Week 12: Post your Blog Entries as Comments to my Main Post Each Week

Post by Sunday at midnight.

1. Mark Whitaker

2. Trends of U.S. inequality and marriage bodes poorly despite Friedman's predictions that we discuss this week

3. Friedman is very optimistic in his scenarios for the whole 21st century about continued U.S. dominance, particularly against Russia and China. HOWEVER, there are some cultural reproduction issues in the USA that could pull the USA apart: massive social reproduction of inequality and poverty for children; many children without the social, emotional, and financial stability of two parents in the USA; and ethnic inequalities tensions with different marriage rates; and women particularly without financial standing outside of marriage, despite gaining independence. Just a few of the trends of the USA that bode poorly I think, and which puts Friedman's more optimistic U.S. dominance scenario in question.

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05-22-2011 15:03
Schwarzenegger just part of story of marriage woes

By Jay Ambrose

...It's now Arnold Schwarzenegger's media moment, something he earned by extra friendliness with household help, having a love child and finally telling Maria Shriver, his wife, about it. She has naturally enough separated from him, and some may think this one more message about an institution in deep trouble, though it is far from the heart of that story.

No, the Schwarzenegger tale mostly symbolizes how ambitious, driven, ego-centered men seem especially given to wandering off the ranch, the examples running the political gamut from John F. Kennedy in the 1960s to Newt Gingrich more recently.

These particular men, however, are upper middle class ― well, upper, upper, upper middle class. It's mostly poorer Americans with scant education who are most abandoning marriage, often not even giving it a whirl, as you can learn from Kay S. Hymowitz, a Manhattan Institute scholar and author of several books and some online writings I recently encountered.

She's full of reason, understanding and facts, and tells us among other things that all the news gab about the marital mayhem of celebrities can be very misleading.

Most educated, better-off folks are in fact growing more in love with marriage. When you catch a story such as a recent one saying three percent more married-couple families are celebrating 10th wedding anniversaries than in the 1980s, you can bet it's the most advantaged taking more advantage of this absolutely crucial institution.

Go back to the 1960s, and we were a marrying, stay-together nation. But then came the birth control pill, something called the sexual revolution and more widely respected rights and opportunities for women. Says Hymowitz, all of this caused many women to reevaluate the old idea that first comes love, marriage, then the baby carriage.

Divorce became a big deal with us, and still is, despite some decline over the past two decades. Very, very scary on top of that is that something more than a third of children are now born out of wedlock, if only a tiny percentage of them to college educated women. They've figured something important out. Marriage matters to children.

They get it that kids with two parents earning money are going to have more money coming in. They get it that having two married-couple parents means more training for the children, more guidance by example toward the kind of life that works best for families, more attention to academics. Those who don't get it are people with the least education ― often less than high school. Here is what single-parent homes give us on average: still no education to speak of in the next generation, still more poverty, still more single-parent moms.

Hymowitz skillfully takes on the people who argue differently, saying that it's the market economy or inadequate social programs that cause these difficulties or that poor women don't marry because there is no one out there for them, no acceptable male. She grants the market is increasingly less friendly to unskilled labor, but notes that marriage tends to engender education and skills in children.

She observes, too, that the women who don't marry often have live-in boyfriends. They have in fact located men they find suitable to have in the home. Hymowitz agrees that marriage may not be a panacea for poverty, but argues something bigger: It is the "sine qua non," that without which you get none of the rest of what it takes to climb out of it.

The percentages of unwed mothers among poor whites, blacks and some other minority groups are over half, and if we are going to fix what ails us, we have to fix this. I am dubious about the role of politics, though some good examples and good preaching might help.

I do believe that cultural values count, as opposed to the politically correct social scientists, some of whom were saying in one news account that talking about wrong values amounts to blaming the victims. No, it's blaming the culture, including the social scientists who help form it. We need a new revolution, and wise thinkers like Hymowitz can help us get there.


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http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2011/05/160_87418.html


[2]

1. Mark Whitaker

2. Fukushima is 50 Chernobyl's in one Estimate: Expect Huge Radioactive Death Around the World Unseen in Human Hisory Very Soon

3. Yes, here's some scenarios based on backcasting what happened with only 1/50th of the nuclear release. How anyone can support nuclear power with all the clean options we have is just a sign that the psychopathic and ignorant lead the deluded in our increasingly globalized society as long as both make money in the short term. Futures studies however is about the long term. Nuclear entirely has to be entirely removed. All nuclear plants require shutting down if this apocalyptic scenario is a potential permanent human relic of any disaster.

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Fukushima: How Many Chernobyls Is It?

Dr Scampa’s Lethal Doses Count Increases Dramatically

by Bob Nichols

(San Francisco) – The world’s second big nuclear disaster occurred at Chernobyl Reactor No. 4 in the Ukraine on Apr 26, 1986. Simply tagged as “Chernobyl,” it is what the next big and well known nuke disaster, after the American Three Mile Island, on March 28, 1979 came to be called. “Chernobyl” ejected 30% of one 192-ton, three-month old reactor core. That’s 57.6 radioactive tons thrown into the air by fire and explosions.

