Angry · Lucifer

The other night my son asked, “Why is it called the New Age? Isn't this crap like 50 years old?” I explained the precession of the zodiac and the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, etc. but it was a little like trying to make him believe that Eric Clapton is still cool.
Understanding the relationship between cosmic time and human time has been the one constant in civilization for at least 28,000 years that I know of. It drives the engines of religion, theoretical physics and astronomy. Should anything dire happen to world culture at the end of this year, it will be the only artifact of our time on earth that will go on.
There are two sources of my pessimism about the future of our culture. Three if you count my being old. The first is the Mayan Calendar. We are currently at the end of a Long Count, a 5,125-year cycle of days and seasons. The Big Mayan Calendar goes back many eons before this last count, but most of the Mayan educated people were wiped out by the Spanish so we'll never really know for sure what they were up to. Academic scholars of Mayan culture recently identified the glyph for tobacco, so in another 5,125 years they may be able to read Mayan fluently.
I don't know much about history, but I do know that a unifying theme of civilization has been the need to specify the place of humans in the grand cosmic scheme. Not every culture goes nuts about it like the Mayans, Egyptians and Incans, but I've never been to a place of ancient habitation that didn't present the tell-tale signs of paleoastronomy. My friend John Carroll remarked that civilization began one night a million years ago when hunter gatherers contemplated the starry sky on the savanna and one of them said, “It's such a beautiful universe. Does It love us?”
The question remains unsettled. In a certain sense we are still measuring, counting and looking at stuff just like our ancestors did without reaching any firm conclusions. Modern humans use instruments like telescopes and computers, but earlier cultures had nothing to work with besides brains, eyes and fingers to explore the ultimate question.
From what little we know, the Mayans didn't stop counting because they got bored. They were relentlessly rigorous about counting because that was the basis of their phony baloney mandate to govern. They were fanatic visual astronomers. Mayans knew empirically where stars should be on such and such a count and where they actually were. The Long Count and the longer counts seem to be efforts to stay on top of calendrical drift. But then it stops. We don't understand why.
Like most enlightened civilizations, the Mayans grasped the concept of a circle having 360 degrees, and the earth comes back to the same point, sort of, every year but it takes 365 and change days, so WTF? It's a mystery like the value of Pi, the square root of two. Aristotle was seriously freaked out by the fact that he could see a circle but he couldn't measure a circle exactly. Eventually, he convinced himself that Pythagoras and Plato were just fucking with him. All these seemingly irrational values did work out rationally, according to Aristotle, so the universe was rational. Case closed. The Catholic Church's penchant for asserting that a logically consistent argument is true derives from his mentality.
Aristotle never had to worry about the consequences of his predictions not working out because most of it was too abstract to matter, and he had his former student Alexander the Great in his corner. However, if you were an Egyptian priest who screwed up reading the annual date that a particular star rose, and the Nile flooded bringing fertile, wet topsoil down the valley, you got killed. If you were a Hopi elder and your rain ceremony failed to bring rain, you were exiled in disgrace.
Observing and counting can get you out of having to farm or doing the dishes. People will pay you their resources if you convince them you know something they don't know. All enlightened cultures enthusiastically asserted that there was a connection between the heavens and the weather, but there were always lumps under the carpet. It's not an exact science.
The early Romans finessed the problem of 360 (the number of days in a Roman year) versus 365 by declaring “Hey, bud, let's Party!” and for some days at the end of each December they'd just get wasted until the priests decided that things were back to normal.
The Mayans were much more circumspect and declared that these extra days, hours and seconds just never happened. People had to stay indoors and keep quiet. The priests were working on the problem. Every 52 years or so, at the end of a Short Count, everyone had to burn all their belongings and sit outside. If the sun rose, then they had another 52 years. If it didn't, at least they didn't worry about packing at the last minute.
So I decided in my 20s that the Mayan Calendar ending in 2012 was significant of something. Maybe it was significant of the Spanish throwing 50 additional Long Count calendars into a cenote, because pagan learning was obviously a tool of the Devil so the Spaniards kind of had to destroy the evidence.
Back in the 60s, man, I knew a lot of people who continually moaned, “We'll all be dead in six months!” The spectre of nuclear war was a bummer, but my childlike faith in the Mayan calender gave me strength to carry on.
Many Christians believed the world would end in 2000 A.D. Even though careless counting errors mean that the year 2000 was nothing like, and Jews who are always reading and studying don't agree with the Christian count at all. You rarely hear a Jew going all Glen Beck on immanent doom, except sometimes Hasidim, because Jews as a whole are smart enough to know that if you stake out a ridiculous position, you might realize a short term grift, like Pastor Hastings but you become an endless jackass that skeptics can beat the pious over the head with.
I appreciate that American Evangelicals today are keeping up the tradition of denying all science and historical learning. Studying mathematics is the most deeply unAmerican thing anyone can do. Real American Evangelicals like Rick Perry can't even count to three. He would have made a good Roman. Bachman asserted that God had called her to run for president. Apparently God also asked her to wear a “Kick Me” sign on her back. Rick Santorum's wife recently declared that God called her husband to be president. I doubt that the Holy Spirit is drunk dialing presidential candidates.
No New Age Mayan experts have ever presented a compelling reason why only one culture in all of world history picked out the winning numbers in the cosmic lotto, but the Mayan cosmology makes as much sense as Rick Santorom identifying Satan as America's biggest problem right now.
But the second thing that makes me want to believe something's comin' has to do with information theory and period doubling. In the 1980s, magazines like Wired and cranks like Robert Anton Wilson alerted me to information theory and overload. It starts with Moore's Law.
Moore's Law, unlike Harry's Law or Martial Law continues to inform the Geekerati's thinking about computers and other devices that gather, store and transmit information. Gordon Moore was a founder of Intel who obviously thought a lot about how fast, how capacious and how small in size a computing device could become. In the mid-1960s he hypothesized that every two years computers would be able to process twice as fast, be able to hold twice as much data and fit into a device half the size of the previous iteration. In 1965 he was still thinking in terms of transistors.
Moore predicted that this would go smoothly until the 70s, and then the iron laws of thermodynamics would kick in. However, since then we've wiggled into smaller and smaller components, quantum computing, better, faster, smaller processing, more storage. The sky's the limit as far as our devices go.
Consider that today Captain Kirk's communicator is a pretty crappy cell phone. Spock was using disks to upload data on the Enterprise. Transporters, still cool, but we're getting there.
Here's the lump under this carpet. Wilson and others figured out that at some point, there would be too much information available for our tiny primate brains to process. We can't buy an upgrade of our brains every two years. They figured this would happen in 2012.
Although you should, you are never going to pick up obscure books now available on the web for the first time. You've probably never even read “the Mill on the Floss.” We are crossing the threshold of continuous information doubling this year. Like a demented McDonald's crew endlessly cranking out more and more hamburgers that no one eats, Google, Amazon and Wikipedia and many others are stockpiling information that is of less and less use to more and more people.
Information is kind of like hamburgers if you think of them as items you can use or you can waste. Like me you probably have no interest in McDonald's new “Scraps of breaded, leftover chicken meat with barbecue sauce.” And the McBite is equivalent for me to knowing anything about the Kardashians or the Jersey Shore. I don't have to wash down a bucket of chicken poppers with a super-size Coke to know it will make me sick to my stomach.
The internet only began in 1993, Google 1998. Those of us who had adult lives before 1990 are continuosly gob-smacked by new information. Zynga? Pinterest? What I've noticed so far about my geezer generation is that we've mostly given up. Twitter? Cloud? You want me to buy another iteration of the White Album? Wait, what? No one listens to albums any more except hipsters? Where can I take all my old 78 singles, my LPs, my eight track tapes, my cassette tapes, my CDs, my Limewire downloads. Nowhere?
For younger people, the present is a tornado of the new. You haven't played Skyrim yet? Are you bored with WoW? Me too. The tornado rips my generation's past out of our hands into the void. Props to my old friend Lee who diligently scours YouTube to retrieve a classic song, but there is no way to keep them. An iPod will be obsolete in two years, and what then?What I've noticed so far about my geezer generation is that we've just given up. Twitter? Cloud? You want me to buy another iteration of the White Album? Wait, what? No one listens to albums any more except hipsters? Where can I take all my old 78 singles, my LPs, my eight track tapes, my cassette tapes, my CDs, my Limewire downloads. Nowhere?
For younger people, the present is a tornado of the new. You haven't played Skyrim yet? Are you bored with WoW? Me too. The tornado rips my generation's past out of our hands into the void. Props to my old friend Lee who diligently scours YouTube to retrieve a classic song, but there is no way to keep them. An iPod will be obsolete in two years, and what then?

