Today is World Water Day. Try to save a few gallons of water today.
Category Archives: News
Northern Japan May be Rendered Uninhabitable by Nuclear Reactors
Look at that picture. That’s a Reuters news photo of the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan. It is disintegrating. Explosions, fires and radiation leaks are growing worse by the day and the efforts to dump water on the reactors are desperate and considered by experts to be ‘last-ditch’ efforts.
The UK’s Daily Mail has an in-depth article with photos.
This is a frightening and horrific world disaster that is quickly approaching and will likely exceed the Chernobyl disaster. The French government is evacuating its nationals from Japan and has announced that the Japanese government is hiding the truth about the disaster. That’s about all one should need to know at this point. The French, one of the world’s leading nuclear nations, are evacuating from Japan.
Let’s stop and think about a Japan with a northern region that is completely uninhabitable.
Japan cannot handle this situation. It has become an emergency requiring a massive U.S. military intervention.
It should go without saying that investigations of nuclear power plant operators worldwide is in quick order. The criminal stupidity of building these things should lead to arrests and prosecutions in the coming months. If someone comes to your town trying sell you a nuclear power plant… put them in a jail cell.
I simply cannot overstress the absolute criminal stupidity of building nuclear reactors in an earthquake zone prone to massive tsunamis. It is simply beyond all excuse and government and power company officials in Japan should definitely be put in jail and taken out of office. This reactor problem is an insult to rationality itself. You don’t build nuclear reactors on top of faults in tsunami waters. It is suicide.
UPDATE: Great Britain is now evacuating all British citizens from Tokyo.
Photos of Earthquake and Tsunami Damage in Japan
The Daily Mail in the UK has a series of photos of the earthquake and tsunami damage in Japan.
The photos are from the European Pressphoto Agency.
CNN has a live blog following the quake and tsunami.
The Huffington Post has live coverage.
Here is how you can donate to the Red Cross Japan Earthquake effort.
Raw Video of Japan Tsunami Entering Town
This is raw and shocking video of the tsunami in Japan entering and destroying a town. It was posted by James MacWhyte on his Facebook page.
Thank you to Paul Gallagher of Dangerous Minds for the find.
CNN has a live blog following the quake and tsunami.
The Huffington Post has live coverage.
Here is how you can donate to the Red Cross Japan Earthquake effort.
Huge 8.9 Earthquake and Tsunami Hit Japan
CNN has a live blog following the quake and tsunami.
The Huffington Post has live coverage.
Here is how you can donate to the Red Cross Japan Earthquake effort.
Thugs Rape American Journalist in Effort to Intimidate Egypt’s Protesters
Update for February 20, 2011: Several days ago, after hearing this news, I posted the following article which is my opinion in a moment of anger. I went too far and made some ridiculous generalizations about the situation in Egypt where a profound and positive change is underway. I should not have characterized a great and noble revolution the way I did based on the alleged actions of a small group. Several commenters from Egypt have been very angry with me. Though I still await the further facts and details of this episode, I do apologize for my generalization and hasty remarks about a ‘pig revolution.’ They are foolish and do not convey my support for the revolution from its first day. I have also changed the title of this post to try to more accurately reflect what probably happened in Tahrir Square during the celebrations of Mubarak’s departure. I will compose a new article that will make my true feelings clear. My opinions here are not to be taken as news. They are simply the overheated and sometimes too angry reactions of an artist. Here are my original and far too general words:
A mob of approximately two hundred Egyptian men gang-raped CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan during celebrations of the Hosni Mubarak resignation in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
This is how Egyptian men celebrate the overthrow of a dictator.
I am not obligated to consistency of opinion on this web site. If something makes me angry I say I’m angry. If I see pigs celebrating a false victory, I say so. Egypt, you have apparently gone to the pigs. Two hundred men raping a woman during celebrations in a city square speaks volumes for your civilization or lack thereof. You are not part of an evolved world. You are outside of the conversation between nations. You rape.
Sure, every country has problems with rape. But my point is that if you see this kind of brutal gang attack during a celebration of joy and victory, you’ve got a statistical certainty that you’re dealing with a brutish general population of men for whom rape is common and widespread. You can’t walk into Times Square in New York and find 200 people willing to commit rape during a New Year’s celebration.
One dictator has been overthrown. What comes next will very likely be worse. A population that can place 200 rapists inside the same square to commit the same crime during a time of joy has sunk to its knees and has no business with the world of civilized nations. How many other women were raped in the square that we don’t know about? This problem of rape and oppression of women is rampant throughout the Middle East. It has deep roots in the region. It seems to be the normal state of existence which is encouraged by every government, whether run by a dictator or not. We will not see any true revolution in the Middle East until every oppressed woman turns to her rapist and stabs him in the throat. Perhaps women of the Middle East should organize such an event through Facebook. All women who have suffered rape arise at 4:00 am on the same day and eliminate their sleeping attackers. Governments would surely fall almost overnight because there would be no ministers or ‘royal princes’ left to reign.
