cores went through the floors, rods went through the roofs, water just keeps leaking...,

derspiegel | This week, the chief nuclear officers of around 100 American nuclear power plant reactors are taking a field trip. They are travelling to Japan and then taking a bus to Fukushima. There, dressed in protective suits, they will walk through the ruins left behind by the earthquake of the century, the tsunami of the century and the resulting triple nuclear reactor meltdown that occurred in March 2011.

"I can assure you when they get back from this trip, all of these chief nuclear officers will double their safety precautions," says Dale Klein, who has made the same trip and describes it as "very sobering." Klein, who was head of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission until 2009, now serves as chair of the Nuclear Reform Monitoring Committee, which advises Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the company that once ran the Fukushima power plant and is now responsible for cleaning up the site. In the eyes of industry experts and the Japanese public alike, the company has proved one thing unequivocally -- that it is in far over its head in trying to handle the aftermath of the disaster.

Klein is generally a polite man, but he recently announced in public exactly what he thinks of the company that hired him. "You do not know what you're doing," Klein told company president Naomi Hirose in person. "You do not have a plan."

In accordance with Japanese custom, the company head, thus chastised, inclined his head and replied, "I apologize for not being able to live up to your expectations."

TEPCO has been stumbling "from crisis to crisis," Klein says. And with no improvement in sight, it had recently become clear that Japan would find itself, out of necessity, doing something that is generally considered very un-Japanese: asking for foreign help. Klein said there were signs that the government was planning on inviting experts from Europe and the US in to help. And on Tuesday, TEPCO took what might be a first step in this direction, announcing in a statement that it had hired Lake Barrett, the former head of the US Department of Energy's Office of Civilian Nuclear Waste Management to advise it on decommissioning the plant and dealing with contaminated water on the site. Barrett was also involved in clean-up efforts at the Three Mile Island plant, which suffered a partial meltdown in 1979.

Situation Still 'Tenuous' at Fukushima

Japan had thus far taken the view that it didn't need any help -- certainly not from abroad -- and that TEPCO would take care of things. This is despite the fact that the company is an energy provider, with little more experience in complex disaster management than a commensurate energy company in Germany would have. 

Accordingly, the situation at Fukushima two and a half years after the nuclear meltdown can at best be described as tenuous. Rather than implementing a clearly thought-out disaster management plan, TEPCO's approach has been a haphazard patchwork.

Perhaps the most bizarre malfunction in recent months occurred when a rat got into a switchbox and caused a short circuit. This immediately caused the makeshift cooling system for all four spent fuel pools to fail. For almost 30 hours, temperatures rose in these pools, which hold over 8,800 spent fuel rods that TEPCO hopes eventually to be able to store safely. Charred remains were all that was left of the rat.

Every day, TEPCO pumps 400 tons of contaminated cooling water and groundwater out of the radioactive wreckage of Fukushima. This water is too heavily contaminated with cesium, strontium and tritium to be emptied into the ocean. Instead, TEPCO stores the liquid in numerous tanks, the largest of which are 12 meters (40 feet) across and 11 meters high, hastily riveted together rather than welded.

Satellite images show how these behemoths have proliferated at the Fukushima site, with a few dozen of them in mid-2011, then several hundred by mid-2012. Currently, there are over 1,000 such tanks, with plans for over 2,000 of them by 2015. TEPCO is veritably drowning in contaminated water.

highest stakes pick-up sticks...,

asiatimes | Experts are unanimous that the engineering challenges are on a scale unseen to date, given that the fuel pool was damaged in a fire caused by a cooling failure and a subsequent explosion during the meltdowns. If the fuel rods, some of which may be damaged, come too close to each other, there is a chance that the nuclearchain reaction would resume, which would be catastrophic in the presence of so much fissile material, as well as extremely difficult to stop.

If, on the other hand, a fuel rod breaks or is exposed to air and ignites, this would release into the atmosphere a massive amount of radiation, likely necessitating the evacuation of the plant. The total amount of radiation present in the pool is estimated at 14,000 times that released by the atomic bomb dropped at Hiroshima, or about the same as in the combined cores of the three reactors that melted down.

"[F]ull release from the Unit-4 spent fuel pool, without any containment or control, could cause by far the most serious radiological disaster to date," states The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2013, compiled by two independent nuclear energy consultants. [1]

In several recent interviews with different media, Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear industry executive and chief engineer of the Fairewinds Energy Education non-profit, cautioned that there was no system to stop a nuclear chain reaction, if one should occur, at the pool, and recommended that the operators "throw all sorts of boron into the water" (boron captures neutrons and slows down chain reactions) before they start pulling the rods out.

"I ran a division that built fuel racks, and these high density fuel racks like they have at Fuksuhima are very close to going critical anyway. ... Normally its 0.95, and it can get as high as 0.99; that means there’s a 1% margin before a self-sustaining chain reaction can occur." [2]

Gundersen said in a separate interview with Radio Ecoshock, expressing his opinion that the Japanese government rather than Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the plant’s operator, should take charge of the operation: "I suspect come November-December-January we are going to hear that the building has been evacuated, they broke a fuel rod, the fuel rod is off-gassing, we have to wait a couple of days and then go back in." [3]

But even the most vocal critics of TEPCO’s and Japan’s response to the crisis so far acknowledge that the fuel has to be removed because the danger of doing nothing far outweighs the dangers of doing something wrong.

obedience at home, oppression abroad, and wholesale destruction of the living planet...,

transitionvoice | Any empire requires three elements for its own survival. As an empire declines, it becomes necessary to push harder on all three fronts: obedience at home, oppression abroad, and destruction of the living planet. I present a few examples of each phenomenon and embed a brief video clip at the end.

1. Obedience at home was the subject of a recent essay in this space. Those who do not obey the corporate government are subject to restrictions on personal freedom. For those who are serious about telling the truth to the masses, imprisonment and torture await.
2. Oppression abroad is obvious even to the typical television-watching American with a reasonably open mind. In the United States of Absurdity, we depend upon our ever-dwindling rural humans for cannon fodder. After all, as pointed out by U.S. President Jimmy Carter during his final year in the Oval Office, the Persian Gulf and its resources belong to us. By extension, the world is our oilster.
3. Consider one of the many adverse consequences associated with civilization. Industrial civilization converts the living planet into bricks, mortar, and city-centered human habitat. That inexpensive meal served at my favorite restaurant seemed like a great deal, until I thought about the actual, hidden costs associated with getting the meal on my plate.

Finally aware of the costs, which include suffering by humans and other animals, my own heart is burdened.

why tepco is risking the removal of rods without further delay?

globalresearch | A Mainichi Shimbun editorial mentions in passing that the Reactor 4 pool contains 202 fresh fuel assemblies.(3) The presence of new fuel rods was confirmed in the TEPCO press release, which described the first assembly lifted into the transfer cask as an “un-irradiated fuel rod.” Why were new rods being stored inside a spent-fuel pool, which is designed to hold expended rods? What threat of criticality do these fresh rods pose if the steel frame collapses or if crane operators drop one by accident onto other assemblies, as opposed to a spent rod?

