A Handy Comma Delimited List of Homeland Security Key Words For Home Use
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[Editor's note: “I looked through the list of keywords and a strong percentage of them are words that I've used in various posts on my site and others over the years, in articles both critical and in favor of governmental or business policy.
It would be difficult to write about politics, current events or publish a news story without the normal and casual use of most of these keywords. I can only conclude that we've arrived at a state of almost unimaginable paranoia and the country is finally, irredeemably insane.
If the US was a magazine I'd promptly cancel my subscription.”
Below the fold is a comma delimited list of the keywords from the 39-page "Analyst’s Desktop Binder.” Feel free to copy and paste them into your blog or use them as tags in your posts. You can also use them in family letters, grocery lists, birthday cards or anything you want to draw attention to. Enjoy. Bob Higgins]
This from the Huffington Post by Andrea Stone :
Ever complain on Facebook that you were feeling “sick?” Told your friends to “watch” a certain TV show? Left a comment on a media website about government “pork?”
If you did any of those things, or tweeted about your recent vacation in “Mexico” or a shopping trip to “Target,” the Department of Homeland Security may have noticed.
In the latest revelation of how the federal government is monitoring social media and online news outlets, the Electronic Privacy Information Center has posted online a 2011 Department of Homeland Security manual that includes hundreds of key words (such as those above) and search terms used to detect possible terrorism, unfolding natural disasters and public health threats. The center, a privacy watchdog group, filed a Freedom of Information Act request and then sued to obtain the release of the documents.
The 39-page “Analyst’s Desktop Binder” used by the department’s National Operations Center includes no-brainer words like “”attack,” “epidemic” and “Al Qaeda” (with various spellings). But the list also includes words that can be interpreted as either menacing or innocent depending on the context, such as “exercise,” “drill,” “wave,” “initiative,” “relief” and “organization.”
Read the rest at Homeland Security Manual Lists Government Key Words For Monitoring Social Media, News.
List below click ‘more:’
Like Lincoln, Jefferson, Madison – Americans Fear Corporate Control of Public Policy (Updated)
"The Truth About the Original Tea Party" Thom Hartmann
[Editor's note: I wrote this piece two years ago just after the terrible SCOTUS decision in Citizens United. I'm re posting it today in order to include the excellent video by Thom Hartmann "The Truth About the Original Tea Party" Bob Higgins] Updated (originally posted 2/17/10)
The Washington Post’s Dan Eggen reports this morning on the results of a WaPo/ABC News poll which shows Americans to be “overwhelmingly” opposed to the recent SCOTUS decision to allow corporations to spend unlimited amounts of cash in election campaigns.
“Eight in 10 poll respondents say they oppose the high court’s Jan. 21 decision to allow unfettered corporate political spending, with 65 percent “strongly” opposed. Nearly as many backed congressional action to curb the ruling, with 72 percent in favor of reinstating limits. The poll reveals relatively little difference of opinion on the issue among Democrats (85 percent opposed to the ruling), Republicans (76 percent) and independents (81 percent).”
Americans have always been distrustful of corporations and their ability to exercise power and control over public affairs.
Ever since Elizabeth I created the East India Company in 1600, corporations have been a pain in the public neck. Her royal act to protect the monetary interests of wealthy members of her court, parliament and herself created a company that would, over the course of two centuries, grow in power to rival many of the worlds nation states.
A legal fiction, corporations exist solely to protect the oligarchy from the results of their risky behavior in the search for ever greater profit. Incorporate and pass the risk on to someone else, creditors, taxpayers, anyone but those involved in the scheme itself.
Businessmen of the time, as today, were and are, infinitely more comfortable operating in an environment devoid of risk to their profits, unless of course they are operating on someone else’s money, (taxpayers) in which case nearly any risk can be accepted; “it’s public money, double down and toss the dice boys.”
Global Unemployment
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Global Unemployment
Cross Posted at FilmAnnex
It will offer small consolation to the long term unemployed in the US to know that much of the rest of the world is suffering from the same problem. The International Labor Organization (ILO) reported late last month that more than 1.1 billion people were either unemployed or underemployed and living in the clutches of poverty.
While there may be some truth to the old saw that “misery loves company” and the discovery that there are a billion people in the boat may be somehow weirdly comforting, you have to wonder how long the dinghy will dally on the surface before behaving more like an anchor.
