why so little looting in japan?

Slate | If your home was hit by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake, a tsunami, and radiation from a nuclear power plant, you'd be forgiven for not remaining calm. Yet that's what many Japanese quake victims appear to be doing. People are forming lines outside supermarkets. Life is "particularly orderly," according to PBS. "Japanese discipline rules despite disaster," says a columnist for The Philippine Star.

Anyone who has seen Big Bird in Japan knows the shorthand for Japanese culture: They're so honest and disciplined! They're a collective society! They value the group over the individual! Of course they're not going to steal anything after the most devastating natural disaster of their lifetimes—unlike those undisciplined thieves in post-Katrina New Orleans and post-earthquake Haiti. Even if they're desperate for food, the Japanese will still wait in line for groceries.

There's a circularity to these cultural explanations, says Mark D. West, a professor at University of Michigan Law School: "Why don't Japanese loot? Because it's not in their culture. How is that culture defined? An absence of looting." A better explanation may be structural factors: a robust system of laws that reinforce honesty, a strong police presence, and, ironically, active crime organizations.

Honesty, with incentives. Japanese people may well be more honest than most. But the Japanese legal structure rewards honesty more than most. In a 2003 study on Japan's famous policy for recovering lost property, West argues that the high rates of recovery have less to do with altruism than with the system of carrots and sticks that incentivizes people to return property they find rather than keep it. For example, if you find an umbrella and turn it in to the cops, you get a finder's fee of 5 to 20 percent of its value if the owner picks it up. If they don't pick it up within six months, the finder gets to keep the umbrella. Japanese learn about this system from a young age, and a child's first trip to the nearest police station after finding a small coin, say, is a rite of passage that both children and police officers take seriously. At the same time, police enforce small crimes like petty theft, which contributes to an overall sense of security and order, along the lines of the "broken windows" policy implemented in New York City in the 1990s. Failure to return a found wallet can result in hours of interrogation at best, and up to 10 years in prison at worst.

Police presence. Japan has an active and visible police force of nearly 300,000 officers across the country. Cops walk their beats and chat up local residents and shopkeepers. Police are posted at ubiquitous kobans, police boxes manned by one or two officers, and in cities there's almost always a koban within walking distance of another koban. A survey in 1992 found that 95 percent of residents knew where the nearest koban was, and 14 percent knew the name of an officer who worked there. Cops are paid well—the force attracts many college graduates—and can live in cheap government housing. They also care a lot about public relations: The Tokyo Metropolitan Police even has a mascot, Pipo-kun, whose name means "people + police." They're good at their jobs, too: The clearance rate for murder in 2010 was an unbelievable 98.2 percent, according to West—so unbelievable that some attribute it to underreporting.* Fist tap Dale.

how much competition do we need in a civilized society?

Springerlink | Francesco Duina is an American associate professor and chair of the Sociology Department at Bates College, in Maine, USA, and visiting professor at the International Center for Business and Politics in Copenhagen, Denmark. His latest book ‘‘Winning’’ is about the American love for competition; a love not shared by all Americans, but dominant enough to shape how many Americans live. In the rest of the world, and certainly in more egalitarian nations like Denmark and the Netherlands, people have more reservations about competition (Data World Values Surveys). Duina describes the ‘‘American obsession’’ with competition and winning and losing very vividly. The bulk of the book is descriptive but in the last chapter Duina makes some critical normative remarks and proposes an alternative mind-set for the USA. This book is important because it poses the question how much competition we really need in rich nations, with high levels of economic and cultural productivity. The answer to this question is relevant in discussions about the role of governments and about the optimal levels of liberalization or regulation of markets. Duina’s suggestions to moderate and redirect competition by changing the American mind-set are valuable. His suggestions might have been more adequate, however, if he would have made a distinction between ‘competition for fun’ and ‘competition to survive’, and if he would have paid more attention to their different effects on happiness.

i call'em knuckledraggers for a reason...,

Physorg | The tendency to perceive others as "us versus them" isn't exclusively human but appears to be shared by our primate cousins, a new study led by Yale researchers has found.

In a series of ingenious experiments, Yale researchers led by psychologist Laurie Santos showed that monkeys treat individuals from outside their groups with the same suspicion and dislike as their human cousins tend to treat outsiders, suggesting that the roots of human intergroup conflict may be evolutionarily quite ancient.

