Bad news continues to pour out of Fukushima-Daiichi. The first article below discusses the impact of F-D radiation on Canadian flora and fauna. The second details the involvement of the Japanese Mafia, the Yakuza, in the containment/cleanup process. The third describes TEPCO's mounting financial losses, as they struggle to keep on top of the problems of contaminated groundwater, electrical outages, etc., move ahead with taking the rods out of the dangerous spent fuel pools, and deal with the many lawsuits arising from the disaster. TEPCO has admitted culpability, so has to pay the victims.
Clearly, the situation is out of control. The US needs to lead the way in rallying international support for the crippled plant,- it's more than Japan can handle. A Senate investigation would be a first step in making that happen. Please continue to circulate this petition. Anyone can sign it!
It would never occur to him to wonder: are the squabbling political legislators really two branches of the same Party? Does government have the Constitutional right to incur this much debt? Where is all that money coming from? Taxes? Other sources? Who invents money?
Is the flu dangerous for most people? If not, why not? Do governments overstate case numbers? How do they actually test patients for the flu? Are the tests accurate? Are they just trying to convince us to get vaccines?
What happens when the government has overwhelming force and citizens have no guns?
When the researchers keep saying “may” and “could,” does that mean they’ve actually discovered something useful about Autism, or are they just hyping their own work and trying to get funding for their next project?
These are only a few of the many questions the typical viewer never considers.
Therefore, every story on the news broadcast achieves the goal of keeping the context small and narrow—night after night, year after year. The overall effect of this, yes, staging, is small viewer, small viewer’s mind, small viewer’s understanding.
Billions of dollars are spent by the networks to build a reality the size of a room in a cheap motel.
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel demanded more information Wednesday after the Air Force removed 17 launch officers from duty at a nuclear missile base in North Dakota over what a commander called “rot” in the force. The Air Force struggled to explain, acknowledging concern about an “attitude problem” but telling Congress the weapons were secure.
While the Pentagon’s modernization budget for the pre-emptive nuclear option is a modest ten billion dollars (excluding the outlay by NATO countries). the budget for upgrading the US arsenal of “strategic nuclear offensive forces” is a staggering $352 billion over ten years. (See Russell Rumbaugh and Nathan Cohn,“Resolving Ambiguity: Costing Nuclear Weapons,” Stimson Center Report, June 2012).
These multi-billion military outlays allocated to develop“bigger and better nuclear bombs” are financed by the massive economic austerity measures currently applied in US and NATO countries.
In 2002, the U.S. military had just two kinds of camouflage uniforms. One was green, for the woods. The other was brown, for the desert.Then things got strange.
Click on Image to Enlarge
Today, there is one camouflage pattern just for Marines in the desert. There is another just for Navy personnel in the desert. The Army has its own “universal” camouflage pattern, which is designed to work anywhere. It also has another one just for Afghanistan, where the first one doesn’t work.
Even the Air Force has its own unique camouflage, used in a new Airman Battle Uniform. But it has flaws. So in Afghanistan, airmen are told not to wear it in battle.
In just 11 years, two kinds of camouflage have turned into 10. And a simple aspect of the U.S. government has emerged as a complicated and expensive case study in federal duplication.
Duplication is one of Washington’s most expensive traditions: Multiple agencies do the same job at the same time, and taxpayers pay billions for the government to repeat itself.
The habit remains stubbornly hard to break, even in an era of austerity. There are, for instance, at least 209 federal programs to improve science and math skills. There are 16 programs that teach personal finance.
Phi Beta Iota: The above do not include the range of uniforms in black, brown, green, blue, and white. There is absolutely no truth to allegation that the USAF has spent $500M on an invisibility cloak for airmen. That is a DARPA project, ranked slightly higher in priority than the automated dog. Meanwhile, OmB (the Management is silent) continues to punch numbers without actually thinking about substance.
As the US and Iranian governments escalate tensions in the already volatile Straits of Hormuz, and China and Russia begin openly questioning Washington's interference in their internal politics, the world remains on a knife-edge of military tension. Far from being a dispassionate observer of these developments, however, the media has in fact been central to increasing those tensions and preparing the public to expect a military confrontation. But as the online media rises to displace the traditional forms by which the public forms its understanding of the world, many are now beginning to see first hand how the media lies the public into war.
Learn more about the media manipulations behind the beginning of war in this week's GRTV backgrounder.
Robert Fisk: We Might As Well Name Our Newspapers ‘Officials Say'
May 7, 2013
Watch the full 20-minute interview with Robert Fisk on Democracy Now! at http://owl.li/kN9jD. Longtime Middle East correspondent of the British newspaper The Independent, Robert Fisk, tells Democracy Now! that journalists covering Syria and other conflicts are too often relying on anonymous government sources for their stories.
ROBERT FISK: Oddly enough, you have to be in Syria to realize how mad it is. There's an odd thing that when you actually are traveling around Syria — Latakia, Tartus, Damascus and further north than Latakia — and you listen to the news coming out of Washington, it's like Americans are living in this kind of fantasy world that bears no relation to planet earth, where I'm trying to report. And this is getting steadily worse.
And I think one of the problems is, as I say, this parasitic, osmotic relationship between journalists and power, our ever-growing ability, our wish, to — you know, to rely on these utterly bankrupt comments from various unnamed, anonymous intelligence sources. And I'm just looking at a copy of the Toronto Globe and Mail, February 1st, 2013. It's a story about al-Qaeda in Algeria. And what is the sourcing? “U.S. intelligence officials said, “a senior U.S. intelligence official said,” “U.S. officials said,” “the intelligence official said,” “Algerian officials say,” “national security sources considered,” “European security sources said,” “the U.S. official said,” “the officials acknowledged.” I went—boy, I've got another even worse example here from The Boston Globe and Mail sic, November 2nd, 2012. But, you know, we might as well name our newspapers “Officials Say.” This is the cancer at the bottom of modern journalism, that we do not challenge power anymore. Why are Americans tolerating these garbage stories with no real sourcing except for very dodgy characters indeed, who won't give their names?
U.S. intelligence agencies traced a recent cyber intrusion into a sensitive infrastructure database to the Chinese government or military cyber warriors, according to U.S. officials.
The compromise of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ National Inventory of Dams (NID) is raising new concerns that China is preparing to conduct a future cyber attack against the national electrical power grid, including the growing percentage of electricity produced by hydroelectric dams.
According to officials familiar with intelligence reports, the Corps of Engineers’ National Inventory of Dams was hacked by an unauthorized user believed to be from China, beginning in January and uncovered earlier this month.
