Have you seen Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars yet? This is a powerful, engaging, mind-blowing documentary, sure to get an Oscar for best documentary of the year. The cinematography is incredible, especially considering where it was shot. Scahill, like Daniel Ellsberg, Bradley Manning, and Edward Snowden, is standing up to lead us even if we don't follow. But if we love our country, follow we will! Until you've seen Dirty Wars, there's a very good chance you don't really know your own country. (You can stream it on NetFlix. Click here for other ways to see it.)
You won't believe how insanely brave Scahill is. He's constantly at risk of being blown up, shot, or kidnapped by one Afghan warlord or another. How he ever got a camera crew to accompany him into one insanely dangerous situation after another I'll never understand!
I hope that after you've seen this movie, you'll turn other people on to it!
Have you seen this Russell Brand interview yet? I was amazed by Brand's skill in handling Jeremy Paxman, a hard-core British interviewer. Just this one little 10-minute exchange has opened my eyes and actually changed my position on the chessboard a bit. It's actually transformative! What a surprise to hear Noam Chomsky-like brilliance from the mouth of Russell Brand. This former drug addict, former husband of Katy Perry, and actor in junk movies is amazingly articulate and a true revolutionary.
Wow, this has got to be the best use of taxpayers money ever! It's like a king or queen having artisans make them a new crown or some jeweled eggs within eggs.
"We put together a time-lapse to show you how it came together -- and to get you in the holiday spirit."
Yeah, spending thousands of dollars to make a gingerbread White House that no one will even eat equals getting into the holiday spirit. Man, I fucking hate this. Barry sent me this link in an email today. He must think Amerika is a country of retarded people.
Check it out:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/share/gingerbread-white-house
I was walking around in Berkeley last week and an analogy for the Fukushima problem popped into my head. As I walked, I dictated it into my iPhone's digital recorder (and almost got creamed by a bicyclist riding about 30 mph on the wrong side of the road through a red light--he came so close to hitting me that his clothes touched my clothes!). At the time, I really believed in my idea--I thought it was a brilliant analogy. But I lost faith in it a few days later after I'd dictated it into my computer and edited it. (Macs have an awesome voice recognition capability, but few people use it. You just talk normally and say "period," "comma," etc. when needed, and it types what you say with almost perfect accuracy!) It sounded too crude and stupid to use.
However, in an email conversation with a friend about Fukushima, I did use it, and I was pleasantly surprised that she liked it. She wrote, "I like your analogy. It really hits the nail on the head. It's crude and weird in a way that people can actually relate to. I think that is the problem. Fukushima is SUCH a big problem that no one can relate . . . can get their mind around the seriousness of it." So now I feel a bit more confident to publish it. It's not like many people read this blog anyway!
By the way, I just added a way (on the upper right of this page) you can sign up for email notification of new blog posts, and I plan to make this blog active again. If this post isn't your cup of tea, please don't give up on me. There are a lot more where this one came from . . .
I think about Fukushima every day. If you study Fukushima, you get more and more and more freaked out. It's like when Dorothy's dog pulled the curtain aside and you could see the Wizard of Oz for what he really was. Millions of people have been given a chance to see the soul of raw capitalism: what kind of human beings would stuff thousands of hot radioactive fuel rods in a swimming pool atop a flimsy little building on the beach of a country known for earthquakes and tsunamis? I've been looking at radiation maps, and I heard Canada's top nuclear scientist on the NBC Nightly News say that just one more sizeable earthquake "and it's bye-bye Japan. People on the west coast of North America [including Jeff Syrop and his family, who can actually see the friggin' Pacific Ocean from their back yard] will have to evacuate." So basically we're playing Russian Roulette. Japan's TEPCO is running around doing clown-car half measures while Japan and the rest of the world are pretending everything is hunky-dory.
I feel an urgency to somehow do my part in sounding the alarm. People need to wake up! The major countries need to work together on the largest scale project every attempted by humankind and solve the problem of Fukushima!
So, without further ado, here is my crude analogy:
Japan, Guest at Your Party
Japan is like somebody who comes to your party and shits in his pants, and the shit is dripping down his leg and getting on your carpet. Some of your guests are already stepping in it! The room is just beginning to stink. But the this Japanese guy is excessively prideful and he can't bear to lose face, so he tries to ignore the problem and refuses to do anything significant about it.
It's a pity, too, because there are several professional janitors at your party, and there are some workers from a professional laundry here as well; their laundry facility is right across the hall from your apartment! Also attending are some of the best doctors in the world. But this fucking Japanese guy won't say anything about his obvious problem. Instead he insists on talking about his favorite subjects: cars and high tech. How shiny my Toyotas are and how sleek are my Lexuses! As surreptitiously as possible, he uses tissues to dab his shoes off each time more shit drips on them, and he keeps hiding the used tissue in his pockets and up his sleeves. It's really fucked up.
Clearly Japan is distressed. People at your party are losing interest in Japanese cars and game stations, and they're all considering canceling their invitations to the big sporting event Japan is having soon at his house (the fucking Olympics!).
The host and the other important guests at the party know that Japan is very distressed, but they are too busy and too greedy to help him because they don't want to impede the flow of conversation and fun at their party. They're making all kinds of deals with one another and enjoying the pretty girls and good scotch! Hardly an offer of help for poor inconvenienced Japan can be heard!
It's likely Japan has food poisoning, which might cause every organ of his body to shut down. He might die! Stupidly and selfishly, the host and the most important guests aren't acknowledging this. If Japan dies, it could destroy the livelihood and safety of all the guests at your party; almost all of them do business with him. And some of the guests are already getting sick! Soon Taiwan and the Philippians might start shitting on themselves. Maybe next it will be your good friends Hawaii, Alaska, and California! It's possible that if he doesn't get treatment soon, Japan could infect everyone in the room with his disease!
Why won't Japan make a serious effort to help himself? Why won't we make a serious effort to help him? What the fuck are we waiting for?
Please click on the comment link below and let me know what you think we can do to get our country seriously involved in this project. Also, are you personally worried about it or is it not a concern for you? A panel of UC Berkeley scientists recently published a paper stating that not much radiation has actually reached us yet, and while they didn't try to diminish the seriousness of the problem, they found that at this point, we're not in any danger of ingesting or breathing dangerous amounts of radiation. Still, every time I eat a tuna sandwich, I think twice now!
