Sunday, June 19, 2011
PA Arts Sunday - Part 2: Hoots and Cello - From the Sitka Music Festival and Alaska Raptor Center
Here's the description, from KCAW radio in Sitka:
Armen Ksajikian is playing at the Sitka Summer Music Festival. While he's in town, he went over to the Alaska Raptor Center to play. He had an unexpected duet with an owl named Arizona.Here's Armen's Vancouver-based string quartet - The Armadillo String Quartet - performing:
hat tip to Jan Flora & Charles Bingham via facebook
Saradise Lost Book 5 - Chapter 78: Palin Loses BFF John Ziegler
More on this later. John Ziegler - hilarious as always. If the GOP hard right had a comedy channel, he'd deserve a prime time spot.
image - Philip Munger interviewing John Ziegler, filmed by Dennis Zaki -- by AKM
Children sickness linked to Fukushima radiation
--- by Deborah Dupre[the author asks "that people subscribe free to my articles and please leave a comment on the Examiner page where the original is." So - please do that - as her essays on Fukushima, and other topics are excellent. Here is a link to her cache of articles at The Examiner. Here is a link to her home page]
Children more susceptible to radiation than adults
In the ultimate nuclear nightmare scenario now unfolding, Japanese local newspapers have attributed sickness in children to Fukushima's nuclear meltdowns, the radioactive levels now elevated throughout eastern Japan. Children over 32 miles from ground zero are suffering fatigue, diarrhea, and nosebleeds, the three most common of eight radiation sickness signs, the three in the earliest stage.
Tokyo Shinbun newspaper reported that many Japanese children have "inexplicable" symptoms. Each symptom described are among the first experienced with radiation sickness.
"Japan is dangerously contaminated by radioactivity over a far larger area than previously reported by TEPCO and the central government according to new reports from multiple sources," the Daily Kos reported.
"The prefectural government of Iwate released new data that shows radioactive contamination of grass exceeds safety standards at a distance of 90 to 125 miles from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plants."
Science Magazine cites data from the prefectural government of Iwate that reveals radioactive cesium has traveled over 100 miles away from Fukushima and pastoral grasses contaminated beyond safety standards.
Children become radiated when they drink milk and eat dairy products from cows feeding on radioactive grass, even at low levels according to the world's foremost anti-nuclear campaigner, Dr. Helen Caldicott, and other independent scientists. Radioactive materials concentrate in milk.
Nationally acclaimed neurosurgeon Russell Blaylock, M.D. recently stated that with Fukushima radiation hitting Americans, there will be a risk of increased cancer.
"When we look at Chernobyl, most of West Germany was heavily contaminated. Norway, Sweden. Hungary was terribly contaminated. The radiation was taken up into the plants. The food was radioactive. They took the milk and turned it into cheese. The cheese was radioactive. That’s the big danger, the crops in this country being contaminated, the milk in particular, with Strontium 90. That radiation is incorporated into the bones and stays a lifetime."
As Gulf of Mexico residents experienced a media blackout and lack of government health support after BP's 2010 catastrophic oil event, necessitating reliance on independent scientists and only a few doctors to test, in the Fukushima media blackout, Japanese independent scientists have been so concerned about children being radiated, they began their own testing. Bloggers have also united to map incidences similar to the service of Louisiana Bucket Brigade.
In, "Citizens Find Radiation Far From Fukushima," Science Magazine published the shocking findings.
"Frustrated by a dearth of information on what happened to all of the radiological isotopes released from the ravaged Fukushima nuclear power plant, civic groups and individuals have been monitoring radiation on their own. Collectively, they have produced a worrisome picture of contamination throughout eastern Japan, with some hot spots surprisingly far from the crippled reactors." (Dennis Normile, Science Magazine)
The report cited by Daily Kos furthers:
Parents in Tokyo's Koto Ward enlisted the help of Tomoya Yamauchi, a radiation physicist at Kobe University, to measure radiation in their neighborhood. Local government officials later joined the act, ordering radiation checks of schoolyards and other public places and posting the results on their Web sites. An anonymous volunteer recently plotted the available 6300 data points on a map. And Yukio Hayakawa, a volcanologist at Gunma University, turned that plot into a radiation contour map.
It shows one wide belt of radiation reaching 225 kilometers south from the stricken reactors to Tokyo and another extending to the southwest. Within those belts are localized hot spots, including an oval that encloses northeast Tokyo and Kashiwa and neighboring cities in Chiba Prefecture.
