Looking Back: 5 – old enough to buy a car

USS Hoist ARS-40

     After only four months on the USS Pawcatuck I got transferred to my second ship, the USS Hoist ARS-40 in March, 1960. Like the Pawcatuck, the Hoist was home-ported in Norfolk. The Hoist was a salvage and rescue vessel that was adapted or modified to come to the rescue of sunken submarines, presumably with living survivors trapped on the ocean floor. Part of the crew were qualified deep sea divers as well as skilled SKUBA divers. The ship also had a decompression chamber designed to relieve people with the bends (a condition arising from dissolved gases coming out of solution into bubbles inside the body due to too rapid depressurization). In other words, if a man rescued from a sunken submarine, say, rises to the surface too quickly the too rapid depressurization causes bubbles to form in the body causing severe pain and possible death. In such a case, the man would be put into the decompression chamber and re-pressurized more slowly until his body was readjusted to normal surface atmospheric pressure. 

      I had turned 18 in December, felt confined by the Norfolk scene without wheels and decided to buy a car, my first. It was a 1955 Ford, just like the one in the photo on the right. Having a car was enormously liberating. Away from Norfolk, in civilian clothes, you could be yourself, whereas in the Norfolk area, even in civilian clothes people seemed to know you were a sailor and treated or shunned or exploited you accordingly. Sad to say, but there was little respect or honor for “our finest”, our boys in uniform, at least not in the Norfolk area where sailors were concerned. It wasn't unusual for us to travel as far as, say, Ohio, to a shipboard buddies hometown and be fixed up with local girls (non professionals) for a weekend. Driving half the night to get there and half the night to get back, staggering and bleary-eyed and back in uniform, aboard ship for Monday morning muster. But it was worth it to get out of Nofuck Virginia.

mushroom cloud over NYC (composite idea)

      We were in the midst of the Cold War and paranoia vis-a-vis the Soviet Union seemed, in retrospect, to be building towards the brinkmanship that was the Cuban Missile Crisis, still a couple years down the pike. There was concern that Soviet subs could easily reach the eastern seaboard of the United States and an early warning system seemed absolutely essential to prevent Manhattan from going up in a mushroom cloud. To this end a kind of wall of sound detection was laid on the ocean floor off shore from the US East Coast. These were a series of sonar submarine sound detection modules known as SOSUS a Sound Surveillance System. For several months the Hoist was engaged in laying these sonar modules on the ocean floor and we were berthed in Hamilton, Bermuda for the duration. 

Photo credit: http://www.corbisimages.com/stock-photo/rights-managed/BE058429/mushroom-cloud-over-nyc-composite-idea

To be continued....

Most Evil Corporation of the Year Award

Most Evil Corporation of the Year Award - 2012

I'm working at a Black Company

      Probably everyone knows about “BLACK OPS”, but have you heard about “BLACK CORPS”?

       It's the little known underbelly of corporate Japan where companies that exploit their labor force have mushroomed since the halcyon days of the lifetime employment system—the vaunted cradle to grave security offered to Japanese salarymen in the heady days of Japan's post-war recovery and economic development. Then the bubble burst leading to now going on 20 years of economic stagnation and a fractured labor market where a significant portion of a whole generation is being forced into part time, low pay, no benefits jobs. 

       This lost generation of young people are called フリーターFREETAs (involuntarily in part time jobs) and NEETs (not in education or employment or training). The nuance of these appellations is something that is undesirable. A large segment of a whole generation is adrift in a working world that has little use for them; they are as dispensable as paper diapers, scraping a living on the margins of the business world, sleeping in cheap coffin hotels or cubicles in all-night Internet cafes that don't ask too many questions or living at home off the pensions of aging parents. (There have even been incidents of family members failing to report the death of a pensioner, stashing the desiccated body in the bedroom for 30 years in one case, and continuing to collect the pension.)

       Into the breach step the “black corporations”. Companies that are happy to hire people desperate for any kind of work and abuse them in near slavery conditions. Some of these are well known companies in Japan who show their best face to the public and even establish a reputation as benevolent philanthropists. There is the case of a young woman who worked for a restaurant chain whose owner, Miki Watanabe, was honored by Forbes for his work building schools and orphanages in countries like Nepal and Cambodia. “In the same year as the Forbes honor, Mina Mori, a 26 year-old employee of one of his Watami restaurants committed suicide only two months into her employment. It was discovered that she had worked 140 hours of [unpaid] overtime in one month before her death. The incident was just recently officially declared a case of karoshi (death by overwork).” [Watami won the “Most Evil Corporation” award, by the way.]

