"I am only a street vendor who sells hot dogs in a relatively ‘poor’ Western nation..."

I've recently been seeking out authors who embrace an authentic Christianity, a more primitive version of that religion, the kind that might have existed early on in Christianity's existence, the kind that is indiscernible in the mega-church, evangelical religions that swamp the United States today.

Meet Ken:

I am only a street vendor who sells hot dogs in a relatively ‘poor’ Western nation, and yet my income, according to Global Rich List, makes me wealthier than the vast majority of the people in the world. Another immigrant, a Bulgarian whose only income comes from helping me sell hot dogs for four hours a week, has an income that makes him comparatively wealthy by the world’s standards. A part-time hot dog vendor’s assistant in Portugal is financially much better off than most of the world! And yet many people who are wealthier than 90 percent of the world’s population consider themselves to be poor and struggling.

But are we really poor because we are having a difficult time of it, living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to make bank payments? Wouldn’t billions love to be in our difficult position? We are wealthy people. And if we who struggle with the bills are wealthy, what are those who are able to hoard their wealth and live comfortably?

In the 19th century, Quakers who were immersed in debt were strongly discouraged from being charitable to others until they had paid off their debt. I say this is contrary to the Spirit of Christ. Let my ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes’ in that I have agreed to pay a debt, and sooner or later, God willing, I will pay it. But if my wealthier creditor demands his $400 now, and a neighbor cannot afford groceries for the week, I will help out my neighbor with her groceries before I pay my creditor that week. In the face of my neighbor’s even more unfavorable circumstances, I will not hoard, nor will I help another to hoard. Hoarding wealth is contrary to Christ, especially when so many people in the world are struggling to eat.

[...]

The way of the Christian community in the Book of Acts is an example of how primitive Christianity worked as real community, based on love of one’s neighbor. ‘Primitive Christianity revived’ is loving your neighbor as you love yourself, and living the Kingdom of God here and now, just as the early Christians did.

So let me realize first that I am wealthy, and second, that whatever struggle I may encounter to maintain my family’s relatively high standard of living is no excuse for not helping someone who is struggling for the more basic necessities. Then let me chip away at lowering the mountain I have set myself on to raise the valleys that so many others live in. This is the will of God, and if we don’t do it, He will.

Lord, let me be content with my wealth and help me to lift the valleys. Lift the valleys, Christians!

Nicely said.

"But are we really poor because we are having a difficult time of it, living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to make bank payments? Wouldn’t billions love to be in our difficult position? We are wealthy people."

"When victory comes through violence, it is a victory with strings attached. ... Those who espouse violence exploit people."

César Chavez:

We work on the theory that men and women who are truly concerned about people are not violent by nature. These people become violent when the deep concern they have for people is frustrated and when they are faced with seemingly insurmountable odds. We advocate militant nonviolence as our means of achieving justice for our people, but we are not blind to the feelings of frustration, impatience, and anger that seethe inside every farmworker. The burden of generations of poverty and powerlessness lies heavy in the fields of America. If we fail, there are those who will see violence as the shortcut to change.

It is precisely to overcome these frustrations that we have involved masses of people in their own struggle throughout the movement. Freedom is best experienced through participation and self-determination, and free men and women instinctively prefer democratic change to any other means. Thus, demonstrations and marches, strikes and boycotts are not only weapons against the growers, but our way of avoiding the senseless violence that brings no honor to any class or community. When victory comes through violence, it is a victory with strings attached. If we beat the growers at the expense of violence, victory would come at the expense of injury and perhaps death. Such a thing would have a tremendous impact on us. We would lose regard for human beings. Then the struggle would become a mechanical thing. When you lose your sense of life and justice, you lose your strength.

The greater the oppression, the more leverage nonviolence holds. Violence does not work in the long run and if it is temporarily successful, it replaces one violent form of power with another just as violent. People suffer from violence. Examine history. Who gets killed in the case of violent revolution? The poor, the workers. The people of the land are the ones who give their bodies and don't really gain that much for it.

We believe it is too big a price to pay for not getting anything. Those who espouse violence exploit people. To call men to arms with many promises, to ask them to give up their lives for a cause and then not produce for them afterward, is the most vicious type of oppression.

"Freedom is best experienced through participation and self-determination, and free men and women instinctively prefer democratic change to any other means."
- César Chavez

“The travail of the poor is intercessory for the rich – for them, in their behalf, in their place, it substitutes for their own suffering.”

Marshall Johnston on the fascinating "lay theologian" and lawyer William Stringfellow:

He wrote, “In this world men live at each other’s expense, and the affluence of the few is proximately related to, and supported by, the poverty of the many.” Practically speaking, Stringfellow cautioned, “Indeed, every American would be wise to remember how dependent their earnings are on cheap, plentiful labor.” He challenged his readers, “Each time a prosperous American peels a banana, let him remember the peon who picked it; whenever a housewife uses a pan, let her recall that the copper from it was made was probably mined by slaves; the next time a middle-class citizen pays an insurance premium, let him intercede for the people of the ghettoes.” This dependence of the prosperous upon the poor Stringfellow labeled intercessory and invested it with theological significance: “The travail of the poor is intercessory for the rich – for them, in their behalf, in their place, it substitutes for their own suffering.”

[...]

...to idolize money, to see its acquisition as the source of moral justification, is to ignore the practical and theological complexities of human existence. Those who make money and keep it never do so in a vacuum. Practically speaking, they benefit from the intercessory experience of the poor in making certain goods and services affordable. Theologically, they cannot take credit before God for their individual works nor can they be absolved from the corporate nature of sin.

"Those who make money and keep it never do so in a vacuum."
- Marshall Johnston

"The disease by which one class preys upon another and upon the nation--the disease of parasitism and selfish domination."

[source]

Edward Carpenter, from The Healing of Nations (1915):

Only when the nations cease to be diseased in themselves will they cease fighting with each other. And the disease of the modern nations is the disease of disunity —not, as I have already said, the mere existence of variety of occupation and habit, for that is perfectly natural and healthy, but the disease by which one class preys upon another and upon the nation—the disease of parasitism and selfish domination. The health of a people consists in that people's real unity, the organic life by which each section contributes freely and generously to the welfare of the whole, identifies itself with that welfare, and holds it a dishonour to snatch for itself the life which should belong to all. A nation which realized that kind of life would be powerful and healthy beyond words; it would not only be splendidly glad and prosperous and unassailable in itself, but it would inevitably infect all other nations with whom it had dealings with the same principle. Having the Tree of Life well rooted within its own garden, its leaves and fruit and all its acts and expressions would be for the healing of the peoples around. But a nation divided against itself by parasitic and self-exalting cliques and sections could never stand. It could never be healthy. No armaments nor ingenuity of science and organization could save it, and even though the form of its institutions were democratic, if the reality of Democracy were not there, its peace crusades and prizes and sentimental Conferences and Christianities would be of little avail.

When a nation's wealth is funneled to the top, a nation half free and half slave is created. We are achieving economically the divided nation that Lincoln feared when he gave his "House Divided" speech. "'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free." Lincoln was echoing Matthew 12:25: "And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand."

Our divisions will only worsen if we continue catering to the rich and exacerbating inequality, as Obama is wont to do. Democracy in America has been hobbled. Its endurance is threatened. A more equal, more just, more democratic society must emerge out of the economic disparities and desolation being created by capitalism's bankers, it's big corporations, and the political toadies who do the bidding of the rich.

The N.Y. Times loses a liberal

Bob Herbert is moving on. Here he is on the Kochs and Howard Zinn. It's too bad the N.Y. Times does not employ more human beings of his caliber.

It’s a perversion of democracy, indeed, when individuals like the Kochs have so much clout while the many millions of ordinary Americans have so little. What the Kochs want is coming to pass. Extend the tax cuts for the rich? No problem. Cut services to the poor, the sick, the young and the disabled? Check. Can we get you anything else, gentlemen?

