Belize debate on national grid electricity versus solar and battery power.

RURAL BELIZE DEBATE MERITS NATIONAL BEL POWER GRID VERSUS SOLAR AND BATTERY OPERATED SYSTEMS. IN `PLACENTIA, SOLAR AND BATTERY ARE MORE EXPENSIVE IN ONE WAY, BUT CHEAPER IN OTHERS, DUE TO BAD BEL ( national grid ) SERVICE. IN THE TOLEDO DISTRICT HALF THE VILLAGES HAVE NO WORKABLE ELECTRICITY SYSTEM AT ALL.
LOOKS LIKE FROM SOUTH OF THE CAPITAL BELMOPAN AND THE HUMMINGBIRD GAP OVER THE MOUNTAIN RIDGE, ONE THIRD OF THE COUNTRY TO THE SOUTHERN END OF BELIZE, IS EXERIENCING ATROCIOUS ELECTRICITY INFRA-STRUCTURE SERVICE FROM BEL.
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"Hmmmm. Like everything else in Belize price of freedom is variable and relative to local circumstances.

Quality of BEL service must vary greatly in different areas of Belize. I may be in a better cost for service situation than some nearby people on grid in a short time. During the days we had so much rain down here we had severe lightening too. Due to ups and downs of power on the Placencia Peninsula (power surges/low voltage/frequent short power outs/lightening strikes, etc.) one friend's business had been partially shut down for several days because refrigeration unit was damaged. Another person lost two tvs. At least 3 have lost microwaves including one that caught fire. Another had lightening travel on line into her house and melt and actually burn her phone and dsl modem and some other equipment. Those are just the people who have listed losses online over the past week or so. Many, many complaints that power has been going on and off for a few mins, every 10 mins or so.

Charles can probably give a better assessment because he lives in and is Village Chair of Placencia, but it sounds pretty bad. I don't take the complaints as exaggerations because we had a rental house on grid during recent construction of this house and I observed similar problems. At the rental, my house power would dim every time a neighbor's water heater, fridge, power tools, etc. were turned on. Several times I woke mid-night to a loud whack sound because the breakers had tripped and surge protectors burned out.

I haven't been out and about in Independence this week to hear what on-grid people are saying but the situation is usually similar on the mainland side of the lagoon as on the peninsula. One of the times my breakers tripped last year on grid power, almost everyone on my street besides my family lost tvs, microwaves, fans, power tools, computers, fax machines or refrigeration. Hardly anyone ever gets compensated by BEL and each incident is usually in the value range where it would cost long term to claim on homeowners. Lots of people don't have homeowners insurgence due to high cost.

If I go 10 years on my independent power system with no loss or decreased service life of my expensive electric appliances and electronic units I may actually come out at lower cost than many who are on grid. For lightening protection we have proper grounding and lightening arresters between each part of our system. Anyone could take a lightening strike but I think we are less likely too than if we were connected to miles of copper wire and with apparently too few safety features to reduce damage."

BELIZE POLITICS, - HOW IT WORKS!

BELIZE POLITICS
In the UK, the real role of the political OPPOSITION is taken by the media. Just as it is in Belize on a smaller scale. In the UK, we have a thousand or more newspapers, both small and large, national and local types. In Belize, there are only two newspapers really, that act in any sort of role as an OPPOSITION. That is the REPORTER and the AMANDALA. The Amandala shifts in allegiance to one party or another and is not always reliable. We probably have room in Belize for another independent investigative political newspaper. Sort of a scandal sheet, doing nothing other than watching politicians at work.
The media are the watchdogs of civil society of the body politic, not the OPPOSITION in parliament. While their role is to sell advertising and they do that well. In the UK, certain major newspapers have usurped that role as ACTIVE watchdogs of things politic, in government. We don´t have that kind of media scrutiny in Belize. In the UK, teams of newspaper reporters investigate most sitting CABINET MINISTERS on a regular basis, around the clock in the worst cases, until those bad politicians are exposed. There are even teams of reporters and photographers who act FREELANCE and find it worth their while to do so, writing both articles and supplying photographs of the peccadillos of human nature gone awry among CABINET politicians, writing and photographing, for cash money on commission.
Without the media, either in the UK, or in Belize, we would have little or no controls on the one party, style government for five years, as an elected, one party, dictatorship we experience in Belize. Nor, do scandals of politicians carry the same penalties it would in the UK, with CABINET MINISTER´s caught in the act of improper acts here in Belize yet. Yet politicians of both the UK and Belize, are in it for the most part to get rich in some sort of fashion. Some CABINET MINISTERS have more opportunities and bigger unscrupulous drives, to take more chances to get rich off the opportunities of using government operations, which they control, to feather their retirement plans. In Belize and the UK, it is ONLY the media that can control such illegal, or improper activities, in this continuous running battle
It is the media in both countries under similar political systems that protect civil society from CABINET POLITICIANS, corruption. Without the media, any sort of control of government depredations by the winning party politicians would be impossible. Unfortunately, the Belize population and advertising base is still too small, to foster and encourage a more active media watch of the actions of politicians and here in Belize, they still get away with a lot of irregularities in politics. One could only wish the media were stronger in Belize.

