you made the rain black and shoved your values down our throat...,

Video - You made the rain black, and shoved your values down our throat.

Yale | The chaotic events unfolding at the damaged Fukushima-Daiichi reactors along Japan’s northeast coast have inspired intense new scrutiny of the country’s nuclear policies. While Japan excels in some anti-pollution measures, the lack of a vigorously independent press and a strong judiciary has enabled Japanese industry to resist legislation to safeguard the environment and human health. The nuclear power industry, a powerful player in Japan’s politically dominant construction industry, has pressed ahead with its plans — endorsed in 2006 by the Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry’s “New National Energy Policy” — to mold the country into a “nuclear state.” In addition to 54 existing nuclear power plants that until last week supplied 30 percent of the country’s electricity, a dozen new nuclear plants are planned or under construction.

One in particular has exposed a deep public divide. The proposed Kaminoseki nuclear plant is to be built on landfill in a national park in the country’s well-known Inland Sea, hailed as Japan’s Galapagos. For three decades, local residents, fishermen, and environmental activists have opposed the plant, saying it should not be built in the picturesque sea, with its rich marine life and fishing culture dating back millennia. The Inland Sea has also been the site of intense seismic activity, including the epicenter of the 1995 Kobe earthquake that killed 6,400 people.

But in a sign of the immense clout of the nuclear power industry, a utility has barreled ahead with plans to build the Kaminoseki plant, despite what may be the most intense opposition yet to a Japanese nuclear project. In 2009, the utility began clearing forests for the project — located just 50 miles from Hiroshima — and reclaiming land from the sea. Nothing, not even intensifying protests, seemed able to stop the plant’s construction — until, that is, last week’s earthquake and tsunami set off the crisis at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant. Now, for the time being at least, work has halted on the Kaminoseki project.

“We have to stop it,” Masae Yuasa, a professor of International Studies at Hiroshima City University and a leading opponent of the plant, told me when I visited Japan last fall. In words that have a chilling resonance now, she continued, “Once an accident happens, there is no border. I want to be more polite, but we have to stop it. I am a person from Hiroshima. I cannot be quiet about it.”

Video - Fallout came in the form of thick black rain.

fallout fear returns...,

Video - Excerpt from "White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki".

CNN | The cities flattened by last week's earthquake look eerily similar to the decimated buildings Shigeko Sasamori saw after an atomic bomb was dropped on her hometown in 1945.

The floodwaters from the tsunami -- the waves of debris and bodies -- remind her of the rivers in Hiroshima, Japan, swamped with corpses.

And the struggle to contain radioactive emissions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant makes Sasamori, 78, wonder if the crisis there will plague a new generation in Japan.

"Radiation is the most horrible thing, and it's more horrible to me because humans make it," she said from her home near Los Angeles. "We don't have to make that."

Sasamori is a hibakusha, or heat radiation survivor -- a name given to those who lived through the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States at the end of World War II.

For them, radiation is an invisible enemy that has haunted them, claimed their loved ones, altered their bodies and threatened their lives.
WWII survivors' second nuclear crisis

The parallels between the devastation from the 1945 atomic bombs and that of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis have reopened old scars.

Sasamori wakes up at night and watches Japanese TV coverage of the disasters from her living room. A slender woman, dignified and gray-haired, Sasamori is shaken. Her body is sleepless, and her heart feels heavy, she said.

And she waits for news, because her daughter-in-law's extended family has yet to be located in the oceanside prefecture of Iwate.

As a nervous world watches the situation at Fukushima, some hibakusha worry that more Japanese people may have to endure the ordeal of radiation exposure than they did after World War II.

"This is like déjà vu," said Dr. Ritsuko Komaki, another Japanese American who grew up in Hiroshima after the bomb fell when she was 2.

Japan's modern history has now been haunted by two major nuclear events: the atomic bombs and the struggle to contain the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which the Japanese prime minister described Friday as "very grave."

response delayed by concern over asset damage

Video - The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency says he's heading to Japan - almost a week after the nuclear crisis began.

Bloomberg | Efforts to control Japan’s nuclear crisis were delayed by concerns over damaging valuable assets at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant and initial passivity from the Japanese government, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. was reluctant to use seawater to cool one of the six reactors at the plant and hesitated because it was concerned about harming its long-term investment in the plant, the Journal cited people involved with the response as saying.

Japan’s government waited more than a day to order seawater flooding at the plant after waves generated by the largest earthquake ever recorded in Japan knocked out power for cooling systems, allowing heat to build to dangerous levels within the reactor chamber. Tepco, as the utility is known, earlier refrained from using seawater because it would corrode metal and render the reactor useless.

“I’m aware there are many criticisms, and rightly so,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said today in response to a question about the Journal report. “We did our best during the whole process, and we aren’t at a stage where we can make any judgment on that.”

privatized nuclear power means cutting corners

Video - Russia Today video examining the risk-reward conflicts intrinsic to private, for-profit nuclear energy.

Russia Today | In light of the crisis at Japan’s Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant, the privatization of nuclear energy in the country has come under fire. Some question whether the accident could have been averted if the plant had been run by the state.

No matter how hard Tokyo Electric Company's workers try, disaster still looms at Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant. Attempts to cool the reactors have been applauded for bravery, but it has been a week since cooling capability was lost, and there is no end in sight to this crisis.

"The implications are that the radiation has already spread a fair distance, there will probably be an area around the plant like Chernobyl that will be uninhabitable for the foreseeable future and will get far worse than this,” said Dr. Jeffrey Patterson, an expert on radiation exposure and professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

The plant's cooling systems may have been crippled by a natural disaster, but some are now questioning the merits of the decision to build reactors near the so-called Ring of Fire.

“This is completely a human-made disaster, because that plant should never have been located there in the first place, and citizens have pointed that out,” said Aileen Mioko Smith, executive director of the Green Action environmental group.

The fact that Japan's nuclear industry is in private hands has also led to accusations that profits were put before safety.

Fukushima's owner already has a questionable past, with a history of falsifying safety records at the site back in the 1980s.

“I think we also have to review the idea of privatized nuclear power because it means cutting corners, and we're watching those corners being cut today,” argued journalist and author Afshin Rattansi.

“What we would like to see is for the government to take control of these nuclear reactors from private corporations, because private corporations’ main purpose for existence is to maximize profits, and by maximizing profits in the nuclear sector, we are talking about minimizing concerns for public health and safety,” added Keith Harmon Snow, a war correspondent and former UN investigator.

It may be down to private investors to get the ball rolling. It is the other way around if things go wrong.

“I think that it is going to be inevitable that the state will take over to contain these plants. They will probably need to be covered with concrete and sand much like Chernobyl was. I think the state will take over the responsibility for that. I think that whether the state does it or private companies do it, it's very difficult for anyone to do this job,” said Dr. Jeffrey Patterson.

Japan has experienced nuclear tragedy before, in 1945 when the US dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today the Japanese are trying everything they can to avert another nuclear disaster, this time at Fukushima, while the world waits for the wider consequences, unsure of how many will be affected.

authorities restrict news you can use on reactor disaster

Video - Authorities restrict news you can use on reactor disaster.

National Journal | Fearing shortages of bandwidth might inhibit military operations after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, U.S. Cyber Command blocked some commercial websites that generally use “extraordinary bandwidth,” a spokesman said on Tuesday.

The partial cyber ban was imposed at the request of U.S. Pacific Command and is a “regional action,” a Cyber Command spokesman told National Journal. It affects websites like Amazon, YouTube, ESPN, eBay, and other “recreational websites... that have low mission impact,” the spokesman said. Social-media websites were not restricted.