       Her case is not unusual for people employed by black corporations. “In Japanese, the term 'black business' refers to companies who rake in huge profits while exploiting their own work force by discrimination, harassment, unpaid overtime, and short-term contracts. This type of business is a widespread problem in Japanese society but often goes undiscussed in mainstream media.”

       The issue of black corporations was brought to my attention just recently by a program on NHK television (Japan Broadcasting Company). One abused employee interviewed on the program is suing her company for abuse. She described being systematically pressured to quit after the first month of employment by her boss. He would call her into his office and verbally browbeat and abuse her for sometimes two or three hours at a time. She was smart enough to bring a tape recorder to at least one of these torture sessions to use as evidence in a court of law.

       The article on the linked website (Rocket News 24) lists the 12 most evil companies in Japan engaged in black business operations. It may come as no surprise that Tepco of Fukushima nuclear meltdown fame is on the list.

       And these are just the tip of the iceberg!

Quotes are from the linked article on the Rocket News 24 website.

Looking Back: 4 – rude awakenings

1957 (Federal troops escorting the Little Rock Nine)

   The Pawcatuck's homeport was in Norfolk, Virginia. Small town hick from the northeast that I was, I had never had any contact with other than white people before joining the Navy. My first contact with Blacks, Asians and Hispanics was at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. This was 1959, before the sit ins, civil rights marches and urban riots of the 1960s. By this time the momentum toward civil rights for Blacks was well underway after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954; Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-56; Little Rock, Arkansas school integration, 1957.

       But, in 1959 there were still remnants of the old Jim Crow Laws in the South where I saw, for the first time, blatant racism depicted in “white” and “colored” signs in rest rooms, waiting rooms, restaurants, etc. I was growing up in more ways and more quickly than I had ever anticipated back in the old all white home town.

       Norfolk was affectionately, or, more accurately, sarcastically, called Nofuck, Virginia. The nickname referred to the attitude of decent girls who shunned sailors as a general rule and B-girls in the bar strips outside the bases who led us on for overpriced drinks and disappeared when the chips were down. There was another side to the sex scene in Nofuck that I was naïvely unaware of when I first arrived and soon fell into a trap, that is, trapped in a moving car with a huge merchant marine man trying to feel me up while driving.

        Lots of sailors, yours truly included, kept “civvies”, civilian clothes off base in lockers at the YMCA in town. We would leave the base in uniform as required, change to civvies to go on liberty, and change back to go back to the base. There was a bus stop just outside the Y. I had changed back into my uniform, one day, and was waiting for a bus when this car pulls up and a big macho looking and smiling man leans out the window and offers me a ride to the base. So, I thought, hey, a ride, sure, why not, and jumped in.

       We drove along exchanging the usual what's your name and where're you from introductions. Suddenly, there is this hand tentatively brushing my knee, which I moved to the side. But, the hand returned more insistently on the knee and traveling up my thigh. I pointedly removed the hand this time and I realized the man was rather drunk. Meanwhile, we were still on the road to the base and traveling too fast to do anything but tell this insistent gentleman with his hand back on my thigh that I wasn't interested and to let me out of the car. He refused and became more insistent both verbally and with his hands, and I became more angry, unceremoniously throwing his hand off me and demanding that he keep his goddamned hand to himself and stop and let me out of this fucking car. No soap.

       Now I realized that he had no intention of taking me to the base and figured he would turn off the main road at some point and drag me to a remote area and probably beat and rape if not kill me—he was big enough. I was scared. My heart was pounding like a jackhammer and the adrenalin was singing. I managed to keep my wits and decided to watch for my chance and hope that he would have to stop for a traffic light or at least slow down enough for me to jump out of the car when he inevitably, I was sure, would turn onto a road that didn't lead to the base.

        Soon enough, that's exactly what happened. He slowed down to turn without stopping but slow enough for me to take what I calculated was my most likely one and only chance to get away. When I opened the passenger door he tried to grab and stop me but I managed to jump out losing my white hat in the car in the process. To my relief the car kept on going. When I stopped rolling I checked for physical damage. I wasn't seriously injured, just a few cuts and bruises mostly on my hands and knees and tears in my clothes, but I was considerably shaken. I sat down on the curb and pulled myself together. When I had calmed down enough, I started thumbing a ride back to the base. Before too long another sailor picked me up and asked me why I was “out of uniform”. 

