Rocky Flats Retirees – You Have a Decision to Make About Your Pension – Don’t Delay

A big change is underway for Rocky Flats retiree’s pension plan. To our other readers: please forgive the focus of this post – but you might be curious about how your government treats the Cold War Warriors. The government is dumping the pension plan. No longer will your pension be guarenteed by the Fedral government. You must choose to receive a lump sum or a private annuity plan.

I’ve received my Plan Termination Benefit Kit and if you have not, call the Support Center at 1-800-709-7697.

There are deadlines coming up – the end of May for corrections. Check your information. My spouse was listed as deceased. He assures me he is not now and has never been deceased, so I had to submit a correction.

There’s a lot of detail in the kit and I won’t try to summarize it. Get your kit, read your kit, and make your decisions. Don’t delay. There are various financial instruments to research. There are forms to fill out, some need to be notorized, and if you are divorced there are extra forms. Did I mention, don’t delay.

Whatever you decide, your paperwork must be postmarked by the end of June or you get whatever the default option is.

I’m not qualified to offer recommendations. Heck, I haven’t decided what I’m going to do. Continue reading

Archeology Takes Courage

book coverIt’s a shame to miss the story behind science. With The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story you don’t have to – the book offers a fascinating tale of discovery.

Since the first Europeans set foot in the Americas, they chased rumors of “lost” cities of gold. The first third of his book, Douglas Preston recounts an amazing group of, generally, con-artists claiming to have found the Monkey God City in an inaccessible jungle, and would rich donors just give them more money to prove it. These characters make for fun reading.

But there are real ruins in Honduras, and the Monkey God City legend is a conglomeration of real places. Space age technology and changing politics in Honduras enabled a scientific team to take up the search. Deadly snakes, deadly insects, drug cartels, dense jungle, and sucking mud all provide a thrilling backdrop to the expedition. Continue reading

Chinese Space Station Will Crash to Earth April 1st – No Fooling

Space events aren’t our usual topic here at Rocky Flats Facts, but this is hard to ignore:

Tiangong compared to school bus

Tiangong compared to a school bus

One enormous chunk of space junk is about to crash. What was once China’s first space station, a habitat designed to test docking procedures as well as perform some experiments in orbit, has run out of fuel. Like any satellite or orbiting spacecraft, without periodic altitude boosts, Tiangong will return to Earth in a fiery breakup.

The world is watching as Chinese space station Tiangong-1 hurtles toward Earth and makes a fiery reentry. Chances that space debris will hurt anybody are extremely slim, although when and where the space station’s remains will land is still unknown. aerospace.org

There’s a great video posted here – scroll down.

Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge – a new source of science-based information for neighbors

Rocky Flats Plant fromAir

My own photo of the old plant, from a public document

Rocky Flats Facts began with a book debunking myths about the Rocky Flats Plant. Decades of secrecy surrounded the nuclear weapons plant, and by the turn of the century, greater-Denver’s expansion towards the once-remote location put a large population within sight.

Read the book to learn about the plant’s production days, good and bad, and the EPA/FBI raid. The raid occurred after the Cold War fizzled out, leaving the Department of Energy unexpectedly confused over what to do with the plant, which was now in the heart of the Colorado Front Range.

It took years, and as an employee I can tell you it was terribly frustrating to go first in one direction, then another, with study after study, before a final plan emerged. Much of the waste and debris from demolishing the plant was shipped away to disposal and storge sites, though some contamination was buried onsite.

Today the site is a National Wildlife Refuge, and since decades of security had protected it from livestock grazing, that’s a fine use.

I was recently sent a link to a new website, Friends of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge.

This site is intended to educate rather than to just convey information. The focus is very much on recent data and recent science. Information on this site is intended for those who wish to understand at a variety of levels (from the very non-technical through the fairly technical) the science behind the assurances that living near or visiting the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge is safe for adults and children.

We have been careful to draw information (whenever possible) from 2012 to the present, and from international (not simply US federal) sources. We intend that it serve as a repository of carefully vetted information (and links to more) drawn from the published, peer-reviewed literature in health physics, radiation biology, biophysics, medicine, and epidemiology, or from personal experience.

The site is independent from the usual suspects in ongoing discussions of Rocky Flats. You’ll find discussions of risk that are useful in daily life, as well as when evaluating the old plant site. I won’t leave you wondering: their headline states “the Wildlife Refuge is safe.”

I hope the surrounding communities value the site’s final use, and I admire the effort and care that has gone into this new website. If you want to know more beyond the headline’s conclusion, check it out.

Lie Travels Around the Globe While the Truth is Putting on Its Shoes

Quoteinvestigator says this expression has been evolving for three hundred years.

hiking bootIn 1787 “falsehood” was reaching “every corner of the earth”. In 1820 a colorful version was circulating with lies flying from “Maine to Georgia” while truth was “pulling her boots on”. By 1834 “error” was running “half over the world” while truth was “putting on his boots”. In 1924 a lie was circling the globe while a truth was “lacing its shoes on”.