It’s also unsettling to realize just how long the unemployment lines are and how many people have applied for the job you so desperately need. With 1.1 billion people waiting the line will stretch around the globe 25 times so you’re not likely to get home for lunch.
Read more at FilmAnnex
Fracking for Treasure in Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago Fish Kills
Cross posted at Film Annex
“Chevron oil rig on fire in Niger Delta,” “BP’s Deepwater Horizon sinks in Gulf of Mexico,” “Shell confirms oil leak in North Sea,” “Massive fish kill in Trinidad and Tobago.” The headlines have become as familiar as announcements of freeway pile ups and severe thunderstorms.
From Nigeria to the North Sea, from the icy chill of Alaska’s Beaufort Sea to the azure bathwater of the Southern Caribbean the scripts are eerily similar. They tell stories of thousands of oil or gas rigs, tens, hundreds of thousand of abandoned wells and the extraction of fossil fuels from the earth. Tales of pirates hunting treasure, not cargoes of gold on sunken galleons but poisonous black sludge buried millions of years ago under thousands of feet of rock, under miles of ocean.
The stories begin in sweat and toil, hard labor and mind numbing tedium, stories of men drilling holes in the Earth. Then the special effects begin and the drama unfolds.
Read more at Film Annex
House Ethics Committee’s Report on Newt Gingrich’s Ethics Violations
In the Matter of Representative Newt Gingrich
The Mayor of Kabul
The Mayor of Kabul
Cross posted at Film Annex: The Mayor of Kabul
I imagine that being mayor of a city, despite decent pay and perks, could be a thankless job. Whether you’re the mayor of East Podunk (pop 236) or a metropolis of millions of people most of the problems land on your desk. Problems of moving people around from work to home to play. Keeping the streets clean and safe. Keeping coalitions together, satisfying the divergent interests of the various neighborhoods and competing groups.
Power failures, sporting events, conventions, fires, storms, crimes both petty and spectacular, strikes, all bring an overnight bag or more of grief for the Mayor.
But what must it be like to be Mayor in a city that has grown in population from just over a million to nearly 5 million in eight years, a city of mostly unpaved roads, a city 3500 years old, with a dozen ethnic groups and half a dozen languages, a city with one foot in the present, one foot in the past and both planted firmly in a war.
Read the rest at: Film Annex “The Mayor of Kabul”
Foxconn: Take This Job and Shove Me Off the Roof
They love their jobs, it shows in their smiling faces.
Do you enjoy reading on your Kindle or wasting time on your Xbox 360? Are you browsing with your iPad or yakking on your iPhone?
When you bought them were you happy with the price?
There may be some hidden costs being paid by the people who make these products.
Foxconn, a manufacturer of circuit boards for a long list of consumer electronics companies including Apple, Microsoft and Amazon is having a bit of a problem in the human resources department. Reports are that on January 2 about three hundred workers in a Foxconn mega factory in Wuhan, China threatened to hurl themselves from the roof of a building in a mass suicide over poor pay and working conditions.
On Jan. 2, over 300 employees at a Foxconn plant in Wuhan, China threatened to throw themselves off a building in a mass suicide. Foxconn makes Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony products. These workers manufacture Xbox 360s. Kotaku
This isn’t the first time for labor relations problems at Foxconn. Fourteen workers opted for the not so golden departure without a parachute in 2010 which should have indicated that the company had bigger problems than crowded lunchrooms.
Microsoft’s Phil Spencer said at the time, “Foxconn has been an important partner of ours and remains an important partner. I trust them as a responsible company to continue to evolve their process and work relationships. That is something we remain committed to—the safe and ethical treatment of people who build our products. That’s a core value of our company.” Kotaku
Foxconn’s factories have been described in a report by 20 Chinese universities as “labor camps” and “concentration camps:
The company was described in the report as a “concentration camp of workers in the 21st century,” and all the employees are “imprisoned” in the “company empire” in order to serve the manufacturing rule of “just-in-time production.”
The students are “kidnapped” to work overtime for the company that takes advantage of a lack of laws and regulations to maximize its profits, according to the report. TeleCom Asia
Concern for the suicides caused Foxconn to install suicide prevention netting on buildings at some of its factories and higher wages were promised to the workers who were forced to sign agreements not to sue the company if they harmed themselves or committed suicide.
