Is John Edwards irrelevant yet?
—GP
10-Year Treasury Yield Falls to New Low
Getting kinda scary out there. The lower it goes, the easier it is for the US government to borrow money. When it starts to reverse however, watch for things to meltdown fast.
For additional context, here are the treasury yields going back to the 1970s.
Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.
—Carl Sagan
The Obama administration asserts what I genuinely believe, without hyperbole, is the most extremist government interpretation of the Bill of Rights I have heard in my lifetime: that the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that the State cannot deprive you of your life without “due process of law” is fulfilled by completely secret, oversight-free “internal deliberations by the executive branch.
Let My People Go
In this video, the representative is angry that the state house won’t allow a bill on pension reform to be read before they force a vote. You can read more about the specifics here if you want, but really, it’s just good to hear someone condemn the powerful right to their faces. “Total power in one person’s hand — not the American way!” he screams.
Once something is repeated enough by government officials, we become numb to its extremism.
“Wealth” by
War TV
America’s long creep into to total, uncompromising, warfare has reached a state where even Time and Newsweek are starting to ask question about it. Little good or depth that will bring to the issue, but still.
The New Yorker goes into detail summarizing the process by which the President and his administration sort through the laborious burocratic process of ordering people killed, “a Kill List”:
Each might include a mini-glossary: “baseball cards,” for the PowerPoint slides with the biographies and faces of targets; “Terror Tuesday,” meetings where targets are sorted out; “nominations” for death-marked finalists; “personality strikes” that aimed to kill a person, and “signature strikes” that went after a group of people whose names one didn’t know because of the way they seemed, from pictures in the sky, to be acting. (From the Times piece, written by Jo Becker and Scott Shane: “The joke was that when the C.I.A. sees ‘three guys doing jumping jacks,’ the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official.”)
This is war run by technocrats, harkening back to stories of the Johnson Administration micromanaging airstrikes over Hanoi (‘hit this train, not that one even though you see missiles on it, thats not part of the strike list’). The idea of war is a struggle between men in a field or bombed out cityscapes. Where life and death decisions are made at the moment and with full knowledge of gravity. This is drone warfare, war printed on CNC machines in a factory.
drone strikes, as opposed to ground troops, bring with them a comforting illusion of distance. Picturing Obama going through the lists in a bright office in Washington shows where that daydream leads, and how deceptive it can be. A drone-based conflict may, in the short run, keep some troops from harm, but it may also take the debate about war and peace out of the public sphere and into what is, in political terms, a much darker space.
It is war without cost, without consequence. One of the greatest intellectual minds of our time, Bill Hicks, famously said that the Gulf War wasn’t a war. “See, a war is when two countries fight.”
We are many levels beyond that now. No countries, no soldiers, no heroes, only casualties on a videogame’s display.
At the very end of the [Austro-Hungarian] Empire, even the streetlights longed for morning so that they could be extinguished. The undercurrent of a world like ours, where people are reduced to objects and where there are no higher values, where national myths collapse, triggers a similar longing for annihilation.
—Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion
The last official act of any government is to loot the nation.
—Michael Rivero
There’s nothing that terrifies the American government so much as the threat of democracy breaking out in America.
—David Graeber
Fukushima Update
This translated news report from a Japanese news broadcast is rather interesting. It sums up the recent developments in the Fukushima disaster or what they call ‘311.’
Remember to turn on subtitles.
Among the interesting quotes provided, Prof. Hiroaki Koide of the Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute said:
If you were to convert the amount of cesium-137 stored within the spent fuel pool of reactor 4, using a Hiroshima bomb equivalent, conservatively you would be looking at the eqivalent of 5,000 nuclear bombs… if the spent fuel pool were to collapse due to another big earthquake the release of radioactive materials would be huge.
An Anonymous Fukushima worker told reporters:
When there is an earthquake I can feel, the first thing I do is check the reactor 4 building.
Contractors note that the pipes supplying water to the fuel pool are weakening and may not hold for long. An earthquake could weaken the pipes further or collapse the building all together. If the water is drained due to a leak in the pipes, the fuel rods could meltdown. Even if the rods don’t melt, they could still be ruptured and radiation could be released slowly over time.
The fuel rods are not scheduled to be removed until December 2013. They are running out of private contractors who have not already reached the limit for radiation exposure.
The station anchor interviewing one last scientists ends with this rather ominous quote:
If anything happens, this is not just about the end of Japan, probably start of the end of the world. I would like them to realize that we are in such crisis situation.
