Fukushima: Reactor 2 Upset Reactor 4 Getting More Attention; Smokes With Rage

Smoke emanating from the ground south of Reactor 2.  I'm sure it's OK..  After all, TEPCO's got it all under control..  Fukushima Diary:

This is not sea-fog.


White gas was observed spouting out from south of reactor2 on 9/4/2012.
It had started already around 10:57 and ended about 11:15. 

Video and close up video (from four days ago) at the link.  Simple question:  What caused the smoke?

Bonus nuclear excitement right here in America:

Senior Advisor: Mystery bacteria growing on nuclear fuel rods have unknown DNA sequence — “Right now we are trying to figure out what they’re using for food”

Further Evidence We Inhabit "Universe B."

Children 'too embarrassed' to pick up books, study says.  Wow.  This sucks.  This situation MUST be reversed.  The Daily Mail.  Excerpts:

According to the latest study, one-in-six children admitted they were too embarrassed to read in front of their friends for fear of being labelled a geek.


Researchers said it was "essential" for children to make time to read as there was a clear link between reading outside lessons and academic achievement.

Young people who read at home on a daily basis are 13 times more likely to perform above the level expected for their age in literacy, it was claimed.

Jonathan Douglas, trust director, called on the Government to back a national campaign to halt the reading decline and “give children time to read in their daily lives”.

"The fact that children are reading less than in 2005 signals a worrying shift in young people's literacy habits,” he said.

"We believe we need to inspire a new generation to read in the same way that the Olympics is inspiring a new generation to take part in sport.

"We need to make reading irresistible. We want to call on families and professionals working with children and young people to make 10 minutes in their day for reading."

The research was based on a long-running survey of 21,000 children in primary and secondary education.

It emerged that 38.1 per cent of pupils read in their spare time when the study was first carried out in 2005. This dropped to 37.7 per cent in 2007, 32.2 per cent in 2009 and 30.8 per cent in the latest poll was completed in 2011.

The research found that 54 per cent of those questioned preferred watching TV to reading.

"These findings together suggest a clear issue with children's leisure time with many children enjoying reading but pushing it out in favour of other activities," said the study.

Of those who did read outside class, 47.8 per cent said they read fiction, down from 51.5 per cent in 2005.

Other forms of reading were also in decline, it was revealed. The study also showed that 57 per cent of children read magazines, compared with 77.5 per cent in 2005; 50.4 per cent read websites compared with 63.8 per cent seven years ago; and 27.9 per cent read comics, down from 50.6 per cent in 2005.

A Department for Education spokesman said: “The findings of this survey come as no surprise and shows that we need to continue our drive to encourage young people to develop a love of reading.

“In a world of so many distractions for young minds, the place of literature is more important than ever.

This societal trend threatens to destroy civilization from the inside out.  We cannot devolve into illiteracy and a mob-mentality chaos.  "Idiocracy" looks less like just a comedy and more like dystopian prophecy:  The logical end result stemming from several generations of BAD Educational Policy and socially-encouraged ignorance.  It's not so far off, really.  We owe future generations better than we're treating them by allowing this intellectual abomination to occur.  We must address this crisis head on.  Yesterday.

PHOTOS: Oil washing up on the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Isaac

It was only a matter of time.. Greenpeace.  Photos at the link.  Excerpts:

Oil is washing up along the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Isaac, confirming concerns that the storm could churn up oil in the Gulf of Mexico. A Greenpeace research team took samples from beaches along the Alabama coast on September 2, including from an area with hundreds of tar balls in the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge.

According to the US Coast Guard, oiled pelicans and other wildlife have been found in Louisiana marshes as well. As people struggle with flooding, wind damage, and power outages in the wake of the hurricane, officials have expressed concerns that on top of that disaster, Hurricane Isaac may stir up oil from the BP spill:

“This is another disaster on top of the hurricane that we’re going to have to deal with,” Garret Graves, chairman of Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, told The Huffington Post. “The threat is not insignificant.”

Up to 1 million barrels of oil are estimated to remain in the Gulf of Mexico. That oil remains, Graves said, because BP has failed to clean it all up in the more than two years since the tragedy. “That’s four to five times the oil that was spilled with the Exxon Valdez,” he added.
 

It took awhile, but this phenomenon will likely repeat itself with each new hurricane that passes this area of the Gulf.  Just one more thing to look forward to, right?  Heckuva job, BP..  Heckuva job.

Do's And Don'ts When Talking With An Alzheimer's Caregiver..