The Egyptians want to establish a viable democracy, and that’s a long, hard road. Americans are in the mind-bogglingly self-destructive process of letting a real democracy slip away.

I had lunch with the historian Howard Zinn just a few weeks before he died in January 2010. He was chagrined about the state of affairs in the U.S. but not at all daunted. “If there is going to be change,” he said, “real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves.”

I thought of that as I watched the coverage of the ecstatic celebrations in the streets of Cairo. [source: UUJEC]

Our tendency is to give these true American heroes short shrift, just as we gave Howard Zinn short shrift. In the nitwit era that we’re living through now, it’s fashionable, for example, to bad-mouth labor unions and feminists even as workers throughout the land are treated like so much trash and the culture is so riddled with sexism that most people don’t even notice it. (There’s a restaurant chain called “Hooters,” for crying out loud.)

I always wondered why Howard Zinn was considered a radical. (He called himself a radical.) He was an unbelievably decent man who felt obliged to challenge injustice and unfairness wherever he found it. What was so radical about believing that workers should get a fair shake on the job, that corporations have too much power over our lives and much too much influence with the government, that wars are so murderously destructive that alternatives to warfare should be found, that blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities should have the same rights as whites, that the interests of powerful political leaders and corporate elites are not the same as those of ordinary people who are struggling from week to week to make ends meet? [source: Café Philos]

R.I.P. Joe Bageant

[source]

I will miss his writing an awful lot. Story here. Click on the label to this post for more of Joe, or visit his web site. Joe's message is vital: Be a citizen, not a consuming captive of capitalism!

Joe could fool you. He talked slow and Southern, lacked pretensions, and you could talk to him for weeks without realizing how very damned smart he was.
 One day we dropped in and he said he had just found that he had cancer. It went fast. He died Saturday.

Most who have heard of him have done so through his books, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War, and Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir. Deer Hunting is a curious work, a sleeper, that you can read the first time without noticing that it deserves a high place in American letters. He tells of that huge class of unnoticed people in America, the white underclass of a thousand small towns and countryscapes, of Winchester, Virginia where he lived and by implication to Waldorf, Maryland and King George, Virginia and, well, all over the Carolinas and the Cumberland Plateau and … everywhere. America thinks it is a middle-class country. It isn’t. Joe knew.

Here he is on the always interesting C-Realm Podcast:

"I have come to think the price of admission anywhere in the world ... is service to others. We have been indoctrinated by an earth devouring capitalist system to believe otherwise. Believe that giving only depletes. And that mankind and civilization came about through kings and warriors and "great men." But the essential glue of man the social animal has always been on cooperation and sharing. That an endless stream of elite thieves have always managed to steal the fruits of that cooperation does not matter. And the best that is in man still rests on the same fundamentals -- cooperation for the greater good of all."
- Joe Bageant

Eyeballs unglued from the N.Y. Times

I visited the N.Y. Times only once today. Because of the N.Y. Times' new pay wall, I will be visiting the L.A. Times a lot more often instead. C'est la vie.

Marcel Proust:

That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper, thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours, the battles which cost the lives of fifty thousand men, the murders, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statesmen and actors, are transformed for us, who don't even care, into a morning treat, blending in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of café au lait.

Alternative online journalism provides a richer diet than the paper written by the rich, for the rich. Thank goodness it is easy to ignore the Gray Lady.

P.S. If this is true, they are just plain stupid:

According to sources close to the situation, the 20-story limit can be breached if you access the site from multiple devices, and/or if you delete your cookies. In other words, suppose you hit the wall on your PC. Then move to your laptop, where you’ll get another 20 stories. Delete your cookies on any computer, and the clock goes back to zero.

"The public had to be made to believe that there are two alternatives, and only two: flight or fight."

Walter Wink:

The Bible translators working in the hire of King James on what came to be known as the King James Version knew that the king did not want people to conclude that they had any recourse against his or any other sovereign's tyranny. James had explicitly commissioned a new translation of the Bible because of what he regarded as "seditious . . . dangerous, and trayterous" tendencies in the marginal notes printed in the Geneva Bible, which included endorsement of the right to disobey a tyrant. Therefore the public had to be made to believe that there are two alternatives, and only two: flight or fight. And Jesus is made to command us, according to these king's men, to resist not. Jesus appears to authorize monarchical absolutism. Submission is the will of God. And most modern translators have meekly followed in that path.

Ernie's Web Log:

The Geneva Bible was first printed in Geneva, Switzerland, by refugees from England, fleeing the persecution of Protestants by Roman Catholic Queen “Bloody” Mary. Many copies were smuggled back into England at great personal risk. In later years, when Protestant-friendly Queen Elizabeth took the throne, printing of the Geneva Bible moved back to England. The Geneva Bible was produced by John Calvin, John Knox, Myles Coverdale, John Foxe, and other Reformers. It is the version that William Shakespeare quotes from hundreds of times in his plays, and the first English Bible to offer plain roman-style type in some of its early printings.

The Geneva Bible was the first Bible taken to America, brought over on the Mayflower… it is the Bible upon which early America and its government was founded (certainly not the King’s of England’s Bible!) The Geneva Bible was also the first English Bible to break the chapters of scripture into numbered verses, and it was the first true “Study Bible” offering extensive commentary notes in the margins. It was so accurate and popular, that a half-century later, when the King James Bible came out… it retained more than 90% of the exact wording of the Geneva Bible.

It's raining iodine

Bloomberg News:

China has detected low levels of radioactive iodine in the atmosphere of northeastern Heilongjiang province although this doesn’t pose a threat to public health, the official Xinhua news agency said today, citing the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The discovery is a sign that some radioactive material released from the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant in Japan has reached China, Xinhua cited a statement from the center as saying. Chinese authorities are monitoring the situation to determine whether the leak from the plant that was damaged in the March 11 earthquake will affect the country, according to the statement.

Boston.com:

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health said Sunday that very low concentrations of radioiodine-131 that were likely from the Japanese power plant severely damaged by the earthquake and tsunami earlier this month have been detected in a sample of rainwater. Officials did not say where the sample was taken.

"That you pay for it and it's done in your name stirs nothing."

Dennis Perrin:

If you know no one in uniform, chances are you don't think about cruise missile strikes or kill teams turning their prey into fetish items. Fifty people vaporized in an instant doesn't register. That you pay for it and it's done in your name stirs nothing. An Afghan child's severed arm landing at your feet might move you if the song on your iPod wasn't so awesome.

"The state not the market plays an essential role in facilitating the greatest concentration and centralization of wealth in world history."

James Petras:

What is striking about the recovery, growth, and expansion of the world's billionaires is how dependent their accumulation of wealth is based on pillage of state resources; how much of their fortunes were based on neo-liberal policies which led to the takeover at bargain prices of privatized public enterprises; how state de-regulation allows for plunder of the environment to extract resources at the highest rate of return; how the state promoted the expansion of speculative activity in real estate, finance and hedge funds, while encouraging the growth of monopolies, oligopolies and conglomerates which captured "super profits" - rates above the 'historical level'. Billionaires in the BRICs and in the older imperial centers (Europe, US and Japan) have been the primary tax beneficiaries of reductions and elimination of social programs and labor rights.

What is absolutely clear is that the state not the market plays an essential role in facilitating the greatest concentration and centralization of wealth in world history, whether in facilitating the plundering of the treasury and the environment or in heightening the direct and indirect exploitation of labor.

Joe Bageant's other masterpiece

Ken Smith:

Set between 1950 and 1963, Rainbow Pie is a coming-of-age memoir discussing one of America’s most taboo subjects -- social class. Combining recollection, accounts, and analysis, the book leans on Maw, Pap, Ony Mae, and other members of this rambunctious Scots-Irish Bageant family to chronicle the often-heartbreaking post-war journey of 22 million rural Americans into the cities, where they became the foundation of a permanent white underclass. Telling the stories of the gun-owning, uninsured, underemployed white tribes inhabiting America’s heartlands, Rainbow Pie offers an intimate look at what was lost in the orchestrated post-war shift from an agricultural to an urban consumer society.