The findings are reported in the March issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

"One of the more troubling aspects of human nature is that we evaluate people differently depending on whether they're a member of our 'ingroup' or 'outgroup,'" Santos said. "Pretty much every conflict in human history has involved people making distinctions on the basis of who is a member of their own race, religion, social class, and so on. The question we were interested in is: Where do these types of group distinctions come from?"

The answer, she adds, is that such biases have apparently been shaped by 25 million years of evolution and not just by human culture.

why inequality matters

Richard Wilkinson has played a formative role in international research on the social determinants of health and on the societal effects of income inequality; his work has been published in many languages. He studied economic history at the London School of Economics before training in epidemiology. He is Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham Medical School, Honorary Professor at University College London and a Visiting Professor at the University of York. Richard co-wrote The Spirit Level and is a co-founder of The Equality Trust.

the method is transparency, the goal is justice

Technology Review | Perhaps the best way to conceive of WikiLeaks is like this: it is a stateless, distributed intelligence network, a reverse image of the U.S. National Security Agency, dedicated to publicizing secrets rather than acquiring them, unconstrained and answerable to a single man.

The future of WikiLeaks
If WikiLeaks is not a media organization, is it another example of the Internet overthrowing our settled habits? That question is more interesting. By this formulation, WikiLeaks is to the state and corporations what Napster was to music or Google is to media as a business.

Shakespeare, Lord Annan recalled in his war memoirs, gave to Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida the haunting phrase "There is a mystery ... in the soul of the state." "That mystery is the intelligence services," Annan explained. He was thinking of his service on the United Kingdom's Joint Intelligence Staff 70 years ago. But the modern state has many allied organizations besides the intelligence services, including the management of large corporations and banks, who partake in its mystery. Julian Assange, the disordered soul of WikiLeaks, wants to explode the soul of the state.

The modern state, with its monopoly on violence, is not like the music industry or the media. It is properly jealous of its secrets, and more powerful and able than Assange understands. It will bitterly resent an attack by a crypto-utopian on its ability to "think." Assange has declared himself the state's enemy, and he will, in all likelihood, be comprehensively destroyed. WikiLeaks will vanish.

Once imagined, however, the technology of WikiLeaks cannot be forgotten and can easily be imitated. Other organizations, less radically activist, will create secure drop boxes for anonymous leaking. Already, the disgruntled former WikiLeaks volunteer, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, has said he will create a less threatening platform called OpenLeaks. It will, he says, publish nothing but, instead, function as a pipeline where sources designate the media organization to which they wish to leak: "We want to be a neutral conduit. That's what's most politically sustainable." Still more leak platforms are sprouting, including GreenLeaks, which will publish "information of environmental significance"; Brussels Leaks, which will expose the European Union; and Rospil, which will uncover Russia's secrets.

Predictably, media organizations want to replicate WikiLeaks's secure drop box, too. Recently, Al Jazeera launched a "Transparency Unit," which encourages its audience to submit "all forms of content" for "editorial review and, if merited, online broadcast and transmission on our English and Arabic-language broadcasts." The first product came in January, when Al Jazeera published the "Palestine Papers," 11 years' worth of secret documents created by the Palestinian Authority, describing negotiations with the Israeli government. The impression that emerges from them is that the Israeli government is no longer interested in securing a Palestinian state: it is a scoop that could not have existed without the Transparency Unit's drop box. Now other publications are considering their own. Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, is pondering how he can make it easier for sources to leak to his journalists.

WikiLeaks may not be with us for the long haul, but others will imitate its innovations, and they are likely to be more constrained and more responsible.

nuclear boy "explains" fukushima daiichi for kids...,

Video - Nuclear Boy explains Fukushima Daiichi Fist tap LongdeShizi.

science vs. money

From: "THE LEADING EDGE" Feb. 1983 M. King Hubbert: Science's Don Quixote ... (Published By: Society of Exploration Geophysicists (Pg.22)):

Hubbert first joined SEG in 1945 and quickly became an active member. He has served on the standing committee geophysical education, the standing committee on publications, and as editor of Geophysics (1947-49).