Easily one of the most soul-crushing aspects of being an Alzheimer's caregiver are the questions:  Almost every day, the questions never stop; Over and over and over again.  And no, I'm not talking about the afflicted (in this case, my father), I'm talking about family members, his friends, my friends, and casual acquaintances that seem more interested in the gossipy aspect of my status as opposed to genuine concern for dad, my family members, or me, or the perfunctory "How is everything?," without really wanting to know..  I am forever grateful for the ones close, those I can vent honestly to, who are objective and do not judge.  Thank you so much.. 

Yes, I am angry while I write these words, but that's hardly a fucking shock.  I am always angry:  Yes, this is happening.  No, there's nothing I can do to alter the outcome.  Yes, he is much worse than you think he is.  Thanks for visiting, but you visited him early;  Wait until the sundowners kicks in and see if you feel the same way.  No, it doesn't really ever get any better; You just learn to deal with a high level of discomfort and anguish just to be able to get out of bed every day and take care of everything that needs to be taken care of.

Yeah, he has good days.  "Good days" now have recently changed:  More often than not, he eats half or more of his pureed food.  Some days he might initiate conversation more than one question.  The Halidol made him laugh for close to a month, and he was polite and and playful and flashes of the person you once knew surfaced.  Some days he remembers what I just told him only seconds before and won't ask again for say, ten minutes.  A good day is when he doesn't latch on obsessively to a particular thought that ends up dominating that day's conversation.  That is now the baseline for a good day. 

The bad days are when he's agitated and delusional, when he thinks he can stand, when he's so resistant to help that his paper-thin skin tears when the orderlies are simply trying to keep him seated.  The times when I morph from son to other son to brother to father in seconds or minutes isn't nearly as horrifying as you might think, but it's not a real happy time, either.  Lately, he's become more quiet, responding to questions, but not initiating conversation.  I dread the first ring of the phone anytime it rings.  I dread that ring more if it's the nursing home.

I dread dealing with my mom.  I love her very much, but it's difficult to see such sadness in her eyes every single day, even when she's "happy."  Her friends and family are mostly dead or dying and she's the "lucky one" because she's lucid and alive.  I can't imagine the sorrow she never shares as I wheel her in to see her husband of 63 years, wasting away, in and out of coherence, knowing she can't care for him anymore, knowing fully the implications of "in sickness and in health."  She told me she wakes up every day and still expects to see him in bed next to her.  It must be horrible to be devastated so deeply, every morning, even before getting out of bed.

I hate the isolation.  Yes, it's self-imposed, but does anyone else really want to hear this bundle of negativity each time they might call me?  I find my reactions to mundane setbacks almost insane.  I am so raw that even little disappointments cause tears or rage or a burning in my stomach that rationally, I know shouldn't even bother me.  And no, it doesn't help to be told to "shake it off."  Fuck you.  You watch your family die ever so slowly day after day after day and YOU shake it off. 

And for me personally, I am, in real time, watching my family die.  My father is but one of many members who are facing dire health situations.  We as a unit could have a bad month and I might have almost no one left.  And I am not so sure that that wouldn't be the best possible outcome;  On the other side, they will all be healed.  Isn't that what I should want?

Then there is the matter of watching my father, a man I physically mirror, whose behaviors are hard wired, whose personal ticks I mimic, waste away, while every moment of every day I wonder;  Is this my fate?  Is he showing me my inevitable demise?  Provided my life has no unforeseen tragic endings, will my exit mirror his?  Dear God; I hope not.

My family is so tired.  Our lives have stopped and re-arranged to accommodate a daily visit, with nothing else to look forward to.  We will only be free upon his death, but that would be selfish, evil, and cruel to verbalize.  I deal with the casual suggestions of those who have no context, remaining polite when I really want to scream "Do you really fucking think I haven't thought of that?"  I know they want to help and they don't know they're not, but nothing quells my rage.  You cannot understand until you understand through a similar experience.

You want to help?  You want to know what's going on?  Thanks.  It might be nice to start off by saying "I don't know what to say," or "I don't know how I can help," or "If you want to talk; call me.  Just know I'm there.."  Approaches like those help.  If I want to talk, I will.  If I don't; I won't.

Having said these things, please don't think these rules are hard and fast.  My father has legions of friends and family who genuinely care about him and have gone out of their way to show their love and respect for him.  I've watched grown men cry after their visit, who've told me stories about him I've never heard, who have traveled great distances to pay their respects.  Every day, every encounter is overwhelming in its own way.  This stage of his life, of our experience, will take years to process.