Against the official silence and disinformation, a few whistleblowers have come forward with clues to answer these questions. Former GE nuclear worker Kei Sugaoka disclosed in a video interview that a joint team from Hitachi and General Electric was inside Reactor 4 at the time of the March 11, 2011 earthquake. By that fateful afternoon, the GE contractors were finishing the job of installing a new shroud, the heat-resistant metal shield lining the reactor interior.(4)

 TEPCO inadvertently admitted to the presence of foreign contractors at Fukushima No.1 up until March 12, 2012, when the management ordered their evacuation in event of a massive explosion during the rapid meltdown of Reactor 2. So far, leaks indicate the presence of the GE team and of a Israeli nuclear security team with Magna BSP, a company based in Dimona.(5)

Another break came in April 2012, when a Japanese humor magazine published a brief interview of a Fukushima worker who disclosed that radioactive pieces of a broken shroud were left inside a device-storage pool at rooftop level behind the Reactor 4 spent-fuel pool.(6) This undoubtedly is the used shroud removed by the GE-H workers in February-March 2011.

A curious point here is that the previous shroud had been in use for only 15 months. Why would TEPCO and the Japanese government expend an enormous sum on a new lining when the existing one was still good for many years of service?

Obviously, the installation of a new shroud was not a mere replacement of a worn predecessor. It was an upgrade. The refit of Reactor 4 was, therefore, similar to the 2010 conversion of Reactor 3 to pluthermal or MOX fuel. The same model of GE Mark 1 reactor was being revamped to burn MOX fuel (mixed oxide of uranium and plutonium).

The un-irradiated rods inside the Unit 4 spent-fuel pool are, in all probability, made of a new type of MOX fuel containing highly enriched plutonium. If the frame collapses, triggering fire or explosion inside the spent-fuel pool, the plutonium would pulse powerful neutron bursts that may well possibly ignite distant nuclear power plants, starting with the Fukushima No.2 plant, 10 kilometers to the south.

The scenario of a serial chain reaction blasting apart nuclear plants along the Pacific Coast, is what compelled Naoto Kan, prime minister at the time of the 311 disaster, to contemplate the mass evacuation of 50 million residents (a third of the national population) from the Tohoku region and the Greater Tokyo metropolitan region to distant points southwest.(7) Evacuation would be impeded by the scale and intensity of multiple reactor explosions, which would shut down all transport systems, telecommunications and trap most residents. Tens of millions would die horribly in numbers topping all disasters of history combined.

on fukushima beach

how capitalists learned to stop worrying and love the collapse....,

bnarchives | Economic, financial and social commentators from all directions and of all persuasions are obsessed with the prospect of recovery. The world remains mired in a deep, prolonged crisis, and the key question seems to be how to get out of it.

There is, however, a prior question that few if any bother to ask: Do capitalists want a recovery in the first place? Can they afford it?

On the face of it, the question sounds silly: of course capitalists want a recovery; how else can they prosper? According to the textbooks, both mainstream and heterodox, capital accumulation and economic growth are two sides of the same process. Accumulation generates growth and growth fuels accumulation, so it seems bootless to ask whether capitalists want growth. Growth is their lifeline, and the more of it, the better it is.

Or is it?          

Accumulation of What?
The answer depends on what we mean by capital accumulation. The common view of this process is deeply utilitarian. Capitalists, we are told, seek to maximize their so-called ‘real wealth’: they try to accumulate as many machines, structures, inventories and intellectual property rights as they can. And the reason, supposedly, is straightforward. Capitalists are hedonic creatures. Like every other ‘economic agent’, their ultimate goal is to maximize their utility from consumption. This hedonic quest is best served by economic growth: more output enables more consumption; the faster the expansion of the economy, the more rapid the accumulation of ‘real’ capital; and the larger the capital stock, the greater the utility from its eventual consumption. Utility-seeking capitalists should therefore love booms and hate crises. [2]

But that is not how real capitalists operate.

The ultimate goal of modern capitalists – and perhaps of all capitalists since the very beginning of their system – is not utility, but power. They are driven not to maximize hedonic pleasure, but to ‘beat the average’. This aim is not a subjective preference. It is a rigid rule, dictated and enforced by the conflictual nature of the capitalist mode of power. Capitalism pits capitalists against other groups in society, as well as against each other. And in this multifaceted struggle for power, the yardstick is always relative. Capitalists are compelled and conditioned to accumulate differentially, to augment not their absolute utility but their earnings relative to others. They seek not to perform but to out-perform, and outperformance means re-distribution. Capitalists who beat the average redistribute income and assets in their favour; this redistribution raises their share of the total; and a larger share of the total means greater power stacked against others.

Shifting the research focus from utility to power has far-reaching consequences. Most importantly, it means that capitalist performance should be gauged not in absolute terms of ‘real’ consumption and production, but in financial-pecuniary terms of relative income and asset shares. And as we move from the materialist realm of hedonic pleasure to the differential process of conflict and power, the notion that capitalists love growth and yearn for recovery is no longer self evident.

The accumulation of capital as power can be analyzed at many different levels. The most aggregate of these levels is the overall distribution of income between capitalists and other groups in society. In order to increase their power, approximated by their income share, capitalists have to strategically sabotage the rest of society. And one of their key weapons in this struggle is unemployment.

The effect of unemployment on distribution is not obvious, at least not at first sight. Rising unemployment, insofar as it lowers the absolute (‘real’) level of activity, tends to hurt capitalists and employees alike. But the impact on money prices and wages can be highly differential, and this differential can move either way. If unemployment causes the price/wage ratio to decline, capitalists will fall behind in the redistributional struggle, and this retreat is sure to make them impatient for recovery. But if the opposite turns out to be the case – that is, if unemployment helps raise the price/wage ratio – capitalists would have good reason to love crisis and indulge in stagnation.

So which of these two scenarios pans out in practice? Do stagnation and crisis increase capitalist power? Does unemployment help capitalists raise their distributive share? Or is it the other way around?

west coast evacuation due to fukushima radiation?

fukushima released up to 100,000 times more cesium-137 in surface ocean waters than Chernobyl or nuclear weapons testing

enenews | Oceanus Magazine, May 2013: Prior to Fukushima, however, the levels of cesium-137 off the coast of Japan, as cataloged by Michio Aoyama at the Meteorological Research Institute in Japan and others, were among the world’s lowest, at around 2 becquerels per cubic meter (1 becquerel, or Bq, equals one radioactive decay event per second). Against this background, the concentrations measured in early April of 2011 were all the more alarming. […] The amount of cesium-137 radioisotopes from the Fukushima disaster in surface ocean waters was 10,000 to 100,000 times greater than amounts that entered the ocean from the Chernobyl accident or atmospheric nuclear weapons tests.

Ken Buesseler, Senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, March 11, 2013: I’ve had to use this crazy tall and logarithmic scale to get the range of concentrations […] how much cesium was in the ocean off Japan. Each red point is a sampling by an individual taken in, actually released by TEPCO. A little complicated to find the data but they were openly released and I translated them to the right units and made some corrections. Each red dot will tell me how much radioactivity was at that point along the coast on a given date. So they start out here around 10,000, the very first measurements that were made, peaking up here, up to 50 million [becquerels per cubic meter]. That’s a very alarmingly high number [...]

