Top Japanese officials have banned everybody else from talking about the nuclear plant situation. This is not a good thing. This means that all statements will be politically driven even more than usual. I understand that there's a lot of confusion from differing reports, but that's better than a ban on statements. This is the likely reason for the ban:
"Scores of terrified residents began to flee Tokyo today as a nuclear power plant destroyed by the tsunami threatened to send a cloud of radioactive dust across Japan.
The Fukushima Dai-ichi plant suffered a third reactor explosion overnight, another reactor on the site caught fire - and officials today announced the wall of one reactor was cracked.Radiation levels are soaring across the country this afternoon as radioactive material is spewed directly into the atmosphere while emergency crews fight to avoid a catastrophic meltdown.Levels of radiation were ten times higher than normal in the capital today, as experts warned that people in Japan could face an increased cancer risk even if the crisis does not deteriorate."
Nobody wants to breath air with 10 times higher than normal radiation, but it can't be that dangerous.
"Health officials have stressed that the radiation levels outside the 18-mile exclusion zone are not harmful, but experts warn residents could still face an increased cancer risk."
I bet this is the conflict that sparked the ban. Some alarmist is scaring people into fleeing and panic buying, and that could further harm the Japanese economy at a time it can hardly afford it. Of course the Japanese have a heightened fear of radiation too.
"After Japan’s request to the United States for help cooling the reactors, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it was considering providing technical advice."
Considering? What's to consider? This is what happens when government seizes power over an activity.
"President Barack Obama offered any help the U.S. could provide to help recover from its ‘multiple disasters’."
Apparently that statement was empty rhetoric.
"Scientists say there are serious dangers but little risk of a catastrophe similar to the 1986 blast in Chernobyl"Can they come up with a more confusing position? No more than a handful of people were affected by radiation at Chernobyl. If this is less bad, then nobody will be affected. How can it be serious if that's the case? This is the most sickening part:
"Green campaigners wasted no time in exploiting the disaster, claiming it proved nuclear power could never be safe."On the one hand, we have houses, cars and boats bouncing around like bowling balls, killing people and destroying property. On the other hand we have a nuclear power plant that hasn't killed anybody. It seems to me the safest place on the coast to be during that earthquake and tsunami was a nuclear power plant.
"Steve Campbell, of Greenpeace, said: ‘This proves once and for all that nuclear power cannot ever be safe. Japan’s nuclear plants were built with the latest technology, specifically to withstand natural disasters, yet we still face potential meltdown.’"I guess if you still live in the '60s, they were built with the latest technology.
"Professor Paddy Regan, a nuclear physicist at Surrey University, said: ‘We had a doomsday earthquake in a country with 55 nuclear power stations and they all shut down perfectly, although three have had problems since.
‘This was a huge earthquake, and as a test of the resilience and robustness of nuclear plants it seems they have withstood the effects very well.’"
That is absolutely correct.
"A radiation dose is expressed in units of Sievert (Sv). On average, a person is exposed to approximately 3.0 mSv/year, most of which is due to natural sources such as cosmic rays.
The readings at the Fukushima site rose beyond safe limits - 400 millisieverts per hour (mSv/hr), after a third explosion last night. So far nearly 200 people have been taken to hospital with suspected exposureAccording to the World Nuclear Authority a radiation dose of 100mSV a year is the lowest level at which any increased risk of cancer is evident.A cumulative dose of 1,000 millisieverts would increase the incidence of fatal cancer by about five per cent."
I see no reason for alarmism.
TAX AND SPEND:
Ohio Governor Kasich releases new budget. Remember when he campaigned on cutting spending? Forget about it.
"Spending in all funds falls from $120.3 billion in Strickland's last budget to $119.5 billion."Another one of those tiny, token spending cuts that Republicans use to pretend they support smaller government. What's different from the Democrats?
"According to administration figures, general revenue funding grows from $50.8 billion to $55.5 billion over the two-year budget cycle."He expects to seize more money from taxpayers. What's Kasich's approach?
""The one thing that I think you need to understand is that this budget is loaded with one reform after another," Kasich said at a media briefing on the plan. "It is, I would guess, the most reform-oriented budget in modern Ohio history.""He doesn't care about reducing government. He wants to make it more efficient at looting us.
Former Reagan budget director David Stockman calls TARP the triumph of crony capitalism.
"To be sure, lowering the burden of taxation on the American economy is a compelling idea from both a philosophical and economic policy viewpoint. But deficit-financed tax cuts are a politician's snare and delusion. Such fiscal actions do not actually reduce the tax burden — they just defer its collection."Nobody knows that better than Stockman.
"Moreover, the evidence of the last 30 years shows that preemptive tax cuts don't actually "starve the beast" — notwithstanding the popularity of this nostrum among certain K-Street philosophers whose day jobs involve panhandling outside the Ways and Means Committee hearing room."That too.