       I laughed and said: “I'm lucky that's all I'm out of!”, and told him the story.

To be continued...

interlude

     Sometimes, when you wake up at 3 in the morning and your mind is like a tumble dryer in a laundromat the best thing to do is to just watch it and let the pictures and thoughts flow wherever they want to go. Maybe you've got a problem and are trying to control the thoughts in a channel you think would be helpful only to come back to square one. The restlessness and tossing and turning only get worse and the solution to the problem seems farther away than ever.

     The other night I was having one of those “nuits blanches”, a French euphemism for sleepless nights, and, in exasperation, stopped trying to shut down my feverish brain and let it wander when, unbidden, the lyrics of a favorite Dylan song started going through my mind. The song took on new meaning and seemed to be talking to me directly and I smiled to myself there in the dawn light. "Just let it go," I thought to myself.

Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

Can you guess the song?

Looking Back: 3 – bell bottom blues

      Just as I was born into a neither here nor there generation, I was also in the military between wars. The Korean War had ended in more or less a stalemate and a “peace treaty” had been signed in July 1953. It was the first of America's subsequent involvement in victory less wars, and tensions continued on the Korean Peninsula and elsewhere in the long Cold War. The United Nations commander in the Far East, General Mark W. Clark said at the time that he had "the unenviable distinction of being the first US Army commander to sign an armistice without victory." 

USS Pawcatuck AO-108 in refueling positi 

     I was a “dungaree Navy” sailor. All four of my ships were auxiliaries, ships that supplied the “right stuff” Navy (fighting ships like cruisers, destroyers, aircraft carriers). My four ships were in order of assignment: November 1959, USS Pawcatuck (AO-108); March 1960, USS Hoist (ARS-40); June 1961, USS Salinan (ATF-161); December 1961, USS Kaskaskia (AO-27). We were considered sort of B class sailors, the downstairs kitchen help to the upstairs nobility serving on warships. 

 

graphic of a 45º roll

      My first ship was a fleet oiler, the USS Pawcatuck AO [auxiliary oiler] 108, to which I was assigned in November, 1959 after a four-week training course in Newport, Rhode Island. People often asked me at the time if I ever got seasick. So, to put that one to rest, yes, I did get seasick on my first cruise, but that was the one and only time. I never got seasick again even in heavy seas with 30- and 40+-foot waves battering my second and much smaller ship (USS Hoist), pitching and rolling as much as 45º on the inclinometer (even hovering there just a bit too long with my nose practically in the water thinking she ain't gonna go back up). But she did!

      The experience of that storm was, oddly enough, strangely beautiful and exhilarating, with the wind shrieking in the rigging and the foaming crests of white-capped waves blowing spray high overhead; the bow of the ship plunging into the oncoming wave and the fantail hovering and dancing on the crest with her screws out of the water; the charcoal and white color of the sky and the deepest blue green water I've ever seen—except in the ship's wake where the color seemed a blend of jade and turquoise of an intense hue dappled with white foam that almost hurt your eyes with its brilliance.

      I was a Quartermaster, trained in Newport in celestial and electronic navigation and updating navigation charts. I also became an expert special quarters helmsman, steering the ship in tight situations such as coming in and out of ports, fueling at sea operations where there were three ships steaming side by side quite close to each other; us in the middle, usually an aircraft carrier on one side and a string of destroyers and cruisers coming and going on the other, being refueled and re-provisioned.

refueling at sea at close quarters

      I remember one incident during fueling operations. I was at the helm of the Pawcatuck, there was a carrier on the port (left) side and the smaller destroyers were coming up on the starboard side one after the other. I must have been daydreaming because the Pawcatuck started to close the distance between us and the carrier. In other words I was drifting to port on a collision course. Suddenly, I awoke with a start, when, from the port side bridge wing, the captain yelled at me: “Boucher! What the hell are you doing in there?” Looked out the wheelhouse window: “Oh, shit!” On instinct, without another word, I spun the wheel hard to starboard to stop the drift. It isn't easy to turn a sluggish tanker with its deep draft, and it's just as difficult to stop it once it starts to turn. In such a critical situation, with ships close on either side, the timing of the opposite rudder was critical. The captain had enough sense to leave me alone until I got the Paw stabilized and on a true course once again. I guess he must have been just as relieved as I was, because he merely took me off the wheel without the ass-chewing that I was, deservedly, expecting. I could have killed a lot of people. 