I started this blog in 2006 for several reasons, some of which no longer matter, but the central premise was that western civiliation which is to say modern global civilization was undergoing end times, and I wanted to record our progress toward or away from that moment. I didn't and still don't know if this is true or not, or if three hundred years from now we'll still be debating whether Jersey Shore is losing its appeal.
Whether it's a single human life, or the life of a country (Yugoslavia for $100, Alex) or the great empires of the past, things end. Something new comes along, and maybe it's better or it's worse, but the human race will stick around to find out.
So between now and December 21 maybe something amazing will happen. Maybe I'll get hit by the 80 bus tomorrow. We don't live our lives expecting to get hit by the 80 bus, but if we consider the possibility that we could, it makes life more interesting.
This weekend the Russian Phobos-Grunt Martian probe came down into our atmosphere carrying 13 tons of frozen propulsant and a random amount of metal. If the fuel had been really frozen solid it would seem like a thunder bolt from Zeus, but instead it broke up over the southern Pacific ocean which sucks if you are a whale or a dolphin, but not so bad for us. The point is eventually a terrible thing that's possible, will happen. The 80 bus lurks out there for all of us in one form or another.
And that's why I'm am dedicated to blogging as much as possible before the Mayan god Ah Pukuh manifests as a giant marshmallow man and destroys billionaires and peasants alike. It could happen. You never know.
I'd like to start by delineating the many ways that the planet is far worse off now than in 2006 and then see what happens. To quote my favorite Paul Simon song, “We come in the age's most uncertain hour to sing an American tune.”
So come along. This should be fun.

Who could have guessed?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/07/roundup-birth-defects-herbicide-regulators_n_872862.html

Monsanto has been Dr Evil's reigning super-corportation for over 30 years. They sue people who say this, although they haven't sued me yet, (Well, maybe they have. I haven't opened any mail in two years.) perhaps because they know I have nothing to sue, perhaps because they expect the FBI will sort me out eventually for my “radical” environmental ideas. Reagan, Bush, Clinton,W, Obama. It doesn't matter who is in power. Monsanto gets the Guard-all shield from the Federal Government, and no one ever asks why. No one ever says, “But wait. Isn't killing us a bad thing? Isn't killing your customers bad for business?”
The short answer is no. There are seven billion humans now. Monsanto can kill a few million a year and no one takes notice. You're worried about your mortgage. You're worried about your credit card debt, your college loan debt. You are much too busy to be concerned with the fact that a global corporation is trying to kill you when the banks that were too big to fail are trying to kill you faster.
It's not a surprise that the hardball game is getting harder
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/07/climate-scientist-death-threats-australia_n_872829.html?icid=main%7Chtmlws-main-n%7Cdl10%7Csec3_lnk2%7C215482

I've put on my aluminum-foil hat, but I can't figure out if these events are linked. It feels intuitively like debt fascists, climate change deniers and corporations that want to deregulate everything have something more in common than that they all watch Fox News. One of the talking heads pointed out that we didn't spend our way into the current crisis. We tax-cut our way into it. And now Cantor and the Boner think we can tax-cut our way out of this, if only we can be disciplined enough to reign in plutocrat public service workers, greedy, sick elderly people on pensions, vampires on food stamps draining the precious blood of American tax payers.
And meanwhile no one can focus on anything except Anthony's Weiner. Progressives are in denial, arguing that a little lying, a little stalking and a little violating your oath of office is what politicians do. Hey, isn't that exactly what DSK said?
I don't give a crap about Weiner one way or another. The window to frame a discussion about Medicare and Social Security is closing and that will remain vital long after Weiner has been thrown into the dustbin of history.
Unregulated companies are killing you and people you know. Get it? Stop looking at a deeply, deeply sad man's junk and start looking around.

This week's climate news is both big and small. The big was about tornadoes and flooding, but there have been worse in the past. Nothing scientifically significant going on here. We're going to lose Memphis if it rains again this week, except not the nice part where Graceland is. New Orleans for $500, Alex. I do not wish to appear to be insensitive to the tremendous damage and tragedy going on right now in the deep south. It is simply not fair to blame this on global climate instability. Some times bad climate things happen.
The much more significant news happened in the badger state, ground zero in the Republican fight against the unmillionares. This is something I've tracked for a while, so I thought I'd share.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110428143149.htm

So okay, I have spent the last forty years of my life sounding the alarm about global climate change, and it did no good. I've been where the lakes are dying. George Monbiot at the London Guardian knows how I feel, and in spite of my vigorously disagreeing with him about nuclear power, I don't have any idea how to move foreward either. The best move would be back but that isn't possible.
Badgers have noticed that lakes freeze later than they should and thaw earlier but no one cares. We all expect the government to solve our problems, but the government is busy right now doing stuff that gets a lot of news coverage.
We've begun living in a cascade effect, where the expected response will be “Wow, that sucks.” I feel awful about Memphis, but I don't live there, so whatever.
And that's my point. Unless we come together as a group, One Planet, One People, One Destiny we're all doomed.

