Exception to the Coup

Why, why, has the American public been so very reluctant to view the events which led to indefinite detention; targeted assassination, suspension of the Right to Privacy, and war-without-end, namely the events of nine eleven as a military/industrial coup?

The evidence is there; it has been placed before the public from every conceivable angle: career airplane pilots; geologists; metallurgists; engineers; firemen; police men; the sources are legion and all converge.  They point to controlled demolition, to the signature pattern of buildings pancaking into their own footprints, and that includes building number seven which the “planes” that flew into the WTC somehow managed to overlook—but which collapsed anyway.  And what was housed in that building? An inquiry as to exactly what it housed yields interesting results, but that is not the subject of this outcry.

From history textbooks—all of which now need to be approved  by the Texas School Board which assures standards of the lowest common denominator to insure that generations of idiots are turned out in the “public” school assembly lines (schools which have long ceased to be public in the sense of serving the public interest) we learn that the United States is:

a shining beacon of democracy

a dispenser of good and largesse to the entire planet

an instrument of good against evil

a force for bringing democracy to every possible corner of the globe

and that it does so with over 1000 military installations throughout the world;

with a military budget that exceeds the combined military budgets of every other country on earth.

The history books don’t ask what the relationship might be between all that benevolence and that fulminating military budget.  Nor are they designed to promote critical thinking because critical thinking just might be real democracy’s secret weapon.

Americans are Exceptional: they are good people; they do good throughout the world, they spread their democracy and their Fulbright grants everywhere, and they do all these good things with absolute certitude of their goodness and their worthiness.

They are too good ever to include the dark stuff of dictatorships in their celestial landscape, things like political assassinations (they are so good they even have ballistic theories that defy the laws of physics). And they could never, never have such an ugly thing as a military coup.  Coups are for dirty  little countries like Guatemala (Rios Montt); El Salvador (Christiani) Honduras (Porfirio Lobo Sosa); Cuba (Fulgencio Batista); Chile (Augusto Pinochet);   But in the well-fed, well-housed, well-educated, well-medicated  Democracy that exists in the United States, ugly things like that could never happen.

Which is why the events of nine eleven were brought to you by a gang of crazed box-cutting –what? Iraqis? Afghanis? no?  well, Saudis. But anyway, they were not Royal Saudis, they were the wrong kind of Saudis because a real coup, a military coup (where all the scrambling jets stand down) could never happen to us.

TESTIMONY

On June 15, 2012, ten women from among the hundreds of Fukushima grandmothers in Tokyo protesting the projected start of the Oi nuclear power plant were ushered in to what they imaged was Prime Minister Noda’s cabinet office to submit a letter of request to Prime Minister Noda. 

This is a word-for-word transcript of their testimony to the ministers:

First woman: Please don’t restart the Oi Nuclear Power plant.  Since the accident at Tepco’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant triggered by the Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami of March 11 last year, vast areas of Fukushima Prefecture have been contaminated with high-level radiation. The conditions [at] the accident site are yet to be stabilized and. . .radiation leakage still continues. We are forced to live in fear every day. We hear that the safety measures at Oi Nuclear Power Plant are worse even than [at] the crippled Fukushima Daiichi [site]. Forcing the restart means losing many things and smearing salt on the emotional scars of Fukushima people who are still suffering. We absolutely cannot allow the restart of Oi Nuclear Power Plant. Please don’t restart it. This is out request.

Second woman:  Well, honestly---we wish we could meet the Prime Minister himself, but I hope you will convey our messages to him as they are.

Third woman:  it is a great agony to live in a contaminated area. I lost hope to live. But to tell everyone about this agony…now I am trying to live for that purpose.  I don‘t want anyone to go through what I am going through.

Fourth woman: Did anyone take responsibility for Tepco's Fukushima Daiichi accident? Who did? I don't think anyone did. When I heard Prime Minister Noda say, "I will restart  nuclear plants on my responsibility," I realized he's living in a different world. I couldn't understand what he was saying at all. You know restarting is really impossible. We are struggling hard as we speak, to suppress our unsurpressable feelings. Please take our words to your heart and convey them to the Prime Minister.

Fifth woman: I wanted to raise my children with the safest possible meals, so I started organic farming. But all my paddies and fields have been contaminated.

Every day, every time I prepare a meal, I wonder if it's OK to feed my children with cesium becquerel-[contaminated] vegetables. I am worried [that] this might affect my children in the future. Can you understand this feeling? How many times have you come to Fukushima? How much of that contaminated air have you breathed in? How many times has Mr. Noda come? How many hours has he spent there? We are there every day, and every time we see helicopters flying over us, we really fear that something might be [going] wrong with the nuclear plant again.  That's how it is in Fukushima. I don't think he understands this reality at all. If he does, he [won't ever] talk about restarting Oi nuclear power plant [again.] 