The higher wages didn’t materialize however hence the recent action and threatened mass suicide.
American workers should sit up and take notice.
When the circuit board factory that you that you work in installs suicide netting around the perimeter of the building to prevent employees from leaping to their deaths you probably have a weak union.
With the dismantling of labor unions, the attacks on the NLRB, continued deregulation of business and the rampant growth of corporate control of government there may soon be a net beneath your office or shop window.
I suppose a smart entrepreneur would draft a business plan and get an SBA loan to start a company called “Suicide Prevention Nets R Us” and get in on the ground floor of what may become a growth industry.
Related stories and sources:
Microsoft Investigates ‘Mass Suicide Threat
300 Chinese Foxconn Workers ‘Threaten Mass Suicide’ At XBox Plant, Reports Claim
More Oil From Macondo?
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Oil Spill From BP's Deepwater Horizon Macondo Field Disaster
The Macondo Prospect, where British Petroleum’s ill fated offshore drill rig exploded and sank last year killing eleven men is a reservoir of oil in the Mississippi Canyon area of the northern Gulf of Mexico about 40 miles off the Louisiana coast.
The rig was actually owned by Transocean, built by South Korean giant Hyundai and under lease to BP at the time of its catastrophic demise. In the high stakes world of oil poker, details of ownership and registry are kept deliberately muddied and overly complex, the better to avoid taxes, laws and other liability and responsibilities.
The prospect which BP bid on in 2008 was estimated to contain 50 million barrels of oil which sounds like quite a lot. Sold at current prices that amount of oil would bring bring in gross revenue of 5 billion dollars and that’s just the cost of the crude. Major oil companies also own the pipelines, refineries and the gas pumps where we go to fill our tanks and pick up a six pack so in addition to the profits at the well they make great chunks of money all the way downstream to our front door and beyond.
50 million barrels of oil is about what we use in this country every 60 hours. That’s right, we use about twenty million barrels every day. The eleven dead, the despoliation of 500 miles of the Gulf’s coast, the crippling of the fishing and tourist industries, the physical destruction of people and wildlife, the damage to their lives and their future well being was all about keeping us cruising the roads and cursing at bubble packaging for a long weekend.
A year ago the NOAA, the Coast Guard, the administration and, of course, BP was telling us that the oil was 70% gone and they were working very hard to make things right. I don’t have to crawl very far out on the limb to say that they were lying then and they continue to lie today.
In the world of business, they’ve grown so accustomed to lying that the truth is no longer necessary.
The oil, BP’s crude gate crasher, appears to be back. In addition to the continual beaching of tarballs from the missing oil at the roiled bottom of the Gulf, expected with the onset of another season of warming waters, tropical storms, and hurricane activity it appears that something is leaking large in the vicinity of the Deepwater Horizon well.
According to an article in Al Jazeera “The return of the BP disaster? “on Thursday, reporting on animal rescue organization Wings of Care and in another piece this morning “Oil Still Gushing From BP Well In Gulf,” September, the most active month of hurricane season is likely to begin uncovering the ugly truth.
It is entirely possible that the coalition of irresponsible and incompetent corporations who gave us the tragic deaths of eleven men and the worst oil spill in our history are no more capable of safely capping a well than they are of safely drilling one, transporting its products, or refining them. They are after all, to be found spilling, gushing, leaking, spraying and otherwise carelessly spewing crude oil all over the Earth.
The reports come at us every month, from the Gulf, Alaska, the North Sea, small towns in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania and from the Yellowstone River. There is no place on earth that these greaseheads will not despoil and are not actively and zealously engaged in destroying. Make a note that these are only the events that get reported or otherwise discovered.
Following the reports linked above, BP is already making noises about “natural oil seeps,” the expression being a large part of the literature that comprises their canned media response.
It’s likely that 60-70 percent of the oil from last year’s spill, rather than conveniently disappearing is laying on the bottom of the Northern Gulf mixed with toxic Corexit. Just laying in wait for a direct hit by something on the scale of last month’s Irene, to spread its filthy fingers all over the southern coast.