See also: Senior Scientist: Chernobyl was nothing with potential of Fukushima right on ocean -- No way to contain all this radioactive water -- You can't stop groundwater flow -- Every bit of news we're getting is radioactivity numbers are going up

long overdue time for a steer roast...,

jacobin | I’d like to look at a specific question raised by the discussion of private returns and social value, namely: can Wall Street, in its present form, be justified? That is, does the share of income flowing to corporations and professional workers in the financial sector reflect their marginal contribution to the total value of social output, so that, if their work ceased to be done and their skills were allocated elsewhere, we would all be worse off?

I argue that society as a whole would be better off if the financial sector were smaller, and received much smaller returns. A political strategy based on cutting the financial sector down to size has more promise for the Left than any alternative approach now on offer, and is a necessary precondition for a broader attempt to make the distribution of wealth and power more equal.

The financial sector has grown massively since the 1970s, whether size is measured in terms of the volume of transactions, the number and remuneration of highly skilled professionals, the share of corporate profits, or, most importantly, the political power of the finance capital. As Frase observes, referencing Felix Salmon, the huge returns extracted by this sector distort the distribution of income for the economy as a whole. The market return on any activity must be adjusted for the cut taken by the financial sector. This fact makes the attempt to assign ethical status to marginal productivity academic, in the worst sense of the term.

Taking this further, any strategy for the Left that yields more than modest changes in the distribution of income, wealth and power, must involve a direct conflict with the financial sector, and must imply a substantial contraction in the size, wealth and power of that sector. A necessary condition for such a strategy to be feasible is the premise that the incomes flowing to the financial sector come at the expense of the rest of the economy, and in particular, at the expense of working people.

Conversely, if the financial sector makes a contribution to the economy that is commensurate with, or greater than, the incomes flowing to that sector, then a policy that substantially reduces the size of the financial sector is likely to harm the rest of the economy. In principle, it might be possible to redistribute income from the financial sector through progressive taxation, without greatly changing its operations. In practice, however, the political futility of such a strategy is obvious. As long as the financial sector commands its current resources, and is viewed as an essential contributor to prosperity, it will easily defeat proposals for higher taxation.

the treason trilogy: capitalism, terror, doom...,

topdocumentaryfilms | Casino Capitalism. The moment that defined the chaos of the 21st century is the financial atomic bomb that exploded in the heart of the world's banking system, sucking up the lifeblood of the global economy, the credit that keeps the wheels of fortune turning. Banks grown too big to go bust held nations to ransom and trillions of dollars cascaded into the bankers vaults. Leaders of the twentieth largest economies promised never again but once again they've betrayed their duty to protect the wealth and the welfare of their people.

The Crucible of Terror. Barack Obama's plan to defeat terrorists is like throwing petrol on a fire. The President's dream of peace is straitjacketed by economic policies that incubate the seeds of violence. How did the most powerful man on earth become prisoner of a false economic doctrine which threatens the security of the United States and nations around the world? Capitalism was conceived nearly 500 years ago with the Royal act of sacrilege. When Henry VIII demolished the religious life of his nation to enrich himself he laid the foundations for the kind of violence that now blights every corner of the world.

The Temple of Doom. Humans have taken control of the destiny of all life on Earth. What was once the domain of the Gods is now in the hands of mortals and their leaders are worshipers in the Temple of Doom. For hundreds of thousands of years the oceans moved with the ups and downs of the levels of the greenhouse gases, but then the humans begun releasing a new layer of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Some scientists say this will rise the global temperatures causing an environmental catastrophe. Rising sea levels of just a few meters would flood most of the coastline of United States. Around the world thousands of cities would be submerged by nature's retribution. Governments say they want to reduce greenhouse gases and protect species, like fish in the oceans, that are exposed to the economics of greed.

as for the people and planet being subordinated to power and profit - they barely even register

medialens | The focus on the 'narcissism' of leading dissidents is a recurring theme across the corporate media. Bloomberg Businessweek featured an article entitled, 'The Unbearable Narcissism of Edward Snowden.'

Jeffrey Toobin condemned Snowden in the New Yorker as 'a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison'.

On CBS, Bob Schieffer commented:

'I think what we have in Edward Snowden is just a narcissistic young man who has decided he is smarter than the rest of us.'

Richard Cohen in the Washington Post:

'Everything about Edward Snowden is ridiculously cinematic. He is not paranoiac; he is merely narcissistic. He jettisoned a girlfriend, a career and, undoubtedly, his personal freedom to expose programs...'

Cohen detected no cognitive dissonance in the idea that a narcissist would be willing to sacrifice his girlfriend, career and personal freedom to expose political corruption. In reality, this is exactly what narcissists are not inclined to do.

Similarly, Seumas Milne protested in the Guardian that, despite not having been charged, let alone convicted, of any crime: 'as far as the bulk of the press is concerned, Assange is nothing but a "monstrous narcissist", a bail-jumping "sex pest" and an exhibitionist maniac'.

Sir Harold Evans commented in the Observer: 'I have not been impressed by the blather about "freedom of the press" surrounding the narcissistic Edward Snowden...'

Glenn Greenwald who, unlike most of the above critics, has met Snowden and worked closely with him, observed:

'One of the most darkly hilarious things to watch is how government apologists and media servants are driven by total herd behavior: they all mindlessly adopt the same script and then just keep repeating it because they see others doing so and, like parrots, just mimic what they hear... Hordes of people who had no idea what 'narcissism' even means - and who did not know the first thing about Snowden - kept repeating this word over and over because that became the cliche used to demonize him.

'The reason this was darkly hilarious is because there is almost no attack on him more patently invalid than this one. When he came to us, he said: "after I identify myself as the source and explain why I did this, I intend to disappear from media sight, because I know they will want to personalize the story about me, and I want the focus to remain on the substance of NSA disclosures."

'He has been 100% true to his word. Almost every day for four months, I've had the biggest TV shows and most influential media stars calling and emailing me, begging to interview Snowden for TV. He has refused every request because he does not want the attention to be on him, but rather on the disclosures that he risked his liberty and even his life to bring to the world.'

But according to the Daily Banter blog, none of this should be taken seriously. Why?

'Glenn Greenwald has been looking to take down Obama and feed his own depthless narcissism for years now. He just managed to accomplish one of these goals in spades...'

Further ironies afflict these many casual denunciations of Assange, Brand, Snowden and Greenwald as 'sexists' and/or 'narcissists'.

Most commentators – including many on the left - appear to have little or no understanding of what these terms actually mean.

As the psychologist and social theorist Erich Fromm noted, narcissism in fact is characteristic of individuals 'who are preoccupied with themselves and who pay little attention to others, except as echoes of themselves' (Fromm, The Heart Of Man, American Mental Health Foundation, 2010, p.66). A narcissist is unable to see issues from the point of view of others and has 'a lack of genuine interest in the outside world'. (p.67)

But as Fromm (and Freud) also noted, 'even in the case of normal development, man remains to some extent narcissistic throughout his life'. Indeed, 'The "normal," "mature" person is one whose narcissism has been reduced to the socially accepted minimum without ever disappearing completely.' (pp.60-61)

In other words, rare corporate bodhisattvas aside, the critics damning Assange, Brand, Snowden and Greenwald as 'narcissists' are busy throwing stones in greenhouses. But this only scratches the surface of their hypocrisy.

