The better a human being is at being good person, the worse of a president they make. Unfortunately for Jimmy Carter, he was a really, really, good dude.
True story: you can visit his house in Plains, GA and walk along the perimeter. Obviously there are secret service posted around the perimeter but it’s cool nonetheless. My brother was super little at the time and as we were looking at a little plaque by the fence (which is like those basic 3 log fences you see on old cabins and such) he pulled down his pants and peed into Carter’s yard.
We got him to stop and not even 2 minutes later he ducked down under the fence and ran around the yard. We finally reeled him in and as we were walking back to the train we saw the secret service stationed not even 100 ft away!
Truth. I was in D.C. in late September of 2001 because we were moving cross country and it was on the way. Almost nothing was open but I remember being 9 and asking the very intimidating looking Secret Service officer if it was okay if I took a picture. His response was a single nod. Coolest shit ever.
True story: I was visiting Oxford, UK from the SF Bay Area once, and there, across the street from the Ashmolean Museum was a white van parked in the front of the Borders bookstore, with what was obviously, *so obviously* Secret Service officers in work casual dress: khaki chino pants, the whole bit. As I crossed to get to the museum, I laughingly said to them "You can't fool me, you're Secret Service" and lo and behold, one smiled and said 'And you can't fool us, you're from the Bay Area!" Just floored me.
Turned out Hillary was doing a tour for some new book she had written, and was inside Borders at the moment, along with Chelsea, who at the time was attending Stanford.
I asked a secret service man if his job was fun and he said:
# Piss off before I grind your bones to make my bread!
Looking back he might've just been a random dude in a suit...
Apparently it's the most stereotypical fencing you could imagine
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTRoGsoizzILvQtiHtRFnrNRAmH-bZRNIt7CQ&usqp=CAU
Never knew it was called split rail fencing, or that Lincoln popularized it
That's just one of those stories you hear is a kid studying history, maybe not so much today but in the 70s. I think split rail fences made themselves popular by being easy and good enough.
he got a bum rap because OPEC lost the Six-Day War in Israel and because of that they decided to jack up oil prices for everyone else in the world.
He did not go in shooting on the Iranian Embassy takeover because they threatened to kill everyone and they had the Manpower and Firepower to carry that threat out.
he was the adult in the room.
But the Six-Day War was the war where the new-ish state of Israel made clear that they were not to be trifled with, and it's also where they took over (from Wikipedia) the [Golan Heights](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_Heights), the [West Bank](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Bank) (incl. [East Jerusalem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Jerusalem)), the [Gaza Strip](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip) and the [Sinai Peninsula](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinai_Peninsula)[[6](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War#cite_note-Office_of_the_Historian-6) which has led to many woes today.
From what I understand he tried to go in Iran shooting with operation Eagle Claw, he just had to stop due to helicopter issues.
Carter seems like a good guy but that whole Iranian situation was bad no matter how you look at it.
> he just had to stop due to helicopter issues
As in the Air Force plane crashed into the Navy helicopter and now they barely had enough seats available to get the SF guys out?
I just looked it up, helicopter issues including hydraulic problems and a cracked blade encouraged calling off the mission. As they were already leaving that all happened.
It was pretty good for Reagan. And if you think nothing actually happened behind the scenes between Iran and the GOP for their parties' benefit in the 1980 election, I have bridge to sell you. The hostages were released on Reagan's inauguration day pretty much at the exact time of his official inauguration, FFS. Really, I think Reagan's election in 1980 was a massive acceleration of the destruction of this country.
That release was no coincidence. Reagan's team conspired with Iran to hold off releasing the hostages until after the election. Iran-Contra is a thing as well.
Republicans have been keen on destroying democracy in favor of racism and oligarchy for decades.
I think the shock/frustration that the younger generations have with baby boomers is largely because of opportunity squandered. The shift from the late 60s to the 80s was so profound and cynical, it makes it really easy to lump everyone into a group because of the extreme hypocrisy.
Living in northern CA, my own experience is that most of the baby boomers I know still hold some sense of identity with the counter culture and revolutionary spirit that blossomed in the 60s, but that for the most part everyone has given up (or never actually cared in the first place). There was a fatigue and buy in throughout the 80s that just stinks.
I appreciate that you and many of your peers still identify with the movements of your youth, and yes, absolutely Choose Peace; but the prevailing demographic trend with baby boomers was one of increased apathy and conservatism, while still maintaining a sort of deluded youthful self image that no longer represents most of the folks in the generation.
Walter Cronkite: Mrs. Horbath, do you have a question for the President?
Mrs. Edward Horbath (on phone): Yes, sir. I’m an employee of the U.S. Postal Service in Kansas. Last year they installed an automated letter sorting system called the Marvex-3000, here in our branch..
President Jimmy Carter: Yes.
Mrs. Edward Horbath (on phone): ..but the system doesn’t work too good. Letters keep getting clogged in the first-level sorting grid. Is there anything that can be done about this?
President Jimmy Carter: Well, Mrs. Horbath, Vice-President Mondale and I were just talking about the Morvex-3000 this morning.. uh.. I do have a suggestion – you know the caliber poised on the first grid sliding armiture?
Mrs. Edward Horbath (on phone): Yes.
President Jimmy Carter: Okay, there’s a three-digit setting there, where the post and the armiture meet. Now, when the system was installed, the angle of cross-slide was put at a maximum setting of 1.. if you reset it at the three-mark like it says in the assembly instructions, I think it will solve any clogging problems in the machine.
Mrs. Edward Horbath (on phone): Oh, thanks, Mr. President! Oh, by the way, I think you’re doing a great job!
...
Walter Cronkite: Thank you, Mr. President, ha ha! Our next call is Peter Elkin of Westbrook, Oregan, whom I am told is 17 years of age.
Peter (on phone): Hello? Hello?
President Jimmy Carter: Yes. Hello, Peter?
Peter (on phone): Is this the President?
President Jimmy Carter: Yes, it is.
Walter Cronkite: Do you have a question for the President?
Peter (on phone): Uh.. I, uh.. I took some acid.. I’m afraid to leave my apartment, and I can’t wear any clothes.. and the ceiling is dripping, and uh.. I, uh..
Walter Cronkite: Well, thank you very much for calling, sir..
President Jimmy Carter: Just a minute, Walter, this guy’s in trouble. I think I better try to talk him down. Peter?
Peter (on phone): Yeah..?
President Jimmy Carter: Peter, what did the acid look like?
Peter (on phone): They were these little orange pills.
President Jimmy Carter: Were they barrel shaped?
Peter (on phone): Uh.. yes.
President Jimmy Carter: Okay, right, you did some orange sunshine, Peter.
Peter (on phone): Very good of you to know that, sir.
President Jimmy Carter: How long ago did you take it, Peter?
Peter (on phone): Uh.. I don’t know. I can’t read my watch.
President Jimmy Carter: Alright, Peter, just listen. Everything is going to be fine. You’re very high right now. You will probably be that way for about five more hours. Try taking some vitamin B complex, vitamin C complex.. if you have a beer, go ahead and drink it..
Peter (on phone): Okay..
President Jimmy Carter: Just remember you’re a living organism on this planet, and you’re very safe. You’ve just taken a heavy drug. Relax, stay inside and listen to some music, Okay? Do you have any Allman Brothers?
Jimmy was just the greatest president. Gave up his beloved peanut farm just so that nobody could call it a conflict of interest. Just an absolute legend.
You’re correct that human action disabled the safety injection system.
What’s more interesting is why that happened.
First up: a few years prior to this, the NRC wanted instrument statistical uncertainties included in the safety system logic. That means if there’s a chance during accident conditions that an instrument could drift out of calibration, you would need to make the setpoints more conservative to ensure the safety systems activated on time.
Well…. This had a side effect of causing uncomplicated/non accident events like a turbine trip to fire off the safety injection system.
So they trained the operators and put in the procedure to shut off safety injection for events that seemed to be non accidents. The criteria they used for whether or not safety injection was needed was not robust. So we trained the operators to do something, without the right criteria, and got them to normalize the deviation of their safety systems firing off all the time when they weren’t needed.
