News and Human Rights 7: Honduras Constitutional Crisis

I'm not sure any editorializing is really necessary in this story, so all the moralizing and big picture messages I usually paste all over these articles will probably be absent from this one. This is all pretty cut and dry stuff, and mostly I think it's useful because I get to jump on my high horse and tell you that there are things going on in Honduras and that Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift is not what you should be paying attention to when you consider current events.
I think that maybe I should name my high horse. What do you think a good name would be for a horse that you use to jump on and get real preachy and bleeding heart liberal about everything? Maybe Kanye West.
Yeah, it's gonna be Kanye West.
Alright, so Honduras.
Not the most politically stable place, historically. That kind of goes without saying, since Central America in general has been pretty rocky since, like, 1500. Mostly this has to do with white people coming across the ocean (as do so very many of our world's current political problems) and within the last thirty years or so, America has done its fair share of damage down there, as was discussed in the Chomsky blog. If you didn't read the Chomsky blog, just suffice it to say that America looks out for America's interests, not for the interests of brown people in foreign countries. So if it's a choice between a democratic socialist government that's already in place and working perfectly fine or a military coup that will ensure staggering human rights violations and the destruction of democracy itself, America won't get caught up in moral baggage. It will choose the financially sound decision, and coups are good for business. At least that has been my impression of the region's history, correct me if I'm wrong.
I would like to stress at this point that the most recent political upheaval in Honduras was not US backed, thankfully. Obama commented that the coup was illegal and that it would set a dangerous precedent in the world if we were to revert back to a time when coups were the standard for political transformation. As usual I both agree and hope he means what he says.
Here's the story about the Honduran Constitutional Crisis of 2009:
Honduras, by nature, is slightly suspicious of dictators. They haven't had a real good relationship with them in the past and they just don't want anything to do with them anymore. For this reason the presidential term in Honduras, according to the constitution, is only one term and only four years. I'm not a political science major so I can't say with any knowledge whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. But that's the whole trick to government, everybody thinks everyone else is doing it wrong. Here's a good joke I know in that same vein:
Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.

Anyways, Manuel Zemalya is the current president of Honduras, and earlier this year he called for a preliminary poll to be held on June 28 to see if the people of Honduras would be interested in adding a fourth ballot to the general elections that are scheduled to be held in November. What he said, exactly, is this: "Are you in accord that in the general elections of November 2009 there be included a fourth ballot in which the people decide whether to convoke a National Constituent Assembly?" What he means by "National Constituent Assembly," is that there would be an opportunity to revise and rework the nation's constitution.
Remember what I said about Hondurans being suspicious of dictators? Well, this suspicion led many to believe that Zemalya was basically trying to sneak into the constitution before the end of his term and extend the length of his presidency. According to the German newspaper Die Welt, "Opponents of Zemalya believe he was pushing the limits of democracy with his drive to extend the single four-year term of presidents to allow re-election."
See, I wouldn't call that pushing the limits of democracy. First of all, Zemalya and many others have observed that it would be impossible for Zemalya to run for re-election because the re-election is to be held on the same day as the ballot for the Constituent Assembly. Any political effects that the constitutional revision would allow for would come into play after Zemalya was technically out of office.
What I do think is pushing the limits of democracy is for the military to organize a couple hundred soldiers, storm the presidential palace, put a gun to the head of a democratically elected president, and deport him to El Salvador simply because he suggested an opinion poll in order to find out who would like to take another look at the constitution. Either pushing the limits of democracy, or, as Obama put it, committing a crime. And that is exactly what happened in Honduras on June 28, the day the opinion poll was to be taken.

