Global Warming Facts As The World Sees Them?

The following weather report is actually 100% correct, sad to say, most people are in the guise of the anchor man.

http://www.upworthy.com/the-one-where-the-weather-lady-starts-telling-the-truth-a-little-too-much-truth-to-be-honest-9?g=2

"It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of Japan and the whole world depends on No. 4 reactor."

So said the former Japanese Ambassador to Switzerland Mitsuhei Murata to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in April 2012; so what has happened since, and why the silence?

The operator of Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is preparing to remove, beginning this November, 400 tons of highly irradiated spent fuel from a damaged reactor building, a dangerous operation that has never been attempted before on this scale.

Containing radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima 68 years ago, more than 1,300 used fuel rod assemblies packed tightly together need to be removed from a building that is vulnerable to collapse, should another large earthquake hit the area.

Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) is already in a losing battle to stop radioactive water overflowing from another part of the facility, and experts question whether it will be able to pull off the removal of all the assemblies successfully.

The operation at the plant's Reactor No. 4 is fraught with danger, including the possibility of a large release of radiation if a fuel assembly breaks, gets stuck or gets too close to an adjacent bundle.  That could lead to a worse disaster than the March 2011 nuclear crisis at the Fukushima plant, the worlds most serious since Chernobyl in 1986.   To see the possible problem see 1) 

Each fuel rod assembly weighs about 300 kilograms (660 pounds) and is 4.5 meters (15 feet) long. There are 1,331 of the spent fuel assemblies and a further 202 unused assemblies are also stored in the pool.   Almost 550 assemblies had been removed from the reactor core just before the quake and tsunami set off the crisis. These are the most dangerous because they have only been cooling in the pool for two and a half years.

“The No. 4 unit was not operating at the time of the accident, so its fuel had been moved to the pool from the reactor, and if you calculate the amount of caesium 137 in the pool, the amount is equivalent to 14,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs," said Hiroaki Koide, assistant professor at Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute.

The seawater around the nuclear plant has been contaminated from the water pumped into the plant and dropped from helicopters used to cool the radioactive fuel rods which has the leaked out into the Pacific Ocean.   See (2

So, why is there the silence from the National News and Government sources, remembering the news that was released after Chernobyl?   There have been no rebuttal of these facts from the US authorities, see (3  

And for a full update see(4

1)    http://real-agenda.com/2013/08/15/fukushima-a-nuclear-war-without-a-war/

2)    http://fukushima-diary.com/category/dnews/sea-contamination/

      3)   http://www.globalresearch.ca/fukushima-radioactive-fallout-in-california-and-alaska-  health-impacts-on-american-children/5329553

     4)   http://consciouslifenews.com/wont-believe-whats-going-fukushima/1161974/

Words Of Wisdom From The Dalai Lama

If anything sums up the state of the world and of life for so many today, the Dalai Lama's observational wisdom does. 

So why did UK Minister Owen Paterson push GM food?

What do we know about Owen Paterson? Married to Rose Ridley, sister of Matt Ridley (son of Viscount Ridley) who is a genetic scientist - and also sits in the House of Lords. He's visiting professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory where they study plant genetics.
Cold Spring Lab are the main protagonists in the iPlant collaborative. Possible conflict of interest for Paterson?


Who fund the Cold Spring Harbor Lab? Amongst others, Dupont, whose subsidiary Pioneer Hi-bred International specialise in GMO corn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Sp...bor_Laboratory

Defends the use of pesticides that kill bees
http://www.shropshirestar.com/news/environment/2013/04/30/owen-paterson-defends-use-of-bees-link-pesticide/

Paterson's letter to Syngenta published in The Guardian...
Linkhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/interactive/2013/apr/29/environment-secretary-letter-syngenta-insecticide-ban

One of the two chief lobbying organisations paying Paterson to push GMO...
http://www.abcinformation.org/

Another UK lobbying group operating on behalf of Conservative party donors;
http://www.cropprotection.org.uk/

UK research council, funded by Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta, Dupont et al...
http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/home/home.aspx

Cropgen - another powerful GM lobbying group, paid for by Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta, Dupont et al...
http://www.cropgen.org/

AND the research institute funded by the UK government and the GMO food companies quoted in this mornings BBC report;
http://www.ifr.ac.uk/

So, is GM safe? There’s the research that’s being paid for by the biotech industry. And then there’s the independent research being done in foreign countries, mostly in Europe, and foreign universities. Most, if not all the research sponsored by the biotech industry says genetic engineering is innocuous and safe. But most of the research done elsewhere concludes otherwise. So says Thierry Vrain, retired former pro-GMO scientist for Agriculture Canada, now campaigning against GMOs.

 

THERE IS NO SUCH PLACE AS 'AWAY'.

Killer whales so contaminated that they were classified as toxic waste. A once-beautiful Lebanese beach that’s now a towering mound of garbage, bleeding contaminants into the Mediterranean Sea. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area the size of Quebec that has six times as much plastic as plankton, the foundation of the food chain.

We all know that trash is a serious environmental problem, but it’s hard to grasp the full extent of the global predicament, and even if you are well-informed, it’s good to be reminded that waste is perhaps the most dire environmental crisis today. So often I hear people say that they are going to throw something 'away'. There is no such place as 'away'.

In this documentary Trashed tells the story of the world’s waste disposal problems through the eyes of Jeremy Irons. The actor-turned-environmental activist takes the audience around the world, showing first some of the most gory garbage patches, before presenting the challenges of getting rid of such trash.

Jeremy Irons, who narrated the film, noted, “We’re making more garbage now than at any time in history.” At the beginning of the film, Irons travelled to Sidon, Lebanon where he found a large, uncontrolled waste dump on the beach. He interviewed a Palestinian refugee who had come to Lebanon 30 years earlier, when the trash mound was non-existent. “When I first worked here it wasn't here,” the refugee said.

In Britain, Irons found that the waste problem was not quite as obvious as in Lebanon but was still significant. Paul Dainton, a British activist who tries to promote regulation of landfill sites said, “We have the most landfill sites in Europe.” Dainton added that breaches occur in the lining of the landfills with “notorious regularity.”

The waste problem is no less serious in the United States. “Over the past decade, 14 dumps around New York have reached capacity,” Irons said. A major problem with these landfills is that the lining used to prevent seepage of materials to the surrounding soil is not always reliable. As a result, landfills can threaten the environment for hundreds of years.

An alternative to landfills used in some parts of the world is incineration of waste. This method has its advantages, but in many ways is not much better than using landfills.

“It’s a very, very challenging environment inside an incinerator,” Professor of Bio-imaging at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland Vyvyan Howard said in the film. Incinerators produce man-made halogenated dioxins, which cause health concerns and can be extremely toxic.

In one small French town, 24 out of 80 residents on a street near an incinerator got cancer. There is no conclusive proof that their cancer came from toxins released from their incinerator, but such a high rate of the disease is unusual. “Governments have to be prepared to act with caution,” Howard said, referring to the danger created by toxins from incinerators.

No area of the planet has been safe from the toxins and waste spread by incinerators, factories and other means. “The Arctic has become one of the most contaminated places on Earth,” Irons said. Charles Moore, an oceanographer and boat captain who has done research on the Great Pacific Garbage, noted, “It’s rare to find a trawl that has no plastic in it.” As Moore says, waste is a problem both on land and sea, with no areas immune to the effects of pollution.

“This is not about what might happen in some distant future,” Irons warned. Howard added, “What we have to do is to stop making that amount of waste.”

Irons ends the film by saying that the status quo in terms of waste management must change. “We are trashing the planet and it’s time to stop,” he said. If waste management practices do not change, Irons and other environmentalists believe the waste problem will continue to damage the planet.

“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.” — Greek proverb

For the Queens Jubilee Year our little Parish Council decided to plant a Jubilee Wood. We were fortunate to be granted 420 saplings from the Woodland Trust that we planned to use as hedging and asked local residents to sponsor a tree, this could be in memory of an event, a person, or as simply as a gift to the parishioners present and future. So far we have 60 trees sponsored. We plan to have seats in the centre where locals to come and meet or just sit and enjoy the view.

The recently started Youth Club became involved and they also sponsored a tree and, on a cold spring day (!) came to plant it and some others. They chose a fruit tree and we hope that in the many years to come they will bring their families to what will be then a small wood, tell them the story of the event and pick an apple or two.

Although the area is somewhat waterlogged and bare in places as I write, this will soon change as many have given willingly of their time and knowledge, working hard to turn what was a once small area of grazing land into what will become an attractive village facility. As for the value of a tree, just look at the image below, and for more detail of that and the value of trees, see HERE. 

I HAVE ACTUALLY MET JESUS

It was late one dark, cold and wet October night when, like many of our team after hearing an unspoken direction while searching for the lost and lonely, I finally found Jesus.   As I walked along the edge she became illuminated by the light of my torch, sitting with her legs dangling over the drop, almost shapeless and shivering in her tattered worn coat and falling apart open sandals.   I came close but Jesus gently told me not to get too close as the edge was not safe, so I sat down a few feet away and spoke to her, telling of my concern for her and asking for her story. 

Jesus said how she had been born into a family to be sexually abused by them and their friends and that when she was fifteen she had run away and lived with a group of people in a squat.   The squat seemed good at first, but the novelty soon wore off and she found out that it was cold, dirty and used by alcoholics and drug takers.   Money was a problem but she soon became adept at picking pockets and shoplifting, and if things got really bad, she sold her body.   “At least I had the choice then” she said with a slight grin, through the stumps of broken and rotten teeth.   

Living on the streets was a nightmare Jesus said, telling of how she had been crawled over by vermin, urinated and defecated on by people and animals, spat at, kicked, and beaten up, the mocking sarcastic voices and comments still echoing in her ears.   “The bruises and breaks usually healed, but the looks of disgust and the insults and abusive comments never do, they always, always hurt” she said.

I asked how old she was, “Thirty four” was the answer.   Thirty four... good grief half my age and I was sure she was only a little younger at best.   She turned and looked at me, her tears had made clean tracks down her dirt encrusted face, “and I can’t even sell my body now” she said.   Jesus moved, and an expression of pain winced across her face, “everything aches, everything hurts, everything is such an effort, it’s not possible to avoid all the punches and all the kicks”, her ever laboured breathing and feeble voice was evidence of this.

She read the look on my face when the noise echoed around the hills of a speeding car passing by on the nearby road “The world has always been concerned for itself” Jesus said.   The wind changed direction slightly and I could sense the unmistakeable smell of her urine, I asked if the black sack I had passed by on my way to find he was hers.   “Yes it is, but I won’t need it where I am going” was Jesus reply.

So here we were, me, a man who knew without any doubt just who he was in the company of showing her concern, yet she had the right to hate all men but so obviously didn't, in fact I heard not one word of condemnation and not one word of hate for anyone, just the stories of the events that had led her there.   

Then, as the rain and cold increased and in the middle of a scene the world would rather forget, a filthy and unloved victim journeyed to paradise.

THE IRAQ WAR FIASCO AND A LETTER FROM A DYING VETERAN

Ten long years ago the combined might of the US and UK military under President Bush and Prime Minister Blair with their relationship that rode over legalities and know facts (1) took armed action against Iraq in a “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign and a land based invasion. In those ten years thousands of military personnel have died. On the Iraq side an unknown number members of public have been killed.

All this was carried out in order to stop the Iraq military from using what the US authorities said were their ‘weapons of Mass Destruction’.

As Bush and Blair knew, there were no such weapons.

So why start a war and who profited out of it? George Bush’s Vice President, former CEO of the giant US Company Halliburton, (one of the world’s biggest oilfield companies who also have subsidiaries involved in private military contracting) Dick Cheney certainly did.

Despite his denials to the contrary, when special advisor to the under secretary of defence for policy at the Pentagon Michael Mobbs stood up to give an under-oath statement, he told how Cheney had held more than $3 million in Halliburton stock options until sometime in 2005, and that Halliburton paid the vice president $178,438 in deferred compensation. (2) A Pentagon Whistleblower, Bunny Greenhouse complained, and was demoted and sacked. (3)

Halliburton’s Iraq war income actually began in 1992, before the Iraq war started when Cheney’s Defence Department paid Halliburton $3.9 million to prepare a classified report on privatising war logistics. Halliburton spent the $3.9 million and then were given a further $5 million for a follow-up report, and later granted a five-year contract to provide the army with logistical support. 

The Bush family made profits from the war via their many interests in different companies, the 2006 article in (4) explains how.

Tony Blair has profited from the war (5) and I wonder where the missing Iraq $billions are? (6)

But for the vast majority of those involved in the Iraq War there has only been despair, pain and anguish. One such Person is Thomas Young, a dying Iraq War veteran, he wrote the letter below to George Bush and Dick Cheney, but I personally think that it should be addressed to Tony Blair as well.

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralysed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbours, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. 

The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretence of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness. 

1             http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jan/21/tony-blair-george-bush-iraq

2             http://www.texasmonthly.com/content/soldier-fortune

3             http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/world/middleeast/29reconstruct.html?_r=0

4             http://www.heatherwokusch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=86

5             http://rainbowwarrior2005.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/tony-blairs-attempt-to-keep-his-iraqi-oil-profits-a-secret/

6         http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7444083.stm