Before my father's generation, Japan was an incidental blip on the current events landscape. The big dinosaurs like Britain and France dominated news, culture, cuisine, manners and morals. Van Gogh admired Japanese prints. Good for him.
America was too busy inventing the modern world to notice Japan's meteoric rise from third world backwater to world power from the 1870s to the 1930s when Japan began to chafe under the major powers' nanny culture. Then on 12/07/41 they busted a move to roll the also-emerging US back to California and create “an Asian co-prosperity sphere” which apparently required them to decimate every country in east Asia.
It almost worked. Except for Australia no one else stepped up to give the US dedicated support. Europe was a little busy with Hitler.
The fatal flaw in the Japanese plan was under-estimating what happens when you enrage America's redneck, relentless, badass side. Roosevelt's America was just that determined, and remember that the Great Depression hadn't gone anywhere. It's just that for the last time, the men (and women) of the West decided that the day might come when the courage of men failed, but it was not this day, when we forsake our friends, but it was not this day; we would not go quietly into the night; we would not vanish without a fight (now I'm just doing a mash-up of Independence Day and Return of the King, so finish this yourself). My father spent nearly five years in the Pacific from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day and the experience certainly ended his life prematurely. It ended a lot of lives on both sides like that. So it goes. Let's move along.
We fought Japan with just our left hand in terms of resources and personnel. Even though we contributed our right hand against Germany, without Russia we would not have beaten Hitler. This is just true. It all worked out. Let's move along.
Thanks to our nukes, we kicked Japan's ass and then rebuilt them in our image. No one celebrates Christmas better than Japan and Ichiro is simply the best baseball hitter ever. The Japanese economy took off quickly, and until the early 80s Japan out performed us to a degree that began to make the US uncomfortable. Detroit stood by helplessly as Japan made cars that were affordable and reliable. The bastards. How could we compete with that? Actually, the simple solution was to hybridize. Toyota makes a lot of cars in the US. GM and Ford own stakes in Asian car companies. Apple makes a lot of computers in Japan. The extent to which globals are in each others' pants would creep you out if you were a Tea Partier and assuming you read. Maybe someday a person will make a YouTube video of this blog so Sarah Palin's America can join the conversation. Suffice it to say that Japan is just as much of a player as the US.
Japan was the template for the future development of South Korea, China and Asia generally. In the late 70s, Japan began over-reaching, buying a lot of useless stuff in the USA like Rockefeller Center and half of downtown LA all of which they had to sell at a loss. Now they are suffering a debt crisis, a population crisis and an oil crisis which is why buying GE's nukes once seemed like such a forward-thinking idea.
Meanwhile the Anglo-American scheme of economics worked its way to its penultimate stage. Businesses didn't need to make or sell things. They just needed to figure out ways to make money by any means necessary. GE which was once both the the pride of American invention and the shark in Jaws remains the shark in Jaws.
No one anticipated the giant earthquake and tsunami that plunged Japan back to the depths of the post-war world. Who ordered this? What we are seeing now is curiously perverted, westernized Japan trying to think beyond the unthinkable.
There is nothing wrong with the Spirit of the Japanese people:
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110421a1.html

What is wrong is with the global corporate culture
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20110419zg.html

Big corporations are comfortable obfuscating the well-being of millions
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110421x2.html

Small corporations are comfortable risking the lives of their clientèle
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110421x3.html

Consider that it does not matter whether you live in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Korea, Japan, China, Indonesia, Brasil, Colombia, Cuba or wherever. We all live in the same penultimate space.
Obviously, the world has always been full of crooks, mountebanks, four-flushers and knaves. That's why the modern world evolved systems of laws and more importantly systems of regulation to prevent corporate culture from depantsing ordinary, honest folk, because as every political thinker from Thomas Hobbes forward realized, if your political system is designed to defraud and abuse ordinary people, pretty soon ordinary folk stop participating. You end up with another French Revolution, and no one wants that, or ordinary people will simply tune you out and nation states get the blue screen of death.
A Big Brother culture can have all the CCTV equipment in the world, but if governments lack the personnel to monitor the videos they are only useful in retrospect. You can't cut cops and maintain surveillance. Likewise, new generations of software can keyword millions of emails, tweets and cell phone conversations every day, but computers still lack esprit d' finesse to discriminate random junk from useful intelligence. Stalemate.
Stalemate also because we continue to discover in the Muslim world that our video game warfare does not crush the will of our opponents the way arms merchants said it would. Here in America we're frustrated that we have a whole playroom full of awesome toys, but we can't afford to use them. Obama knows that he's damned if he commits America's full resources in Libya and damned if he doesn't. It's Welcome Back Carter doing the time warp again.
I think we have a Wizard of Oz culture right now, in the sense that the state wants us to believe that the Wizard never guesses, he knows. But then why can't we find Osama bin Laden (remember him? Did you see him on the TV land awards show?) while we justify turning Bradley Manning into Sampson Agonistes? Why is Libya a more urgent Topic A than Syria, Yemen or for that matter North Korea or Nigeria?
History consists of endless lucky or unlucky guesses and what sustains a people is the rule of law and a mutual commitment to consent in community. When Clinton was president he rode the dotcom revolution into a solution to the deficit crisis. I am pretty sure he didn't anticipate this. In just eight years, President Elvis managed to pay off the Reagan deficit which Ross Perot said in 1992 would be a legacy for our grandchildren. A rising tide lifts all boats. Alas, Murdoch purloined the 2000 election and no one has ever called him out on this. President Retard inherited a surplus gifted him by Clinton which was promptly forfeited by launching two pointless wars and cutting taxes for the rich. Murdoch profited, but did he win?
Obama is still fighting two pointless wars. He's looking the other way as the middle class gets mugged and the lower class gets brutalized. He's given our tax money to global corporations and tells us it is for our own good.
And probably the worst news is that Obama is secretly a deficit hawk
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/04/22/president-obamas-deficit-plans-run-into-economic-reality/