The U.S. military has about a dozen ships assisting in the crisis in Japan, either based off the coast or en route, and is engaged in air operations there. The spokesman said the partial ban is seen as a necessary precaution to ensure that mission-critical communications can continue even after significant damage to structures, facilities, and infrastructure in the region.

Misawa Air Base, a forward operating base for these missions, warned its personnel in a blog post Friday that the Defense Switched Network, which handles voice calls, was in backup mode and had only limited capacity, according to NextGov.com. "We have a number of connectivity issues. Internet has been up and down due to our connections through other places in Japan,” the blog post said.

Col. Daniel King, deputy public affairs director for Pacific Command, said he was unaware of any concrete communications problems that prompted the partial ban. “It was precautionary,” he said, while declining to discuss any damage caused by the earthquake. When asked about the blog post, of which he said he was unaware, King noted that any posting on Friday was “literally hours after a 9.0 earthquake -- that’s a significant shock to any infrastructure.”

Right now, “communications are good” for the U.S. missions, King said from Hawaii.

The Pacific Command area of responsibility encompasses about half of the earth’s surface, according to the command’s website, and stretches from the waters off the U.S. West Coast to the western border of India, and from Antarctica to the North Pole. “Even what happens in the Pacific Command area of operations impacts operations worldwide,” another official from U.S. Cyber command said. “Even though the majority of the damage was isolated... in a specific area of operations, it still affects communications worldwide,” the official said.

A public affairs officer for U.S. Pacific Command, Lt. Cmdr. Bill Clinton, said the missions will prompt “a lot of demand on our networks.” Blocking the sites is “just a precaution to make sure that information is flowing back to us.”

authorities resume failing cooling operations

Video - Japan resumes cooling operations.

Xinhua | Japan's Self-Defense Force and firefighting personnel resumed shooting water over the No. 3 reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant on Saturday afternoon, in an effort to cool down the reactor and overheating spent fuel pools.
A spokesperson for Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), operator of the faltering Daiichi facility, said a total of 1,260 tons of water will be discharged over the next seven hours.

An unmanned vehicle with a 22-meter high platform was utilized in the efforts to avoid personnel coming into contact with excessive amounts of radiation.

The Tokyo Fire Department's special "hyper rescue team" also joined the SDF in spraying water to cool down the No. 3 reactor and the combined effort discharged 60 tons of water in 20 minutes, in the first phase of the operation on Saturday morning.

Efforts to cool the reactor were suspended as the TEPCO workers tried to reconnect electricity to the plant by using outside power sources.

TEPCO said Saturday that reconnection of the No. 2 reactor is expected to be completed during the day, but it may take some time before cooling devices can be reactivated as a lot of damage may have been caused to electrical systems when the tsunami hit the plant following Friday's 9.0 magnitude quake that struck the region.

The utility said that at the time of the quake, the No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 reactors at the Daiichi facility were the only ones operating and shutdown automatically as they are supposed to.

But due to lost cooling functions in the reactors some of the cores are believed to have partially melted.

The buildings housing the No. 1, No. 3 and No. 4 reactors have been severely damaged, TEPCO said and fuel pools in the reactors have been left uncovered.

authorities seek to systematise social media sock-puppetry

The Rise of the Autobots: Into the Underground of Social Network Bots from Tom on Vimeo.

Guardian | The US has a chance to move on from a history of clandestine foreign policy – instead it acts like a clumsy spammer. The US government's plan to use technology to create and manage fake identities for social interaction with terrorists is as appalling as it is amusing. It's appalling that in this era of greater transparency and accountability brought on by the internet, the US of all countries would try to systematise sock puppetry. It's appallingly stupid, for there's little doubt that the fakes will be unmasked. The net result of that will be the diminution, not the enhancement, of American credibility.

But the effort is amusing as well, for there is absolutely no need to spend millions of dollars to create fake identities online. Any child or troll can do it for free. Millions do. If the government insists on paying, it can use salesforce.com to monitor and join in chats. There is no shortage of social management tools marketers are using to find and mollify or drown out complainers. There's no shortage of social-media gurus, either.

Tools are quite unnecessary, though. Just get yourself a fake email account, Uncle Sam, and you can create and manage anonymous and pseudonymous identities across most any social service.

Hell, if the government wants to spread information around the world without being detected, why doesn't it just use WikiLeaks? Oh, that's right. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called WikiLeaks disclosures "not just an attack on America [but an] attack on the international community". The leaks, she said, "tear at the fabric" of government.

Yes, indeed, they tore at the fabric of the Tunisian government and helped launch the revolts in the Middle East and a wave of freedom – and, we hope, democracy – across borders. The movement of liberation we are witnessing came not from war and weapons or spying and subterfuge but from a force more powerful: transparency; openness; honesty.

I remain sorely disappointed that the Obama administration's reflexive response to the WikiLeaks revelations was to clamp down and then condemn, attack, and reportedly torture the alleged leaker and his allies in accountability. Obama missed the opportunity to separate himself from a secretive and sometimes deceitful history of government.

He could make good on his campaign pledge to run the transparent administration. Even while disapproving of the theft of documents, he could acknowledge the lesson of the leaks: that government keeps too much from its people. Government is secret by default and transparent by force when it should be transparent by default and secret by necessity.

coming in the air tonight?

The Independent | Even before Japan's devastating earthquake struck Honshu, certain sections of the global blogosphere were already warning in breathless tones about an upcoming Moon armageddon caused by the extra gravitational pull of the moon's proximity. Richard Nolle, an American astrologer who claims to have coined the phrase "super moon" and – according to his own website – foresaw the 1993 World Trade Centre bombings, has predicted a whole host of global meteorological nightmares this weekend, including a surge in extreme tides, magnitude 5+ earthquakes and a slew of powerful storms.

"Being planetary in scale," he added ominously, "there's no place on our home planet that's beyond the range of a super moon, so it wouldn't hurt to make ready wherever you are or plan to be during the March 16-22 super moon risk window."

After the Japanese earthquake struck, what further proof was needed, especially once fellow bloggers claimed that the 2004 Asian tsunami and a large Australian flood in the mid-1950s also occurred close to a lunar perigee? Fortunately, seismologists, astronomers and most scientific consensus demand a lot more evidence before we blame the moon for natural disasters.

At its perigee, the moon is about 220,000 miles from Earth; at its furthest point, 254,000 miles. Although the moon's gravitational pull is a factor in oceanic tides, there is little evidence to suggest that its pull is great enough to have any substantial effect the Earth's tectonic activity or lead to freak weather patterns.

"Don't get me started on the blogosphere," says a rather weary Kevin Horsburgh, from the National Oceanography Centre in Liverpool which monitors Britain's tidal pattern. "I don't know where they get their ideas. But the great thing about astronomy-driven tidal measurements is that they are completely predictable."

japan crisis spikes u.s. demand for radiation pills

NPR | Japan's nuclear crisis is spiking demand in the U.S. and a few other places for a cheap drug that can protect against one type of radiation damage — even though the risk is only in Japan.

Health agencies in California and western Canada warned Tuesday that there's no reason for people an ocean away to suddenly stock up on potassium iodide. Some key suppliers say they're back-ordered and are getting panicked calls from potential customers.

"Tell them, `Stop, don't do it,'" said Kathryn Higley, director of radiation health physics at Oregon State University.

"There's a lot of mythology about the use of potassium iodide," added Dr. Irwin Redlener, a pediatrician and disaster preparedness specialist at Columbia University. "It's not a radiation antidote in general."

The pill can help prevent radioactive iodine from causing thyroid cancer, for which children are most at risk in a nuclear disaster.

