The 500-channeled monster

37 Replies to “The 500-channeled monster”

1. I know that people got et at the Superdome in New Orleans because MSM was reporting that about 24 hours after Katrina … lots more peoples in the freezers.
   BTW: BC got themselves flooded out a couple of years ago … most of us lost everything, including our lives.

2. Picture of subsistance craters at Nevada Nuclear Test Site:
   http://tinyurl.com/4dtmumk
   There were 928 nuclear weapons tested at this site, 100 above ground, 828 underground.

3. I don’t think it is just the media. I heard the anti-nukes with all kinds of scary scenarios and then I heard from the people that know about things.
   The problem is one relies on information and there is not a lot of that as things are happening. The guys that know are trying to control things rather than answer everybody’s information requests.
   It’s not like they can send someone in to take readings and shine a flashlight around.

4. I recall a cartoon in the late 50’s-early 60’s, in PlayBoy of all things.
   It featured 2 hide clad dude with clubs standing in a cave looking out at pouring rain…
   The caption:
   “We never had such lousy weather before they starting fooling around with them bows and arrows.”

5. It’s not like they can send someone in to take readings and shine a flashlight around.
   ~Speedy
   What they need is some of those robo thingies like in the scifi flicks.
   Too bad Japan doesn’t have any robots./

6. The problem is that MSM, for the most part, seeks the biggest crackpot they can find … which ain’t hard to do … they ain’t doing nothing because they are crackpots.
   So far the earthquakes have killed thousands … nuclear meltdowns in Japan? … slightly less.
   Meanwhile … Canadian media expects me to pay for a free plane ride back to Canada if those that decided to work anywhere but in Canada.
   Nobody forced you to go to Japan. Why do taxpayers have to act as your insurance company?

7. “So far the earthquakes have killed thousands ”
   Actually, the earthquake didn’t kill anyone, it was the Tsunami.

8. Then I stand corrected. In my defense, I am scared shitless because of the radiation cloud about to hit the BC coast.

9. I remember when Chernobyl went bad. Iodine was sold out in Edmonton along with most of the Canada’s major cities.
   The survivors of three mile Island. No not the venting, but the Media insanity assault on our minds. It was the death of NP new NP in America. An emerging greenish religion was born.
   As EBD said for years as a kid I watched open air Hydrogen bomb tests. The French only quit in the 80’s. Yet like before Handy capped parking, or low flush toilets. Where still here.
   Thanks for the memories EBD.
   “The Big Picture Series; Atomic Bomb
   http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2149878949626814717#

10. My father worked at the Atomic Energy Commission outside of Idaho Falls, Idaho in the fifties and sixties. On January 3, 1961 a test reactor at what we used to call “the site” exploded and killed three people instantly. Others died after cleaning up the test reactor.
    As far as I am aware, those three deaths due to the explosion are three more deaths than at Three Mile Island. Although it was not quite Chernobyl the accident has to rank as the worst nuclear accident in US history…but it only took three lives that night and a few more time. Eleven men died on the BP oil platform in the gulf.
    Nobody shut down the AEC, nor did they quarantine the Lost River Desert area, nor did they evacuate the towns of idaho Falls, Blackfoot, Ririe, etc., Instead, people shook their heads when they heard the story of how it happened and went about their business. The men involved made a mistake and they paid with their lives. The men who helped had a job to do, and some of them paid with their lives.
    There were no CNN hosts running around in circles claiming the sky was falling and the next year, no two-headed calves were born. If there were any long term health effects of that nuclear explosion in the surrounding area, I am not aware of them, and I grew up there.
    That said, when asked about the danger of the Japanese reactor, my father commented, “It sounds like those guys don’t have a physical plan to deal with the equipment failure, and if I’m right, they’re screwed.”
    What he meant is that as part of a disaster recovery plan the Japanese needed to have some physical means to get pure water into the reactor to cool it, and probably some physical means to remove rods or seal them off with lead or other materials. That part of the Japanese DR plan should have been completely physical and involved physically opening water cocks that delivered their special water from a DR reservoir and by cranking open vents to bleed off the steam they would have recycled if the system had been working. If they had done that, it would have saved them from using seawater (which ruined their equipment) saved them from a public relations nightmare and probably kept their problems under the radar.
    I asked what he thought would happen next, he said, “Nothing good. I think the guys who designed the Titanic designed that reactor’s DR system. They saved a few dollars by not having a physical way to answer the bell, but they might have scuttled the whole industry.”