 

To be continued...

Closing the barn door...

...after the horse's escaped.

Tepco admits nuke accident avoidable

やっぱり - YAPPARI

Just as everyone thought.

Tepco (Tokyo Electric Power Company) “finally admits [that the] nuke crisis [was] avoidable”.

An investigation by Tepco's own in house task force concluded that the company “was aware safety improvements were necessary long before last year's quake and tsunami caused ... but failed to act because it feared the political, economic and legal consequences of implementing new measures.”

Furthermore, “the utility could have mitigated the impact of the Fukushima meltdowns if it had diversified the plant's power and cooling systems by paying closer heed to international standards and recommendations [and] Tepco also should have trained its employees in practical crisis-management skills, rather than conducting obligatory safety drills as a mere formality...”

A five-member member committee headed by former U.S. nuclear regulatory chief Dale Klein set up to monitor Tepco's internal task force reform plan concluded: "It's very important for Tepco to recognize the need to reform and the committee is very anxious to facilitate the reforms necessary for Tepco to become a world-class company... The committee's goal is to ensure that Tepco develops practices and procedures so an accident like (the Fukushima meltdowns) will never happen again."

NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN? We seem to hear those brave new words after every major screw up has occurred. It has the moral equivalence of “Oops! Sorry, folks. We'll be sure to keep the barn door closed next time.” Until “the next time” finds the barn door wide open once again.

Meanwhile, “investigative reports compiled by the government and Diet panels said collusion between Tepco and government regulators resulted in lax supervision and allowed the utility to continue lagging in safety measures.”

But Tepco's apparently on top of it now if you have faith in Tepco's self serving pronouncements –like this one: Takafumi Anegawa, Tepco's official in charge of nuclear asset management said: ...”the task force plans to compile recommendations by year's end 'that would have saved us from the accident, if we were able to turn back the clock'."

Hmmm, yes, well....

Looking Back: 2 - join the Navy and see the world

            My response to the restlessness and the push and tug of growing up and striking out from the bosom of the family (in view of the fact that we still had a military draft and not being particularly interested in carrying a rifle and slogging through mud and very much interested in “seeing the world”) was to enlist in the USNavy after graduating from high school in 1959. I was seventeen, feeling confined by small town life, restless, wanting to break out of my cocoon and, as I saw it, spread my wings, literally, on my first flight from Boston in a TWA airliner headed for Chicago and the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. It felt like I had truly “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” as John Gillespie had described it in his poem High Flight.

        Of course, the Post Office posters and the recruiter's enlistment pitch turned out to be somewhat different from the reality of life in the military. Thus did I become, on the one hand, addicted to the lure and fascination of faraway places and, on the other, disenchanted with the regimentation of military life.

my dog tags - the nick is for inserting the
tag between your front teeth in case of death

        As a sailor I was something of a rebel with a cause—getting through my hitch with my independence of thought reasonably intact. It grew increasingly clear to me that I was being conditioned to be a faceless cog in a machine, a number on a dog tag where thought and opinion were discouraged while adherence to strict rules and regulations were demanded. Furthermore, as time passed and I became more familiar with the guys around me, I developed the strong impression that many re-ups (career sailors), far from being fierce warriors, were really dependent type personalities who needed to be told what to do and when to do it. I also began to realize that I liked to write (thanks to a snotty ROTC wonder Ensign who demanded that I write an essay about driving carefully after I had been invoved in a traffic accident that wasn't my fault). I think that what I considered his arbitrary treatment of me as if I were  a juvenile delinquent contributed to my determination not to submit to the unquestioning obedience required of a good soldier. In short, I was not and could never be a real soldier—and I knew it.

        But I got around. And I also got a tattoo either in Milwaukee or Chicago, I don't remember which. It was the de rigeur thing to do on our first day of liberty from Great Lakes. You were supposed to brag later how you got drunk and laid and so out of your head that the supposed pain of the tattoo needle didn't bother you a bit. Well, in fact, full disclosure, there was no getting laid and I wasn't even drunk when I got the tat. Everybody invariably asks: "Did it hurt?" No. It stung like a series of mosquito bites, but it took a couple weeks to heal the scabs.  

