New Study Confirms Use Of Mercury In Vaccines To Be Dangerous

March 28, 2011 by · 1 Comment
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The toxic effects of the mercury, also known in vaccines as Thimerosal, have once again been confirmed, this time by researchers from the University of Brazil. Marking the sixth major study in recent months to condemn the use of mercury in medicine, the new study reveals that mercury causes serious brain damage, and is linked to autism and other developmental diseases in children and Alzheimer’s disease in adults.

Dr. Jose Dorea and his colleagues conducted an extensive, peer-reviewed analysis of various studies and available information in major databases that address the effects of low-dose Thimerosal, or ethylmercury, on neural tissue and behavior. They found conclusively that Thimerosal accumulates in brain tissue, negatively affects brain development, and harms brain cells.

“Mercury is known to cause serious harm, especially to fetuses and children because of their smaller size,” said Lisa Sykes, president of the Coalition for Mercury-free Drugs (CoMeD), a non-profit group dedicated to removing mercury from medicine. “Why remove Thimerosal from pediatric vaccines only to inject it into pregnant women and children with recommended flu shots? They removed Thimerosal from other vaccines, so it should also be removed from flu shots.”

Several other recent studies confirm the numerous dangers posed by mercury, including one recently published in the Folia Neuropathologica that links the toxin directly to autism

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Robert Gates: Libya not a threat until U.S. began campaign

March 28, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
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Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that Libya did not pose a threat to the United States before the U.S. began its military campaign against the North African country.

On “This Week,” ABC News’ Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper asked Gates, “Do you think Libya posed an actual or imminent threat to the United States?”

“No, no,” Gates said in a joint appearance with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “It was not — it was not a vital national interest to the United States, but it was an interest and it was an interest for all of the reasons Secretary Clinton talked about. The engagement of the Arabs, the engagement of the Europeans, the general humanitarian question that was at stake,” he said.

Gates explained that there was more at stake, however. “There was another piece of this though, that certainly was a consideration. You’ve had revolutions on both the East and the West of Libya,” he said, emphasizing the potential wave of refugees from Libya could have destabilized Tunisia and Egypt.
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Amy Charron: Child Kidnapping by CPS

March 28, 2011 by · 15 Comments
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Amy Charron is a single mother who’s young daughter was wrongfully taken by CPS in Texas 20 Months ago. She argued her case Pro Se (represented herself) and actually won custody, only for them to rescind the ruling a couple of days later
Her daughter was placed in the care of Amy’s mother and step-father where Amy experienced documented child abuse as a child herself and is very concerned for the welfare of her young daughter. Here’s her story.

Part 2
Part 3

Amy’s Facebook

Federal Reserve vs. Communist China Economics

March 23, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
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By Michael Snyder – BLN Contributing Writer

Most Americans believe that we still live in a capitalist system and that free markets primarily determine the growth and development of our economy. But is that really the case? No, sadly it is not. The truth is that the U.S. Federal Reserve does a tremendous amount of central economic planning. So what makes the central economic planning that the Federal Reserve does different from the central economic planning that communist China does? Yes, in China it is the government that does the central planning and in the United States it is a private central bank that does the central planning, but other than that are there any huge differences? And if our economy is centrally planned, then how can we continue to claim that we still have a free market capitalist system?

Certainly China goes into greater detail in their economic planning, but that does not mean that the economic planning that the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government do is not similar.

After all, free markets do not set interest rates in this country – the Federal Reserve does.

The Federal Reserve also determines what the money supply will be.

The Federal Reserve is the one that decides if inflation is too high or too low.

The Federal Reserve is the one that decides if unemployment is too high or too low.

In addition, the Federal Reserve has a tremendous amount of regulatory power over U.S. banks and the entire financial system. Most Americans simply do not realize how much power the Federal Reserve has over our banks. Just last year Federal Reserve officials walked into one bank in Oklahoma and demanded that they take down all the Bible verses and the Christmas buttons that the bank had been displaying.

Like the communist Chinese, the Federal Reserve is not elected and it is essentially accountable to nobody.

Like the communist Chinese, the Federal Reserve also picks winners and losers. You see, not all financial institutions are treated equally by the Fed. For example, some have access to the Fed’s discount window and others do not.

