Just a quick note to remind you (as if you needed any reminding) that there is more than one crisis in Japan. The nuclear power plant emergency is a small part of the problems the country now faces. Here is a message from US ambassador Roos. The bigger problem involves thousands of displaced people whose houses and livelihoods and, sometimes, even families were swept away by a roiling ocean.
Chip in if you can. Here is a list of resources you can donate to courtesy of the folks at Apartmenttherapy and UnPlgged:
Text "REDCROSS" to 90999 to donate $10 to Red Cross efforts in Japan
If you haven’t seen this video of the tsunami from a guy who was standing a few feet from it, you should really check it out. It’s rare that a force of nature of this magnitude is documented like this. Tsunami scientists will find this footage invaluable.
PJ Crowley, the State Department’s spokesperson resigned yesterday under pressure for some intemperate remarks he made about the detention conditions of Bradley Manning. It seems that Obama was inconvenienced by having to ask questions about Manning’s state at his press conference on Friday and he was most seriously not amused. FWIW, what Manning did was illegal but following his due process rights and treating him well before his trial is what Americans do. That’s because it’s the right thing to do to other human beings. It costs this country nothing to play by the rules. Rules, I might add, that we used to hold up as examples to the rest of the world. So, Crowley was right, Manning’s detention has been “stupid and ridiculous”. If Obama has been the driving force behind it, then the ridiculousness and stupidity rubs off on him. One can almost hear the sun king plaintively whine, “I will not be MOCKED!” Off with Crowley’s head. Yeah, that will cut down on the mocking.
Oooo, and now the left is speaking out. He can’t take a little criticism? What did they ever see in Obama? Beats me. He’s always been this way. Remember how his campaign went after people who said perfectly innocuous things and turned them into poster boys for the KKK? Ahhh, yes, those were the days. Or remember when Clinton delegates at the Convention were harrassed and threatened to change their votes to Obama? I remember it well. How about when his trolly minions camped in our threads and applied bone crushing peer pressure to us after calling us fat, ugly, uneducated, low class sows? Such terms of endearment. They were so loving and kind.
Hey, this is the Obama culture. If you don’t like someone, call them names, like “bitter knitters”, push their voters out of the caucus room doors, steal their delegates, threaten their careers, enforce conformity and uniformity. Haven’t you guys been paying attention? They think you’ll just end up blaming Hillary.
So predictable.
‘git.
And now, I must be off to work. The end is coming fast. It feels like a breakup.
Once again, our news media does not fail to disappoint. It’s not enough to revel in the mass destruction caused by a supersized earthquake and mega tsunami. No, now we must wait with breathless anticipation for the catastrophic Chernyobal style nuclear fuel meltdown that is *sure* to follow. As plutoniumpage said cynically last night on Twitter, Mothra has been sighted off the east coast of Japan. I blame the entertainment industry. Hollywood has made one too many Armageddon genre movies in recent years. We seem disappointed that the waves weren’t bigger, the cracks in the earth didn’t swallow skyscrapers whole and the nuclear meltdown isn’t turning the night sky neon green.
Actually, this is one end-of-the-world scenario that is probably *not* keeping my mother up all night. Full disclosure: my dad was a nuclear reactor maintenance specialist. Trained by the Navy and having spent several years at a reactor research facility in upstate New York, he was recruited by Three Mile Island after the accident to put their remaining undamaged reactor online and maintain it.
So, while I’m not an expert, I don’t have an irrational fear of nuclear energy. I just have a healthy respect for it. Despite that, I wouldn’t build one in the US right now but I’ll get to that in a sec.
Some of the things we should think about when reading the news accounts of the problem in Japan are common sense but we tend to forget them when there’s a good story, which is what the media is flogging right now. Here’s some of the ones that popped into my mind:
1.) Whether or not the Japanese government is lying about the seriousness and extent of the damage to the reactor, it’s going to be very difficult to maintain a lie for very long. International monitoring systems are going to ferret out the truth pretty shortly. Radiation gets picked up by the atmosphere and circulates the globe in surprising ways. If there’s an unholy amount of radiation from these plants, we’re going to know about it very soon.
2.) When the media reports that the radiation levels are measuring 1000x what is normal, ask yourself, “relative to what?” How many zeros precede or follow the decimal point? What are the units? The media has been very bad a reporting this stuff. A number is meaningless without context. I’m not saying that the risk is small, mostly because I don’t know and no amount of radiation exposure in excess of allowable limits should be considered “safe”, especially for fetuses. All I’m saying is that the media has failed to describe this amount of radiation in understandable human terms, like how many xrays is this equivalent to? How much would make you sick? How sick? What’s the governmental limit in Japan vs the US? Stuff like that. If they aren’t elaborating on the numbers, then they’re just throwing big numbers around to keep viewers on the edge of their seats.