11. Kate, that’s no ordinary gopher on your masthead….

12. Whatever you do guys and gals don’t even mention autism and all those nuke tests in the same sentence. Please.

13. Yeah, but we do have Lady Gaga and Kanye West. Let’s give this a bit more thought.

14. Horny toad:
    You are incorrect. At least one hydro dam burst from the earthquake and killed between two and three hundred people.
    None of the almost three thousand dams in japan generates a large amount of electricity – looking at pictures none of the ones I saw looked to be very big – maybe 100 to 150 mw if they were very high head facilities. The smallest of the afflicted reactors was 450mw. And no one has died yet nor does it look like anyone is likely to.
    Ps- the nyt and others are reporting that the real radiation threat is coming from the spent fuel rods stored on site that have lost the water from their cooling ponds. Spent rods heat up and give off lots of radiation but they aren’t going to explode.
    (the one caveat to comparing radiation levels from nuke bomb tests and the japan situation is the quality of the radioactive isotopes produced. Im no expert, but I think that the half life of bomb debris isotopes were almost entirely very short – a couple of months at most. Whereas the emissions from these fuel rods could have a very different, possibly thousands of years long half-life. I reiterate I don’t know, I’m just that comparing peak radiation levels is only one consideration when discussing the severity of this current nuclear accident.)

15. Soon Robert Fife, Bourque and National Newswatch will tie this disaster in Japan to PMSH somehow,Iggula will demand his resignation.

16. The mainstream media need a crisis especially after they figured out Prez. Obama, sword in hand, was not going to go into Libya on a white stallion and arrest Col. Omar.
    So focusing on somewhere else serves to take the pressure off of President “I’ve got a Nobel Peace Prize, though I’ve no idea why.”

17. “Plight of elderly patients left to die in hospital six miles from Japan’s stricken nuclear power plant”
    “Japan has a high proportion of elderly citizens and many of them are now struggling to survive in shelters without heating or electricity as supplies of food and medicine run low.
    Many of the rural, seaside towns hit by the tsunami were in economic decline and had seen an exodus of young people, who moved to major cities for work.”
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1367473/Elderly-hospital-patients-left-die-Japans-nuclear-zone-400-000-fight-survive-tsunami-humanitarian-crisis.html?ITO=1490
    …-
    “Spike Japan
    A look at the overlooked”
    http://spikejapan.wordpress.com/ugly-japan-2/

18. THe amount of fissionable material used in mid 20th century nuke testing is miniscule compared to what was dispersed by combustion in the Japan disaster. Even so, US domestic nuke testing killed thousands (including John Wayne)in long term lingering radiation-related ailments. This includes many military staff who were never compensated for the ailments they suffered from exposure. – but you don’t think the cause of death was admitted to by officialdom as inhaling/ingesting radio active fall out do you? I mean that would be expecting truth from the the Feds and MSM.
    http://tinyurl.com/6h4dro

19. “…all that was left from Colorado to the
    Atlantic were six-legged rats battling two-headed cockroaches in the glowing ruins?..”
    Leave it to politicians and bureaucrats to fight with each other about who is to blame when disaster strikes…

20. The various news reporters are starting to have the same effect on me as vuvuzelas.

21. Headline on front page of Toronto Star this morning
    “On the edge of nuclear winter”.
    Panic people, panic

22. Good buying opportunity on Cameco (uranium miner).
    Learn not to be overwhelmed by the news, learn how to profit from it.
    This is like shooting (three-eyed) fish in a barrel.

23. “And how we just let the fallout blow wherever and it landed all over the eastern US?…Yeah. Exactly. So shut up with the panic already.”
    No, the fallout didn’t wipe out life as we know it, but we DO now know that the iodine 131 fallout from the atmospheric tests was widespread. See, e.g., Ch 8, “Estimated Thyroid Doses Resulting from Atmospheric Bomb Tests Conducted at the Nevada Test Site” from the National Cancer Institute’s 1997 report, Estimated Exposures and Thyroid Doses Received by the American People from Iodine-131 in Fallout Following Nevada Atmospheric Nuclear Bomb Tests (available here: rex.nci.nih.gov/massmedia/Fallout/contents.html)
    Or, here’s a quicker summary map: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_fallout_exposure.png
    The estimated average dose received by the general population during the above-ground testing period of the 1950s-60s was 2 rads, but was higher among children, ranging from 2.8 rads for those 10-14 yrs up to 10.3 rads for those 1-4 yrs.
    Taking that into account, the NCI estimates that I-131 exposure during that time led to some 11,000 cases (at the lowest end) of thyroid cancer in the decades that followed (rex.nci.nih.gov/massmedia/falloutQ%26A.html).
    Sensationalism and hyperventilation in the media — especially on television, especially among the round-the-clock news channels (CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC) — are general and ongoing problems, no doubt, but the situation in Japan is also not trivial (for the Japanese; those on the west coast of N. America, however, still have little to worry about radiation-wise). There are plenty of sober and objective news outlets out there for those looking for them; viewers relying on CNN and similar sources for their “news” get exactly what they pay for.

