Best video and article on earthquake and tsunami in Japan

The article I’m linking to today covers the disaster comprehensivley, hear the bottom of the article is a link to a video of the tsunami that is mesmerizing.

http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03/14/in-japan-plant-partial-meltdown-highly-possible/?icid=maing%7Cmain5%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk3%7C49940

Nuclear Meltdown in Japan

So it looks like there is one more tragedy on the front for the people of Japan, it looks like the Fukushima  Daiichi nuclear power plant is potentially melting down.  A large explosion in the plant occurred as plant officials tried to cool down the core so I meltdown is currently fear to be in progress.

So what is a nuclear meltdown, essentially when a nuclear power plant can no longer cool the nuclear power rods the system can heat up to the point of melting the core of reactor.  Most modern reactors have a containment dome that keeps the radiation from being released into the environment.

There are some fears that the containment dome at the plant in Japan may have been damaged during the earthquake and tsunami.  The natural disaster was the cause of the potential meltdown as the quake and the tsunami lead to an explosion that disrupted the cooling system for the plant.  The large fear of course is that a large amount of radiation may be released if the dome has been damaged bringing up flashbacks of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.  The reality is even in a worst case scenario the release will be less than Chernobyl and worse than Three Mile Island.

Why we will do nothing about Libya

Unless you are living under a rock and if so thanks for coming out to read this blog, you probably know that the most recent of the countries to be having a little revolt is Libya.  A country run by the ever highly entertaining, dangerous, insane bastard by the name of  Muammar Gaddafi or Khadhafi, it seems like each news organization picks a new way to spell his name.  The link below will give you a little background on this madman and his past atrocities which include sponsoring the terrorist who destroyed a flight over Lockerbie, Scotland which included killing one of my friend’s siblings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaddafi

Without a doubt Gaddafi is a bastard who in seeing what was happening to Saddam Hussein decided to give up his WMD programs in order to pacify the Bush Administration.  He’s insane, not stupid.  He bought himself a place outside of the spotlight and stayed tucked away in his little corner until the recent uprising.  Now, his people, seeing the successes in Tunisia and Egypt decided it was time to take the tyrant down.  However Libya is not Egypt and Gaddafi has not been above hiring mercenaries, killing civilians or using airpower and his military to subdue his citizens.

So today both the EU ministers and the NATO Alliance folks sat around and debated what they might do.  Of course they will do nothing without a mandate by the United Nations.  The fact is, that by time they get around to seriously considering doing anything Gaddafi will quite literally have crushed the opposition.  Libya is small potatoes in the oil business, a small country that accounts for only 1-2% of the world’s oil supply so in the end, unless the French oil companies doing business there can truly pressure NATO, we will watch the Libyan people get crushed.  Gaddafi and his family know this and they are so sure that they are brutally bombing, torturing and killing their citizens to put down this revolt.  As usual, in order to see what drives the events of history, we need look no further than the financial impact on the military industrial complex and Libya just doesn’t register a large enough hit.

Muslim radicalization hearings or state sponsored bigotry?

Republican Peter King of New York, and today I’m ashamed of the New Yorkers who voted him into office,  in a bit of political grand standing, meant I’m sure to solidify his “conservative” credentials, is holding hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims. 

Now let’s look at those two words, American Muslims, so Americans are being investigated for their religious beliefs.  I believe they tried this in Spain once, it was called the inquisition.  By what right does our government have to investigate a whole religion of people based upon the acts of several individuals?  And I don’t want to hear the nonsense some conservatives spout about how Islam is a violent religion, read the Christian Bible then read the Koran, there is a lot of overlap and a whole lot of violence in both books.  As a matter of fact if you made a movie using the literal stories in the Christian Bible it would have to be rated NC-17 due to violence, sexual situations and rape.  Yet Christianity is considered by conservatives to be the peaceful and “right” religion and Islam is violent and wrong. 

There are radicals in every religion; I’ll bet Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph were all Christians, so why aren’t we having hearings on the radicalization of Christianity.  Hell American Muslims haven’t actually killed anyone but these white Christians did?  Oh that’s right, they are white Christians so they can act as individuals, but brown people who are Muslims are incapable of individual thought, at least that is what these hearings suggest.

Peter King you should be ashamed of yourself and your state sponsored bigotry.

Conservative hypocrites and a high sugar tax

There has been a TV commercial on lately that has been annoying me to no end.  It has a nicely dressed woman shopping in the grocery store while she lectures us on how government should stay out of her kitchen, she should decide what her family eats and drinks.  The ad is a push back to the idea being floated in many jurisdictions around the country to add an additional tax to high sugar drinks and foods that contribute to obesity. 

Now, my libertarian nature finds me in complete agreement with this woman and this commercial.  I mean unless an industry is actually providing addictive material, like the tobacco industry, I think it should be left alone.  If people eat fast food and drink too much high fructose sugary drinks so be it, if they get fat, ill and die, ok that’s the consequence.  Now, I also don’t believe that the fast food industry should be open to law suit for serving non-addictive bad food.  I mean hell, what’s next, are we going to launch a war on Baskin-Robbins? 

The problem I have with this ad is the hypocrisy; this commercial is being put forward under the idea of keeping the government out of my kitchen.  However, these are the same people, who are in favor of allowing the government into a woman’s life and deny her the right to have an abortion, don’t want Planned Parenthood to be funded for sex education, pregnancy and disease prevention or allow two people of the same-sex to marry. 

So I guess the kitchen is the most sacred room in the house because they don’t mind having the government in our bedrooms or married lives.  Hypocrite is the word you’re looking for right now.

Violence in American Sport

Recently I was reading an article on how the National Hockey League is clamping down on violence because a former player, an enforcer, has died of a brain disease believed to be linked to the violence.  This follows on a long season in the National Football League where the league’s emphasis was on reducing head blows and injuries related to players taking vicious hits.  There has been lots of discussion around this point and many of the pundits from both sports have talked about how the fans really don’t want the brutal violence, they want to see nice clean sportsmanship.

Some players took a lot of flak for saying otherwise, including a wise-crack made by James Harrison prior to the Superbowl where he said, if possible, he’d happily tackle the Green Bay Packers onto soft mattresses.   The fact is in my observations I have come to view our sports like football and in particular hockey as modern-day gladiator fights.  We see ourselves as more civilized because we patch our gladiators up, pay them millions of dollars and ruin their post sporting lives.  But none-the-less it is violent gladiator sport and if my words haven’t convinced you then let this picture taken from the LA Times speak its thousand words, take a good look on the expression of the young man’s face.

Look at the kid's face