       I was assigned to four ships in three years, sailed the Atlantic and Caribbean. Memorable [both for positive and negative reasons] ports included my stateside homeports: Norfolk, Virginia, Key West, Florida and Jacksonville, Florida. Overseas ports included Hamilton, Bermuda, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Ocho Rios, Jamaica, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Charlotte Amalie, Virgin Islands and Funchal, Madeira off the coast of Morocco in North Africa.

To be continued...

"Younger Next Year"

Younger Next Year

 then, 1986 - Dad and Kool Kid in outdoor spa

       In an older post on this blog [Career Opportunity] I talked about retirement, how I put it off until the decision was more or less made for me. I wasn't sure how I would be able to cope without the routine of a 9 to 5 job. The last time I lived on my own time was in the mid 1980s when I lived in Kurashiki (as I mentioned in a previous post [A step back in time]) and worked as a freelance English conversation teacher. Aside from preparation and class time the rest of the time was my own. That worked out well since our baby was born in 1985 and I spent a lot of my extra time being a daddy and very much enjoyed the role

Mitsu Sports Center - a pleasant 25-minute
drive in the country from our house

        But when retirement loomed, the baby was a full grown man and on his own, so there wasn't the option of filling in the time being a daddy. That career track was blocked so I hit on the idea of making preventive health my occupation of choice in retirement. Men, especially, seem to have to have an occupation and/or a purpose in life. I had already begun doing some physical exercise, taking some supplements and watching what I eat due to some mildly alarming cholesterol levels and higher than normal BMI. As a result my cholesterol levels improved and my excess weight began to drop, gram by gram.

Mitsu Sports Center 25 meter pool

        This past summer I was already in pretty decent shape when I visited the States. When I got together with an old friend from college days, she gave me some CDs about weight training for older people with the odd-sounding title “Younger Next Year”. Well, being “younger next year” sounded like a great idea to me! I decided to make my health and fitness my new “career” goal and expanded the exercise regime that I was already doing to include some weight training, some yoga (that I had neglected since college days) and some swimming. This seems like a pretty well rounded and doable regimen for a guy of my age. It's a little rigorous, and the more neglected or less used parts of my body feel it, but I expect that in time even those recalcitrant joints, muscles and tendons will mellow out—at least to a reasonable extent. You can't expect to have the body of a 20 something again, after all.

now, 2012

        I try, on average, to work out alternating with weights and yoga five days a week, go to the pool one day and take one day off—Never on Sunday! Road buddy does her own exercise regimen and we go to the pool together. We took a few forbidden photos at the pool recently and stopped at a very picturesque Japanese restaurant on the way home feeling pleasantly body tired but hungry.

       So, if you're wondering what to do with all that retirement time, get up from the recliner, turn off the TV and make taking care of your health your new career. It'll keep you focused, do wonders for your body and your outlook. Guaranteed!  

landscaped Japanese style garden with restaurant 

A step back in time

oHIGANBANA

         With the blooming of the oHIGANBANA 彼岸花 (honorable equinox flower) the season has turned and the sweltering Japanese summer is blessedly behind us. It's autumn again and one gets the urge to get off the mats, move around and do a bit of local traveling. So it came to pass that a friend of ours was having an art exhibition at a gallery in the first town I lived in when I came to Japan in 1980—Kurashiki 倉敷. 
 
         It was purely by chance that I got dropped in Kurashiki to fend for myself (I didn't know a word of Japanese and couldn't read the signs) by my company representative in a beautiful town that time seemed to have forgotten, not to mention that the allied bombs of World War II had ignored as well. 

typical KURA with its black
and white tiles - upper right

         The core of the town is a canal surrounded by buildings that look unchanged since the Meiji Restoration (1868) period. The canal was a river port used to send rice and other goods down to the Seto Inland Sea. And many of the wooden buildings were storehouses and granaries (kura 倉) used for storing goods before shipping. 

