absolutely worth your time.....
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
LISTEN TO THIS AMAZING INTERVIEW. THANKS TO AMY GOODMAN http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/10/for_the_64th_time_no_more“For the 64th Time: No More Nuclear War”–
A Roundtable Discussion on Disarmament
Sixty-four years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we host a roundtable discussion on the present nuclear landscape. We speak with nuclear physicist and disarmament activist Pervez Hoodbhoy, peace activist Frida Berrigan, and Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Over the next year, Ellsberg will release regular installments of his insider’s memoir of the nuclear era, “The American Doomsday Machine.”
Sixty-four years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we host a roundtable discussion on the present nuclear landscape. We speak with nuclear physicist and disarmament activist Pervez Hoodbhoy, peace activist Frida Berrigan, and Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Over the next year, Ellsberg will release regular installments of his insider’s memoir of the nuclear era, “The American Doomsday Machine.”
Peace Activist Frida Berrigan, http://www.tomdispatch.com/"64 Years Too Late and Not a Moment Too Soon
As another August 6th approaches, let me tell you a little story about Hiroshima and me:
As a young man, I was probably not completely atypical in having the Bomb (the 1950s was a great time for capitalizing what was important) on my brain, and not just while I was ducking under my school desk as sirens howled their nuclear warnings outside. Like many people my age, I dreamed about the bomb, too. I could, in those nightmares, feel its searing heat, watch a mushroom cloud rise on some distant horizon, or find myself in some devastated landscape I had never come close to experiencing (except perhaps in sci-fi novels).
Of course, my dreams were nothing compared to those of America's top strategists who, in secret National Security Council documents of the early 1950s, descended into the charnel house of future history, imagining life on this planet as an eternal potential holocaust. They wrote in those documents of the possibility that 100 atomic bombs, landing on targets in the United States, might kill or injure 22 million Americans and of an American "blow" that might result in the "complete destruction" of the Soviet Union.
And they were pikers compared to the top military brass who, in 1960, found themselves arguing over the country's first Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear strategy. In it, a scenario was laid out for delivering more than 3,200 nuclear weapons to 1,060 targets in the Communist world, including at least 130 cities which would, if all went well, cease to exist. Official, if classified, estimates of possible casualties from such an attack -- and by then, nuclear weaponry and its delivery systems had grown far more powerful -- ran to 285 million dead and 40 million injured (and this probably underestimated radiation effects).
From the National Security Council and the Pentagon to a teenager's nightmares, an American obsession with global annihilation undoubtedly peaked when President Kennedy came on the air on October 22, 1962, to tell us that Soviet missile sites were just then being prepared on the island of Cuba with "a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere." Listening to his address, Americans everywhere imagined a nuclear confrontation that could leave parts of the country in ruins. Nuclear fears, however, began to fade (even as the superpower arsenals grew) when the Cuban Missile Crisis was defused and, along with atomic tests, went underground after the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963. Then, of course, the Vietnam War seemed to swallow the world.
In 1979, after the reactor core of a nuclear plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania partially melted down, the bomb returned to me in an odd way. Then a book editor, I went out to lunch with a potential author who had been on one of the investigatory panels created by the President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island which Jimmy Carter had set up. She told me of a Japanese journalist who testified before her panel. He had interviewed the mothers of young children and pregnant women belatedly evacuated from the potential danger zone to an iceless ice rink in the state capital, Harrisburg. None of them had heard of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
This so startled me that I decided to search for a book to publish on what had happened on those August days in 1945 when two Japanese cities were wiped out by a new weapon and the nuclear age began. With the help of a historian and friend, I finally came across a Japanese book of images drawn by Hiroshima survivors, few of them artists, sometimes with school materials borrowed from their own grandchildren. Each drawing caught a moment experienced on that terrible day when Hiroshima was wiped out and was accompanied by a little personal description. Many of images were in pastels, or even crayon, and looked invitingly sprightly until you read the horrific accounts that accompanied them. The book was called Unforgettable Fire and it played a small role in the massive anti-nuclear movement that arose in those years. Unfortunately -- and this tells us something -- it's now long out of print. "
As another August 6th approaches, let me tell you a little story about Hiroshima and me:
As a young man, I was probably not completely atypical in having the Bomb (the 1950s was a great time for capitalizing what was important) on my brain, and not just while I was ducking under my school desk as sirens howled their nuclear warnings outside. Like many people my age, I dreamed about the bomb, too. I could, in those nightmares, feel its searing heat, watch a mushroom cloud rise on some distant horizon, or find myself in some devastated landscape I had never come close to experiencing (except perhaps in sci-fi novels).