Since the military has seized control of Honduras, police and military brutality is unsurprisingly on the rise. Amnesty International has reported hundreds of instances of students and civilians being brutalized by the police, beaten with batons while in the midst of peaceful marches and protests. Women have been especially vulnerable to these attacks and women as old as 59 years old have been beaten with batons during peaceful resistance. Many have been detained but released without charges. Curfews and check points have also been put into affect and are largely arbitrary, it would seem. To me, these look like great way to control for the sake of control.
As I read about these things, I can't help imagine how badly it would suck to live in a place where one morning you might wake up and your entire life has been flipped upside down because of a military coup. I don't think any of us can really understand what that would be like.
"Shit, did you hear? This morning Obama got marched out of the White House with a gun to his head and they sent him to Canada. Now the military's in charge, there's check points all over the roads, and everybody who thinks that this isn't such a good idea is getting their asses handed to them with the business end of a baton."
Sounds like a science fiction movie, but it's reality for millions and millions of people all over the world.
Oops, there's that moralizing stuff again. Sorry about that.

As of today, Zemalya is claiming to be back in Honduras while the government and a UN spokeswoman assure the rest of the world that this is not the case. The US has a lot of stuff going on right now, it's true, but our government needs to put more pressure on the Honduran military to allow its rightfully elected president to return to office for the remainder of his term, and to let democracy continue from there on out. For now, the situations goes unresolved.

God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian and Einstein's Dreams

While these books don't have much to do with each other, they are sort of similar in their bizarreness, their shortness, and their short chapters. Also, I read both of them in the same week, so I would feel like I was cheating if I spaced them out for two separate entries.

First, I think I should digress and talk a little about how I came to have these books in the first place. As you may or may not have heard, a few weeks ago my girlfriend Lindsay and I were on our way to New York City for the end-of-summer-road-trip of a lifetime. First to NYC, where we were to stay overnight in Time's Square and see the nightlife, then on to Atlantic City and the ocean, followed by Philadelphia, and finally to Washington D.C. Instead, we ended up stranded on the Ohio turnpike when a piston misfired through the motor of Lindsay's Saturn, leaving a softball-sized hole in its wake. We found ourselves in downtown Sandusky where the hotels are overpriced, the recommended dining is The Weenie Hut (we ate their twice) and by the grace of god there happens to be a Borders. After a wrecked car and a trashed plan to see the East Coast, I wasn't in the mood for the likes of David Foster Wallace (author of Infinite Jest, over 1,000 pages long.) I wanted something short, something easy to read and easy to get a lot of good stuff out of in a short period of time. While it's usually hard to find even one book like this, I managed to find two.

God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian is really classic Vonnegut. By this I mean the tone is perfect, the chapters are short, every page is brilliant and nothing happens the way you expect it to. This 76 page book is a collection of radio broadcasts that Vonnegut did in Texas some years back, claiming to be in the company of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Kevorkian, while in a state-of-the-art maximum security prison in Texas, supposedly induced a number of near-death experiences for Vonnegut, at which time Vonnegut was able to go up to Heaven (just outside the pearly gates, as entering would mean his actual death) and interview whoever happened to be around that day.
What's best about this book is not the interviews themselves, for, in typically Vonnegut fashion, very little attention is paid to what the book is actually supposed to be about. Instead the reader gets a lot of Vonnegut's musings on death, for instance, that there is no hell. In this book, Adolf Hitler is shown to be strolling around outside the gates, and he confides in Vonnegut that he wishes some likeness of himself would be erected (I think) in the UN headquarters in New York with a German engraving that would be the equivalent to "Excuse me," or "Beg Your Pardon," in English.
We also find out that angels are the souls of babies who have died and whose souls are raised in heaven. In this book, as always, I enjoyed Vonnegut's undying optimism and humanism. Everyone goes to heaven, how nice is that? Vonnegut's epitaph is at its most appropriate in this book: "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."

Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman was second on my reading list, and it too was filled with three-page chapters and a lot of interesting stuff. This book is all about mis-imagining, or maybe re-imagining, time. The book is supposed to take place in the dreams of Albert Einstein while, in his mid-twenties, he was working in a patent office in Germany and at the same time coming up with his theory of relativity. The dreams in question take up about 90% of the book, and each one is an exploration of the daily lives of parallel universes (it would seem) where time exists completely differently from the way we experience it. In one reality time is a loop and all actions are repeated over and over again into infinity. In another it has been discovered that time moves slower for people further from the earth, so all houses are built on stilts up in the mountains. Likewise, another dream shows all buildings on wheels because it has been discovered that time move slower for people in motion. In one dream, time is not a reality, time is a sense like sight or taste. However, some people are born with a type of time-blindness and are out of the flow of time altogether.
What was most interesting for me about this book is that you begin with kind of easy observations about differences in time (that time might be a loop) and end with increasingly personalized and complex imaginings of time. Time becomes more and more relative to the people experiencing it as the books goes on, which while not the exact meaning of relativity, is genius nonetheless.