K gallery - little white square in center of photo
(note the black and white tiles on right)

         Today, the old merchant quarter along the weeping willow lined canal area known as the Bikan Chiku, with its distinctive white-walled, black-tiled warehouses is a popular tourist destination in Japan. I lived in Kurashiki from 1980 to 1988. It's only around 15 miles from our present home and we like to take a sentimental journey there from time to time to visit the old haunts. And, this time, to drop in on our friend's art exhibition at K gallery in a small alley off the canal. 

 our Mitsubishi i

 
         So, yesterday, we hopped into the Mitsubishi i and struggled along for over an hour in ghastly traffic on this 3-day holiday weekend. The return trip was even ghastlier, but I wont dwell on the dark side and just show a few photos of my first home in Japan.

Bikan Chiku - weeping willow lined canal
Meiji period river port of Kurashiki

boat landing - canal rides for tourists in period boats

stone bridge over the canal with a typical KURA in background

traditional  RYOKAN  (Japanese Inn) on the canal

Ueda's coffee house - my old TAMARIBA (hangout) since 1980

Mrs. Ueda my old Mama-san - now 78 or so and still going strong

iced coffee - my favorite

iced tea - her favorite

Buddhist temple precinct on mountain behind our old house

our house in Kurashiki from 1982 - 1988
photo taken from temple mount

Bye bye Senkaku, hello Fuku

The current (recent?) dispute over the ROCKS in the East China seems to have exceeded its “use by” date in terms of its usefulness as a hot news item—at least until the next flare up.

Does anybody remember the Fukushima nuclear disaster?

Yoshihiko Noda

In what could be basically a photo op for the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) Prime Minister (Noda) in an attempt to shore up his dwindling popularity in the run up to a general election widely speculated to return power to a possible new coalition government headed by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), he paid an “inspection” visit to the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Apart from posing in a white protective suit and hard hat and expressing "heartfelt" thanks to the Tepco workers who risked their lives in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami disaster its hard to see what “inspection” value there was in a look see by someone who knows nothing about nuclear energy.

Be that as it may, an article in The Japan Times by staff writer Reiji Yoshida does give a bit of an update on the current conditions at Fukushima. The overall message seems to be that things haven't gotten worse but it will take a very long time to clean up the mess.

Since Fukushima has potentially much farther-reaching consequences than some rocks in the sea for people other than the nationalist nutjobs shooting water pistols at each other, sane people might be interested in learning about the current state of ongoing repairs or non-repairs there. Here are a few excerpts from the article:

Experts say that over the past year, the risk of another serious accident at the plant has considerably lessened, although long-term concerns about the durability of equipment and facilities remain since decommissioning the reactors could drag on for up to 40 years.

Plant workers are now speeding up work to remove about 1,500 nuclear fuel assemblies stored in a spent-fuel pool on the fourth floor of the No. 4 reactor building, which suffered extensive damage from a hydrogen explosion.

Tepco now plans to start extracting the fuel assemblies by the end of next year, and to finish moving them to another spent-fuel pool designed for long-term storage by the end of 2015.

Once accomplished, the likelihood of another serious accident will be even slimmer, according to Kyoto University professor Hajimu Yamana...

"There won't be any more serious trouble unless something extraordinary happens," Yamana said, pointing out that simulations by plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. showed the reactor 4 building can withstand an earthquake measuring upper 6 on the Japanese seismic intensity scale of 7.

But it's better to move all the spent fuel to the second pool, which is more resistant to earthquakes and has a better cooling system, Yamana noted, because "you can't totally deny the possibility of (another) gigantic earthquake" striking the area.

Meanwhile, the remaining decay heat from the nuclear fuel in the damaged reactor cores is estimated to have fallen to 1 megawatt from 2.35 megawatts over the past year as radiation is emitted, according to calculations by Tepco.

This has considerably reduced the risk of another disaster at the complex "and as time passes, (Tepco) will get greater scope" to fix the critical water coolant system, Yamana said.

The decay heat is expected to fall to 0.61 megawatt by next October and to 0.42 megawatt a year later, according to Tepco's data.

The question is how much trust and confidence you have in Tepco's calculations!

Bibi's bomb - bomb fallout

Bibi's ACME bomb at UNGA inspires Israeli meme artists

Some of these are really funny.  Check 'em out!

I don't think we have to worry too much about Israel's continuing "existence" as long as Israelis (who actually live in Israel) can laugh at the antics of their "leader". 

 

An interesting political analysis of Bibi's bomb bomb by investigative journalist Gareth Porter has it that after months of trying to maneuver the Obama Administration into committing the US to attack Iran by a specific date (the famous "red line") and being rebuffed unceremoniously and publicly by US officials, his UNGA speech was, in effect, a concession that his tactics had failed and was merely a sop to Israeli public opinion that isn't interested in a unilateral attack on Iran by Israel itself. 