How is that fair?

Certainly the Federal Reserve does not do all of the central economic planning in this country. The U.S. government loves to get involved in economic planning as well. For example, the U.S. government has decided that there are certain types of light bulbs that we are allowed to buy and certain types of light bulbs that we are no longer going to be allowed to buy. It doesn’t matter that the new light bulbs are far more dangerous to children or that most of us would still like to have the choice to buy the old light bulbs.

But getting back to the Federal Reserve, how “democratic” or how “capitalist” is it to have 12 unelected people sitting around a table deciding the economic direction of this country?

The truth is that we live in a system that simply does not trust free markets and that believes that our economy needs to be “managed”.

I have to admit that my thinking on these issues was stimulated when I recently read an excellent article by Vitaliy Katsenelson in which he asked the following question….

It is a fundamental tenant of American capitalism that central planning of economies doesn’t work in the long term, whether in Soviet Union historically or in China today. But I often wonder: How is the Fed’s Board of Governors – the proverbial 12 guys in a room – any different than the 24 guys in a room who make up the Chinese politburo?

Is Katsenelson not right about this?

How in the world is the Fed’s Board of Governors all that much different from the Chinese Politburo?

In both cases, a group of unelected elitists makes the major economic decisions for all the rest of us.

That certainly does not sound like “capitalism” to me.

Would the free markets really produce worse results for our economy than the Federal Reserve does?

Would America ever have gone through the Great Depression if the Federal Reserve had not been created in 1913?

Would we have experienced the financial crash of 2008 if the policies of Greenspan and Bernanke had not created tremendous bubbles in the financial system?

Would the U.S. dollar have lost over 95 percent of its value since 1913 if the Federal Reserve was not around to constantly inflate our currency?

Would the U.S. government have the largest debt in the history of the world if we were not using the debt-based monetary system imposed upon us by the elite international bankers?

Now that the total debt of the U.S. government is $14,228,193,126,138.72, it is getting really hard to deny that the federal government is drowning in debt.

Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher unknowingly indicted the very system he serves when he recently made the following statement….

“If we continue down on the path on which the fiscal authorities put us, we will become insolvent, the question is when.”

If the Federal Reserve had never been created, and the U.S. government had been issuing debt-free currency all this time, it is entirely conceivable that we would have absolutely no federal government debt at this point.

But defenders of the Federal Reserve tell us that if not for the brilliant people over at the Fed, America would be an economic basket case by now.

Oh really?

In case anyone has not noticed, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has a very long track record of incompetence. Nearly every major judgment that he has made since taking over that position has been wrong. If one of us could go down the street and appoint the manager of our local Dairy Queen as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, it is very doubtful that person could do a worse job than Bernanke has done.

Unfortunately, most Americans do not understand this. Most Americans are still convinced that “the greatest economy on earth” will just keep roaring along forever. Most Americans are spending and partying as if everything is going to be just fine.

Sadly, as Richard Daughty recently pointed out, most Americans will not wake up and realize just how bad our economic problems really are until it is too late….

In fact, to use an analogy, the economy is like a group of overpaid people, milking the government for every dollar and benefit they can get, on a chartered airplane that has been certified as “unsafe,” where one minute everybody is having fun, drunk as skunks, laughing and telling dirty jokes, and the next minute the plane is plunging out of the sky, out of fuel, one wing is in flames, the engines are dead, the entire electrical system is kaput, and, worst of all, the beverage cart is completely empty of cold beer and those little bottles of different kinds of tasty liquors. Uh-oh!

Most Americans have become so “dumbed down” that they still won’t even understand what is happening even after the economy has collapsed. Newsweek recently found that 63 percent of Americans do not know how many justices are on the Supreme Court and 29 percent of Americans cannot even name the current Vice-President.

America today is rapidly degenerating in many of the same ways that the Roman Empire once did. Tens of millions of Americans are lazy, slothful and absolutely addicted to entertainment. It is frightening to see just how many Americans did not show any empathy during the recent crisis in Japan or when we started launching missiles on Libya. The following mini-documentary that was recently posted on YouTube does a beautiful job of making this point….

