Society's Child

'Global consequences' of lethal radiation leak at severely damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant

Sputnik
Sun, 04 Feb 2018 11:44 UTC

Lethal levels of radiation have been observed inside Japan's damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant. And they are arguably way higher than you suspect.

According to Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), radiation levels of eight Sieverts per hour (Sv/h) have been discovered within the Fukushima nuclear power plant, which was destroyed after a massive earthquake and a tsunami in March 2011.

Tepco, the company that operated the plant and is now tasked with decommissioning it, reported the discovery after making observations in a reactor containment vessel last month.

Eight Sv/h of radiation, if absorbed at once, mean certain death, even with quick treatment. One Sv/h is likely to cause sickness and 5.5 Sv/h will result in a high chance of developing cancer.

Comment: Fukushima is still an absolute disaster and will continue to pose great health risks to the world at large for many years to come. See also:

Let me begin by 'checking my privilege'

Tristan Flock
Quillette
Tue, 23 Jan 2018 10:29 UTC

Having the privilege conversation is itself an expression of privilege. ... It's not just that commenting online about privilege - or any other topic - suggests leisure time. It's also that the vocabulary of 'privilege' is learned at liberal-arts colleges or in highbrow publications.
~ Phoebe Maltz Bovy, "Checking Privilege Checking," The Atlantic

All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it.
~ Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By

A couple of years ago, while studying law in western Canada, I took a political science course on environmental issues taught by a renowned professor. Having become alarmed at the lack of legal protections for the environment, I hoped to learn more about the politics behind such flagrant and pervasive oversights.

Unfortunately, the class was a bust. Instead of analyzing political thought and behaviour related to our current ecological crisis, the course taught a strange blend of self-help and pseudoscience. We "learned" that atoms have free will, that the Earth purposefully maintains conditions conducive to life, that modern science is naïvely reductionist and therefore urgently in need of a paradigm shift, and that Francis Bacon was one of the main architects behind the modern disconnect from nature.

Comment: Having to 'check your privilege' because of the privilege you have to be able to say it makes a mockery of the situation and detracts from genuine acts of co-operation. Even more so considering the current climate in higher education where everything is structured around these alt-left ideologies where any minor transgression is immediately used by those indocrinated to bring themselves under the 'victim' label that's so popular these days.

If anything, prefacing what you say with that thought implies that you are better than the other person. It says, "I'm better than you and because you are not so privileged I will 'check my privilege' so that I'm not direspecting you." It's demeaning and disrespectful to the other party and runs counter to creating open dialogue where both people can be free to express their thoughts without entering into some sort of dominance hierarchy where the conversation is a battle to be won rather than a fair exchange of ideas. See also: Post-nihilism, a template for where we are heading

Damore's lawsuit exposes Google's internal culture of intolerance

Gideon Scopes
Quillette
Thu, 01 Feb 2018 09:02 UTC

James Damore, the former Google engineer who was fired last summer after authoring a document questioning the company's diversity policies, has filed a lawsuit against the company. In a 161-page complaint, he does far more than challenge his firing and accuses Google of systemic discrimination against and harassment of white and male employees, as well as of violating a California state law that prohibits employers from discriminating on the basis of an employee's political persuasion. He has joined together with another engineer by the name of David Gudeman who was also fired after he expressed politically incorrect views. Together, the two of them are requesting that their case be treated as a class action on behalf of all employees who have faced similar treatment at the hands of the Internet giant. The charges that they make are broad and far-reaching, but they are not asking that their claims be taken on faith alone. More than half of the complaint is taken up by an 87-page-long exhibit consisting of screenshots from internal systems used by Google employees to communicate. These screenshots present a stunning display of unprofessional behavior not just by rank-and-file employees but managers and even a senior vice president, including overt discrimination, prejudice on the basis of race and gender, conflation of dissenting political views with racism and sexism, punishment of those who asked questions about what behavior was permitted, endorsement of politically motivated violence, and even an attack on the very notion of truth itself.

Comment: Social justice warriors have taken over the asylum and essentially run the company. This is the result. See also:

Gender politics kills school's father-daughter dance

Anna Sanders & Sara Dorn
NY Post
Sun, 04 Feb 2018 01:06 UTC

A Staten Island elementary school scrapped its traditional father-daughter dance this coming Friday because of the Department of Education's new gender guidelines.

The DOE ordered schools to "eliminate" any "gender-based" practices like the dance in a March 2017 policy update unless they serve a "clear" educational purpose.

The PS 65 shindig, set for Feb. 9, was abruptly postponed until next month after the school's PTA realized the dance would run afoul of the rules.

Robert Wagner again 'person of interest' in Natalie Wood's drowning 37 years later

Sputnik
Sun, 04 Feb 2018 00:48 UTC

In a recent interview, Los Angeles Police Lieutenant John Corina told 48 Hours that deceased actress Natalie Wood's then-husband, Robert Wagner, is again "a person of interest" in her mysterious death almost 40 years ago.

"As we've investigated the case over the last six years, I think he's more of a person of interest now," Corina suggested. "I mean, we now know that he was the last person to be with Natalie before she disappeared."

Hope amid the scars of Derry's tortured past

John Wight
Sputnik
Fri, 02 Feb 2018 19:41 UTC

CC BY-SA 3.0 / Ardfern / St Eugene's Cathedral, Francis Street, Derry, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland

There are places the very names of which conjure an association with the best and worst of humanity, synonymous with suffering, struggle, and the determination and obdurate refusal of the human spirit to be crushed under the wheels of injustice.

Belgrade, Sarajevo, Gaza, Jenin, Soweto, Belfast, and Derry are cities, towns and places where ordinary men and women have forged history neither by choice nor design but as a consequence of circumstances not of their choosing. And with this in mind, on a recent trip to Derry in Ireland I was reminded of something Bertolt Brecht wrote: "Because things are they way they are, things will not stay the way they are."