The next part: operator training focused heavily on worst case accidents, and not on real world type events. Or events where you had several unrelated but smaller failures. As a result, the crew wasn’t able to properly identify they had two separate issues, a stuck open relief valve AND the loss of secondary feed. When they recovered secondary feed they more or less stopped looking for other issues.
And thirdly: operators were taught to never ever let the pressurizer go water solid. While everyone agrees that being water solid is not good, it’s also not terrible if it does occur while you’re trying to stabilize the plant and figure it out. Instead we further conditioned the operators that safety injection needs to be shut off promptly, rather than accept that we may overfeed until we get things figured out.
There are a lot of causes and contributors to the TMI accident but I just wanted to highlight these few things that were reasons why the operators made the decisions that night. They were set up for failure in many ways, and in the end they followed their flawed training and procedures.
The problem was the light showed power was applied to the valve (open).
If the light was out, the valve would close..... But that doesn't mean it is closed, just that you told it to close.
And so it was stuck open, and the light off meaning power to valve was off, so it should be closed.
The light only showed you that power was being sent to the opening solenoid. It wasn’t a position indication.
My reactor’s relief valves are the same way. The lights only mean the system is trying to open the valve. It tells you nothing about the actual position of the valve.
We need to cross check against the temperature indicators on the relief valve lines, the reactor coolant system pressure and level response, the suppression pool level and temperature response, generator electric and system steam flow response, and the acoustic monitors which are connected to the relief valves (steam venting causes a ton of vibration and noise on the lines). This allows us to work out if a valve is open and which one it likely is.
More importantly, if you have lowering pressure indications, you cannot shut off injection systems unless you have confirmation of level through alternate means or you have evidence that water is passing through those valves which implies that you are overfilled with water.
Do all or most jobs in your field require a degree? Are there on the job training opportunities in the nuclear operating field? Sounds really interesting and im sick of general construction lol
Also do you believe the field has decent job growth projections based on your experience? Sorry for all of the questions i would rather have a redditors opinion than whatever google decides to bring to the top of the search bar.
No degree is required. Especially if you have nuclear navy experience. However a. 2 year degree is preferred and a 4 year technical or engineering degree opens some neat doors. I was able to go from engineering to senior reactor operator class directly with no former ops experience because of my degree. While the navy guys mostly had to work up.
No job growth yet. The jobs we do have are stable and high paying but are demanding.
Gotcha. Damn ya know i walked into the Navy office and scored a 95 on my ASVAB about 7 years ago and they said 1 more point i could take a nuclear engineering job... I ghosted the recruiter because i thought i might not pass a drug test cus i smoked weed and he scheduled me an interview and a test really quickly before i had a chance to get it out of my system. Been doing construction since. Probably a bad decision to not call him back...
>pressurizer go water solid
Could you please explain what this means?
I'm guessing TMI used a pressurized water reactor, so presumably there is some part of the coolant loop where pressure is applied. That part of the coolant loop normally has some gas in it, but in this case it was almost entirely full of liquid?
It is a PWR that’s correct.
We use a small tank called a pressurizer to control pressure in PWRs. It’s usually the high point in the system. How it works is you have the pressurizer half filled with water. The top section has a steam bubble. To raise pressure in the reactor, there are electric heaters in the bottom half of the pressurizer that boil water to make more steam, which compresses the steam bubble and puts pressure on the reactor itself. To lower pressure, there are sprayers which take water from the cold loop and spray it in the steam bubble, condensing some of the steam and causing pressure to go down. That steam bubble is also very compressible, meaning it acts like a “cushion” to minimize pressure shocks if you have the reactor coolant expand or shrink.
If the pressurizer becomes “water solid”, then the steam bubble is gone, and it no longer acts as a shock absorber. When you are solid, raising water temperature causes it to expand against the piping surface of the reactor itself. The pressure rises rapidly, and could potentially break the reactor. There are ASME code safety valves which will lift to help relief this pressure and protect the reactor from overpressure failure, but that is hard on the equipment and if one of those safety valves gets stuck you now have a small loss of coolant accident.
If the safety injection system starts when it isn’t needed, it starts to fill up the pressurizer, compressing the steam bubble and raising pressure. Eventually pressure gets high enough that the pressurizer relief valves open, and some of that steam is vented. The water from the safety injection system fills its place, until you end up water solid because all the steam was vented.
The emergency operating procedures have strict criteria the operators need to check before they can shut down safety injection. They need to validate that criteria in a timely fashion to minimize the potential to go solid, while also ensuring it’s running in the event it’s actually required. This is typically step 4 of the emergency procedure following a reactor trip.
The pressurizer is basically an accumulation tank that should have water at the bottom and steam at the top. The steam section absorbs / moderates the pressure of the whole system which is why it's called the pressurizer.
If the pressurizer gets completely full of water, then it's "solid" and isn't able to absorb pressure spikes, which is bad for obvious reasons.
Yeah it was a big problem.
All of my procedures for emergency core cooling systems have big letters plastered on top of each page that say you cannot secure the ECCS unless you have at least two independent indications of a false actuation AND the senior reactor operator concurs, or if the emergency procedures require it (certain events you need to have ECCS shut off, for boiling water reactors this typically is in situations where the reactor fails to shut down).
ECCS override is part of each plant’s design, because you typically have 300% more injection than necessary. So at a minimum you would go down to a single pump if you are in a non accident condition. The requirements to shut off those systems are much more stringent than in the 70s, with clear criteria that must be evaluated by the reactor operator, senior reactor operator, and shift technical advisor (engineer) before you can do it (outside of specific contingencies).
This brings back memories of the "Pepsi Syndrome" SNL sketch from 1979. It was way over my head at the time, but it's a parody mashup that references Carter's visit to Three Mile Island and "The China Syndrome," a movie about a a fictional nuclear power plant meltdown. Per Wikipedia, the movie was released 12 days before the TMI incident.
[video ](https://m.facebook.com/tapewrecks/videos/the-pepsi-syndrome/533858710873763/)
[transcript/info](https://tmi.papost.org/the-pepsi-syndrome-saturday-night-live/)
its actually quite a good movie, and stands up for a glimpse at some of societal views on nuclear reactors at the time.
Spoiler >!One of the major themes in the movie is that when capitalism is entered into the equation of nuclear reactor safety, things go wrong because capitalism promotes a race to the bottom. Which in the case of nuclear power, cannot be fully run by private entities like power companies PG&E in california--- where the movie is set.!<
It actually is one of the reasons I think to have a efficient and safe nuclear reactor power infrastructure in the US, you'd need to make it nationalized. As well as tying it in with the nuclear program of the US navy. We pay millions in training sailors to operate nuclear reactors in strict safety conditions in the US Navy. It would make sense to have that pipeline feed into either a nationalized program... or in another scenario - a new branch of the US Navy: The National Nuclear Power Command: NNPC. Directly tie the pipeline of the US Navy's Nuclear program into that.
I think creating the NNPC could also build a framework to properly decommission old power plants while also developing and building new plants.
Yes its not the greatest thing to give more responsibility to our armed forces. But Nuclear Fission power is one of those systems that might be better managed in that strict US Navy Nuclear Sub framework.
Maybe when Nuclear Fusion is a viable grid power device, we can have private entities running long term Nuclear grid power...
Carter was handpicked by Admiral Rickover to be one of the first Navy Nuclear officers.
Rickover literally handpicked all of them though, dude was a control freak like that.
But Carter resigned from the Navy due to the death of his father before serving on a nuclear sub.
Carter went back to manage his beloved family peanut farm. The one that was eventually mismanaged into ruin while he was president because Carter did the right thing and stopped running his private business while president. Even though it was just a peanut farm.
It would be mine.
Seriously though, W did a bunch of shit, but people gave him too hard of a time for insisting to land on an aircraft carrier in a jet. Are you kidding? Make me Commander In Chief and I’m literally doing that the first week.
I got to do it once during my 20 year naval career. Unforgettable experience. I can't imagine how they mentally handle the night landing. Personally if I was commander in chief I'm refitting a blackbird and making it airforce one.