Voices of the women: That's right.  That's right!

Fifth woman (cont'd): Why doesn't he try to understand? Why doesn't he come and see Fukushima (crying). Prime Minister Noda is said to be the leader of this country, but he's inhuman and I can never forgive him. I  think he's wrong. Please tell him so. Please be sure to tell him. Please.

Sixth woman: Ever since then, worrying about my children occupies my mind so I cannot listen to music. I haven't been able to listen to music since then. I have been tense both mentally and physically. In late June last year, I started to suffer from various health problems one after another. The problems are exactly the same as those found in villages around Chernobyl. I feel really uncomfortable when I have an armpit ache [that lasts] two days. We were already exposed to a critical amount of radiation when the levels were high. Now we are forced to be exposed to radiation internally every day. That's why restarting Oi Nuclear Plant should never, ever be allowed! It's a sin to do it without preparations! And if an accident occurs, that will heap sin upon sin! Fukushima demonstrates it! Please tell him so!

Seventh woman: Now [you are] listening to these women from Fukushima, don't you think they are wonderful? During the past year, women in Fukushima relearned everything. Everything since the beginning of human history. Relearned how foolish humans are. How we have always fought each other. How we dug out the worst thing, the thing called uranium [out of the earth,] and how we started to use it. We have learned these things more than any scientists. We are really risking our lives. You may think I'm exaggerating, but we are here, risking our lives.

Eighth woman: I have an only daughter. She had a baby in late January last year, and then the accident occurred. We [wanted] to flee and [we] tried to figure out the way to do [it.] But at that time in Fukushima [there was so much] confusion. There was no gasoline, no public transportation. The bullet trains had stopped. The airport stopped operating. There was no way for us to evacuate. So for a while we were compelled to. . . be exposed radiation at home. During a little more than a month's time, my grandchild, my daughter and I were [crying]….Excuse me…I didn't mean to be this way. I'm sorry.

Voices of the women: It's OK, it's OK.

Eighth woman (cont'd): My highest priority is to protect children. If you have money to spend on decontamination, please use it for evacuating children [before anything else!]

Ninth woman: We are really living in fear. Please imagine. For example, you can't dry your clothes outside. You can't dry your bedding outside. You can't take a deep breath. I have grandchildren, but I can't let them come to Fukushima, to my city of Koriyama because the radiation levels are [so] high. And in the meantime, swimming classes are starting at school, and a lot of radioactive particles are stuck to the walls of the swimming pool. Concrete walls. A little scrubbing won't remove it. A lot of cesium has accumulated on the bottom. Water itself [has] become' scary. We are exposed to radiation day after day. Particularly children [who] are at higher risk. I think you already know by now how dangerous radiation is. Please [learn] more about Fukushima. If you do, you will never even begin to think about re-starting [the Oi Reactors]. Please address this issue as a human being.

Tenth woman: Prime Minister Noda, what are you looking at? What are you looking at when you decide your policies? You are not looking at us at all!  You put the economy first. You are such a shallow prime minister, [someone] who tries to restart the Oi Plant with shallow words: "It's safe." I can't forgive you. You said, "the ultimate responsibility rests with me." What do you mean by "the ultimate responsibility?" Does it mean [just] giving the go-ahead? How are you going to take responsibility after that?  Can you say you are willing to face a life sentence if anything goes wrong? I think you are an extremely insincere prime minister.

Now it is the turn of the male-authorities  to speak.  (One figure in a suit stands silently next to the speaker; behind him, a safety-helmeted worker.) 

Bureaucrat speaker (After a great deal of bowing and clearing of his throat he begins): Thank you, uh, everyone, uh, for bringing the letter of request, uh, when you are, uh, very busy. We have just heard, uh, what might be called a "sincere outcry from the soul," uh, from each of you. Uh, we will do our best to, uh, compile your "fervent feelings" together with your letter of request and, uh, hand it to. . . .Well, we're not going to hand it directly to the Prime Minister, but to his secretaries. . . .

Tenth woman: Why don't you hand it directly to him. If you can't, please bring Prime Minister Noda here now. What we have told you is not our "feelings." but our actual damages.

Another woman: I would like to believe you will convey our messages directly to Prime Minister Noda so they are felt in his heart. I hope we'll have a chance to hear what he thinks about them and how he answers to them directly from him.

