Thursday, March 17, 2011

Open Thread


Open
Thread



Meltdown In Japan:
"We are afraid that the water level at [the No 4 reactor] is the lowest," said Hikaru Kuroda, a Tepco official. But he added, "Because we cannot get near it, the only way to monitor the situation is visually from far away."
(Guardian, emphasis added). The United Nations projects that the radioactive plume will hit Alaska by today, California by Friday.

USA decides to dispense with the propaganda and for once tell it like it is:
According to the official, the U.S. believes a larger evacuation zone should be imposed and that the next 24-48 hours are "critical."

"It would be hard to describe how alarming this is right now," ABC quoted the anonymous official as saying.
(Huffpo, emphasis added).
Meanwhile propaganda goes to Hollywood:
Connections between the Pentagon and the entertainment industry, first intensified in the 1980s, continue to embed militarism in seemingly non-political products like video games and action movies ... when it comes to the Pentagon-Hollywood relationship since the 1980s -- only in that case, we're now seeing military officials quite literally line-editing scripts to make them more pro-military.
(Your Tax Dollars At Work, emphasis added).
I updated the post which said that MOMCOM spent about $700 billion a year on "defense".

After that update, the post now says $1.22 Trillion, which means MOMCOM spends the equivalent of about 120 Japan disasters every year (10 per month) on imperialism.

4 comments:

  1. "They need to stop pulling out people -- and step up with getting them back in the reactor to cool it. There is a recognition this is a suicide mission," the unnamed U.S. official was quoted by ABC as saying.

    Yeah, I'll bet the workers are just lining up for this duty alright. Even the talking head scientists on TV this morning are all over the map as to what's going on over there, and no one's talking at all about the ultimate outcome here if the worst case scenarios play out. Massive and long-lived fallout in Japan for sure, but how far could this thing potentially spread if the plume gets into the upper atmosphere? What a mess.

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  2. There is recognition this is a suicide mission...see it below...

    http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-send-special-nuclear-team-japan-nuclear-regulatory/story?id=13148044

    President Obama has been briefed by nuclear experts.

    The Japanese have evacuated most of the reactor personnel from the Fukushima nuclear complex and are rotating teams of 50 workers through the facility in an attempt to cool it down.

    "We are all-out urging the Japanese to get more people back in there to do emergency operation there, that the next 24 to 48 hours are critical," the official said. "Urgent efforts are needed on the part of the Japanese to restore emergency operations to cool" down the reactors' rods before they trigger a meltdown.

    "They need to stop pulling out people—and step up with getting them back in the reactor to cool it. There is a recognition this is a suicide mission," the official said.

    The official said the United States is in very deep consultations with Japanese about the way forward and that the only thing that has been favorable is the wind pattern that is blowing the contaminated material out to sea instead south towards Tokyo and other populated areas, but that can't be counted upon.

    Chilling

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  3. It is obscenity on steriods that MOMCOM spends the equivalent of 120 Japan disasters every year on imperialism.

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  4. Randy,

    But on the bright side (for someone anyway), MOMCOM's probably got her efficiencies so far down pat (albeit, in reverse), that we're probably only actually receiving 80 Japan disasters worth of value for our money. Call that "the MOMCOM markup," or the price a free society pays for allowing a group of corporate blood-sucking leeches to extort old fashioned "protection money" under the guise of "national defense." It's all the rage among the business school set these days. Fortunately, the host is on emergency life support measures as we speak, so the parasite is not long for this world either.

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