Radiation in this zone is 0.4 microsieverts per hour, or about 3.5 millisieverts per year. That is a fraction of the radiation found throughout much of Fukushima Prefecture, which surrounds the nuclear power plant. But it is still 10 times background levels and even above the 1-millisievert-per-year limit for ordinary citizens set by Japanese law... [I]t is known that children are more susceptible to radiation than adults, and few parents want to take chances with a child's health."
The Japanese “citizens’ map” of radiation levels, maintained by a group of Japanese bloggers, shows radiation levels highest near Fukushima and northwest of it, elevated radiation southwest of the reactors, and a large pocket of contamination further south, in Tokyo's outskirts.
Public discussions needed in Japan and United States
In the tradition of barefoot doctors and community participatory research, community members lacking information and medical attention, gathering to share what information and resources they do have and discuss defending each other with survival means, rather than investing resources in corporate led "public meetings," can be effective.
Kyo Kageura, an information scientist at University of Tokyo, recently stated that public discussion of the radiation issue, “based on a scrupulous presentation of the data” is needed. When officials fail to provide urgently needed information, however, the community participatory approach has proven in many crisis areas to be the only thing that saved lives.
Such gatherings always happen due to one active community member taking the lead. Japanese independent scientists and bloggers are filling a gap.
Due to the media blackout on the Fukushima nuclear power plant catastrophe, "it took several months for the world to learn that there were three core meltdowns at Fukushima," stated Dave Worthington of Small Planet on Friday. "It will take years for the entire truth to be revealed."
Pointing to far more radiation released than information released, Arnold Gundersen, a 39-year veteran of the nuclear industry told AlJazeera on Thursday, "Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind."
The same radioactive particles found in Japan are also being recorded in the Seattle, Washington area according to Gundersen.
"With Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and now with Fukushima, you can pinpoint the exact day and time they started," he said. "But they never end."
A forty-year old Japanese father, not allowing his 4-month old baby daughter to go outside anymore, told Tokyo Shinburn, "I'm so worried. I don't know how to defend ourselves."
PA Arts Sunday - David Cheezem's "Purification of the Temple"
Palmer Alaska bookstore owner, progressive activist, sometimes-politician (he ran for House District 13 in 2008), poet and photographer, David Cheezem has created a new image, he claims was empowered by the talk I gave Friday evening, at the June Mat-Su Democrats' Egan Dinner.My talk was on how some notable Classical composers have been far more progressive and political in their underpinnings than is generally acknowledged. I was happy that so many people showed up for the June dinner on a non-election year, and on a sunny, warm evening, and how well my little talk was received. But David's response is almost overwhelming to me. I'm quite honored. Here's his short description of his "Purification of the Temple":
I was trying to re-imagine El Greco's "Purification of the Temple" in a somewhat contemporary setting. It seemed in harmony with your presentation last night about rebel composers.David, in his facebook entry on this, goes on to dismiss his own poetry, as he explains why he is turning more to visual images. This is surprising, as one of the finest poetry presentations I've ever witnessed in Alaska was two years ago, at a slam in Anchorage, where he shook me to the core with his deeply nuanced renderings of some of his recent work.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Clarence Clemons Passes
Tenor Saxophone master Clarence Clemons, the "Big Man," passed away today, after suffering a stroke. He was 69 years old. His style, whether as soloist, or as a sideman with Bruce Springsteen, harked back to the earliest of rock and roll tenor players, and touched into Clemons' roots in church-based gospel, and into R&B, yet changed over the years, bringing more to his palette of sounds. He had a fascinating biography, both in music and outside - he was an offensive center for the New Jersey Generals professional football team, and was active in helping troubled young people. Here he is playing on the David Letterman show, years ago, and being interviewed by Letterman:
Many musicians I know (like Tamra Spivey) are posting youtubes of his solo in Jungleland:
Here he is, just two and a half months ago, performing the national anthem, at opening night of the 2011 MLB season, a game between the Marlins and the Mets - a fitting tribute to a former professional athlete:
Obama DOJ’s War on Free Speech & Activism
--- by Kevin GosztolaA few days ago, rallies were held in cities all over the United States in support of veteran Chicano activist Carlos Montes, who had his home raided by the FBI on May 17. The rallies
coincided with Montes’ arraignment hearing for felony charges, which were filed against him by the LA County Sheriffs and FBI after the raid.
The target of an ever-expanding government investigation into antiwar and international solidarity activists, Montes demanded that his charges be dropped. The District Attorney denied his request. Montes asked to see the search warrant and police report on the raid of his home. The District Attorney initially refused the request but then agreed to release heavily edited versions of the documents. Montes was also told he would not be allowed to show the documents to the press.
