OT, a tip of the fez to Doctor Atta J. Turk, podiatrist to the stars, who is celebrating his seventh blogiversary today. Compliments are welcome here or at his establishment, Rising Hegemon.

Morning all.

If obama says that nuclear can be safely run that’s change I can believe in.
My eyes are lying about the fake terror incident in Japan nuclear plant. People must be gathering around the plants for warmth I suppose.

It’s not like we site reactors one per site and there is absolutely no greed or corruption in obama’s America, more change we can believe in.

With another military solution in the middle East, this one will go great,
More chaange we can believe in .

This guy’s such a genius, it’s mourning in america all over again.

Congrats on your 7 yr hitch.

For those of us that live within the “evacuation zone” of a nuke plant, this one Seabrook in NH, that was built after much protest not only because of faulty construction (the concrete container inspection company was a subsidiary of the main contractor among other things) but also just the idea of a dangerous nuke being built anywhere near a populated area this disaster in Japan is 1/ no surprise and 2/ demonstrates the need to close the damn plants here before the inevitable happens.

It is encouraging to see some governments (Germany and Japan) reevaluating their rush to build more of these dangerous and unnecessary boondoggles.

The technicians at Fukushima trying to avert catastrophe will also suffer the same fate. Will today be the day Rush tells us they’re just playing for pity so they can take advantage of government generosity?

Apparently the WH shithead said the other day that he had fulfilled most of his campaign promises. I assume he means the promises he made to his moneymakers and not the promises he made on the stump.

Øbama has learnt well from his Clinton mentors. He lies with a straight face and has convinced himself that he is telling the truth.

Obama’s mentor in the Senate was, in fact, Joe Lieberman. If we had only known, that one fact would have said it all.

I think the law should be those who lobbied for nuclear power and those who certified the safety have to be the first people assigned the most dangerous tasks of shutting them down when they fail

I wonder how many reactors would get certified if that were the law of the land

we did know, and we were warned of just that before obama took office

I even speculated before obama won that he might do more damage then a republican could since mounting an oposition to his corporate agenda would be impossible

we did know

our only excuse is that our hopes were high he would rise to the occasion and task

man, that was audacious of us

Also: Senator Obama voted for the Cheney energy bill. In the future, progressives are advised to vet their candidates.

Oh indeed he was, in the Senate but Øbama was surrounded by Clintonites not only at the tail end of the campaign (after his deal with Hillary) but also in the WH as his “policies” i.e. fuck the people has been directed by the Clintonites and their moneymakers.

progressives are advised to vet their candidates.

That would be fine if we had any progressive candidates. They way the system is set up we are given two “choices” both of which are corporate puppets and will do the bidding of their masters. Until the election system is changed (50% threshold?) we will not get any real choices.

Starting with understanding Diebold is worse than nuclear power.

You’re right. My advice is useful only during the primaries, or when candidates are being chosen. Most progressives honest-to-God thought Obama was good news for the left. When I tried to tell them about Obama’s less-than-progressive history, they mostly called me a racist.

I remember that perry, I also remember anyone against hilary was a masogonist

we really wanted kucinich or edwards, the press made us choose between hillary and the big zero

When I tried to tell them about Obama’s less-than-progressive history, they mostly called me a racist.

Yes, indeed, that was a problem but, hopefully, people can now see that his is a fucking prick no matter what the colour.

Log by Spümco. He’s better than bad, he’s good.

Never heard of Spumco before and even after looking it up I still cannot understand the reference but I am willing to be educated.

Good morning all.

That’s one amazing film.

In the exclusion zone around Chernobyl 25 years later, nature appears to be moving along without humans. There have now been 3 generations of several species since the accident, and they are surviving. Because many animals have a normal life span of about 15 years, the exposure to cesium and iodine have less effect because in many cases it takes 20 years for the thyroid cancer and leukemia to show up. Because humans have longer life spans the fallout makes human existence impossible for long periods.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVv1vsZxV00

Pripyat is the ghost town. Chernobyl is just the name of the reactor plant.

It was heartbreaking to see the Chernobyl workers going to their deaths and not knowing it. I’ve heard that the Japanese plant workers are volunteers. I suggest, instead, a draft — of Company executives and shareholders. And include all the nuclear flacks here in the USA.

This is INCREDIBLE film in all ways and so sad.