And the most interesting aspect of this debate is that factotums in the media continue to insinuate that cutting off the most needy, most vulnerable Americans is a superior alternative to asking the richest, least worthy to pay their fair share. Raise your hand if you'd prefer that DJ Rush can light his cigars with $100 bills even if it means a grandmother will die in the emergency room waiting for attention.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-04-21/washingtons-debt-debate-depressing-soap-opera-re-run/?cid=hp:mainpromo3

Because of the curious nature of LJ, this blog will seem like crazy talk unless you read the previous blog which is posted subsequently after this one, or unless you are one of those people who get up every Monday morning and read my blog right after you read Paul Krugman which would be nobody.
I've had a long, twisted journey through the political spectrum in my life. I started out passionately pro civil rights, anti-war, pro Bobby Kennedy, but I voted for Reagan against Carter because Carter betrayed decency and blamed the American people. He remains the best ex-president ever, but he was a shitty president. I also voted for the real President Bush over Mike Dukakis, because seriously, what were the Democrats thinking? If you decide you can't win, why not give Jesse Jackson a shot? He won the primaries.
Every week I get 20 or so emails from various leftist organizations like Democrat.org and MovingOn.Org. I've been getting them since November 2000 when Fox News and W stole the election and I was pissed off. They ask me for money. They never do anything except ask me for more money. It was memorable back in 2008 when they told me how crucial it was to have Democrat majorities in the house and senate because then the reign of peace and justice would begin.
After many years of cynicism, I bought in. I contributed and campaigned for Obama, trudging through neighborhoods like Greenville in Jersey City where today I would not go in an armored truck (I can tell you some stories), and the Democrats got control of the house and the senate. Were the faithful rewarded with peace and justice? Nope. We got politics as usual, actually worse than usual because W lowered the bar pretty far, but Obama has managed to drain a bit more from the shallow end of the pool.
If you read this blog regularly, I will spare you the litany of ways Obama betrayed his campaign, betrayed the memory of his mother who died from Big Insurance health care by passing a thin gruel bill that will not survive two more years of the Republican jackals, and most of all by failing to use a majority in both the house and the senate to change filibuster rules, change the playing field to favor the welfare of our people. No, he gave us banks too big to fail.
As I keep saying, I'm a Libertarian at heart. I want government to leave me the fuck alone. Don't tell me what I can't eat. Don't tell me that poor people need to donate a higher proportion of their income to taxes than rich people. Don't argue that tax cuts for the rich help the many because I've been alive long enough to know that they don't. Don't piss on my leg about ruinous foreign wars that contribute nothing to my country's well-being and tell me that it's raining.
The world is much too complex these days for citizens to gather at the Agora and vote democratically on things the way they did in ancient Athens. Especially because modern marketing techniques have created a nation of hypnotized zombies, some of whom apparently believe that electing Donald Trump president would not be like electing Lex Luthor president in a world without Superman. So I'm terminally frustrated with people quoting DJ Rush or Glen Beck to me as if they have more standing than Snookie, Larry the Cable Guy or Gilbert Gottfried. Politics in America today is merely bread (at least for right now) and circuses.
This is unfortunately not an exclusively American problem.
Before he sucked, Woody Allen observed correctly that life was divided between the unthinkable and the horrible. TEPCO is going to give the Japanese who had their homes destroyed, their lives and jobs ruined a whole 7,300. dollars and calling it even. See you in nine months. Nice. Once again GE who built the reactors brings good things to light. The Federal Oil Spill Czar says that things in the Gulf are like a Jimmy Buffet song, just forget about dead and dying, oil-coated dolphins and whales washing up on shore. Who are you going to believe, me or your damn lying eyes?
In Texas and elsewhere citizens are shocked, shocked! to discover that gas fraking isn't the emolument to clean energy but instead is poisoning their drinking water, poisoning their children. Bear in mind that many of these revelations are not issuing from trusted media sources, because frankly editors can't be expected to support corporate profits and responsible citizenship at the same time. Give them a dollar and they'll buy you a clue. A lot of “news” these days is coming from bloggers.
The litany of the unthinkable and the horrible could continue for many pages. The internet is supremely useful in relentlessly hammering us with one agony after another, but it's not so good at promoting individuals or organizations who are agents of change. The Audubon Society is taking on polluting electric companies in the Supreme Court by itself. Audubon doesn't have a spotless record, but this is a bold step. They are opposed in this suit by the Obama Justice Department which I believe is all you need to know.
And here's the thing: those of us who bought into the concept of the audacity of hope, those of us who prayed for change we could believe in deserved better than cynical crap larded out by Mad Men.

So we're having a food crisis which is already having repercussions.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/market-news/u-s-companies-shrink-packages-as-food-prices-rise/19897911/?icid=main%7Chtmlws-main-n%7Cdl5%7Csec1_lnk1%7C208570

We know that Americans habitually throw away 60% of their food, so maybe this development is useful. We could all exercise a little portion control, cut back on the all-you-can eat restaurant nights, eat when we're actually hungry not when the clock says we should be hungry and generally be conscious of what we eat. We're becoming a nation of fat-ass diabetics. More than a third of the US population is obese, more than 40% of children are, and it's not only because high fructose corn syrup is in practically everything we eat and drink.
We in the US have the luxury of eating more than we need, unless we're poor, but people in the developing world don't. If Americans skipped one meal a week and instead donated that money to the WHO, international relief or even the local homeless shelter, we could feed a lot of people. If we were a Christian nation we'd accept that as a moral obligation.
Instead, politicians like Barbour look the other way as citizens in his state are among the fattest and least healthy Americans. On the opposite side, Michelle Obama is leading the charge to stigmatize fat kids for their own good
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lloyd-i-sederer-md/child-obesity-education-_b_842782.html?icid=main%7Chtmlws-main-n%7Cdl13%7Csec3_lnk2%7C208586