As for the current leaks being from natural seeps, I don’t know, but I don’t buy it. There are 4000 active oil and gas platforms in the Gulf and 27,000 that have been plugged and abandoned by actors like BP.
In addition to BP’s giant screw up in the Macondo prospect, the Deepwater Horizon disaster, that’s a lot of unnatural holes.
Originally posted at Clean Technica: More Oil From Macondo?
Photo: Courtesy of the MODIS Rapid Response Team[see page for license], via Wikimedia Commons
The Creek’s Rising, Texas Is Aflame And My Lawn Chairs Just Passed Memphis
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US Temperature Map From Weather Underground
The wildfires continue in Texas. Much of the southwest still suffers under a drought as this summer’s brutal and record breaking heatwave continues.
There are areas of Texas that have gone without measurable rainfall for a year.
It’s the driest it’s been since 1895 when they started keeping records.
Texas Governor Rick “Goodhair” Perry, this month’s centerfold for “Science Denial Magazine” says that people may just have to get used to this toasty new climate.
Perry is on the record, in the recent GOPTP candidates debate he accused climate scientists of manipulating data to keep the research grants and the money rolling in.
I don’t know, a vast worldwide conspiracy of marginally paid climate science academics seems, somehow… unlikely.
His state, or a large part of it is on fire, over fourteen hundred homes have burned and there are at least four dead but his ideological certainties remain un-threatened by readily available evidence and unchanged in spite of the hot breezes causing the copious beads of prairie sweat that stain the Stetsons of his neighbors.
Fanned by winds that are carrying off precious Texas topsoil by the ton, a scene reminiscent of the Dust Bowl of 80 years ago,the fires are raging out of control through much of central Texas amidst an atmosphere of political certainty about the righteousness of Lilliputian government, of no taxes and no money to fight fires or train even volunteer firefighters. They have to shell out of their own pocket to buy gear and gas.
As Lucia Graves and Jason Cherkis at TheHufington Post report: Back in May, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) signed a budget presented by the state legislature that cut funding for the state agency in charge of combating such blazes.
The Texas Forest Service’s funding was sliced from $117.7 million to $83 million. More devastating cuts hit the assistance grants to volunteer fire departments around the state. Those grants were slashed 55 percent from $30 million per year in 2010 and 2011 to $13.5 million per year in 2012 and 2013. Those cuts are effective now. Rick Perry’s Budget Leaves Texans In Bind Amidst Historic Wildfires
This is an atmosphere that unfortunately, is not confined to Texas, a political cult has developed that seriously believes that people should fight their own fires. This cult apparently believes that only socialists call the fire department or the police. A truly self reliant follower of this line of Randian “reasoning” would get a bucket and bravely put out the blaze or get his trusty six gun and capture the bad guys himself. If one needs a road to drive on to reach the fire well by golly don’t be a socialist wimp,just bring a shovel and take care of that project while you’re there.
While you have your bucket out
Wildfire update – Sept. 8, 2011
Current situation:
· Yesterday Texas Forest Service responded to 20 new fires for 1,422 acres, including new large fires in Red River, Smith, and Cherokee/Rusk counties.
· In the past seven days Texas Forest Service has responded to 176 fires for 126,844 acres.
· A more comprehensive assessment has been completed on the Bastrop County Complex by FEMA and the State Operations Center. The total number of homes destroyed on that fire is now confirmed at 1,386. Approximately 240 additional homes have been reported lost on other fires since Sunday, for a total of approximately 1,626. From: Texas Forest Service
Speaking on climate in Sydney, Australia Ban Ki Moon declared that “…we are running out of time” and as reports roll in of drought and famine in the Horn of Africa, extreme weather events worldwide, massive flooding in Northern Australia, Moon said, “This is a global race to save the planet.”
There is no such sense of urgency among American politicians as Obama reigns in the EPA, takes the leash off of Shell in the Beaufort Sea and speeds the process of drilling offshore. The State Department indicates that it is likely to give approval to the 1700 mile toxic bitumen pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, a project that will span the nation under spacious skies, climb purple mountain’s majesty, slice through amber waves of grain and cross our largest aquifer of freshwater to provide greater security for oil company profits.