3.) What’s the difference between the Japanese reactor design and the one at Chernyobal or TMI? Which parts are affected? Which parts were involved in yesterday’s explosion? Having some basic explanation and simple diagrams of how these style reactors work would help the audience understand the parameters and the risks of each. While our American media doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job of this, there are other sources. Also, plutoniumpage has been tweeting good resources and people knowlegeable in the field to follow. If you want a calm, level headed resource and references to other knowledgeable nuke commenters, follow Page.
So, here’s my perspective on these plants. Yes, the situation is serious but a Chernyobal style meltdown is unlikely at any of them. These plants have extensive containment systems that would prevent that. That doesn’t mean a partial meltdown isn’t possible, and may have already happened. But the world, and even Japan, isn’t going to come to an end. From what I’ve read, it would be more in line with a TMI type event. Radiation has been released and iodine has been distributed to people in the affected area. It’s probably hard for the Japanese government to make a full assessment as to the extent of the exposure to the population in the area right now. Until they do, the media is just speculating- wildly.
Ok, so why wouldn’t I build nuclear plants today.
First, let’s talk about the safety of these Fukushima plants. They’ve come through a massive earthquake, giant tsunami and power failures. The fact that there aren’t more serious problems at these plants after these events is a testament to their design and multiple redundancy backup systems. Yep, their backup systems are experiencing problems right now but I think the Japanese have made the right call to flood one of the reactors with seawater even if it means losing it. Better to be safe than sorry. Give them some credit.
While we do have many BWRs in the US, we haven’t built any new facilities in 30 years. That’s because, as usual, Americans overreacted (no pun intended) to the TMI accident. Americans seem to be predisposed to magnify problems where nuclear issues are concerned to a hyperbolic degree. I don’t know if that’s because we who were children during the cold war are predisposed to have a Pavlovian response to the word nuclear or what exactly. But whatever it is, we fail to discriminate and tend to treat everything with the word “nuclear” in it with extreme fear and loathing. For example, what most average Americans call an MRI, Magnetic Resonance Imager, most chemists would call a NMRI, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imager. But if the medical community called it *that*, no one would get in the sucker. So they dropped the nuclear bit from the name.
The truth is, nuclear energy in the US has a pretty impressive safety record. It doesn’t matter if you’re on the left or the right, you are obligated to look at that record if you want to make your point. Unfortunately, very few people on the left are capable of leaving their ideology aside where nuclear issues are concerned and actually LOOK at the numbers. That’s not very rational. NO, I am not a Republican. I loathe Republicans. But as a lefty, I have the right to criticize my tribe for their faith-based behavior. When it comes to issues such as nuclear energy, pharmaceuticals and immunizations, the left can sometimes be as anti-intellectual as the right is about evolution and climate change. We’re just as nutty as the right is. It’s just that our issues are different. Let’s stop flattering ourselves.
Nevertheless, nuclear energy is not something you want just anyone monkeying around with. It’s genuinely dangerous when not used with the utmost attention to regulation, safety and design. Of course, a reactor built today is going to have a much different design than one built 40 years ago. We could and should expect advancements in technology to make them safer.
But in this business environment, with arrogant, smartass, MBAs running industries they know nothing about and trying to reduce everything to the bottom line, building a new nuclear reactor in the US, or anywhere else in the world for that matter, would be a recipe for disaster. In fact, I’d be checking up on the ones we already have. The nuclear industry must have regulation. That doesn’t mean we have to be stuck with the regulations we have that are 40 years old or that regulations have to be so burdensome that nuclear power is too expensive to use. It’s that regulation is necessary in this industry because it will make everyone more accountable and safer.
More than that though is that the nuclear power industry will have to rely on human beings to build, run, monitor and maintain the new reactors. That means hiring experienced and well trained people of the highest integrity to do it and who approach their work with rigor and discipline. You can’t cut corners with your plant operators and maintenance specialists. These people have to be paid well and respected. Don’t even think about reducing them to subsistence wages. I don’t see the MBAs really understanding that concept. They don’t seem to teach it at business school. A human resource at a nuclear power plant is not just a number on a spreadsheet. That person is an investment in safety and should be an expert, paid as well or better than some cheeky Wharton asshole sitting in an office somewhere.
So, until the business community gets that, I’m not in favor of building new nukes. Maybe someday, when the oil crisis gets really serious and we’ve had it up to here with the speculators and the biz school grads, we can revisit this issue. Maybe hire some experienced Navy nuke experts to run things and replace the “smartest guys in the room”. I won’t hold my breath.