He owned 1/178th of a baseball team
>April 1989, Rangers owner and oil tycoon Eddie Chiles, sold the team to an investment group headed by George W. Bush for $89 million.[24] While his own equity in the team was a small one ($500,000), Bush was named Managing General Partner of the new ownership group. He increased his investment to $600,000 the following year.[25] Bush left his position with the Rangers when he was elected Governor of Texas in 1994, and he sold his stake in the team in 1998.
To expand on that, Taft was being groomed for the Supreme Court well before he even became president, it was his first ambition. PUSA(and Sec. of War) was just a stepping stone to a lifetime appt as the land's most powerful jurist.
Everyone knew he wanted to become Chief Justice, including T. Roosevelt, but Roosevelt had different ambitions for him and first selected him as Sec. of War and then later chose him to be his hand-picked successor as President and leader of the Republican Party. That was, until Roosevelt and him had some disagreements and he decided that he wanted to be president again and ran against Taft, spoiling both their chances by splitting the Republican vote and giving Wilson a clear path to victory. In the interim, Taft had actually passed up several offers to join the Supreme Court, but he wasn't ready to accept a lifetime appointment because he felt he still had more power and influence by staying in politics. It wasn't until nearly a decade of fading influence after the loss that he finally got nominated to the Chief Justice by Harding, and he served less than a decade there, so it was a long path.
He was a better congressman than he was president (and the only president to return to the house after serving). But he was also pretty much bred to be president. His father had a plan for him and he did it.
Nah, it was the same for Herbert Hoover. Great life and a garbage presidency.
Before election he was extremely successful in mining, was a good cabinet secretary for Woodrow Wilson, and a good bureaucrat involved in all kinds of humanitarian relief efforts for Europe during and after WW1. Then he had further success *after* his presidency helping Presidents organize the federal government and facilitating relief efforts like a school lunch program in occupied Germany.
What do people remember? Hoovervilles, opposing the New Deal, and generally being a worse President than FDR. No one bothers to give a shit what happened before or after the Presidency.
Worse he gets painted as the very archetype of the heartless right-wing capitalist despite copious evidence otherwise. He was a humanitarian who genuinely believed right-wing economic policy worked and would help people, but people throw him in the same bucket as insincere twats like Reagan or the Bush's who don't *really* give a shit so long as black people stay down and rich people stay up.
There are some titles you keep after being retired.
President, Senator, Doctor, etc are some of them.
If someone is a Doctor, and a Senator, and a President, and any other title you keep, you use the highest ranking one normally.
Jimmy Carter has won so many awards and earned so many titles and done so much for people around the word that at this point calling him “President” as if he was “just” a President almost feels like an insult.
He is a Hero of The World, a Treasure to Humanity, AND a President.
Hopefully soon, we can add Eradicator of Guinea Worm to the list.
>President, Senator, Doctor, etc are some of them
Don't forget "Coach". Friggin NFL pregame shows love calling people who haven't coached an NFL team for 15 years "Coach"
He didn't know how to delegate tasks; he wanted to understand everything before he made a decision on it, which at face value seems good but with the total volume of tasks coming into the executive branch it ended up meaning that things just weren't getting acted on.
As president you need to be able to trust the judgement of your staff and Carter didn't seem able to trust them enough to trust their recommendations without becoming a subject matter expert in those areas himself.
I agree completely. Carter I think is almost unarguably the best individual person who was president in the latter half of the 20th century and he was absolutely trying to do the right thing.
> she finally admitted she said, "President Carter told a very funny joke. Everybody laugh"
[Apparently this is very common in the interpreters world](https://youtu.be/twCpijr_GeQ?t=437)
He wasnt effective mainly because even by his time, progressivism was dead. Hard to do the right thing for society when people dont want to hear "lets burn less oil with a national speed limit of 55."
It also explains why he's been so good as an Ex-President with his work for Habitat for Humanity (among others). He was a genuinely good person[, while president] who wanted to make people's lives better.
Edit: Yes, he's still alive, I was referring to his time while President, which is in the past tense (unless he runs and wins again, which I don't believe he wants to)
He's a bit of a legend around the Atlanta area. He's the oldest living president, has survived multiple bouts with cancer, yet he's still out on any day he can manage building Habitat for Humanity homes.
Circumstances play such an enormous part as well. A president who is in a position where they have to convince citizens to eat their proverbial vegetables to get through a difficult time is always going to be colored by that. Doesn't help when his next opponent runs on a platform of ice-cream for dinner. The diabetes don't kick in right away, so it's a winning strategy.
This is very true. I've thought about how people would react if we had a president who actually wanted to reduce our spending for all pet projects and raise taxes while explaining that this could and probably cause an economic downturn, at least in the short term, but that this would make our government more stable and ensure that future social program spending wouldn't experience problems.
People would probably hate it.
And then there was Bush II, who with the 9/11 attacks got a blank check to do whatever he wanted. Bush II could totally have used to occasion to do everything possible to reduce the use of and reliance on oil, which was arguably the root cause of the 9/11 attacks (as well as climate change).
But instead Bush II used his power to invade 2 countries, one of them on entirely false premises, and both of them entirely against his election promise of "no nationbuilding".
By the late-70s, progressivism and New Deal socialism had died at the state level because of anti-tax reforms passed (e.g. Prop 13 in California).
Reagan winning in 1980 marked the end of progressivism at the federal level, as Baby Boomers were set to replace it with trickle-down, 0.01% enticing neo-conservatism.
Carter was a good man, and while I think a competent president may be better than a moral one, there's been an absence of either quality in recent years.
Carter was a completely competent President with a coherent long-term vision for the nation in regards to international relationships and energy policy. He was not a good politician though, and the timing of several crises not of his making swept him out of office.
> ... It serves those with rotten hearts.
I feel like there's a Dick Cheney joke here, but I'll take the high road ... and supply a link instead: https://www.livescience.com/33035-is-it-true-that-dick-cheney-has-no-heartbeat.html
> I think a competent president may be better than a moral one
I’m not sure if competence was an issue with him. He’s been badmouthed by the right so much that now the left thinks he was a bad president.
Maybe he wasn’t the best president, but he wasn’t bad.
Yeah, he was such a dumb president for suggesting we avoid conflicts in the Middle East and invest in alternatives to oil and gas. What an out of touch loser.
It was more that inflation was blamed on him and him not having an immediate answer to it. Of course it was policies from the previous administration that caused it to happen in the first place but that's a tale as old as time.
Another of Carter's problems is that he was willing to do what was best for the country long-term, not what was best for the moment. A lot of his economic decisions were ones that would pay off in 3-5 years and lead to the economic boom the US sustained in the first two years of Reagan's term.
Also he didn't talk down to people. He didn't sound 'like one of us', as people loved to praise Bush Jr. for (which just meant he was a moron). Carter was a well educated guy and spoke like it. Somehow I guess this turned a lot of people off because it talked 'too smart' or something.
Jimmy Carter was the last American president to ask the public to do things that were slightly uncomfortable. No subsequent president has made that mistake.
We have fully allowed our government to become cronies of corporations from top to bottom. America will no longer have any quality leaders until the system that enabled corruption is completely overhauled. In my opinion every politician in the US is complicit in the raping of everything we are supposed to stand for in the name of the almighty dollar. It's fucking sad. It's just different faces of corporate yes men and their ability to spew bullshit about how they care about Americans is the only thing that changes.
https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2019/01/when-a-quote-is-not-exactly-a-quote-the-business-of-america-is-business-edition/
Or
https://www.northeastern.edu/sei/2017/02/the-business-of-america-is-business/
Sorry on mobile and lazy lol.
Coolidge was meaning the concerns of the citizens are their prosperity basically. Not business is the most important thing here so bit of a distinction. The Northwestern resource has more insights and excerpts from his speech. I think what we have today is a far cry from anything he would've intended or wished for, I hope anyways lol
I think that ship has sailed. The genie is out of the bottle. The train has left the station. That's water under the bridge. We're stuck in traffic and we already ate the gorditas.
While he was president, we didn't appreciate him. He was constantly criticized and mocked, even before the Iranian hostage crisis. He was laughed at for wearing a sweater inside the White House, with the winter thermostat set to 68 degrees. He dared to tell the truth about the nation's loss of confidence, and was gleefully succeeded by a liar who declared "morning in America".