Japan's Nuclear Safety Agency has stored potassium iodide to distribute in case of high radiation exposure, and the U.S. Navy is giving it to military crews exposed to radiation as they help with relief efforts in Japan. But government and independent experts say that Americans have little to fear from any radiation released by the damaged Japanese nuclear plant.

"You just aren't going to have any radiological material that, by the time it traveled those large distances, could present any risk to the American public," said Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Greg Jazcko.

global quake risk map

Fist tap Nana.

u.s. radiation network

strange agricultural landscapes seen from space

Fist tap Dale.

why did japan enter world war II?

Japan was not a nation blessed with many natural resources as was the U.S., and other enemies of that nation. In order to secure those additional raw materials, such as rubber, tin, and petroleum, among others, the war leaders decided that conquest of other nations was a solution, and began by attacking China, which in actuality was the (early) start of the war.

At the time, China was a virtual colony for many European nations, including England, France, Netherlands, and the US as well as Japan. Other colonies in Asia included Vietnam for France, Philippines for US, Indonesia for Netherlands, and so on. As the great powers competed for regional interests, Japan was quickly gaining ground from obtaining German concessions after participating on the allied side in WWI. The United States did not view Japan's intrusion into China as favorable to its own interests in the area, and thus economic frictions between US and Japan arose. At the time, Japan relied 80% of its resources, including oil, indispensable at the time, to the US. The US began throttling its exports to Japan, and pressured its allies to do the same (such as the Netherlands and Mexico, which Japan sought to purchase oil as alternative sources). The friction reached its height when the US stopped all exports to Japan under the Export Control Act on July 31, 1940 after freezing all Japanese assets in the US, virtually cutting off all of Japan's access to resources. 4 months later, Japan decides to attack the United States on Pearl Harbor.

shock begins to turn to anger in japan

NPR | Shock among survivors of Japan's earthquake and tsunami turned to anger Wednesday as nearly a half-million people displaced by the disaster and resulting nuclear crisis remained crammed in makeshift evacuation centers, many with few basic necessities and even less information.

The governor of northeastern Fukushima prefecture, the site of a badly damaged nuclear power plant, fumed over what he saw as poor government communication and coordination.

"The anxiety and anger being felt by people in Fukushima have reached a boiling point," Gov. Yuhei Sato told broadcaster NHK. He said shelters do not even have enough hot meals and basic necessities for those living near the plant who have already been relocated.

In a rare address to the nation, Japan's Emperor Akihito called the nuclear crisis "unprecedented in scale" and urged the country to pull together in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami.

"Nobody knows how many people will die," the 77-year-old emperor said, "but I fervently hope that we can save as many survivors as possible."

Prime Minister Naoto Kan also appeared on television, ordering officials to take radiation level readings and relay them to the public.

The official death toll from the disaster has reached nearly 3,700, but authorities expect that figure to climb to more than 10,000 because so many are still listed as missing.

A blanket of snow in parts of the devastated northeast added to the misery for millions of people faced a sixth night with little food, water or heat. Police said more than 452,000 people were staying in temporary shelters.

'Something's Just Not Right'

forecast for plume's path a function of wind and weather

world energy crunch as nuclear and oil both go wrong

Telegraph | The existential crisis for the world's nuclear industry could hardly have come at a worse moment. The epicentre of the world's oil supply is disturbingly close to its own systemic crisis as the Gulf erupts in conflict.

Libya's civil war has cut global crude supply by 1.1m barrels per day (bpd), eroding Opec's spare capacity to a wafer-thin margin of 2m bpd, if Goldman Sachs is correct.

Now events in the Gulf have turned dangerous after Saudi Arabia sent troops into Bahrain to help the Sunni monarchy crush largely Shi'ite dissent, risking a showdown with Iran.

Russia's finance minister Alexei Kudrin warned on Wednesday that the confluence of events in Japan and the Mid-East could push oil to $200 a barrel in a "short-lived" spike, which would snuff out global recovery.

While there has been no loss of oil output in the Gulf so far, the violent crackdown in Manama on Wednesday left four people dead and risks inflaming the volatile geopolitics of the region. The rout of protesters encamped at the Pearl roundabout had echoes of China's Tiananmen massacre.

The risk group Exclusive Analysis said such heavy-handed methods may provoke Iran to launch a proxy war by arming insurgents. This could rapidly cross the border, fuelling Shia irredentism in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province. Any threat to Saudi control over the 5m bpd Ghawar oil field nearby would be a global "game-changer". "Much worse headlines can easily be imagined," said Raza Agha from RBS.

the peak oil crisis: protests, tsunamis and deficits

FCNP | Thus far only one major oil producing state, Libya, has undergone so much political unrest that its oil production has been essentially halted. The loss of roughly 1.3 million barrels a day (b/d) of oil exports has already destabilized the oil markets and sent prices some $10 - $15 a barrel higher. Should the same fate befall a second or third major oil exporter, the world is unlikely to ever be the same again.

There is no end in sight to the unrest in the Middle East for its root causes run deep and are unlikely to be held in check with the traditional carrots and sticks. No matter how fighting in Libya goes in the next few months, the damage has been done and we are unlikely to see Libyan oil exports resume their former levels for quite some time. Although the Saudis seem to have intimidated away a recent challenge to the authority of the ruling family, the Kingdom's incursion in Bahrain early this week shows just how worried they are that Shiite dissent may spread down the causeway joining the two countries.

As the U.S. State Department pointed out in a recently leaked cable, the real threat to Saudi stability may come from a succession crisis and not from protesters in the street. The current King is ailing and his designated successor is not in much better shape. It is only a matter of time.

The real threat to Saudi stability may come from a succession crisis and not from protesters in the street.

The unprecedented series of disasters that struck Japan this week are of such a magnitude that they are sure to impact the global oil markets in the year ahead. Initially, the earthquake and subsequent events have driven down global oil prices, but whenever the radiation leak situation stabilizes, and the country gets back to business, it is clear that the Japanese will be importing considerably more oil and products, simply to clean and rebuild from the mess left by a 10-meter tsunami sweeping across much of their country. The permanent loss of at least six of the country's 54 nuclear power reactors will lead to the need to import more crude, natural gas, and oil products to keep Japan's highly industrialized economy functioning.

As about 30 percent of Japan's refining capacity was closed down by the earthquake and the floods and fires that followed in its wake, initially there will be a great demand to import refined gasoline and diesel. There is already talk of how this might impact prices on the U.S.'s west coast. When the refining recovers, the economy regains its balance, the need to clean up the massive damage and the rebuilding begins, the demand for imported oil is likely to set new records. All this, of course, assumes that the radiation leaks from the damaged reactors can be contained. If the contamination becomes widespread then Japan's government and people are likely to be preoccupied for an indeterminate period.

Our final new development is in Washington where the new majority in the House of Representatives is dead set on cutting $60 or perhaps $100 billion annually from federal spending. In a perfect world, these cuts would be spread around so that the Defense Department, Homeland Security, and the various entitlements would take some of the load. Alas, a disproportionate share of the cuts seems destined to fall on the energy programs that were designed to mitigate the overuse of fossil fuels and prepare us for an age when fossil fuels will not be so cheap or readily available.

It is only March and already Beijing has announced that its electricity consumption in February, a basic indicator of how fast its economy is growing, was up nearly by nearly 16 percent over last year. If China's economy is going to undergo a major setback that will lead to a reduction in its demand for oil, then it had better get going, 2012 is fast approaching.

the very best that humanity has to offer....,

Video - 50 exemplars give everything to protect their countrymen from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station

NYTimes | A small crew of technicians, braving radiation and fire, became the only people remaining at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station on Tuesday — and perhaps Japan’s last chance of preventing a broader nuclear catastrophe.