"Needless to say, this outcome bespeaks irony. Milton Friedman was an unrelenting foe of big government and the American welfare state, yet the global monetary contraption he inspired ensured its perpetuation."I think if Friedman was alive today, he might change to a hard money advocate.
"The January nonfarm payroll number was 130.5 million — a figure first reached in November 1999. And that is the encouraging part of the story! Way back then, there were 72 million "breadwinner" jobs in the US economy — that is, jobs in manufacturing, construction, distribution, FIRE, information technology, the professions, and white-collar services. Average pay levels were about $50,000 per year in today's dollars.A decade later in February 2011, there were only 65 million breadwinner jobs — 10 percent fewer. Too be sure, this large drain was nearly offset by a 6 million job gain over the decade in the HES complex (health, education, and social services). But the 30 million total jobs in the HES complex have much lower average pay, at about $35,000 per year, so we are trading down — and their funding is almost entirely derived from the public purse, which is broke."This is a glimpse of how much of the illusion of wealth we've already lost. But when the curtain finally falls, it will be far worse. This is a great speech.
POLICE STATE:
Hypocrisy of spraying Americans with radiation via nude-scanners while decrying the radiation leak in Japan.
POLITICS:
More Americans are realizing our government sucks.
"The latest ABC-WaPo poll says the number of Americans who, in the poll’s hilarious phrase, are “optimistic about ‘our system of government and how well it works,’” has dropped to 26%."How can anybody be optimistic about it? Those 26 percent must get a ton a money from the government.
The danger from the belief that the state has no moral limits.
"The general view of the State as an amoral entity inevitably and powerfully stimulates the ambition of the type of person who is best qualified, and also most eagerly disposed, to profit by it and presume upon it to the utmost."If you want to steal without being punished for it, government is the only job for you. If you want to kick in doors, shoot dogs and stick guns in the faces of peaceful people, government is the only job for you. This is why government attracts the worst people in the country and they rise to the top.
MEDIA:
Alarmism over Japan's nuclear reactors rampant despite this:
"Afterward, officials in Ibaraki, a neighboring prefecture just south of the area, said up to 100 times the normal levels of radiation were detected Tuesday. While those figures are worrying if there is prolonged exposure, they are far from fatal."This nuclear issue shows just how amazingly safe nuclear reactors are. They survived a magnitude nine earthquake, the fifth biggest earthquake ever recorded, and a huge tsunami, which likely killed tens of thousands of people and destroyed hundreds of billions worth of property, with relatively little damage. And these designs are over 40 years old. Computers as we know them didn't even exist to aid in the design of those reactors. Modern materials didn't exist then. Earthquake science was in its infancy. Imagine how much safer reactors designed today would be. These problems also show the remarkable ingenuity of people.
"To lessen the damage, Japan's central bank made two cash injections totaling 8 trillion yen ($98 billion) Tuesday into the money markets after pumping in $184 billion on Monday."But of course the central bank has to steal money from the people and transfer it to the big corporations. As always. This earthquake was so powerful, it shifted the earth's axis by about ten inches, it changed the speed of the earth's rotation by a micro second every day, and moved the Japanese coastline by nearly eight feet. The tsunami was 33 feet high.
"Earthquakes of this magnitude are only seen once in every 1,000 years off the coast of Japan, according to Japanese seismologists."Yet these nuclear plants have not allowed a serious radiation leak. What an impressive feat of engineering.
Glenn Beck calls the earthquake a message from God. You gotta be kidding me.
LOCAL:
City lowers standards for police test.
"The city’s Civil Service Board and the U.S. Department of Justice have agreed on a lower passing score for the police recruit exam after it was rejected because not enough blacks passed the exam."Only government.
MISC:
Government malfeasance in Japanese tsunami disaster.
"So many people died because when the nine-magnitude Pacific Ocean earthquake struck 80 miles off the coast of Sendai, warnings were issued that a tsunami would hit land in an hour.
But survivors said it struck in nine minutes."
Naturally the government screwed that up and potentially cost tens of thousands of people their lives. Compared to that devastation, here's how few have radiation exposure:
"Officials revealed that 22 people had already been recorded with radiation poisoning, and they said around 190 were in the plant’s vicinity when radioactive steam was deliberately leaked in an attempt to cool the reactors."
This alarmism is irresponsible. But I'm not blaming the government for this:
"It also emerged yesterday that the government ignored explicit warnings from a Japanese expert on nuclear power more than three years ago.
Professor Ishibashi Katsuhiko, of Kobe University, said the guidelines introduced to protect the nuclear plants were ‘seriously flawed’ and that the plants were vulnerable to major quakes.
‘Unless radical steps are taken now to reduce the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to earthquakes, Japan could experience a true nuclear catastrophe in the near future,’ he warned in 2007."
One guy warned they were vulnerable. No doubt a dozen other experts claimed the risk was minuscule. These reactors went into operation in 1971. The threat is minimal.