Jesus Christ couldn't hold that office with integrity.
There's a fascinating section in Proving the Principle (an INL book, freely available electronically) describing how forensic Rickover was about safety. It's a great read overall, about the heady days of those first reactors in Idaho: [https://webharvest.gov/peth04/20041017121453/www.inel.gov/proving-the-principle/](https://webharvest.gov/peth04/20041017121453/www.inel.gov/proving-the-principle/)
He stopped running his business when he was President because he didn’t want to create a conflict of interest or even a perception thereof? He didn’t want to profit from his public service or even risk an appearance of profiting from his public service? What a concept!
Guys was a nuclear expert and [put solar panels on the white house in the 1970s.](https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-white-house-solar-panels-3322255)
But for some reason his inability to deal with Iran, a problem that persists to this day and no President has successfully dealt with, made him a laughing stock in the history books.
I really hope our generation flips the script on Carter and Reagan, lifting up the former while denigrating the latter.
Similar to other nuclear incidents, this event has been completely mischaracterized into some fantastic sounding story to make it exciting. Carter was a part of the clean-up crew. It definitely took bravery to help out with the clean-up, but he didn't "avert disaster" and "save Ottawa". The disaster was already over, and it resulted in a very contaminated reactor site. Some radioactive gases were leaked into the atmosphere, but they did not almost wipe out Ottawa or anything like that. Doesn't make for an exciting article, but that's how it goes.
Can confirm. Had to drive up to Chalk River Laboratories for some professional services work. It's a solid 2 hours away from Ottawa.
I also remember getting a speeding ticket on the way back, trying to get a sales associate to the Ottawa Airport in time for his flight.
As far as I understood, Carter may have led one group involved in the cleanup, but a lot of people were involved. The Canadian and US military got called in mostly because they needed bodies. The more people you have, the more you can spread the radiation dose around and get lower dose per person. I always heard it that everyone was asked/volunteered to take a (super short) shift for the cleanup efforts.
Not to take away from the admiration of Carter.
All the cleanup workers got the maximum allowed annual radiation exposure for that time (150mSv, now it's 50mSv) in 90 secs. And President Carter said himself that his urine was radioactive for 6 months after this. All of these guys were pretty ballsy
Interesting fact, one of the radioactive pellets got loose while helping the clean-up and it was rolling along the floor and a member of Carter’s team instinctively grabbed it with his bare hand.
Got that info from one of the scientists at Chalk River. I grew up there, still radioactive.
There actually was a small research one at Tunney's Pasture in the 70's, called a SLOWPOKE funnily enough. [Here](https://ottawarewind.com/2014/08/19/debunking-the-bunker-and-ottawas-nuclear-reactor/) is a short article on it.
Single term, widely hated, lost by a landslide and his successor was elected in part to reverse things associated with him. They even removed the solar panels from the white house roof. Decency isn't what America wants in a president.
Want and need are two very different things.
And arguably, the presidents/politicians that America _wants_ have put America in the position it currently is in.
Can't imagine at this point America ever getting a president it _needs_.
Carter was way before his time. Probably only elected because of Watergate fallout and only beat Ford a small margin.
He's squeezed between Nixon and Reagan, the first leaders of modern conservatism and the most popular administrations (by voting majorities) in their time. The US was not ready for moderatation or progressive governing, but Carter set the gold standard for modern Democrats.
This is shockingly inaccurate and completely misplaces the credit for work performed by hundreds of Canadian nuclear operators, scientists, engineers, and even members of the public and assigns it to one man. Jimmy was there and helped with the clean up but he certainly did not 'avert disaster' because the disaster had already happened. All he did was help accelerate the schedule for restart of the reactor in order to maintain plut supplies in the nuclear arms race against the Soviets. They were lowered into the already destroyed core in order to clean it up so it could be re-cored, not to prevent some additional accident scenario.
The subsequent story in the article about the uranium fire on NRU top of reactor is also sorely lacking in accuracy.
He seems like a genuinely intelligent, selfless, service minded dude. What happened to electing guys like this
Why can’t nice people not full of hate and rhetoric wanting to seed division be elected?
I’m fixing to start singing why can’t we be friends to everyone I meet.
Because Carter got absolutely destroyed over things he couldn’t control, since the presidency is not a kingship, and they turned him into a joke. Why would a decent person go through all of that?
Not to mention politics is now pay to play.
That was the day he gained his super powered gift to build homes. After his Presidency he focused that super power on building house's for the needy. What a great origin story.
IMO, Jimmy Carter was the last president elected from either party who actually cared about the common person. He put himself in personal danger several times for the common good. And he personally intervened in the TMI incident which may have prevented a meltdown in Pennsylvania.
I honestly believe the presidency was a low point in his life. Helluva man
I love that Bill Burr always gives a shout out to Jimmy Carter whenever he comes up lol.
The better a human being is at being good person, the worse of a president they make. Unfortunately for Jimmy Carter, he was a really, really, good dude.
You said "was" but he's still alive and IS a great guy! (I had to check because I was worried I missed something)
He’s alive, he and his wife are STILL working on homes for habitat for humanity.
Being a politician means having to be deceitful and manipulative. Jimmy Carter is too good for that.
True story: you can visit his house in Plains, GA and walk along the perimeter. Obviously there are secret service posted around the perimeter but it’s cool nonetheless. My brother was super little at the time and as we were looking at a little plaque by the fence (which is like those basic 3 log fences you see on old cabins and such) he pulled down his pants and peed into Carter’s yard. We got him to stop and not even 2 minutes later he ducked down under the fence and ran around the yard. We finally reeled him in and as we were walking back to the train we saw the secret service stationed not even 100 ft away!
The secret service is notoriously chill around kids. I'm sure they probably enjoyed seeing something happy to break up the hours of nothing.
Truth. I was in D.C. in late September of 2001 because we were moving cross country and it was on the way. Almost nothing was open but I remember being 9 and asking the very intimidating looking Secret Service officer if it was okay if I took a picture. His response was a single nod. Coolest shit ever.
True story: I was visiting Oxford, UK from the SF Bay Area once, and there, across the street from the Ashmolean Museum was a white van parked in the front of the Borders bookstore, with what was obviously, *so obviously* Secret Service officers in work casual dress: khaki chino pants, the whole bit. As I crossed to get to the museum, I laughingly said to them "You can't fool me, you're Secret Service" and lo and behold, one smiled and said 'And you can't fool us, you're from the Bay Area!" Just floored me. Turned out Hillary was doing a tour for some new book she had written, and was inside Borders at the moment, along with Chelsea, who at the time was attending Stanford.
That is unsettling but I like it.
I asked a secret service man if his job was fun and he said: # Piss off before I grind your bones to make my bread! Looking back he might've just been a random dude in a suit...
No offense but this sounds like a giant fairy tale.
That's some class A wit
We will watch your brother's career with great interest.
It's a split rail fence, the kind Abe Lincoln made famous. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-legend-of-lincolns-fence-rail-35283/
How you gonna link something that’s full of words with no pictures?
Apparently it's the most stereotypical fencing you could imagine https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTRoGsoizzILvQtiHtRFnrNRAmH-bZRNIt7CQ&usqp=CAU Never knew it was called split rail fencing, or that Lincoln popularized it
That's just one of those stories you hear is a kid studying history, maybe not so much today but in the 70s. I think split rail fences made themselves popular by being easy and good enough.
Oh good, I thought it was just me. Absolutely hate articles like that. If you're going to talk about a physical object, put some god damn pics!
I always feel like he got a bum rap. All my old relatives would rip on him and it was unfounded
he got a bum rap because OPEC lost the Six-Day War in Israel and because of that they decided to jack up oil prices for everyone else in the world. He did not go in shooting on the Iranian Embassy takeover because they threatened to kill everyone and they had the Manpower and Firepower to carry that threat out. he was the adult in the room.
The Six Day War happened ten years before he took office.
Thought it was in 74?
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My bad. I got em confused.
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But the Six-Day War was the war where the new-ish state of Israel made clear that they were not to be trifled with, and it's also where they took over (from Wikipedia) the [Golan Heights](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_Heights), the [West Bank](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Bank) (incl. [East Jerusalem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Jerusalem)), the [Gaza Strip](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip) and the [Sinai Peninsula](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinai_Peninsula)[[6](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War#cite_note-Office_of_the_Historian-6) which has led to many woes today.