They crawl through labyrinths of equipment in utter darkness pierced only by their flashlights, listening for periodic explosions as hydrogen gas escaping from crippled reactors ignites on contact with air.

They breathe through uncomfortable respirators or carry heavy oxygen tanks on their backs. They wear white, full-body jumpsuits with snug-fitting hoods that provide scant protection from the invisible radiation sleeting through their bodies.

They are the faceless 50, the unnamed operators who stayed behind. They have volunteered, or been assigned, to pump seawater on dangerously exposed nuclear fuel, already thought to be partly melting and spewing radioactive material, to prevent full meltdowns that could throw thousands of tons of radioactive dust high into the air and imperil millions of their compatriots.

They struggled on Tuesday and Wednesday to keep hundreds of gallons of seawater a minute flowing through temporary fire pumps into the three stricken reactors, Nos. 1, 2 and 3. Among the many problems they faced was what appeared to be yet another fire at the plant.

The workers are being asked to make escalating — and perhaps existential — sacrifices that so far are being only implicitly acknowledged: Japan’s Health Ministry said Tuesday it was raising the legal limit on the amount of radiation to which each worker could be exposed, to 250 millisieverts from 100 millisieverts, five times the maximum exposure permitted for American nuclear plant workers.

aftermath of the earthquake

Video - Aftermath of the Earthquake

Friday's magnitude 8.9 earthquake in Japan shifted Earth on its axis and shortened the length of a day by a hair. In the future, scientists said, it will provide an unusually precise view of how Earth is deformed during massive earthquakes at sites where one plate is sliding under another, including the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

The unusually rich detail comes from an extensive network of sensors that were placed at sites across Japan after that country's Kobe earthquake of 1995, a magnitude 6.8 quake that killed more than 6,000 people because its epicenter was near a major city.

"The Japanese have the best seismic information in the world," said Lucy Jones, chief scientist for the Multi-Hazards project at the U.S. Geological Survey, at a Saturday news conference at Caltech in Pasadena. "This is overwhelmingly the best-recorded great earthquake ever."

Already, just over 36 hours after the quake, data-crunchers had determined that the temblor's force moved parts of eastern Japan as much as 12 feet closer to North America, scientists said — and that Japan has shifted downward about two feet.

Jones said that USGS had determined that the entire earthquake sequence — including associated foreshocks and aftershocks — had so far included 200 temblors of magnitude 5 or larger, 20 of which occurred before the big quake hit. She said the aftershocks were continuing at a rapid pace and decreasing in frequency although not in magnitude, all of which is to be expected.

Researchers have a laundry list of items they hope to gather data on.

Caltech geophysicist Mark Simons said that knowing how much the land had shifted during the quake and its aftershocks would help scientists understand future hazards in the region and allow them to plan accordingly (LA Times News Report).

how to evacuate a big city if you don't own a car

Video - Intro to Escape from New York.

Grandpappy | If you live in a major metropolitan area then you may not own your own vehicle. The city's existing mass transit system will take you anywhere you need to go within the city. Therefore everything you could possibly need is within easy reach, such as doctors, hospitals, restaurants, grocery stores, and everything else. Purchasing a vehicle is simply not an option for most of the residents in a big city for the following reasons: (1) the down payment, (2) the monthly car payment, (3) the monthly insurance payment, (4) the monthly parking fees, (5) the cost of gas, and (6) the repairs. When added together these costs far exceed the small amount of money you currently spend riding the city's mass transportation system.

However, during a major disaster event some of the problems of living in a big city would be: (1) the mass transit system will probably become unreliable or simply stop, (2) deliveries of food to the restaurants and grocery stores will stop, (3) the electricity may become intermittent or stop, (4) the water and sewer systems may fail, and (5) it would only take one fire to burn the city to the ground. The fire could be started intentionally by a terrorist, or it could be a simple heating or cooking fire that accidentally gets out of control. Think about what happened to the World Trade Center in New York City. On September 11, 2001 the city's fire fighters were able to limit the damage to a very small part of the city. However, if the fire fighters had not had access to an continuous supply of water at high pressure then the entire city could have gone up in flames. Therefore, during a major disaster event a big city will not be a place where people will die of old age.

Folding Luggage Carrier 120# Max. The first question is how could you escape from a big city if the mass transit system isn't working and you do not own a vehicle? The obvious answer is that you could walk or ride a bicycle out of the city. Although this may seem to be a monumental task, it is a feasible option as long as you don't have to carry a lot of weight with you. In fact, depending on the disaster event, a person walking or riding a bicycle may have a much better chance of escaping a major city if the disaster results in a traffic grid-lock situation and vehicles are stalled for hours or days on the roads, bridges, tunnels, and highways. In this situation it would not be unusual to see lots of people attempting to walk out of the city. Many of these people will have simple daypacks or school backpacks on their backs, or they will be pulling a luggage carrier behind them containing either a suitcase or a backpack. The only individuals who would be noticed would be the ones with specially designed camping backpacks which display a variety of special survival tools or weapons strapped to the outside of those packs. Those individuals would quickly become obvious targets for the thieves and criminals who are also a part of the exodus crowd.

The next question is where would you go and what would you do when you got there. Traveling to a remote small town with very little money in your pocket and with only the clothes on your back is a very scary thought. However, there is a way to make it a little less scary if you are willing to engage in a little advance planning.

hunkering down in an urban apartment in a worst case societal collapse

SurvivalBlog | In the event of a disaster (I live in New York City) I intend to shelter in place until all the riotous mobs destroy each other or are starved out. I am preparing for up to six months. I have one liter of water stored for each day (180 liters) and about 50 pounds of rice to eat as well as various canned goods. I have not seen on your site anything about heat sources for urban dwellers who intend to shelter in place. I'm assuming that electricity would go first soon followed by [natural] gas and running water. Do you have any recommendations for cooking rice and other foods in this event.

I am considering oil lamps or candles, methane gel used for chafing dishes, or small propane tanks. Because of the small size of my apartment and potential hazards of storing fuel I'm unsure which would be best. Please advise. Thank You, - Michael F.

JWR Replies: I've heard your intended approach suggested by a others, including one of my consulting clients. Frankly, I do not think that it is realistic. From an actuarial standpoint, your chances of survival would probably be low--certainly much lower than "Getting Out of Dodge" to a lightly populated area at the onset of a crisis. Undoubtedly, in a total societal collapse (wherein "the riotous mobs destroy each other", as you predict) there will be some stay-put urbanites that survive by their wits, supplemented by plenty of providential fortune. But the vast majority would perish. I wouldn't want to play those odds. There are many drawbacks to your plan, any one of which could attract notice (to be followed soon after by a pack of goblins with a battering ram.) I'll discuss a few complexities that you may not have fully considered:

the state of real american hate...,

Video - Anti-Muslim protesters in Orange County CA.

Salon | House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King (R-NY) convened his Congressional hearing to investigate the loyalty and "radicalization" of American Muslims. Earlier in Tennessee, a bill was proposed to make it a felony to follow sharia law -- which would essentially criminalize the practice of Islam in that state. Last year, mosques in Tennessee, Oregon and Georgia were targeted with apparent arson. The case against the Park51 community center -- including from mainstream TV journalists -- was grounded in the warped premise that Muslims generally bore guilt for the 9/11 attacks. All of these sentiments are regularly bolstered by a deranged cult-leader/TV personality followed by millions.

And last month, in Orange County, California, Tea Party members and other protesters bombarded a charity event sponsored by a Muslim group -- and the families of American Muslims entering the event -- with the most foul, hateful, threatening messages possible, while various politicians, including a member of Congress, praised the protesters.

rise of the new mercenaries

Video - Naomi Klein on Democracy Now talking about Shock Doctrine in Wisconsin.

