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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.
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.
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.
Special Treat For The Anti-Defamation League: How to Build a Mosque
Since the Anti-Defamation League has just decided to support the mission of bigots opposed to the building an Islamic center in the vicinity of the World Trade Center site in New York City, I thought I’d offer them a special presentation on the building of a mosque.
Another suggestion for all bigots like those who work at the Anti-Defamation League would be to schedule a field trip to a local mosque to see just how well-treated one is upon entering a mosque. If you have never been inside a mosque I would recommend going. What you imagine goes on inside a mosque is most certainly not what goes on inside a mosque. Give it a try sometime. Get to know the people inside the building and when you start to feel really bad about the way you have behaved, just chalk it up to your own uneducated imagination.
Here’s an article about the raging anti-Muslim attitudes spreading across the U.S. and Europe.
Anti-Defamation League Joins Anti-Mosque Bigots in Hatred
Anti-Defamation League - Fighting Anti-Semitism, Bigotry and Extremism - Yeah, unless you're a Muslim.
The Anti-Defamation League, an organization that ostensibly stands up for religious freedom and tolerance in the United States has shocked and disgusted many people, including me, by announcing their opposition to the construction of a mosque in the vicinity of the World Trade Center site.
In the vicinity! We’re not talking about on top of Ground Zero. We’re talking about nearby, somewhere in the general neighborhood in New York City.
The Anti-Defamation League appears, as a result of this bizarre proclamation, to be an organized group of bigots pretending to support tolerance.
Muslims have every right to build a mosque near the World Trade Center site. There’s nothing inappropriate or wrong about it. In fact, I think it shows a concerted effort to be a thriving part of the New York community. It’s healthy to build this mosque. It’s a better decision than building the ever-stalled ‘Freedom Tower’ which never gets an inch off the ground. Why not rename it ‘Freedom Hole.’ These people who have been protesting, including some of the relatives of 9/11 victims, are nothing more than the worst form of bigot. They couch their hatred in ‘protecting the emotional well-being of families and victims.’ By their logic we should cordon off every site of a plane crash and forbid construction by people who are of the same religious beliefs as the pilots. We should ascertain the religion of every person who commits a murder and prevent people of that religion from ever constructing churches near the murder sites. Insane. Hateful. Nonsense.
Muslims are not terrorists. Muslims are simply people who worship in a particular way. Associating Muslims with terrorism is bigotry by definition. I think someone should build a mosque on top of the Anti-Defamation League.
Here is what the Anti-Defamation League says:
Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site, and may even have chosen the site to send a positive message about Islam. The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong. But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain – unnecessarily – and that is not right.
So don’t build your mosque because it’ll make a bunch of backwoods idiot bigots feel bad. Wow! I’m just blown away. You know, I never give money to organized bigots. But I’ll certainly contribute to the mosque-building fund if there is one.
This insidious and creeping connection of Islam to terrorism is becoming very dangerous. It’s getting worse quickly. It’s spreading all over the U.S. and Europe. If the Anti-Defamation League feels that is can say something like this then we are in very bad shape indeed.
I Think BP is Faking its Spill Fix
Fake. It should be obvious. Any twelve year old child can look at the volcano of oil and tell you that it will never fit inside a narrow pipe. This is just public relations for the sake of the video feed. President Obama should get into a military posture immediately and remove BP from the Gulf. It is time to start arresting BP employees. This is terrorism. The ideas and execution on display from BP make no logical sense and therefore must represent something beyond what we are being made aware of. Obama needs to ask Congress to convene specifically to authorize a takeover of all BP assets and physical property worldwide by the United States. They need to basically declare a state of war against a multi-national corporation. And if they refuse, then Obama needs to move without them. I’m dead serious in my opinion on this. This is one of the worst attacks ever perpetrated against the United States. The reason I call it an attack is because what started as an accident has changed now into an ongoing effort to confuse observers of the situation and mislead them into thinking that BP is trying to stop the leak. What are other BP people doing around the world right now? What is going on in their banks? Where are they moving their money? Obama is missing the big red ball here and he’s never going to recover. I think it would be wise to very quickly and quietly remove all BP personnel from any offshore oil rigs near the U.S. and shut those rigs down asap. NASA engineers need to be pulled into this emergency and the military must provide logistics and hauling support for the effort to shut the gusher down.