"Professor Richard Wakeford, a nuclear expert at Manchester University, said yesterday: ‘If the fuel is not covered by cooling water it could become so hot it begins to melt – if all the fuel is uncovered you could get a large-scale meltdown.’
Hopefully this will not happen, and thanks to both the design of the Japanese reactors and to the swift and organised response of the authorities, handing out iodine pills to prevent the ingestion of cancer-causing substances, there is little chance that Fukushima will enter the annals of notoriety alongside Chernobyl."
"Unlike Chernobyl, there is no chance that this could become an international incident; Japan is simply too far away from anywhere else for the radiation to spread, and the most serious radioactive contaminant – Iodine-131 – has a half-life of just eight days. Furthermore, the Japanese government is rich, competent and open – which the Soviet authorities in 1986 conspicuously were not."
So much for the alarmism. I'm sure nuclear plant managers and designers will study what happened in Japan and make their existing plants and new designs safer because of it, but it's responsible for people to be stoking alarmism in an attempt to get nuclear power banned.
"The initial explosion resulted in the death of two workers. Twenty-eight of the firemen and emergency clean-up workers died in the first three months after the explosion from Acute Radiation Sickness and one of cardiac arrest.""There have been at least 1800 documented cases of thyroid cancer children who were between 0 and 14 years of age when the accident occurred., which is far higher than normal."Wikipedia on Chernobyl. As painful as that is for the individuals who suffered, it's hardly a mega-disaster. According to 2000 study, 225,000 Americans died of medical error in our government-controlled health care system the year before. Now that's a mega-disaster. Some guy explains that these power plants are designed to survive a core meltdown. Obviously there's a chance the design could fail, bridges sometimes collapse, but it's tiny. The worst case scenario is simply not that bad. Report that the GE containment vessels may be more prone to failure than other designs.
On the distinctions between capitalism and statism:
"Throughout history, states have existed as instruments for organized predation and exploitation. It doesn't much matter which group of people happen to gain control of the State at any given time, whether it be oriental despots, kings, landlords, privileged merchants, army officers, or Communist parties. The result is everywhere and always the coercive mulcting of the mass of the producers — in most centuries, of course, largely the peasantry — by a ruling class of dominant rulers and their hired professional bureaucracy. Generally, the State has its inception in naked banditry and conquest, after which the conquerors settle down among the subject population to exact permanent and continuing tribute in the form of "taxation" and to parcel out the land of the peasants in huge tracts to the conquering warlords, who then proceed to extract "rent.""So that's where the term "rent seekers" comes from.
"To make their rule permanent, the State rulers need to induce their subject masses to acquiesce in at least the legitimacy of their rule. For this purpose the State has always taken a corps of intellectuals to spin apologia for the wisdom and the necessity of the existing system. The apologia differ over the centuries; sometimes it is the priestcraft using mystery and ritual to tell the subjects that the king is divine and must be obeyed; sometimes it is Keynesian liberals using their own form of mystery to tell the public that government spending, however seemingly unproductive, helps everyone by raising the GNP and energizing the Keynesian "multiplier." But everywhere the purpose is the same — to justify the existing system of rule and exploitation to the subject population; and everywhere the means are the same — the State rulers sharing their rule and a portion of their booty with their intellectuals."And the Ivy League performs that job wonderfully.
"In a profound sense, the free market is the method and society "natural" to man; it can and does therefore arise "naturally" without an elaborate intellectual system to explain and defend it. The unlettered peasant knows in his heart the difference between hard work and production on the one hand, and predation and expropriation on the other. Unmolested then, there tends to grow up a society of agriculture and commerce where each man works at the task at which he is best suited in the conditions of the time, and then trades his product for the products of others. The peasant grows wheat and exchanges it for the salt of other producers or for the shoes of the local craftsman. If disputes arise over property or over contracts, the peasants and villagers take their problem to the wise men of the area, sometimes the elders of the tribe, to arbitrate their dispute."This is the first I've read anybody besides me explain that free markets are the natural product of evolution. They evolved right along with us. It's ironic that the leftists who worship nature hate this product of nature. But then again, they hate all human development, and free markets enable human development.
"The result of the aggravated network of mercantilist burdens and restrictions has been to place our economy under greater and greater strain. High taxes burden us all, and the military-industrial complex means an enormous diversion of resources, of capital, technology, and of scientists and engineers, from productive uses to the overkill waste of the military machine. Industry after industry has been regulated and cartelized into decline: the railroads, electric power, natural gas, and telephone industries being the most obvious examples. Housing and construction have been saddled with the blight of high property taxes, zoning restrictions, building codes, rent controls, and union featherbedding. As free-market capitalism has been replaced by state capitalism, more and more of our economy has begun to decay and our liberties to erode."And this was written in 1972. The burden of government today is horrendously greater, and it's accelerating.
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