Sexism, of course, is a prime example of 'group narcissism', the idea that: "'I am somebody important because I belong to the most admirable group in the world – I am white"; or, "I am an Aryan".' (p.76) Or indeed, 'I am male.'

Group narcissism is so dangerous because it generates extreme distortions of rational judgement. Fromm commented:

'The object of narcissistic attachment is thought to be valuable (good, beautiful, wise, etc.) not on the basis of an objective value judgement, but because it is me or mine. Narcissistic value judgement is prejudiced and biased.' (p.70)

This, of course, is in direct collision with rational analysis, scientific method and simple common sense. Alas, Fromm concluded that despite some ameliorating impacts from higher education, 'it has not prevented most of the "educated" people from joining enthusiastically the national, racial, and political movements which are the expression of contemporary narcissism'. (p.81)

And this, indeed, is the great irony of so much criticism of Brand the 'narcissist'. Because Brand is a rare dissident precisely throwing off the corporate chains of 'contemporary narcissism' to point out 'the absolute, all-encompassing total corruption of our political agencies by big business'.

And:

'The planet is being destroyed. We are creating an underclass. We are exploiting poor people all over the world. And the genuine legitimate problems of the people are not being addressed by our political class.'

These are some of the central truths and crises of our time that corporate journalists employed by the very system doing the damage will not and cannot discuss. Brand's willingness to discuss them in the face of intense pressure to do otherwise - the corporate system will continue to strongly punish him for speaking out – his empathy with victims of corporate power, are again the exact opposite of what one would expect from a narcissist.

On the other hand, the determination of corporate commentators to ignore the importance and truth of Brand's arguments, and to focus instead on his 'sexism', 'narcissism', and his relationship with Jemima Khan, are classic examples of group narcissism; of journalists prioritising their careers, their corporations, their class, 'not on the basis of an objective value judgement, but because it is me or mine'.

is ethical revitalization the secret to avoiding collapse?

mahb.stanford | The most important ethical question facing society and the scientific community today is whether we can prevent the collapse of global civilization in response to today’s “perfect storm” of environmental problems.  That is, will (or can) we pay enough today to spare future generations from utter disaster?  The interrelated crises of overpopulation, wasteful consumption, rapidly deteriorating life-support systems, growing economic inequity, widespread hunger and poverty, toxification of the planet, declining resources, an increasing threat of resource wars (especially over oil, gas, and fresh water), a worsening epidemiological environment that enhances the probability of unprecedented pandemics, and persistent racial, gender, and religious prejudices that make these problems more difficult to solve, represent the greatest challenge ever faced by Homo sapiens.  The urgency of finding answers is signified by the view of many scientists that society may have only a decade to initiate drastic corrective action, that this complex of interrelated problems is unrecognized by the elites who run the world, and that it has not yet generated a global “issue public” around sustainability.  Civilization is fiddling while its life-support systems burn.

the bugs in darwin?

fredoneverything | If you look at evolution from other than the perspective of an ideological warrior who believes that he is saving the world from the claws of snake-handling primitive Christians in North Carolina, difficulties arise. Chief among these is the sheer complexity of things. Living organisms are just too complicated to have come about by accident. This, it seems to me, is apparent to, though not provable by, anyone with an open mind. 

Everywhere in the living world one sees intricacy wrapped in intricacy wrapped in intricacy. At some point the sane have to say, “This can´t be. Something is going on that I don´t understand.”

Read a textbook of embryology. You start with a barely-visible zygote which, (we are told) guided by nothing but the laws of chemistry, unerringly reacts with ambient chemicals to build, over nine months, an incomprehensibly complex thing we call “a baby.” Cells migrate here, migrate there, modify themselves or are modified to form multitudinous organs, each of them phenomenally complex, all of this happening chemically and flawlessly. We are accustomed to this, and so think it makes sense. The usual always seems reasonable. I don´t think it is. It simply isn´t possible, being a wild frontal assault on Murphy´s Law. 

Therefore babies do not exist. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Unless Something Else is involved. I do not know what.

Complexity upon complexity. In virtually invisible cells you find endoplasmic reticula, Golgi apparatus, ribosomes, nuclear and messenger and transfer RNA, lysosomes, countless enzymes, complex mechanisms for transcribing and translating DNA, itself a complex and still-mysterious repository of information. Somehow this is all packed into almost nowhere. That this just sort of, well, you know, happened is too much to believe. It began being believed when almost nothing was known about the complexity of cellular biology, after which, being by then a sacred text, it could not be questioned. And cannot.

The foregoing is only the beginning of complexity. The many organs formed effortlessly in utero are as bafflingly elaborate as cells themselves. Consider (a simplified description of) the parts of the eye: The globe of three layers, sclera, choroid, and retina. Cornea of six layers, epithelium, Bowman´s membrane, substantia propria, Dua's layer, Descemet´s membrane, endothelium. Retina of ten layers. Lens consisting of anterior and posterior capsule and contained proteinacious goop. The lens is held by delicate suspensory ligaments inside the ciliary body, a muscular doughnut that changes the shape of lens so as to focus. An iris of radial and circumferential fibers enervated competitively by the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems in opposition. A pump to circulate the aqueous humor. On and on and on. And equally on and on for all the other organs, which last for seventy years, repairing themselves when damaged. 

I can´t prove that this didn´t come about accidentally. Neither can I believe it.

how, if, and why species form?

thescientist | Evolution is not concerned with species, but with individuals. The survival and reproduction of those individuals that are best adapted to their environment determine the characteristics of subsequent populations, but neither the process nor the theory requires that these populations be organized into species. The formation of species, when it occurs, is a phenomenon that needs to be explained.

On closer inspection, the very notion of a “species” is difficult to formally define. This has been a matter of debate since before Darwin, who himself concluded that “we shall have to treat species in the same manner as those naturalists treat genera, who admit that genera are merely artificial combinations made for convenience” (Origin of Species, Chapter XIV). Many subsequent authors have proposed more formal definitions, known as species concepts, each useful for particular applications but not without idiosyncrasies.

For example, in sexually reproducing populations, the biological species concept refers to distinct groups of organisms that can only mate successfully with other members of the same group. This definition at first seems reasonable, but situations have been observed where members of group A can mate with group B, and B with C, but not A with C. Formation of biological species is therefore not an evolutionary necessity: under some conditions it happens, under others it does not.

Two other species concepts that are frequently employed are ecological species and genetic species.

sleepers will find collapse swift, brutal, and shocking...,

The myth of human progress, the unexamined belief in the ability of our industrial and technological society to save us from collapse, is a form of magical thinking. These forces, in fact, will ensure that the descent will be swifter and more brutal. Chris Hedges will examine this myth and others that have left us collectively self-deluded. He will look at effective forms of resistance and rebellion in an age of totalitarian capitalism and at ways to keep our lives whole and sane as we begin to face the great unraveling.

remove tepco before removing the fuel rods

vimeo | Fairewinds has fielded a number of questions regarding the removal of the fuel rods from the spent fuel pool in Unit 4 at Fukushima Daiichi. Today's video shows Arnie debunking TEPCO's animated film point by point, and highlights the issues TEPCO will have removing the fuel rods. TEPCO needs to be removed as the organization overseeing the cleanup of the site prior to the removal of the fuel rods.

there were not just three, there were EIGHTY damaged fuel assemblies at fukushima, seventy in reactor one

ex-skf | Move over, three fuel assemblies with damaged/deformed fuel rods inside in the Reactor 4 Spent Fuel Pool!　You're nothing.