Undernews | One of the things that has perplexed me about the current chaos is how did so many Republicans become so bizarrely crazy so fast? The closest example that comes to mind is the McCarthy era – but that only targeted a progressive minority and not all union members and the middle class. Further, McCarthy was brought down with the help of other Republicans who saw the damage he was doing to their cause. Has any leading Republican spoken out firmly against Scott Walker?

While it is easy to blame it on the fiscal crisis, that seems a bit too simple. For example, consider the number of Republican politicians who have announced their retirement in the face of potential more rightwing opposition. I suspect what’s scaring these folks is not ideology but money. They are not facing a grass roots rebellion but political mercenaries well paid by forces recently liberated by the Supreme Court decision on corporate personhood.

One of the ways you can tell they’re mercenaries is because true conservatives act more like Ron Paul, people with a solid record of commitment to particular ideas. Can you imagine John Boehner actually having a coherent set of principles? Or Scott Walker doing anything based on ideals rather than campaign cash flow?

We have been educated to treat politics as a battle of ideas. In America it no longer is. It is the elite and their well financed mercenaries on the one side and their victims on the other. A milder and less violent variety of what’s going on in Libya but still pretty damn ugly.

why ALL climate change deniers come from the right...,

Video - Naomi Klein on the climate change deniers.

Something very different is going on on the right, and I think we need to understand what that is. Why is climate change seen as such a threat? I don't believe it's an unreasonable fear. It's unreasonable to believe that scientists are making up the science. They're not. It's not a hoax. But actually, climate change really is a profound threat to a great many things that right-wing ideologues believe in. So, in fact, if you really wrestle with the implications of the science and what real climate action would mean, here's just a few examples what it would mean.

Upending the whole free trade agenda. Because we will have to localize our economies, because we have the most energy-inefficient trade system that you could imagine. And this is the legacy of the free trade era. This has been a signature policy of the right, pushing globalization and free trade and it will have to be reversed.

Dealing with inequality. Because this is a crisis that was created in the North but whose effects are being felt in the South. "You broke it, you bought it," policies in which the polluter pay involve a global redistribution of wealth, which is in stark opposition to rightwing conservative parasitism and greed.

Regulating corporations. Any serious climate action will necessitate economic interventions. Carbon tax and subsidies for renewable energy are in stark contradistinction to the rightwing conservative parasitic corporatist way of life.

A strong United Nations. Individual countries can't do this alone. A new and strengthened international architecture of governance is vigorously opposed by the parasitic rightwing conservative.

Climate science challenges everything that the parasitic rightwing conservative believes in. So they pretend to disbelieve it, because it's easier to deny the science than to say, "OK, I accept that my whole worldview is going to fall apart," that we have to have massive investments in public infrastructure, that we have to reverse free trade deals, that we have to have huge transfers of wealth from the North to the South. Imagine actually contending with that?

It's a lot easier to deny it and to demonize it. The Big Lie is well established. Medieval.

Klein goes on to say that a lot of the major green groups are in a "kind of denial" as well; in that they don't want to confront the fact that this is not simply a technical issue, but is instead a deeply political and economic issue.

Augustus Owsley Stanley - RIP

Video - Owsley Stanley expounding on cycles.

Third Age | Owsley Stanley, a 1960s counterculture icon who worked with The Grateful Dead and was a prolific LSD producer, died in a car crash in Australia, his family said Monday. "Bear" was 76.

Lyrics sung by The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa reference Stanley and his brushes with the law, underlining his influence.

Stanley produced an estimated pound (half a kilogram) of pure LSD, or roughly 5 million "trips" of normal potency of the hallucinogenic drug, after enrolling in 1963 at the University of California at Berkeley and becoming involved in the drug scene that underpinned the hippie movement, according to the BookRags.com website.

He was an accomplished sound engineer who worked for the psychedelic rock band The Grateful Dead.

Sam Cutler, a firm friend of Stanley since 1970 when Cutler became the band's tour manager, described him as was "a wonderful man and a great teacher."
Owsley StanleyOwsley Stanley
Click to Enlarge

"His death is a grievous loss to his family and the tens of thousands of people from the '60s on who were influenced by his work with The Grateful Dead," Cutler said. Stanley, who had adopted Australia as his home country, was the son of a U.S. government attorney and his namesake grandfather, Augustus Owsley Stanley, was a Kentucky governor and U.S. senator.

Stanley was driving a car that swerved off a highway and down an embankment before hitting trees near the town of Mareeba in Queensland state Saturday. His wife was treated for minor injuries from the crash.

A family statement Monday described Stanley as "our beloved patriarch."

He is survived by his wife, Sheila, four children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, the statement said.

Video - Media Project rendering of White Rabbit.

obama does not get it...,

aljazeera | From Tunisia to Egypt to Bahrain, and in many places in between, protesters have been calling for free and accountable governments. Decades of bitter experience have shown them that unrepresentative governments are often willing to accept - or at the very least are unable to resist - subordination to Western, and particularly American, political and economic diktats.

The 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, for example, was not signed by a democratic Arab government but was reached in spite of the strong opposition – that persists until today – within the Arab world’s largest country. Likewise, it is unlikely that the 1978 Camp David Accords would have been signed if it were up to the Egyptian people who, undeterred by the alliance of consecutive Egyptian governments with Washington and their close ties to Tel Aviv, continued to resist all attempts to impose normalised relations with Israel.

Over the years, the Egyptian people have repeatedly shown – through demonstrations, their media and even their cinema – that they oppose US policies in the region and Israeli aggression towards the Palestinians.

But now some American analysts, officials and former officials are seeking to rewrite history - and possibly to convince themselves in the process - by claiming that popular animosity towards Israel was simply a product of the Mubarak regime’s efforts to deflect attention from its own vices.

Jackson Diehl, a Washington Post columnist, has even blamed the former Egyptian regime for deliberately keeping the peace with Israel cold and for sometimes challenging the US. "Imagine an Egypt that consistently opposes the West in international forums while relentlessly campaigning against Israel. A government that seeds its media with vile anti-Semitism, locks relations with Israel in a cold freeze and makes a habit of publicly rejecting "interference" in its affairs by the United States. A regime that allows Hamas to import tonnes of munitions and Iranian rockets into the Gaza Strip," Diehl wrote of the Mubarak regime in an article published on February 14.

Diehl seems to think that a democratic Egypt will be friendlier to the US and Israel than what he deemed to be an insufficiently cooperative dictatorship. The same idea has been presented by Condoleezza Rice, the former US secretary of state, who argued that Mubarak’s fear of the "Arab street" prevented him from fully endorsing US policies towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But what Rice and others seem not to realise – despite the fact that their statements implicitly acknowledge it – is that Mubarak’s supposed shortcomings reflected his realisation that he could go no further in his support of US policies without provoking popular anger.

Arab regimes have always sought to appease the opposition by paying lip service to the Palestinian cause, because they understand the place it holds in the Arab psyche. And while the revolutions have revealed that this tactic is no longer sufficient to keep the forces of opposition at bay, it is wrong to assume that the new Arab mood is somehow consistent with a friendlier posture towards a country that continues to occupy Palestinian land and to dispossess Palestinian people.