We see this revolution unfold and we see people shouting for more freedom. But we do not see a single soul shout for women. Instead we see Egyptian men raping them. I will not join my fellow Americans in naively celebrating a pig revolution.
This does not mean that I do not support the revolution. I do support it. It simply means that I will not celebrate while ignoring the very serious problem of how women are treated in the Middle East. The situation is appalling and will cause revolutions to fail. You cannot have freedom and democracy where women are considered to be something less than men.
Egypt Celebrates First Victory in Revolution
Egypt has begun to put out its garbage. It’s an amazing achievement for Egyptians that I have witnessed via the news video and photos coming from Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Congratulations to all the Egyptians who wanted to be free. They forced a raping, murdering, totalitarian criminal to resign his dictatorial position. The dictator Mubarak was and is an ongoing embarrassment and deep shame to the entire Middle East and to the United States that insisted on giving him respect and credibility even while he committed murder and oppressed a great civilization. Egyptians have made an incredible start to ridding themselves of the human garbage that was and is Mubarak. It remains to be seen if Egypt can become truly free and wrest control of the nation from its military.
Hopefully, the revolution in Egypt will spread to topple the rest of the governments in the Middle East which are nearly unanimous in their willingness to allow brutal thugs and criminal royal families to rule in bitter oppression. These savage despots straight out of the Dark Ages are specialists in murder, rape and complete suppression of all ideas and expression. They also have the absolute respect and support of governments like those in the U.S.
Beyond the Middle East and its ‘royal families,’ it would be astonishing and constructive to see the people of China put their own garbage out by removing their totalitarian government. Revolution is in the twenty-first century air. No one is immune.
Mubarak Wants His Bullets Back
Violent news footage showing death of an Egyptian protester:
I suspect that the people of Egypt will want to return this bullet to Mubarak as soon as possible.
Live Egypt News From Al Jazeera Network
The best coverage of the uprising in Egypt is from the Al Jazeera news network which is heavily censored in the U.S. by media corporations like the cable and satellite providers.
You can follow the events with a live updating news page and a live 24-hour video feed.
Egyptians Continue Arab World Revolt Against Despotic Rulers
In a stunning rebuke to the ongoing U.S. policy of ‘useful dialog’ with the Arab world’s collection of brutal, murdering dictators, the people of Egypt are staging one of the great revolutions in history by occupying the streets of Egypt’s major cities and burning the headquarters of the brutal and thuggish regime that has held power there for over 30 years. It is very likely that this ongoing revolution is as significant an event as the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. All dictators and the people attached to them, whether they be Arab or otherwise, sign their own death warrants as soon as they take power, giving the people an undeniable right to eliminate them by any means necessary. The current U.S. administration shows itself to be woefully out of step with events as it insists that protesters chart a course for the future through dialog with Mubarak! Mubarak is as dead as King Tut’s mummy. I suspect that most of the people in Egypt recognize that President Obama has been secretly complicit in the activities of dictator Mubarak and his torture facilities. As buildings burn in Cairo, so does U.S. policy toward the brutal, barbaric, and inhuman torturers who lead most of the Arab world. The sad truth of the matter is that in the U.S. we have a president who completely and unreservedly supports a criminal dictator. Shame on the U.S. Go Egypt!
Wikileaks is Fighting World’s First True Information War
The United States government is attempting to physically destroy the Wikileaks organization. The ‘Cablegate’ release of diplomatic communications has begun to reveal that Western democracies maintain shadow governments that are outside the reach of their electorates. They appear to have a system in place that is not subject to the outcomes of elections. For me, that is the main thing suggested by the leaks.
The Obama administration is fully engaged in a very serious information war that threatens to turn the public eye toward the inner workings of a government sliding very quickly toward a new form of corporate/government fascism. The obvious connection between government, corporations, and the military is now under public scrutiny as we watch officials tell companies like Amazon and Paypal to cut off the Wikileaks operations. A democratic superpower is influencing, through threats or friendly suggestion, the behavior of companies that are enormously powerful on the Internet. It has become clear that we absolutely cannot expect any form of free expression to exist where Amazon or Paypal are concerned. The fact that Amazon controls most of the book trade in the U.S. is an emergency and should ultimately result in a move toward a more open source form of book selling. I would not want to be in the position of trying to sell a book on Amazon that contained thorough investigative reporting on U.S. government secrets or corruption. One call from Joseph Lieberman could shut everything down for my book.