The following day, Saturday, June 16, Prime Minister Noda authorized Kansai Electric Company to re-start the Oi Reactors.

For a link to this YouTube go to: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYQNd2ybiDg&list=PLA062D76527E74690&index=179&feature=plpp_video

Wrong Way on a One-Way Street

Wrong way on a one-way street

What if James Watt had been born under French skies, and not in Scotland? Or what if Augustin Mouchot’s invention of the solar-powered steam engine had preceded rather than succeeded Watt’s by 100 years? The history of industrial age energy might have taken a radically different course. As it is, from its beginning its Anglo-centric history projected a trajectory similar to traveling the wrong way on a one-way street. Instead of looking below the Earth’s crust for ever-declining resources to fuel the industrial age’s growing need for energy, it might have been wiser to look above to the sun as Mouchot did for the ever-renewable energy it could provide in limitless quantities.

Today, the 266^th day following the planetary disaster at Fukushima, the morning dawns shrouded in fog so dense, the tall redwoods lining the opposite side of the street hover like ghosts, their crowns barely discernible at 40 feet. It reminds me of what Londoners called pea-soup fog, the result of burning coal in all of London’s fireplaces against the winter chill.

What were the Scottish skies like when James Watt made his appearance on earth in 1736? What were the skies like in 1825 when Augustin Monchot was born? Why did one man look below the earth for redemption, while another looked to the sun? Long before the year of Watt’s birth, the so-called “primitives” of the Southwest had thought to orient their cliff dwellings on the north sides of their steep canyon homes to benefit from the sun’s radiation in the winter months. Even proponents of Feng Shui will tell you a front door opening east is always propitious. How did it occur to a Westerner to see with eco-centric eyes and with a sensibility that concerned itself with implications for the future?

Watt and Mouchot were very different men in terms of social class, in culture, and sensibility. While Watt was born into the merchant class, inadept at any scholarship other than mathematics and mechanics, Mouchot was born in the Morvan, a district in the heart of France known for its natural beauty. Except for the year in which the Ministry of Education gave him a grant and a leave of absence to travel to Algeria to perfect his invention of a solar steam engine, he served as a schoolmaster, moving from teaching grammar school in the Morvan, to teaching high school in Tours and later in Rennes.

“One must not believe, despite the silence of modern writings, that the idea of using solar heat for mechanical operations is recent. On the contrary, one must recognize that this idea is very ancient and its slow development across the centuries has given birth to various curious devices.” What curious devices might Mouchot have referred to in his 1880 statement? The small book he published in 1869, the same year he displayed one of his first models, Chaleur Solaire credits the Arabs with their glass-making skills for experiments focusing the sun’s rays to obtain heat and traces their interest to ancient Egypt and later Greece, evidence of Mouchot’s historic sensibility. Even more telling, in another short section he points out the sun’s role in regulating the planet’s wind and ocean currents, and nurturing the life of plants and animals, suggesting a deeply ecological cast of mind. But, unlike Watt, he never succeeded culturally or financially in obtaining support for his invention. He taught school till his retirement. One can only imagine how fortunate were those pupils who studied under him.

By 1869, the year he displayed one of his first prototypes, the price of coal dropped, effectively making his invention all but irrelevant in the eyes of the public.

“Eventually industry will no longer find in Europe the resources to satisfy its prodigious expansion... Coal will undoubtedly be used up. What will industry do then?” Mouchot wrote those words in 1878, the year he exhibited at the Universal Exposition in Paris the great axicon he had perfected—essentially a solar dish.

The earlier model he displayed in 1869 disappeared in 1871 during the chaos and destruction of the Franco-Prussian War during which—ironically —France lost its access to cheap coal with the German annexation of the mining district of Alsace-Lorraine—which may in part explain why present-day France is the European country relying most on nuclear energy.

It’s hard to imagine what the consequences to our planet might have been had Mouchot’s timing been otherwise, had the Industrial Revolution not resulted in the growing infrastructure that guaranteed support for Watt’s invention to the exclusion of Mouchot’s: the coal mines in which children and women worked sixteen hours a day stripped to the waist to better withstand the heat, crawling on their knees to push the coal cars in galleries too shallow to allow for mules or machines to do the work, how thousands died of tuberculosis in the crowded cities of newly industrialized Europe whose skies became darkened by carbon pollution, air so thick, at dusk you could see the carbon particles shimmer in the fading light.

Greed or Bleed

Even (some) billionaires agree: the greed class ought to pay taxes.