Defining democracy
This kind of misreading of the situation derives not from facts but from an Orientalist attitude that has long dominated American thinking and large sections of the American media.

the right to economic development in the arab world

RWER | At this juncture in Arab history, there is an opportunity to be grasped. Unless there is a successful transition from the political to the social revolution in the Arab world, the sacrifice made by the Arab working classes will be betrayed. The following is a proposal to expose some of the previous aspects of development and economic performance in the Arab world with the aim to infuse the development debate with the idea of development as a human right. It need not be said, the present struggle is a struggle for rights. The idea of rights empowers people; it gives them a sense of self-affirmation. The language of rights establishes a framework for the allocation of resources. Without the rights rhetoric we will end up with a totally uncaring market system that will not solve our problems.

In the Arab world, economic policies are concentrated in the competence of the state. It is the efficiency and practicality of public policies that should be accountable and come under independent public scrutiny. The role of economic policy and, more specifically, fiscal and monetary policy is to find the appropriate regime that mediates disparate developments and puts interest back in the national and regional economies. Under the right to development rubric, economic growth should meet basic needs and not be a trickle down arrangement. Also, the Arab world is a world that is so interlocked with the global economy, such that, it would not be possible to lock in resources for development without international cooperation. The international community, comprising countries and institutions at the international level, has the responsibility to create a global environment conducive for development.

By virtue of their acceptance and commitment to the legal instruments, the members of the international community have the obligation to support effectively the efforts of Arab States that set for themselves the goal of realizing human rights, including the right to development, through trade, investment, financial assistance and technology transfer. Without this rudimentary cornerstone of an economic strategy designed to reduce poverty and unemployment, it is unlikely that any economic program of action can meet the basics of human rights, compensate working people for their suffering under the combined assault of neoliberalism and Arab autocracy and, generally, to secure the right to development.

atlantis found?

Video - NBC affiliate talks to Richard Freund about his search for the lost city of Atlantis.

Reuters | A U.S.-led research team may have finally located the lost city of Atlantis, the legendary metropolis believed swamped by a tsunami thousands of years ago in mud flats in southern Spain.

"This is the power of tsunamis," head researcher Richard Freund told Reuters.

"It is just so hard to understand that it can wipe out 60 miles inland, and that's pretty much what we're talking about," said Freund, a University of Hartford, Connecticut, professor who lead an international team searching for the true site of Atlantis.

To solve the age-old mystery, the team used a satellite photo of a suspected submerged city to find the site just north of Cadiz, Spain. There, buried in the vast marshlands of the Dona Ana Park, they believe that they pinpointed the ancient, multi-ringed dominion known as Atlantis.

The team of archeologists and geologists in 2009 and 2010 used a combination of deep-ground radar, digital mapping, and underwater technology to survey the site.

Freund's discovery in central Spain of a strange series of "memorial cities," built in Atlantis' image by its refugees after the city's likely destruction by a tsunami, gave researchers added proof and confidence, he said.

Atlantis residents who did not perish in the tsunami fled inland and built new cities there, he added.

The team's findings will be unveiled on Sunday in "Finding Atlantis," a new National Geographic Channel special.

crowley just lost his hope for audacity too...,

Video - Crowley was willing to question the actions of military, why isn't Obama?

FoxNews | State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley is out of a job after criticizing the Pentagon last week for its detention of a private accused of feeding hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Crowley resigned Sunday after also recently angering the White House for comments that he made during the height of the Egyptian crisis that forced President Hosni Mubarak to step down.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a statement saying, "It is with regret that I have accepted the resignation of Philip J. Crowley as assistant secretary of state for public affairs. P.J. has served our nation with distinction for more than three decades, in uniform and as a civilian. His service to country is motivated by a deep devotion to public policy and public diplomacy, and I wish him the very best."

Crowley also issued a statement acknowledging his remarks about Manning.

"The unauthorized disclosure of classified information is a serious crime under U.S. law. My recent comments regarding the conditions of the pre-trial detention of Private First Class Bradley Manning were intended to highlight the broader, even strategic impact of discreet actions undertaken by national security agencies every day and their impact on our global standing and leadership.

"The exercise of power in today's challenging times and relentless media environment must be prudent and consistent with our laws and values. Given the impact of my remarks, for which I take full responsibility, I have submitted my resignation," he said.

Last week, Crowley attended an MIT event on social networking, Twitter and the Arab revolution and reportedly was asked by a guest in the audience about WikiLeaks and the "torturing" of a prisoner in a military brig.

According to blogger Phillipa Thomas, Crowley replied without pause that what's being done to Manning by military officials "is ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid."

impeccable culture

LATimes | She was elderly and alone, injured and in pain. When the massive earthquake struck, a heavy bookshelf toppled onto Hiroko Yamashita, pinning her down and shattering her ankle.

When paramedics finally reached her, agonizing hours later, Yamashita did what she said any "normal" person would do, her son-in-law recounted later: She apologized to them for the inconvenience, and asked if there weren't others they should be attending to first.

The worst earthquake in Japan's recorded history left a trail of blazing buildings, inundated coastal communities, wrecked roadways and potentially unstable nuclear power plants. But it barely made a dent in the implacably Japanese trait of exhibiting concern for others even in the worst of circumstances.

The Japanese language is full of ritual apologies, uttered so often as to become almost meaningless: I am about to make a nuisance of myself — please excuse me! Some of this is a matter of mere formality. But at a time of crisis, such politesse can be the glue that holds the country together.

Even though Friday's magnitude 8.9 quake was shocking and discombobulating, few would imagine burdening a stranger with their anxieties.

japan earthquake shifted earth on its axis

LATimes | Friday's magnitude 8.9 earthquake in Japan shifted Earth on its axis and shortened the length of a day by a hair. In the future, scientists said, it will provide an unusually precise view of how Earth is deformed during massive earthquakes at sites where one plate is sliding under another, including the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

The unusually rich detail comes from an extensive network of sensors that were placed at sites across Japan after that country's Kobe earthquake of 1995, a magnitude 6.8 quake that killed more than 6,000 people because its epicenter was near a major city.

"The Japanese have the best seismic information in the world," said Lucy Jones, chief scientist for the Multi-Hazards project at the U.S. Geological Survey, at a Saturday news conference at Caltech in Pasadena. "This is overwhelmingly the best-recorded great earthquake ever."

why socialism?

Video - Part 1 of Albert Einstein's Why Socialism?

Video - Part 2 of Albert Einstein's Why Socialism? (The Money Shot)

Monthly Review | I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals. Fist tap Chauncy DeVega.

probably pray a lot, meditate....,

Video - America is over if it experiences a big one.

avoiding water wars

PakObserver | The US Senate report released the other day warned that the Indus Water Treaty may fail to avert water wars between India and Pakistan, acknowledging that dams India is building in occupied Kashmir will limit supply of water to Pakistan at crucial moments. “This report highlights how water security is vital in achieving our foreign policy and national security goals and provides recommendations to foster regional cooperation and long-term stability,” said Senator John Kerry, chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, while releasing the report. India is constructing 33 dams that are at various stages of completions, and cumulative effect of storing water would limit the supply to Pakistan at crucial moments in the growing season, the report added. Currently, the most controversial dam project is the proposed 330-megawatt dam on the Kishenganga River, a tributary of the Indus. The US Senate Foreign Relations Committee should have come out with the solution to the problem instead of giving an impression that Indus Water Treaty has become redundant. In fact, it is the responsibility of the international community to urge India to honour its commitment under the treaty. And this is the only way to avoid war.

With the climate change and as a consequence shrinking water availability across the Middle East, Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, violent conflict between states is increasingly likely. This matter was on the agenda of annul World Water Week forum in Stockholm held in 2006, but it could not answer the question raised in the meeting whether we are heading for an era of “hydrological warfare” in which rivers, lakes and aquifers become national security assets to be fought over, or controlled through proxy armies and client states? Or can water act as a force for peace and cooperation? It has been estimated by the experts that by 2025, more than two billion people are expected to live in countries that find it difficult or impossible to mobilize the water resources needed to meet the needs of agriculture, industry and households. Population growth, urbanization and the rapid development of manufacturing industries are relentlessly increasing demand for finite water resources. Symptoms of the resulting water stress are increasingly visible. In northern China, rivers now run dry in their lower reaches for much of the year. In parts of Pakistan and India, groundwater levels are falling so rapidly that from 10 percent to 20 percent of agricultural production is under threat.