These are both books you can read in an afternoon and they are jam-packed with interesting ideas. They are good for the same reason poetry is good. Sometimes it's nice to swim in a sea of language, characters, plot and metaphors for hundreds of pages. But sometimes it's nice to read a book cover to cover in one sitting and soak it in as a whole right then and there. I like the idea that a couple of hours can alter your perception of the world around you if you've got a good enough book in your hands.

College For Free 7: The United States School System

This blog is about due for a rant, and this is as good a topic as any. In fact, this may be the best topic.

Since the time we are entered into the system, we're told that next year things will get harder. School may not be that serious right now, but next year it will be harder. In second grade I was told I had to learn cursive because next year I wouldn't be allowed to turn in anything written in print. In third grade we were told we couldn't talk during the tests because if we did that sort of stuff next year our teacher would simply take it away and rip it up. Sure, slacking off in middle school seems fun, but once you get to high school it's a no nonsense, all business, fucking bloodbath of discipline and homework. Alright, so high school's not that hard, but college is no laughing matter. You at least have to pretend to try in college. I mean, it's college for God's sake. It must be hard, right?
Truth: School never gets harder.

I once saw an episode of Doug in which Skeeter told our hero that once they got to middle school, everything would change for worse. Specifically, I remember a theory about the tests being so hard that they wouldn't even have questions written on them. The students would be expected to write their answers unprompted on a blank piece of paper and, ultimately, fail. But of course, when they actually arrived and began their classes, they found that it wasn't so bad after all, nor was it very different from elementary school, and everyone went about their business as usual.
This is an absolutely perfect description of my experience in the public school system.

I think the fatal flaw in our school system is the same fatal flaw that exists everywhere else: Money. When you turn such a fundamental system as education (or health care for that matter, but I'll get to that some other time) into a business, it is doomed for failure. This is a long-standing problem, but No Child Left Behind really wrecked shit, let me tell you. The crime of No Child Left Behind is that it relies on standardized testing, which has very little to do with actual intelligence. Intelligence is better measured through creativity and inquisitiveness, not the ability to blindly memorize facts for the duration of an hour-long test.
Here's the ugly truth of the matter: some kids need to be left behind. Not left behind in the big picture, I mean left behind a grade. If a student isn't performing up to par with the rest of his peer group, if he isn't grasping basic concepts, if he hasn't shown mastery of the subjects needed to complete that level of education, he should be: a) shown special attention if these short-comings are not his fault or b) be held back if it is the student's unwillingness to learn that is slowing his progress. It seems to me that a vicious snow-balling phenomenon begins very early on in the education process, a phenomenon among teachers called "Not My Problem."
I'm not sure when this process starts, at what grade level a child shows up ill-equipped to deal with the most rudimentary tasks of education and the teacher simply shrugs it off, but I know it happens. Students that aren't performing at an acceptable level are pushed through the system with C's and D's, failing to comprehend the value of education and, in fact, feeling alienated from subject matter that they should have been helped with instead of scraping by in. Scraping by is not really acceptable anywhere, ever, so why is it acceptable when building the foundations of an educated society? I really, really wish I knew.
This is how we end up with a generation of people who do not understand the very most basic things about the English language, even when it is the only language they know how to read, write and speak. This is how we end with a generation of people who can't do multiplication in their heads and who don't have any awareness of the true nature of the world. The system dictates that the students must perform well in order for the school to receive funding. But the students aren't doing well, because all the teachers know that it is far too late to sit down with a high school student and explain the difference between "to," "too," and "two." So what do these teachers and school systems do? They lower the standards until the bare-minimum becomes acceptable work.