Copies via Abebooks.

“Damn few of us grasp how the loss of traditional aesthetic and foundational values, the yeoman tradition, are connected with so much modern American tragedy.”
- Joe Bageant

Another Edward Abbey moment: "I find nuclear power very unappealing. ... It's expensive, it's dangerous, it's undemocratic."

Another Edward Abbey moment: "How can we have freedom without wilderness?"

"It's as if the very process of representative government in America has broken down. The politicians do not represent the voters, they seem to represent the commercial interests which finance their election campaigns, which finance their grotesquely, grossly expensive election campaigns. In America, politics has become a game of the rich, the rich only, or of the cronies and the servants of the rich."
- Edward Abbey

"Must society ever be divorced from simplicity?"

Henry R. Salt, from Life of Henry David Thoreau:

The enormous increase which the present age has witnessed in material wealth and mechanical invention has accentuated both the magnitude of the evil and the necessity of relieving it. A century ago, it might have occurred to those who were living on the threshold of the new era, and who foresaw (as some must have foreseen)the coming rush of civilisation, with its fretful hurry and bustle of innumerable distractions, to wonder whether the very prevalence of the malady would work out its own reformation. Must society ever be divorced from simplicity? Must intellect and wildness be incompatible? Must we lose in the deterioration of the physical senses what we gain in mental culture? Must perfect communion with Nature be impossible? Or would there arise a man capable of showing us in his own character—whatever its shortcomings and limitations—that it is still possible and profitable to live, as the Stoics strove to live, in accordance with Nature, with absolute serenity and self-possession; to follow out one's own ideal, in spite of every obstacle, with unfaltering devotion; and so to simplify one's life, and clarify one's senses, as to master many of the inner secrets of that book of Nature which to most men remains unintelligible and unread.

"The bill ... would actually cut off all food stamp benefits to any family where one adult member is engaging in a strike against an employer."

Zaid Jilani:

Now, a group of House Republicans is launching a new stealth attack against union workers. GOP Reps. Jim Jordan (OH), Tim Scott (SC), Scott Garrett (NJ), Dan Burton (IN), and Louie Gohmert (TX) have introduced H.R. 1135, which states that it is designed to “provide information on total spending on means-tested welfare programs, to provide additional work requirements, and to provide an overall spending limit on means-tested welfare programs.”

Much of the bill is based upon verifying that those who receive food stamps benefits are meeting the federal requirements for doing so. However, one section buried deep within the bill adds a startling new requirement. The bill, if passed, would actually cut off all food stamp benefits to any family where one adult member is engaging in a strike against an employer.

"We're the Cops of the World, boys, we're the Cops of the World"

Here's a kick in the ass, boys
Here's a kick in the ass
We'll smash down your doors, we don't bother to knock
We've done it before, so why all the shock?
We're the biggest and toughest kids on the block
'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World

When we butchered your son, boys
When we butchered your son
Have a stick of our gum, boys
Have a stick of our bubble-gum
We own half the world, oh say can you see
The name for our profits is democracy
So, like it or not, you will have to be free
'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World
- Phil Ochs

David Swanson:

Is generosity really a motivator behind our wars, whether the launching of them or the prolonging of them? If a nation is generous toward other nations, it seems likely it would be so in more than one way. Yet, if you examine a list of nations ranked by the charity they give to others and a list of nations ranked by their military expenditures, there's no correlation. In a list of the wealthiest two-dozen countries, ranked in terms of foreign giving, the United States is near the bottom, and a significant chunk of the "aid" we give to other countries is actually weaponry.

Humanitarian wars don't exist

Glenn Greenwald:

...what I cannot understand at all is how people are willing to believe that the U.S. Government is deploying its military and fighting this war because, out of abundant humanitarianism, it simply cannot abide internal repression, tyranny and violence against one's own citizens. This is the same government that enthusiastically supports and props up regimes around the world that do exactly that, and that have done exacty that for decades.

By all accounts, one of the prime administration advocates for this war was Hillary Clinton; she's the same person who, just two years ago, said this about the torture-loving Egyptian dictator: "I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family." They're the same people overseeing multiple wars that routinely result in all sorts of atrocities. They are winking and nodding to their Yemeni, Bahrani and Saudi friends who are doing very similar things to what Gadaffi is doing, albeit (for now) on a smaller scale. They just all suddenly woke up one day and decided to wage war in an oil-rich Muslim nation because they just can't stand idly by and tolerate internal repression and violence against civilians? Please.

Peter Hitchens:

We watch the launch of missiles, the grandeur of warships afloat, the thrill of jets flying low over targets, the pretty orange and black flowering of distant explosions, the flash of missiles landing in cities lighting the night sky. We are not shown what it looks like afterwards. People would rush from the room gagging if the truth came on their TV screens at 10 pm. Most of us have never even seen a corpse, let alone a charred or dismembered one. We have not been powerless and defenceless in a city under bombardment (I am haunted by the fact that during the bombing of Baghdad dozens of women went into premature labour through terror. Who wants to be responsible for that?) My own brief experience of war zones has forever cured me of imagining that there is such a thing as a humanitarian war.

R. Lee Wrights:

I have come to realize that any excuse to go to war is as good as another -- for the warmongers. They claim we must wage war to preserve peace in a humanitarian effort to save the world. What utter and complete nonsense. There is nothing humanitarian about killing people en masse, for any reason, save that of self-defense. It is blasphemy to kill innocent people and have innocent people do your killing for you, all the while proclaiming to the world you are doing it in the blessed name of Peace.

It is time for all Americans to stop making excuses for war, or justifying it with supposed good intentions. War is much easier to stop before it starts than after it has already begun. Is it not preferable to have a country filled with prosperous patriots, than to fill our cemeteries with dead heroes? Please join me in calling for real change in American - an end to all war, and bringing the troops home.

Pablo Ouziel:

I assume that to some, I daresay to the majority of Western citizens, it must be a relief to see that ‘our’ force for good has not lost its momentum – that humanitarian benevolence which characterizes the self-portrait we paint of our societies as we ponder on our own exceptionalism, our magnanimity.

What would the world do without ‘our’ greatness, without ‘our’ kindness, without ‘our’ Altruism? It is in asking ourselves these kinds of moronic questions, that we carry forth the full force of our dogma – our collective delusion, the lie, which once again has facilitated the dropping of ‘our’ bombs on the citizens of another part of the planet. This time it is happening in Libya, and just as with all other wars of aggression initiated through the barrel of Western guns, the submarines, aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and missiles of all kinds, are only engaged in a ‘humanitarian’ mission.

The late Howard Zinn would often remind his audiences around the world of the definition of modern warfare – “war is the indiscriminate killing of civilians” he would say. Perhaps it would serve us well to ponder on this thought as we embark as citizens on some kind of collective response to this new and illegitimate war, this crime against humanity, which once again is being perpetrated in our name.

To the Teachers!

Rick Ayers:

We don’t go to work to blithely reproduce the inequities that exist in our society. We want students to learn, not just the ropes of the game and the gatekeepers, but their own power, their own capacity. We want them to have the creativity and imagination to know that another world is possible; we want them to have the skills to make it so.

[...]

A lot of people jaw about social change and activism but teachers do the work every day. Like an organizer, you are fighting for broader goals, ones tied to the doors you open for this student, the progress you make on that project.

We go back to work again and again for those goals, not for the ones defined by those who are selling off the public domain and the promise of equality, justice, and the common future, the policy wonks who seem to be in charge today.

My hero and heroine teachers are not the savior types you see in the movies. They are people like Septima Clark teaching in rural South Carolina, Paulo Freire organizing in the mountains of Brazil, Father Lorenzo Milani transforming peasant kids in Tuscany, Sylvia Ashton-Warner empowering Maori children in New Zealand, and so many others. They got no respect. They changed the world.