In the meantime, let’s maintain a healthy fear and skepticism and turn our focus to the survivors of the devastating natural events in Japan. This is not entertainment.
The video footage from Japan can fill you with awe and terror. There’s a whirlpool that looks like God pulled the plug on the Pacific and a video of a tsunami wave hitting farmland in Fukushima prefecture that was captured live from a helicopter. Follow The Lede at the NYTimes for the most recent news and videos.
Number 1 child in Maui was wakened early this morning by tsunami sirens and this time, unlike the 2010 scare, she evacuated to higher ground. She’s sleeping in her car in a parking lot, although her location in Maui is not expected to get hit very hard.
Number 2 child was hoping to attend a semester in Japan through AFS. She’s at school right now and probably doesn’t know the full extent of the damage. I doubt that this event will change her mind about her destination.
We are very concerned for the people of Japan and the Russian coast who have been affected by this tsunami and hope that the loss of lives is minimal.
President Michelle Bachelet confirmed 47 deaths and said more were possible. Telephone and power lines were down, making damage assessments difficult in the early morning darkness.
“Never in my life have I experienced a quake like this, it’s like the end of the world,” one man told local television from the city of Temuco, where the quake damaged buildings and forced staff to evacuate the regional hospital.
The quake downed buildings and houses in Santiago and knocked out a major bridge connecting the northern and southern sections of the country.
It struck at 3:34 a.m. local time and was centered about 200 miles southwest of Santiago, at a depth of 22 miles, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. The epicenter was some 70 miles from Concepcion, Chile’s second-largest city, where more than 200,000 people live.
Phone lines were down in Concepcion as of 7:30 a.m. and no reports were coming out of that area. The quake in Chile was 1,000 times more powerful than the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that caused widespread damage in Haiti on Jan 12, killing at least 230,000, earthquake experts reported on CNN International.
The U.S. Geological Survey and eyewitnesses reported more than a dozen aftershocks, including two measuring magnitude 6.2 and 6.9.
Only hours earlier, there was a 6.9 magnitude earthquake off the southern coast of Japan. A tsunami was predicted, but did not take place.
The late late night TC crowd was discussing this insane video of Trent Franks (R-Arizona) being asked about hate radio and Rush Limbaugh and then doing a quick pirouette to talking about abortion and “killing innocent babies.” He calls Obama “the abortion president” and he thinks African Americans were better off under slavery because (he claims) “half of all black babies are aborted.” Oh, and Rush Limbaugh made fun of Michael J. Fox because he cares so much about humanity.
Just who is voting for politicians like this? Thinking about the possible answers to that question gives me the creeps.
Three years ago, Russ Rector, a Fort Lauderdale dolphin trainer turned marine mammal activist, said he wrote SeaWorld a letter warning it was pushing its show mammals too hard to wow audiences, thereby inviting attacks on trainers.
On Wednesday, a killer whale named Tilikum implicated in two previous fatalities attacked a trainer during a show at the Orlando theme park, dragging her around like a toy and drowning her in front of horrified visitors.
“I warned them this was going to happen,” Rector said. “Happy animals don’t kill their trainers.”
Another opinion:
Naomi Rose, a senior scientist for the Humane Society of the United States, which has campaigned at marine parks, said Tilikum’s reputation was well known and that SeaWorld specifically forbade trainers from entering the orca’s tank.
“He clearly has some sort of issue with people in the water with him,” she said of the orca.
Rose and many marine mammal activists believe the stress of life in a tank is acute for orcas, large animals that roam deep waters in close-knit pods.
“They’re moody,” she said. Rector, who has campaigned for years to free Lolita, a female orca that has spent nearly four decades in captivity at the Seaquarium in Miami, says it leaves them “demented.”
Lolita, Rose said, has not been linked to any serious attacks on trainers, but its old tank-mate, Hugo, died of a cranial bleeding in 1980 that activists blamed on the orca ramming its head against the sides of a small tank.
Can you blame a whale for getting mad when he is kept in a tiny container and forced to perform tricks for humans instead of being able to swim freely in the ocean? And get this, another trainer says Dawn Brancheau’s horrible death was all her own fault.
A former co-worker told the station that trainer Dawn Brancheau was to blame when her hair floated over the mouth of killer whale Tilikum. The massive creature responded by dragging her under Wednesday, and she drowned.
Thad Lacinak, a former head trainer at SeaWorld, said the trainers knew to stay away from the whale’s mouth. “The protocol was not to be around Tilikum’s mouth while you’re laying down,” he said.