Let me say something that sounds like bragging but is actually regret: I did very well in school. I have never failed a class in my life. I was the English Laureate of my high school. I graduated college in 4 years with Magna Cum Laude honors and a 3.7 GPA. And, to be honest, I have never tried very hard at school. In fact, for the most part, I didn't try at all. The quality of basic public education has become so sub-par that a college essay written with fantastic grammar, spelling and vocabulary will receive an A every time REGARDLESS of content.

Why is this in the College For Free section? Because this is something that I've always known but didn't start to depress me until I came to college. In elementary school I thought middle school would be hard, and it wasn't. The same went for my transition for high school. In college, I really thought that the lie would be real this time, that I would be challenged, that I would be pushed, that the classes would be hard and my classmates would be smart and the material would be worth getting out of bed for. Sadly, that was not the case. As I sat in lecture halls surrounded by disinterested students checking their facebooks and playing games online, I realized that college is actually just high school part 2. A college degree has become so expected in our country that the standards have necessarily been lowered to greet all those high school graduates who, from day one, have been pushed through the system while teachers stood back and said "not my problem."

My conspiracy theorist side says that this all makes perfect sense, because it's really easy to govern a population that is more interested in celebrity gossip than the tyrannical abuse of power exhibited across the globe by their own country. It's very easy to control a group of people who can't even spell the word "government." When you don't teach empathy or world history or colonization as part of the K-12 agenda, it takes no effort at all to convince an entire nation of people that Muslims (all of them) hate our freedom. Man, the only thing that would make people easier to control would be to make them poor. You can't very well question the government when you're trying to feed your family and keep your house. You just don't have time.
But that's ridiculous, right?
I don't know. Nothing is certain, ever. It's turtles all the way down, didn't you know that?

News and Human Rights 6: East Timor

I know what you're thinking: "I've never heard of a place called East Timor."
Well, there's a perfectly good reason for this. East Timor is quite commonly known as Timor-Leste, so there you have it, just one of those simple mix-ups.
Oh, you've never heard of Timor-Leste either? Well there's a perfectly good reason for that, too.

The American public school system. And the American mainstream media. So two reasons.

East Timor is a country in South-Pacific Asia roughly the size of Connecticut. Even though you've never heard of it, more than one million people live there. And, unfortunately, all one million of them are living in the aftermath of a 25 year occupation that left an estimated 100,000 natives dead. Bummer, I know, but bear with me.

East Timor was first colonized by Portugal, because even though Portugal is small, they really know their way around colonization. They were, after all, the first to colonize in Africa. The Portuguese ruled until 1974 when a military coup in their own country forced them to relinquish control of some of their colonies, East Timor included. As would be expected the newly freed country was rocked by the sudden political upheaval after 400 years of colonial rule, but at this point things had to be looking up for them. They were free to govern their own land, reap their own rewards, and be the masters of their own destinies. On November 28, 1975, the pro-independence group known as FRETILIN (the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor [the acronym is goofy because of the language difference]) claimed an independent East Timor after winning a short-lived civil war and the declaration of victory in the capital city of Dili.
Then, four years later, Indonesia showed up.
Indonesia came barging in Farva-style, completely uninvited and ready to fuck things up. They completely annihilated the armed resistance of East Timor and declared the country to be a province of Indonesia. During the 25 year occupation, the Timorese people were subjected to extrajudicial executions, torture, sexual crimes and starvation. While the UN opposed the occupation and demanded immediate withdrawal, countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, Britain and Germany firmly backed Indonesia. Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger even reportedly gave the "green light" for invasion after meeting with the Indonesian president shortly before the invasion.
The Massacre:
In 1991, a delegation to East Timor was supposed to take place with members of Portuguese Parliament, a UN representative, and a dozen journalists. After one of the journalists was identified as a FRETILIN sympathizer by the Indonesian government, the entire thing was called off. Demoralization of the Timorese independence activists, who had planned to use this delegation to gain international attention for their cause, ensued. This grew to frustration, tensions ran high, and things escalated when a group of resistance members was discovered by Indonesian troops. In the course of the confrontation, a supporter of independence named Sebastiao Gomez was taken outside and shot. Gomez's memorial service turned into the largest protest of Indonesian occupation since 1975. Several thousand pro-independence Timorese walked from the site of the shooting to the cemetery where Gomez was to be buried, chanting, holding anti-Indonesian banners, and mocking the troops all the way. While loud, the protest was reported to be peaceful and orderly by most accounts.
When the procession reached the cemetery, some were allowed in while others remained outside the gates and continued to protest their oppressors. It seems to me, in my limited knowledge, that massacres in these sorts of situations always develop out of protests, and usually over the protests of a man who was wrongfully killed. Not surprising, I suppose. What better way to get the state's enemies all in one place, than with a protest?
As the procession continued their peaceful assembly, a new group of soldiers appeared. These newly arrived Indonesian soldiers arrived with purpose. They didn't waste any time with crowd control, they simply opened fire on the protesters. An estimated 250 - 400 were killed. A direct quote from the Indonesian Commander-in-Chief taken two days after the massacre reads as follows: "The army cannot be underestimated. Finally we had to shoot them. Delinquents like these agitators must be shot, and they will be."