So is there any hope for America?

Let us hope that people wake up, because there are going to be even more economic disasters coming our way. Right now a large percentage of the American people don’t even know enough to realize what the real problems are, much less what the solutions may be.

When most Americans talk about economics, they instantly start blaming “Obama” or “Bush” and a lot of them never even bring up the Federal Reserve.

But it is the Federal Reserve that has the most power over our economy.

If Americans want to blame someone in Washington D.C. for the economic mess that we are in, the number one culprit is the Federal Reserve.

Yes, Obama, Bush and virtually every member of Congress has played a role in our economic nightmare as well. But it is the Federal Reserve that is actually “managing” our economy.

We would have been much better off if we had allowed free markets to “manage” our economy all this time, but very few Americans actually seem to still believe in free markets anymore.

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Libya Bombings May Backfire On U.S.

March 22, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
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As the U.S. fired more than 100 Tomahawk cruise missiles into Libya on Saturday, the objective seems clear.  Barack Obama declared that “we cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy.”  He explained:  “Today we are part of a broad coalition.  We are answering the calls of a threatened people.  And we are acting in the interests of the United States and the world.”  But he didn’t explain how acting forcibly to remove Muammar Gaddafi would indeed be in America’s interests.  And that is a case that is not as easily made as it might appear to be.

How could removing Gaddafi, who is undeniably a tyrant and fanatically anti-American, not be in America’s interests?  The simple answer is that it is unlikely that he will be succeeded by Thomas Jefferson or John Adams.  The fact that Gaddafi is a reprehensible human being and no friend of the U.S. does not automatically turn his opponents into Thomas Paine.

Obama has strongly affirmed his support for “the universal rights of the Libyan people,” including “the rights of peaceful assembly, free speech, and the ability of the Libyan people to determine their own destiny,” but he has never specified exactly who in Libya is working to uphold and defend those rights.  He has praised “the peaceful transition to democracy” that he says is taking place across the Middle East, and yet the countries where uprisings have taken place have no democratic traditions or significant forces calling for the establishment of a secular, Western-style republics.

In fact, there is considerable evidence to the contrary.  Eastern Libya, where the anti-Gaddafi forces are based, is a hotbed of anti-Americanism and jihadist sentiment.  A report by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center reveals that during the last few years, more jihadists per capita entered Iraq from Libya than from any other Muslim country—and most of them came from the region that is now spearheading the revolt against Gaddafi.

That may explain why Libyan protesters have defaced Gaddafi’s picture with the Star of David, the hated symbol of the Jews, whom the Koran designates as the “strongest in enmity” toward the Muslims.  There has been a notable absence among the protesters of anything equivalent to “Don’t Tread On Me” flags or other signs that what the uprising is really all about is establishing the ballot box and the hearty give-and-take of open-society politics.  The Libyan protesters have chanted not “Give me liberty or give me death!” or even “Democracy, whiskey, sexy,” but “No God but Allah!”

Meanwhile, Abu Yahya al-Libi, a Libyan who heads up al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, has warmly praised the uprising in his homeland, calling on Libyans to murder the tyrant and crowing:  “Now it is the turn of Gaddafi after he made the people of Libya suffer for more than 40 years.”  He said that removing Gaddafi as well as other Middle Eastern autocrats is “a step to reach the goal of every Muslim, which is to make the word of Allah the highest”—that is, to establish a state ruled by Islamic law.

Such a state would be inveterately hostile to the United States.  “We have to get rid of our inferiority complex and free ourselves from the West,” declared al-Libi.  Of course, the statements of a Libyan al-Qaeda commander 3,000 miles away from Libya don’t necessarily have any traction back home, but it is noteworthy that every Islamic hard-liner, from al-Qaeda leaders to the mullahs in Iran, has warmly praised the uprisings in Libya and elsewhere.  Hiezbollah’s Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah recently told the people of Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen that Allah would grant them victory “if you persist in your jihad.”

“These revolutions,” Nasrallah enthused, “are the will of the people.”  He seems confident that if the will of the people in Libya and elsewhere does indeed find expression, that what will result will not be pluralistic democracies that guarantee the rights of their people and are friendly toward the West, but Islamic states bristling with hatred for the Great Satan.