You can read the citations for yourself on the site. I’m more excited by a recent study that shows this expression is true.

False news spreads faster than true stories, and it’s because of humans, not bots, according to a new study published today in Science. axios

I’m still angry at Russian meddling in our elections, and fake news continues to be a threat. Did the Russians change anyone’s vote? Who can tell? You and I look at loads of information – even if I told you a particular story you viewed was false-news-from-Russia (or, for that matter, from a fellow citizen) I doubt you could say that particular item tipped you over the edge.

The reason fake news works is because we’re human. “Avoid temptation to shift the blame elsewhere… Even if we solve bots and the foreign interference problem, it wouldn’t solve the problem of online misinformation.”

Researchers studied more than 4.5 million tweets between 2006 and 2017. They used six fact-checking sites, including Politifact and Snopes, to determine if an item was true.

They found false stories — especially political ones — traveled faster, farther and deeper into the network than the true kind. (True stories took six times as long as false ones to reach 1500 people.) And, false stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth.

We humans are programmed for this. I’m reminded of the notion that, if our ancestors believed there was a lion rather than wind behind rustling grass, they lived to have offspring who led to us. Our brains find it safer to believe anything that confirms our fears, and so we share the item. The study says novelty also grabs us, and something we never heard before is more likely to be false (at least, on Twitter) but we share it.

sneakersIf you’ve tut-tutted over claims about male and female bell peppers, or Mars will appear the size of the full moon tomorrow night, or rumors of gang initiations that kill innocent people, or pizzagate – well, it’s just human nature. It takes effort to engage all that lovely pre-frontal cortex, but it’s worth it.

Let’s Take the Gun Debate Down a Notch

Since the most recent mass shooting, at a high school in Parkland Florida, the gun control debate has reached a new level of hysteria.  When emotions run high, reason is usually a casualty, but the abdication from logic now being displayed by both camps over how best to stop sick-minded males – and so far this is an all-male club – from committing mass murder in our schools would be laughable if the subject were not so deadly serious.  Straight-faced calls for the banning of all semi-automatic weapons are countered by calls to turn schools into fortresses. Neither side seems even mildly interested in finding any middle ground between “no guns” and “more guns”, nor will either admit that their proposed solutions will do nothing more than nibble around the edges of the problem.  This impasse, deepened by hurled insults and angry protests, is beginning to look unbreakable.

That is particularly sad, because there are doable policy ideas on both agendas that might prevent some – by no means all – armed psychos from shooting up our schools.  Universal background checks that ask the right questions, better communication and data sharing between agencies, buybacks of bump stocks, limits on magazine capacity, higher age qualifications for buying semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, more effective methods to identify and report those who are mentally at-risk – all of those measures are doable.  So too are measures to “harden” schools, such as arming and training those school personnel who are capable and willing, employing more resource officers, making classroom doors assault-proof, upgrading security camera systems to work in real time and giving onsite officers and local law enforcement instant smartphone access to camera feeds so that they can quickly pinpoint a shooter’s location and armament.  No doubt other workable ideas will surface.  Smarter people than I will think of them.

What is not doable is an outright ban on the manufacture and sale of semi-automatic weapons, assault or otherwise, as is being demanded by Parkland student activists. There are some 15 million AR-15 style rifles and many millions more high-capacity (10 or more rounds) magazines already in circulation.  Imagine the backlash that government attempts to confiscate them would provoke, the Second Amendment notwithstanding.  Additionally, nearly all the handguns in circulation are semi-automatic.  Any attempt at a ban of such magnitude would only drive the entire firearm community onto the Dark Net, if not into open revolt.

Equally not-doable, or certainly inadvisable, is the suggestion that school administrators turn their buildings into armed camps staffed by nervous teacher/warriors who want nothing to do with either end of a gun.  But anyone who contends that a school with a sign over the door proclaiming it a “Gun Free Zone” is safer from attack that a school whose sign reads, “ Certain personnel in this building may be armed and are authorized to defend inhabitants with deadly force” cannot claim to be the voice of reason in this discussion.

Sadder still is the overarching fact that there is nothing – nothing – we can do, radically or reasonably, to completely insulate our schools from danger.   But even if we can’t confiscate every gun or confront every shooter, any incident we do manage to mitigate or prevent will save lives.  At the margins we can make a difference, but only if we stop the name-calling and sloganeering and start listening to each other.

There is much that might be done to prevent at least some school shootings if the pro and anti-gun factions could crawl even a few feet out of their dogmatic corners, but so far both sides look to be more vested in defending their ideologies than in defending the kids.  That is by far the saddest fact of all.