Bombs Away, Rescue Me

The indiscriminate killing by the U.S. begins.

N.Y. Times:

A Marine Corps officer said that the grounded pilot, who was in contact with rescue crews in the air, asked for bombs to be dropped as a precaution before the crews landed to pick him up. “My understanding is he asked for the ordnance to be delivered between where he was located and where he saw people coming toward him,” the officer said, adding that the pilot evidently made the request “to keep what he thought was a force closing in on him from closing in on him.”

In response, two Harrier attack jets that were part of the rescue team dropped two 500-pound bombs before a Marine Osprey helicopter landed to pick up the pilot, at about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday local time. The Marine officer said he did not know if the people approaching the pilot were friendly or hostile or what damage the bombs had caused.

Channel 4 News in Britain reported that six villagers were shot by American troops in rescuing one of the two airmen. None of the villagers — who were interviewed by a reporter in a nearby hospital — were killed, although a small boy may need to have a leg amputated.

"It would appear on its face to be an impeachable offense."

"It's not even disputable, this isn't even a close question. Such an action -- that involves putting America's service men and women into harm's way, whether they're in the Air Force or the Navy -- is a grave decision that cannot be made by the president alone."
- Dennis Kucinich

Obama once believed:

"The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

Rustbelt Radical:

I support the overthrow of Gaddafi by his own people; he should go the way of Ceausescu. I do not support the overthrow of Gaddafi by the most criminal regimes in the world, US and European imperial powers. France bombing North Africa? No thanks, seen that movie before. The United States bombing an Arab country? Way past time to end the sequels in that franchise too. There is not an instance in the last 100 years and longer, and if readers can come up with one please do share, where imperial powers have played anything but a pernicious role in the region. Just look at where those weapons Gaddafi is using to roll over the towns held by revolutionaries come from. We are to trust those same mother fuckers with saving the Lybian people? Not for a single moment.

radical left:

While Libya is Africa's third largest oil producer, it has the continent’s largest proven reserves; 44.3 billion barrels. It is a country with a relatively small population of about 6.5 million people. Western oil companies are salivating over the oil riches.

This is how the Western ruling classes see the popular uprising there. It's this that underlies their bogus "concerns" over the welfare of the Libyan people.

Dennis Perrin:

Bill Hicks once likened US foreign policy to old westerns where a gunman forces an unarmed man to pick up a pistol and then kills him when he does. But I think our national values are closer to The Sopranos -- armed sociopaths trying to maintain their power and wealth by any means necessary. And if a former friend/ally/business partner becomes inconvenient, two in the back of his head. Bada bang. It's only business.

Ilargi:

War has throughout history been used by "leaders" as a means to cover up their economic failures. The Great Depression never truly ended before World War II broke out for real in 1939.

"We immediately jump from 'This is a good cause' to 'This deserves a war.'”

Howard Zinn:

We’re supposed to be thinking people. We’re supposed to be able to question everything.

There are things that happen in the world that are bad, and you want to do something about them. You have a just cause. But our culture is so war prone that we immediately jump from “This is a good cause” to “This deserves a war.”

You need to be very, very comfortable in making that jump.

[...]

We’ve got to rethink this question of war and come to the conclusion that war cannot be accepted, no matter what. No matter what the reasons given, or the excuse: liberty, democracy; this, that. War is by definition the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers of people for ends that are uncertain. Think about means and ends, and apply it to war. The means are horrible, certainly. The ends, uncertain. That alone should make you hesitate.

"Remember Fukushima, oh yeah, didn’t that happen not long ago, how did it all come out?"

We've flipped from the nuke to the war channel. The red glare of rockets supplants the invisible nightmare of nuclear radiation.

Morialekafa:

This new “war” in Libya has at least for the moment upstaged the nuclear disaster in Japan, or so it appears. We haven’t forgotten about Japan, but in spite of the fact the situation there has been upgraded from level 4 to level 5 on the scale of 7, and in spite of the fact that radioactive iodine has been discovered in the Tokyo water supply, and in some of the food, and in spite of the fact that the situation could still blow up into an even greater disaster, it seems to be slowly getting less and less attention. This is as it should be if you have no intention of giving up on nuclear energy and want to continue building reactors, and who wouldn’t want to do that? Remember Chernobyl, oh yeah, I sort of remember hearing about that. Remember Three Mile, or yeah, I kind of remember. Remember Fukushima, or yeah, didn’t that happen not long ago, how did it all come out? How are those two new plants in Texas coming along?

Morialekafa again:

...no matter how it turns out, I believe to continue depending upon nuclear energy plants after Chernobyl and now Fukushima is so totally insane as to be completely unfathomable. Either people in power are just insane to begin with or their desire for profit is so overwhelming they are willing to sacrifice even life on the planet for their short-term gain. I don’t even care if it is safe (which it clearly is not), there still remains the unsolved problem of nuclear waste that will be around for centuries. If President Obama truly believes these plants are safe, and continues to provide billions in taxpayer money to promote them, he is truly the Commander-in-Chief of Insanity.

"If President Obama truly believes these plants are safe, and continues to provide billions in taxpayer money to promote them, he is truly the Commander-in-Chief of Insanity."

"I conceive of the Voluntary Simplicity Movement ... as a movement that seeks (and finds!) pleasure outside the market."

Samuel Alexander:

The liberal-democratic systems which structure modern consumer societies are based on the ideals of individual freedom and consumer sovereignty. In return for being left alone, consumer-citizens are asked for little more than to fulfil their civic duty once every three or four years by voting in elections. Aside from that minor inconvenience, the consumer-citizen is otherwise left free to pursue pleasure by maximizing consumption in the marketplace of goods and services. Spending money is the method of gratifying both one’s deepest and one’s most superficial desires. The slogan of our age seems to be: “I shop, therefore I am.”

Nice in theory, perhaps – or perhaps not even nice in theory. Whatever the case, consumer reality today is reflecting a picture that differs greatly from its own self-image. Increasingly the negative and debilitating features of consumer society are becoming evident, to none more so than consumers themselves. The pursuit of money and market consumption is proving so often to be a false target when it comes to the attainment of pleasure.

[...]

The core insight of alternative hedonism is that a life of pleasure can be best attained not by working for and then purchasing luxuries, necessarily, but by finding time for those ‘simple things’ in life that are free or at least inexpensive – things such as time with family and friends, time to swim in the ocean or read a good book, time to be creative, to make love, to sit under a tree in the morning and listen to the birds with a cup of tea. In other words, alternative hedonism does not see material simplicity of life impoverishing, but enriching. Indeed, it sees the high-consumption, materialistic lifestyles of consumer culture as impoverished. There will always be conspicuous consumers, of course, who seek ‘the good life’ through market expenditure. All I am suggesting is that we relinquish to those people the pursuit. I conceive of the Voluntary Simplicity Movement – at least one dimension of it – as a movement that seeks (and finds!) pleasure outside the market.

Alternative hedonism, in short, is about reclaiming the pleasures that are all too often lost in hustle-and-bustle of the rat race.

Do you try to live a more simple lifestyle? Take the Simplicity Institute's Simple Living Survey.

"Whatever words we use to disguise the fact, war is essentially about murder."

Peace Pledge Union:

SINCE THE END of the Second World War in 1945 there have been over 250 major wars in which over 50 million people have been killed, tens of millions made homeless, and countless millions injured and bereaved. In the history of warfare the twentieth century stands out as the bloodiest and most brutal - three times more people have been killed in wars in the last ninety years than in all the previous five hundred. The 21st century is off to a bad start.

[...]

Murder, the world over, is a crime punishable by long prison sentences (in some countries by execution). Yet hundreds of thousands of people in the world's armed forces are trained to murder - and murder people they do not even know. Whatever words we use to disguise the fact, war is essentially about murder. To drop bombs on a city, for example, is to murder ordinary citizens, many of them children; the pilot has no personal quarrel with them, but drops the bomb in the name of war - and thereby commits a mass murder.

