacobs Engineering to handle the extensive cleanup. As Jamie Satterfield, the News Sentinel’s excellent court/crime reporter who has been writing the News Sentinel’s long series on the coal ash spill, detailed in a series of articles, the cleanup workers were largely unprotected from the ash as they cleaned it up. Also, air filter results were inaccurate because the filters were tampered with, the workers were told the ash was so safe they could eat it, etc. This was shocking but not really surprising to people familiar with radiological work. Following the work, so many workers developed serious illnesses that the number seems statistically significant although no data has ever been presented. Further, these illnesses seemed to be fairly specific in their symptoms, as would be expected when the coal ash contained concentrated heavy metals and radioactivity (although as I note below, we would not expect to see effects of exposure to the radioactivity until more years had passed since the cleanup).

As usual, the News Sentinel did not choose to publish my piece, in fact did not even respond when I sent it in. The editor, Joel Christopher, had said in print that the News Sentinel reserved its op-ed pieces for those authors who were “experts and policymakers with direct and deep knowledge of a topic”. I thought that I might qualify as such here since I had had a long career as a radiological engineer and health physicist and was broadly trained in various aspects of safety in radiological work areas. Apparently Mr. Christopher disagreed. I sent the piece to Jamie Satterfield in an FYI manner. She said in her modest and polite way that Mr. Christopher had been unavailable (sick or busy) and would undoubtedly look at it soon. Well, if he did, he chose not to publish it.]

The fly ash controversy reminds me of when, as a radiological engineer in the mid-1980s, I was assigned to do a calculation involving fly ash.

I was working for an architect-engineer firm that did designs for power plants, including nuclear and coal-fired ones. A client wanted to put a nuclear power plant on a space-limited site that already had two coal-fired plants. The question was whether the workers on the coal-fired sites would have to wear radiation badges once the nuclear plant went into operation. So the external radiation dose to these workers from the fly ash – with its known content of radionuclides – would have to be calculated as a contribution to the site background dose.

I was given a table of radionuclides found in a representative sample of fly ash, with typical concentrations; I used a radiological source program to generate a spectrum of gamma rays. I spoke with a foreman at the coal-fired site, who confirmed that the most exposed worker would be the one in the operations monitoring tower overlooking the ash pile; he noted that a typical accumulation would be two days, but on long holiday weekends there could be four days’ worth. A study of site drawings enabled me to figure out the gamma-ray paths and model the 3-D physical layout. All of this went into a radiological dose rate program.

The results popped my eyes open: a worker who routinely spent hours per shift up in the tower would receive a large fraction of the legal annual dose limit of 100 mrem for a member of the public, which is what the coal plant workers were considered to be. Of course, conservative assumptions were used; still, even with more realistic assumptions the annual dose from the ash pile was not negligible. Further, this was only the external dose and did not include the internal dose from breathing in or ingesting radioactivity on the ash particules drifting around in the air. (That was outside the scope of the calculation since the badge would not measure external dose). Finally, it appeared that just the dose from the ash pile via both routes would significantly exceed the probable coal worker dose from the neighboring nuclear plant.

As my description above shows, it is practical to estimate external dose before work begins. The same is true of internal dose, although it is harder to calculate. TVA and Jacobs Engineering have never said they didn’t know that there were radionuclides in the fly ash; of course that has been known for a long time. In fact, I would bet that TVA, with its long experience with both coal and nuclear plants and with its many radiological professionals, has in hand both calculated and measured data on external and internal dose rates from fly ash. The Jacobs Engineering radiological safety people were likely also aware of these dose rates. So it was exceedingly cynical, not to mention unethical and immoral, for one or more Jacobs people to tell workers that they could eat the stuff. The statement might be literally true: radiation dose incurred via the ingestion route (by mouth into the stomach and intestines) was probably far less than dose incurred via the inhalation or external routes. But ignoring the latter two routes, as was done by denying protective equipment to the workers, was just criminal.

Radiological analyses do not even touch on the hazards of taking in nonradioactive but still hazardous substances in the ash, such as the heavy metals, which were the probable cause of any damage suffered by workers. I say “probable” because the health issues began relatively soon in time after most of the exposure; damage due to radioactivity has a time lapse of some years before it appears, usually in the form of some type of cancer.