Tom Burke, a spokesperson for the Committee to Stop FBI Repression and a subpoenaed activist, explains that Montes allegedly was found to be in possession of a weapon that was not properly registered. Burke believes that if Montes hadn’t been a political activist or organizer he would have been contacted about a problem on the gun permit. But, the LA sheriffs chose to make an example of Montes.
Burke also notes, like twenty-three other activists subpoenaed thus far, Montes has a link to the organizing of marches at the 2008 Republican National Convention.
The FBI raided the Antiwar Committee office in the Twin Cities in Minnesota in September 2010. On the warrant for the raid there were seventeen names. Burke says Carlos Montes’ name appears on the warrant.
When Montes’ home was raided by the FBI & SWAT team, they smashed Montes’ front door, rushed in with automatic weapons while Montes was sleeping and proceeded to ransack his home, “taking his computer, cell phones and hundreds of documents, photos, diskettes and mementos of his current political activities in the pro-immigrant rights and Chicano civil rights movement.” They did this at 5 am in the morning.
“For people who have had their homes raided, it’s worse than being robbed because it’s the government coming in and taking the things that are nearest and dearest to you – your own writing, your own diary,” says Burke.
Rallies in eighteen cities were held in support of Montes and against ongoing FBI repression of activists. And because the judge did not drop the felony charges against Montes, another round of rallies will be held July 7 to again call for the charges to be dropped.
Recent articles in news publications like the Washington Post has given the repression against activists greater attention. At the Netroots Nation 2011 conference, a member of the audience asked at a panel session titled, “What the Government Wants to Know About You,” if he could get more information on what he read on the recently published Post article.
Marcy Wheeler of Firedoglake, one of the speakers on the panel, described to the audience how the activists are alleged to be “material supporters of terrorism.” She outlined how the grand jury investigation has been opened and recounted how an informant infiltrated the Antiwar Committee. She noted the activists are alleged to have connections to groups in Palestine and Colombia that perhaps have engaged in terrorist activities but concluded, “Chiquita has far closer ties to terrorism than any peace activists but nobody from Chiquita has gone to jail.”
Essentially, the FBI now has all this data and is able to use it to start investigations. The FBI can turn over any rock that they want to turn over and they can seek out whatever they want to find and piece together a case.
With the FBI moving to expand surveillance powers, it is cases like this investigation into activists that the new powers will effectively make legitimate.
Burke reacts to the news that the FBI is claiming new powers, “The FBI has been violating their own guidelines and their own standard operating procedures and instead of saying we violated what we set out ourselves, they decided to expand what they were allowed to do.
Why does the government want these new powers? Why does the Justice Department under Obama support a growing investigation into activists?
Burke suggests with the economy getting worse the American people are getting more frustrated, with the Congress’ approval rating getting lower and lower, the war in Afghanistan failing, stability in Iraq not being maintained and troops not being sent home, the Colombia war stagnating with no defeat of the insurgency—This “cumulation” is leading to more state repression against those fighting for change in the system.
The war on free speech and activism is apparent here at Netroots Nation as people like Lt. Dan Choi and Tim DeChristopher speak on panels and as individuals like David House are discussed during panel sessions.
Lt. Dan Choi, a soldier and gay rights advocate who engaged in an act of civil disobedience at the White House fence last year to push the Obama Administration to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” is facing federal charges for exercising his right to demonstrate. While most people receive misdemeanors for protesting, for the first time since 1917, the Department of Justice under Obama is taking him to trial this August for speaking out.
Tim DeChristopher, a climate activist who placed fake bids in a public land auction to disrupt drilling by energy companies, has been convicted of a crime. Although the land auction was ultimately declared illegal, the Obama Administration has gone ahead and pursued a case against DeChristopher. The prosecution pushed the jury in his trial to not consider his conscience but rather that he broke a law. They nudged the jury to obfuscate facts and, in fact, many key details on the auction were kept from the jury. And so, DeChristopher now faces up to ten years in prison.
And, David House, co-founder of the Bradley Manning Support Network, has been embroiled in a grand jury investigation that seeks to embroil him in espionage charges for being linked to WikiLeaks. House has been targeted consistently by the government for the past months. His lawful association with the Bradley Manning Support Network, which was created to raise funds for the legal defense of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower to WikiLeaks now being held at Ft. Leavenworth, has led the Department of Homeland Security stop him at airports and seize his laptop, camera and USB drive.
What is at stake with the targeting of activists is an American’s right to protest against the government and sometimes take bold action that could be regarded as adversarial. Those who believe in free speech and support a person’s right to protest must not ignore the cases the Department of Justice is pursuing against individuals in this country, who are being made examples to send a message to others that if they draw inspiration and display courage in the face of power they too might face the same punishment or harassment as these people.