The tiny radioactive and burning smoke particles have traveled around the world many times since 1979, killing an estimated one million people to date from radiation caused illnesses and cancers. This is according to Editor Dr Janette Sherman’s exhaustive and widely acclaimed book on 5,000 Chernobyl scientific papers recently published by the New York Academy of Sciences [1].

Fukushima Daiichi Equals 50 Plus Chernobyls

As Dr. Michio Kaku, a world renowned CUNY theoretical physicist pointed out on CNN March 18, 2011, Chernobyl involved one reactor and only 57.6 Tons of the reactor core went into the atmosphere. In dramatic contrast, the Fukushima Daiichi disaster immediately involved six reactors and IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN Agency) documented 2,800 Tons of highly radioactive old reactor cores.

Simple division tells us there are at least 48.6 Chernobyls in the burning old reactor cores pumping fiery isotopes into the Earth’s atmosphere. It is no stretch to say Fukushima Daiichi’s six reactors and the dry holding pools for old reactor cores are equal to more than 50 Chernobyl disasters.

Further clarification is needed, of course, and it is being worked out now by independent physicists. Note that the lethality of radioactive reactor cores goes up the first 250,000 years they are out of the reactor – not down.

Looking at the current Japanese meltdown as more than 50 Chernobyls is just the start. In addition, the fate of the four nearby reactors at Fukushima Daini is as yet unknown by the outside world. Working at the nearby reactors, only 10 km (6 miles away) is a quick, painful death sentence. They are inside the mandatory evacuation zone.

This much is known. All radioactive exposures are cumulative for each human, animal and plant. What’s more, mutated genetic codes are passed on to offspring forever. This means all Japanese and all Northern Hemisphere inhabitants are suffering internal radioactive contamination from Fukushima Daiichi reactors already.

Fukushima Equals 3,000 Billion Lethal Doses

Dr Paolo Scampa, a widely know EU Physicist, single handedly popularized the easily understood Lethal Doses concept. “Lethal Doses” is a world wide, well understood idea that strips Physics bare and offers a brilliant, understandable explanation for all the physics gobbledygook Intelligence agencies and their respective governments use to disguise the brutal truths of the Fukushima Daiichi Disaster.

Three thousand billion (3,000,000,000,000) Lethal Doses of Radiation means there are 429 Lethal Doses chasing each and every one of us on the planet, to put it in a nutshell. This is up from about 70 Billion Lethal Doses March 23, 2011. It is getting worse everyday without any intervention by the US and the other nuclear powers.

VeteransToday calls on the world’s nuclear powers to intervene sooner rather than later. It is up to the world’s only remaining Super Power, the United States, to get the Japan Reactor Disaster Intervention meeting officially underway.

The Fukushima Kill

The Fukushima Kill, already underway world wide, will certainly dwarf that of Chernobyl. All US Super Power President Obama’s delay does is increase the numbers of The Kill. That is a clear Choice. We call on President Obama to re-visit that Choice.

Further, the Genetic and DNA changing aspects of the radioactivity now in the air, spreading worldwide within a year, will spawn a grotesque new assortment of radiation-degraded mutants; both human and of other life forms.

Many of these creatures in the animal world will not survive long outside the womb, if carried to term. What’s more, future Human Genetic Mutants of ever-lower intelligence and greater, more grotesque physical deformities are the genetic legacy of Humanity forevermore. That is the new starting point for any rational and reality-based national or foreign policy.

What We Know Now about Fukushima

Here is what is known more than 75 days after six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Reactor Plant started a disastrous and lethal nuclear meltdown on March 11, 2011.

- March 11, 14:46, a One Million Kiloton Earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter Scale hammered Japan off-shore near the six Japanese reactors. The reactors attempted to shut down automatically when electronic sensors detected the earthquake. The huge earthquake dropped the reactors three feet, moved Japan 8 inches to the West and altered the tilt of the Axis of planet Earth.

- March 11, about 15:30, the giant Earthquake caused a tsunami up to 30 meters (98.4 Ft) high washed away all the fuel tanks for the reactors Emergency Generators and all the reactors’ outside electrical feeds. This was the Death Blow to the reactors.

The six Fukushima Daiichi reactors were dead in the water and their fate sealed. Without an external source of electricity for the water pumps and hot reactors, they are just so much radioactive scrap iron – good for nothing. The internal temperature of the reactors started climbing immediately.

- March 11, about 18:00, only two and a half hours later, multiple reactor cores started melting down as the reactors internal temperatures skyrocketed to the melting point of uranium and beyond – a measured 1,718 Deg C (3,124.4 Deg F) past the melting point.