According to Kahoku Shinpo, a Fukushima local paper, TEPCO admitted on November 15, 2013 that there are 70 fuel assemblies with damaged fuel rods in the Reactor 1 Spent Fuel Pool, located on the operating floor (top floor) of the reactor building whose air radiation levels are measured in millisievert/hour and sievert/hour (first floor).

There are also three such fuel assemblies in the Reactor 2 SFP, and four of them in the Reactor 3 SFP.

Total 80 spent fuel assemblies in the SFPs in Reactors 1 - 4 are damaged.

The damages had been there long before the March 11, 2011 accident, and TEPCO claims it properly notified the national government as they discovered the damages. But the company has come clean in public only now.

Kahoku Shinpo article below suggests that the oldest of such damaged fuels may have been there for 40 years in the Reactor 1 Spent Fuel Pool. (Reactor 1 started generating electricity in 1971.)

Reactor 1 at Fukushima I Nuke Plant is TEPCO's oldest nuclear reactor; it was entirely the project by General Electric of the US, a turnkey.

a visual tour of the fuel pools of fukushima...,

tangled wreckage inside the pool

ratical | You already know that Fukushima’s fuel pool number 4 may be the single greatest threat, but that pool number 3 is very dangerous as well.

You’ve heard that unit 3’s fuel pool contains less radioactive material than unit 4 . . . but still a tremendous amount of radiation. Scientific American reported last year:

The pools at each reactor are thought to have contained the following amounts of spent fuel, according to The Mainichi Daily News:

• Reactor No. 1: 50 tons of nuclear fuel
• Reactor No. 2: 81 tons
• Reactor No. 3: 88 tons
• Reactor No. 4: 135 tons
• Reactor No. 5: 142 tons
• Reactor No. 6: 151 tons
• Also, a separate ground-level fuel pool contains 1,097 tons of fuel; and some 70 tons of nuclear materials are kept on the grounds in dry storage.

You’ve learned that unit 3’s reactor was the only one at Fukushima which burned plutonium. As Japan Times notes:

Reactor 3 . . . uses highly dangerous mixed oxide fuel, Tokyo Electric has reported.
***
No. 3 reactor is the only one at the crippled power station that was powered by the plutonium-uranium MOX

You’ve gotten the fact that – if the water drains out for any reason – it will cause a fire in the fuel rods, as the zirconium metal jacket on the outside of the fuel rods could very well catch fire within hours or days after being exposed to air. See this, this, this and this. (And that even a large solar flare could knock out the water-circulation systems for the pools.)

this and this – starting at 4 minutes into the video.

35 ton machine blocking the pool

You’ve listened to experts say that – unless the rods are removed from the fuel pools before a major earthquake strikes (using special equipment which keeps the rods submerged in water the whole time) – they will likely catch fire and release huge amounts of radioactivity. See

You’ve read that – after reviewing photos from several different angles – the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s initial impressions were that spent fuel pool number 3 might not be there at all, and that nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen said a couple of days ago:

Unit 3 is worse [than No. 4]. It’s mechanically, it’s rubble, the pool is rubble. It’s got less fuel in it. It faces the same problem. Structurally the pool has been dramatically weakened. And, god, nobody has even gotten near it yet.

And you may have caught the recent headline that a 35-ton machine fell into Unit Three's spent fuel pool. As Kyodo News reports:

The operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Friday found that a 35-ton machine had dropped inside the spent fuel pool of the No. 3 unit, possibly because of a hydrogen explosion that occurred in the early stage of plant’s nuclear accident last year.

Tokyo Electric Power Co., commonly known as TEPCO, reported the finding after placing a camera inside the water-filled pool the same day to prepare for removing, as part of the decommissioning process, the nuclear fuel stored there.

One photo showed part of the machine, originally located above the pool and used to insert and remove fuel, appeared to have dropped onto the nuclear fuel storage racks.

But – until you see pictures – it is hard to get a sense of what all this means.

dubya picking up an honorarium from the messianic jews...,

guardian | Bush himself famously described the war in Iraq as a "crusade" once, before it was pointed out to him that such language had unfortunate resonances in the Middle East. But the links between Zionism and Christianity go much further and deeper than that. The conversion of the Jews, and their restoration to Jerusalem, was a great enthusiasm among English evangelicals in Victorian times. 

Barbara Tuchman's marvellous book Bible And Sword chronicles some of the consequences. It's fair to say that without the belief of Victorian upper class evangelical Englishmen – almost exactly the equivalents of George W Bush – there never would have been a Balfour Declaration. And without that declaration, there could not have been the Jewish immigration to Palestine that laid the foundations for the state of Israel.

Some people will see this as an example of the destructive craziness of religion, and perhaps it is, but it is also an example of the way in which theology is only powerful and important when it is wrapped up in identity. Because if there is one group that has suffered as a result of the establishment of the state of Israel and its support by Western Christian countries, it is the historic Christians of the Middle East – who are now the victims of persecution throughout the region and scapegoats of an angry nationalism. This is one reason why the churches with historic links to Palestinian Christians are much less pro-Israel than those which don't, like the majority of American Baptists.

In the end, what matters is not so much what you believe about God, as who you think you are. The upper classes of any global empire feel certain that God is on their side. The Bushes feel that now as surely as the Balfours did a hundred years ago – and two thousand years ago the Caesars believed that gods were actually among their family members. None of them were good news for the inhabitants of Palestine, and I can't help feeling that Bush and his Texan Zionists are not so close to Jesus as they are to the Romans who crucified him.

a child-rape assembly-line

vice | Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg—who is 63 with a long, graying beard—recently sat down with me to explain what he described as a “child-rape assembly line” among sects of fundamentalist Jews. He cleared his throat. “I’m going to be graphic,” he said.

A member of Brooklyn’s Satmar Hasidim fundamentalist branch of Orthodox Judaism, Nuchem designs and repairs mikvahs in compliance with Torah Law. The mikvah is a ritual Jewish bathhouse used for purification. Devout Jews are required to cleanse themselves in the mikvah on a variety of occasions: women must visit following menstruation, and men have to make an appearance before the High Holidays such as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Many of the devout also purify themselves before and after the act of sex, and before the Sabbath.

On a visit to Jerusalem in 2005, Rabbi Rosenberg entered into a mikvah in one of the holiest neighborhoods in the city, Mea She’arim. “I opened a door that entered into a schvitz,” he told me. “Vapors everywhere, I can barely see. My eyes adjust, and I see an old man, my age, long white beard, a holy-looking man, sitting in the vapors. On his lap, facing away from him, is a boy, maybe seven years old. And the old man is having anal sex with this boy.”