Somebody posted a link in one of the nuclear threads to a website the other day (that I had seen a couple of years ago) recording a rogue motorcyclist’s adventures in the Chernobyl dead zone. It’s fascinating and macabre stuff. I did a *lot* of looking around for info about Chernobyl a few years ago. Couldn’t find much. Clearly there is much more info available now because of the toobz.

We have to live with it now ~ Chernobyl teaches us.

I think that’s closer to the truth than anyone wants to see right now ~ we who have feelings will come to understand this. I think the workers have *little* choice in the end, much as mine workers and soldiers everywhere.

That would be Elena Filatova. I have the CDs. That ride is one of the most compelling stories I have seen. Elena has been slammed by some media and the authenticity of her personal story questioned. However she is a fine poet and political activist in the Ukraine independence movement. I don’t know much of her recently however. I will see if that motorcycle ride is still online and post the link.

I am frustrated and half confused with all the playing with dosage/effects. They change the units and then currently speak as though it is all a mystery. It is not

After accusing Japan of lying about fallout and radiation sickness from the bomb drops we and the Japanese got good acute and long term data. Then we did the studies animal and human as an aspect of the various open air testing of bombs we did. Then there was the Oak Ridge data from the scurrilous study of dose ranging on fatally ill children, purporting to be “treatment.” and of course data is collected with every industrial accident etc.

By the time I was going into oncology in the early sixties we were awash with facts.

Today the physicists and the medical people tip toe around as though this is the first time something like this has happened and “we just don’t know what to expect.”

In a macabre way radioactivity poured into the environment is similar to the pouring of CO2 into the atmosphere. The planet can dilute it to minimal harm until the tipping point is reached. It is however a lot easier to monitor effects of CO2.

There is no such thing as completely safe dosages. It just becomes less and less safe as levels rise.

Lawrence ODonnell had a good segment last night and reminded me of something I came across awhile back. Japanese Doctors do not typically tell their patients how serious their medical conditions are. They don’t tell terminal patients that they are going to die. I wish I had better documentation of this phenomenon. If it is true, or substantially so, and it suggests a cultural trait, then it might explain why revealing the magnitude of the crisis is unlikely. Lots of caevats there. I also recognize the desire to avoid panic and cover up mistakes but there may be an element which is not purely sinister in their avoidance of facts.

Elena Filatova had a website or something some years ago, and I saw photos from her motorcycle ride around the Pripyat area of Ukraine. It was fascinating. But then Filatova was panned and her photos were called fakes. I could never truly ascertain what was what but I figured that the PTB were the ones attempting to diss Filatova and her motorcycle ride.

I’d love to hear an update about her, if you locate any info.

I could never find much info about Chernobyl, but I was led to do some minor research on it after reading Martin Cruz Smith’s book Wolves Eat Dogs published in 2006. It begins with a Russian Oligarch who dies from being exposed to plutonium, which leads Smith’s protagonist, Arkady Renko, to Prypiat and surrounding environs. Interesting fiction, and shortly after its publication, Alexander Litvinenko was killed by poisoning by plutonium.

http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/garage.html

Here’s a link to Elena Filatova’s website.

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/comments/1026/

Here’s one of the “it’s a hoax” sites. Some years ago, I saw Filatova’s photos derided as being either photoshopped and/or that she used other people’s photos of the Chernobyl area and never went there herself. In this particular hoax site, they’re saying that Filatova took the photos but that she didn’t ride a motorcycle. Rather she was in a car.

whatever… I think the photos are real. Look & learn.

Thanks so much. I am on a tight sched today and on the way out again. My assessment of Filatova is that she took a good bit of poetic license but the message is basically accurate and powerful. My guess is too powerful for those who support the industry.

Be back in a while with what more I may find or have to say.

Fascinating ~ these cultural realities are so compelling, especially when they play out on the landscape of an entire country. We in NA can be so self-centred that we miss these dynamics of live in Russia, the ME, China, SE Asia, and, even the various dimentsions of Europe and Australia.

Yes: Thanks!

Thanks, TalkingStick ~ if it’s performance art or reportage, I have no worries, I’m hip. I so wanted to say how artistic the Chernobyl footage above is, but something held me back from saying that “out loud” about something so horrible. Watching that film, I felt my body reacting to the fact that a lethal dose of radiation was happening as the filming progressed.

When I found Filatova’s material, it was before youtube and I really couldn’t find much else on the toobz or in the library about Chernobyl.