Uranium melts at 1,132.2 Deg C (2,069.9 Deg F.) The internal reactor temperatures reached at least 2,850 Deg C, (5,162 Deg F.) The millions of 1 mm Uranium fuel pellets in the reactors and in the core pools had no defense at all without the powerful water pumps and billions of gallons of cooling water against those temperatures.

The Uranium pellets simply melted forming a white hot lava-like radioactive uranium isotope blob that was and probably still is super heated by the power of the uranium atom itself. The highly radioactive blob then burned through the graphite seals of the General Electric Mark 1 Reactor Control Rods at the bottom of the American submarine based reactor design of US Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover, now deceased.

General Electric copied the US Government financed Navy nuclear reactor design for many commercial nuclear reactors. The Radioactive Blobs trickled out of hundreds of control rod holes instead of melting together to form a single giant, highly radioactive, burning lava blob like that of Chernobyl.

The Solution, Then and Now, has Changed

World famous theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku caught the world’s attention on a March 18, 2011 CNN broadcast when he suggested the Prime Minister of Japan immediately choose the “Chernobyl Option” for the Fukushima Daiichi General Electric reactors.

Kaku said the Japanese PM should order the Japanese Air Self Defense Force to bomb the reactors into submission with boron, sand, water and concrete like the Red Army did to kill the out-of-control Chernobyl reactor on orders of USSR President Gorbachev. Boron absorbs neutrons, the radioactive heart of the reactors.

The time for Dr. Kaku’s “Chernobyl Option” has passed. Multiple explosions destroyed the reactors and the swimming pools holding old reactor cores weeks ago. Hundreds to thousands of tons of burning highly radioactive reactor cores are scattered all over the Fukushima Daiichi site. The reactors are releasing as much as a Tepco (Tokyo Electric Power Company) measured 10 Quintillion (10,000 Trillion Bq) radioactive counts per second of deadly radioactive smoke particles into the Earth’s atmosphere.

The invisible, killing Radioactive Smoke is already all over the Northern Hemisphere and everyone in it – each and every one – is radiologically contaminated. The scope of Dr. Kaku’s once brilliant former solution is unfortunately, now too small and ineffective.

Generally speaking, most Radiation cannot escape into the atmosphere if it is covered by water. Honshu, Japan is an island and the Pacific Ocean is conveniently located nearby.

Subsidence charges from multiple nuclear weapons buried by drilling rigs 500 ft (152.4 meters) below and inland of the string of six reactors must be engineered to slide the reactors into the sea. [<--- This is an even more insane suggestion.] This method works best if there is igneous or volcanic rock behind the subsidence charges, to “bounce” the blast and pressure wave from and “push” the trashed reactors area of the beachfront into the sea. [Into the sea? You mean into a water current that will distribute it even wider than it is? If this author is typical, humans in my opinion have revealed their dominating stupidity and inability to handle such technologies once more. Nuclear power should be consigned to history. Nuclear power combined with human hubris and stupidity in the drivers seat of this technology is a self-destructive combination.]

Specially equipped submarines can then pick up the pieces of reactor cores from under water. [Huh? He thinks that the radioactive cores can be 'picked up' somewhere once a nuclear blast scatters them to the air and sinks the area into the sea? He thinks they will merely be lying on the surface underwater? Huge untested assumptions about a 'good nuclear' scenario.] The surface of the ocean blocks the escape of radiation. [No, it carries it worldwide through a deadly radioactive sea!] The submarines must work fast to limit killing more of the Earth’s Oceans. [That's the scenario, they 'work fast' eh? Lots of assumptions that they can do this job and pick up strange pieces of metal full buried or half buried by a nuclear blast and melted to the rock!]

Veterans Today calls on President Obama to authorize the disposal of the six reactors at sea and the collection of the deadly radioactive metals with submarines. We conclude there are no other options left. [If you conclude there are 'no options' except one, then you reveal that you really are dangerous.]

The “Do Nothing Option”

The “Do Nothing Option” allows the deaths and maiming of many millions of people to rapidly proceed. Doing nothing, by default, allows the Fukushima Kill to ruthlessly continue unabated. Doing nothing is also not acceptable from a practical standpoint; because, Japan does not own the nuclear weapons to use themselves.

Nuke the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi right into the sea, Mr. President. [Crazy idea.]

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http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/05/28/fukushima-how-many-chernobyls-is-it/


[My scenario: the whole area requires months and months of people dropping boron and other things on the area to complete bury it in a mountain of concrete and boron. Sluices of boron sand should be delivered to specific spots, and the radioactive heat will melt it into stable glass, sealing in much of the radioactivity as Chernobyl did. Then, the whole area should at least have a large tent erected over it, then, that tent covered with concrete. This tent would be many square kilometers wide. It will be the "new Pyramids". It has to be covered and entombed and without pushing more of it into the sea that will only wash ashore in the next tsunami. Radioactive glass is perhaps the best option, covered in a mountain of boron. There's 50 Chernobyls there, so thinking about small Chernobyl sized solutions has past.]