If you click on the article, you'll notice that Mayor Bloombucks is fully on board with this plan, which is ironic since the Bronx was recently named the fattest, least healthy county in New York state, but still Bloomberg named high fructose Snapple as the official beverage of NYC public education. In Bloomie's billionaire mind, rather than, say, enhance the free breakfast program, it's just easier to let market forces choose what kids drink at school (like a third grader can just run out to the store, and anyway, the Bronx is what is called a food desert where super markets are few and far between, over-priced and smell like wet cardboard. If you want decent food in the Bronx, drive to Westchester or over the GWB to the Whole Foods in Edgewater).
Fat children grow up to be fat parents and unhealthy eating habits proliferate down the generations. If you want to change things, forget about the kids and work on the grown-ups, but bear in mind that parents won't let their children go hungry, even if there is nothing to eat except hot pockets and Reeses Cups.
Telling a fat kid that his brain doesn't work as well as a skinny kid's is not unlike telling a black child that his brain is inferior to a white child's. No one does that any more (at least not in public), but it's okay to dog fat kids who can't drive to Westchester and have no control over the dinner menu. The “scientific” study that supports this is based on a small sample, and anyway, I can cite hundreds of peer-reviewed papers down to Schockley in the 1970s which “proved” that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites. Also, they smell funny, can't swim and are scared of dogs.
My personal theory is that Bloomberg doesn't give a crap about nutrition, but is against New Yorkers doing anything that gives them pleasure if it offends him in some way, and just as he hates the Irish for being drunk on Saint Patrick's day, he hates looking at fat kids on his way to work.
If you doubt this theory, consider the new regulations imposed on the Department of Health
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2011/04/04/2011-04-04_health_depts_new_guide_focuses_more_on_donts_than_dos.html

They sound like a bunch of party animals, don't they? It's already illegal in New York to smoke outdoors. I guess that soon it will be illegal to serve both cake and cookies at a birthday party held in a public park.
Except for his support of gay marriage, Bloomberg is typical of the Republican agenda, in the sense that he cuts teachers to support tax cuts for Wall Street, uses state power as a stick to beat the down-trodden (like supporting cuts in Medicare, reducing pensions and benefits for union workers who bargained in good faith, laying off cops, firefighters, sanitation workers, city employees, forcing welfare recipients to do field labor rather than forcing them to attend job training, increasing fees and fines wherever possible, especially in the City University system) and myopically maintaining against all evidence that lower taxes on the richest New Yorkers (most of whom live in places like Nassau County, Westchester and New Jersey) somehow stimulates the economy. Recently, the aforementioned Board of Health has cut back its pest control staff. Go to Union Square in the middle of the night (and don't get mugged because there aren't as many cops on the street) and try not to be freaked out by the number and the bulk of the rats. There are a bunch of good Youtubes about this if you enjoy getting creeped out.
All Republicans recite the Reagan mantra, “Government isn't the solution. Government is the problem.” but I don't see Wall Streeters with baseball bats slugging rats at night in Times Square. Privatizing snow removal during the last blizzard worked out great, didn't it? If you wonder why I care, check this out.
http://news.travel.aol.com/2011/04/06/city-official-says-rats-damaging-tourism-in-nyc/?icid=main%7Chtmlws-main-n%7Cdl6%7Csec3_lnk2%7C208864

So, not only do I have to warn tourists about predatory CD merchants in Times Square, bed bugs, head lice, limousine drivers and Scientologists, I also have to apologize for Bloomberg's laissez faire approach to rats. You'd think that after 230 years into our brave experiment to create a republic based on democratic principles, we'd have figured a few things out.
I like a good conspiracy theory as much as anyone, so I've been struggling with the deeper connections between the food crisis, bipartisan dogging of fat people and the evolving face of the new world order without cops, teachers, bridge and tunnel inspectors, without a safety net for the poor and unemployed, without NPR.
I don't think what I'm about to describe is a conspiracy, as much as yet another perfect storm in a century that has so far brought us a lot of perfect storms. It feels like there should be a through line between climate change denial, union busting, deficit hawks, women-hating and America's three wars, apart from the fact that they are all Republican hot topics. This is not the blog that Glen Becks this.
Let's start with quick survey the current condition. The Republican agenda includes defunding the EPA, Medicare and Social Security; trampling women's reproductive rights at the expense of women's health, delegitimizing trade unionism, destroying public education, overturning business regulation oversight, FDA and OHSHA standards, declaring war on immigrants legal or otherwise. Also mandatory puppy-kicking and spitting on Elizabeth Warren.
The Obama agenda is lowering the Social Security tax, bailing out banks “too big to fail,” continuing to be W when it comes to war, being in fact a bigger weasel than W with respect to illegal renditions, Gitmo, black ops, enhanced interrogation (see Bradley Manning who is being treated worse than Khalid Mohammed), offering to trade social spending cuts for Defense Department increases, even though the Pentagon said last year they didn't need it, going along with Republicans on the above and generally being a lying noodle about the very things he promised he would be transparent about.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/04/defense-spending-budget-as-pa_n_844692.html