Sixty-one percent (61%) of taxes went to what’s euphemistically called defense. Defense means keeping upwards of 700 imperial bases throughout the world, even in countries which don’t want the US finger in their pies; it goes to droning civilians, woman and children; it goes to the torture budget at black sites, and at Guantanamo; it goes to running night raid “operations” on Afghani civilians.  Even toady-fellah Hamid Karsai doesn’t like that kind of surgery. It means dropping depleted uranium (essentially waging nuclear war) on countries which have our oil beneath their sands. Of 547 babies born to a sampling of 55 Iraqi families, 15% had serious birth defects caused by contamination of Iraq’s water, soils, air and food stuffs. 

Maybe paying taxes is not such a good idea, not even for billionaires.

An alternative proposal: If you (few) billionaires really want to contribute to your country, why not get an alternative energy enterprise off the ground. The government for sure won’t do it because the government is eyebrow deep in oil, uranium, and CO2.

Most 99% of the bleed class agrees: we need jobs jobs jobs.

What kind of jobs, jobs, jobs?  Combined Systems, Inc. located in Jamestown, Pennsylvania, employs between 100 and 250 people. It manufactures “non-lethal” crowd control paraphernalia for foreign and domestic use combined. Its tear gas canisters litter Tahrir Square today. Tahrir is described by one on-site reporter, Abdel-Koudous, as the largest field hospital in the world. Unarmed people face the military’s lethal weapons. Thousands of people have been wounded, and as of 6 A.M. today, November 22, 2011, 33 people had been killed . The wounded are picked up by two motor bikes which lift them off the ground in tandem and rush them to field hospital stations on the square where they are patched up and return to the front lines.  They keep going back. They know they will be injured if not killed.  One protester lost one eye some months ago. Yesterday he was blinded in the other eye.

Maybe not all jobs, jobs, jobs are such a good idea, not even for people who’ve been foreclosed by the banksters who’ve ripped us off.

A modest proposal: Maybe Combined Systems, Inc. needs to be occupied by the 99%. After all, you can’t eat teargas, and rubber bullets won’t pay the rent.

HABITABLE ZONES: A Fukushima Diary

We picked out planets that are just the right size—between the size of Earth or twice that—and all are within the ‘habitable zones’ of their stars, at distances where there’s the best chance for liquid water—and possibly life—to exist.

— Dan Wertheimer, space sciences lab astrophysicist

There is no place more wonderful than this. There is no place more marvelous than here.

                                                                                                            —Milarepa

Starry night.  All along the horizon, telescopes rotate, staring at the night sky.  In the Atacama Desert, where the skies are transparent like no other place on earth, free of the pollution of city lights, and of temperate zone moisture.

The human race is looking for planets. Hungry for planets in our own image, in the image of Gaia, of Earth. Planets near enough yet far enough from their distant suns not to burn up, not to freeze. Planets which show signs of water in their atmospheres. Planets that revolve around the maybe 50 billion stars in the local galaxy, in the neighborhood we call the Milky Way, and in the narrowest possible tranche of it, 1,235 planets have been sighted that correspond to such spacial parameters, and of those 1,235, 86 stand out, 86 which answer within reasonable limits to those conditions: sufficiently distant from their suns (but not too distant) to entertain the possibility of water.

Imagine 86 watery planets, each with its own orders of life: its own set of one-celled organisms, of invertebrates, of phyla inherited from a primordial past, of the first cone bearing trees, of the first flower bearing plants, of mammals, of insects, of trees, and shrubs and flowers. Imagine 86 planets with their own hereditary, evolutionary lines culminating or perhaps on the way to culminating in sentient, intelligent beings with appendages to hold tools, to compose music, to create dance, with tongues to bend around the syllables of languages structured entirely other than any Earthlings can begin imagining.  Eighty-six planets with their own dynasties of composers, choreographers, writers, poets, singers of songs.  Take all the sounds of all the languages of 86 planets, and all the sounds of all the music of 86 planets, meld them together, imagine the chorus. Now turn down the volume to a whisper: the whisper of the sounds made by the sentient beings of 86 planets. That is only 1/600,000,000th of the sounds of all the neighborhood galaxy’s planets, and, of the universe’s, a fraction so unfathomable, human cognition cannot imagine it.

But this one, this Earth, this Gaia is the one you have.  This one, and only this one. Its rocks, its fossils, palimpsest of times more ancient than time, its petroglyphs of a mankind more ancient than language, more ancient than writing, its horsetails and ginkos, survivors of an unfairytale age of dragons, of cone bearers, of spore bearers, of molds, of microorganisms, of nematodes, of annelids, of the lowliest of beings without which none of our living, none of our songs, or our musics, or our dances, or our writings or our tongues could ever have been possible.

This Gaia is all you have.