The entire southern and eastern coasts of the U.S. are at severe risk and the volume of oil in the Gulf is far beyond what BP or the government have stated. This company has absolutely no concern whatsoever for what happens to the Gulf waters or the U.S. coasts. It concerns itself only with limiting financial losses and maximizing oil profits. Cleanup and stopping the spill are completely irrelevant to this company. Obama needs to consider what he would do if he wakes up tomorrow and realizes that BP is falsifying the entire operation at the spill site. What would you do, Mr. President?
Further thoughts: Extreme language and extreme action are required in this very odd situation with the Gulf disaster. I think it is only this kind of extreme, left-field thinking that will somehow break the massive inertia that is apparent in our government’s response to a major world emergency. I continue to hear high government officials, including the President, talk about what the government, military, and BP can’t do. Everyone seems to think that there’s not much that can be done that BP isn’t already doing. This thinking is very dangerous and indicates a total collapse of the nation’s intellect and general technical infrastructure. That is not the way the United States expresses itself. We are seeing what is either an anomaly or an indication of failure on a massive and existential scale. The United States that has existed up until recently would never say that it could not plug a hole 5,000 feet below the sea. Never. It would turn all of its technical, military, industrial, and intellectual resources toward filling that hole immediately. I’ve heard reports that President Obama has an IQ of 160. Really? Really? I’m not sure which test was administered to this guy, but it is quite apparent that somebody got paid a little extra to score it.
This country is bleeding out of its asshole. And our President is modeling business casual slacks on the oil-slicked shores of a destroyed southern coast.
The President should be using extreme language and taking extreme actions to get this hole filled instantaneously. He should be reacting in very much the same way he would react if a nuclear bomb had exploded somewhere on American soil. Nothing less will suffice. What is wrong with our President and what is wrong with America?
Watch Astounding Deepwater Submersible Work to Fix Gulf Oil Gusher
Update June 4 10:00 am: The BP robot operators are trying to close the valves on the gusher cap they installed last night. Meanwhile, oil blasts out through those valves while some channels up to a surface ship. It remains to be seen if by closing the valves BP can stop the uncontrolled gusher and channel all of the oil to their ships.
Update June 3 10:00 pm: It does not appear to be working. I think BP keeps insisting on using rather narrow pipes to handle this gusher which is putting out enormous loads of pressure. Why don’t they fit a large sewer pipe around this blowout preventer? A large diameter sewer pipe could simply hang around the gusher without even making a tight fit. Then the gushing oil would be gradually corralled into a somewhat narrower pipe leading to the surface. Blockages of frozen matter seen in the original effort to put a big box around the gusher must be a product primarily of using too narrow gauge a pipe for this job. You can’t try to push all this high-pressure oil into a narrow pipe leading to the surface. You have to gradually ease it up into a very wide pipe.
The cap BP is trying to fit on the gusher simply doesn’t have enough weight to press its rubber gasket tight enough to the pipe, so too much oil is leaking around it. BP’s robot operators are wonderful, but I’m having very serious doubts about the competence of its engineers. Very serious. It may be well past time for President Obama to get NASA involved. There’s no way that a good engineer is going to be trying to fit a narrow pipe over a high-pressure volcano. It’s silly.
By the way, this planetary level disaster is quite likely to wipe out most of the coast of the United States. The greatest superpower nation on earth is about to lose most of its coastline from the south all the way up the eastern seaboard to New York. A single company with a single 24-inch hole in the ground has done this. It is this event, not 9/11, that is the turning point. We have reached the end of the era of global corporations. They are too dangerous. Governments must retool and rethink. Companies like BP must be destroyed, either financially or legislatively.
Original post below:
If you want a few heroes out of this horrendous Gulf Oil Disaster, you should start by watching the work of whoever is controlling the deep water submersible arms. It’s fascinating and highly educational to observe the careful thought process that goes on in advance of every single minute movement made by this machine. Remote control at 5000 feet of depth is a rare skill indeed. BP is attempting to place a cap and pipe onto the cutoff top end of the pipe that is spewing oil into the Gulf waters. So the robots will need to be carefully controlled to aim this device and place it right into the center of the gusher.
This approach has a high probability of success. But if they miss the hole and bend something, they will need to try again. This could well be one of the great feats of engineering in modern times. Well worth watching patiently.