BELIZE BELTRAIDE department FLOPS in interview

BELTRAIDE FROM BELMOPAN CONTINUES TO FLOP!



Was watching a talk show on local TV on cable and it was a BELTRAIDE official and an ITVET school manager. The TALK SHOW host tried his best to get answers to queries about what it was they did, if anything. But no luck! Evasive as usual.

The only thing they were pushing, was a training course to teach people to be waiters and waitresses for $50. A favorite trick of academically overtrained bureaucrats who don´t know how to do their job. Teach a training course, for your monthly reports and evaluation.

I finally tuned out and changed the channel.

Belize - The BANANA measuring radiation guage.

THE BANANA RADIATION MEASURING GUAGE


Bananas are a natural source of radioactive isotopes. True, there's not much in one banana. But enough, according to Nuclear Threat Initiative - a security-minded think tank - for a few bananas to trigger radiation sensors used at US ports to detect smuggled nuclear material.

The standard measure of the biological effect of radiation is the sievert. One sievert is a heck of a big dose, but one tenth of a millionth of a sievert, or 0.1 micro sieverts, is roughly the dose from eating one banana.

So we can use one banana as our basic unit and convert other radiation exposures to so many bananas. The data for the table comes from here. I don't claim to have checked it.
Number of bananas equivalent Selected exposures to radiation

500 million


Ten minutes next to Chernobyl reactor core after explosion and meltdown

80 million


Fatal dose even with treatment

20 million


Severe radiation poisoning, fatal in some cases

500,000


Maximum legal yearly dose for a US radiation worker

70,000


Chest CT scan

40,000


Ten years of normal background dose, 85% of which is from natural sources

4000


Mammogram

1000


Approximate total dose received at Fukushima Town Hall in two weeks following accident

400


Flight from London to New York

300


Yearly release target for a nuclear power plant

200


Chest X-ray

50


Dental X-ray

1


Eating a banana

0.5


Sleeping with someone

But why bother converting this to bananas? Partly because it's hoped BED is friendlier than sieverts and grays and rads and rems, and all the other paraphernalia. I'd agree. Though not everyone likes the BED because of problems counting changing level of exposure from the radiation in a banana as it passes through the body.

But I reckon the BED is useful for several reasons. First, it reminds us that radiation is commonplace. You can't get much more ordinary than a banana.
Officials in Japan check for signs of radiation on children Checks are done for radiation levels in Japan

Second, we know eating one banana won't kill us. Not even nearly. Not without extreme violence. This affirms an age-old point about toxicity - that danger is in the dose. In other words most things, radiation included, are only dangerous in sufficient quantities. The distinction between toxic and safe is not really a distinction of kind, but of quantity. That goes for just about everything from water and vitamins to arsenic.

Third, think about eating 20 million bananas, equal to a dose causing severe, sometimes fatal, radiation poisoning. You'd probably die from something other than the radiation well before you were anywhere near 20 million. Do not attempt this at home. Even over an 80-year lifetime it's nearly 700 a day. Brings to mind Cool Hand Luke's 50 eggs in one hour.

So by putting all radiation exposure on one scale, the banana scale, we see clearly how huge a scale it is. At low doses the bananas come in bunches, then rise through the thousands to the millions, corresponding to micro-sieverts, milli-sieverts and sieverts, the SI unit.

Usually, graphs with this kind of problem use a logarithmic scale, as with decibels, but logarithmic scales trouble some readers. Bananas don't have that problem. For another visualisation that tries to get over the breadth of scale, take a look at this David McCandless effort here.

By talking bananas, Go Figure doesn't mean to trivialize the health risk of radiation. Radiation - strictly speaking we're talking ionizing radiation here, the type that can damage human cells - is often far from trivial. The US National Cancer Institute has estimated, for example, that the millions of CT scans in the US in 2007 alone will eventually cause 29,000 cancers.