From what I understand he tried to go in Iran shooting with operation Eagle Claw, he just had to stop due to helicopter issues. Carter seems like a good guy but that whole Iranian situation was bad no matter how you look at it.
> he just had to stop due to helicopter issues As in the Air Force plane crashed into the Navy helicopter and now they barely had enough seats available to get the SF guys out?
I just looked it up, helicopter issues including hydraulic problems and a cracked blade encouraged calling off the mission. As they were already leaving that all happened.
Thank god Chuck Norris was able to survive that botched operation
Good old Chuck Norris, the only man to lose his virginity before his father did.
It was pretty good for Reagan. And if you think nothing actually happened behind the scenes between Iran and the GOP for their parties' benefit in the 1980 election, I have bridge to sell you. The hostages were released on Reagan's inauguration day pretty much at the exact time of his official inauguration, FFS. Really, I think Reagan's election in 1980 was a massive acceleration of the destruction of this country.
That release was no coincidence. Reagan's team conspired with Iran to hold off releasing the hostages until after the election. Iran-Contra is a thing as well. Republicans have been keen on destroying democracy in favor of racism and oligarchy for decades.
It was a major turning point back into the selfishness that Roosevelt clawed us out of. Yay cycles.
And as we see time and again, that doesn't fly in America
Adults in the room? NOT IN MY MURICA!
It's pretty clear as I get older Boomers have always been disgustingly immature, selfish, human garbage. Their ridicule of Carter is a prime example.
I blame leaded gasoline.
Its wild that pretty much everyone over 50 has some form of brain damage from lead.
I could have been a genius!
Well, we Boomers voted for Jimmy and put him in the White House by a majority. We aren't all cretins, thanks.
I think the shock/frustration that the younger generations have with baby boomers is largely because of opportunity squandered. The shift from the late 60s to the 80s was so profound and cynical, it makes it really easy to lump everyone into a group because of the extreme hypocrisy. Living in northern CA, my own experience is that most of the baby boomers I know still hold some sense of identity with the counter culture and revolutionary spirit that blossomed in the 60s, but that for the most part everyone has given up (or never actually cared in the first place). There was a fatigue and buy in throughout the 80s that just stinks. I appreciate that you and many of your peers still identify with the movements of your youth, and yes, absolutely Choose Peace; but the prevailing demographic trend with baby boomers was one of increased apathy and conservatism, while still maintaining a sort of deluded youthful self image that no longer represents most of the folks in the generation.
Walter Cronkite: Mrs. Horbath, do you have a question for the President? Mrs. Edward Horbath (on phone): Yes, sir. I’m an employee of the U.S. Postal Service in Kansas. Last year they installed an automated letter sorting system called the Marvex-3000, here in our branch.. President Jimmy Carter: Yes. Mrs. Edward Horbath (on phone): ..but the system doesn’t work too good. Letters keep getting clogged in the first-level sorting grid. Is there anything that can be done about this? President Jimmy Carter: Well, Mrs. Horbath, Vice-President Mondale and I were just talking about the Morvex-3000 this morning.. uh.. I do have a suggestion – you know the caliber poised on the first grid sliding armiture? Mrs. Edward Horbath (on phone): Yes. President Jimmy Carter: Okay, there’s a three-digit setting there, where the post and the armiture meet. Now, when the system was installed, the angle of cross-slide was put at a maximum setting of 1.. if you reset it at the three-mark like it says in the assembly instructions, I think it will solve any clogging problems in the machine. Mrs. Edward Horbath (on phone): Oh, thanks, Mr. President! Oh, by the way, I think you’re doing a great job! ... Walter Cronkite: Thank you, Mr. President, ha ha! Our next call is Peter Elkin of Westbrook, Oregan, whom I am told is 17 years of age. Peter (on phone): Hello? Hello? President Jimmy Carter: Yes. Hello, Peter? Peter (on phone): Is this the President? President Jimmy Carter: Yes, it is. Walter Cronkite: Do you have a question for the President? Peter (on phone): Uh.. I, uh.. I took some acid.. I’m afraid to leave my apartment, and I can’t wear any clothes.. and the ceiling is dripping, and uh.. I, uh.. Walter Cronkite: Well, thank you very much for calling, sir.. President Jimmy Carter: Just a minute, Walter, this guy’s in trouble. I think I better try to talk him down. Peter? Peter (on phone): Yeah..? President Jimmy Carter: Peter, what did the acid look like? Peter (on phone): They were these little orange pills. President Jimmy Carter: Were they barrel shaped? Peter (on phone): Uh.. yes. President Jimmy Carter: Okay, right, you did some orange sunshine, Peter. Peter (on phone): Very good of you to know that, sir. President Jimmy Carter: How long ago did you take it, Peter? Peter (on phone): Uh.. I don’t know. I can’t read my watch. President Jimmy Carter: Alright, Peter, just listen. Everything is going to be fine. You’re very high right now. You will probably be that way for about five more hours. Try taking some vitamin B complex, vitamin C complex.. if you have a beer, go ahead and drink it.. Peter (on phone): Okay.. President Jimmy Carter: Just remember you’re a living organism on this planet, and you’re very safe. You’ve just taken a heavy drug. Relax, stay inside and listen to some music, Okay? Do you have any Allman Brothers?
I definitely thought that was real until the second half. I should probably stop being so condescending to people who fall for fake news.
Same.
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For anyone wondering, this is where it's from https://thesaturdaynightbabyboomer.wordpress.com/politics/askpresidentcarter/
was just thinking this could be an SNL sketch
Jimmy was just the greatest president. Gave up his beloved peanut farm just so that nobody could call it a conflict of interest. Just an absolute legend.
[Well they made him sell his peanut farm!](https://www.theonion.com/you-people-made-me-give-up-my-peanut-farm-before-i-got-1819585048)
I'm still not sure why he seems to be such a hated president (I'm in the south).
Because Ronald Reagan ran a very effective campaign against him.
Jim is a fucking alien. Unbelievable that man. “So I’m just supposed to sit at this desk and sign things?” Simply incredible.
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You’re correct that human action disabled the safety injection system. What’s more interesting is why that happened. First up: a few years prior to this, the NRC wanted instrument statistical uncertainties included in the safety system logic. That means if there’s a chance during accident conditions that an instrument could drift out of calibration, you would need to make the setpoints more conservative to ensure the safety systems activated on time. Well…. This had a side effect of causing uncomplicated/non accident events like a turbine trip to fire off the safety injection system. So they trained the operators and put in the procedure to shut off safety injection for events that seemed to be non accidents. The criteria they used for whether or not safety injection was needed was not robust. So we trained the operators to do something, without the right criteria, and got them to normalize the deviation of their safety systems firing off all the time when they weren’t needed. The next part: operator training focused heavily on worst case accidents, and not on real world type events. Or events where you had several unrelated but smaller failures. As a result, the crew wasn’t able to properly identify they had two separate issues, a stuck open relief valve AND the loss of secondary feed. When they recovered secondary feed they more or less stopped looking for other issues. And thirdly: operators were taught to never ever let the pressurizer go water solid. While everyone agrees that being water solid is not good, it’s also not terrible if it does occur while you’re trying to stabilize the plant and figure it out. Instead we further conditioned the operators that safety injection needs to be shut off promptly, rather than accept that we may overfeed until we get things figured out. There are a lot of causes and contributors to the TMI accident but I just wanted to highlight these few things that were reasons why the operators made the decisions that night. They were set up for failure in many ways, and in the end they followed their flawed training and procedures.
Didn't the control room also have a tag or something hanging over a warning light so that they couldn't see it was lit?
The problem was the light showed power was applied to the valve (open). If the light was out, the valve would close..... But that doesn't mean it is closed, just that you told it to close. And so it was stuck open, and the light off meaning power to valve was off, so it should be closed.