Obviously, Obama was ready to say anything to get elected in 2008, and get ready to hear him say anything plus to get reelected. I don't care if Obama/Biden run against Bachman/Beck. I'm not voting in the next election. Fool me twice, shame on me. We can expect the usual Democrat bullshit that the Republicans are worse, but define worse exactly.
Anyway, back to the food crisis, because as Brecht observed, “Food is the first thing morals follow on.” Hungry children are more likely to have health and developmental problems which means they are more likely to need more medical care and special schools. With the food crisis and the current oil crisis, middle class people are being squeezed in ways that are inevitably detrimental. A recent article reported breathlessly that white people aren't having as many babies and soon white people will be a national minority. White people, except not poor white people, have options, and not having babies is an intelligent choice when there isn't enough to go around. Lots of young people I know are burdened by college loan debt, lowered wages, unaffordable health insurance, negative equity in their co-ops and starter houses. The ones who aren't burdened went through the door marked "amuse yourself to death" and left the fight. And you wonder why white people are marrying later and having fewer babies?
Jesus said, “What you do for the least of them, you do for Me.” This is directly at odds with the billionaire fetish of cutting taxes and balancing budgets. Jesus also said, “It is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.” I'm pretty sure the Koch brothers don't have this quote monogrammed on their handkerchiefs.
So, the Reagan years opened the door to killing unmillionaires, not in a deeply unpleasant way, but in a firm and incremental way. Today, anyone who doesn't serve the plutocracy is now expendable, and if they are to die then they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.
Paul Ehrlich and his wife play a role in this. They came out with the definitive edition of the Population Bomb in 1970, which is the one I still have, and then newer versions every few years down to at least 1983 that I know of. The Ehrlichs marketed more remixes and extended versions than the Rolling Stones. In 1991 they put out a newer version of the old thesis, the Population Explosion. They operate an institute dedicated to the simple idea that the West has a moral imperative to stop profligate reproduction, especially in the Third World (as it was called then) by any means necessary.
Their movement in turn encouraged groups like the UN to promote cultural genocide in places like Africa where extended families are literally the glue that holds their societies together, as well as encouraged hip, Western wannabes like Indira Gandhi to send “birth control” trucks into poor neighborhoods to hand out balloons and sweets ostensibly to talk about condom use and diaphragms but really to perform secret vasectomies and remove uteruses. China solved the problem by simply ordering people to only have one baby, but that is a major problem the Chinese are just waking up to which we will discuss another day.
My point is that reproduction has been the secret battle behind world history for the last 50 years. Every form of birth control except the wildly unreliable condom (the odds against pregnancy with nothing is 90%, and the odds with a condom are 98%, so you do the math) puts women at risk for cancer, infections and infertility. The patriarchal hegemony is okay with this.
The Ehrlichs were part of a movement of buzzkills who encouraged my generation to laissez les bontemps faire which did nothing to inhibit reproduction in the developing world but contributed to places like Italy, France and yes, Japan to stop reproducing which is why all of them now rely on immigrants just to keep things together. The French have their panties in a bunch about the Muslimization of France, but if the French aren't having babies, where does the work force come from to support their generous social safety net for my generation? It's always all about the Boomers.
The western world is like an awesome party where the hosts have had to borrow money and blow out their credit cards, anything to keep the party going. Now the sun is coming up. This isn't a deficit hawk argument. The world as I find it is the sum total of myriad decisions all of which ultimately devolve upon food and reproduction. The US is now fighting three open-ended wars which will never return any tangible benefit to Americans except maybe to keep the Al Qaida boogeyman safely under the bed. The US spends more on war than China and Western Europe combined.
Some time this year or next, the world population will pass seven billion. I believe that's a billion over what the Ehrlichs initially said was the point of no return for planet earth.
This is where it is useful to mention Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood. In many ways her work was a mitzvah to overworked, under-nourished women of her era, except secretly what really gave Sanger the heebie jeebies was the specter of smelly, ignorant immigrants breeding like roaches on the Lower East Side and flooding New York City with people she considered genetically inferior.
She in turn was part of a moment, especially popular in Sweden and Nazi Germany, to sterilize haploids, dweebs, people who wore eye glasses in the interest of the greater good. I know a woman who was classified as developmentally challenged in grade school because she couldn't speak English. The fact that she had arrived only a few months prior from Puerto Rico didn't factor into the experts deliberations, and that is my second point. Any decisions made by committees or scholars with agenda or worse, lunatics with personal bias, are likely to be wrong and should never be made into law
From the Wall Street perspective if you're not an MBA, a lawyer, an IT/HR person or someone at a Fortune 500 company, there's something wrong with you. If you are a teacher, a social worker, a doctor or any kind of public sector worker, then obviously you weren't raised right. Whose fault is that? Why should their taxes support you?
Right on jump street, the Reaganauts fired and decertified all the union air traffic controllers and established insurance-based health care as the national standard. These were the shots that should have been heard around the world, but at the time no one was paying attention. Let's go see ET.
Dutch Reagan pursued the somewhat incongruous double whammy of being against birth control, especially abortion, but at the same time supporting the “lifeboat” mentality of managing health care and denying benefits for the poorest Americans. What this policy led to was the intended consequence of lots of people being denied health benefits and, well, dying before their times. It also produced the unintended consequence of America needing to import immigrants, even illegals to do the shit work that there were no longer enough dirt poor Americans to do. I can't find documentation of this, so don't believe me, but it was estimated in the 1980s that managed health care would kill 30 million of the poorest Americans over the next fifty years and if you think about how there are now many new Americans from Latin America and Asia, but no population bomb that disrupted the pretty linear increase of Americans as such, it makes sense.
Reagan and the real President Bush paid lip service to pro-life, but it wasn't until W that we had a president dumb enough to actually do something about it. W reversed the American policy of supporting the UN population initiative which was Sanger's legacy, refused American funding for a simple prophylactic (excuse the pun) to hand out condoms in Africa. Condoms were not necessarily intended to discourage reproduction, but to inhibit the proliferation of people with AIDS, but W could not nuance the difference. W also let slip the anti-abortion hounds which killed some medical providers and empowered the recent lunatic right to pass or at least consider such epically horrible ideas as forcing women to listen a fetus' heart beating, look at the amino scan and watch three days of abortion slasher porn before they can have a procedure; authorizing the legal murder of abortion providers on the grounds that using deadly force to save a life is not really murder; trying women for murder if they can't prove that a miscarriage was unintended, eliminating rape as grounds for abortion because all Republicans know women will play the rape card if it's convenient, eliminating medicare funds for abortions and removing federal funds for Planned Parenthood which was a sticking point on the budget debate.
I know my devout Catholic and Orthodox friends would argue that unplanned, unwanted babies are part of G-d's plan for the world. I can't prove that they aren't, but I do know that unwelcome babies become sick, unhappy children in the majority of cases and inevitably dysfunctional adults unless they can arrange to have ther lives written by Charles Dickens. I also know that there are plenty of back alleys and plenty of coat hangers where desperate women will turn.
William Buckley was fond of saying that self-restraint was the most exhilarating of pleasures. If I had been born into great wealth, perhaps I'd agree. As it is, I've spent too much of my life among the homeless, ex-cons, ghetto kids and single moms trying to survive on what they make at Walmart to believe that poor people are simply lacking in character.
Now we are verging on a tipping point. Our deep, global ignorance of history gulls us into believing that this crisis is somehow different. America was a debtor nation from the Revolution to World War I. Then we became a creditor nation until Reagan smashed open the piggy bank with a sledge hammer. Then the dot.com boom enabled Clinton to make us a creditor nation again. W came in and redug the hole, bigger and deeper than ever before. Yet, Americans can not fill in the blanks here.
Reagan's trope that Welfare Queens were driving around in Cadillacs while Joe Lunch Bucket could only afford a Fiesta was the worst kind of distortion, and the fact that this trope became holy writ is a disgrace to every person who believes it.
Spend a day with a bunch of women on public assistance. Yes, they could have fewer parties in their pants, but what else do you suggest to alleviate the stress and tedium of their lives? Reading Ayn Rand?
Tea partiers act as though “tax” is some kind of abstract idea, that Washingtonians throw it in a big building and late at night swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck. Consider some of the cuts Obama sanctioned to mollify right wing nuts and the billionaires they love:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/12/inside-the-budget-deal_n_848089.html

The list kind of summarizes what this blog is about, but hey, Planned Parenthood survived until September. Back in 2008 we thought we were electing Neo president. Turns out we were electing Steve Urkel. Our bad.
I was talking to a nice guy from Hayesville, North Carolina yesterday. We were driving in the vicinity of the United Nations which I pointed out. He launched into a rant about US tax dollars supporting that evil empire. Right then I knew everything I needed to know about his political world view. I knew I could never nuance the idea that maybe the world is going to hell in a hand basket now, but without the UN the world would be going to hell in a dumpster, so I let it go. You'll note that cutting the US contribution to the UN budget was on the list of Obama-approved budget cuts.
I thought the candidate I campaigned for believed what I believe: Tax cuts for the rich, bad. Unnessary war, bad. Support for necessary services (and yes, that includes NPR), protecting our most vulnerable citizens, good.
What happens this summer if the food crisis hits the fan? Will President Noodle step up or will he defer to the Boner who will get on TV and cry about how hungry he and his legion of siblings were growing up in Ohio and yet look at him now?