What can be done now? For exposed workers and their families, there is only compensation in the form of payment of medical bills and wrongful death settlements. But for future workers, better safety coverage should be mandated. For the sake of justice, there should be aggressive investigation and prosecution of those responsible at TVA, Jacobs Engineering, and (I hate to say it) TDEC [Tennessee (State) Department of Environment and Conservation]. Jacobs should not be allowed to shirk responsibility on the grounds that TVA approved their project plans; their people were at the site and could see what the work conditions were. TVA should not be allowed to claim that they are not responsible because their contractor Jacobs Engineering covered the jobs; it was TVA’s material and TVA’s responsibility to oversee the cleanup project to make sure the job was done safely. TDEC should not be allowed to claim that they accepted the assurances of Jacobs and TVA; it is their job to provide regulatory oversight of hazard-heavy projects, in order to protect workers and the public. This project was not a quick job; it went on for a long time and so there was ample opportunity for TVA and TDEC to take their own measurements and study the work process.

For a safety professional, this whole story is disheartening. Did we learn nothing from, e.g.,  the radium dial painters case? Those who cannot learn from history – or who cynically ignore it in pursuit of profits or personal advancement – will be condemned to repeat it, but they won’t be the ones who suffer.

Op-Ed

Super Bowl Slutfest

I watched part of the performance by Jennifer Lopez and Shakira at the 2020 Super Bowl halftime a day or two after it took place. As a woman, a person descended from Hispanics, a mother, and an appreciator of dance, I was appalled.

At one point, Shakira stuck her tongue and flicked it in and out rapidly over and over, obviously in imitation of a sexual act. At another point, Lopez and Shakira faced each other and did some vertically twerking, miming having sex with one another. At another point, there was a pole dance. At yet another point, one of them (Lopez, if I recall correctly) was wearing a costume that ran in narrow bands down the front and back of her leg while leaving the outside of her leg and the inside of her thighs bare. Decades ago, of course, it became common to see dancers baring their entire legs, so it would not have been shocking had she done that. But the design of the costume, emphasizing the inner thigh, struck me as more revealing and as more suggestive of sexual invitation than baring the entire leg would have been.

One reviewer claimed that because Shakira is from Colombia and Lopez is Hispanic, the performance was a show of Latin pride. I blinked when I read that. Two middle-aged women (43 and 50 respectively) doing a show that belonged in a men’s club is exhibiting Latin pride? I had a Hispanic grandmother and a Hispanic aunt and I grew up in Southern Arizona. I love all things Latin, especially the music and dancing, and I don’t object to some suggestive dancing (e.g., the tango). But this went far beyond that. Personally, I was ashamed of these women’s use of Latin musical tropes and of their presenting themselves as Latin icons.

Lots of kids, especially teenage boys, were watching the Super Bowl. Probably some teen girls were too; perhaps they tuned in at halftime just to see their idol J Lo. Also on the stage with Lopez and Shakira was a troupe of child dancers, most of whom seemed to be in the middle school range. I am not sure how much of the older women’s performance those kids saw, but I find it hard to believe that their parents (unless they were far-gone stage parents) would want their children to be associated with it. Lopez and Shakira might even have violated some law about children working in the environment of a sex club.

Now, Lopez has a twin son and daughter, age 11, and two stepdaughters, ages 15 and 11; Shakira has two sons, ages 7 and 5. How could anybody say that these women are setting a good example for their kids? Unless the lesson is “Use your body to get ahead”, it is hard to figure out what the kids were supposed to have thought as they watched Mommy gyrate like that.

My first grandchild, a girl, was born the day after the Super Bowl; her mother was actually in labor while the Super Bowl was taking place. So naturally when I saw the show later I thought of her future. My first reaction was “Oh, hell no.”

I have read that in the past some Super Bowl performances were pretty lame, with high school marching bands and poor singers. Obviously, in terms of production this one hit the heights. But do great production values justify abdication of moral values, in terms of a show that people of all ages would see, people who thought they were tuning in to a sports event and not a porno event?

There were some very talented dancers that we could see in the background. The whole show could have been an exhibit of the spirit of Latin contemporary dance, with featured dancers performing as individuals or in smaller groups. The kids dancing could have joined in at one point the same way kids join an adult Latin party and could have showed off their stuff. But in the massed dancing, which seemed to serve only to showcase Shakira and Lopez (to be fair, terrific dancers in their own right), the group view mostly swallowed up the view of the strong individual non-star dancers.

To me, this performance was a giant paean to sex, a total slutfest. It was not appropriate for general audiences. It shows to what depths the promoters of the Super Bowl will stoop for ratings. Maybe someday football – which is declining in popularity as a sport in schools – will fade away and we won’t have any more Super Bowls. But until then we will surely see more of these appeals to men’s baser natures, with no attention paid to the women and children watching.

Op-Ed

Underperforated, Overglued, and Insufficiently Reinforced

So when I encounter a commercial product for which the designer seems not to have taken into consideration the range of people that might use it, I mutter to myself, “Men!” Perhaps I am wronging men by saying that, but it really does seem as if many products were not tested by anybody but the guys who designed and built them.