Reporter Emily Turner explained that Lacinak said Brancheau “became too comfortable with the animal she loved so much.”
And can you believe there are still pictures and video on-line of Breacheau’s last moments? What is wrong with us? Set these beautiful, intelligent animals free!
Did you know that Matt Taibbi and an expat named Mark Ames ran an alternative newspaper in Russia for years? I didn’t. Yesterday I posted a link to an article by Ames on Ayn Rand’s obsession with a vicious serial killer who liked to dismember little girls.
From there, I was directed to Ames’ website and learned that this month’s Vanity Fair has an in-depth story on the “The unlikely life and sudden death of The Exile, Russia’s angriest newspaper.” Ames is also the author of a book on workplace and school shootings in which he argues that Americans don’t want to face what is really going on in this rage killings–that bullying and alienation in schools and workplaces are driving both kids and adults to the point where they just can’t take it anymore. Sounds controversial yet interesting. I reserved it at my local library.
“I am eager and willing to move forward with members of both parties on health care if the other side is serious about coming together to resolve our differences and get this done. But I also believe that we cannot lose the opportunity to meet this challenge,” Obama said.
“The tens of millions of men and women who cannot afford their health insurance cannot wait another generation for us to act. Small businesses cannot wait. Americans with pre-existing conditions cannot wait. State and federal budgets cannot sustain these rising costs.
The President didn’t mention that the bill he supports doesn’t do anything to help lower health care costs for ordinary Americans or prevent insurance companies from refusing to pay for care for people with preexisting conditions.
This article in New Scientist reports on research suggesting that ancient humans may have communicated in a written language much earlier than previously thought: The writing on the cave wall
Until now, the accepted view has been that our ancestors underwent a “creative explosion” around 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, when they suddenly began to think abstractly and create rock art. This idea is supported by the plethora of stunning cave paintings, like those at Chauvet, which started to proliferate across Europe around this time. Writing, on the other hand, appeared to come much later, with the earliest records of a pictographic writing system dating back to just 5000 years ago.
Few researchers, though, had given any serious thought to the relatively small and inconspicuous marks around the cave paintings. The evidence of humanity’s early creativity, they thought, was clearly in the elaborate drawings.
While some scholars like Clottes had recorded the presence of cave signs at individual sites, Genevieve von Petzinger, then a student at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, was surprised to find that no one had brought all these records together to compare signs from different caves. And so, under the supervision of April Nowell, also at the University of Victoria, she devised an ambitious masters project. She compiled a comprehensive database of all recorded cave signs from 146 sites in France, covering 25,000 years of prehistory from 35,000 to 10,000 years ago.
What emerged was startling: 26 signs, all drawn in the same style, appeared again and again at numerous sites (see illustration). Admittedly, some of the symbols are pretty basic, like straight lines, circles and triangles, but the fact that many of the more complex designs also appeared in several places hinted to von Petzinger and Nowell that they were meaningful – perhaps even the seeds of written communication.
I’ll wrap this up with a feel-good story from a few days ago about a 3-year-old girl who was saved from freezing to death by her dog Blue: Police Credit Dog With Saving Lost Girl’s Life
“She was able to stay warm with the dog. And it probably was one of things that saved her life. It was extremely cold out here,” Sgt. Jeff Newnum of the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office told KPHO, a CBS news affiliate in Phoenix. “God watched over her last night.”
Victoria Bensch vanished while playing outside with the family’s Queensland Heeler around 4:30 p.m. on Thursday. Search teams scoured the rocky terrain surrounding Victoria’s Cordes Lakes, Ariz., home, but as the night wore on, and temperatures dipped into the 30s, there was still no sign of her.
When the sun rose Friday morning, a rescue helicopter spotted movement below. It was Blue, hovering close to the missing girl, nearly half a mile from their home.
Even as medics approached, Blue kept Victoria, who was only wearing a T-shirt, pants and tennis shoes, safe.
“I think the dog was initially apprehensive of me. I was a little concerned he might bite me when I first walked up, but as I just walked right past the dog, the [animal] realized I was there to help,”
Just a quick note to remind you (as if you needed any reminding) that there is more than one crisis in Japan. The nuclear power plant emergency is a small part of the problems the country now faces. Here is a message from US ambassador Roos. The bigger problem involves thousands of displaced people whose houses and livelihoods and, sometimes, even families were swept away by a roiling ocean.
The video footage from Japan can fill you with awe and terror. There’s a whirlpool that looks like God pulled the plug on the Pacific and a video of a tsunami wave hitting farmland in Fukushima prefecture that was captured live from a helicopter. Follow 
The Confluence 