San Onofre…

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…disaster waiting to happen:  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/26-1

Disease clusters around nuclear power plants (PDF) here: http://www.radiation.org/reading/pubs/091116Thyroidcancer.pdf

Map on disease clusters here: http://clusteralliance.org/clusters/

More posts on nuclear here: https://sunlightonthewater.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/theres-no-climate-change/

And here:  https://sunlightonthewater.wordpress.com/2012/07/11/nuclear-disaster/

The strength of women

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This story is refreshing in that it paints a woman as empowered.  She fought back:  http://www.commondreams.org/further/2013/04/26-1

I have a quibble with it, however, because then the question from the minds of those who wish to blame women for being raped:  why didn’t they fight back…?

First, this woman is trained in defense.  Most women are not….which begs the question of why not…??  Why aren’t self defense classes for women offered in high school? (on that note, why aren’t they taught how to change the oil in a car…but that’s another subject for another post.)

Secondly, this woman apparently has enough upper and lower body strength to put on a good defense.  What if she did not?  If she was unable to fend off her attacker and was raped, would she be considered complacent?

And lastly, if this were another scenario, where she were out on a date and was raped, but not violently….she would have a much more difficult time of proving it was raped….and this would be only after her sex life and, well, her entire life were examined to *know* that she was telling the truth and not a slut…

Shining the light

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PR Watch has a report up on the growing gaps between CEO pay and worker pay:   http://www.prwatch.org/NODE/12060

This is just wrong.  They’re closing factories and moving them overseas because, as they claim, American workers want too much –safe work conditions and a living wage…

…while CEO’s are making astounding salaries…

I have no words.

The man behind the curtain

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…apparently is Pete Peterson.  He is behind the curtain to economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s seriously flawed work that advocated austerity measures:  http://www.prwatch.org/NODE/12065

From the article:

Reinhart, described glowingly by the New York Times as “the most influential female economist in the world,” was a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics founded, chaired, and funded by Peterson. Reinhart is listed as participating in many Peterson Institute events, such as their 2012 fiscal summit along with Paul Ryan, Alan Simpson, and Tim Geithner, and numerous other Peterson lectures and events available on YouTube. She is married to economist and author Vincent Reinhart, who does similar work for the American Enterprise Institute, also funded by the Peterson Foundation.

Kenneth Rogoff is listed on the Advisory Board of the Peterson Institute. The Peterson Institute bankrolled and published a 2011 Rogoff-Reinhart book-length collaboration, “A Decade of Debt,” where the authors apparently used the same flawed data to reach many of the same conclusions and warn ominously of a “debt burden” stretching into 2017 that “will weigh heavily on the public policy agenda of numerous advanced economies and global financial markets for some time to come.” (Note that not everyone associated with the Institute touts the Peterson party line.)

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Reinhart, a senior fellow at Peterson’s Institute and married to an economist also funded by Peterson.  Um-hmmm….

Rogoff, on the advisory board for Peterson.  (things that make your head spin…)

Yep.

(Stephen Colbert covered this, too.  He had Herndon on the show to explain how they discovered the errors.  Herndon is an econ student who was assigned to replicate someone’s study.  He chose Rogoff and Reinhart’s work, and to his surprise, could not replicate it.  Previously, they refused to share their data with others asking to see it, but gave it to Herndon, who found the flawed research that omitted countries that were against the Rogoff and Reinhart hypothesis.)

 

Fighting efforts to save the bees

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PR Watch has this up on Bayer and Syngenta’s trying to stop efforts to save the bees :   HTTP://WWW.PRWATCH.ORG/NODE/12066

(for some reason, my “link” feature is not working on my blog.  Also–I clicked on one of my links yesterday, and now they have ads–I have nothing to do with them, and I’m certainly not being compensated for them advertising with my blog. FYI.)

From the article:

The response of Bayer and Syngenta was to unleash a barrage of letters to the food safety agency and the European Commission, followed later by threatened lawsuits.

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This is the heart of the matter—Too Big To Fails can quash efforts against them or their interests just by simply litigating their way out of it., a la Monsanto. They don’t even have to win, but keep their opponents fighting in courts to bankrupt them.  Empty what little they may have in their bank accounts, and voila! no more opposition….

More here from Purdue University confirming the neonicotinoids were causing bee deaths: http://www.beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?263169-Purdue-university-study-confirms-neonicotinoids-on-maize-killing-honeybees

 

More on the Bush Library

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Common Dreams has this up on the Bush Library dedication today:  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/25-5

I think I’m going to be sick….

From a letter quoted in the article:

Last month, on the tenth anniversay of the start of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, wounded Iraq war veteran Thomas Young, who remains in hospice waiting to die, wrote an open letter to Bush and his vice president Dick Cheney which included:

“I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.”

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Ending his letter, Young wrote to Bush:

“My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.”

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Domestic violence mirrors war

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I swear that I did not see this before making my previous comment on the connection between domestic violence and war.  Wow, what a timely article.

From the article:

Some 3,073 people were killed in the terrorist attacks on the United States on 9/11. Between that day and June 6, 2012, 6,488 US soldiers were killed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing the death toll for America’s war on terror at home and abroad to 9,561. During the same period, 11,766 women were murdered in the United States by their husbands or boyfriends, both military and civilian. The greater number of women killed here at home is a measure of the scope and the furious intensity of the war against women, a war that threatens to continue long after the misconceived war on terror is history.

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On the photos taken of the violence at home:

The photos are remarkable because the photographer is very good and the subject of her attention is so rarely caught on camera. Unlike warfare covered in Iraq and Afghanistan by embedded combat photographers, wife torture takes place mostly behind closed doors, unannounced and unrecorded.

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An excellent point–because in Communications, the Vietnam War is known as the media war —a war that was lost because of the diligence of the press–they brought the war home every night on the nightly news.  People could see with their own eyes what was happening–politicians in Washington could not whitewash it.  The violence we were doing to others could not be denied.  The thought of a photographer taking photos while someone commits domestic violence makes my stomach turn…and at the same time, I’m thinking “is this what it takes to make it *real*….???”  Do the people have to see photos of women beaten to a pulp on the nightly news, every night to grasp how horrible this is?

Here’s another report on domestic violence in Africa following war.  Does the war cause domestic violence or is it a cycle repeating itself?