Case in point: rolls of paper towels and toilet paper that don’t rip off evenly along the perforations. The way to tear these things is to provide the proper degree of “impulse” (a word from physics meaning a sudden strong force) while jerking the paper sideways at about a 45° angle. If the paper is properly perforated, this works every time. But if the paper is not properly perforated – if the perforations are not long enough or not all the way through or if they tend to fade out at one edge — it requires a great deal of force evenly exerted over the appropriate line of the jerk in order to get the paper to tear in a straight line, if it does even then.

For the fluffier brands of toilet paper, almost no amount of impulse will work for weak or almost nonexistent perforation areas, which seems to be the case pretty frequently even with premium-priced rolls. This is of course a failure of quality control the production goal (based on customer expectation) is that it be completely perforated. The cheaper paper found in public restrooms need not even be mentioned here because even with perforations it is so stiff that it may not tear at all if you don’t use both hands – which is hard since as we all know the toilet paper holder is usually placed to one side.

For paper towels with adequate perforations, a person with a long arm can rip off a perfect piece easily, but due to the width of the roll, this is not always possible for people with shorter arms (who are tearing across their bodies). When somebody else advises me to use both hands for paper towels, I snort in derision. Very often a person has only one hand to use, the other being covered in damp flour or butter or soapsuds. If you have a fixed towel holder, as I do, then there should be no excuse for paper towels not to tear off evenly with a good jerk by an ordinary person, say an old woman.

It takes energy and sharp blades to cut clean perforations. I am therefore of the opinion that the manufacturers of paper towel and toilet paper rolls have taken the low road and saved themselves money by minimizing perforator energy and blade sharpening costs.

Another problem with commercial products that in the past seldom used to be a problem is the overgluing of boxes and other overpacks. My toothpaste is made for sensitive teeth and it works well, so I can’t just switch to another product. But it is a sore trial every time I finish a tube and have to open another box to extract a new tube. The end is glued down completely over the whole area of the top flap, not just spot-glued. Thus it is difficult or even impossible to insert a fingernail between the top and side flaps at the end to rip it open. Sometimes I do get my fingernail in, but I risk having my fingernail torn off when I try to jerk open the box. I have to resort to cutting the box open with scissors nearly every time.

Besides the outer box, my toothpaste manufacturer puts a foil seal over the toothpaste exit hole in the tube. You have to grip a tiny, tiny tab on the periphery of the seal and then try to pull it off. This requires quite a degree of grip strength over the very small tab area – something more on the order of what a healthy younger man might be able to do easily than what an older person with some arthritis in her fingers could do. I have sometimes had to take a pair of tweezers in order to grasp the tab so that in effect I could use my whole hand to overcome the adhesion.

With pill bottles there is usually a paper seal whose diameter is much greater than the toothpaste seal. So I resort to using scissors: I grip the handles in reverse and then stab downward through the seal. Then I am able to push my forefinger down through the hole and tear the seal off the bottle, albeit most often in two or three pieces. It is very satisfying to stab the paper, I admit, like a bonus for my trouble in getting out the scissors.

With food packaging, there are many containers that are opened to take out only part of the contents and then reclosed, e.g., boxes of crackers. Thus in the top of the box there is a little tab and a slit into which the tab may be tucked to keep the container closed. However, in addition to the minimal perforation of the slit, which leads to tearing the box top when you try to push open the slit, the flaps on the top are nowadays often glued down so hard that you can’t detach the flaps without tearing them and the tab.

I have heard many people complain about those plastic overpacks that encase everything from batteries to screwdrivers to nasal spray to toys. It used to be that you could get a fingernail between the paper backing and the plastic cover and tear them apart. Not any more! The two are mated so tightly nowadays that they seem to be fused. So again with the scissors, but this time using them to cut the plastic….which, I have read, is bad for the blades.

Now, surely the manufacturers realize – or do they? – that when people use scissors to cut open tightly sealed packaging, the scissors may slip and cause an accident. As a person with a lot of professional safety training, I think that overgluing fosters accidents. How is that consumer-friendly? Some men whip out their knives to open packaging, but given the instability associated with holding a package and slicing open the irregularly shaped plastic, it would seem that even more risk is involved with a knife.