As previously referenced in this blog, the world is experiencing a food crisis due to instability in the supply chain that diminished the capacity of Russia, Australia New Zealand, India and China. Some of it is related to climate change, but some of it is circumstance. Now we add Japan to the list. Hey, anyone want to go eat some sushi imported from Japan right now?
The problem with radioactivity, especially as the measurable amount of cesium grows in the ocean and the ground water around Dai-ichi, is that it doesn't stay put. Twenty-five years after Chernobyl, wild German boars 900 miles away from the meltdown are still toxic, illegal to eat, and so are the radioactive mushrooms they feed on. Large animals, be they tuna, boars or school children tend to store up toxins over the course of a lifetime. And let's remember that it isn't just radioactive iodine that's floating off the coast of Japan right now. It's Toyotas, computers, houses, industrial solvents, antibiotics, oil, etc. a vast litany of toxic debris that will become a gift that keeps on giving. While the Japanese government states that the Pacific is so big that all this toxic waste will quietly shuffle off into the vast deep, that is at least unrealistic and maybe negligent. Most of the junk will sink to the bottom off the coast and stay there for decades.
You may say to yourself, well isn't it ironic that so many G-20 countries will know what it is like to experience a food crisis? Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. Here in the US, the price of corn is up 87%, wheat is up 54% and soybeans 41%. This trickles down to products that are made from these grains like soy milk and soda, but more importantly livestock that feeds on corn and wheat.
The price of beef is up over 30%. Pork and chicken less so, but the differential between the price of factory-raised, crappy food people like me eat and the prohibitive price of free range livestock that swells like Wendy eat is converging in a crisis point.
This summer more than ever, the US, Canada and Argentina will have to pick up the global slack. The US has announced that it will solve the food crisis by producing a lot more corn. There are several problems with this. In the last several years American corn producers have backed off selling as much food to humans because corn is actually not good for humans; it's mostly sugar which contributes to obesity and diabetes. Corn remains the main ingredient in livestock diet, but that's okay because livestock rarely die of natural causes. Also, in the Heartland, most farmers know that the big money is in producing the badly flawed biofuel ethanol that's actually 30% less efficient than petroleum.
Did I mention that the price of corn is up 87%? Some of this is no doubt due to commodities speculators, but our stock piles are already depleted by 15% and it'll be a few months until the corn is as high as an elephant's eye. In the meantime, all the other livestock-producing countries, which is everybody, will be putting in bids against American food producers because that is how commodities markets work. Even though the US can probably outbid Liberia or Syria, the Japanese survivors of the tsunami are getting tired of living on rice balls and tea. Can we outbid Japan it the midst of a humanitarian crisis? Maybe, but this is obviously not going to be a banner year for summer cook-outs because the price of everything will go up.
I don't know if folks in the Muslim world enjoy kicking back with their neighbors and enjoying a barbecue, but I do know that the food crisis is a major contributor to global political unrest. While children in sub-Saharan Africa have learned to eat mud just to have something in their stomachs, the Arab world is trying a new strategy, insurrection. I also doubt that Muslim leaders will get their people to adopt Mexican Meals Night where they make tacos and fajitas out of corn meal.
Meanwhile what some see as a crisis, real entrepreneurs see as an opportunity:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alison-rose-levy/monsanto-lawsuit_b_842336.html

Satan's favorite global corporation is not only actually trying to leverage a global food crisis into the world accepting GM food, because hey, food is food, right? but a monopoly on global food production because even people who never wanted anything to do with Frankenstein food are being sued for taking advantage of Monsanto patents by promiscuously mixing their lousy crops with Monsanto's superior genetically modified products and infringing on their copyrights.
I don't know what metallic substance comes after brass for balls, but the Monsanto execs clearly have them.
It's not like eco-nuts such as myself haven't known that crop mixing was inevitable since the 1970s. The likelihood is that natural grains will exist only in the Norwegian food ark within 50 years. Thanks to armies of Monsanto lobbyists and lawyers, the government blew off concerns by generations of farmers, natural food advocates and scientists. The worst news is that should anything happen to Mosanto in the future many their GM crops will die because most don't produce seeds. You have to buy them every year.
Maybe I'm over-reacting. Consider the career of Paul Ehrlich who puts the profit in the phrase prophet of doom. In 1968 began publishing various iterations of his treatise The Population Bomb. His thesis was that overpopulation would doom the earth to global famines beginning around the mid1970s which would lead to food wars, mass migrations of starving refugees, pandemics caused by dead bodies piling up. This was eye-opening stuff for high school students like me.
If you didn't live in the 1970's, take it from me, this didn't happen. Partially because of the Green Revolution and yes, biotechnology firms like Monsanto figured out ways to make exhausted or marginally productive land produce surpluses. By the end of the century both India and China were exporting food.
Over-population contributes to deforestation and desertification which accelerates climate change which leads to local famines in places like Ethiopia, but population growth by itself isn't the problem. This will be a challenging year for planet earth, and a Christian nation would reach out its hand in help to its neighbors. But in our case, that isn't going to happen.
This will be continued.