On the other side of the political food fight the republicans have no time for climate change, occupied as they are with fighting the twin scourges of Social Security and Medicare while defending the barricades against teachers, bus drivers, fire fighters and other enemies of the state and insuring that no woman gets an abortion and no child is exposed to science or gets a free lunch.
In a column at the Huff Post last week environmentalist, actor and director, Robert Redford asked the question, “Is the Obama Administration Putting Corporate Profits Above Public Health?”The short answer is yes…wait, that’s also the long answer and probably the only answer.
The waters are rising, the dead ocean is in the living room,the sewage ridden river is lapping at the kitchen door and the lawn furniture just blew past Memphis but please get these scientists out of our classrooms.
Everyone is being sold out here, every plant, animal and microbe on the planet is being sacrificed to the greed of big oil, big coal, big gas and big corporate profit. No air worth breathing? No water fit to drink? Is your food poisoning your family?
The republicans say they have the answer, just get rid of the American government and let the corporations run this place like a business.
Maybe that’s the “credible threat” that Homeland Security is currently babbling about, the republicans are taking over and they’re goin to run this show like Enron, Lehman Brothers or Bank of America.
I don’t know how credible the threat is but it’s pretty scary.
Must read:
Perry Tales: Rick Is Not Who He Says He Is
Weekly Reads From Common Dreams 9/10/11
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Weekly Reads From Common Dreams
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Sarah Palin Hovers In Mid Air Unannounced And Unnoticed In Iowa Half Marathon
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Sarah Palin Flying, Running or Hovering Unannounced And Unnoticed In Iowa Click on Image to enlarge.
Greta Van What’sHerName ran the photo at left on her blog on Sunday morning.
The Huffington Post reported:
Sarah Palin ran a half-marathon after giving a speech at a Tea Party rally in Iowa on September 4.
Palin ran unannounced in the “Jump Right in and Run” half-marathon sponsored by Storm Lake Running Club. She registered for the race under her maiden name, Sarah Heath, and listed her hometown as Des Moines.
News of Palin’s participation in the race broke after Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren posted a photo to her website of a runner she claimed was the former vice presidential candidate.
I’m no expert on Photoshop but this looks suspicious to me. Not only does she appear to be effortlessly flying along, or just suspended in mid air she’s the only one not running on the course… in the street, it’s that maverick thing again, I guess.
She does have an interesting running style though, if there were a broom involved she’d be in danger of being mistaken for Christine O’Donnell.
Greta doesn’t explain where she got the photo and there’s no credit or I’d run it here.
Sarah Palin Runs Iowa Half-Marathon Unannounced Over Labor Day Weekend.
Good Morning Irene
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Hurricane Irene Beaufort, North Carolina Coordinates: 34°43′15″N 76°39′9″W
It’s 4AM on Saturday and I’m up early. When you cant go back to sleep in the 21st century you turn the on computer, then the news.
According to NOAA, and verified visually on Google Earth, Hurricane Irene is centered at 33.7N and 77.5W which puts it in position to munch Beaufort, North Carolina just a degree or so north and west at 4°43′15″N 76°39′9″W according to Wikipedia.
A degree of latitude is about 69 miles and NOAA tells me that the Lady is moving north at 12 knots which means landfall in a few hours.
As you can see this is a monster of a storm stretching up the east coast from the Carolinas to New York and beyond.
Originally posted at Clean Technica: Good Morning Irene
Fire, Water, Wind or Sunshine, a Watt is a Watt
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Unicorn Tears As An Energy Source?
I sometimes think that many of us have a deep seated mania that causes us to believe that for a substance to be an effective source of energy it must be something that can be burned. Not only must it be combustible, the substance must be hard to get. This manic belief requires that the energy source must be searched out and dug up or clawed from the earth at great trouble and expense.
What’s more, to be a credible source the fuel must be retrieved from the bowels of the earth or the deepest depths of the ocean in an odyssey by intrepid explorers with fedoras and a five day growth of manly stubble, all else is considered to be alchemy.
“We know that renewable energies like solar and wind at this point in time are not capable of addressing the world’s total energy demands.” The Remarkable Energy Potential of Methane Hydrate from Clean Technica by Glenn Meyers
Not to single out a fellow writer here at Clean Technica, I’ve heard and read similar statements many times but the fact that they grossly distort the reality of the potential energy sources all around us does make them nettlesome. Actually we “know” no such thing.