24. THANK YOU. I have been scratching my head while listening to all the radiation hysteria in the media and thinking “But what about Nevada? And all those Pacific atolls??”

25. glasnost
    […….The various news reporters are starting to have the same effect on me as vuvuzelas……]
    Precisely mine own sentiment. Thank you for putting it into words……….

26. Oz Can they get a robot through the wreckage of the containment building?

27. Speedy, I don’t know if they can or can’t.
    If any nation has a huge selection of robots to use in this situation, Japan may be that nation.
    I wonder if the use of robots has even occured to them?

28. Toronto Star got even better headline: “Nuclear crisis: Japan needs the full truth”
    Toronto Star journos think that if the news are good (no meltdown, no further tsunami, no more deaths) then the Japanese government must be lying.
    MSM always think everybody behave like themselves.

29. The pictures showing the devistation around this plant is a testament to modern technology in that the plant has not self destructed at this point. I think we should be more concerned about peoples lives and health issues that will arrise from mold and other bio issues.

30. Yep, the MSM and it’s need for sensationalism. My personal favorite is Lisa LaFlamme (sp?) of CTV. She has the concerned facial expression and the breathless delivery down pat. Probably worth a Genie award at least.
    Of course, while every big news outlet scrambles to offer possible consequences more dire than the next, I’d guess that many real stories of hardship and pain are ignored.
    Since I’m a nobody, David McGuinty won’t come after me and I can safely assert that in the bigger picture, this reactor story is good news. They had a Richter scale 9+ quake and their nuclear power plants didn’t blow up.
    Sure they’ve got a serious problem right now at one of their facilities. They’ll solve that problem, get in there, find out where the weaknesses are, fix them so that a magnitude 12 quake can’t break them and be on their way. Long term, this event will invigorate Japan. Meanwhile we’ll still be quivering in fear that we’re all going to die from radiation.
    For a different take on the radiation factor you might like to check out Ann Coulter’s March 16 column, “A Glowing Report on Radiation”.
    http://www.anncoulter.com

31. Well, the folks in south-western Utah did get exposed to some pretty serious radiation. It’s been a pretty serious deal here.

32. My guess is that many, many more people will die from the LACK of electrical power from that power plant than will die BECAUSE of it.

33. Here is an interesting take on the radiation “issue” with respect to the Fukushima plant.
    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/17/live-real-time-monitoring-map-of-radiation-counts-in-the-usa/

34. All this ‘panic’ crap is just that: crap.
    People don’t panic after a horrible event like this happens. They start to gather together and form small groups and with come up with plans. They help each other and Leaders emerge.
    Panic comes largely from Hollywood and simple-minded teenagers who have watched so much H’wood crap that they think screaming is the way everyone reacts.

35. I-131 has a half-life of eight days: the amounts released even by the above-ground tests essentially disappeared in roughly three weeks. Far from good, true, but I would worry a heck of a lot more about the Cesium.
    More about the fuel rods – yes, a definite problem. But quite localised, barring a far larger explosion than those so far. And even if they do crack, the contents are about as radioactive as the original ore from the mines – can kill, but also can be handled OK with proper gear and other precautions.
    But it may be cheaper in some ways to take the Chernobyl approach – bury under lots of concrete and lead.

36. Private workers, aka non-union, non-government workers on the job battling Godzilla.
    Fearless private workers get the job done.
    Even hope is hoping.
    >>> “the bravehearts inside.” “Five have died so far from explosions, two are missing and 22 have been injured.”
    Outside: “hundreds of firefighters, Japanese Defense Forces personnel, doctors, experts and technicians”.
    …-
    “Battling a crisis: When contract workers turn a nation’s only hope”
    “They are contract workers getting about 9,000 yen per day. They move from one nuclear plant to other in medium term contracts. They had probably looked upon assignment to the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant as another routine job. But all that changed on March 11 when the monster quake-cum-tsunami turned the aging facility into one of the most dangerous places on earth. They could well become Fukushima’s own hibakushas — survivors of 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
    The 180 workers deployed in 2-hour shifts to get control over truant radioactivity in Fukushima’s 6 nuclear reactors have been battling for a week. Combined with their previous work, they may well have become exposed to high radiation by now. Five have died so far from explosions, two are missing and 22 have been injured. There are times when radiation soars, as on Tuesday, and the workers retreat into safe zones. Then they are back again.
    Outside the complex, hundreds of firefighters, Japanese Defense Forces personnel, doctors, experts and technicians provide the backup to the bravehearts inside. Families tensely follow news reports each minute.”
    http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Japan-nuclear-crisis-When-contract-workers-turn-a-nations-only-hope/articleshow/7741052.cms

37. This is a propaganda explosion second only to Obama’s election campaign for sheer, utter stupidity.