Then again, you might catch me on a good day, and all might not be well, but under control.  I am mercurial, dealing with the horrible circumstances that surround me.  Please be patient with me if you call at a difficult time, as I might not be "nice."  Please remember I am flailing, drowning, slapping at the water, surrounded by chaos, fear, and the pain of watching those I love most, die.  Please forgive my subjectivity, even when I cannot.

Thank you.


Note:  This is the third edit I've made to this post, and there may be more.  I like to refine and re-read, just so you know..

Cesium from finished school lunch in Miyagi

Gross.  Fukushima Diary:

In Japan, most of the elementary schools serve school lunch. (Some of the junior high schools do too) Students basically have no rights to reject it or change it to home-made lunch box without a permission, even if the school lunch is radioactive.

In Miyagi prefecture, they measured 12 Bq/kg of cesium from finished school lunch. They mixed all of the food to detect cesium.
On 8/30/2012, it was served in Nakaniida junior high school, Miyagi. (About 130km from Fukushima plant)

It was the mixture of rice, fried chicken, vermicelli salad, miso soup of cabbage, orange and milk.

Costa Rica rocked by powerful earthquake

7.5 to 7.9, depending on who you believe.  Ya Libnan says ultimately 7.6.

At least 20 people were injured Wednesday when a major earthquake hit northwestern Costa Rica, authorities said. The Red Cross said those numbers could rise as damage assessment teams reached more areas.


The quake — initially rated at magnitude 7.9 but then revised by the the U.S. Geological Survey to 7.6 — struck at 10:42 a.m. ET at a depth of about 25 miles about 7 miles southeast of Nicoya. The town of 15,000 people is near the Pacific coast, about 90 miles from the capital, San Jose.
Government buildings, including the National Assembly complex in San Jose, were under evacuation orders, the newspaper La Nacion reported. Thousands of youngsters were sent home from school as a precaution against aftershocks.

Reports earlier in the day said three people had died — two from heart attacks — but Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla said the deaths were not caused by the quake.

Government buildings, including the National Assembly complex in San Jose, were under evacuation orders, the newspaper La Nacion reported. Thousands of youngsters were sent home from school as a precaution against aftershocks.

Gina Rinehart Is A Bubble

The article should have been called "Gina Rinehart is bigger than a goddamned planetoid and probably smells like a toxic waste dump," but the author has more class than I.  I pray for the day when we get to see this waste of humanity, depleted of her INHERITED wealth, working at McDonald's, cleaning toilets, foraging roadkill for food, something soooo beneath her station, harassed every day, every step of the way by those she used to harass simply by being "Gina Rinehart, Obnoxious Blimp and second generation mining mogul."  Please let me see that day..  Zero Hedge.  Excerpts:

Last week she said:


If you’re jealous of those with more money, don’t just sit there and complain. Do something to make more money yourself — spend less time drinking, or smoking and socializing and more time working.

Today she claimed that Australians should be willing to work for less than $2 a day:

Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart has criticised her country’s economic performance and said Africans willing to work for $2 a day should be an inspiration.

Ms Rinehart is said to make nearly A$600 (£393) a second.

The richest woman in the world is making an increasing number of public appearances, and speaking of increasingly controversial topics.

I wonder why.

It couldn’t be that she is becoming increasingly aggressive and controversial because her core business is in trouble, could it?

Marc Faber suggests so:
There have been four mega bubbles in the past 40 years. In the 1970s it was gold; in the 1980s it was the Nikkei, and in the 1990s it was the Nasdaq. Bigger than all of them, though, has been the iron ore bubble, a tenfold increase in prices in less than a decade.

Pop!  Motherfucker, Pop!  I wanna see her sweat!  And not her normal "my heart is beating, so you know I'm damp" kind of sweat, either.  You'd think with all that money she could pay for a less repulsive exterior to hide her repulsive interior.  The epitome of a horrible human..  Dis.

Gusting.

Latest WuJo From Clif High

In Clif's podcast, he describes a bit of the already-present and upcoming (various!) complexities of life here on Earth in the upcoming nine months.  He's certain it's gonna get hairy, so don't say you weren't warned.  The good news?  The closer we get to whatever this is, there does to be more optimisim expressed within the data Clif is processing.  Hope for humanity type optimisim.  This is heartening, as more people seem to be waking up.  And not a moment too soon!

Run time is about 56 minutes.  I will listen again.

Note:  When at the download link, choose the top report:  The one that doesn't contain "$300." 

Hal David Has Died. Long Live Hal David!

