Make you Fink on Friday

I have been thinking lately, and regular readers will know that when I do, the results can be nasty.

I am going to tackle Russia today.

But not in a Cold War style. James Bond already did that.

Since the Second World War, the mere mention of Russia (or as it was then the USSR) brought shivers to the spines of many a patriot.

But the Iron Curtain faded, rusted and then tumbled and with it the Cold War as we knew it.

But with the American Empire crumbling… Oh, you think it’s not, then you must watch Fox News. Believe me, it’s crumbling on the edge of a cliff and about to topple into an abyss of a depression like we’ve never seen before. America’s problem is a myopic view that the American Dream is alive and well; sorry, but it’s a really sick puppy. America fell into the trap set by the bankers and corporations heedless of the welfare of the people.

Sure America had a brief heyday in the 60s & 70s, but that’s gone.

Russia is the only country in the world to buck the system; to turn it’s back on a couple of things that have made me think that maybe, just maybe, Russia is on the right track in some respects.

In the mid-1970s Russia banned microwaves. Now you may think that is pretty silly, until you look at the latest reports on how they f**k-up food beyond all recognition. More recent studies have shown that microwave ovens totally alter the structure of food, so much so, that it isn’t food anymore.

Yes, Russia made a good move.

Microwaves should be banned globally, but of course that’ll never happen. The microwave oven market is big. Corporations like this because there’s a lot of profit. Because the corporations run America, America will continue to have microwave ovens and obesity, yes, microwave ovens are a part of the obesity problem.

Yesterday, I read of another move by Russia.

Russia suspends import and use of American GM corn after study revealed cancer risk

• The European Food Safety Authority orders review in to the research, conducted at a French university
• Russia’s decision could be followed by other nations
• Experts at the University of Caen conducted an experiment running for the full lives of rats – two years
• The findings found raised levels of breast cancer, liver and kidney damage
• The same trials also found minuscule amounts of a commonly used weedkiller, Roundup
• Both the GM corn and Roundup are the creation of US biotech company Monsanto

Russia has suspended the import and use of an American GM corn following a study suggesting a link to breast cancer and organ damage.

Separately, the European Food Safety Authority(EFSA), has ordered its own review in to the research, which was conducted at a French university.

The decision by Russia could be followed by other nations in what would be a severe blow to the take-up of the controversial technology.

Cancer risk? A farmer shows two corncobs of genetically engineered corn by U.S. company Monsanto, right, and two normal corncobs from Germany, left

Historically, biotech companies have proved the safety of GM crops based on trials involving feeding rats for a period of 90 days.

However, experts at the University of Caen conducted an experiment running for the full lives of rats – two years.

The findings, which were peer reviewed by independent experts before being published in a respected scientific journal, found raised levels of breast cancer, liver and kidney damage.

Read more

Opinion:

The world is beginning to wake and smell the coffee.

People who are concerned with their health should be pressing the government to enforce product labeling.

 

 

Nature Ramble

Not so much a ramble today, more like a ‘float.’

And we’re doing it under Los Angeles.

This is an interesting story, in that it shows how we have callously built over nature and then rediscovered it, even to the extent of it becoming a tourist attraction.

The Los Angeles river lives again

LA’s concrete storm drains conceal a living, breathing waterway that has rarely been explored – until now

Concrete jungle: the LA river flows under Burbank Boulevard. Photograph: Michael Owen Baker/Los Angeles Daily News/Zumapress.com/Alamy

A scorching morning in the San Fernando valley and I am driving up and down Balboa Boulevard, parks and fields either side of the motorway, lost. The talking GPS on my dashboard has lapsed into silence, defeated by an arcane destination with no zip code. I spy a park attendant emptying a bin and pull over to ask directions. He eyes me, baffled. I wonder if he is deaf and repeat the question. He still looks confused. “Did you say river?” Yes, I reply. Where is the river? He shakes his head. “What river?”

I find an elderly woman with a straw hat walking her terrier and ask the same question. She looks puzzled. “What river, honey?” The river I am supposed to kayak, I reply. She looks at me compassionately, as if I have sunstroke. “I don’t think you’re in the right place.”

But I am. Swishing below, all but invisible from the park and motorway above, is the Los Angeles river. A river with water, fish, tadpoles, birds, reeds, banks, a river that flows for 52 miles skirting Burbank, north Hollywood, Silver Lake, downtown and Compton and empties into the Pacific Ocean at Long Beach. A regular river, except that to most Angelenos it’s a secret. I ask three other people and receive the same blank looks until finally a park ranger confirms that, yes, there is a river at the bottom of a ravine all of 150ft away.

There, amid the reeds, bob a dozen little green and red kayaks, and people wearing helmets and lifejackets are clambering inside them. It is the inaugural season of LA River Expeditions, a pioneering effort to reclaim a waterway that vanished from the city’s consciousness almost a century ago. “Welcome,” says George Wolfe, the group’s founder. “I hope you’re ready for adventure.” We push off into the current.

Until recently this excursion would have been considered not just mad but illegal. City authorities encased the river bed in concrete in the 1930s, turning it into a flood-control channel that was a byword for contamination and forbidden to boaters. For decades it languished all but forgotten, save for Hollywood using its storm drains in films such as Grease and Terminator 2. Now, however, it has formally opened to boating tours, specifically kayaks and canoes. Activists hope it is the first step towards transformation. “It’s a milestone, and hopefully there are more to come,” says Charles Eddy, a board member of Friends of the LA River, and part of this expedition, as he navigates his kayak through brambles. “If you think of the river as a blank palette, people will create all sorts of wonderful things.”

