Friday, May 13, 2016



5 Years Later, Deaths Caused by Radiation Leak at Fukushima: 0

Good disproof of the Leftist contention that there is no safe level of radiation.  Moderate doses can even be beneficial

Since the horrific earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor meltdown in Japan on March 11, 2011, there have been no deaths directly caused by the radiation leak from the nuclear plant in Fukushima, which is located on the northeast side of Japan.

The latest update (in April) by the World Nuclear Association on the Fukushima disaster states, “there have been no deaths or cases of radiation sickness from the nuclear accident.”

Also, in a May 11 e-mail to CNSNews.com, Jaya Mohan, information officer for the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), said “no deaths directly caused by radiation exposure after the accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant have been reported.”

That conclusion corresponds with what the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in August 2015, and what UNSCEAR confirmed in 2013 and projected for the future.

In its 2015 report, the The Fukushima Daiichi Accident, the IAEA stated, “No early radiation induced health effects were observed among workers or members of the public that could be attributed to the accident.”

The IAEA noted that the “latency time for late radiation health effects can be decades,” but said “given the low levels of doses reported among members of the public, the conclusions of this report are in agreement with those of the UNSCEAR to the United Nations General Assembly.”

The UNSCEAR had reported in May 2013, two years after the Fukushima accident, “Radiation exposure following the nuclear accident at Fukushima-Daiichi did not cause any immediate health effects. It is unlikely to be able to attribute any health effects in the future among the general public and the vast majority of workers.”

“No radiation-related deaths or acute effects have been observed among nearly 25,000 workers (including TEPCO employees and contractors) involved at the accident site,” reported the UNSCEAR.  (TEPCO is the acronym for the Tokyo Electric Power Company.)

“On the whole,” said UNSCEAR, “the exposure of the Japanese population was low, or very low, leading to correspondingly low risks of health effects later in life.. The actions taken to protect the public (evacuation and sheltering) significantly reduced the radiation exposures that would have otherwise been received.”

Three TEPCO workers were killed “directly by the earthquake and tsunami, but there have been no fatalities from the nuclear accident,” reported the World Nuclear Association in April 2016.

The earthquake on March 11, 2011, triggered a massive tsunami, which killed about 19,000 people and destroyed more than a million buildings.

A combination of factors caused by the earthquake and tsunami led three of the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi to go into meltdown – the nuclear fuel rods could not be cooled and subsequently got too hot and started to melt, which led to several explosions and the release of radiation.

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EPA regulations Causing Huge Increase in Housing Prices

In a five-year period, government regulation increased the price of building a home by nearly 25%, a report from the National Association of Home Builders finds. When it comes to buying a new home, the average homebuyer is paying $84,671 more today than he or she was in 2011. Most of these costs come from developing the lot — even before concrete is poured or framing goes up. Thanks, Environmental Protection Agency.

According to the NAHB, in this half decade, regulation has accounted for a nearly 30% increase in the cost of a house. “By comparison, disposable income per capita increased by 14.4% from 2011-2016,” NAHB wrote. “In other words, the cost of regulation in the price of a new home is rising more than twice as fast as the average American’s ability to pay for it.”

Pricing Americans out of homes is a government-caused problem. When will the government think it should impose a government-inspired “solution”? Before the 2008 housing bubble, statists decided that every American should be able to take out a home loan. Will they repeat history and think of a similar situation in a few years? Government regulation weighed down our economic growth. Now it’s come for new homeowners.

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New US federal rule would permit thousands of eagle deaths

From the recent AP article announcing a plan that would allow wind companies and other power providers to "kill or injure up to 4,200 bald eagles a year without penalty" the USFWS gave out official numbers pertaining to the current population status of Golden eagles. A population I might add that has been rapidly declining in the western US.

"The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates there are about 143,000 bald eagles in the United States, and 40,000 golden eagles."

I will explain very clearly why this statement is not even close to being true and I will use official USFWS data to prove it. When I am finished it will be very clear to most that the USFWS is either very incompetent, very corrupt and probably both.

Look closely at these official golden eagle population figures released in 2013. The estimated population for an area totaling 422,391 square miles is a measly 526 golden eagles. In addition the USFWS openly admits that this region is also host to the highest density of nesting golden eagles in the world........

"The highest known density of nesting golden eagles is in central California among the rolling hills of Alameda and Contra Costa counties."

The large geographical area of 422,391 square miles given in the USFWS table, amounts to about 16% of the entire land mass covering the lower 48 states. If there were equal numbers of golden eagles spread out over the entire lower 48 states there would still only be about 3950 golden eagles. This is a figure more than ten times lower than the 40,000 golden eagle population released by the Interior Department on 5/4/2016.

