Risky transfers

This update is 6 days old, but it hasn't made any more sense with time. Perhaps it was the way it was written - my opinion: the stress on the financial benefits of offsetting local plutonium storage with monetary compensation is alarming. That Germany will pay the UK to store this ridiculously dangerous material, that the UK will risk political backlash because the "financial benefits from the title transfer will exceed the long-term costs of the material's safe storage and management", that France will then supply processed MOX fuel for use in German reactors, that the UK will then argue that it is glad it has been spared the trouble of shipping plutonium while implying that it is comfortable being the site of nuclear waste storage... are all alarming developments.

Why? Because, even though I'm pro-nuclear, the backlash that could arise out of this could negate years of progress in developing MOX-processing technologies and installing them in the middle of energy policies of three countries. One problem is already obviously foreseeable: Germany's reluctance to continue its reliance on nuclear power is simply short-sighted. If it requires any more power in the future, it will have to purchase it from France, which, given the knee-jerk shutdown of NPPs worldwide after the Fukushima Incident, is just as surprisingly displaying enough sense to rely on NPPs. By then, I hope monetary advantages will not suffice to mask the reality that Germany would be paying to have France purchase its troubles. Unless, of course, there is some other agreeable form of risk-transfer.

Just ugly.

The sons of conspiracy

When I was speaking with Z earlier this evening, she mentioned a conspiracy she claimed to have heard from a friend of hers. What follows is entirely a description of what I've heard of it, and my reflections where stated.

During World War II, with the assurance of Aryan supremacy, Adolf Hitler should have had no trouble recruiting soldiers, given that many of them were those who had lost their jobs and lebensraum ("living space") because of an "economic invasion" by the Jews.

Despite these drives, there was apparently a brothel-that-wasn't-a-brothel somewhere in Germany where supremacist men and women prostituted their bodies for a strange cause: to birth children who would be brought up as Übermensch (from the Nietzschean philosophical concept of a "super-human") to serve the cause of the Third Reich. These children would be conditioned to believe that Hitler's word and beliefs were final and definitive, and to become warrior-mages (a notion borrowed from World of Warcraft).

The curious speculation doesn't end there but goes on to assert that such children were indeed present in the ranks of the army, and that they faced considerable ridicule because none of them knew who their fathers were. In other words, they were conceived in an environment of deliberate invalidity, stripped off their identities soon after birth, and turned into armed proselytizers. They were the walking bits of Nazi Germany.

[caption id="attachment_21607" align="aligncenter" width="512" caption=""We are... legion?""][/caption]

Although this theory was refuted by a historian that Z had spoken to, it doesn't hurt to conjecture the possibilities such a plot presents for historical fiction. The best book I have read in that regard - a book that captured properly the tension, fear and rage in Europe in the 1940s - is The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth: at its centre is a Nazi-hunting reporter attempting to track down a former SS concentration-camp commander. That's a choice of plot that makes the book simpler to write.

What of the sons of conspiracy? Were they willful participants or lost souls who moved with the current they were inadvertently generating? I - for what my opinion counts - believe that the initiative that created them could not have been organized by the government: Hitler was too principled a eugenicist to resort to prostitution. At the same time, it is not entirely implausible that a misguided fanatical cult could have perpetrated such a scheme.

Someone could write a good story about it... perhaps with a neo-noir narrative that is courageous enough to satirize the war so the comedians living the foolishness of 1941-Germany can be laughed at.