Here are a few excerpts:

Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Netanyahu had twice used to convey to the US his purported readiness to go to war with Iran, called it a "concession speech". Netanyahu conceded, in effect, that his effort to force the US to accept his red line had failed completely.

As the Republican Party prepared to nominate Netanyahu's old friend Mitt Romney as its presidential candidate, all the pieces seemed to be in place for Netanyahu to maximize the impact of his Iran war bluff.... [but] the Republican convention in Tampa Bay from August 27 to 30 failed to make an American ultimatum to Iran, as demanded by Netanyahu, a central theme of the convention.

... Netanyahu met unexpectedly firm US resistance to his pressure tactic. On August 30, General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talking with reporters in the UK, said an Israeli strike on Iran would be ineffective, and then dropped an unexpected bomb. "I don't want to be complicit if they [the Israelis] choose to do it," Dempsey said.... [but] after such a "public, bold statement" by Dempsey ... "the situation had to be reassessed".


Obama and other senior US officials had clearly decided it was time to cut off Netanyahu’s ham-handed effort at pressure on US policy at the knees. In an interview with Bloomberg Radio on September 9 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared, "We're not setting deadlines". And when Netanyahu pushed Obama in a phone conversation on September 11 to adopt his "red line" ... Obama flatly rejected the demand, according to American sources. Three days later, Panetta told Foreign Policy magazine, "Red lines are kind of political arguments that are used to put people in a corner".

And in an unmistakable signal by Obama that Netanyahu should end his meddling in US politics and policy, the White House even rebuffed a Netanyahu request for a meeting during his upcoming US trip, as the Israelis leaked to the news media. 

Haaretz editor Aluf Benn has suggested that Netanyahu's UN speech reflected not only the Obama administration's rebuff but the realities of Israeli public opinion. He wrote that the Prime Minister had tailored his speech to polls showing that Israelis wanted the US to handle the problem of Iran, not Israel.   

The full article:

www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/10/201210493522531400.html  

Pants on fire

Look people, we're in the game!

It isn't very often that one gets caught in flagrante delicto, with his metaphorical pants down. But in a recent video shot at a policy forum luncheon at WINEP (Washington Institute for Near East Policy) the Director of Research, Patrick Clawson, suggested that a Pearl Harbor type incident is needed to coerce the US into acceding to Israel's demand for an attack on Iran's alleged nuclear weapons facilities--"crisis initiation" in Newspeak. No description of the video can do justice to the flagrantly, if not immoral, diabolical nature of the proposal and the man proposing it. 

William A. Cook, and English professor at a university in southern California, characterized Clawson as a "Clown" in one of the most drippingly sarcastic pieces of writing I've seen come down the pike in a long time:

...the absolute darkness of this soulless Clown who joked his brilliance before his peers ... this idiot vomited out of his mouth the way to move forward with his agenda and that of his peers, “after all people, we are in the game”.

But the consequences are far greater than the lost sailors in our Clown’s descriptive false flag; “after all people,” this act will propel the world into a catastrophic war, and we will “not be in a game.” Put this in context; here’s the Clown, an appointed researcher for an exclusive think tank the purpose of which is to push the Israeli agenda in the United States at all costs. These un-appointed individuals draw up strategic plans for the US government, maneuver them into strategic places in the Pentagon, the Congress, the State Department, and into the Executive Branch in order to bring them to action. This action is to force the US to go to war on behalf of Israel. That the people of the US do not favor such a war, that hundreds and thousands of their soldiers, the sons and daughters, the fathers and mothers of American families will be the fodder for WINEP’s war is irrelevant to them since they work for Israel and for AIPAC. The end purpose alone counts—their end purpose. That is what Patrick Clawson told us in that released video, a video I suspect WINEP wishes never saw the light of day. The absolute arrogance of his presentation, the total commitment he uttered in his remarks tell of a man incapable of human sympathy, oblivious to international law, uncaring, bestial.

http://palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=19610

As an accessory piece to the clown metaphor we have the cartoonish performance of drawing “red lines” in the sand (and on cartoon bombs) by the supposedly mature adult macho man PM of Israel in the United Nations. But it seems the bomb may have been a dud:

Binyamin Netanyahu's cartoon nuclear bomb certainly grabbed attention, but not necessarily the kind he wanted. No doubt it was intended as a bold and graphic way of presenting the Iranian nuclear threat, but much of the initial response – on Twitter, at least – was ridicule. -  The Guardian

These kinds of performances by Israeli officials and their hired public relations and black ops operatives will do nothing to stabilize the tensions and rivalries in the Middle East. Nor will it endear them to any but the most right wing and neo-conservative types in the United States, who still don't realize how much their benighted adventure in Iraq has weakened the US's ability to successfully fight wars in that region. The Administration main's concern, although unstated openly, appears to be getting out of the military quagmire without losing more once friendly allies and face than necessary. An Israeli-inspired military fiasco in Iran will only inflame the already volatile Middle East, further damage the reputation of the United States and keep the global economy locked into a very long term recession if not plunge it into a depression.

We've had enough farce in the region already, let's not Send in the Clowns. 

Looking Back: 1 - a generation neither here nor there

As Charles Dickens said of David Copperfield—and perhaps himself as well: I am born.

me

Aren't we all!

Mom and Dad

I wasn't born a Baby Boomer. I must have been born a vagabond. In those days we were just born into an unlabeled generation. The “neither here nor there generation” you could say. I arrived on the planet on the cusp of the Great Depression and World War II—December, 1941. It seems, in retrospect, that I was born into a world entering an era of perpetual war, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, sometimes in conscious thought, sometimes buried in the unconscious disturbing only occasional dreams, but always there as a kind of painted backdrop to a stage set.

me - 8-years old

I don't remember much of my earliest years (nothing actually) and only know what I've been told. I lived in a bilingual home (English and French) because we lived with my recently widowed grandmother until I was about 4- or 5-years old. Grandma was an immigrant from Montreal in Quebec Province, Canada who spoke no English. She was a widow because my grandfather died from a head injury incurred when he hit his head on a low tree branch while riding in an open trolley. When my grandmother remarried she sold the house and moved out. We moved into a cold water, unheated (that was normal in those days) 2-bedroom tenement in another part of town and I entered the first grade at the local parish school. My younger brother was born in the same year, 1946.    

Elvis Presley in the 50s

We came up in the era of Rock 'n Roll--Bill Haley and the Comets, Elvis Presley idolized by millions of swooning hysterical fans. There were Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver and American Bandstand on that marvel of marvels, the TV. I was around 12-years old when we got our first one. Before that, I remember listening to programs like The Shadow and Fibber McGee on the radio in the kitchen. The 1950s were a kind of age of innocence, or maybe it just seemed that way because we were still young and relatively innocent to the world outside our small industrial city. It was the time of my first high school (unrequited) crush, "duck's ass" haircuts, record hops, bowling night, wet dreams, pegged pants and white buck shoes. Some of the lucky ones had cars, but not me. We swam on weekends at my uncle's “camp” on a lake and ice skated on the frozen pond just down the street in the winter.

James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause

The seemingly placid surface of the 50s began to show a few ripples, troublingly and darkly, in Rebel Without a Cause at the movies. James Dean epitomized the angst of growing up with pablum for breakfast in a sunny TV kitchen (the real “morning in America”?) and the aimlessness and confusion over what to do with a life seemingly without challenges (other than seeking thrills in driving cars over a cliff in the flicks). And then, when I was 16, Brigitte Bardot breathtakingly appeared in shocking semi-nudity in the then notorious (now, what was all the fuss about?) French film (et dieu crea la femme) And God Created Woman. There were two movie theaters practically next door to each other on Main Street in our town. One was showing And God Created Woman, the other was showing Walt Disney's Bambi. My cousin and I told our parents that we were going to see Bambi and, of course, went into the other theater instead.

Brigitte Bardot in et dieu crea la femme

Around this time my parents were building their dream home. My father, who died in 1986, was a carpenter. In high school I was interested in drawing and took a mechanical drawing class as an elective for three years. Part of the class involved drawing blueprints and with Dad's guidance we designed the “dream house”. We worked together building it on weekends when my father became very ill with bleeding ulcers. To help supplement the family income and while still in high school I went to work part time at my uncle's small furniture making factory doing a bit of everything that didn't have to do with dangerous machinery, but mostly in the shipping department. And so, the 50s played out not altogether as carefree as they had seemed earlier in the decade.

To be continued...