Rabbi Rosenberg paused, gathered himself, and went on: “This boy was speared on the man like an animal, like a pig, and the boy was saying nothing. But on his face—fear. The old man [looked at me] without any fear, as if this was common practice. He didn’t stop. I was so angry, I confronted him. He removed the boy from his penis, and I took the boy aside. I told this man, ‘It’s a sin before God, a mishkovzucher. What are you doing to this boy’s soul? You’re destroying this boy!’ He had a sponge on a stick to clean his back, and he hit me across the face with it. ‘How dare you interrupt me!’ he said. I had heard of these things for a long time, but now I had seen.”

The child sex abuse crisis in ultra-Orthodox Judaism, like that in the Catholic Church, has produced its share of shocking headlines in recent years. In New York, and in the prominent Orthodox communities of Israel and London, allegations of child molestation and rape have been rampant. The alleged abusers are schoolteachers, rabbis, fathers, uncles—figures of male authority. The victims, like those of Catholic priests, are mostly boys. Rabbi Rosenberg believes around half of young males in Brooklyn’s Hasidic community—the largest in the United States and one of the largest in the world—have been victims of sexual assault perpetrated by their elders. Ben Hirsch, director of Survivors for Justice, a Brooklyn organization that advocates for Orthodox sex abuse victims, thinks the real number is higher. “From anecdotal evidence, we’re looking at over 50 percent. It has almost become a rite of passage.” Fist tap Dale.

google map reveals the devastating rate of deforestation across the globe..,

dailymail | The destruction caused by deforestation, wildfires and storms on our planet have been revealed in unprecedented detail. High-resolution maps released by Google show how global forests experienced an overall loss of 1.5 million sq km during 2000-2012. For comparison, that’s a loss of forested land equal in size to the entire state of Alaska.

seen in the scene from the anthropocene in the philipines....,

Humans devised the technological means to use natural resources to construct a vast array of infrastructure (cities, roads, cars, ships, power stations, computers etc. etc). The operations of society are now very dependent on the services of this infrastructure. When it is abruptly destroyed as has happened in the Philipines, and as it irrevocably ages - which we witness all around ourselves - the decisions made by people (and their survivability) in the future will be greatly affected by the declining availability of these services.

paul chefurka | Denial wears many faces. Whether it’s average people who are too busy with their lives to take on board the more extreme reports of environmental degradation; bloggers and politicians who believe that it’s all a hoax cooked up by evil scientists to get grant money for bogus studies; or, perhaps surprisingly, the green activists who believe that more political or technological change will improve or even fix the situation – these are common techniques we use to avoid confronting the horror of global collapse face-to-face.

We are all familiar with the face of climate change denial. The Koch brothers, James Inhofe, Anthony Watts and a host of bloggers and politicians work tirelessly to derail any efforts to address humanity’s greatest existential crisis since the Toba super-volcano 75,000 years ago. They are a resilient species, their fact-resistance bolstered by inoculations of status and cash.

But this form of denial is easy to spot. There is a more subtle form, one that is endemic among the white hats of the green movement. They are the ones who tirelessly work from the moral high ground – to change policies, to develop and promote green technology, to encourage sustainability. They resolutely refuse to countenance any thoughts of our predicament being inextricable. Tireless work, even in a lost cause, tends to keep one insulated from the deeper, darker realizations, and lets one keep fighting the good fight. Heroism has always been an intrinsic part of our story: “Quitters never win and winners never quit!”

Is it unfair to characterize (at least some) green activists as being (at least somewhat) in denial? Possibly. But it’s true far more often than you might expect.

I have no idea if we’re facing “the end of the world”, whatever that hackneyed phrase might mean. However the big picture that most green activists, including the Transition folks and most Permaculturists I’ve met, fail to take on board includes some very simple, very stark facts: the entire planetary biosphere is collapsing, including the oceans, rivers, lakes and land; we are going to break the 2C degree “safe” threshold (which was never safe to begin with) within a couple of decades even with our best efforts (which we’re not giving); we will break 4C and possibly 6C with BAU; the agricultural systems of the world are destabilizing before our eyes due to extreme weather; methane feedbacks may have already begun; the world’s populations of human beings and their food animals are exploding while the world’s population of wild creatures is imploding; the bees and bats are dying; starfish are melting; sea turtles are dying on the beaches; the Eastern Cougar, the Western Black Rhino, the Japanese River Otter and the Formosan Clouded Leopard have all been declared extinct in the last year.

It looks a whole lot like the global life-support system is coming apart at the seams, and we are doing what we’ve always done: precisely nothing.

awareness required to handle climate change impossible...,

guymcpherson | Seems to me that all efforts to create awareness about climate change will be useless. Any effort to make the average individual understand the problem we are facing today, will be useless. “Limits to growth” is a good example of failed efforts. The message has been there for 40 years. The required awareness, at a global scale, a necessity to handle the current situation, is something that seems to me impossible, because we are, as specie, not smart enough to handle our own power. 

Based on my experience, average human has, let´s say, a six-dimensional perception of the world. Own body, family, house, job, grocery store (stores in general) and neighborhood. Anything beyond this limits, it is outside of a truly understanding (something happens out there, but nobody dares to find out what and how). Nation is a distant concept understood only because our job and family require some security provided by the concept of nation. Most people do not understand how the nation-system works. Water and electricity are there, always available. Food, at the grocery store. Job, a place to go and do something for what we receive some fiat money. Garbage, is taken by the garbage truck, to who knows where. Dirty water goes somewhere. Smoke vanishes into the air. Outside these limits, nobody knows what is really going on. Nobody knows how things happen.The mechanisms.We are unable to connect the dots. Concurrently, nobody knows their footprint and the effects of it to the rest of this world (present and future). Nobody cares.

But the world, the biosphere, mankind activity included, is a thousand times more complex (ten thousand dimensions?). Average people can handle only six …. We have not been able to model climate. We have not been able to model the behavior of the ocean (I work with it). We have not been able to make a robot like in “I robot” (the movie), that is still Sci-Fi, even though we have been trying for more than 50 years. We have not been even close to make an organic part of a human body. Our so respected medical doctors can just help to repair it. The truth is that the final repair is done by the body itself. We know that gravity exists, but we do not know what it is. And so on. There are so many things we do not know how they work. The reality of the average human is so basic.

too hot to touch the problem of high-level nuclear waste

energyskeptic | After Yucca Mountain was thrown out as a nuclear waste site in 2009 after 25 years and $10 billion in studies — to help Senator Majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) get re-elected in 2010 — there is nowhere to put nuclear waste.  Not much, if anything, is being done to find a new place, and there’s no chance an ideologically divided Congress would agree on a new site anyhow.

Meanwhile, 70,000 tons of spent nuclear reactor fuel and 20,000 giant canisters of defense-related high-level radioactive waste is sitting at 121 sites across 39 states, with another 70,000 tons on the way before nuclear power plants reach their end of life.  All of this waste is now, and for millions of years, exposing future generations and is vulnerable to terrorists, tsunamis, floods, rising sea levels, hurricanes, electric grid outages, earthquakes, tornadoes, and other disasters.

Spent fuel pools in America at 104 nuclear power plants, have an average of 10 times more radioactive fuel stored than what was at Fukushima, and almost no safety features such as a backup water-circulation systems and generators.

About 75% of spent fuel in America is being stored in pools, many of them so full they have four times the amount they were designed to hold.