This is really a blog about the on-going Fukushima Dai-ichi catastrophe. What immediately follows is simply setting the table.
When I was a boy, my mom would always admonish me to wear clean underwear whenever I left the house because God forbid I should get hit by a car and taken to the hospital. What would people say about her if they brought me in wearing dirty underwear? This begs the question of shouldn't the fact that I had just been hit by a car outweigh the state of my underpants? Well, it didn't.
That's the essence of shame culture. Being any kind of an outlier under any circumstance reflects badly on your immediate family and your extended family. Mostly peasants. In a time before the police state, a culture of shame inhibited our baser impulses, enforced cultural norms. In the middle ages, common law had a concept called Weirgelt where if a person was convicted of a crime his entire extended family had to pay a hefty fine to the victim's family. This was well before prisons, but if you think about it, it was a more effective deterrent than the modern penal system to keep people on the up and up.
This system of shame obviously works best in the context of clans, small villages and cohesive groups, but all that changed decisively when the car was introduced to modern culture. No longer did you court on the living room setee with your maiden aunt sitting by. It was now possible to, for example, dance on Sunday if you drove to the next town. That way you wouldn't be seen by the neighbors and become the subject of gossip. If things got really bad, you could always pack your things into the car and move away from the farm to a big city or California if things were much worse than that.
In the 20th century things that were scandalous in the century before began to become ordinary life. Premarital sex, divorce, inter-racial dating, syncopated music, women smoking, people being undressed in public, people being gay in public-- the list of behaviors that would have resulted in jail or public ostracism fell one after another.
In the modern era, shame culture has become problematic. Very few of us live in farming communities now. We don't attend church suppers much less worry that if we don't show up at church someone will call us out on it. No one gossips over the back fence any more. Obama was conceived out of wedlock. Does anyone care? Did anyone then?
The Westboro Baptist Church is an old-timey collection of biddies and cranks who are trying to keep shame culture alive, but instead shame themselves by protesting Liz Taylor or anyone even vaguely associated with equal rights for gay people. This cult hates gay people. We get that. Keep it to yourselves until you go out and actually talk to some gay people. You'll be surprised. More importantly, “You're Going to Hell!” is no longer much of a deterrent. When I was a youth, I got kicked out of confirmation class for arguing with the pastor that his assertion that only the 2.5 million members of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod were going to heaven and the remaining 2.975 billion humans alive then were going to Hell was absurd.
Muslims have a completely different take on who is going to Hell and why. Hindus and Buddhists don't believe in Hell as such and whatever Jews believe about the afterlife seems to be a highly variable, Jew-specific mindset that I can't figure out. Suffice it to say that in America, the question, “Am I going to Hell?” doesn't keep a lot of people up at night these days.
This is not to say that prominent figures have stopped hitting the shame, hellfire and damnation button. Michelle Bachman announces loudly that she is a deeply ignorant woman (who can't spell surprisingly enough. Read her Tweets) following Palin down the rabbit hole of shameless bigotry, and anyone who is still a Birther at this point is just an asshole (I'm looking at you Trump, who is by himself a whole cottage industry of shame). Rudy Giuliani decided when he ran for president that the ridiculous comb-over made him look pathetic, but not Trump.
Rex Ryan is not ashamed that his foot fetish videos are up on YouTube. Paris Hilton turned her leaked boyfriend porn into a very lucrative celebrity for hire sideline (and here's a bit of gossip: she didn't actually inherit much of the Conrad Hilton fortune, so what's she's got is largely earned).What we have instead is a guilt culture. If the gloves don't fit, you must acquit. Amanda Knox, Van der Sloot, Lawrence Taylor, Barry Bonds, Charlie Sheen, Chris Brown, Lindsay dance on the edge between possible legal guilt versus merely public shame.
The parents of the lunatic who murdered a bunch of people trying to take out Congressional Representative Giffords simply stopped answering their door or phone and instead spent a lot of time at the mall. Don't look at us, we were good parents.
This brings us to Japan. Let's remember that some Japanese soldiers chose to live in the pacific jungle after the war rather than face the humiliation of surrendering. The Empire of Signs remains a country full of social behaviors that seem quirky unless you remember that Japanese people live ever mindful of being judged by unseen legions.
I'm sure you have seen the YouTube video where the Tsunami floods a parking lot and turns into a disagreeable child smashing his hot wheels into a Lego building with a garden hose and sweeping them both out to sea. As someone who was up close and personal on 9/11, I know the feeling of reality suddenly becoming a Michael Bay movie, but this was 9/11 a thousand-fold. Still, the Japanese carry on with stunning decorum and resolve, and unlike the Haitians they aren't casting spells on one another or pooping in the drinking water.
As I referenced last week, no one knows what to do in the event of a nuclear disaster, and it may turn out that the damage to Fukushima Dai-ichi becomes the enduring legacy long after an unprecedented earthquake and its aftermath are forgotten. The nuclear industry may be true believers of a power source we can't truly control and only vaguely understand, or maybe they are cynical bastards who see the profit potential in grabbing millions of people by the pubes.
In any case, Japan remains a shame culture. TEPCO, the Tokyo-based power company who own the Dai-ichi facility has of late been called out on the fact that they ignored inspection results, had no plan to remove spent nuclear rods, had only constructed a facility to withstand a 7.5 earthquake and through this crisis have withheld accurate information and timely updates.
Alas, this is too big of a crisis to ignore
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03/27/radiation-inside-fukushima-dai-ichi-nuclear-plant-rises-sharply/?icid=main%7Chtmlws-main-n%7Cdl2%7Csec1_lnk1%7C207635
Apparently, some dumb guy came up with the one million times normal ambient radiation reading, panicked and ran away. Eventually everyone has settled on merely 100,000 times above normal. We know that Massachusetts and Iceland are measuring radiation from Fukushima. I suppose we'd be getting other readings if eliminating meteorology wasn't a necessary sacrifice to fund tax cuts for billionaires. Radioactive iodine sucks, but it has a half life of eight days. By fall it's gone. Radioactive cesium, strontium and plutonium are basically forever, forever in this instance being longer than the time between the end of the last Ice Age and now.
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03/22/chernobyl-cleanup-survivors-message-for-japan-run-away-as-qui/

By some accounts the #2 reactor is in meltdown. So the world kind of needs to know what's going on. We seems to sit at the point where not wanting to admit you fucked up meets everyone knowing you fucked up This is where the traditional Japanese desire to avoid humiliation dovetails with the modern corporate culture of denying public guilt in a way that has global implications.
The Japanese nuclear engineers who are heroically sacrificing their lives for the greater good speaks to what is best about Japanese culture. The corporate weasels who are evading bad news speaks to what is worst.
Japan has Toshiro Mifune, but we have Jimmy Stewart.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/03/28/slowing-bp-oil-spill-administration-slowed-flow-information-claims-coast-guard/

Like all global corporations, BP is staffed by lying sacks of shit. If you want to prove them guilty of something, take them to court. There's no shame as long as the bonus checks clear. However, the Coast Guard ratting out the Obama administration is an extremely big deal. When has that happened before, um, never.
Maybe the Coast Guard is a hot bed of Birthers, or maybe they just decided to do the right thing. What we need right now is someone at Fukushima Dai-ichi's parent company TEPCO to do the the right thing, too. The president of TEPCO just had a convenient heart attack. Oh, and you know who built Dai-ichi? Why General Electric who bring good things to light. I thought maybe they'd whisper a word of advice, but, nah. They are steering clear. This is a story that may be with us for the next 25,000 years.