In 1999 alone it is estimated that 1,200 Timorese were murdered in an attempt to dissuade the population from voting for independence, which they were allowed to finally (finally, finally, finally) do during a UN-supervised poll (finally.) East Timor was finally granted independence with an overwhelming majority of 78.5% voting for freedom from Indonesia and was recognized as an independent nation on May 20, 2002.

Now, East Timor is one of the many countries in the world still struggling to recover from centuries of outside control. Since their recognition the country has been rocked by political instability and violence. A protest turned riot in 2006 forced over 20,000 residents to flee the capital city and resulted in 40 deaths between rioters and military. Large numbers of the military have disaffected and assassination attempts plague political officials. It occurs to me that perhaps it is difficult to stop fighting when your environment has taught you that it is the only way to live. Sure, Indonesia is gone, but there will always be an opposition whether it be political or civil or authoritarian. After centuries of armed opposition, how do you stop killing your enemies?
For the men and women who suffered for so long through the cruelty of Indonesian occupation, it must be incredibly disheartening to see that the violence did not end with independence. And it must be even more disheartening to know that the war criminals of Indonesia have yet to be punished. In fact, in 2005 East Timor chose to pursue something called the joint Indonesia - Timor Leste Truth and Friendship Commission, which provides no prosecutions for the perpetrators of war crimes from 1975-1999.
As usual, it seems, it's not even that we forgot about this country. We never even knew it existed in the first place.

"The path pursued by these two governments has weakened the rule of law in both countries... The victims need a clear commitment by the Indonesian and Timor-Leste governments and the United Nations to investigate all allegations and bring to justice those responsible for the grave human rights violations committed between 1975 and 1999." - Donna Guest, Amnesty International.

The Radioactive Boy Scout

Last summer, in one of my many attempts to stall any kind of productivity in my life, I found myself reading the Wikipedia article on Commerce Township. I expected to find the usual things, of course. Demographics, geography, date of establishment, populations, all the boring numbers. However, what I was hoping to find was something weird and striking, something that would shock me, something that would make my rich, white, waspy, hometown stand out from other rich, white waspy towns. I didn't expect to find much, maybe a story about the infamous wall in Walled Lake, or something about the history of Native Americans in the area. What I didn't expect to find was this paragraph:

"In 1994, David Hahn, a 17-year old Eagle Scout, constructed a makeshift nuclear reactor in his backyard in Commerce Township, exposing himself and his neighbors-and maybe even as many as 40,000 people in the area-to radioactive materials and drawing the attention of the EPA. The event became a short-lived media sensation, and a book by Ken Silverstein called The Radioactive Boy Scout was written about the incident and published in 2004."

