I shouldn't pick on David Climenhaga too much on the Raj Sherman file, as he is one of the few reflexive anti-Tories to realize that Sherman's claims have collapsed into dust and his political career is basically over. Parties went from wooing him to shunning him faster than studios reacting to Mel Gibson screaming at that Jew cop who wrote him the unfair ticket.
But when talking about how some people want the affair to drag out -- or perhaps not drag out -- we get this curious passage:
Needless to say, it will suit some people in the system very nicely if this sad affair turns out to have a half-life longer than a plutonium isotope.Well does this mean they want the affair dragged out or not? The choice of Pu, which does not have any stable (non-radioactive isotopes) would seem to indicate the timeframe is short (ie. people want this all swept under the carpet lest the 10% true part of Sherman's claims become too important). But when you think of plutonium you're usually thinking about Pu-239 who's half life is four times the timeframe of human civilization, so maybe we're supposed to be thinking a long timeframe ("they" want the Sherman political theatre in full swing to cover up their misdeeds)
But there are also far more unstable isotopes: Pu-237 and Pu-239 have half-lives measured in microseconds. Yet when questioned in this in the comments, Climehaga claims he was talking about plutonium's most stable isotope, Pu-244 (80,000,000 year halflife). But if your rhetorical intent is to quote a very very long time, why bring up plutonium (in general: no specific isotope) in the first place? Why not a more stable element with numerous long-term radioactive isotopes like samarium or lutetium?