And America’s Tomahawk cruise missiles will have helped bring about such a state in Libya.


Mr. Spencer is director of Jihad Watch and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad, Stealth Jihad and The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran (all from Regnery-a HUMAN EVENTS sister company).


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Government Funding For La Raza

March 15, 2011 by · 1 Comment
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The United States government is funding the National Council of La Raza with our tax dollars. La Raza, which literally means in Spanish “The Race,” is a radical organization that advocates open borders and amnesty for illegal aliens. I pulled and analyzed the tax return Form 990, the form filed by 501(c) 3 organizations to the IRS, and here is what was reported:

Government Grants (contributions) to the National Council of La Raza

2008 Tax Returns, (October 1 2008 to September 30, 2009) $5,136,535

2007 Tax Returns $3,458,351

2006 Tax Returns $3,353,319

Three Year Total $11,948,205

What do people get paid at La Raza?

According to the 2008 tax returns seventeen people listed as officers, directors, trustees, key employees and highest compensated employees of the National Council of La Raza have an income ranging from $119,675 to $378,446, the latter of which goes to Janet Murguia, president and CEO.

To put that income figure in perspective a rank and file United States Senator makes $174,000. A United States Marine Sergeant with five years of service earns a base salary of $29,376, including the raise received for 2011.

Lobbying:

Part II, Section 1b indicates lobbying expenditures to influence a legislative body amounted to $550,787.

Section 1g indicates lobbying expenditures to “Grassroots nontaxable amount” of $250,000.

Here is the quick analysis: The US government pays La Raza to lobby the US government for money.

The United States of America is facing a multitude of critical issues. Two of those issues are wasteful government spending and illegal immigration. Cutting funding for the National Council of La Raza would begin to help in both of those issues.

Now you sound off. Should the United States taxpayer be funding the National Council of La Raza?

Mike Piccione is the Editor of Guns & Patriots. He is a long time shooter, hunter and writer. Mike is a former United States Marine, NRA Marketing Manager and a member of the Fairfax County, VA, Community Emergency Response Team.

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Western Bankers Threaten Japan With Eco-Warfare

March 14, 2011 by · 1 Comment
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Western Bankers Threatened Japan with HAARP Eco-Destruction a Year Before China Quakes
Constructed by the US Navy and Army in Alaska’s bush country during the early 80s, the Pentagon’s widely acknowledged high-tech “sky zapper” also can rattle the earth’s substructure. But while the Defense Department acknowledges the program’s existence, officials are keeping the “pandora’s box” that is HAARP–High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program–classified.

Nonetheless, some remarkably eerie circumstantial evidence compiled below from diverse, reputable sources suggest politically flaccid Democrat congressional leaders should investigate if the Bush White House and Pentagon has perpetrated humankind’s deadliest terrorist attack last month on China.

In 1996, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation telecast reported the US Defense Department was then in the initial stages of developing “geophysical warfare”; YouTube.com now hosts the broadcast in two parts, excerpted below.

Part 1, 7:13 minutes

Part 2, 7:13 minutes

Though I cannot expertly assess the geo-political entanglements outlined in the next clip by Jeff Steinberg, an media analyst for the political action committee representing perennial presidential candidate (and staunch Bush opponent) Lyndon LaRouche, the 10-minute excerpt of his 7 April 2008 podcast alleges escalating hostilities among the Asian Union (Russia, India but principally China), the European Union and the U.S. North American Union juggernaut. Though he does not mentions eco- or weather weapons, Steinberg claims “World War III” is imminent.

Those observations are followed by experts observations about HAARP’s likely expanded military applications: weather modification and, yes, earthquakes. Around the 6-minute mark, listen closely to “radio tomographer” Brooks Agnew cite his remarkable success during the early 80s in using directed 30-watt radio energy to find twenty-six untapped oil fields beneath the earth’s surface; he then effectively illustrates the impact of HAARP’s one billion-watts if it were directed into the earth’s substructure instead of the ionosphere.

Supporting Evidence from Japan

Before stomping off in a dither, declaring the evidence is yet another bucketful of barking conspiracy insanity, consider a claim about Japan’s financial system recently made in the next clip by Benjamin Fulford.