Of course, my dreams were nothing compared to those of America's top strategists who, in secret National Security Council documents of the early 1950s, descended into the charnel house of future history, imagining life on this planet as an eternal potential holocaust. They wrote in those documents of the possibility that 100 atomic bombs, landing on targets in the United States, might kill or injure 22 million Americans and of an American "blow" that might result in the "complete destruction" of the Soviet Union.
And they were pikers compared to the top military brass who, in 1960, found themselves arguing over the country's first Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear strategy. In it, a scenario was laid out for delivering more than 3,200 nuclear weapons to 1,060 targets in the Communist world, including at least 130 cities which would, if all went well, cease to exist. Official, if classified, estimates of possible casualties from such an attack -- and by then, nuclear weaponry and its delivery systems had grown far more powerful -- ran to 285 million dead and 40 million injured (and this probably underestimated radiation effects).
From the National Security Council and the Pentagon to a teenager's nightmares, an American obsession with global annihilation undoubtedly peaked when President Kennedy came on the air on October 22, 1962, to tell us that Soviet missile sites were just then being prepared on the island of Cuba with "a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere." Listening to his address, Americans everywhere imagined a nuclear confrontation that could leave parts of the country in ruins. Nuclear fears, however, began to fade (even as the superpower arsenals grew) when the Cuban Missile Crisis was defused and, along with atomic tests, went underground after the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963. Then, of course, the Vietnam War seemed to swallow the world.
In 1979, after the reactor core of a nuclear plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania partially melted down, the bomb returned to me in an odd way. Then a book editor, I went out to lunch with a potential author who had been on one of the investigatory panels created by the President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island which Jimmy Carter had set up. She told me of a Japanese journalist who testified before her panel. He had interviewed the mothers of young children and pregnant women belatedly evacuated from the potential danger zone to an iceless ice rink in the state capital, Harrisburg. None of them had heard of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
This so startled me that I decided to search for a book to publish on what had happened on those August days in 1945 when two Japanese cities were wiped out by a new weapon and the nuclear age began. With the help of a historian and friend, I finally came across a Japanese book of images drawn by Hiroshima survivors, few of them artists, sometimes with school materials borrowed from their own grandchildren. Each drawing caught a moment experienced on that terrible day when Hiroshima was wiped out and was accompanied by a little personal description. Many of images were in pastels, or even crayon, and looked invitingly sprightly until you read the horrific accounts that accompanied them. The book was called Unforgettable Fire and it played a small role in the massive anti-nuclear movement that arose in those years. Unfortunately -- and this tells us something -- it's now long out of print. "
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: A Look Back at the US Atomic Bombing 64 Years Later Commemorations this weekend in Japan and around the world marked the US bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and then on August 9th, of Nagasaki. Anthony Weller, the son of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist George Weller, who was the first reporter to enter Nagasaki after the bombing story from: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4717966June 25, 2005
George Weller was the first Allied journalist to reach Nagasaki after it was struck by an American atomic bomb at the end of World War II. But his stories for the Chicago Daily News never made it to print, because they were censored by the U.S. military.
Weller's son, novelist Anthony Weller, recently found carbon copies of his father's articles and released them in anticipation of the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing. Among other things, they detail the medical puzzlement that greeted post-bombing deaths from radiation poisioning.