The important thing about the Wikileaks is that they change journalism. They open a deep wound in the side of government that bleeds secrets, incompetence and corruption. The wound will continue to bleed because there will always be someone willing to leak the information. It’s simple human nature. There will always be a place to send that information and there will always be journalists to sift through it and print it for us to read. If this Wikileaks is killed, another will pop up.
Wikileaks is nothing more than a reporter sitting at a desk answering the phone and taking notes from a confidential source. Wikileaks is a reporter. President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have openly declared themselves to be extremely dangerous enemies of a free press. They have already begun threatening university students who try to download or link to the Wikileaks data (the data is here, by the way). They will stop at nothing to end Wikileaks. We should be prepared for this. They will stop at absolutely nothing. Just wait for the leak. Then you’ll know.
Here’s an excellent article by John Naughton at the Guardian Newspaper about how governments now must either live with open access to information or try to shut down the net.
NASA Discovers Entirely New Life Form
NASA is preparing to announce today that it has discovered an entirely new form of life that is built on a different basis from any life form every known.
In other words, life does not have to be made up of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. The new life form discovered by the space agency is built upon arsenic.
Essentially, NASA has discovered an alien life form.
This changes the entire basis of the search for life on other planets. It changes the whole story. Life can apparently build itself out of things we thought made life impossible.
There’s a 2:00 pm EST news conference scheduled at NASA to formally announce the world-changing discovery.
Here’s NASA’s announcement of the finding.
This is NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon who leads the team that made this discovery.
Wikileaks Diplomatic Document Release May Uncover Massive U.S. Criminality
Wikileaks.org today released 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables that have apparently caused grave concern in Western governments. The documents have already revealed that the U.S. has been spying on the United Nations Secretary General. Also, Wikileaks is currently under a massive cyber attack that began early Sunday morning. We can easily guess who is behind that.
The U.K.’s Guardian newspaper has been given the document release files by Wikileaks. You can go and explore the database here.
The U.S. government has stated that the release of the documents is illegal. I beg to differ. It is information that people need to know about their elected leaders. On the basis of this information we can begin to get rid of government officials who turn out to be little more than gangsters. It may be time to realize that the release of information about the backroom dealings of Western governments and their diplomat/spies is a long overdue protection and counterbalance against criminal activities by government officials up to and including the President of the United States.
And in case you didn’t realize it, this is why President Obama wants an ’emergency’ switch to shut down the Internet in the U.S.
Hey world, enjoy the data!
Wednesday Is The Day To Make Hell For The TSA At U.S. Airports
I can’t believe that I’m posting a video interview with Ron Paul about the ongoing horror show coming out of the TSA and the Obama administration. But the simple fact of the matter is that it really doesn’t matter who is attacking the President and the TSA for blatantly unconstitutional molestation and physical abuse of air passengers across the United States. It doesn’t matter if it’s Republicans or Tea Party dopes. The only thing that matters is that a free people with some hope of maintaining a democracy MUST stop a government that thinks it can go inside peoples’ clothes and touch their bodies in the name of very questionable security.
The Obama administration’s TSA must be stopped no matter what. It is an absolute imperative that they not be allowed to molest men, women or children who are simply exercising their right to travel freely. So I find myself fully in the camp of a political party that I normally want nothing to do with. When it comes to stopping the TSA and protecting the civil rights of people in this country it makes no difference who is leading the fight. It think this cause does in fact join Republicans with liberals. It’s one of the few things we can agree on.
The TSA has expressed concern about verbal and physical abuse being directed at its employees. They hope that passengers can understand the difference between the TSA employees and the officials making the policies. Except that the person you have to defend yourself from is the one standing in front of you trying to put his or her hand into your pants. You must defend yourself against that person. The policymakers will get the message and act eventually. But in the airport you must defend yourself against the person actually committing the assault.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010 is National Opt Out of TSA Abuse Day
Mature Content
One would of course want to do more than just ‘opt out’ if a child were treated this way by the frighteningly imbecilic TSA. You know, the regular airport police really don’t much like the TSA people very much and are probably just itching for a good reason to arrest one or two.
I thought of a possible alternative to the TSA’s threat to arrest or financially penalize people who try to opt out of the full body nude scanners and the groin touching pat down. One could simply opt out of the scanner and then state that although not refusing the pat down a request for local or airport police observation of the pat down procedure is insisted upon because one has a real fear of imminent sexual assault. That would seem to me to put the TSA officers at a serious disadvantage legally and force local police to come to the scene. Just a few episodes like this will really jam up airport gates all across the country and then the hand-job President might get the message that we’re all just fine without hands in our pants.
At the very least, passengers all across the country should be filming with their cell phones just like the guy in the video above.