But 'murder' is not a word used when talking about war. That would clearly make war a bad thing - something we should avoid at all cost, ready to lock up anyone who tries it. You can see the problem - 'British soldiers murder 150 Iraqi women and children in liberation of Kuwait' would make a very unusual headline in the daily paper. War transforms murder not only into something acceptable but highly commendable, for which, if you survive, you may receive praise, promotion, and even a medal.

Check out the Peace Pledge Union web site. Learn peace!

"War transforms murder not only into something acceptable but highly commendable, for which, if you survive, you may receive praise, promotion, and even a medal."

'War is a crime against humanity. I renounce war, and am therefore determined not to support any kind of war. I am also determined to work for the removal of all causes of war."

"The wrong questions are being asked and the wrong people are answering them."

Keith Harmon Snow:

A few months ago, President Barrack Obama signed some 8.5 billion dollar loan guarantees for a nuclear reactor construction project for U.S. nuclear corporation Southern Company, in partnership with the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).

Of course, the Price Andersen Act, passed in 1957, indemnifies nuclear utilities and reactor operators from all lawsuits, financial liability or related responsibility.

Everything suggests that it will be business as usual. Destabilization, destruction, war and catastrophe have always been turned into a big business for the United States of America. Across the ocean tens of thousands of people are protesting in Germany and France and Briton. Here, even the discussion is off course. The wrong questions are being asked and the wrong people are answering them. Instead of talking about limits to growth, the focus is on expansion, profits, trade and so-called progress. Why would this situation be any different? As Senator Barbara Boxer eventually said: we should be humbled.

Perhaps the worst horror of all is that people trapped in the contaminated zones are now being shunned by outsiders, including aid organizations. Radiation fears, mingled with a sick sense of abandonment, reported the Los Angeles Times, as people are afraid to help them. People in the evacuation zones – elders and those without fuel or transport — are getting no help, and no information. We should be humbled.

Community organizer and constitutional scholar gone bad

Daniel Ellsberg gets Obama.

"Where you stand depends on where you sit and the guy who sits in the oval office clearly comes to think that he's sitting on a throne."
- Daniel Ellsberg

The Planet It Is On

[source]

"What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?--if you cannot tolerate the planet it is on?"
- Henry David Thoreau

Does Thoreau have a future? What does he have to say to the 21st century? Check out this lecture by Lawrence Buell: Does Thoreau Have a Future? Reimagining Voluntary Simplicity for the Twenty-first Century

Google "business-obsessed culture"

I get only 84 results. I guess I'll have to rephrase what I am looking for, which is a better understanding of our business-obsessed culture.

"This technology is far too unforgiving and lethal to be managed safely over time by human institutions, even if they were operated responsibly."

Richard Falk:

Some critics of nuclear energy facilities in Japan and elsewhere had warned that these Fukushima reactors sme built more than 40 years ago had become accident-prone and should no longer have been kept operational. And we know that governments will be under great pressure to renew the Faustian Bargain despite what should have been clear from the moment the bombs fell in 1945: This technology is far too unforgiving and lethal to be managed safely over time by human institutions, even if they were operated responsibly, which they are not. It is folly to persist, but it is foolhardy to expect the elites of the world to change course, despite this dramatic delivery of vivid reminders of human fallibility and culpability. We cannot hope to control the savageries of nature, although even these are being intensified by our refusal to take responsible steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but we can, if the will existed, learn to live within prudent limits even if this comes to mean a less materially abundant and an altered life style. The failure to take seriously the precautionary principle as a guide to social planning is a gathering dark cloud menacing all of our futures.

Let us fervently hope that this Sendai disaster will not take further turns for the worse, but that the warnings already embedded in such happenings, will awaken enough people to the dangers on this path of hyper-modernity so that a politics of limits can arise to challenge the prevailing politics of limitless growth. Such a challenge must include the repudiation of a neoliberal worldview, insisting without compromise on an economics based on needs and people rather than on profit margins and capital efficiency. Advocacy of such a course is admittedly a long shot, but so is the deadly utopian realism of staying on the nuclear course, whether it be with weapons or reactors. This is what Sendai should teach all of us! But will it?

"The failure to take seriously the precautionary principle as a guide to social planning is a gathering dark cloud menacing all of our futures."

"Nobody can say how much radioactivity will hit California."

[source: N.Y. Times]

Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times:

Since Japanese authorities have said little about the amount of the releases at Fukushima, nobody can say how much radioactivity will hit California.

The models show that even with prevailing easterly winds, the plumes whip back and forth over a wide area of Japan's east coast, Russia's Kamchatka peninsula and Alaska's Aleutian Islands. It is unknown whether nuclear fallout is hitting the vast wilderness of northeastern Asia.

Of particular concern, however, is radiation emanating from Fukushima's No. 3 reactor. That reactor uses plutonium fuel, which poses a special health risk even in small quantities if the fallout were to reach U.S. shores.

N.Y. Times:

Western nuclear engineers have said that the release of mox into the atmosphere would produce a more dangerous radioactive plume than the dispersal of uranium fuel rods at the site. The Japanese authorities also expressed concern on Wednesday that the pressure in the No. 3 reactor had plunged and that either gauges were malfunctioning or a rupture had already occurred.

The South Coast AQMD is posting a daily radiation monitoring update. As of yesterday:

...radiation levels measured at three regional sites operated by the South Coast Air Quality Management District for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have not been higher than typical “background” levels seen before the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. In the unlikely event that this changes, these extremely sensitive monitors will detect any change in outdoor radiation levels and it will be reported on this website.

It's good to know that some areas are taking the risks seriously. If enough radiation is emitted, it's not going to just disappear over the ocean. It's well-documented that the U.S. gets billions of pounds of particulate pollution each year from China. What gets into the atmosphere over there makes its way to us.

Satellite data confirmed 18 teragrams -- almost 40 billion pounds -- of pollution aerosol was exported to the northwestern Pacific Ocean and 4.5 teragrams – nearly 10 billion pounds -- reached North America annually from East Asia over the study period.

This is a reader in Santa Monica.

“What are they wanting? For everyone to be making minimum wage?”

Sabrina Tavernise:

David Beaver, 65, a barber, said that when he got out of high school, “you could go anywhere you wanted to and pick your job.”

“Now, it’s depressing,” Mr. Beaver said. “I hear the boys talking. They can’t find anything.”

It is not that there are no jobs, but rather that the jobs available pay too little and have no benefits, resulting in, as Mr. Beaver put it, “just scraping by.” A private hospital and two power plants do offer good jobs, but they are highly competitive and many require some higher education, something that fewer than one in five people here have, according to 2009 census data.

So most people scrape by, as Ms. Taylor did before landing her state job in 1996. At the time, she was living in a trailer and working in low-wage jobs at Wendy’s, Dairy Queen and a Big Lots discount store. Her hourly wage jumped to $9 when she started at the Gallipolis Developmental Center, a state home for mentally retarded people, up from $5.25 at a private nursing home.

“If I wasn’t working at the G.D.C., I’d have to work around the clock,” said Chris Smith, Ms. Taylor’s colleague, referring to the center, where she has worked for 20 years. “I’d have to work two or three jobs to keep at this level.”

The Taylors are not college educated, but their public-sector jobs have made them middle class. Together they earn about $63,000 a year, a sum that puts them squarely at the middle point of earnings for American families, and higher than the $50,000 earned by the typical Gallipolis family.

Money is still tight. When their washing machine broke in November, they had to put the new one on a credit card. They could not afford college for either of their sons. One is in the Marines, and the other, a high school senior, just enlisted.

“We’re not living in any rich, high-income way,” said Ms. Taylor, 37, who, together with her husband, protested the public-sector bill in Columbus this month.

“What are they wanting?” she said of the bill. “For everyone to be making minimum wage?”

