Only about two more hours left in this year. I’ll be up in Yokohama with my wife, having artfully stashed the youngster at the in-laws’. I’ll try to connect and send pics, but the place we’re going (Minato Mirai) is so thronged on New Year’s Eve that it’s difficult to get even a data connection. Still, I’ve always managed.
Stay tuned for a preview of your new year from the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy’s official correspondent to the future (the fu-tuuuure…)
I have been crazy busy at work, staying late, going in early, and not doing much else. It’s nice to have a challenging, rewarding job, especially when the fun/futility quotient is better than one.
The regularly scheduled substandard blog posts will resume in good time.
Meanwhile, here’s a giant asian hornet eating a mere wasp. I could actually hear the smaller insect’s head being chomped to bits by the orange killing machine.
Video to follow posted.
The inestimable Charles Krauthammer nails another one. No we did not go crazy after 9/11 and create our own self-perpetuating climate of fear.
There was a terrorist threat before Al Qaeda, and there will still be one after it, but make no mistake — AQ is dying, and we killed it.
Al-Qaeda, uninvited, came out to fight us in Iraq, and it was not just defeated but humiliated. The local population — Arab, Muslim, Sunni, under the supposed heel of the invader — joined the infidel and rose up against the jihadi in its midst. It was a singular defeat from which al-Qaeda never recovered.
We have achieved successes that are more impressive the more you know about the problem. And that in itself is a huge problem–to … Continue reading
Japan’s economy has been stranded by the same moronic scheme announced by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. Japanese politics is an impenetrable hive-mind of graft and just-so stories, but the fundamentals of the economic problems are shockingly similar. And I try not to sprinkle the internet’s favorite word about too much.
Japan, inc. was overvalued and when the walls came down, nobody got out. Yet an unwillingness to allow real corrections has resulted in a state of suspended economic activity, where the official policy is zero interest, and everybody’s still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Periodically you see headlines announcing that the worst is over, that they’ve turned a corner, that this at long last is the real bottom, except that nobody actually believes it. The media, … Continue reading
GoJ knew about contam in northern Miyagi. Withheld info. Rice straw grown there fed to cattle, now 1500 contam cattle confrm sold as beef. Rice farmer said he thought his whole are was beyond the hazard area. Fair enough–Govt told him it was.
So the cattle fed that rice draw are a result of the Govt withholding that info.
This is one of the most interesting weather updates I have had the pleasure to read, especially since it concerns the fate of a system which used to be a menacing typhoon, and then a collapsing tropical storm, and is at the time of this writing, a mere tropical depression. From reading the series of these updates, I get the feeling that there has been lively debate (possibly with thrown crockery) at the Joint Typhoon Warning Center, which uniformly turns in a great product. I reproduce it here in full, and will likely refer back to this post from a more informed future post.
MSGID/GENADMIN/NAVMARFCSTCEN PEARL HARBOR HI/JTWC//
SUBJ/TROPICAL CYCLONE WARNING//
RMKS/
1. TROPICAL DEPRESSION 08W (MA-ON) WARNING NR 040
DOWNGRADED FROM TROPICAL … Continue reading
Fukushima has been another TEPCO cover-up of a radioactive disaster since before the tsunami hit, and their slow, incomplete notifications have enticed regulators and the government as a whole to go along with it. A price will be paid.
After the Japanese government forced TEPCO to release hundreds of pages of documents relating to the accident in May, Bloomberg reported on May 19 that a radiation alarm went off 1.5 kilometers from the number one reactor on March 11 at 3:29 p.m., minutes before the tsunami reached the plant.
via Meltdown: What Really Happened at Fukushima? – Global – The Atlantic Wire.
[This is an amazing story by Jake Adelstein whose ability to wring truth from stones in Japan is legendary, and David McNeill, of whom I … Continue reading
This is a good article on some of the electricity-conserving measures ravaging the lives of workers in Japan and the productivity thereby lost. I have no criticism (shockah!), as this is a healthy response to an awful set of circumstances. There a few good answers, and plenty of worse ones. I think Japan’s approach is right on the mark with power-savings.
I worry a little about some of the numerical targets, in that a company which never gave a damn about saving power can easily generate a 15% reduction year-to-year for 2011, whereas a “green” plant will be hard pressed to improve what they were already doing. I hope that penalties (which are expected to be fierce) will be assessed with an eye toward that fact, but as … Continue reading