Change we can believe in?
Amy Goodman Interviewed on Netroots Nation Participants' Disenchantment with Obama
The country's most important conference of internet-aware progressive activists is underway late this week in Minneapolis. A record contingent of Alaskans are there, with progressive commentator Shannyn Moore and sometimes progressive blogger and far right Christian book publishing company author, Jeanne Devon, returning. This year, they are joined by progressive blogger and Alaska Young Democrats organizer, John Aronno, and by very progressive Alaska blogger, Mel Green - and other Alaskans.I was once again offered an opportunity to attend, but declined, as I have in the past. My friend, Philip Weiss, who is attending for his first time, partially answers the question of why I don't attend - here.
One of the big issues this year, as we look toward the 2012 presidential campaign, is why should progressives support Obama? For me, it is simple - I'm not deciding who I'm going to vote for until things shape up more clearly, but Obama certainly does not have my automatic endorsement.
Let alone my time and money, which I gave him so much of in 2008.
We were in two wars when he came in. We are now in five - Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and Yemen. We sponsored - with Obama's increasingly obvious endorsement (thanks, Wikileaks and Bradley Manning) - an anti-Democratic coup in Honduras, which benefitted the oligarchs there along with their American corporate partners, and fucked over the common people.
The banksters that brought on the 2008 economic collapse have only been strengthened by the Obama administration turning a blind eye to their past and continuing actions, which threaten the very fabric of our economy and democracy. The war criminals of the Bush era, and the national security state that expanded under Bush have even gotten into far more power since early 2009, with Obama's hearty blessings.
Here's Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, and White House apparatchik Cornell Belcher, laying out the framework of the problem on CNN yesterday:
Dahr Jamail Reports on Fukushima: "A Problem of Infinite Proportions"
Friday, Al Jazeera published a long article by former Alaskan, Dahr Jamail. Jamail, who wrote many of the best articles on the BP Gulf of Mexico tragedy, has penned the best evaluation of the predicament Fukushima presents mankind I've recently read. He centers the essay around an interview with former reactor developer and operator, Arnie Gundersen:"Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind," Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.Here's a link to Jamail's excellent article, which ends with:
Japan's 9.0 earthquake on March 11 caused a massive tsunami that crippled the cooling systems at the Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. It also lead to hydrogen explosions and reactor meltdowns that forced evacuations of those living within a 20km radius of the plant.
Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.
"Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed," he said, "You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively."
TEPCO has been spraying water on several of the reactors and fuel cores, but this has led to even greater problems, such as radiation being emitted into the air in steam and evaporated sea water - as well as generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive sea water that has to be disposed of.
"The problem is how to keep it cool," says Gundersen. "They are pouring in water and the question is what are they going to do with the waste that comes out of that system, because it is going to contain plutonium and uranium. Where do you put the water?"
Even though the plant is now shut down, fission products such as uranium continue to generate heat, and therefore require cooling.
"The fuels are now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor," Gundersen added. "TEPCO announced they had a melt through. A melt down is when the fuel collapses to the bottom of the reactor, and a melt through means it has melted through some layers. That blob is incredibly radioactive, and now you have water on top of it. The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water."
Gundersen's assessment of solving this crisis is grim.
"Units one through three have nuclear waste on the floor, the melted core, that has plutonium in it, and that has to be removed from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years," he said. "Somehow, robotically, they will have to go in there and manage to put it in a container and store it for infinity, and that technology doesn't exist. Nobody knows how to pick up the molten core from the floor, there is no solution available now for picking that up from the floor."
Dr Sawada says that the creation of nuclear fission generates radioactive materials for which there is simply no knowledge informing us how to dispose of the radioactive waste safely.
"Until we know how to safely dispose of the radioactive materials generated by nuclear plants, we should postpone these activities so as not to cause further harm to future generations," he explained. "To do otherwise is simply an immoral act, and that is my belief, both as a scientist and as a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing."
Gundersen believes it will take experts at least ten years to design and implement the plan.
"So ten to 15 years from now maybe we can say the reactors have been dismantled, and in the meantime you wind up contaminating the water," Gundersen said. "We are already seeing Strontium [at] 250 times the allowable limits in the water table at Fukushima. Contaminated water tables are incredibly difficult to clean. So I think we will have a contaminated aquifer in the area of the Fukushima site for a long, long time to come."
Unfortunately, the history of nuclear disasters appears to back Gundersen's assessment.
"With Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and now with Fukushima, you can pinpoint the exact day and time they started," he said, "But they never end."