Comment: Also See:

Lebanon needs Hezbollah to resolve internal clashes as Israel's war threats escalate

Martin Jay
RT
Fri, 02 Feb 2018 14:53 UTC

Lebanon is a pressure cooker which could blow at any moment, but don't worry about confused US policy. Israel's threats to invade are not irking the Lebanese, but many wish Hezbollah would end a local Shiite-Christian spat.

America's confused position in Afrin, northern Syria, is not the only location in the Middle East where Washington's loyalties are at odds with the reality on the ground. Lebanon, a country once called the 'Switzerland of the Middle East' for its Western pretensions, is now what many call a failed state which is consumed by corruption. And a confused one, for Washington to grapple with.

Lebanon is one of the highest net recipients of US military aid and because of its unique location (bordering Israel) and its dominance by Iranian-backed Hezbollah, that makes it a special case in the eyes of Washington. Indeed, only recently when Israel threatened to attack, it was the US which "pledged" support for the Lebanese Army, which it erroneously believes acts as a "counterweight" to Hezbollah. Is the US misinformed and comically out of touch of the recent developments in Lebanon, or is it simply confused about the realities on the ground?

Comment: Every hand on a gun, every faction in a back pocket. Status quo. Meanwhile, Israel is stirring the pot, picking for a fight.

Student experiment: On questions of US foreign policy, it is different when 'Obama' says it

RT
Sat, 03 Feb 2018 15:05 UTC

Campus Reform tested the partisan lines at New York's John Jay College by presenting elements of Barack Obama's State of the Union addresses as quotes from Donald Trump's latest speech.

Following Trump's first State of Union address this week, the conservative news outlet duped a number of students into believing that words uttered by Barack Obama - the more favourably-regarded president among young New Yorkers - were actually those of a Republican.

As the short video experiment shows, Trump's name can be controversial regardless of the content being shared. However, it also shows young Americans pondering the impact of their previous government's foreign-policy rhetoric.

On Barack Obama's stance on Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), which was to hunt and destroy them, one respondent said: "[The president] should mind his own business and focus on America because he is the president of the US, not of the whole world."

Comment: As cleverly shown, bias colors how we input information and interpret it -- a thought process necessitating awareness and neutralization before forming opinions.

Top five biased left-wing Wikipedia edits of 2017

T.D. Adler
Breitbart
Thu, 01 Feb 2018 20:01 UTC

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales believes the Wikipedia model can help salvage journalistic integrity, but in the year since Donald Trump took office as President of the United States, the online encyclopedia has instead proven unable to even restrain its own biased editing community.

A look back on five of the biggest cases of political bias that gripped the site in 2017 should discourage anyone from looking to Wikipedia as a source for reliable and neutral information on the political topics of the day.

1. Instructor at Berkeley sending students on anti-Trump editing spree

UC Berkeley instructor Michel Gelobter launched a course in January 2017 for his students to edit Wikipedia advancing an "environmental justice" narrative. Gelobter's course description cited the importance of the course as being at "a unique moment in history...the first few months of a historically unique U.S. President whose agenda has been explicitly anti-environmental, sexist, and racist." He encouraged his students to "edit and/or create Wikipedia articles in order to create a neutral, well-documented record of the assaults on the environment and environmental justice expected to unfold early in the Trump Presidency."

Despite the clear bias of the course description, Helaine Blumenthal of the Wiki Education Foundation, which oversees such editing projects, posted it to Wikipedia without any alterations. After a few months, Wikipedia editors discussed the problems the course was creating and swiftly banned Gelobter from the site. While Wikipedia editors did delete some of the more egregious additions, others remained. In one of the worst examples, a lengthy section about "environmental injustices and the Trump Administration" consisting of over an eighth of the article on air pollution in the United States still remains essentially untouched, as do similar sections in the articles on food security and the Port Arthur Refinery in Texas. On Facebook, Gelobter insisted the pages were all neutral.

Russian Navy's large cargo ship carrying a wealth of new military equipment, departs for Syria's waters

FARS
Sat, 03 Feb 2018 20:39 UTC

© FNA
The Russian Army's large cargo ship has left the country for Syria's waters to join the Russian naval fleet in Eastern Mediterranean Sea, a media outlet reported on Saturday

The Arabic-language website of RT reported that Caesar Kunikov (BDK-64), a Project 775 class large landing ship of the Russian Navy, has left the country for Syria's waters.

The Arabic RT quoted Turkish media as saying that the Caesar Kunikov ship passed the Black Sea's strait and entered the Mediterranean Sea on Friday.

The Russian sources had previously reported that the army's large cargo ship left Sevastopol port in Crimea for Mediterranean Sea to join the Russian naval fleet in Syria's Tartus port.

Comment: The Russian Navy has just fired several cruise missiles over the Idlib countryside, pro-government activists in Latakia reported this afternoon.

The cruise missiles reportedly targeted the eastern countryside of the Idlib Governorate, where the downed Russian pilot was killed today.

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Society's Child

'Global consequences' of lethal radiation leak at severely damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant

Let me begin by 'checking my privilege'

Damore's lawsuit exposes Google's internal culture of intolerance

Gender politics kills school's father-daughter dance

Robert Wagner again 'person of interest' in Natalie Wood's drowning 37 years later

Hope amid the scars of Derry's tortured past

Lebanon needs Hezbollah to resolve internal clashes as Israel's war threats escalate

Student experiment: On questions of US foreign policy, it is different when 'Obama' says it

Top five biased left-wing Wikipedia edits of 2017

Russian Navy's large cargo ship carrying a wealth of new military equipment, departs for Syria's waters

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