The National Academy of Sciences published a report that stated terrorists could drain the water from spent fuel storage, causing the fuel rods to self-ignite and release large quantities of radioactivity, or they could steal nuclear waste to make a (dirty) bomb.

Not making a choice about where to store nuclear waste is a choice. We will expose future generations to millions of years of toxic radioactive wastes if we don’t clean them up now.

This book has a complete history of nuclear waste and what to do with it, the many issues, how we arrived at doing nothing, and has outstanding explanations of difficult topics across many fields (i.e. nuclear science, geology, hydrology, etc), as well as explaining the even more difficult political and human issues preventing us from disposing of nuclear wastes in a permanent geological repository.

The goal of anti-nuclear opponents has been to prevent a nuclear waste site from happening so that no new nuclear power plants would be built. Many states, such as California, have laws against building new nuclear plants until a waste depository exists.

The thing is, activists never needed to fear new reactors because the upfront costs are so high and the payback so delayed along with such high, uninsurable liabilities, that investors and utilities haven’t wanted to build nuclear power plants for decades.  Also, Uranium reserves are so low there’s only enough left to power existing nuclear plants for a few more decades (Tverberg), and perhaps less than that once the energy crisis hits and the energy to mine and crush millions of tons of ore is used for other purposes.

The only way new plants would ever get built is for the government to build them.  Not going to happen.  America has trillions in debt, hundreds of trillions of unfunded liabilities in the future (i.e. Medicare and other programs), the overall economic system is $600 trillion in debt, and the entire economic system is rotten and corrupt to the core with no reform in sight (see my amazon Fraud & Greed:  Wall Street, Banks, & Insurance book list  for details).  The final nail in the coffin is Fukushima — even if the government decided to nuclear power plants, public opposition would be too high.  Not to mention the most dysfunctional Congress in history.

Within the next few years (Hirsch), we will be on the exponentially declining oil curve of Hubbert’s Peak, and it will be too late to move the waste because our priorities will be rationing oil to agriculture to grow, harvest and distribute food, repair essential infrastructure, home heating and cooling, and emergency services.

Once the energy crisis hits, even if new nuclear plants are begun, which is not a given, since the crisis is oil — electricity doesn’t solve anything — building would probably stop because within the next ten years there are very good odds of another nuclear disaster: our plants are old and falling apart.

It’s really bad, much worse than most people realize. I highly recommend the 128 page report by Hirsch called “Nuclear Reactor Hazards Ongoing Dangers of Operating Nuclear Technology in the 21st Century”, or my summary of this paper at energyskeptic “Summary of Greenpeace Nuclear Reactor Hazards”.

visit sunny chernobyl

energyskeptic | After Chernobyl, Russia had workers hired people to be “liquidators”. They were exposed to a lot of radiation to clean up Chernobyl so radioactive waste wouldn’t be tracked out or blown into the air and spread further.  These workers are now entitled to benefits depending on how much radiation dosage they received.

It hadn’t occurred to me that every time there’s a forest fire, the fallout of Chernobyl continues, because trees take up radioactive particles, which are released by fire again.

After Chernobyl exploded, firemen rushed over and kept the fire from spreading to an adjacent reactor — most of them died, but their bravery kept Chernobyl from creating an 800 kilometer no man’s zone, instead of the 30 kilometer zone that exists today.

Russia is planning to put a concrete dome over Chernobyl that will last for 150 years.  Blackwell describes this as “The reactor building, though, will be dangerous for millennia. So maybe there will one day be a shelter for the shelter for the Shelter Object, and then a shelter for that, and we will continue down the generations, building–shell by shell– a nest of giant, radioactive Russian dolls.”

There are tours of Chernobyl, here’s a description from the book: “Dennis’s radiation meter topped out at 1300 micros, about 30 times the background radiation in New York City. He twisted around in his seat to face me. “Yesterday it was up to 2,000″. There was a hint of apology in his voice. Perhaps he was worried I might feel shortchanged for having received less than the maximum possible exposure …, as if I had come to Nepal to see Mount Everest, only to find it obscured by clouds”.

The Chernobyl core “was the size of a small building, a thick bucket standing several stories tall. It felt impossible to understand the power embodied in such a machine. A quarter ounce of nuclear fuel holds nearly as much energy as a ton of coal; the core had held more than a hundred thousand times that much”.

unspeakable atomic plague inexorably spreading...,

Esquire, Nov. 12, 2013: Fukushima Radiation Arrives In Alaska – The Fukushima Crisis Comes To The States [...] The catastrophe at the Fukushima nuclear power plant — aka Yesterday’s Tragedy — appears to be ongoing, and Alaska now has become part of the story. “Some radiation has arrived in northern Alaska and along the west coast. That’s raised concern over contamination of fish and wildlife. More may be heading toward coastal communities” [...] It’s past time for the world to step in because this problem now is riding on the wind and the tides to places far from Fukushima. [...]

Hannah Spector, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Education at Penn State (Harrisburg), Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 2012: [...] One of the problems we face with radioactive fallout from Fukushima is the lack of information coming from “experts.” Indeed, there has been a global media blackout, a “deadly silence on Fukushima” (Norris, 2011) […] science still does not have the technological or methodological understanding to clean up the disaster (Magwood, 2012) which has leaked into the Pacific Ocean and spread throughout the northern hemisphere by way of wind and rain. This invisible truth is so incomprehensible that it is easier to pretend it doesn’t exist. [...] The novelty of Fukushima is worth noting. A new and improved version of the original atomic plague is spreading across the planet through earth, air, fire, and water – yet it cannot be seen, heard, tasted, smelled, or touched. It has become part of the atmosphere. [...] Where to run? Where to hide? What to do? At the same time, official reports have denied the extent of this boundary-transgressing catastrophe in both overt and covert ways. One year after Fukushima began, National Public Radio reported that “trauma, not radiation is [the] key concern in Japan” (Harris, 2012). [...] focusing upon trauma as being more worrisome than possible effects of radiation contamination deflects from the crime that created the trauma to begin with, a crime that will last days, decades, and millennia into the future depending on what type of radionuclide we are talking about. [...]

(In April 2013, Spector received the American Educational Research Association’s Critical Issues in Curriculum and Cultural Studies Award for this journal article  -Source)

highest-stakes pick-up sticks game of all time...,

enenews | Reuters, Nov. 12, 2013: The urgency to clear Reactor No. 4 of the fuel assemblies is because of the risk in having spent fuel stored at such a height – some 18 meters above ground level – in a building that has buckled and tilted and could collapse if another quake strikes. Also, if the pool housing the fuel assemblies is punctured and the water drains away, there could be a fire [...] threatening Tokyo […] As the water used to cool the rods has had to be pumped in from the ocean, there is a risk that some may have corroded from the seawater. […] [The fuel rods] contain plutonium, one of the most toxic substances known [...]

Bloomberg, Nov. 8, 2013: Engineers have been examining the stability of the reactor building to make sure no new vulnerabilities have developed that could lead to accidents during removal. Quarterly tests have also been conducted to ensure the building isn’t sinking because of soil subsidence, [Akira Ono, head of the Fukushima Daiichi plant] said.

