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Wed, 29 Sep 2021
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Nuke

Smoking Helps Protect Against Lung Cancer

Joe Vialls
Web Archive
Wed, 16 Jul 2003 05:38 UTC
Image
© Unknown
The Fukushima nuclear plant
Every year, thousands of medical doctors and other members of the "Anti-Smoking Inquisition" spend billions of dollars perpetuating what has unquestionably become the most misleading though successful social engineering scam in history. With the encouragement of most western governments, these Orwellian lobbyists pursue smokers with a fanatical zeal that completely overshadows the ridiculous American alcohol prohibition debacle, which started in 1919 and lasted until 1933.

Nowadays we look back on American prohibition with justifiable astonishment. Is it really true that an entire nation allowed itself to be denied a beer or scotch by a tiny group of tambourine-bashing fanatics? Sadly, yes it is, despite a total lack of evidence that alcohol causes any harm to humans, unless consumed in truly astronomical quantities.
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Nuke

Fukushima-Related Radioactive Materials Measured Across Entire Northern Hemisphere


ScienceDaily
Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:49 UTC
Since the double disaster of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami that affected hundreds of thousands of people and seriously damaged the Fukushima Daichi power plant in Japan on 11 March 2011, minute traces of radioactive emissions from Fukushima have spread across the entire Northern Hemisphere. A monitoring network designed to detect signs of nuclear explosions picked up these traces from the stricken power plant.

radiation dispersion map
© German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources
Dispersion of radioactivity after the damage to the Fukushima Daichi power plant in Japan on 11 March 2011.
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Bizarro Earth

Earthquakes in Japan, Chile, Haiti: Are We In An Age Of Giant Quakes?

Becky Ham
ABC News, US
Fri, 08 Apr 2011 00:43 UTC
The devastating 2004 Indonesian tsunami, with its death toll of as many as 250,000 people, was caused by the first magnitude-9.0 earthquake since 1967. A succession of smaller but still destructive tremors in Haiti, Chile, and New Zealand -- surpassed by this year's magnitude-9.0 quake in Japan -- has some researchers wondering whether the number of large earthquakes is on the rise.

An earthquake represents the abrupt release of seismic strain that has built up over the years as plates of the Earth's crust slowly grind and catch against each other. Giant earthquakes live up to their fearsome name. The biggest ever recorded was the magnitude-9.5 Chile earthquake of 1960. It accounts for about a quarter of the total seismic strain released worldwide since 1900. In just three minutes, the recent quake in Japan unleashed one-twentieth of that global total according to geophysicist Richard Aster at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro.



The Indonesian quake "reinvigorated interest in these giants," said Aster, who is also president of the Seismological Society of America. The Chile and Japan earthquakes -- along with a magnitude-9.2 quake in Alaska in 1964 -- also triggered catastrophic tsunamis.

After a lull in large quakes in the 1980s and 1990s, we may now be in the middle of a new age of large earthquakes, Aster added.
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Alarm Clock

Wild And Crazy 2011: 10 History-Shattering Events That Have Shaken The Financial World To The Core


End of the American dream
Fri, 08 Apr 2011 16:51 UTC
Image
2011 has already had more history-shattering events than almost any other year since World War 2. Revolutions have swept the Middle East and much of Africa, a new war has erupted in Libya, Japan has experienced an unprecedented tsunami and a horrific nuclear crisis, the price of oil is skyrocketing, multiple nations in Europe are experiencing a financial meltdown and budget issues have pushed the U.S. government to the verge of a shutdown. In past years, it always seemed like there was time to "catch our breath" between each major crisis, but now huge events are striking in rapid-fire succession. We live at a time when wars, rumors of wars, natural disasters, bizarre occurrences and major financial problems are becoming so common that they hardly shock us anymore. 2011 truly has been one wild and crazy year, and the world is literally being transformed right in front of our eyes.

For a moment, let's review some of the history-shattering events that we have witnessed this year so far and the impact that they have had on the financial world....
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Bizarro Earth

More Updates on Fukushima: Discussion of High Level Radiation Releases and the Previous "Worse Case Scenario" Planned for by the Industry


Fairewinds Associates
Thu, 31 Mar 2011 08:55 UTC
April 6, 2011: Arnie Gundersen discusses inconsistencies between what the NRC, TEPCo, and the Nuclear Industry are saying privately and publicly. Documents from the French nuclear firm, Areva, and the NRC reveal what the industry knows about the Fukushima disaster.

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Heart - Black

Why a lack of empathy is the root of all evil

Clint Witchalls
The Independent
Thu, 07 Apr 2011 20:35 UTC
From casual violence to genocide, acts of cruelty can be traced back to how the perpetrator identifies with other people, argues psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen. Is he right?

