Tomorrow marks the 150^th anniversary of the attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, and the beginning of the Civil War.

In the Miami Herald this past Sunday Leonard Pitts, Jr. addressed the issue of historical revisionism so common in the American South, The Civil War: ‘A conspiracy of amnesia’.

For me it is simple – people were literate and wrote contemporary accounts of what happened. There were newspapers and the acta of the secessionist conventions, so there is absolutely no doubt that the issue for the South was slavery. The issue for Abraham Lincoln was union. That is what the written records from that period show, and there were too many of them, in too many places, for anyone to have changed them all.

Later in the war, when it was obvious the South couldn’t win, there were attempts to change the subject, but at the beginning of the war the reason was not in doubt.

I don’t get into Civil War history to any great extent, because I have no interest in wasting time with delusional people, but there is a relevance to our current situation – compromises.

In a sense, slavery in the United States, under the Constitution is a long list of compromises, beginning with the “Three-Fifths Compromise” in the document itself. I understand the need for compromise in framing something like the Constitution, but there has to be a limit. The failure to take a stand on the extension of slavery after the Constitution came into effect eventually led to the Civil War. By repeatedly compromising on slavery issues, the South was emboldened to constantly threaten secession, which is what happened after Crittenden Compromise as rejected as the last straw for the Free States.

CBS carries the AP story: Japan raises nuclear alert to Chernobyl level. That is the top of heap, a level 7, but the AP story doesn’t provide any information as to why it was done.

For a much more technical discussion of what happened “George Washington” at Naked Capitalism releases his inner geek.

The short form is that the Japanese nuclear safety people started looking at the numbers being compiled by people other than TEPCO, including numbers from monitoring stations in the US, and had an OMG! moment. They have finally realized that the fires at the facility were the result of fuel rods in the spent fuel pools being exposed and spewing radioactive particles. They have discovered that it wasn’t just iodine and some cesium, but there was strontium-90 released. We have gone from half-lives measured in days, through those measured in decades, and arrived at those measured in millennia.

That would be Paul Ryan, the math-challenged Republicant from Walkeristan.

According to the BBC widget on my sidebar on today in history: Napoleon was shipped to Elba, McArthur got fired by Truman, and Idi Amin was thrown out of Uganda.

According to CNN Laurent Gbagbo of the Ivory Coast joined the list:

(CNN) — Forces stormed the president’s residence in Ivory Coast on Monday and arrested self-declared president Laurent Gbagbo, whose refusal to accept the results of a presidential election last year plunged the West African nation into civil war.

The 11^th of April may not have the zing of the Ides of March, but it works for me. [I missed Napoleon, but was around for the rest of the events.]

In comments about the Fukushima problems, Badtux and I have a running dark joke about the plant being run by Moe-san, Curley-san, and Larry-san [look up the Three Stooges is you don’t understand]. I’m guilty of starting this [see Number 7] in reference to an earlier nuclear problem caused by three Japanese workers enriching uranium using “milk pails” [stainless steel buckets {pronounced BUK-ET}] that resulted in a chain reaction. It is a dark and un-PC bit of humor that turns out to be closer to the truth than we expected.

Ms Ex-Pat at Corrente reports on a rather disturbing New York Times article that indicates that almost 9 out of 10 people working at Japanese nuclear facilities are day-laborers. The guys who accidentally set off the chain reaction at the nuclear fuel facility may have been using the same type of pail to actually milk cows the week before they began enriching uranium.

Apparently trained nuclear workers are expensive and want benefits, so the nuclear industry fills a lot of their jobs by hiring temporary workers. Imagine a TEPCO van pulling into a Home Depot parking lot at 5AM and loading up.

Nuclear energy is too dangerous to be left in the hands of people who are only interested in profits. People keep referring to these problems as Black Swans, but they are all quite predicable. We keep finding out that events that “No one could have imagined …”, were not only imagined, but rather stridently warned against.