Dear Matt Damon,
First of all, let me just say that I have enjoyed your work in various movies over the years. And congratulations on all of your success, both popularly and especially financially. But I want to talk specifically to you about one of your rolls, as the voice-over talent for the recent documentary movie entitled “Inside Job”.
Again, well done sir.
This is a slightly edited version of an article that appeared in The Japan Times, on May 23rd, 2004 which was sourced from Japan Focus who posted it on November 29th, 2005.
A video presentation given by Leuren Moret shortly after the nuclear disaster in Japan has been added to the end of this article for your perusal.
[Leuren Moret is an internationally recognized geoscientist and critic of nuclear power who has maintained a long interest in Japan's nuclear power program. As she points out in this article, Japan is the world's 3rd largest nuclear producer, with 52 reactors (versus 72 in France and 118 in the United States). Japan's reactors produce about 30 percent of the country's electricity. Japan is also one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world, with a multiplicity of active fault zones. In persuasive detail spelled out in a map, Moret shows that Japan's nuclear industry has generally neglected the earthquake threat and built its reactors close to fault zones. She shows that Japanese government and industry has no serious emergency planning in the event of a disaster. For example, Japan's most seismically dangerous nuclear plant - the Hamaoka reactor in Shizuoka Prefecture - has Emergency Response Centres (ERCs) equipped with tiny decontamination showers that would be of little avail in the event of a serious emergency. In fact, planning for a very serious nuclear emergency is in many respects not possible. According to Moret, the scale of the disaster would be of such magnitude as to render any conceivable emergency response totally inadequate and ineffective. She shows why the only adequate response ultimately is to prevent accidents by turning away from nuclear energy.
This is particularly daunting news for Japanese energy planners. The importance of this article has, if anything, increased since its initial publication last year. With world oil prices spiraling and mounting concerns over energy costs and long-term supplies, the Japanese nuclear industry has sought to play on fears of energy shortage in a bid to overcome a slew of recent nuclear mishaps and convince the public that more nuclear plants are necessary. Such heavy lobbying evident in the UK and elsewhere, threatens to soak up funding and attention to the pressing need to develop alternative renewable energy sources. Citing the example of several successful retrofitted US nuclear plants that now burn natural gas, Moret argues that this is a far safer alternative. At present it appears that neither the spiraling of oil prices nor the prospect that peak oil production is imminent has led to serious scientific efforts to develop such renewable energy sources as solar and wind power. Japan Focus]
Of all the places in all the world where no one in their right mind would build scores of nuclear power plants, Japan would be pretty near the top of the list.
The Japanese archipelago is located on the so-called Pacific Rim of Fire, a large active volcanic and tectonic zone ringing North and South America, Asia and island arcs in Southeast Asia. The major earthquakes and active volcanoes occurring there are caused by the westward movement of the Pacific tectonic plate and other plates leading to subduction under Asia.
Japan sits on top of four tectonic plates, at the edge of the subduction zone, and is in one of the most tectonically active regions of the world. It was extreme pressures and temperatures, resulting from the violent plate movements beneath the seafloor, that created the beautiful islands and volcanoes of Japan. Continue reading
Armand Saiia is a ball of manic energy. Originally from Buffalo, NY, Saiia spent most of his nine lives as an artist in New York City. However, his jack-of-all-existence work has found him as a sculptor, painter, photographer, filmmaker, chef, restaurant owner, yogi, Qigong healer, wilderness camp instructor, and now– organic farmer. His life story is a tumultuous, bohemian saga that at 56 has spat him out in rural New Mexico. Now, his art has transformed from images and sculpture to growing food and running Desert Grows, a non-profit that donates organic produce to local food banks.
I’ve had the pleasure of laughing with, learning from, and working for Saiia for the past 10 days while wwoofing at a nearby farm. His passion for what he’s doing bubbles out of him in such heated force that I knew I had to get his own words on this blog. Thus, an interview: Continue to this article.
Now we know that computers don’t help children learn and that drugs don’t help them concentrate, because the establishment mandarins who sold us the computers and drugs have conceded failure. In the January 29 New York Times, a prominent professor of child development shows that attention-deficit-disorder drugs only harm the three million children who take them. One out of 10 American children have been diagnosed with so-called Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and most of them have been medicated.
Some months ago, the Times reported that test scores lagged in school districts that invested massively in digital education. It does not seem to have occurred to the mandarins that computers cause attention deficit disorder. The brain is a machine, in the enlightened secular model, and so-called brain science teaches us to tweak its functioning with pharmaceuticals, or stimulate its development through digital approximations of intelligence. The grand result of a generation’s worth of brain-science application is a generation of schoolchildren who are disproportionately illiterate, innumerate, anxious, angry, and unhappy.
Please Continue Reading @ Asia Times Online
As the natural world dies around us, what will take its place? Planetary engineering includes bioremediation measures to bring us genetically engineered trees and crops. And what of mankind itself? How are we being transformed from the inside out?
Presented at Conspiracy Con 2011, this 1 hour power point presentation by Sofia Smallstorm introduces primary and scientific findings hidden in the muffles of corporate controlled media.
People around the world are observing aerosol spraying (also called “chemtrails”) and strange man-made clouds. White skies filter sunlight as trees around the country sicken and die. Soil and water tests high for heavy metals, and artificial fibers fall on us from the sky. Continue reading
A Portland doc flips on big pharma and reveals its “dirty little secret.”
Ten percent of Americans—children, teens and adults—take antidepressants. Whether it’s Prozac, Paxil, Lexapro, Effexor or Cymbalta, 30 million of us take a pill daily in hopes it will keep dark moods at bay. Antidepressants are the most prescribed family of drugs in America, an $11.9 billion market in the U.S. in 2007.
In January, Erick Turner, a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University and a clinician at the Portland VA Medical Center, shook up the medical community, provoked the pharmaceutical establishment and, perhaps, disappointed millions of depressed Americans. He published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine that revealed antidepressants are not as effective as we’ve been led to believe. For years, he implied, pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer (maker of Zoloft) and Forest Laboratories (Celexa and Lexapro) have vastly exaggerated the performance of their drugs.
Turner calls it the “dirty little secret” of the psychiatric world. Continue reading