"The atomic bomb's peculiar disease, uncured because it is untreated, and untreated because it is not diagnosed, is still snatching away lives here," Weller wrote on Sept. 9, 1945, slightly more than four weeks after the bomb fell. "Men, women and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around three or four weeks thinking they have escaped.... But they are dead; dead of the atomic bomb. And nobody knows why."
U.S. authorities had used propaganda to spread the notion that there was no danger from radiation, Anthony Weller says, and at first his father tended to agree. His son says the dispatches show how his father came to realize the situation was far more complex:
"There's a kind of arc in my father's dispatches that goes from the initial sense of 'this is an extremely precise bomb' to 'what on Earth is going on here.'"
George Weller went on to complete a remarkable career as a foreign correspondent that included a Pulitzer Prize in 1943. He died at age 95 in 2002.
George Weller was the first Allied journalist to reach Nagasaki after it was struck by an American atomic bomb at the end of World War II. But his stories for the Chicago Daily News never made it to print, because they were censored by the U.S. military.
Weller's son, novelist Anthony Weller, recently found carbon copies of his father's articles and released them in anticipation of the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing. Among other things, they detail the medical puzzlement that greeted post-bombing deaths from radiation poisioning.
"The atomic bomb's peculiar disease, uncured because it is untreated, and untreated because it is not diagnosed, is still snatching away lives here," Weller wrote on Sept. 9, 1945, slightly more than four weeks after the bomb fell. "Men, women and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around three or four weeks thinking they have escaped.... But they are dead; dead of the atomic bomb. And nobody knows why."
U.S. authorities had used propaganda to spread the notion that there was no danger from radiation, Anthony Weller says, and at first his father tended to agree. His son says the dispatches show how his father came to realize the situation was far more complex:
"There's a kind of arc in my father's dispatches that goes from the initial sense of 'this is an extremely precise bomb' to 'what on Earth is going on here.'"
George Weller went on to complete a remarkable career as a foreign correspondent that included a Pulitzer Prize in 1943. He died at age 95 in 2002.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
You Know What They Say about Corn Syrup...that It has Mercury in it. by David Friedlander, New York City 
on 08. 8.09"Despite claims by the Corn Refiner Association to the contrary, there are in fact problems with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). In addition to being a major contributor to epidemic obesity and diabetes rates, you can add the presence of mercury to the growing list of reasons why HFCS is dangerous in any amount.
According to a recent Mother Jones article, in 2004 when FDA researcher Renee Dufault found mercury in HFCS samples from leading manufacturers, they did what any agency looking to protect public health would do: they asked her to stop her inquiry.
The source of the mercury is thought to be lye, which is used to separate the cornstarch from the kernel. Many chemical companies make lye by pumping salt through large vats of mercury. That mercury-laced lye is most likely the same lye used in processing corn to make HFCS.
After the FDA tried to stymie Dufault’s inquiry, she decided pursue the matter further, sending the original 20 samples to be retested; nearly half of the samples contained mercury. This past January, Dufault published her findings in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health.
At issue between Dufault’s and the FDA’s claims is the what form the mercury is present—whether it’s elemental, inorganic or organic. The FDA, supposedly without any scientific substantiation, claims the mercury found was the relatively benign elemental form. Unfortunately, Dufault and her colleagues’ findings were inconclusive as to sample HFCS’s form, but they believed there was strong evidence that it might be the most harmful organic variety, whose property of easy absorption makes it particularly dangerous. If the mercury were organic, the amounts found would constitute a major health risk (particularly children, pregnant women, women who plan to become pregnant, and nursing mothers) for Americans whose insatiable appetite for sweetness and convenience leads them to consume average 50 grams of HFCS daily.
Putting aside how crummy refined sugar products like HFCS are for your health, the chance that Dufault et al might be right about the mercury, coupled with the the FDA's sketchiness should be sufficient reason to pass on the cookies and soda.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/08/you-know-what-they-say-about-corn-syrup-that-it-has-mercury.php
Via Mother Jones
Read More on HFCS:
High Fructose Corn Syrup Producers on a Roll
Review: King Corn- You Are What You Eat
Corn Syrup vs. Sugar: Which is sweeter for your diet?
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