Rwanda genocide
© Agence France-Presse/Getty
Lucy Adeniji - an evangelical Christian and author of two books on childcare - trafficked two girls and a 21-year-old woman from Nigeria to work as slaves in her east London home. She made them toil for 21 hours a day and tortured them if they displeased her. The youngest girl was 11 years old.

Sentencing her to 11-and-a-half years in prison last month, Judge Simon Oliver said: "You are an evil woman. I have no doubt you have ruined these two girls' lives. They will suffer from the consequences of the behaviour you meted out to them for the rest of their lives."

Most people would probably agree with Judge Oliver's description of Adeniji as evil, but Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, would not be one of them. In his latest book, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A new theory of human cruelty, Baron-Cohen, argues that the term evil is unscientific and unhelpful. "Sometimes the term evil is used as a way to stop an inquiry," Baron-Cohen tells me. "'This person did it because they're evil' - as if that were an explanation."

Comment: The writer of this article is right. Lack of empathy is a characteristic of psychopathy among a cluster of other characteristics. For more information, read:

The Psychopath: A New Subspecies of Homo Sapiens
Truth to Power: Psychopaths Rule Our World
The Trick of the Psychopath's Trade: Make Us Believe that Evil Comes from Others
Devils In Disguise

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Alarm Clock

Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%

Joseph E. Stiglizt
Vanity Fair
Sun, 01 May 2011 17:47 UTC
Image
© Unknown
The Fat and the Furious: The top 1 percent may have the best houses, educations, and lifestyles, says the author, but “their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live.”
Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation's income - an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.

It's no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation's income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous - 12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades - and more - has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.
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Bizarro Earth

The Peasants Need Pitchforks

Robert Scheer
Truthdig.com
Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:39 UTC
Image
© Associated Press/Jason deCrow
Protesters yell at people looking out from the windows of an AIG building in New York during a 2009 rally against government bailouts for corporations.
A "working class hero," John Lennon told us in his song of that title, "is something to be/ Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV/ And you think you're so clever and classless and free/ But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see."

The delusion of a classless America in which opportunity is equally distributed is the most effective deception perpetrated by the moneyed elite that controls all the key levers of power in what passes for our democracy. It is a myth blown away by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz in the current issue of Vanity Fair. In an article titled "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%", Stiglitz states that the top thin layer of the superwealthy controls 40 percent of all wealth in what is now the most sharply class-divided of all developed nations: "Americans have been watching protests against repressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet, in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation's income - an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret."
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Bizarro Earth

Global Cooling? Huge Arctic 'pool' could flush into Atlantic, alter weather


MSNBC
Tue, 05 Apr 2011 14:57 UTC
'Unpredictable impact on an ocean current system important to both European weather and marine food chain,' experts warn

A swirling pool of icy Arctic meltwater has the potential to flush quickly into the Atlantic Ocean and alter weather in Northern Europe, climate scientists reported Tuesday.

Located just north of Alaska and Canada, the vast pool's percentage of freshwater from rivers has grown by about 20 percent since the 1990s and that change in salinity level could impact ocean circulation and cause temperatures in Northern Europe to cool, the experts said.


Comment: An excerpt from Fire and Ice: The Day After Tomorrow written by Laura Knight-Jadzyck in 2007:

"What is important is that there IS a heating up of the planet, a Global Warming, which is causing a lot of ice to melt. It is also causing a lot of evaporation which then falls as snow in certain areas, and this put pressure on the ice sheets and squeezes them outward so that they actually melt faster around the edges. This adds a LOT of fresh water to the oceans. In the Antarctic regions, it may not be so bad, but in the Arctic, it is a building cataclysm.

The implications are so huge that it is really no wonder that the Bush Reich and others of the ruling elite are trying to shush it up and convince people that it's just going to get hotter and we all have to make sacrifices to try to slow it down. As if! Bush is certainly right when he goes his merry way acting as if Global warming is nothing. He might as well because he, and the rest of them, know that there is nothing that anyone can do about it to stop it. That's a fact. And so, they continue to do the one thing that they believe will save their own skins: continue to follow the plan of imposing total control over everyone and everything so that when the disasters fall fast and hard - as they will - the masses will be controllable. And it certainly doesn't hurt to kill off as many as they can get away with killing in advance; that many fewer mouths to feed, doncha know?

In short, the economic, political and national security implications of sudden cataclysm are what is driving the political machine these days. Britain is headed for a climate worse than Alaska's. And it could be here sooner than anyone expects."

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Bizarro Earth

Fukushima Daiichi Reactors 5-6 Stability Under Threat 04.04.11 - Tepco offical breaks down

leakspinner
YouTube
Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:38 UTC
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