"The Taylors are not college educated, but their public-sector jobs have made them middle class."

Our nuke-loving President: "Any nuclear release dissipates by the time it gets even to Hawaii, much less the mainland of the United States."

Raw Story:

Obama said he was not worried that any radiation seeping out the plant might reach US shores, but emphasized: "I'm deeply worried about radiation effects in Japan."

[...]

"There are some dangers for radiation release that could affect the immediate vicinity of nuclear plants and potentially could drift over other parts of Japan," he told KDKA.

"But I've been assured that it -- any nuclear release dissipates by the time it gets even to Hawaii, much less the mainland of the United States," he said.

A web site, Radiation Network, shows "environmental radiation levels across the USA". I have no idea if it is providing legitimate readings. This is something our government should be doing.

Update: RADNET, a government site, provides detailed quarterly radiation readings. Apparently, near real-time data can be accessed as well, with registration.

KTVU:

Radnet, as it's called, can detect minute changes in radiation levels across the country.

Eric Stevenson of the Bay Area Air Quality and Managment District said the system is capable of reading radiation levels on a real time basis.

"And there are filter media inside the instrument that we send to the laboratory twice a week," explained Stevenson.

The devices can pick up traces of beta and gamma particles as well as uranium and plutonium. Following the explosions at the Japanese nuclear plant, particles would likely get picked up by the jet stream, the fast moving current of air that travels from Asia to the West Coast.

But experts said they believe any radioactive material will diminish by the time it reaches California.

"Accidents will happen. We're fallible and so are our technologies. And the consequences of accidents with nuclear energy are just too high."

Paul Levinson:

But after Three Mile Island in 1979, I concluded that nuclear power was just too dangerous to warrant using as a mainstream energy source. I was struck back then by a headline in the New York Daily News - "Thousands Flee N-Zone". I love science fiction, but that was one movie I did not want to be in.

Chernobyl in 1986 only confirmed this. It doesn't matter what the reasons for the accidents are. Accidents will happen. We're fallible and so are our technologies. And the consequences of accidents with nuclear energy are just too high. Radiation released and its destructive consequences stay around for a very long time.

And now the same may be happening at a nuclear plant in Japan. It was damaged by the earthquake and tsunami. Its cooling system was broken. Current reports say the ceiling of the plant has collapsed, which could lead to a complete meltdown, in turn releasing large amounts of dangerous radiation.

With prices of oil soaring all over, it's especially difficult to give up an alternate source. But it's time to give up on nuclear energy. The world should do everything it can to help Japan in its awful time of need, and then see to it that its own energy sources no longer include nuclear.

It doesn't matter how many safety measures and back-up safety measures and back-up back-up safety measures are implemented in nuclear power plants. Nuclear power is not safe because human beings are not perfect. The costs of imperfection are on display now in Japan.

"Arguing for the freedom to eat as much meat as you want is equivalent to arguing for treating farm animals as if they could not feel pain."

Mark Bittman:

I can put around 200 million male chicks a year through grinders (graphic video here), castrate — mostly without anesthetic — 65 million calves and piglets a year, breed sick animals (don’t forget: more than half a billion eggs were recalled last summer, from just two Iowa farms) who in turn breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria, allow those sick animals to die without individual veterinary care, imprison animals in cages so small they cannot turn around, skin live animals, or kill animals en masse to stem disease outbreaks.

All of this is legal, because we will eat them.

We have “justifiable purposes”: pleasure (or, at this point, habit, because eating is hardly a pleasure if you do it in your car, or in 10 minutes), convenience — there are few things more filling per dollar than a cheeseburger — and of course corporate profits. We should be treating animals better and raising fewer of them; this would naturally reduce our consumption. All in all, a better situation for us, the animals, the world.

Arguing for the freedom to eat as much meat as you want is equivalent to arguing for treating farm animals as if they could not feel pain.

Bittman also did a blog entry yesterday about bills in Iowa and Florida that would make filming on farms without permission a first-degree felony.

I mentioned in my column that in recent weeks politicians in Florida and Iowa have introduced bills that aim to crack down on shooting photographs and videos of agricultural operations. The Florida bill would require anyone wishing to photograph a farm to first secure written permission from the owner. And what if they don’t? First-degree felony. The implicit goal here is to deter and criminalize damning undercover exposés like this one. The bill would also make it illegal for an agenda-less passerby to snap a picture of a farm from the side of the road, but my best guess is that those “crimes” might not be prosecuted quite so diligently.

If you have to hide it, farmers, you shouldn't be doing it.

“A single spent fuel pond holds more cesium-137 than was deposited by all atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in the Northern Hemisphere combined."

Information on spent fuel from: An Investigation of People’s Concerns about Interim Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel in the United States:

...the radiation of spent fuel is predominantly made up of alpha particles. Because spent nuclear fuel primarily emits alpha particles, the likelihood of exposure is not as high as most people believe. Alpha particles are the largest radioactive particle and travel at the slowest speed (relative to gamma and beta particles) which makes it very difficult for them to penetrate human skin and therefore is usually harmless. These particles travel very small distances in air and can be stopped by a single sheet of paper. The only way in which alpha particles may be harmful to the human body is if they are first ingested or inhaled.

[...]

While containing the radiation given off from spent fuel is very important, cooling the spent fuel is equally (if not more) important. If spent fuel is not transported to fuel pools to be cooled, or if the fuel pools are not monitored carefully, the fuel could overheat and create a fire that could possibly be more devastating than a nuclear meltdown. If the zirconium cladding used in fuel rods is exposed to air or steam, it will react exothermically and create a fire that would reach a temperature of about 1,000 degrees Celsius. A fire of this magnitude could rage on for days. The effects of radiation from the fuel itself catching fire could cause even more damage than the fire. In fact, according to NIRS (Nuclear Information Resource Service): “A single spent fuel pond holds more cesium-137 than was deposited by all atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in the Northern Hemisphere combined."

N. Y. Times:

Once most of the fuel is exposed, he said, it can catch fire.

If the spent fuel is a few months old, most of the iodine 131 — one of the most dangerous radioactive byproducts in spent fuel — will have decayed into harmless forms.

But the cesium 137 in the spent fuel has a half-life of 30 years, meaning it would take about two centuries to diminish its levels of radioactivity down to 1 percent.

It is cesium 137 that still contaminates much land in Ukraine around the Chernobyl reactor, which suffered a meltdown in 1986.

"It is cesium 137 that still contaminates much land in Ukraine around the Chernobyl reactor, which suffered a meltdown in 1986."

"Human conscience is nowhere so profoundly inoperative, as in their disregard for the life and happiness of the non-human animal world."

[source]

Howard Moore, from The Universal Kinship (1916):

Human nature is nowhere so hideous, and human conscience is nowhere so profoundly inoperative, as in their disregard for the life and happiness of the non-human animal world.

[...]

Non-human millions are outsiders. They are looked upon and treated by human beings as if they were an entirely different order of existences, with entirely different purposes and susceptibilities, from human beings. They are not considered to be living beings at all, as human beings are, who are here in the world to enjoy life and all that life holds that is dear to a living being. They belong to the same class of existences as the waves of the sea and the weeds of the field. They are looked upon as mere things — mere moving, multiplying objects, without the slightest equity in the world in which they find themselves. They may be set upon, beaten, maimed, starved,assassinated, eaten, insulted, deceived, imprisoned, robbed, tormented, skinned alive, shot down for pastime, cut to pieces out of curiosity, or compelled to undergo any other enormity or victimisation anybody can think of or is disposed to visit upon them. It is enough almost to make knaves shudder, the cold-blooded and business-like manner in which we cut their throats, dash out their brains, and discuss their flavour at our cannibalistic feasts. As Plutarch says, 'Lions, tigers, and serpents we call savage and ferocious, yet we ourselves come behind them in no species of barbarity.' Accustomed from our cradle up to look upon violence and assassination, we have become so habituated and hardened to these things that we perpetrate them and see them perpetrated with the same indifference as that with which we watch waves die on the beach. Human beings are, in fact ('paragons' though they pretend to be), the most predatory and brutal of all animals —the great bone-breakers and bone-pickers of the planet.