But the way we measure things can change how we think about them. Take the radiation from a chest CT scan. If I say that it compares to being a mile and a bit from the epicentre of the Hiroshima atom bomb, you might just see the risk of that scan differently than if I compare it to eating 70,000 bananas.

Believe it or not, both comparisons are just about valid. The exposure caused by the bomb falls away quite quickly with distance. Decide for yourself which sounds worse.

So does looking at radiation exposure through a banana change anything for you? If not, it might be because of the freakiness with which we began.

Attitudes to risk are complicated, emotional and cultural, and they run deep. Fear, for instance, isn't easily quantifiable. It's not obvious how to put the psychology of risk on a graph. Numbers only take us so far, even when converted to your everyday friendly banana.

USA EXPORTS CRIPS AND BLOODS GANGLAND CULTURE TO BELIZE CITY, the port.

GANGS IN BELIZE, BROUGHT AS PRODUCT OF USA.

Was watching an interesting movie on television last night, entitled the GANGS OF BELIZE, in Brooklyn, NY and Los Angeles.
It explained how the early Belize members joined either the CRIPS or the BLOODS and learned how to totally control the robbery, and crack cocaine sales, through violence, murder and terror. Streets and even blocks were controlled by the CRIPS and the BLOODS in the USA. The teaching and enrollment of youngsters in primary school and high school in the gangs was where they got their growing membership from, nearby housing projects.
These gang members quickly learned that murder, or zero tolerance to anybody different on their controlled streets was the way to mastery of their market share in crack cocaine sales. Anybody with any sort of addictive tendencies, either alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, etc., were soon seduced into trying crack cocaine. When they did, they became addicted in just a couple of days. Whereas heroin takes about a week. Once addicted the cost escalated and they became victims, exploited by the gangs.
Apparently in the mid- 1995´s or so, a lot of the street dealer types, the younger ones got sent to jail in the USA, and had for their own protection in the greater prison population, had to join a gang, or be beaten, raped, injured or murdered even in jail. When they finished, their sentence with time off for good behavior, ( half the sentence roughly ) they were deported back to BELIZE. They brought their gangland, prison college education back to Belize with them. That is where we are now in Belize. Mostly in Belize City the port. There are constant attempts to create new street gangs in rural communities and towns in Belize. Seems to be an infectious virus of culture? The population however is still too small for this to happen effectively. Sporadically the police lock up those who try.
The police GSU unit, is probably a unit with a good mission statement. It seems to be flawed as to intelligence gathering? Where it goes awry, is when they hit homes of innocent ordinary people. Offending the sensibilities of the ordinary citizen and voter. There is much discussion what the GSU should do about GANG members involved with crack cocaine. Extra judicial killings of senior gang members has been apparently tried and suggested. Another would be to deprive such people of their citizenship and get them to sign an agreement to be deported. Deportation could be to someplace like the CONGO, or SOMALIA. Anything seems better than locking them up in our local prison system, where they infect other prisoners with their culture and modus operendi. Having a Hattieville Prison College for training and teaching other youths, gangland culture, who just made a simple mistake and landed in jail is certainly not a solution.

MENTAL HEALTH A BIG PROBLEM IN BELIZE WITH NO MONEY FOR SERVICES

THE MENTAL HEALTH AND MENTALLY CHALLENGED INDIVIDUALS IN BELIZE SITUATION, IS TERRIBLE.

Money is the problem the government say in Belize with our huge national debt. They cannot afford to maintain a decent mental health institution and services. At least we do not chain by the ankle, or neck a mentally challenged individual to a tree, like they do in some African Continent countries.

A recent local court case where a mentally disadvantaged person was criminalized in court for masturbating and approved by a Belize government pyschiatrist as competent to be tried as an individual, distresses the public, who know the mentally challenged person. In my personal opinion, the pyschiatrist is the mentally challenged individual. Such a nonsense judgement. I know the mental patient surviving on the street myself. He is a neighbor of mine and have seen him grow up. Doesn´t have the capability to earn money, or do work, like taking a machete and chopping and cleaning a house yard.

THE MONKEYS ARE RUNNING THE ZOO IN BELIZE!

At least one HIGH SCHOOL in Western Belize makes this BLOG required reading?

APPARENTLY I AM TOLD, THIS BLOG IS REQUIRED READING BY AT LEAST ONE LOCAL WESTERN HIGH SCHOOL.

I´m flattered and glad we are providing a public service. Must be social studies or some subject like that?