In the past, there have been wars between the countries over religions, usurpation of territories and control of resources including oil, but in view of acute shortages of water in Africa, Middle East, Asia and elsewhere, the future wars could be fought over water.

china's big dam problem

change gone come...,

Video - No more Fannie or Freddie propping up homeownership.

RT | It’s not just the US middle class that’s going to feel it. Foreign countries all over the world hold billions upon billions of US home mortgages in their portfolios. Doing away with Fannie and Freddie could amount to massive losses for these investors, and for US clout. Especially when you consider economists said shoring up foreign investment was a major reason for Fannie and Freddie’s bailout in the first place.But America appears unable to afford another option in the face of such massive failure.

“I believe the banks were making bad loans,” Sontra said from her experience. “I think it was just greed.”

“Fannie and Freddie got out of control took ridiculous amounts of risks which didn’t properly disclose to regulators or investors who were slammed by misadventure,” explained Wolff.

A misadventure coming at the cost of the American Dream that so many Americans and that the world, bought into.

Author and journalist David DeGraw said both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae brought the system down through flawed policies, but they did not do it alone.

“Let’s talk about unwinding the people who caused this problem; Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JP Moran, how come were not talking about winding them down?” asked DeGraw. “These are fraudulent institutions that exploded the housing market.”

He argued Wall Street is a “mafia racket” of legalized political bribery controlling the US legislature.

“The criminals have taken over. They are obviously above the law,” DeGraw comments. “These are the people that have to have their assets frozen and we can recoup the money that way. One tenth of the US population has robbed everyone blind.”

Americans simply are unaware of the magnitude how much money and wealth has been stolen by such a small version of the population, if the people knew, Egypt style revolt would sweep across the US, he argued.

breadbasket running dry?

naturalnews | It's the largest underground freshwater supply in the world, stretching from South Dakota all the way to Texas. It's underneath most of Nebraska's farmlands, and it provides crucial water resources for farming in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and even New Mexico. It's called the Ogallala Aquifer, and it is being pumped dry.

Without the Ogallala Aquifer, America's heartland food production collapses. No water means no irrigation for the corn, wheat, alfalfa and other crops grown across these states to feed people and animals. And each year, the Ogallala Aquifer drops another few inches as it is literally being sucked dry by the tens of thousands of agricultural wells that tap into it across the heartland of America.

This problem with all this is that the Ogallala Aquifer isn't being recharged in any significant way from rainfall or rivers. This is so-called "fossil water" because once you use it, it's gone. And it's disappearing now faster than ever.

The end of cheap food in America?
It's a sobering thought, really: That "America's breadbasket" is on a collision course with the inevitable. A large percentage of the food produced in the United States is, of course, grown on farmlands irrigated from the Ogallala. For hundreds of years, it has been a source of "cheap water," making farming economically feasible and keeping food prices down. Combined with the available of cheap fossil fuels over the last century (necessary to drive the tractors that work the fields), food production has skyrocketed in North America. This has led to a population explosion, too. Where food is cheap and plentiful, populations readily expand.

It only follows that when food becomes scarce or expensive (putting it out of reach of average income earners), populations will fall. There's only so much food to go around, after all. And after the Ogallala runs dry, America's food production will plummet. Starvation will become the new American landscape for those who cannot afford the sky-high prices for food.

u.s. farmers fear return of the dustbowl

Telegraph | There is not much to be happy about these days in Happy, Texas. Main Street is shuttered but for the Happy National Bank, slowly but inexorably disappearing into a High Plains wind that turns all to dust. The old Picture House, the cinema, has closed. Tumbleweed rolls into the still corners behind the grain elevators, soaring prairie cathedrals that spoke of prosperity before they were abandoned for lack of business.

Happy's problem is that it has run out of water for its farms. Its population, dropping 10 per cent a year, is down to 595. The name, which brings a smile for miles around and plays in faded paint on the fronts of every shuttered business – Happy Grain Inc, Happy Game Room – has become irony tinged with bitterness. It goes back to the cowboy days of the 19th century. A cattle drive north through the Texas Panhandle to the rail heads beyond had been running out of water, steers dying on the hoof, when its cowboys stumbled on a watering hole. They named the spot Happy Draw, for the water. Now Happy is the harbinger of a potential Dust Bowl unseen in America since the Great Depression.

'It was a booming town when I grew up,' Judy Shipman, who manages the bank, says. 'We had three restaurants, a grocery, a plumber, an electrician, a building contractor, a doctor. We had so much fun, growing up.' Like all the townsfolk, she knows why the fun has gone. 'It's the decline in the water level,' she says. 'In the 1950s a lot of wells were drilled, and the water went down. Now you can't farm the land.'

Those wells were drilled into a geological phenomenon called the Ogallala Aquifer. It is an underground lake of pristine water formed between two and six million years ago, in the Pliocene age, when the tectonic shifts that pushed the Rocky Mountains skywards were still active. The water was trapped below the new surface crust that would become the semi-arid soil of the Plains, dry and dusty. It stretches all the way down the eastern slope of the Rockies from the badlands of South Dakota to the Texas Panhandle. It does not replenish.

Happy is the canary in the coalmine because the Ogallala is deepest in the north, as much as 300ft in the more fertile country of Nebraska and Kansas. In the south, through the panhandle and over the border to New Mexico, it is 50-100ft. And around Happy, 75 miles south of Amarillo, it is now 0-50ft. The farms have been handed over to the government's Conservation Reserve Programme (CRP) to lie fallow in exchange for grants: farmers' welfare, although they hate to think of it like that.

scorched earth and stalemate...,

DailyMail | Colonel Gaddafi's forces today blasted an oil terminal to smithereens as Libya's bloody civil war entered its blackest day.

Rebels retaliated by firing back with rockets as a fireball exploded from one of the oil tanks and the sky above the Es Sider terminal, in the east of the country, filled with hideous smoke.

A witness said one of the smoke plumes was the biggest he had seen in the conflict so far.

The fresh onslaught came as Gaddafi deployed tanks and snipers to 'shoot anything that moves'. Forces loyal to the Libyan dictator poured into the city of Zawiyah in a desperate bid to oust the hardcore band of protesters and army defectors who have taken control.

Witnesses said dead bodies were lying in the ruins of many buildings destroyed in air raids earlier in the week and there was no one in the streets of the centre of the city of 290,000.

'We can see the tanks. The tanks are everywhere,' one rebel fighter said by telephone.

Eye witnesses said that the city had been almost flattened after a 13-and-a-half hour barrage from rockets, tanks and war planes

The hellish scenes unfolded as senior officials in the U.S. spoke of their fears that the country had reached a painful stalemate.

Senior officials believe that Gaddafi has solidified his control over some cities but ant-government protesters have a strong enough hold on other regions to remain locked in the stand off.

As the standoff continues and hundreds of more lives continue to be lost, it has created a split in the U.S. government about whether to take military action.

The Obama intervention is still looking at options for intervention while the European Union is preparing to impose stricter sanctions on the Libya government, including an asset freeze.

'What we're looking at right now—and things can change on a dime in these kinds of fluid conflicts—is basically a stalemate in certain parts of Libya,' another U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal.