Formerly a well-traveled Far East correspondent for Forbes magazine, Fulford, fluent in Japanese, is hosting What is This?, his weekly podcast from Tokyo, and alleges “Hazel” Takana, Japan’s finance minister, told him in 2007 “a group of American and European oligarchs” threatened to strike the country with manufactured earthquakes unless he ceded control of the Japanese banking system.

Hosted by YouTube.com, Fulford’s allegation is accompanied by an critical explanatory note in the webpage’s “more info” opition; it cites similarities in Japan’s 2007 ‘quakes with those more recently striking China: “Benjamin Fulford reports from Tokyo on a mysterious plasma weapon seen prior to the Niigata earthquake [... on 16] July, 2007 and red, white and blue lights seen prior to the recent earthquake in China. Both quakes targeted nuclear facilities… coincidence?”

This clarification suggests Japan was first subjected to earthquakes before Tanaka allegedly ceded control of Japan’s banks to US and European financial leaders.

Can this possibly be true?

US Defense Department Sought Eco- and Weather Weapons Since 1950s:

Consider this provocative military historical note by American physicist Neil Begich’s coauthored book Angels Don’t Play this HAARP: Advances in Tesla Technology, (1995, 233pp.) excerpted from here:

As far back as 1958, the chief White House advisor on weather modification, Captain Howard T. Orville, said the U.S. defense department was studying “ways to manipulate the charges of the earth and sky and so affect the weather” by using an electronic beam to ionize or de-ionize the atmosphere over a given area.

In 1966, Professor Gordon J. F. MacDonald was associate director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, was a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, and later a member of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality.

He published papers on the use of environmental-control technologies for military purposes. MacDonald made a revealing comment: “The key to geophysical warfare is the identification of environmental instabilities to which the addition of a small amount of energy would release vastly greater amounts of energy. ” World-recognized scientist MacDonald had a number of ideas for using the environment as a weapon system and he contributed to what was, at the time, the dream of a futurist. When he wrote his chapter, “How To Wreck The Environment,” for the book Unless Peace Comes, he was not kidding around. In it he describes the use of weather manipulation, climate modification, polar ice cap melting or destabilization, ozone depletion techniques, earthquake engineering, ocean wave control and brain wave manipulation using the planet’s energy fields.

On 28 April 1997, Senator Sam Nunn of George organized a counterterrorism conference in Atlanta. During the Q&A session after US Defense Secretary William S. Cohen’s presentation, Cohen indicates at least two–individuals? groups? countries?–have succeeded in creating HAARP-like weaponry: “Others are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the usnetic waves.”

Until recently, Cohen’s alarming revelation appeared online in a DoD News Briefing of the Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy, University of Georgia, Athens, 29 April 1997. Check out this empty page: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Apr1997/t042897_t0428coh.html; the coded dates in the url address certainly coincide with Cohen’s appearance at Senator Nunn’s Atlanta conference.

HAARP lecturer and author Jerry Smith has archived part of Cohen’s discloure here, further incorporating it in his own writing and speaking.

And finally, this related angle to military use of directed energy on citizens around the world, to include the US:

In February, Milkhouse Mouse referenced a Washington Post article, buried deep in the folds of a 2007 Sunday edition, about–and I quote WaPo staff write Sharon Weinberger –”a community of people who believe the government is beaming voices into their minds. They may be crazy, but the Pentagon has pursued a weapon that can do just that.”

Though Weinberger never mentions HAARP per se, she sought an interview with Rich Garcia, the HAARP spokesman appearing in part 1 of the CBC clip. While in 1996 he talked to the Canadian media about HAARP, by 2007 Garcia “declined to discuss that patent or current or related research in the field, citing the lab’s policy not to comment on its microwave work.”

[A researcher and Targeted Individual (TI) Weinberger interviewed] came across references to the CIA seeking to influence the mind with electromagnetic fields. Then he found references in an academic research book to work that military researchers at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research had done in the 1970s with pulsed microwaves to transmit words that a subject would hear in his head. Elsewhere, he came across references to attempts to use electromagnetic energy, sound waves or microwave beams to cause non-lethal pain to the body. For every symptom he experienced, he believed he found references to a weapon that could cause it.