I like a certain brand of cereal and over many years I have bought hundreds of boxes of it. At one point, some years ago, the box was redesigned to be taller and not as deep. I have read that many cereal and other food boxes stored in pantries between uses are now made that way to accommodate people’s desire to make more use of the empty space above the boxes when they are sitting on standard-spaced shelves and to make more side-to-side space. Well, that would be fine except that the manufacturers seem to have made the box walls thinner along with taller. So the sides cave in when you pick up the box. This makes it very hard to lift the box, tip it, and pour a controlled amount out of it. I would be willing to pay a little more for thicker cardboard, but that of course is not an option. (It is partly a practical matter: the manufacturing machine tolerances are undoubtedly set for the thinner wall, so you can’t just put in thicker cardboard.)

One thing that seems to frustrate a whole lot of people is water bottles with overly flexible walls. Every time they open one, they have to grip it tightly in order to get the cap to turn. But then when the cap comes off, the water spurts out of the bottle onto their clothes because the grip has reduced the bottle volume available for the water to fit into. One solution is to fill a rigid water bottle of one’s own before going off, say on a hike. But then when the water is all gone and one has to refill with purchased water, the drenching occurs again.

Of course, the manufacturers know about all these underperforation, overgluing, and structural instability problems – people complain all the time about them in their reviews of these products. But as long as people are willing to cope, or have to cope because there is no practical alternative, there is no incentive for the manufacturers to do anything different. What I would say to them is this: if you don’t make it easy for people to use your product, don’t expect brand loyalty. When the day comes that people find an adequately similar product that avoids these packaging and detachment hassles, they will drop you in a instant and switch to that other product. And rightly so.

Op-Ed

Why I Started This Web Site (10 October 2019)

I started this Web site in order to be able to write op-ed pieces and to share them with others. I used to submit such pieces in the form of letters or articles to the principal local newspaper in my area, the Knoxville News Sentinel, but I have come to feel that that avenue is largely closed off to me because of changes in the way the newspaper management views the opinions of ordinary people.

In 2008-2010 and again in 2013-2014, I was a “community columnist” for the Knoxville News Sentinel. A community columnist was someone from the community: not a journalist, not a member of the state or national legislature, etc. The other community columnists and I applied by submitting several sample columns to the News Sentinel and we were chosen on that basis by one of the editors. Over a period of a year or a year and a half, we submitted 8-12 columns for publication. We were not paid for our columns, which made it all the more of a jolt to be told when I applied for the later period that the newspaper owned the rights to our columns. (I was not told this during my first stint and I do not recall seeing or signing any document stating that.) So not only was the News Sentinel getting our columns for free, we did not own the copyright and would ourselves have to apply for reprint rights if we wanted to give somebody permission to reprint our material. Not wanting to be tied up for possibly months in requesting permission from the News Sentinel to publish my columns (and guessing that they have no further interest in them anyway), I have ignored their alleged ownership in posting my columns on this Web site.     // After my second cohort finished our series of columns in 2014, the News Sentinel discontinued the community columnist program. Still, after that various of my op-ed pieces and letters to the editor were published in the News Sentinel; The Oak Ridger, the local paper for Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where I lived until late 2014; and in the now defunct The Oak Ridge Observer. To this day, people ask when my next column or letter is coming out.

Then the ownership of the News Sentinel changed. Eventually the management broke from cover to confirm what many readers suspected: as Joel Christopher, the “executive editor” of the News Sentinel, stated in the newspaper (“Opinion Pages: We Listen to Our Readers”, 2/17/19), op-eds were “typically reserved for experts and policymakers with direct and deep knowledge of a topic”. I was struck by that word “reserved”: as I told him in an E-mail message, this seemed to me to be not in the best interest of informing the public. I said, “People don’t want to read happy fluffy stories or canned political tripe, but stuff that makes them think and discuss. Also, the idea that only the elite need apply will not be well received by us alleged non-cognoscenti.”

I told him that the newspaper’s position reminded of the story told by the late great columnist Mike Royko about the idealistic young Chicago man who went to his local Democratic organization to volunteer to help out. The guy who answered the door of the office peered at him suspiciously and asked who sent him. He replied that nobody sent him, he just came. The guy said, “We don’t want nobody nobody sent!” and closed the door on him. So, I added, if Mr. Christopher was saying that “only pre-vetted, approved experts and policymakers – the elite, the In Crowd, the A-Listers, the Haves – are appropriate writers of op-ed columns”, then, I predicted, by this elimination of the casting of the wider personal net the newspaper would turn its readers off. This was especially true, I said, because to me many of the “expert/policymaker” op-ed columns the newspaper had taken to printing did not seem to represent the personal point of view of the writer but instead to be intended to serve some political or business interest; the content often seemed to be canned, as though the ostensible writer was actually just a front for his PR department or campaign staff. (In fact, I know a thoughtful, educated man who cancelled his subscription to the News Sentinel for that reason.)