'Gaddafi has solidified his control of some areas while the rebels have the upper hand in other places.'

libyan oil mostly underexplored...,

useia.gov | Libya, a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), holds the largest proven oil reserves in Africa, followed by Nigeria and Algeria (see below). According to Oil and Gas Journal (OGJ), Libya had total proven oil reserves of 46.4 billion barrels as of January 2011, the largest reserves in Africa. Close to 80 percent of Libya's proven oil reserves are located in the Sirte basin, which accounts for most of the country's oil output.

Libya hopes to increase oil reserve estimates with incentives for additional exploration both in established oil producing areas as well as more remote parts of the country. Recent increases in foreign investment have begun to slow as a result of uncertainties stemming from OPEC quotas, infrastructure constraints, and contract renegotiations.

Libyan oil is generally light (high API gravity) and sweet (low sulfur content). The country's nine export grades have API gravities that range from 26.0o – 43.3o. While the lighter, sweeter grades are generally sold to Europe, the heavier crude oils are often exported to Asian markets.

Refining
According to OGJ, Libya has five domestic refineries, with a combined capacity of 378,000 bbl/d. Libya's refineries include:

1) the Ras Lanuf export refinery, completed in 1984 and located on the Gulf of Sirte, with a crude oil refining capacity of 220,000 bbl/d;

2) the Az Zawiya refinery, completed in 1974 and located in northwestern Libya, with crude processing capacity of 120,000 bbl/d;

3) the Tobruk refinery, with crude capacity of 20,000 bbl/d;

4) Sarir, a topping facility with 10,000 bbl/d of capacity; and

5) Brega, the oldest refinery in Libya, located near Tobruk with crude capacity of 8,000 bbl/d.

Libya's refining sector was impacted by UN sanctions, specifically UN Resolution 883 of November 11, 1993, which banned Libya from importing refinery equipment. Libya is seeking a comprehensive upgrade to its entire refining system, with a particular aim of increasing output of gasoline and other light products.

subBlue

Surface detail from subBlue on Vimeo.

Fractal Lab Introduction from subBlue on Vimeo.

epigenetics and society

The Scientist | The potent wish in the productive hour
Calls to its aid Imagination’s power,
O’er embryon throngs with mystic charm presides,
And sex from sex the nascent world divides…
—Erasmus Darwin,
“The Temple of Nature,” Canto II

I was first introduced to Charles Darwin’s flamboyant grandfather when I was an undergraduate searching through Michigan State’s wonderful Special Collections. In between bothering the curators for archived copies of Howard the Duck, I read Erasmus’s prose and poetry, and was treated to a great mind grappling with ideas that presaged one of the truly great ideas of modern times, the theory of evolution. As the passage above hints, Erasmus believed that environmental influences, in particular the “Imagination” of the parents, greatly influenced the phenotype of the child.

How very pre-Victorian (and post-). Erasmus anticipated Charles in many ways, but surprising results in the field of epigenetics—heritable (and reversible) changes in gene expression—suggest that he may have been very far ahead of his time indeed. In the current issue, David Berreby cites the increasing body of work that correlates childhood trauma with DNA methylation with suicide. One’s personal epigenome is modified by environmental perturbations, and that influences behavior. Certainly the Victorians could have related to the notion of an Original Sin that made its heritable mark on the genomes of parents created innocent, passing the curse down to their descendants. That said, the Victorians did have their biases, and it was of course the father who had the predominant influence over the child. But recently published studies of genetic imprinting show that the two parents’ influence on their offspring is more akin to a tug of war.

The Lamarckian idea that giraffes’ reaching for leaves resulted in longer-necked progeny seems silly to us today, primarily because we know so very much about the underlying mechanisms of genetics. And yet Lamarck may have a last laugh—think inheritance patterns in ciliates, or the effect of diet on the coat color of agouti mouse offspring. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in our understanding of how evolution can act…on evolution, yielding mechanisms that allow both adaptation and heritability within the course of a lifetime. And such paradigm shifts almost always have societal consequences. Manel Esteller shows that epigenetics also impacts the “dark genome” in a way that may improve cancer diagnostics. An even more far-reaching consequence is that it may prove possible to engineer epigenetics, as Bob Kingston’s Thought Experiment tacitly suggests. If so, will epigenetic engineering be subject to the same restrictions as genetic engineering? Or will this be a way that we can not merely treat disease, but possibly engineer human health into future generations?
Andrzej Krauze

Such possibilities will be the rational outcome of a great deal of research and debate that is yet to come. However, there are at least two outcomes of the revolution in progress that would seem to have more near-term consequences. First, the overturning of a purely Darwinian paradigm will undoubtedly be viewed as the overturning of Darwin and his Theory itself. It matters not a whit that science will have been shown, once again, to be self-correcting, and to provide a means of advancing knowledge through the application of the experimental method and mechanistic naturalism. We can expect that epigenetics will be held up as the forerunner of that bastard child of Creationism, Intelligent Design. Dribs and drabs of this are already appearing on the Interwebs, but it may soon come to a school board near you. Second, the notion that environmental tags are embedded in our genome within a human time frame has got to be one of the best things to happen to tort law in a long time. DNA typing has led to the conviction of the guilty and the freeing of the innocent. Epigenetic typing may now lead to expert testimony regarding the presymptomatic impact of environmental disasters on susceptible populations. This may seem fanciful, but where there are moneyed interests (on either side), the science will inevitably follow.

testing a central tenet of epigenetic regulation

The Scientist | A fundamental problem in biology concerns how the genomic information present in fertilized eggs can give rise to the full spectrum of stably differentiated cell types required to form vertebrates and invertebrates. In the 1930s, C.H. Waddington’s largely observational mammalian embryology studies, which defined this problem, were central to establishing the field of epigenetics. It is now well known that there are master regulatory genes that must be kept on to specify a given cell lineage and off in the many other cell lineages that make up the body.

The problem of keeping these genes in the off state when required has received considerable attention, in large part due to the landmark genetic studies initiated by Pam and Ed Lewis in the 1940s that identified a set of genes required for this repression. This family of genes is called the Polycomb Group (PcG) because the visual phenotype of a heterozygous null allele in these genes is duplication on the second and third legs of the sex combs that wild-type male Drosophila flies have on their front legs. It turns out that PcG proteins repress key developmental master regulatory genes in organisms from plants to humans. The PcG is responsible for a diversity of important biological events, from why plants flower only in the spring (and not in a December warm spell) to how mammals form the correct body tissues in the correct locations.

epigenetics: a primer

The Scientist | What makes the ~200 cell types in our body remember their identity? What prevents them from becoming cancer cells? Why do we inherit some traits from our father, others from our mother? How do our experiences and environment influence our thinking? Why do plants bloom in spring but not in winter? These important and quite different questions are all addressed by the field of epigenetics, which studies heritable changes in a phenotype arising in the absence of alterations in the DNA sequence. The idea of transgenerational inheritance of acquired characteristics goes back to Lamarck in the early 19th century, but still only correlative evidence exists in humans. In contrast, many cellular epigenetic phenomena are now well understood on the molecular level. In humans, they include the parent-of-origin specific expression of genes (imprinting) and the shutting-down of almost all genes on one of the two X chromosomes in females (X-chromosome inactivation).

All these epigenetic phenomena are characterized by chemical modifications to DNA itself (DNA methylation) or to histones, the proteins around which DNA is wound. These modifications change during development as stem cells give rise to liver cells and neurons, but also in response to environmental signals—in plants, for example, during the cold of winter or in humans when immune cells are activated after an infection. One of the biggest controversies in the field is whether histone modifications are inherited through cell division (called the “histone code hypothesis”) or whether they only form transient indicators of transcriptional states (“signaling model”).