How much of the research Girard cites checks out?

Concerns about microwaves and mind control date to the 1960s, when the U.S. government discovered that its embassy in Moscow was being bombarded by low-level electromagnetic radiation. In 1965, according to declassified Defense Department documents, the Pentagon, at the behest of the White House, launched Project Pandora, top-secret research to explore the behavioral and biological effects of low-level microwaves. For approximately four years, the Pentagon conducted secret research: zapping monkeys; exposing unwitting sailors to microwave radiation; and conducting a host of other unusual experiments (a sub-project of Project Pandora was titled Project Bizarre). The results were mixed, and the program was plagued by disagreements and scientific squabbles. The “Moscow signal,” as it was called, was eventually attributed to eavesdropping, not mind control, and Pandora ended in 1970. And with it, the military’s research into so-called non-thermal microwave effects seemed to die out, at least in the unclassified realm.

But there are hints of ongoing research: An academic paper written for the Air Force in the mid-1990s mentions the idea of a weapon that would use sound waves to send words into a person’s head. “The signal can be a ‘message from God’ that can warn the enemy of impending doom, or encourage the enemy to surrender,” the author concluded.

In 2002, the Air Force Research Laboratory patented precisely such a technology: using microwaves to send words into someone’s head. That work is frequently cited on mind-control Web sites. Rich Garcia, a spokesman for the research laboratory’s directed energy directorate, declined to discuss that patent or current or related research in the field, citing the lab’s policy not to comment on its microwave work.

Related: Weinberger later made public the FOIA documents obtained from the Air Force Lab Directed Energy Division she used in writing her remarkable account.

Some may be interested in this 2005 discussion–hosted by Mind Justice, a group lobbying to have government mind control experimentation investigated and halted –among four literary and journalist honorees who respective writings track mind control developments and government abuses.

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Tepco Battles Cooling Failures in 3 Reactors Hit by Quake

March 14, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
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By Tsuyoshi Inajima, Yuji Okada and Shigeru Sato

Tokyo Electric Power Co. engineers tried to stabilize three nuclear reactors damaged by the biggest earthquake in Japan’s history, as a second explosion disrupted efforts to cool fuel rods and prevent a meltdown.

The cooling system failed at the Dai-Ichi No. 2 reactor today, said Tokyo Electric, which runs the Fukushima nuclear plant 220 kilometers (135 miles) north of the nation’s capital. Tokyo Electric is pumping sea water into the reactor after pressure buildup led to explosions at two other reactors.

Fuel rods in the reactor “may be” exposed, said Sakae Muto, vice president at Tokyo Electric. That increases the risk of a possible meltdown. A hydrogen explosion occurred at the No. 3 reactor today, following a similar blast on March 12 at the No. 1 reactor that destroyed the walls of its building.

The utility known as Tepco is flooding the three reactors with water and boric acid to reduce the potential for a large release of radiation into the atmosphere following the March 11 earthquake-generated tsunami that smashed into the plant, disabling electricity supply and backup generators.

“They are managing the situation, they have very qualified personnel there,” Gennady Pshakin, a nuclear expert based in Obninsk, Russia, said by telephone. “We will have a week or 10 days of this uncertainty, but the situation should normalize. What we need is for the water supply to be constant.”

Radiation Concerns

U.S Navy ships and planes involved in earthquake rescue efforts were moved after radiation was detected on three helicopters.

“Low level radioactivity” was detected on 17 air crew members when they returned to the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier operating about 100 miles northeast from the plant, Navy spokesman Jeff Davis said in an e-mail.

Japanese officials yesterday evacuated more than 200,000 people and handed out iodine, used to protect the thyroid from radioactivity, as they extended an exclusion zone around the plant to 20 kilometers.

Winds in the area of the Fukushima plant are blowing at less than 10 kilometers (6 miles) per hour generally in a northeasterly and northerly direction, according to a 9 a.m. update from the Japan Meteorological Agency today.

Core Intact

The vessel containing the No. 3 reactor’s radioactive core is intact after today’s blast, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said today. The likelihood of a large radiation leak is very small, even as radiation levels at the No. 3 reactor are rising, said Edano, the government’s spokesman.