Kayakers paddle under the Woodley Avenue bridge in Los Angeles. Photograph: ZUMA Wire Service / Alamy/Alamy

The kayak excursions are the latest twist in California’s water wars, a saga immortalised in Roman Polanski’s 1974 film Chinatown, a neo-noir exploration of intrigue and treachery with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway set during the state’s 1930s battles over land and water rights. The river, fed by streams from the Simi hills in Canoga park, originally provided food, water and transport for Gabrielino Indians and Spanish settlers. After the US seized control from Mexico the city’s water needs outgrew the river. An aqueduct completed in 1913 directed water from the Owens river in the Sierra Nevada mountains to LA, ending dependence on the LA river. Disastrous flooding prompted its conversion – desecration, some critics would say – into a glorified drainage ditch. And so it remained for decades, a butt of jokes, a rubbish dump, out of sight and mind except when used as a backdrop for Hollywood car races and chases….

….

After passing a concrete bridge with graffiti-daubed arches and a shopping trolley half-buried in mud, we enter a wilderness that seems a world removed from the freeways and urban sprawl above. “We call this the Grand Canyon,” says Wolfe, showing his flair for advertising, as we paddle through a mini-gorge 15ft tall. Nature slowly asserts itself. To our left are wild fig trees, descendants of those planted by the Indians, to our right potentially deadly ricin-producing plants. Further on, hallucinogenic jimson weed. “Around the next bend is the Apocalypse Now bit,” says Wolfe. We encounter “fish sticks”: improvised traps made by unknown hands to trap carp, tilapia and other species. A discourse on how to make the traps is drowned out by a passenger jet roaring low overhead, briefly breaking the spell.

The sense that this is something special returns as we moor our boats and slosh ashore, inspecting plants, a turtle shell, a cascade, before resuming the journey. It is difficult to believe that the 405 freeway, the gridlocked bane of LA motorists, is just a mile away. Three hours later we return to where we started, a swampy bank, and moor the kayaks amid some ducks. The tour is over. We saw nothing that would excite David Attenborough. But we glimpsed another LA, one not consumed by automobiles, or turned into a strip mall, where nature and human optimism thrive in a watery realm, an ever so slightly mystic river.

Read the rest

 

Japan shuts down last reactor

All 50 reactors now closed for maintenance after 2011 tsunami but government faces major public opposition to reactivation

Operators have begun to shut down the third nuclear reactor (centre in foreground) at the Tomari plant in Japan. Photograph: AP

Japan is shutting down its last working nuclear reactor as part of the safety drive imposed after the March 2011 tsunami triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima plant.

The closure of the third reactor at the Tomari plant in Hokkaido prefecture, northern Japan, means all of the country’s 50 nuclear reactors have been taken offline, leaving the country with no nuclear-derived electricity for the first time since 1970.

Hokkaido Electric said it started lowering output from the reactor at 5pm (8am GMT). The unit should be shut down completely by the early hours of Sunday.

Hundreds of people marched through Tokyo waving banners to celebrate what they hope will be the end of nuclear power in Japan.

Source: The Guardian Read more

Opinion:

Has Japan learned its lesson?

Kansai Electric Power’s Ohi nuclear plant

“The trade minister, Yukio Edano, and three other ministers have been trying to win public backing to restart two reactors taken offline at Kansai Electric Power’s Ohi nuclear plant to help ease expected power shortages of nearly 20% in the summer.” – The Guardian

Obviously not!

In another article the statement was made, “It’s okay, we know what we are doing now!”

Sorry, you don’t!

You have no more idea of what you are doing now than when nuclear energy was first proposed.

When it comes to nuclear energy, you are playing with fire! As my mother always said, “Little boys should not play with fire!” She was right.

The whole nuclear issue is so clouded by unkowns, that moves to make the WORLD nuclear free ought to be the highest priority.

Reading the news (NOT MSM, they’re full of shit and omissions) the Fukushima disaster is much worse than we have been lead to believe.

We all remember Chernobyl, Fukushima has 85 times the amount of fuel rods. Fukushima is not safe; the tank holding spent fuel rods is so badly compromised that even a minor earthquake could topple it. They can’t fix it. To remove all the fuel rods in Fukushima (something that has NEVER been done on this scale) cannot be completed before 2014.

What happens if there is a small tremor before then? Remember that Japan is one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world. The chances are extremely high.

The radioctivity from a total collapse of the cooling pool (remember this is 30 metres (90ft) in the air) is enough to annihilate Hawaii, Alaska, the western seaboards of Canada and the USA and badly contaminate the rest of the two countries, before spreading across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe.

Radiation levels in the US are already being held responsible for for an identifiable increase in deaths since the disaster.

American women pay high price for Fukushima cover-up: 35% more dead babies

Babies are dying at a 35% increased rate in eight northwest U.S. cities since the Fukushima meltdowns, evidence supporting radiation expert…

This is fact not fiction. Read the source: The Examiner

MSM, TEPCO and the governments are not telling you the full story!

$75 billion of food wasted

Half the food in the US goes to waste

As the US celebrates Thanksgiving, a new study reveals that almost half the food in the country goes to waste – a statistic that should alarm an industry that is struggling to achieve greater efficiency in order to salvage profits.

Read more: Food production

.Yes, $75 billion of food wasted annually in the United States alone.

Now watch here:

 

And read the story on Reuter’s Photography Blog

Monday Moaning

Too little, too late

2020, what a lot of bollocks!

We need it NOW!

Don’t the fools understand that?

The world is a circus…

‘Coz it’s full of bloody clowns!

The UN Climate Talks are about as much use as tits on a bull.

Countries like the USA, China and India need to be boycotted. No exports, no imports until they play ball.

If countries don’t import from them, then they won’t have the excuse to manufacture.

Shut down their industries.

But we all know that’ll never happen, the world is full of weak-kneed, lily-livered, cowardly arseholes.