Holy shit! Can you believe that? This kid lived in Golf Manor! Like a two minute drive from my house. This is the subdivision just west of CHS where most of my friends went to middle school. The subdivision gets its name from Edgewood Country Club where I used to work. Also, to put that "40,000 people in the area" figure into perspective: as of 2000 there were less than 35,000 people living in Commerce Township. That number must have been far reduced back in 94, which says to me that many people outside of just Commerce (such as the residents of White Lake and Walled Lake) must have also been effected.

So, what drives a 17 year old boy to the isolation of a potting shed, reducing gas lantern mantles to thorium-rich ash in his senior year of high school? The answers are all in Ken Silverstein's book, and luckily for you I've already read it so you don't have to.

David Hahn, first of all, had a naturally experimental and inquisitive streak. When he was four years old he recalls mixing his first experiment while alone in the bathroom using chemicals under the sink. Obviously it's not exactly safe for a four year old to be playing with dangerous household chemicals, but a lack of parental supervision was absolutely key in all of David Hahn's experiments. His father Ken was an engineer at GM who worked long hours and paid very little attention to his son. His mother Patty was the source of affection in his home life, and the two were very close when David was little. Unfortunately, around the time that David was six his mother was diagnosed with depression and paranoid schizophrenia for which she was briefly institutionalized. Upon her release, Patty developed a drinking problem and the marriage came to an end when David was nine.
Obviously, a depressed, alcoholic, paranoid schizophrenic is going to have a hard time hanging onto custody rights, so David was sent to live with his father in Clinton Township. Though his father remarried shortly thereafter, David's stepmother seems to have been nearly as aloof as his father and David's family life quickly disappeared. With all this instability in his life, it isn't surprising that David turned to something that he could control and manipulate to his liking.
The most dangerous possession that ever fell into David's hands, even more dangerous than the radium, thorium and americium he was able to get his hands on later in life, was a textbook called The Golden Book of Chemistry. This was a severely outdated textbook from the 1960s that spoke optimistically of the nuclear age as a thing of the future, and as the way that humanity would solve all of its energy crises. It was also the kind of book that showed children performing dangerous science experiments without gloves or masks, just happily working away without regard for their own personal safety. This book, meant for children, would have brought down the fury of God in the form of angry mothers' lawsuits if it were released today. A short and simple recipe for chlorine gas (a chemical weapon used to kill tens of thousands of soldiers in WWI by stripping away the mucus linings of their lungs and letting them drown on their own blood) was provided for anyone who wanted to try it. The book also urged young scientists to perform their experiments in the garage or the basement, somewhere private. In other words, away from parental supervision.
By the time David was twelve he was making his own hair dye and experimenting with homemade tanning solutions. He would show up to school with his hair streaked blonde green and black or sporting skin the color of a carrot. He was also working with a very serious grasp of chemistry. When his father encouraged him to join the Boy Scouts (this in itself an effort to deter him from his increasingly dangerous experiments) David was briefly banned for concocting a batch of moonshine while on a trip. His real pride, however, were the sparklers, fireworks and smoke bombs he was able to throw together with chemicals like magnesium and potassium nitrate. Even at this young age, his confidence in his ability and seemingly harmless nature proved incredibly useful when it came to getting his supplies, no matter how difficult it may have seemed to come across them.
When David was in high school, he decided that he would find a way to collect all of the elements of the periodic table. When he told his assorted science teachers what he intended to do, he was met with the kind of disbelief that marked his entire life and always made it easy for him to slip by undetected. Some teachers brushed him off as a lying kid looking for attention. Others assumed that he would stick only to the simpler elements. None ever dreamed that he would go after radium, and none after thought that he would actually collect it.
Actually, back in the 1920s and 30s, radium was found in a lot of places. Radium was used as paint to make clocks and toys glow in the dark. Some of the radium painters actually used to paint their teeth in order to shock friends, and for this reason many radium painters later died of cancer. Obviously such practices were discontinued, but the clocks can still be found, and David found them. He also managed to get thorium, as I mentioned earlier, and he was able to extract americium from smoke detectors. About a hundred smoke detectors, actually, which he bought at bulk price.
So why a nuclear reactor? How did he go from making hair dye and smoke bombs to irradiating up to 40,000 people in Commerce Township and beyond?
One of his sources of inspiration was the institution that was supposed to deter him from such activities: the Boy Scouts. Their out of date pamphlets on atomic energy (that phrase itself being outdated) were terribly optimistic, downplaying disasters like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and exaggerating nuclear promise and potential. David was, in fact, completely adverse to any negative literature on the topic, feeling that reading negative criticism of his obsession wasn't really worth his time.
Another fact that seemed to suggest he would actually able to build a breeder reactor in a shed in his schizophrenic mother's backyard was that Marie and Pierre Curie operated in much the same way when they discovered radium. Also, it must have appeared to him that he was absolutely unstoppable. This is a kid who couldn't spell the word "millions" when he wrote letters to government nuclear companies and professors around the country, and yet he was able to collect his radioactive materials and all the information necessary for his grandest experiment. So, from a outdated blueprint in one of his father's chemistry books, David Hahn attempted to build a nuclear reactor.
What's weird about this story (or, I guess, weirder) is that David came about as close as anyone has ever come to making a breeder reactor. (A breeder reactor is a reactor with a uranium core and a plutonium shell. When the uranium passes through the plutonium it's supposed to create more uranium which goes back to the core, and in this way the energy breeds itself and is perpetual.) No one has ever made a breeder before, ever. No country, no matter how many millions of dollars it spends, has ever done it. David didn't create nuclear fission, but he was getting reactions and the radioactivity of his materials grew at an alarming rate. So alarming, in fact, that even he realized how dangerous it was and had to dismantle it. The materials were only found when a random encounter with the police led to a search of his trunk, which held some radioactive materials, and this led to a subsequent search of his house, which revealed the rest.
So where is David Hahn now? Google his name and you'll see. The picture that comes up is his mugshot from 2007 when he was caught trying to steal smoke detectors from his apartment building. The pockmarks on his face were allegedly from radiation exposure, but I read an interesting blog that theorized Hahn has become a meth addict. As the article points out: he knows he can't build a reactor, he knows he doesn't have the materials, and frankly, he knows his shit when it comes to chemistry. Why would he be trying to get the tiny bits of americium out of a few dozen smoke detectors? This indeed does not seem like the actions of a healthy mind.
What's most sad to me about the entire ordeal is that afterwards, all the people he had been trying to impress, his teachers and peers, treated him as more of a pariah in light of his accomplishments. This is a 17 year old kid we're talking about here. He hadn't even graduated high school and he was able to create the basis for a breeder reactor, something that people with limitless supplies and resources do just about as well as he did. All anyone ever wanted from David Hahn was to hide his passion, hide his talent, and follow the rules like everyone else. He was never offered any guidance and encouragement, though to me he clearly shows signs of a savant at work.