Tokyo Electric said at least four employees and two contractors were injured in the blast. The company’s shares slumped 24 percent.

There are six boiling-water reactors at the Fukushima Dai- Ichi plant, three of which were shut for maintenance before the earthquake.

Unit No. 1 is a General Electric Co. model that can generate 439 megawatts of power and began commercial operation in 1971, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The No. 2 reactor was built by GE Toshiba and the No. 3 by Toshiba Corp.

Tokyo Electric said the sea water used to cool the two reactors is being retained at the plant. “We will look into what we will do about the water,” spokesman Shogo Fukuda said by telephone today.

Flooding the reactors with sea water renders them useless for future power production.

The disaster at Fukushima isn’t the first quake-related accident for Tokyo Electric.

A 6.8-magnitude temblor on July 16, 2007, caused a fire and radiation leaks that shut down the Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear plant, the world’s biggest. It took almost two years to restart.

–With assistance from Chisaki Watanabe and Yuriy Humber in Tokyo. Editors: Amit Prakash, Peter Langan

To contact the reporters on this story: Tsuyoshi Inajima in Tokyo at tinajima@bloomberg.net; Yuji Okada in Tokyo at yokada6@bloomberg.net; Shigeru Sato in Tokyo at ssato10@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Amit Prakash at aprakash1@bloomberg.net

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Video: Larken Rose’s The Tiny Dot

March 10, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
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Wisconson GOP Had Enough

March 10, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
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UPDATE By Erick: The Wisconsin Republicans have been prevented from passing their financial reform package because they must have a super-majority quorum in the state legislature to pass financial matters. Part of the financial reform package was an end to collective bargaining on salary for public employees. Consequently, the Wisconsin legislature got tired of the Democrats hiding in Illinois. By an 18-1 vote, the Wisconsin Senate stripped collective bargaining from the financial package and passed it as a stand alone item. The portion of the financial package that the unions most objected to is now going to be the law without them present. They are, to say the least, upset.

Oh well. At least the Republicans didn’t just “deem” it passed.

—————–

They will be (at 7 PM Eastern time) voting to strip out the collective bargaining reform part of the state budget bill and passing it separately (which they can do with a quorum of a simple majority). The Left is, of course, now going collectively insane over this.

More as we get it.

[UPDATE 6:48 PM] Tactical surprise over the unions was apparently achieved.

[UPDATE 6:51 PM] Useful links: @kevinbinversie, WisPolitics.

[UPDATE 6:53 PM] Personal note: if you are on the Left and you were surprised by any of this, please remember that this is entirely due to the fact that your regular media sources are pretty much incompetent at telling you the things that you need to know, and almost as bad at telling you the things that they want you to want to hear.

[UPDATE 6:58 PM] Multiple reports of Wisconsin Democrats throwing everybody that they can find at the Capitol building, complete with helpful self-incrimination in the case of mob violence. One hopes that they put crowd-control people there ahead of time.

[UPDATE 7:10 PM] Actual live-blogging – well, live-tweeting via @news3jessica. Matters are proceeding apace.

[UPDATE 7:15 PM] This is a thing that is going to happen, folks. I suggest that the Democrats start talking their more excitable types down NOW.

[UPDATE 7:20 PM] Allahpundit makes a point that just occurred to me: “Don’t you hate it when irregular procedures are used to destroy a de facto filibuster of an unpopular bill?” Karma. It’s what’s for dinner, and the Democrats have earned every bite.

[UPDATE 7:22 PM] Annnnd voting has started. No discussion: what, the Democrats wanted to? Guess they should have showed up for work at the appropriate time like adults, then. So sad. Annnd voting has ended, too; 18-1, Dale Shultz voting no (no surprise).

[UPDATE 7:30 PM] …Well, that was a waste of my valuable time for something that was pretty much inevitable from the start. The next time, can the Democrats simply accept the concept of elections having consequences and act like adults? …Well, they can: but they won’t. Oh, well, I always did prefer incompetent opponents. Fair fights are for suckers.

And with that, I sign off.

Moe Lane
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