"It is enough almost to make knaves shudder, the cold-blooded and business-like manner in which we cut their throats, dash out their brains, and discuss their flavour at our cannibalistic feasts."
- Howard Moore

"Prevailing jet stream winds in the upper atmosphere will carry any radiation towards Alaska, California and Hawaii."

Prison Planet:

The fact that the winds are set to change to an easterly direction and blow any radiation out to sea is good news for Japan, but it won’t be of any comfort to Americans living on the west coast. As we have documented, prevailing jet stream winds in the upper atmosphere will carry any radiation towards Alaska, California and Hawaii.

If the radiation leak is significant enough not to be dispersed over the Pacific Ocean, it will take roughly seven days to reach the United States.

It would be nice to know what the risks are.

"Any system that requires endless time frames of total vigilance is one we cannot run."

Culture of Life News:

Any system that requires endless time frames of total vigilance is one we cannot run. Our monkey natures means we always screw it up in the end due to simple familiarity. For example, dealing with nuclear power means being very, very, very careful and utterly endlessly day and night vigilant…impossible for us to do for years and years and years on end.

All religions are based on the notion that we have to do various magical spells exactly right with the right words, facing the right direction (or widdershins!) and making the right gestures and movements and these are etched in stone and passed on year after year and even with this maniacal devotion to the details, we still screw it up hopelessly on one or another occasion.

[...]

Like a religious mantra, they keep bleating, ‘But these massive explosions didn’t disturb the container units!’ Na Mu Myo Ho Ren Ge Kyo chant the Japanese corporation who runs this catastrophic nuclear power plant. Seriously, no one has any idea what is really going on inside of the belly of these Japanese youkai death machines!

What we do know is that all of the reactors are reacting in a similar way in that they are changing from being human servants trapped inside of these cement and metal jugs and are now hatching like Hani no Tori firebirds of prey. Once these former servants shed their chains and are free, they will fly forth and devour or destroy us.

This is why I have been against nuclear power all my life. I don’t trust humans to do sane things for very long, we tend to be crazy. And anyone who claims we are vigilant should have their heads examined. Even with threats of angry gods, we still screw up the protocols for handling demonic forces! All myths agree on this!

"Dealing with nuclear power means being very, very, very careful and utterly endlessly day and night vigilant…impossible for us to do for years and years and years on end."

"TEPCO doesn't care who lives and who dies, whether in Japan or the USA."

Greg Palast:

These plants are now releasing radioactive steam into the atmosphere. Be skeptical about the statements that the "levels are not dangerous." These are the same people who said these meltdowns could never happen. Over years, not days, there may be a thousand people, two thousand, ten thousand who will suffer from cancers induced by this radiation.

In my New York investigation, I had the unhappy job of totaling up post-meltdown "morbidity" rates for the county government. It would be irresponsible for me to estimate the number of cancer deaths that will occur from these releases without further information; but it is just plain criminal for the TEPCO shoguns to say that these releases are not dangerous.

Indeed, the fact that residents near the Japanese nuclear plants were not issued iodine pills to keep at the ready shows TEPCO doesn't care who lives and who dies, whether in Japan or the USA. The carcinogenic isotopes that are released at Fukushima are already floating to Seattle with effects we simply cannot measure.

Heaven help us. Because Obama won't.

"Be skeptical about the statements that the 'levels are not dangerous.' These are the same people who said these meltdowns could never happen."
- Greg Palast

Take a Little Yellow Lemon break

Racism at UCLA: "The problem is these hordes of Asian people."

Someone needs to grow up.

"The problem is these hordes of Asian people that UCLA accepts into our school every single year, which is fine. But if you're going to come to UCLA then use American manners."

"Always we have to press on towards that great and final liberation—the realization of our common humanity."

Edward Carpenter, from The Healing of Nations (1915):

Personally, I am probably more International by temperament than Patriotic. I feel a strange kinship and intimacy with all sorts of queer and outlandish races—Chinese, Egyptian, Mexican, or Polynesian—and always a slight but persistent sense of estrangement and misapprehension among my own people. Flag-waving certainly does not stir me.

[...]

It is an old story and an old difficulty. There comes a time when every institution of social life becomes rotten and diseased and has to be removed to make way for the new life which is expanding behind it. Broadly speaking, we may say that the institution of Patriotism is approaching this period—at any rate over Western Europe. The outlines of an International life are becoming clearly visible behind it.

What we have to do is to help on that international life and spirit to our best, and certainly clear out a lot of sham patriotism that stands in its way; but this has to be done with discrimination and a certain tact. People must be made to see that " my country, right or wrong," is not the genuine article. They must be made to understand how easily this sort of slapdash sentiment throws them into the hands of scheming politicians and wire-pullers for sinister purposes—how readily it can be made use of directly it has become a mere unreasoning instinct and habit. If a war is wanted, or conscription, or a customs tariff—it may be merely to suit the coward fears of autocratic rulers, or the selfish interests of some group of contractors or concession-hunters—all that the parties concerned have to do is to play the patriotic stop, and they stand a good chance of getting what they want.

[...]

Always we have to press on towards that great and final liberation—the realization of our common humanity, the recognition of the same great soul of man slumbering under all forms in the heart of all races—the one guarantee and assurance of the advent of World-peace.

That we are verging rapidly towards some altered perspective I quite believe; and the day is coming when in the social and political spheres International activity will make excessive patriotism seem somewhat ridiculous —as, in fact, it has already done in the spheres of Science and Industry and Art.

"People must be made to see that 'my country, right or wrong,' is not the genuine article. They must be made to understand how easily this sort of slapdash sentiment throws them into the hands of scheming politicians and wire-pullers for sinister purposes..."
- Edward Carpenter

"They are the faces of the corporate state. They have the capacity to exude a kind of false empathy and understanding."

Chris Hedges interviewed on the Progressive Radio Network.

The mainstream media, liberal or otherwise?
"It's vacuous."

Hedges on corporations:

"It's all about profit. I mean, these people have a very myopic and stunted vision of life. They've lost the capacity for the sacred. Everything is a commodity. Human beings are a commodity. The natural world is a commodity. And we exploit them until exhaustion or collapse. That's all they know how to do. In theological terms, they support systems of death and they are individuals who are stunted, deformed, moral and intellectual trolls."

"War is the killer of cultures and civilizations and ours is in danger."

Rob Ham:

We love to glorify war in this country. We cheer and pontificate about our “cherished way of life” and “democracy” and “freedom” and all manner of other high sounding hyperbole in order to keep the guilt of causing so much carnage at bay. I really wonder if the wars we fight are really about any of those things. It’s a tough pill to swallow when you consider that no matter what the justification for war, somebody always gets rich off the bloodshed. Patriotism is easy when you are lining your pockets and you don’t have to fight. Our gated communities and country clubs are full of fat cats getting huge paydays while are kids bleed and lose limbs.

[...]

No process more efficiently siphons money from public coffers into private bank accounts like war. Oceans of tax payer dollars go to arms manufacturers and support service corporations at a rate that boggles the mind. At no time in our history has war been more privatized then it is today. Food service, transport, security and all manner of other services are being farmed out, at considerable cost, to private companies. These companies are reaping huge profits and the citizenry is footing the bill. Do you really think that it is an accident that this war has gone on for nearly ten years? It certainly is not. US business knows a good thing when they see it and they will keep it going as long as they possibly can, after all, it’s not their blood being spilled.

[...]

War is glorified, fears are played upon and children are taught from a very young age that to serve the nation as a soldier is glorious. Killing and maiming becomes okay if it is in the name of “National Security” or our precious “way of life”. Hate also becomes a virtue, words like “Kraut” and “Jap” evolved into “Gook” then “Towelhead” or “Hadji”. Hate is a vital ingredient of war. As soon as a people stop hating “the enemy” then the jig is up. Peace ensues and the corporate gravy train comes to a screeching halt.