Hubbert has had serious health problems for several years... But, neither his ailments nor the recent adulation have eroded his zest for intellectual combat. In recent years, he has assaulted a target which he labels the culture of money that is gigantic event by Hubbert standards. His thesis is that society is seriously handi-capped because its two most important intellectual underpinnings, the science of matter-energy and the historic system of finance, are incompatible. A reasonable co-existence is possible when both are growing at approximately the same rate. That, Hubbert says, has been happening since the start of the industrial revolution but it is soon going to end because the amount the matter-energy system can grow is limited while money's growth is not.

"I was in New York in the 30's. I had a box seat at the depression," Hubbert says. "I can assure you it was a very educational experience. We shut the country down because of monetary reasons. We had manpower and abundant raw materials. Yet we shut the country down. We're doing the same kind of thing now but with a different material outlook. We are not in the position we were in 1929-30 with regard to the future. Then the physical system was ready to roll. This time it's not. We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It's unique to both human and geologic history. It has never happened before and it can't possibly happen again. You can only use oil once. You can only use metals once. Soon all the oil is going to be burned and all the metals mined and scattered."... That is obviously a scenario of catastrophe, a possibility Hubert concedes. But it is not one he forecasts. The man known a pessimist is, in this case, quite hopeful. In fact, he could be the ultimate utopian. We have, he says, the necessary technology. All we have to do is completely overhaul our culture and find an alternative to money. We are not starting from zero, he emphasizes. We have an enormous amount of existing technical knowledge. It's just a matter of putting it all together. We still have great flexibility but our maneuverability will diminish with time.

A non-catastrophic solution is impossible, Hubbert feels, unless society is made stable. This means abandoning two axioms of our culture the work ethic and the idea that growth is the normal state of affairs. Hubbert challenges the latter mathematically and concludes the exponential growth of the last two centuries is the opposite of the normal situation "It is an aberration. For most of human history, the population doubled only once every 32,000 years. Now it's down to 35 years. That is dangerous. No biologic population can double more than a few times without getting seriously out of bounds. I think the world is seriously overpopulated right now. There can be no possible solutions to the world's problems that do not involve stabilization of the world's population."

Hubbert's ideas about work are even more heretical. Work is becoming, he says, increasingly unimportant. He thinks it is conceivable that the future work week might be on the order of 10 hours. Indeed, because production will have to be limited by increasingly limited mineral resources that might be inevitable. And that, Hubbert stresses, could be the foundation of an earthly paradise...Most employment now is merely pushing paper around, He says. The actual work needed to keep a stable society running is a very small fraction of available manpower.

The key to making this cultural alteration is to come up with limitless supply of cheap energy. Hubbert feels the answer is obvious solar power and he does not feel more technological breakthroughs are needed before it can be made universally available. His faith is not that of a kneejerk trendy but that of a doubter who did much studying before his conversion. Fifteen years ago I thought solar power was impractical because I thought nuclear power was the answer. But I spent some time on an advisory committee on waste disposal to the Atomic Energy Commission. After that, I began to be very, very sceptical because of the hazards. That's when I began to study solar Power. I'm convinced we have the technology to handle it right now. We could make the transition in a matter of decades if we begin now.

Solar power is limited by astronomic time but not in human time frame. It's been there for billions of years and it will be going on for billions of years after we're gone. It also has another great advantage over conventional sources -- once the system is in place it is permanent. All that's required to keep it going is routine maintenance.

Harnessing an infinite supply of cheap energy is the key to Hubbert's technate, because of the leisure time it would generate. Look at the people who did remarkable things in the past. The Greeks. The English of a century ago. What did they have in common? They were highly educated and had a lot of leisure time. Of course not everyone with that combination did remarkable things, but the people who did do remarkable things generally had that combination.

In both cases, though, the opportunities for intellectual greatness were limited to a very few. The intellectual life of Greece was made possible because it was a slave society. England's was supported by great masses that lived in terrible poverty. But if the sun is conquered, education and leisure could be universal. It could result in the greatest intellectual renaissance of all time, Hubbert says.

His nominees for the leadership role in making this cultural change? His earth science peers... Intellectual leadership is, he says, their natural function.

A handful of men like Hutton, Lyell, and Darwin (1780-1880) changed the world. They gave us a geologic view of history instead of a Biblical view.

In the second stage, from 1880 until now, earth scientists became utilitarian and concentrated mostly on the search for ores, metals and fossil fuels. They did very little thinking about the broader subjects.

Now is the start of the third phase when the world is heading into intellectual turmoil... It needs guidance. The knowledge essential to competent intellectual leadership in this situation is pre-eminently geological "a knowledge of the earth's mineral and energy resources." The importance of any science, socially, is its effect on what people think and what they do. It is time earth scientists again become a major force in how people think rather than in how they live.

If Hubbert is right about man being on the brink of an unparalleled crisis, then men are going to have to make fantastic decisions “species-wide decisions" imminently.

This ability to make people, particularly the right people think, will be of inestimable worth. It may be Hubbert's greatest legacy.

technical information on fukushima daiichi

In the aftermath of Japan's earthquake and tsunami, reliable technical information about the crisis affecting the nuclear power plants at Fukushima has been difficult to discern from the media coverage. The demand to know what is happening, however, is very great. The Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering held an information session for the MIT community about the current situation at Fukushima on March 14, 2011. Topics discussed include: the characteristics of the boiling water reactors at Fukushima; the possible causes of the accidents; the current status of the reactors; the technical options that may now be available to the reactor operators; and the possible future implications. NSE students, with support from our faculty, are maintaining a technical information blog at mitnse.com to continue to provide non-sensationalized, factual data from engineers in a manner that can be understood by the general public.

archaic superpowers in the age of superorganismic explosion (redux)

Video - J. Robert Oppenheimer we knew the world would not be the same.

Originally posted 1/30/11
America had made the bomb, and it could not escape the decisions that the possession of the bomb entailed. We had it. No one else did. Having it, what should we do with it? Should we share our knowledge or seek some international custodian of the "secret" we had discovered by prodigious wartime effort and the expenditure of some $2 Billion? Or, should we husband it, should we keep it all to ourselves? These were the fateful questions, and on the answers to them depended in large degree the climate of the postwar world and the direction that world would take.

The answers lay in the realm of science, which alone could gauge the validity of our secret and estimate the degree of our true choice; and because these answers, like the questions, involved entire new worlds of techniques and knowledge, it could not be expected that they would be widely and clearly understood. Inevitably, the issue of the bomb, the most momentous issue of our time, would be debated and settled in the inner councils of government; and, inevitably, under these circumstances, with knowledge largely confined to the high-circle inner club, it was foreordained that the Military, which already dominated this club, would define the argument in its own terms and dictate the decision. For this was clearly the Military's province, was it not? Who else could possibly know with their certainty?

The simplicity of this logic, viewed in the perspective of the years, now seems to have been the great delusion of our times. For anyone studying the record is forced to the conclusion that the Military, preoccupied with their own narrow professional interests, simply did not know best. Trained always to seek out the more powerful weapon, drilled to the point of instinct to protect such weapons by the tightest of secrecy, the military mentality was precisely the worst possible type of mentality with which to meet the special challenges of the new and infinitely complicated age of nuclear science. Great vision would be needed to recognize and deal with the unimaginable host of problems that we had willed ourselves in the birth of our horrible brain child.

But the military mind, by its very nature, would fall prey to the obsession that it possessed a great and final "secret" when in reality it had no secret at all, or at best only one of fleeting duration. This first delusion of the military mind would lead directly to a second. Convinced we alone held the "secret" of this supreme power, we would soon envision ourselves as the guardian of the world, the policeman of its security and its peace - a decision that ignored the elemental fact other nations almost certainly would not desire a guardian and one of them, Russia, would not trust or countenance our policing. Along such paths were we to be driven into the ever-mounting tensions of the Cold War that sane men can hardly be expected to continue and remain forever cold.

The tragedy is that we need not have walked so often to so many precarious brinks. There were men who saw the issues clear and whole. But these men were not of the Military. They were civilian scientists whose only claim was that they had created the atomic monster. They knew its terrible power. They knew that the scientific knowledge on which it was based was world-wide, not the exclusive province of any single country. They could glimpse the still more horrifying potentials that lay in the nuclear future now that the door was open, and they clearly saw that an arms race to achieve these higher horrors would escalate into the most desperate competition the world had ever seen. The views of the scientists were reflected in the eleoquent voice of one far-visioned statesman in the top-level councils of government, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. The scientists raised their voices in protest. Stimson tried to bring to the issue the power of prophetic vision and common sense and high ideals. But the scientists and Stimson lost. Inevitably, because the Military was against them. This is the story of that defeat - a defeat that led directly to all our future points of no return.

Video - FDR warns of a fifth column.

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."