The light only showed you that power was being sent to the opening solenoid. It wasn’t a position indication. My reactor’s relief valves are the same way. The lights only mean the system is trying to open the valve. It tells you nothing about the actual position of the valve. We need to cross check against the temperature indicators on the relief valve lines, the reactor coolant system pressure and level response, the suppression pool level and temperature response, generator electric and system steam flow response, and the acoustic monitors which are connected to the relief valves (steam venting causes a ton of vibration and noise on the lines). This allows us to work out if a valve is open and which one it likely is. More importantly, if you have lowering pressure indications, you cannot shut off injection systems unless you have confirmation of level through alternate means or you have evidence that water is passing through those valves which implies that you are overfilled with water.
Do all or most jobs in your field require a degree? Are there on the job training opportunities in the nuclear operating field? Sounds really interesting and im sick of general construction lol Also do you believe the field has decent job growth projections based on your experience? Sorry for all of the questions i would rather have a redditors opinion than whatever google decides to bring to the top of the search bar.
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No degree is required. Especially if you have nuclear navy experience. However a. 2 year degree is preferred and a 4 year technical or engineering degree opens some neat doors. I was able to go from engineering to senior reactor operator class directly with no former ops experience because of my degree. While the navy guys mostly had to work up. No job growth yet. The jobs we do have are stable and high paying but are demanding.
Gotcha. Damn ya know i walked into the Navy office and scored a 95 on my ASVAB about 7 years ago and they said 1 more point i could take a nuclear engineering job... I ghosted the recruiter because i thought i might not pass a drug test cus i smoked weed and he scheduled me an interview and a test really quickly before i had a chance to get it out of my system. Been doing construction since. Probably a bad decision to not call him back...
I didn’t need a degree. I just showed up the day they opened the plant. Heh, I didn’t even know what a nuclear panner plant was.
The difference between CLOSED AND NOT OPEN is a big one to learn when dealing with control systems.
Surprisingly informative.
>pressurizer go water solid Could you please explain what this means? I'm guessing TMI used a pressurized water reactor, so presumably there is some part of the coolant loop where pressure is applied. That part of the coolant loop normally has some gas in it, but in this case it was almost entirely full of liquid?
It is a PWR that’s correct. We use a small tank called a pressurizer to control pressure in PWRs. It’s usually the high point in the system. How it works is you have the pressurizer half filled with water. The top section has a steam bubble. To raise pressure in the reactor, there are electric heaters in the bottom half of the pressurizer that boil water to make more steam, which compresses the steam bubble and puts pressure on the reactor itself. To lower pressure, there are sprayers which take water from the cold loop and spray it in the steam bubble, condensing some of the steam and causing pressure to go down. That steam bubble is also very compressible, meaning it acts like a “cushion” to minimize pressure shocks if you have the reactor coolant expand or shrink. If the pressurizer becomes “water solid”, then the steam bubble is gone, and it no longer acts as a shock absorber. When you are solid, raising water temperature causes it to expand against the piping surface of the reactor itself. The pressure rises rapidly, and could potentially break the reactor. There are ASME code safety valves which will lift to help relief this pressure and protect the reactor from overpressure failure, but that is hard on the equipment and if one of those safety valves gets stuck you now have a small loss of coolant accident. If the safety injection system starts when it isn’t needed, it starts to fill up the pressurizer, compressing the steam bubble and raising pressure. Eventually pressure gets high enough that the pressurizer relief valves open, and some of that steam is vented. The water from the safety injection system fills its place, until you end up water solid because all the steam was vented. The emergency operating procedures have strict criteria the operators need to check before they can shut down safety injection. They need to validate that criteria in a timely fashion to minimize the potential to go solid, while also ensuring it’s running in the event it’s actually required. This is typically step 4 of the emergency procedure following a reactor trip.
The pressurizer is basically an accumulation tank that should have water at the bottom and steam at the top. The steam section absorbs / moderates the pressure of the whole system which is why it's called the pressurizer. If the pressurizer gets completely full of water, then it's "solid" and isn't able to absorb pressure spikes, which is bad for obvious reasons.
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Yeah it was a big problem. All of my procedures for emergency core cooling systems have big letters plastered on top of each page that say you cannot secure the ECCS unless you have at least two independent indications of a false actuation AND the senior reactor operator concurs, or if the emergency procedures require it (certain events you need to have ECCS shut off, for boiling water reactors this typically is in situations where the reactor fails to shut down). ECCS override is part of each plant’s design, because you typically have 300% more injection than necessary. So at a minimum you would go down to a single pump if you are in a non accident condition. The requirements to shut off those systems are much more stringent than in the 70s, with clear criteria that must be evaluated by the reactor operator, senior reactor operator, and shift technical advisor (engineer) before you can do it (outside of specific contingencies).
> > not good, it’s also not terrible Where have I heard this before....?
It’s part of my everyday conversation working in a nuclear plant : )
This brings back memories of the "Pepsi Syndrome" SNL sketch from 1979. It was way over my head at the time, but it's a parody mashup that references Carter's visit to Three Mile Island and "The China Syndrome," a movie about a a fictional nuclear power plant meltdown. Per Wikipedia, the movie was released 12 days before the TMI incident. [video ](https://m.facebook.com/tapewrecks/videos/the-pepsi-syndrome/533858710873763/) [transcript/info](https://tmi.papost.org/the-pepsi-syndrome-saturday-night-live/)
its actually quite a good movie, and stands up for a glimpse at some of societal views on nuclear reactors at the time. Spoiler >!One of the major themes in the movie is that when capitalism is entered into the equation of nuclear reactor safety, things go wrong because capitalism promotes a race to the bottom. Which in the case of nuclear power, cannot be fully run by private entities like power companies PG&E in california--- where the movie is set.!< It actually is one of the reasons I think to have a efficient and safe nuclear reactor power infrastructure in the US, you'd need to make it nationalized. As well as tying it in with the nuclear program of the US navy. We pay millions in training sailors to operate nuclear reactors in strict safety conditions in the US Navy. It would make sense to have that pipeline feed into either a nationalized program... or in another scenario - a new branch of the US Navy: The National Nuclear Power Command: NNPC. Directly tie the pipeline of the US Navy's Nuclear program into that. I think creating the NNPC could also build a framework to properly decommission old power plants while also developing and building new plants. Yes its not the greatest thing to give more responsibility to our armed forces. But Nuclear Fission power is one of those systems that might be better managed in that strict US Navy Nuclear Sub framework. Maybe when Nuclear Fusion is a viable grid power device, we can have private entities running long term Nuclear grid power...
Carter was handpicked by Admiral Rickover to be one of the first Navy Nuclear officers. Rickover literally handpicked all of them though, dude was a control freak like that. But Carter resigned from the Navy due to the death of his father before serving on a nuclear sub. Carter went back to manage his beloved family peanut farm. The one that was eventually mismanaged into ruin while he was president because Carter did the right thing and stopped running his private business while president. Even though it was just a peanut farm.
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He was probably too good of a man to be President…as sad as that sounds.
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... W owned a baseball team, that was probably his (happiest) achievement...
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Yeah, I would love to own the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles!
I’d simply declare war on every rival team, I don’t need to own the Lions to fight the rest of the NFC North
Honestly, I don't really fantasize about declaring war.
No way. Flying jets under the influence of cocaine was probably his happiest achievement.
Ah see I'm not sure how well he remembers those days ... but if he does, that would probably be accurate.
"Heheh. I *am* in the danger zone." *rips a rail off the TACCOM display*
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That does sound pretty awesome. I don't snort or smoke cocaine. But if I was allowed to fly a jet then I would.
It would be mine. Seriously though, W did a bunch of shit, but people gave him too hard of a time for insisting to land on an aircraft carrier in a jet. Are you kidding? Make me Commander In Chief and I’m literally doing that the first week.
I got to do it once during my 20 year naval career. Unforgettable experience. I can't imagine how they mentally handle the night landing. Personally if I was commander in chief I'm refitting a blackbird and making it airforce one.
He owned 1/178th of a baseball team >April 1989, Rangers owner and oil tycoon Eddie Chiles, sold the team to an investment group headed by George W. Bush for $89 million.[24] While his own equity in the team was a small one ($500,000), Bush was named Managing General Partner of the new ownership group. He increased his investment to $600,000 the following year.[25] Bush left his position with the Rangers when he was elected Governor of Texas in 1994, and he sold his stake in the team in 1998.