Independent (UK), Nov. 8, 2013: Engineers must remove the fuel assemblies one by one, without incident, and each time deal with the risk of fire or the cooling water boiling dry. The building lists slightly but Tepco says it has been reinforced [...] Tepco had built an alarm system that would warn workers to evacuate if radiation climbed dangerously high. […]

Takashi Hara, head of the spent fuel removal operation at Unit 4, Nov. 12, 2013: “A lot of debris fell into the fuel pool as a result of the March 2011 hydrogen explosion. The large pieces of debris have been removed […] If, for some reason, the water levels drop, the fuel would quickly heat up.”

Ichiro Kazawa, 61, a former real estate manager from Hirono, nearby the plant, Nov. 12, 2013: “We are all worried … Every day we read news about the plant, and we are aware of their plans to remove the spent fuel rods […] Everybody’s concerned and just hoping there will be no major accidents. No one here trusts Tokyo Electric.”

scenes from the anthropocene...,

LATimes | As concerns grew about rampant looting and lawlessness, Philippine security forces sent reinforcements and imposed a nighttime curfew in Tacloban. Armed assailants have been holding up aid convoys headed to the city. On Tuesday, troops killed two suspected communist rebels who attacked one such convoy, the military said.

Local officials said bands of looters, having cleaned out shops in Tacloban, were beginning to break into the homes of people who had died or fled the city. But there were reports that newly arrived troops were restoring order.

Flights delivering aid from around the world are arriving at the airport in Cebu, which has been turned into a logistics hub for the relief effort. The many donations included a field hospital from Belgium and a portable purification plant from Germany, according to European officials.

By the end of the day Wednesday, the United States had delivered nearly 274,000 pounds of supplies to Tacloban, about 100 miles northeast of Cebu, said two senior Obama administration officials who briefed reporters in Washington on condition of anonymity. The shipments included plastic tarps, hygiene kits, blankets and medical supplies.

U.S. military personnel had also evacuated about 800 people from Tacloban to Manila for medical treatment.

Philippine welfare personnel loaded up packages of rice and canned food provided by the World Food Program and distributed them to nearly 50,000 Tacloban residents. But even there, where the bulk of assistance has been delivered, bodies still lined the streets because, authorities said, there were not enough hands to remove them.

Hundreds of additional Marines are expected to arrive in the Philippines by week's end to bolster the relief effort, which has struggled against logistical hurdles and the scale of the devastation.

Aid has yet to reach many victims of the typhoon, known by Filipinos as Yolanda, particularly on outlying islands.

"The major challenge is logistics," said Mathias Rick, a regional spokesman for the European Commission's humanitarian aid directorate. "With all this aid arriving and at the same time, the various Philippine authorities — military, civilian structures, the Philippine Red Cross — trying to distribute aid to so many communities ... obviously there are bottlenecks."

Some of the logistical problems eased Wednesday, as remote airstrips and major roads were cleared of debris. However, fuel shortages and lack of power remain problems in rural areas.

The longer the aid takes to arrive, the more people try to leave. Every day, desperate residents gather at Tacloban airport hoping for a spot on one of the departing supply planes.

pacific ocean warming faster...,

usatoday | "We're pumping heat into the ocean at a faster rate over the past 60 years," said study lead author Yair Rosenthal, a climate scientist at Rutgers University. "We may have underestimated the efficiency of the oceans as a storehouse for heat and energy," he added. "It may buy us some time — how much time, I don't really know. But it's not going to stop climate change."

"It's not so much the magnitude of the change, but the rate of change," noted study co-author Braddock Linsley, a Columbia University climate scientist. "We're experimenting by putting all this heat in the ocean without quite knowing how it's going to come back out and affect climate."

He said that in the past six decades the temperature of the Pacific Ocean water studied (from the surface to about 2,200 feet below) has increased by about one-third of a degree Fahrenheit. (The specific area studied was in the Pacific near Indonesia, chosen because that's a typical sample of Pacific Ocean water.) Researchers say that while the amount of warming might seem small in the scheme of things, it's the rate of warming that's so alarming, Linsley said.

The researchers found that Pacific Ocean water has generally been cooling over the past 10,000 years, until about 800 years ago, when temperatures started to slowly rise. (Then fell again, during the so-called Little Ice Age from the mid-1500s to mid-1800s). It's been only in the past few decades, though, that the rate has dramatically increased.

The Earth's atmosphere has been about the same temperature for the past 15 years or so, providing fuel for skeptics of man-made global warming. However, this study, along with other recent research, finds that heat absorbed by the planet's oceans has increased significantly.

Obviously, there were no thermometers taking measurements of ocean temperatures over the past few thousand years (instrument records from buoys go back only to the 1960s). So scientists had to use "proxy" sources to measure temperature. In this case, it was fossils of ancient marine life — little shelled animals known as foraminifera — that could be analyzed to reconstruct the climates in which they lived over millennia.

"This is a relatively new way of measuring past temperature data," Rosenthal noted.

kufi on too tight....,

quoth Bro. Makheru: If all language in the locker room or on the battlefield is fair game, why don’t we hear about Black players/soldiers using derogatory terms like “crackers,” “peckerwoods,” “honkies,” or “devils?” Why is that? White supremacy?

After 1978 or so, nobody outside the pathologically identified and the perpetually aggrieved use those terms of endearment - either in the heat of anger, or, in the throes of overwrought righteous indignation. The exception is of course "peckerwood", and the all-time classic conjugation of "redneck peckerwood" - which I haven't heard comically screeched since the last time I was at the Texas state fair. When that happened, I nearly had to have CPR I was laughing so hard hearing it inveighed by one loud and bumptious rednecked peckerwood against yet another only slightly less boisterous representative of the caste.

Now, the great Sam Peckinpah was intensely fond of this particular term of endearment, and he used it whenever and wherever possible in his westerns. It turns up in both Major Dundee and in the Wild Bunch.  So Bro. Makheru, in partial answer to your rhetorical kwestin, "why don't we hear black soldiers using these specific derogatory terms" - I'ma go with the answer "you better have been a very special brand of badass back in the day to have had the nerve and audacity to say it and live to tell of it", and, in consequence of this fact, it never caught on and became popular outside a small circle of intensely identified folk who LOVE to use these terms of endearment when they gather together to reminisce about the glory days of the early 70's.

quoth Bro. Makheru: “Where men are required to depend on one another, the spoken word doesn't even come from the same psychological spigot…” That is pure unadulterated, historically revisionist, bovine excrement!

Because I'm decidedly not a team player, you won't find me representing on behalf of either the Amerireich or the NBUF..., as a species-level guy, I find it preferable to observe and assess the antics of deuterostems in more universal and powerfully explanatory ethological terms, thus my preference for "killer-ape" on the small scale, "dopamine hegemony" on the largest scale, and global system of 1% supremacy to identify the controlling minority who rules it all.

quoth Bro. Makheru: The above mentioned derogatory words all come from the same psychological spigot--the spigot of white supremacy. Epithets don’t lose their meaning, particularly when a specific epithet is repeatedly used by the same group of people with violent intentions.

As the nominal and symbolic commander of the whole and entire machinery of global supremacy, the boss is not merely a figment of the imagination. The Hon.Bro.Preznit signifies where black Americans stand in the fourth and final quarter of this game. With nothing else left to prove. Everything else is - as they say - merely conversation.