I don’t know where this belief comes from or how it got started, maybe it’s primal. It could be an archetype, lodged early in the human mind, left over from the terror, fascination, even trauma, when some guy with a five day stubble first dragged a burning branch from a lightning struck tree back to the cave for a mastodon roast.
Originally posted at Clean Technica: Fire, Water, Wind or Sunshine, a Watt is a Watt
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WTF: What’s This Fracking?
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Hydraulic Fracturing of Shale Gas Deposits in US / Source: Energy Information Administration Click for larger image
Reading” Looking for Gas in All the Wrong Places” a piece in Monday’s NYT by Stanley Fish I found a calm, collected, depiction of an equally calm and collected town meeting in Andes, N.Y. where the subject on the agenda was “fracking” or hydraulic fracturing of shale gas deposits.
Calm, rational, and civil aren’t normally descriptive of a gathering when fracking, the subject that is bitterly dividing communities from North Texas and Colorado to Pennsylvania, and from West Virginia to New York is under discussion. Fracking is a national and local hot potato.
This contentious issue has the oil and gas industries, development interests, and cash strapped landowners looking to make some quick lease money, on one side, facing down environmentalists, agricultural, tourism interests and other landowners, looking to protect the nature of their land and water from what they see as polluters and wastrels, on the other.
In the middle is water, the use and abuse of billions of gallons of it and the potential pollution, and ruination of billions, trillions… or some impossibly larger quantity, more.
Originally posted at Clean Technica: WTF: What’s This Fracking?
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More Drilling In The Gulf, The Death Of A Thousand Cuts
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Map of the northern Gulf of Mexico showing the nearly 4,000 active oil and gas platforms. NOAA Photo
There are about 4000 active oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, a fact I bumped into while researching an article on BP’s Macondo field Deepwater Horizon disaster last year.
In addition, there are more than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells that dot the Gulf, actually it’s much more like a blanket.
This morning I ran across a map and a video by tsinn at The Sword Press in which he plots these wells by time and position as well as location as in the NOAA map above.
Watching the brief video is a bit ominous as the rigs spread east and west along the Gulf coast and retreat farther from shore and into ever deeper water over a time span from 1942 through 2005.
I had oil on my mind over coffee this morning because the first item in my Email was a NYT article “U.S. to Offer Oil Leases in the Gulf.” Times writer John M. Broder reveals the administration’s new lease plans and he stopped me cold with this statement:
The lease offering includes parcels from nine to 250 miles offshore and in water depths from 16 to nearly 11,000 feet. The Interior Department estimates that the tract could produce 222 million to 423 million barrels of oil and 1.49 trillion to 2.65 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. “ U.S. to Offer Oil Leases in the Gulf.” John M. Broder NYT
Please note that many of these wells will be more than five times as far from the coast and in more than twice the water depth as BPs colossal failure of last year, greatly increasing the technological problems and challenges while making recovery and mitigation of a spill vastly more problematic.
Originally posted at Clean Technica: More Drilling In The Gulf, The Death Of A Thousand Cuts
You Don’t Need A Weatherman To Demonstrate The Obvious
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Weatherman Braced For Hurricane
The guy is standing on the beach, back to the driving rain, hoodie and trousers flapping crazily, shouting into a microphone, like Ahab standing in the bow of the Pequod screaming at the fates.
They cut to a woman reporter at another location wearing the obligatory hoodie and speaking more reservedly into a microphone, slightly sheltered on the boardwalk above the seawall but sill being pelted by stinging rain and buffeted by the cyclonic wind.
And so it goes, hour after hour, on every cable news outlet, in every storm, the weather critters offer their graphic demonstrations of wind or rain, if it’s snowing they’ll seize a handful and hold it up for the camera as if it was an alien substance found in a meteorite.
In a flood they don waders and plunge in to their thighs to prove beyond doubt that the water is really stacking up out there. A good flood or snowstorm in a city calls for boat rentals to truly show that the water is deep enough to… row a boat or ski rentals to demonstrate… ad nauseum.
If you watch for awhile or you’ll notice that from channel to channel they all perform the same schtick, the dialog is numbingly similar and I’m sure that there are specialized courses of study for weather critters, Severe Weather Coverage 101, or Advanced Weather Drama 201, Theory of Disaster Props and Costumes and so on.