Except for one brief letter, I had not sent any letter or op-ed column to the News Sentinel in a long time. That is because of an experience I had in 2017 following the shocking second trial of Raynella Dossett Leath for murdering her husband.

For those readers not familiar with her case, I digress to provide this summary. Raynella Large, a nurse, married Ed Dossett in 1970. When he became the Knox County, Tennessee district attorney, she became a local VIP. But after many years of marriage he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. In July 1992, he was so ill that, family friends observed, he could not walk and had to spend his time in bed or in a wheelchair. But somehow, according to Ms. Dossett, he made it out to the cattle corral on their farm, fell down or was knocked down by the cattle, and was trampled to death. His body was autopsied. The medical examiner, despite doubts about the death because there was a double indemnity insurance policy for accidental death, certified it as an accident. The ME did not wait for the toxicology report to come in before making this determination; when the report did come in, weeks later, it was apparently routinely filed. There were suspicions that this was because Ms. Dossett had important friends who spoke up for her. Years later, another medical examiner would note that the toxocology report showed that the level of morphine in Dossett’s system was too high to be consistent with life. As a nurse and his caregiver, Ms. Dossett would have been the prime suspect in his death.

About six months after Mr. Dossett’s death, Ms. Dossett became Ms. Leath by marrying David Leath, a barber and family friend who owned a nearby farm. In 1994, Ms. Leath’s son by Ed Dossett died in a car accident. Shortly thereafter, she was told that Mr. Dossett had fathered a son by another woman during their marriage. So for some bizarre reason – conjecture was that she somehow wanted to gain custody of that other son – Ms. Dossett Leath lured the woman’s husband to her farm. There she took out a gun and began to shoot at him. He ran, with her in pursuit, but eventually fell and twisted his ankle. She caught up with him and fired her gun at him again, but the gun jammed. She remarked to him ruefully that she used to be a better shot. He fled and reported the incident to the police. She ended up pleading guilty to aggravated assault (instead of the proper charge, attempted murder). She was sentenced to six years of probation — and her conviction was erased at the end of that period.

In 2003 her husband David Leath was found dead in his bed; she said it was suicide, but his daughter (by a previous marriage) disputed that. There were three shots fired from the gun, with the second being the one that killed him. The authorities dithered for three years, then finally gave the evidence to a grand jury, which indicted her for murder. A separate jury indicted her for the death of her first husband as well. But a judge in the Criminal Court at the time, Richard Baumgartner refused (three times!) to allow Mr. Dossett’s body to be exhumed. 

In 2009 a jury deadlocked in her murder case for killing David Leath, but she was retried in 2010 before Judge Richard Baumgartner and convicted. She was sentenced to life, so the prosecutors dropped the Ed Dossett murder case. But subsequently, Judge Baumgartner was himself convicted of extensive drug use while hearing cases. At least one major case had to be retried, on the basis that he was so under the influence that he was not fit to have been on the bench. So Dossett Leath petitioned for and got a retrial. This was before Judge Paul Summers. She was convicted again – but then there was a twist that shocked many people. After more than 24 people went on record as believing the evidence against her (i.e., those voting for her conviction in the hung jury plus the 24 people in the juries in her two subsequent trials), she  was set free by Judge Summers, who entirely discounted the second jury’s verdict and said he (personally) found the evidence lacking. Dossett Leath was set free.

I considered this to be so outrageous that I wrote an op-ed column about this and submitted it to the News Sentinel. I heard nothing back and meanwhile the News Sentinel did not publish a single letter or op-ed on this subject in the newspaper even though the News Sentinel had devoted a lot of space to the case. (There might have been something online, but I don’t read the stuff online because of all the popups.) So, because this was a matter that people were really interested in, I wrote a followup E-mail message to the News Sentinel, asking if my piece would be published. I received a brief, slapdash reply from one of their people:

             “we are not publishing”

Yes, he failed to capitalize the sentence, he did not include a direct object, and he left the period off the end. This seemed to me very ignorant and beyond that, unprofessional. But it did seem to be of a piece with the new editorial policies in place: the News Sentinel was not interested in volunteered pieces, i.e., not interested in something nobody important sent.

In my E-mail message to Editor Christopher of the News Sentinel, I told him about the op-ed piece I submitted and how it was received by his person. As now seems typical of the News Sentinel, I received no reply from him.

The News Sentinel’s motto is “Give light and the people will find their own way”. That is so ironic considering that they don’t seem to want anything but pattycake input in the form of brief letters from the people, i.e., the public. Maybe they should change their motto to “Tell them what we deem it desirable for them to know” because they seem to want to control public opinion. Me, I have decided to go my own way. So here I am, blogging away.