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Joe Bageant, 'Redneck' Rebel and Popular Progressive Author, Dies at 64


Alternet.org
Mon, 28 Mar 2011 14:20 UTC
Image
© Rich Cooley/Daily
Writer Joe Bageant sits inside his Winchester home by his laptop computer. His book, "Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War," examines problems with political rivalry within the United States today.
Progressives have lost one of their most talented writers in Joe Bageant, who assailed the corporate takeover of American democracy and the collapse of the middle class.

On Sunday March 27, progressives lost one of their most talented authors in Joe Bageant, who died at age 64 after a four month bout with cancer. The recipient of high praise from luminaries such as Studs Terkel and Howard Zinn, Bageant was one of AlterNet's most popular essayists for his work on the corporate takeover of American democracy, the destruction of the middle-class over the past four decades and the plight of Redneck America. Bageant grew up in Winchester, Va. and his work often dwelled on the misery and duldrums of rural blue collar life.

Dave Pollard, a colleague of Bageant's, summed up the author's unique approach and insight reviewing Deer Hunting with Jesus, Bageant's 2008 book, a revisit to his Virginia roots:

Comment: For more of Joe Bageant's articles, see this Sott link:

AMERICA: Y UR PEEPS B SO DUM? Ignorance and courage in the age of Lady Gaga

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Eye 1

CNN: Fukushima will end very, very badly - No one knows how to stop it


Energy News
Sun, 27 Mar 2011 14:15 UTC
Transcript Summary:

Unprecedented...
Frankly no one knows how to end situation...
Beyond ability of Japanese authorities to contain...
Best guess on how this ends?...
There is going to be a bigger breach than we have already seen in 2 and 3...
Workers will be evacuated...
We will see at least two core meltdowns and two spent fuel pool fires...
It will end very, very badly, that is what I actually think is going to happen...
This will take weeks, months to contain it in best case...

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Heart - Black

Thousands of Gulf Oil Spill clean-up crew are dying


Gulf Leak Watch
Thu, 24 Mar 2011 13:58 UTC
Notes from a Facebook buddy:

This young woman, Jennifer Rexford, BP-hired oil cleanup worker, is documenting her illness from the toxins in the gulf with her video camera. If you think it's just headaches or something like that, watch this. Severe neurological damage. Doctors and hospitals refuse to acknowledge this with anyone there who's sick. And there are apparently tens of thousands now.



Paul Doomm is mentioned twice in this video. He is a 22 year old who swam in and ate from the Gulf all summer, against his grandmother's advice. He has been hospitalized after seeing 94 doctors who don't know what to do for him. His blood had the highest amount of PAH's ever documented.
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Evil Rays

Plutonium detected in soil at Fukushima nuke plant, suggesting damage to fuel rods


Xinhua
Tue, 29 Mar 2011 13:04 UTC
Tokyo,-- Plutonium has been detected in soil at five locations at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said in a statement on Monday.

According to Kyodo News Agency, the plutonium detection suggests "certain damage to fuel rods".

Plutonium, a key ingredient in nuclear weapons, is present in the fuel at the complex, which has been leaking radiation for over two weeks.
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Bad Guys

The Doomsday Scenario: Is Fukushima About to Blow?

Mike Whitney
Counterpunch
Mon, 28 Mar 2011 12:49 UTC
Fukushima plant
© n/a
Damaged reactor building at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant.
Conditions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant are deteriorating and the doomsday scenario is beginning to unfold. On Sunday, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) officials reported that the levels of radiation leaking into seawater at the Unit 2 reactor were 100,000 times above normal, and the airborne radiation measured 4-times higher than government limits. As a result, emergency workers were evacuated from the plant and rushed to safe location. The prospect of a full-core meltdown or an environmental catastrophe of incalculable magnitude now looms larger than ever. The crisis is getting worse.

If spent fuel rods catch fire from lack of coolant, the intense heat will lift radiation plumes high into the atmosphere that will drift around the world. That's the nightmare scenario, clouds of radioactive material showering the planet with lethal toxins for months on end. And, according to the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics of Vienna, that deadly process has already begun. The group told New Scientist that:
"Japan's damaged nuclear plant in Fukushima has been emitting radioactive iodine and caesium at levels approaching those seen in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Austrian researchers have used a worldwide network of radiation detectors - designed to spot clandestine nuclear bomb tests - to show that iodine-131 is being released at daily levels 73 per cent of those seen after the 1986 disaster. The daily amount of caesium-137 released from Fukushima Daiichi is around 60 per cent of the amount released from Chernobyl. (New Scientist, March 24 ---thanks to Michael Collins "They said it wasn't like Chernobyl and they were wrong")
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Evil Rays

Carolinas, Florida Utilities Report Radiation from Japan


First Coast News
Mon, 28 Mar 2011 12:50 UTC
Raleigh, North Carolilna-- Utilities in Florida as well as North and South Carolina are adding to the list of states in the U.S. reporting trace amounts of radiation from a nuclear reactor in Japan that was damaged by an earthquake and tsunami.