Meanwhile the camera cuts back and forth between our hardy hero braving the elements and the anchor person seated cozily at the anchor desk, with a sheaf of anchor papers and a mouthful of stupid anchor questions to fill another five minutes between Enzyte or Geico commercials.
Big Coal: Making Mountains Even Better
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Making Mountains Better
Coal provides jobs. The jobs are dirty, they produce a product that’s harmful to the planet, hazardous to the health and welfare of the workers and their neighbors, but… hey, they’re jobs.
Besides, some of those jobs involve improving our mountains. They blow the tops off them, and haul away the coal, leaving flat tops, suitable for landing pads, parking lots, Nascar racing, or Appalachian soccer matches.
Where once was a vista of jagged, irregular, disorganized peaks we now have a neat, orderly range of mountains that looks like a platoon of Bob Haldemans.
They also leave behind some pretty ugly mountains.
CNN ran a documentary Sunday night by anchor Soledad O’Brien titled “Battle for Blair Mountain” which should have carried a warning that it was an advertisement for Big Coal.
Originally posted at Clean Technica: Big Coal: Making Mountains Even Better
Fukushima To Do List: Take a Walk, Lunch, 100k Chest X Rays, Pick Up Kids
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![Residents of Ohkuma-cho attend a memorial service for the victims of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami on 24 July 2011 in Ohkuma-cho, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, 20 km from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant [EPA Photo]](http://bobhiggins.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/fukushima-memorial.jpg "Fukushima Memorial")
Residents of Ohkuma-cho attend a memorial service
What we are getting is alarming and according to an Al Jazeera story yesterday Japanese scientists and doctors are sounding the alarm.
There is a spreading feeling that the government and TEPCO are under-reporting the severity of the situation, the radiation levels and the extent of the affected areas.
There are a number statements that jump off the page in the Al Jazeera piece:
“… the total amount of radiation released over a period of more than five months from the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster is the equivalent to more than 29 “Hiroshima-type atomic bombs” and the amount of uranium released “is equivalent to 20″ Hiroshima bombs.” Dr Tatsuhiko Kodama, a professor at the Research Centre for Advanced Science and Technology and Director of the University of Tokyo’s Radioisotope Centre quoted in Al Jazeera.
Or this one:
When on August 2nd readings of 10,000 millisieverts (10 sieverts) of radioactivity per hour were detected at the plant, Japan’s science ministry said that level of dose is fatal to humans, and is enough radiation to kill a person within one to two weeks after the exposure. 10,000 millisieverts (mSv) is the equivalent of approximately 100,000 chest x-rays.
Originally posted at Clean Technica: Fukushima To Do List: Take a Walk, Lunch,100k Chest X Rays, Pick Up Kids
Evacuate Fukushima
 Evacuate Fukushima Save the children of Japan Please Watch The Video And Sign The Petition
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Please Sign The Petition |
An Ocean of Oil, A Toxic Brew
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An older oil rig in the North Sea
Another oil spill, the worst in the North Sea in a decade according to several media sources. I didn’t bother to call Donald Trump when news of Shell’s North Sea oil spill broke on this side of the pond. He’s not taking my calls.
I would have asked him if he found it ironic that a week after publicly berating Scotland for wanting to site a wind farm off the coast of his golf development near Aberdeen, Shell dumped more than 55,000 gallons of oil into the North Sea out beyond where the wind farm would stand.
Big oil seems to work night and day adding layers of tarnish to their negative image.
I don’t know how expensive or difficult it is to properly maintain oil fields and pipelines in a safe and responsible fashion, I’m not in the oil business. The difficulties must be extreme and the costs prohibitive though, because some of the largest, wealthiest and most powerful corporations on earth are unable to keep this poisonous beast it its cage.
Every few weeks bring news of another escape, another ugly load of toxic crude oil in some greater or lesser quantity is added to the already overtaxed, over fished and slowly over heating ocean on which all of the life on earth ultimately depends.
Originally posted at Clean Technica: An Ocean of Oil, A Toxic Brew
Weekly Reads From Common Dreams
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Weekly Reads From Common Dreams
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