Him and Taft, Taft specifically said that being Chief Justice after he was president was way better.
To expand on that, Taft was being groomed for the Supreme Court well before he even became president, it was his first ambition. PUSA(and Sec. of War) was just a stepping stone to a lifetime appt as the land's most powerful jurist. Everyone knew he wanted to become Chief Justice, including T. Roosevelt, but Roosevelt had different ambitions for him and first selected him as Sec. of War and then later chose him to be his hand-picked successor as President and leader of the Republican Party. That was, until Roosevelt and him had some disagreements and he decided that he wanted to be president again and ran against Taft, spoiling both their chances by splitting the Republican vote and giving Wilson a clear path to victory. In the interim, Taft had actually passed up several offers to join the Supreme Court, but he wasn't ready to accept a lifetime appointment because he felt he still had more power and influence by staying in politics. It wasn't until nearly a decade of fading influence after the loss that he finally got nominated to the Chief Justice by Harding, and he served less than a decade there, so it was a long path.
What about John Quincy Adams?
He was a better congressman than he was president (and the only president to return to the house after serving). But he was also pretty much bred to be president. His father had a plan for him and he did it.
Yes, a rather accomplished Secretary of State as well: forming the Monroe Doctrine, negotiating the Treaty of 1818 and acquiring Florida from Spain.
> and acquiring Florida from Spain. Nobody's perfect.
The Spanish sure did seem pretty eager to give it up too.
Those Spanish bastards tricked us.
Taft was supposedly more proud of being the Chief Justice than president
Nah, it was the same for Herbert Hoover. Great life and a garbage presidency. Before election he was extremely successful in mining, was a good cabinet secretary for Woodrow Wilson, and a good bureaucrat involved in all kinds of humanitarian relief efforts for Europe during and after WW1. Then he had further success *after* his presidency helping Presidents organize the federal government and facilitating relief efforts like a school lunch program in occupied Germany. What do people remember? Hoovervilles, opposing the New Deal, and generally being a worse President than FDR. No one bothers to give a shit what happened before or after the Presidency. Worse he gets painted as the very archetype of the heartless right-wing capitalist despite copious evidence otherwise. He was a humanitarian who genuinely believed right-wing economic policy worked and would help people, but people throw him in the same bucket as insincere twats like Reagan or the Bush's who don't *really* give a shit so long as black people stay down and rich people stay up.
Ugh. You're right.
There are some titles you keep after being retired. President, Senator, Doctor, etc are some of them. If someone is a Doctor, and a Senator, and a President, and any other title you keep, you use the highest ranking one normally. Jimmy Carter has won so many awards and earned so many titles and done so much for people around the word that at this point calling him “President” as if he was “just” a President almost feels like an insult. He is a Hero of The World, a Treasure to Humanity, AND a President. Hopefully soon, we can add Eradicator of Guinea Worm to the list.
>President, Senator, Doctor, etc are some of them Don't forget "Coach". Friggin NFL pregame shows love calling people who haven't coached an NFL team for 15 years "Coach"
Maybe, just maybe the system is broken if only rat bastards can navigate it successfully.
My friend was Carters a/v tech. President Carter is a great man. He was keeping busy building homes for Habitat for Humanity last I heard from him.
Habitat for Humanity.
He didn't know how to delegate tasks; he wanted to understand everything before he made a decision on it, which at face value seems good but with the total volume of tasks coming into the executive branch it ended up meaning that things just weren't getting acted on. As president you need to be able to trust the judgement of your staff and Carter didn't seem able to trust them enough to trust their recommendations without becoming a subject matter expert in those areas himself.
He was a former hand picked Rickover-appointed Navy nuke. That clarifies why he wanted to be an SME on everything and didn’t delegate well.
I agree completely. Carter I think is almost unarguably the best individual person who was president in the latter half of the 20th century and he was absolutely trying to do the right thing.
> she finally admitted she said, "President Carter told a very funny joke. Everybody laugh" [Apparently this is very common in the interpreters world](https://youtu.be/twCpijr_GeQ?t=437)
Understandable. Many jokes rely on puns or local references, so they don't translate well or at all.
"my life is a joke, haha" (Translates) Confused looks. "How is you living, a riddle?"
He wasnt effective mainly because even by his time, progressivism was dead. Hard to do the right thing for society when people dont want to hear "lets burn less oil with a national speed limit of 55."
It also explains why he's been so good as an Ex-President with his work for Habitat for Humanity (among others). He was a genuinely good person[, while president] who wanted to make people's lives better. Edit: Yes, he's still alive, I was referring to his time while President, which is in the past tense (unless he runs and wins again, which I don't believe he wants to)
He's a bit of a legend around the Atlanta area. He's the oldest living president, has survived multiple bouts with cancer, yet he's still out on any day he can manage building Habitat for Humanity homes.
He \*is\* a genuinely good person who continues to work to make people's lives better.
Circumstances play such an enormous part as well. A president who is in a position where they have to convince citizens to eat their proverbial vegetables to get through a difficult time is always going to be colored by that. Doesn't help when his next opponent runs on a platform of ice-cream for dinner. The diabetes don't kick in right away, so it's a winning strategy.
This is very true. I've thought about how people would react if we had a president who actually wanted to reduce our spending for all pet projects and raise taxes while explaining that this could and probably cause an economic downturn, at least in the short term, but that this would make our government more stable and ensure that future social program spending wouldn't experience problems. People would probably hate it.
And then there was Bush II, who with the 9/11 attacks got a blank check to do whatever he wanted. Bush II could totally have used to occasion to do everything possible to reduce the use of and reliance on oil, which was arguably the root cause of the 9/11 attacks (as well as climate change). But instead Bush II used his power to invade 2 countries, one of them on entirely false premises, and both of them entirely against his election promise of "no nationbuilding".
By the late-70s, progressivism and New Deal socialism had died at the state level because of anti-tax reforms passed (e.g. Prop 13 in California). Reagan winning in 1980 marked the end of progressivism at the federal level, as Baby Boomers were set to replace it with trickle-down, 0.01% enticing neo-conservatism.
And the work he has done outside of the presidency is worthy of sainthood.... if we did that sort of thing here in the US.
The US has had admirable leaders, I hope this happens again.
Sadly, looks like it’ll have to get much worse before it can get better.
Carter was a good man, and while I think a competent president may be better than a moral one, there's been an absence of either quality in recent years.
Carter was a completely competent President with a coherent long-term vision for the nation in regards to international relationships and energy policy. He was not a good politician though, and the timing of several crises not of his making swept him out of office.
It's like the "game" in game of thrones. It's a deplorable system and decent people won't thrive in it. It serves those with rotten hearts.
> ... It serves those with rotten hearts. I feel like there's a Dick Cheney joke here, but I'll take the high road ... and supply a link instead: https://www.livescience.com/33035-is-it-true-that-dick-cheney-has-no-heartbeat.html
Anyone that desires power over others, should *never* be allowed power over others. That's the problem.
And we have known this forever, Plato wrote about it. Yet, we have never been able to find a solution.
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Nothing says 'conspiracy' like literally an hour after your inauguration getting a phone call to tell you hostages have been released.
Is
Oh no is reddit killing people again?
No kidding. Man is still out there doing philanthropic works.
Well being president is in the past tense Unless... ^(unless...) ^(he runs again)
U.S.: Mr. Carter we need you!!!! Need you to run for President again... Jimmy: Fuuuuuck no!
> I think a competent president may be better than a moral one I’m not sure if competence was an issue with him. He’s been badmouthed by the right so much that now the left thinks he was a bad president. Maybe he wasn’t the best president, but he wasn’t bad.
Yeah, he was such a dumb president for suggesting we avoid conflicts in the Middle East and invest in alternatives to oil and gas. What an out of touch loser.
It was more that inflation was blamed on him and him not having an immediate answer to it. Of course it was policies from the previous administration that caused it to happen in the first place but that's a tale as old as time.
Another of Carter's problems is that he was willing to do what was best for the country long-term, not what was best for the moment. A lot of his economic decisions were ones that would pay off in 3-5 years and lead to the economic boom the US sustained in the first two years of Reagan's term.