You know, since I've been away from Commerce, I've found one truth to be consistent and inescapable: people from Commerce Township are weird. Upon arriving at college, I immediately gained a new respect for my hometown along this line of thinking: at least the people there are interesting. It's difficult to explain. You may say that I stuck with the friends I had, and that all people are interesting once you get up close and personal with them, but I beg to differ. For example, Scott Kilby was a perfect stranger to me when I moved to Kalamazoo, despite the fact that we attended school together and that he lived a mere ten minutes away from me. We became fast friends not because he was familiar, I had no idea who he was or what he was like. We became friends because he was the kind of person to be playing a digereedo outside the dorms while everyone else stood around smoking. And this kind of behavior, this pattern of strangeness worthy of characters in a novel, is relatively consistent in the people of Commerce Township, whether you love them or hate them.
Now, there are a lot of possible explanations for this. One is that the area's mixed level of wealth (from extreme affluence to lower-middle class) and the area's lack of anything fun to do (but not so desolate and stickish that heroin was allowed to completely run amok,) made for a batch of resourceful and interesting people who were afforded a great amount of leisure time in which to creatively entertain themselves. Not a bad theory.
My theory, however, is that David Hahn accidentally turned us all into borderline super heroes when he attempted to create a homemade breeder reactor in a shed and unwittingly exposed us all to radiation.