Progress Energy says it picked up low levels of iodine-131, a radioactive byproduct of nuclear fission, at its nuclear plant in South Carolina and a Florida plant.

Progress Energy owns the single-unit Crystal River Nuclear Plant near Crystal River, Fla.
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Dollar

Bayer ordered to pay 136.8 million in US GM rice contamination case


Current TV
Sun, 27 Mar 2011 11:58 UTC
Image

A unit of Germany's Bayer AG has been ordered by a court in Arkansas to pay $136.8 million to Riceland Foods over the contamination of U.S. long grain rice stocks with a genetically modified strain from Bayer that decimated exports more than four years ago.

The judgment, handed down by a jury in Stuttgart, Arkansas, includes $125 million in punitive damages to Riceland, a farmers cooperative.

Bayer said it is "disappointed" with the verdict and is considering its legal options. It said the punitive damages exceed what is permitted by Arkansas law and will therefore be limited to the statutory cap of $1 million.
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Evil Rays

Highly radioactive water found in tunnel outside nuclear plant


CNN
Mon, 28 Mar 2011 11:43 UTC
Tokyo -- Water found in a tunnel at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has alarmingly high radiation readings, officials said Monday, adding that it is unclear how or why the tainted water got out of the building.


The water at the plant is emitting more than 1,000 millisieverts per hour of radioactivity -- a level the plant's owner had said is at least 100,000 times normal levels for coolants inside a nuclear reactor.

It was in a tunnel that contains electrical cables and is connected to the No. 2 reactor's turbine building, an official with the Tokyo Electric Power Co. said. The measurements were taken Monday afternoon.
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Bizarro Earth

Japan Copes with 21st-Century Dark Age

Barbara Demick
The Seattle Times
Sun, 27 Mar 2011 18:51 UTC
man & child Japan
© Getty
The first pitch of Japan's baseball season has been pushed back so people don't waste gasoline driving to games.

The first pitch of Japan's baseball season has been pushed back so people don't waste gasoline driving to games. When the season does start, most night games will be switched to daytime so as not to squander electricity. There will be no extra innings.

Tokyo's iconic electronic billboards have been switched off. Trash is piling up in many northern cities because garbage trucks don't have gasoline. Public buildings go unheated. Factories are closed, in large part because of rolling blackouts and because employees can't drive to work with empty tanks.

This is what happens when a 21st-century, technologically sophisticated country runs critically low on energy. The March 11 earthquake and tsunami have thrust much of Japan into an unaccustomed dark age that could drag on for up to a year.
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USA

AMERICA: Y UR PEEPS B SO DUM? Ignorance and courage in the age of Lady Gaga

Joe Bageant
joebageant.com
Tue, 07 Dec 2010 00:00 UTC

Comment: Joe Bageant died March 26th 2011 after a relatively brief struggle with cancer. Joe was a prolific social commentator and author who used his keen insight and raw sense of humor to dissect and expose the ugly truth about the failed experiment that is human 'civilization'. Hailing from the backwoods of Virginia, Joe saved his most incisive commentary for life in the USA and his last article, written in December 2010, shows why his voice of sanity will be sorely missed.


Image
© Joe Bageant
If you hang out much with thinking people, conversation eventually turns to the serious political and cultural questions of our times. Such as: How can the Americans remain so consistently brain-f*cked? Much of the world, including plenty of Americans, asks that question as they watch U.S. culture go down like a thrashing mastodon giving itself up to some Pleistocene tar pit.

One explanation might be the effect of 40 years of deep fried industrial chicken pulp, and 44 ounce Big Gulp soft drinks. Another might be pop culture, which is not culture at all of course, but marketing. Or we could blame it on digital autism: Ever watch commuter monkeys on the subway poking at digital devices, stroking the touch screen for hours on end? Those wrinkled Neolithic brows above the squinting red eyes?

But a more reasonable explanation is that, (A) we don't even know we are doing it, and (B) we cling to institutions dedicated to making sure we never find out.
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