[...]

The time has come to stop this. War is unsustainable militarily, economically and morally. We need to reevaluate what the threats realistically are and examine alternatives in dealing with them besides the deployment of troops. War is the killer of cultures and civilizations and ours is in danger.

"Plutonium's half life is 24,000 years ... anything released in Fukushima today could be around at dangerous levels for up to half a millon years."

Jeffrey Kluger:

There are four kinds of isotopes that are likeliest to be emitted by the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant, as well as the other three that have been taken offline: iodine-131, cesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-239. Iodine-131 is, in many ways, the most dangerous of the four, because it can lead to cancer — specifically thyroid cancer — in people exposed to it in the shortest time. Epidemiologists estimate that there were 6,000 to 7,000 cases of thyroid cancer that never would have occurred as a result of the 1986 Chernobyl explosion in Russia. Most of the victims were people who were children at the time of their exposure and developed the disease later.

Strontium and cesium are the next up the danger scale. While iodine tends to concentrate its damage to the thyroid, those two are not nearly so selective. "Strontium is chemicaly similar to calcium," says Dr. Ira Helfand, a board member for Physicians for Social Responsibility. "So it gets incorporated into bones and teeth and can stay there, irradiating the body, for a long time." Strontium is most commonly linked to leukemia.

Cesium works in other ways, behaving more like potassium when it's inside the body — which means it circulates everywhere and can contaminate anything. Cesium doesn't linger as long as strontium does — it gets excreted in urine over the course of months or years — but that's more than long enough to cause cancer of the liver, kidneys, pancreas and more. "Basically all of the solid tumors," says Helfand.

More troubling, cesium and strontium linger not just in the body, but in the environment. Strontium has a half-life of 29 years; cesium's is 30. A radioactive isotope is generally considered dangerous for 10 to 20 times its half life, which in these cases tops out at about 600 years.

Most worrisome of all is plutonium-239 — for a number of reasons. First of all, the vast majority of a fuel rod is made of plutonium, which means there's just more of it in play. What's more, says Helfand, "It's extraordinarily toxic." Plutonium exposure usually comes from inhalation rather than ingestion, so it's mostly associated with lung cancer. What's more, plutonium's half life is 24,000 years, which means anything released in Fukushima today could be around at dangerous levels for up to half a millon years.

"Wherever it is that a power plant is leaking radiation, you want to be somewhere else — preferably a very distant somewhere else."

"Even at its most just, it’s most unavoidable, war is an obscenity so foul that is should offend us."

Glenden Brown:

Patriotism isn’t about rushing to war because it seems glorious, it isn’t about treating life as a cheap and disposable thing. Instead, patriotism is about valuing American life enough to only ask people to give up their lives in battle and to give up their loved ones enough that we will never rush to war blind to the costs of war. We must not hide the cost of war from ourselves, we must not pretend that war is simply a march to glory and we must instead face facts that war is a hideous, shameful exercise that debases humanity; even at its most necessary, even at its most just, it’s most unavoidable, war is an obscenity so foul that is should offend us; we should not celebrate or glorify war-making.

"Pretty much every great worthwhile achievement in human history ... has been based on cooperation and mutual aid."

David Graeber:

Take the principle that two wrongs don't make a right. If you really took it seriously, that alone would knock away almost the entire basis for war and the criminal justice system. The same goes for sharing: we're always telling children that they have to learn to share, to be considerate of each other's needs, to help each other; then we go off into the real world where we assume that everyone is naturally selfish and competitive. But an anarchist would point out: in fact, what we say to our children is right. Pretty much every great worthwhile achievement in human history, every discovery or accomplishment that's improved our lives, has been based on cooperation and mutual aid; even now, most of us spend more of our money on our friends and families than on ourselves; while likely as not there will always be competitive people in the world, there's no reason why society has to be based on encouraging such behavior, let alone making people compete over the basic necessities of life. That only serves the interests of people in power, who want us to live in fear of one another. That's why anarchists call for a society based not only on free association but mutual aid. The fact is that most children grow up believing in anarchist morality, and then gradually have to realize that the adult world doesn't really work that way. That's why so many become rebellious, or alienated, even suicidal as adolescents, and finally, resigned and bitter as adults; their only solace, often, being the ability to raise children of their own and pretend to them that the world is fair. But what if we really could start to build a world which really was at least founded on principles of justice? Wouldn't that be the greatest gift to one's children one could possibly give?

G.E., we bring radiation to life

Steven Mufson (via Seattle Times):

There were also reports of elevated radiation levels inside the control room of one reactor unit, which was built 40 years ago by General Electric. NISA said levels were 1,000 times the norm inside the room. The Associated Press later quoted a NISA official as saying radiation levels outside the plant were measured as eight times higher than normal.

"The pageantry of power, the still more foolish pageantry of wealth... words fail me to express my utter contempt for such pleasure or such ambitions"

[source]

Richard Jefferies:

It is in myself that I desire increase, profit, and exaltation of body, mind, and soul. The surroundings, the clothes, the dwelling, the social status, the circumstances are to me utterly indifferent. Let the floor of the room be bare, let the furniture be a plank table, the bed a mere pallet. Let the house be plain and simple, but in the midst of air and light. These are enough--a cave would be enough; in a warmer climate the open air would suffice. Let me be furnished in myself with health, safety, strength, the perfection of physical existence; let my mind be furnished with highest thoughts of soul-life. Let me be in myself myself fully. The pageantry of power, the still more foolish pageantry of wealth, the senseless precedence of place; words fail me to express my utter contempt for such pleasure or such ambitions. Let me be in myself myself fully, and those I love equally so.

[...]

I would submit to a severe discipline, and to go without many things cheerfully, for the good and happiness of the human race in the future. Each one of us should do something, however small, towards that great end. At the present time the labour of our predecessors in this country, in all other countries of the earth, is entirely wasted. We live--that is, we snatch an existence--and our works become nothing. The piling up of fortunes, the building of cities, the establishment of immense commerce, ends in a cipher. These objects are so outside my idea that I cannot understand them, and look upon the struggle in amazement. Not even the pressure of poverty can force upon me an understanding of, and sympathy with, these things. It is the human being as the human being of whom I think. That the human being as the human being, nude--apart altogether from money, clothing, houses, properties--should enjoy greater health, strength, safety, beauty, and happiness, I would gladly agree to a discipline like that of Sparta.

For more on Richard Jefferies.

"Their little profits aren't worth the welfare of society as a whole."

John Madziarczyk:

So businesses should at the very, very, least pay their fair share. All of this talk about cutting taxes and cutting regulations in order to improve business functioning is misleading in the extreme, in that the argument is that improving a climate for business improves society. Doesn't doing things that improve society, improve society? Having regulations to protect individuals and the environment protects and improves society, having business pay their fair share so that state and local governments can pave roads and pay teachers improves society. Business, by this standard, is not an end in itself, but is only instrumental, and so as an instrumental institution can and should be compromised if it no longer fulfills a positive instrumental function. That is, if we really are talking about not just having business be unregulated because businesspeople want money. Surely business sees itself as an end and not as a means. They should have their perspective adjusted, because their little profits aren't worth the welfare of society as a whole.

"Have you always been respected by your neighbours?"

Beware

HAVE you always been respected by your neighbours?
Do they ask your advice on all important matters?
Do they all speak well of you, and point you out as a leading citizen and a pillar of society?
Has no one ever said that you were beside yourself,
Or called you crazy, or a crank, or a pestilent fellow?
Have you never been accused of associating with publicans and sinners, or of stirring up the people, or of turning the world upside down?
In short, are you thoroughly respectable?
Then beware! you are on the downward road; you are in bad company.
Mend your ways, or you can claim no kinship with
the saints and heroes which were before you.

- Ernest Crosby