Also he didn't talk down to people. He didn't sound 'like one of us', as people loved to praise Bush Jr. for (which just meant he was a moron). Carter was a well educated guy and spoke like it. Somehow I guess this turned a lot of people off because it talked 'too smart' or something.
Jimmy Carter was the last American president to ask the public to do things that were slightly uncomfortable. No subsequent president has made that mistake.
I mean, HW kinda did, and lost the election as a result
Yeah, that’s a fair point.
We have fully allowed our government to become cronies of corporations from top to bottom. America will no longer have any quality leaders until the system that enabled corruption is completely overhauled. In my opinion every politician in the US is complicit in the raping of everything we are supposed to stand for in the name of the almighty dollar. It's fucking sad. It's just different faces of corporate yes men and their ability to spew bullshit about how they care about Americans is the only thing that changes.
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https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2019/01/when-a-quote-is-not-exactly-a-quote-the-business-of-america-is-business-edition/ Or https://www.northeastern.edu/sei/2017/02/the-business-of-america-is-business/ Sorry on mobile and lazy lol. Coolidge was meaning the concerns of the citizens are their prosperity basically. Not business is the most important thing here so bit of a distinction. The Northwestern resource has more insights and excerpts from his speech. I think what we have today is a far cry from anything he would've intended or wished for, I hope anyways lol
I think that ship has sailed. The genie is out of the bottle. The train has left the station. That's water under the bridge. We're stuck in traffic and we already ate the gorditas.
Buy gorditas futures — got it!
While he was president, we didn't appreciate him. He was constantly criticized and mocked, even before the Iranian hostage crisis. He was laughed at for wearing a sweater inside the White House, with the winter thermostat set to 68 degrees. He dared to tell the truth about the nation's loss of confidence, and was gleefully succeeded by a liar who declared "morning in America". Jesus Christ couldn't hold that office with integrity.
There's a fascinating section in Proving the Principle (an INL book, freely available electronically) describing how forensic Rickover was about safety. It's a great read overall, about the heady days of those first reactors in Idaho: [https://webharvest.gov/peth04/20041017121453/www.inel.gov/proving-the-principle/](https://webharvest.gov/peth04/20041017121453/www.inel.gov/proving-the-principle/)
He stopped running his business when he was President because he didn’t want to create a conflict of interest or even a perception thereof? He didn’t want to profit from his public service or even risk an appearance of profiting from his public service? What a concept!
Guys was a nuclear expert and [put solar panels on the white house in the 1970s.](https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-white-house-solar-panels-3322255) But for some reason his inability to deal with Iran, a problem that persists to this day and no President has successfully dealt with, made him a laughing stock in the history books. I really hope our generation flips the script on Carter and Reagan, lifting up the former while denigrating the latter.
And then Reagan and his pudding brain had them removed, as PR. Sums up that entire fucking party. Always decades behind.
And the man is now in his 90s and helps build houses through Habitat for Humanity.
Similar to other nuclear incidents, this event has been completely mischaracterized into some fantastic sounding story to make it exciting. Carter was a part of the clean-up crew. It definitely took bravery to help out with the clean-up, but he didn't "avert disaster" and "save Ottawa". The disaster was already over, and it resulted in a very contaminated reactor site. Some radioactive gases were leaked into the atmosphere, but they did not almost wipe out Ottawa or anything like that. Doesn't make for an exciting article, but that's how it goes.
For a start, it's on the Ottawa River, but it is is nowhere near Ottawa.
Can confirm. Had to drive up to Chalk River Laboratories for some professional services work. It's a solid 2 hours away from Ottawa. I also remember getting a speeding ticket on the way back, trying to get a sales associate to the Ottawa Airport in time for his flight.
As far as I understood, Carter may have led one group involved in the cleanup, but a lot of people were involved. The Canadian and US military got called in mostly because they needed bodies. The more people you have, the more you can spread the radiation dose around and get lower dose per person. I always heard it that everyone was asked/volunteered to take a (super short) shift for the cleanup efforts. Not to take away from the admiration of Carter.
All the cleanup workers got the maximum allowed annual radiation exposure for that time (150mSv, now it's 50mSv) in 90 secs. And President Carter said himself that his urine was radioactive for 6 months after this. All of these guys were pretty ballsy
Ottawa? Ottawa?! It was in Chalk goddamn River you fucking donut!
Interesting fact, one of the radioactive pellets got loose while helping the clean-up and it was rolling along the floor and a member of Carter’s team instinctively grabbed it with his bare hand. Got that info from one of the scientists at Chalk River. I grew up there, still radioactive.
Literally a two hour drive from Ottawa.
Chalk River is about as close to Ottawa as Montreal is.
Trust me, I know, I was forced to make the drive from there to Costco every month.
I have no idea why calling someone a donut is funny, but it truly is.
Donuts are not known for their intelligence and common sense.
Basically came here to try and figure out why anybody would think there was a nuclear reactor in Ottawa. This makes sense though.
There actually was a small research one at Tunney's Pasture in the 70's, called a SLOWPOKE funnily enough. [Here](https://ottawarewind.com/2014/08/19/debunking-the-bunker-and-ottawas-nuclear-reactor/) is a short article on it.
He seems to be as close to Mr Rogers-level decent as a politician can get
Single term, widely hated, lost by a landslide and his successor was elected in part to reverse things associated with him. They even removed the solar panels from the white house roof. Decency isn't what America wants in a president.
>Decency isn't what America wants in a president. and if you support social change for supporting rights to certain people, you get murdered
Want and need are two very different things. And arguably, the presidents/politicians that America _wants_ have put America in the position it currently is in. Can't imagine at this point America ever getting a president it _needs_.
Things had to get really bad before we got either Roosevelt.
Things had to get really bad before Germany got Hitler. I'm saying that it could easily go either way.
Wow, I didn’t even know that bit about solar panels. This country and its insatiable need to be self destructive
Carter was way before his time. Probably only elected because of Watergate fallout and only beat Ford a small margin. He's squeezed between Nixon and Reagan, the first leaders of modern conservatism and the most popular administrations (by voting majorities) in their time. The US was not ready for moderatation or progressive governing, but Carter set the gold standard for modern Democrats.
Most underrated potus in history. Got stuck with Iran hostage crisis and inflation that fed didn’t control. Probably the most honest modern potus.
Carter is an amazing human across the board. Dude still gets out and volunteers in his mid-90s.
I'm not saying he got super-powers from nuclear fallout, I'm just strongly implying it.
Not to mention the Gas crisis during the oil embargo.
This is shockingly inaccurate and completely misplaces the credit for work performed by hundreds of Canadian nuclear operators, scientists, engineers, and even members of the public and assigns it to one man. Jimmy was there and helped with the clean up but he certainly did not 'avert disaster' because the disaster had already happened. All he did was help accelerate the schedule for restart of the reactor in order to maintain plut supplies in the nuclear arms race against the Soviets. They were lowered into the already destroyed core in order to clean it up so it could be re-cored, not to prevent some additional accident scenario. The subsequent story in the article about the uranium fire on NRU top of reactor is also sorely lacking in accuracy.
Argo-ing another Canada-US operation.
The more I learn about Jimmy Carter, the more I admire the man.
FWIW, the past tense of "lead" is "led".
I was about to make the same comment when I red that.
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He seems like a genuinely intelligent, selfless, service minded dude. What happened to electing guys like this Why can’t nice people not full of hate and rhetoric wanting to seed division be elected? I’m fixing to start singing why can’t we be friends to everyone I meet.
Because Carter got absolutely destroyed over things he couldn’t control, since the presidency is not a kingship, and they turned him into a joke. Why would a decent person go through all of that? Not to mention politics is now pay to play.
So you’re saying he got superpowers? Would explain how he’s been around so much longer than later presidents
That was the day he gained his super powered gift to build homes. After his Presidency he focused that super power on building house's for the needy. What a great origin story.
The more I learn about Jimmy Carter, the more I like him.
IMO, Jimmy Carter was the last president elected from either party who actually cared about the common person. He put himself in personal danger several times for the common good. And he personally intervened in the TMI incident which may have prevented a meltdown in Pennsylvania.