We'd drive all over Taney County, every Sunday, in a 1972 Chrysler New Yorker.  My grandparents, mom, sometimes dad, or an aunt or cousin or both and I would drive around, some roads being more familiar and/or dangerous than others, of course.  Grandpa drove.  Always.

And he chain smoked while driving.  Also; Always.   He only cracked the windows, never fully rolling them down.  Between the curves and the second-hand smoke, I was usually car-sick moments after our drive started.  Unpleasant.

The best part of the day was always Dionne Warwicke on the eight track.  My grandparents loved her, and so did I.  As they were, at the time, in their late 60's, it was the only way I ever thought of my grandparents as being "cool" in any way.  They had both volumes of her greatest hit collections.  Within the confines of that car, I can't remember hearing any other artist played.  Dionne Warwicke made nausea much more tolerable, and in some cases, cured it completely.

When I say "Dionne Warwicke," I am also referring to the songwriting team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Ms. Warwicke being their Muse.  There are many, many other talented artists that worked both with Bacharach and David together and alone, but I prefer to focus on my favorites.  In no particular order, here they are:

Thank you, Hal David, for creating some amazing pop perfection.  Your contributions are greatly appreciated.  Greatly.

Taibbi Talks: You Listen

Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital, or How the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck others with the bill.  Rolling Stone.  Excerpts:
..Last May, in a much-touted speech in Iowa, Romney used language that was literally inflammatory to describe America's federal borrowing. "A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation," he declared. "Every day we fail to act, that fire gets closer to the homes and children we love." Our collective debt is no ordinary problem: According to Mitt, it's going to burn our children alive.
And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a "turnaround specialist," a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don't know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.
By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It's almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House.

The unlikeliness of Romney's gambit isn't simply a reflection of his own artlessly unapologetic mindset – it stands as an emblem for the resiliency of the entire sociopathic Wall Street set he represents. Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it's dusted itself off, it's had a shave and a shoeshine, and it's back out there running for president.

Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect front man for Wall Street's greed revolution. He's not a two-bit, shifty-eyed huckster like Lloyd Blankfein. He's not a sighing, eye-rolling, arrogant jerkwad like Jamie Dimon. But Mitt believes the same things those guys believe: He's been right with them on the front lines of the financialization revolution, a decades-long campaign in which the old, simple, let's-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new, highly complex, let's-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy. Instead of cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDOs and other toxic financial products. Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly euphemistic concept of "creative destruction," and amounted to a total abdication of collective responsibility by America's rich, whose new thing was making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest, sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by a true prairie fire of debt.
Mitt Romney – a man whose own father built cars and nurtured communities, and was one of the old-school industrial anachronisms pushed aside by the new generation's wealth grab – has emerged now to sell this make-nothing, take-everything, screw-everyone ethos to the world. He's Gordon Gekko, but a new and improved version, with better PR – and a bigger goal. A takeover artist all his life, Romney is now trying to take over America itself. And if his own history is any guide, we'll all end up paying for the acquisition.

If he were a drug addict and much more hilarious, Matt Taibbi might be mistaken for the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson. As it is, he may be the best American political journalist working today. Maybe among The Best Political Writers Ever. Only time will tell. Read the whole thing.

Ventura talks 9/11, makes Fox idiot leave stage

Jesse Ventura made brian kilmeade scared, so he had to leave.  Too bad he didn't make him a broken nose, too.  Video from You Tube, via We Must Know.

Giant filament explosion erupts on the Sun: massive CME to glance Earth’s magnetic field – Earth dodges dangerous bullet

Space Weather, via The Extinction Protocol, with video at the link:

September 2, 2012 – SPACE – Chance of flares: Sunspot AR1560 has more than quadrupled in size since August 30th, and now the fast growing active region is directly facing our planet: movie. NOAA forecasters estimate a 40% chance of M-class solar fares during the next 48 hours. A filament of magnetism curling around the sun’s southeastern limb erupted on August 31st, producing a coronal mass ejection (CME), a C8-class solar flare, and one of the most beautiful movies ever recorded by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory: The explosion hurled a CME away from the sun traveling faster than 500 km/s (1.1 million mph). The cloud, shown here, is not heading directly toward Earth, but it could deliver a glancing blow to our planet’s magnetic field on or about September 3rd. This date is preliminary and may be changed in response to more data from coronagraphs on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). – Space Weather

Jon Stewart Celebrates Clint Eastwood’s ‘Fistful Of Awesome’

In a special Friday night Republican National Convention edition of The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart took on Clint Eastwood and the now-infamous empty chair. 


Found it on Raw Story.  Video at their link: