Denial Is Not A River In Japan
A Blog from the keyboard of Schneiderama
TIN PROPHET
Long after my obsession with the Gulf Oil War III oil “spill” (sabotage/attack?) on the once pristine, crystal sands of that The Tin Man’s heart seemed to know something was coming.
Tin Man was fabricated out of small panels of antique iron found in a field near my small mountain valley town. The thin iron bands that were the first tried on wagon wheels that frequented this part of the country found new life as his legs, as bow-legged as my own. A heart was snipped from a leftover and spray-painted red. Two days before March 11th, I saw that the Tin Mans heart was broken. Half of it lay at the scrawny feet of my passive, rust-brown manikin hung on a chain-link fence I had to wonder: “what horrible event will soon take place?”
Some great tragedy was in the works, and I greeted each morning of CNN newscast with a sense of foreboding. Two days later, the three Great Disasters were visited on Nippon Island: Two from nature, and one from man’s manipulation of that great creative storehouse. The genie that had danced for our greed and amusement escaped his bottle.
The tsunami was incredible, and the cameras available mated history and geology. The 2 blasts in Fukushima nuke plant were horrifyingly dramatic, more so than any of us can presently know. In light of the blatant censorship that has been the fallout from this global tragedy it was a wonder that those explosive clips got airtime. The facts re: the nature of those containment failures, one very possibly the result of a nuclear reaction rather than a “hydrogen gas buildup” has not received serious investigation or follow up. If all the facts were known it might be too much for societies to bear.
ESCAPE TO NOSTALGIA
In three days after the tsunami and meltdown(s), the blanket and incredible censorship of the bad news began. CNN quickly pulled the first “expert” commentator I have seen acting with integrity, honesty and angry candor on television. He was pulled after day tow, I believe, after day three all news from Fukushima vanished from Big Brothers screens. From then media denial was stunningly consistent. The major networks incredibly adapted the platitude: No News Was Good News. Ergo; If several nukes melt on beach and no one hears, is it happening? Are the masses deemed so ignorant, gullible or desperately frenzied with the task of survival from day to day that the lack of television news will appease? To what degree have we the people become we the sheeple, put out to pasture by a New Rome that pacifies its’ populace with the bread of cheap fast food and the circus of digital entertainment and revised/ignored history?
The Wall Street Journal, surreptitiously read from a news stand in Altadena, California, aound May of 2010 revealed that the power company in charge of the F Plant had “one stretcher and one satellite phone’ on hand in case of emergencies. Some media outlets were making reports on the earthquake/tsunami aftermath but the Internet seemed the best source of bad news. It is evident that TEPCO and the Japanese government is covering up the mess as best they can, the naked emperor whos lack of clothes is lack of truth. But just as blissful ignorance can be a helpful response mechanism, so can preoccupation with a distant disaster that one is helpless to address a downer in itself.
In my miasma over Japans misfortune, I realized that my attention was leading an emotional catatonia. The video feeds of tsunamis flowing inland were sensory overload to any of a sensitive nature. Old media events, a movie made in the fairly distant past, for instance, can be a balm for the soul, as in any great movie or song we can recall made before 9-11 can channel us back to better, more peaceable times. Such was the case when I watched the classic movie Deliverance starring a then young and virile Burt Reynolds. Mr. dark eyes played a guide for several city boys on a backcountry Appalachian river voyage. In a pointed nod to the present came this dialog:
Burt Reynolds: Mechanics will fail. Systems will fail. (pause)
John Voight: Then what?
B.R. Then survival - who is able to survive.
In the film, an exercised-challenged man gets “fucked,” to use the ubiquitously potent verb of the creative act. Sacred or profane, we see some scary synchronicity at work. Just after earth and sea do their damage, industry assists in the raped and plundering of a town near the once heat producing plant that could be called Fuck-You-shima.
INTRODUCING A NEW WORD
Not to disrespect a once lovely and functional town, allow me to refine this bastard word. Let us consider a new word in the lexicon of language: “Fuk,” as in Fukushima. To be pronounced the same as the first syllable of the once noble and beautiful town: fook. This word would imply a new, industrial sized version of that tired old f word.
(As in:) Wow, truly the poor Indians got fuked by all that nerve gas from the Union-Carbide India Limited plant in 1984! Those poor Iraqis got fuked by a military industrial-spy complex that boosted the crap out of a few hawk-eyed politicians stock portfolios! The people of Japan are getting fuked by that silly energy company one it’s government schills who keep independent reporters out of the update briefings and those near the troubled plants like mushrooms, pooped on and kept in the dark! With the right (wrong?) earth movements the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant and the San Onofre plant could both really fuk up California big time.
Two questions perhaps arise here: 1) How fuked are we as a whole planetary people in this seminal year of 2011– and 2) How bad can it be to get fuked.
More on this fascinating subject in my “Western Judeo-Christian Philosophy blog)
While I edited out my rant on the condemnation of the noble goat species from a Biblical perspective (goats do not wreck the environment as sheep do eating wise, and gives milk more fit for human consumption than cows) I have a story about goats that vaguely ties into this newly hatched saga of The Revenge Of The Genie Who Was Unleashed on Japan.
A friend of mine recounted her version of the issue of her goats and two shipping middlemen. Her goats were ensconced on a large hilly ranch in the hill of Humboldt, California. She made a deal with one dude to ship her goats in his container with some other four-leggeds. A glitch in the good deal occurred as the second trader emerged from his dark cave of opportunity.
“This guy told me that since the goats landed on Oahu, he needed to get them by boat to the Big Island and the price per head was 400.00.”
I asked, “Did you think to tell him, you just bought yourself 4 goats, bitch?”
“That’s what he wanted: for me to give up the goats. I paid his full price. His name was Fukushima.”
This may be a reminder that karma happens in mysterious ways, but assures us that “synchronicity happens,” and another validation of the application of the new word, applied in this case as a certain man took advantage of a nature-loving and somewhat past middle-aged woman who, indeed, in a deal with an opportunistic man, got “Fuked.”
NEWSPAPER FOR A LEAKING DIKE
In a karmic one-two punch a little bit of General Electrics devilish workings manifested. The blackout on the meltdown is going on one week. CNN and other mainstream newspersons commit the sin of omission as the naked emperor of space-time information parades pants and shirt of Mid East riots. How long will we believe that if they don’t tell us, it isn’t happening? In a deadly ploy that is typical in that lovely island, Japanese media played its own old “toe the line” bowing to Corporate control. This trend to revere corporate and National face at any price – to value corporate “persons” over individual’s persons is a famous and fatally flawed Japanese pattern. In a great play on irony and synchronicity, Tokyo Electric Company, (TEPCO) attempted to stifle a deadly water/radiation leak from a “crack in a concrete pit” by dumping a mixture of “sawdust, newsprint and absorbent polymers in an attempt to glue the leak shut. That didn’t work either, noted the International Atomic Energy Agency…” If the newsprint cannot stop the leak, the elitists believe that stopping the newsprint itself might. Japan is not alone in quelling the reality of a hot situation. An obscure web site announced the findings of several sharp scientists who dad detected small amounts of iodine 124 in the rain draining off their buildings roof. Thus Berkley California, not far from (Never more to) Livermore labs became the first bit of information to be found regarding the radiation reaching the west coast of North America. The Environmental Protection agency mostly slept March of 2011, quite failing to live up to their name.
The reactor design that caused three General Electric engineers to quit in brave, principled protest was totally valid. The Mark 3 reactors were built upside down, in a sense, with the rods inserted from the bottom of the reactor. (See those entry points are easily breached there in the bottom of the six-inch steel casing in the event of a fuel-rod catastrophe. Faulty design and fault fracture triggered the inevitable, with human error in Nippon to boot.
The basic engineering mistakes made by the TEPCO Fukushima Daichi builders were chiefly, (1) to The Japanese officials who, in the first place in the creation of the plant choosing to alter the natural 40 foot sea wall barricade by obliterating it and creating a far shorter sea-wall, (in the interest of easing construction,) 2) Choosing the less-than-adequate GE plant design and modifying it for more power, 3) and finally in 2010 chose to seek to renew the license for the aging plant. These human errors left the labyrinth of pipes and boilers and spent-pool storage ponds ready for the tragically unanticipated earthquake/tsunami of 2011.
A MECHANICS DREAMS
I once worked in both natural gas and later nuclear power plants as an industrial construction Union worker. Now, many years later, my power-plant dreams are usually nightmares. There are other building trades besides mine, jostling for their workspaces among many levels of huge pumps and turbines and transformers, tall men in overalls and steel toed books, tools strewn every-where. We worked on the turbines usually. Giant metal shells encases a two-foot thick shaft 6o odd feet long, with huge fan-blades in an array that would catch the hot rushing steam as it flowed thought he containment, causing the shaft to spin on shiny chrome bearings whose perfect metal semi-circles are large enough for a human to sit in.
Natural gas or fuel oil would be the usual fuels to blaze in giant two-story ovens lined with pipes that circulated very hot water to the turbines. Of course the nuclear plants used enriched uranium rods to heat the water. Still, the next-to-ocean generating stations could be a beautiful work environment. In the evening in back of a Redondo Beach plant with a series of transformers and wire grids to move the energy out of the plant, a heavy fog hung in the air. Baseball sized chunks of electric sparkings radiated in a rainbow-range of colors.
In the latter stage of my career as a Millwright, around 1983 I walked onto a job of truly science-fictional proportions: the twin mega-breasted -beast called Diablo Canyon Power plant on now somewhat pristine central California coast. . Much further North, beyond the town of Pismo Beach rests the controversial Devil’s electrical generating station. My trade brought me there around 1980, as a worker in the not-yet-loaded unit 2, the second of two gigantic dark grey breasts jutting perhaps 100 feet above the ocean. I recall the strange feeling of watching the protesters as I entered another workday at Diablo Canyon power plant Unit two. This was in 1994 ---- about two years before the plant became operational.
Our hard-hat and steel-toed-boots crew had to make the long, pleasant drive in to the plant by way of a narrow road that wound along the coast on a once pristine ranch of rolling hills and oak trees. Just as my fellow laborers and I struck out, the protesters formed a small line of about 14. Three or four of them were formally garbed in white robes and hoods, ominously beating primitive drums, a tiny remnant of the huge (and also ignored by media) protests that the citizens of nearby communities mounted to attempt to stop the plants from initially being built. They were the largest such protests against a commercial operation in the history of the US. While observing them in silence, I had an ominous feeling that these odd protestors bore the Spirit of Truth and Warning.
Later on, as I worked in this incredible dome of concrete and steel, I learned that not only was there an ancient Chumash burial site nearby that almost derailed the entire project, but there was also a newly discovered earthquake fault. Whoopsi! Rather than cancel the project with many millions already invested, it was decided that some fancy stainless steel shock absorbers would be installed. As I walked around the vast interior of the various levels of the plant, with large and small pipes snaking intertwined like snakes breeding, the comedy of the gleaming, various sized shock absorbers struck me as comical – no, absurd. In particular, the giant three-feet-in-diameter pipes with really long shock absorbers seemed most vulnerable. If there was an earthquake that moved this building back and forth and up and down for 12 feet for two minutes, this place will spring more leaks than Wiki.
DON’T WANNA BE A PROPHET
Ominously, the two nuclear power stations that lie along the coast of California are named after saints and demons; San Onofre (“Saint Onofre,” in the town of San Clemente) and many miles north, rests the controversial Devil’s electrical generating station, “Diablo Canyon.” My trade brought me there around 1980, as a worker in the not-yet-loaded unit 2, the second of two gigantic dark grey breasts jutting perhaps 100 feet above the ocean. I recall the strange feeling of watching the protesters as I entered another workday at Diablo Canyon power plant Unit two. This was in 1994 ---- about two years before the plant became operational.
Our hard-hat and steel-toed-boots crew had to make the long, pleasant drive in to the plant by way of a narrow road that wound along the coast on a once pristine ranch of rolling hills and oak trees. Just as my fellow laborers and I struck out, the protesters formed a small line of about 14. Three or four of them were formally garbed in white robes and hoods, ominously beating primitive drums, a tiny remnant of the huge (and also ignored by media) protests that the citizens of nearby communities mounted to attempt to stop the plants from initially being built. They were the largest such protests against a commercial operation in the history of the US. While observing them in silence, I had an ominous feeling that these odd protestors bore the Spirit of Truth and Warning.
Later on, as I worked in this incredible dome of concrete and steel, I learned that not only was there an ancient Chumash burial site nearby that almost derailed the entire project, but there was also a newly discovered earthquake fault. Rather than chancel the project that had millions invested, it was decided that some nice looking shock absorbers much like the ones that maintain the stability of our autos in relation to the road and our cars wheel-chassis system would be installed. As I walked around the vast interior of the various levels of the plant, with large and small pipes snaking intertwined like snakes breeding, the comedy of the gleaming, stainless steel shock absorbers struck me as comical. In particular, the giant three-feet-in-diameter pipes that came into the turbines themselves seemed venerable. If there was an earthquake that moved this building back and forth and up and down for 15 feet for two minutes, this place will spring more leaks than Wiki.
About 15 years ago, around 1997 I had a vivid dream that I never forgot. It took place in Newport Beach on the cliffs, a good 140 or so feet above sea level. I could not see the sea but knew it was just behind me. The water came at me, pushing tide of danger that I sought to escape. A tow ear appeared before me and I entered the spiral staircase and started to climb. Looking quickly down, I saw that the water rising rapidly toward me, and in a panic that ends our nightmares due to the intensity of the nightmare, I woke up.
The dream implied a tidal wave of over 100 feet. Newport Beach is but a handful of miles north of San Clemente, the town that contains the San Onofre nuclear power plant – two saints side by side bearing witness to men’s scientific folly and pride
SAINTS AND DEAMONS The Devil Diablo and Saint Onofre, ready to spread wrath and judgment after Saint Andreas (via the state-long fault named after him) slips into action.
The problem with dreaming about nuclear power disasters is that America (or any other country who has relied on this source of power thus amassing thousands of potentially deadly rods in pools on-site) is on a potential disaster to make Fukushima look like a Sunday school picnic. All it would take for mega meltdown(s) would be a power failure on a local or mass area basis. In September of 2011 a major, “freak” power outage that began in Yuma Arizona shut down power for San Onofre Nuclear Power plant near San Clemente California.
No power, no water pumping and recirculation of water in said pools, thus the potential for Meltdown(s) or massive radiological contamination, possibly an extinction event of our own creation.
Now that you’ve read my drawn-out blog aglow, pat yourself on the back for going beyond our very filtered, may I say “Fuk-you-sized” media, to a place where you can, rather than being kept in the comfortable, careless dark, live in total fear, despair and depression. Actually, there is hope in averting disaster. 1) A Divine Messiah will float down and become a good and just ruler of Earth with supernatural powers to clean up all spent-fuel storage sites and other large human messes, or 2) The several countries with large storage sites will somehow keep a continuous power grid in place to keep the cooling pumps going for the 15 thousand years it will take for those pools and their deadly cargo to “cool down.”
Let me conclude my copyrighted blog-cast with another poem that will end this essay on a poetic note – it’s called
Not A River In Japan
By J Schneider
Heart Vortex
Tectonic Plates Overlapping Mate
Unified Universal Atomic Gravitational
Forces Holding Hands and Tugging At
Quantum Strings
Converging in Whirlpools
Carpools Floating
Bodies Bloating
Gasses Toking By Unwilling Lungs
Truth Hidden Like An Ostrich Head
In the Sands Of Humanities Denial
Not A River In Japan
Not A River in Japan