Of course declaring 10 times too many eagles means that ten times as many turbines can be built for the wind industry and ten times as many eagles can be legally killed. Then one must consider that there are virtually no golden eagles remaining in the eastern half of the lower 48 states, so how big is this lie being told?

The truth of the matter is that our golden eagle population in the western US has not only been rapidly declining we have a government agency hiding this fact and then lying to the public with highly embellished fake population statistics.

It is for many reasons like the example just given from my research, that I can boldly proclaim the Interior Department to be a corrupt government agency in collusion with the wind industry.

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Denmark’s Electricity Subsidies Increase by 1000%

The European Commission hopes that its Energy Union strategy will make the EU’s energy supply more secure, affordable and climate-friendly. But the energy market is highly fragmented, and focused on national interests.

The price that the average European household pays per kWh of electricity has risen from 12 cents in 2005 to 18 cents in 2014. However, the prices in individual countries varies significantly. In Bulgaria and Hungary, households currently pay around 10 cents per kWh. In Germany and Denmark, energy is three times more expensive.

Factors that influence cost include a country’s geographical location, energy resources, and world market prices. But energy policies are increasingly a significant factor.

Energy subsidies are growing across the majority of countries in the European Union. Only Austria and Sweden decreased their subsidies from 2008 to 2012. The rest of the EU increased by 57%. Leading the way? Denmark and Greece, which increased subsidies by over 1000%, and Germany, which accounts for roughly 25% of all energy subsidies in the EU.

But despite more subsidies, electricity prices are still increasing. While household electricity prices have risen by 50% from 2005 to 2014, the average price for industrial consumers has increased by 66%.

These prices also vary significantly across the EU. In Germany and the Netherlands, prices for medium-sized industries have remained fairly stable, increasing by approximately 25%. In the United Kingdom and Poland, however, prices have gone up by as much as 100%.

To build a successful Energy Union, the Commission has a tough job ahead of itself: harmonising the different national policies, building a transnational infrastructure, and getting member states to work together, towards a common goal.

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Climate: The Real ‘Worrisome Trend’

By Meteorologist Joe D'Aleo

Who is pushing this end-of-hydrocarbon-energy to prevent an end-of-world-calamity agenda? The list is long and includes politicians and UN globalists (look up Agenda 21) who seek more power and control over every aspect of your life.

Scientists, environmentalists, green NGOs and corporations are all chasing the $1.5 trillion per year that feeds the climate crisis and renewable energy industry. The lengthy list also includes scientifically illiterate population-control socialists and Hollywood cause seekers, who are all supported by environmental journalists who never question any “green” causes or scare stories.

Many use the “precautionary principle” to justify drastic actions that perversely have truly drastic consequences, intended or unintended.

Bad Policy, Bad Impacts

Eco-fanaticism has already pummeled Europe. In the past ten years, the price of electricity in Europe has climbed by an average of 63 percent. Polling indicates that 38% of British households are cutting back essential purchases like food, to pay high and rising energy bills. Another 59% of homes are worried about how they will pay energy bills when the Paris accord is enforced.

Poor and middle class families are impacted worst of all.

Families and businesses in the “Blue States” in the Northeast already pay the highest electricity prices in the United States – twice that of some other states. The changes the EPA and this administration are pushing could double those rates – and the rates in other states.

The thousands of dollars that an average Northeastern family saved on gasoline and heating oil in 2015, thanks to fracking and drilling on private land, was truly welcomed as the only “raise” that many families got in many a year.

However, that too will be a memory, if the EPA’s plans are not blocked by the courts – or a President Trump. Moreover, if elected president, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both plan to eliminate fracking, as well as most conventional oil and gas drilling and production.

With a Hillary Clinton administration and newly Democrat Congress promising to kill fracking and eliminate, hyper-regulate and/or over-tax fossil fuels, energy costs per family would increase thousands of dollars a year. This happened in Europe when the greens took control.

Moreover, soaring energy prices ripple through the entire economy, affecting the cost of all goods and services – including products and services provided by factories, hospitals, schools, small businesses and the shipping of food and other products. Soaring energy prices kill jobs and depress living standards, as companies and communities find they must come up with thousands to millions of extra dollars every year, just to keep the lights, heat and air conditioning on and machinery humming.

That means more industries will head overseas, where energy costs and workers’ wages are far lower, while millions of Americans will be relegated to part-time positions, service jobs at far less than they had been getting, or welfare and unemployment benefits for the newly and perhaps permanently jobless.

Meanwhile, the United States will be expected to send billions of dollars to poor countries and emerging economies, as climate change “reparation, mitigation and adaptation” payments, under the new Paris climate treaty. And those now relatively poor nations, including China and India, will be still burning fossil fuels and taking away our jobs, to lift their people out of poverty.

All the sacrifices by Americans, Europeans and families in other now-developed, now-rich countries will be for naught.

This is what the so-called “progressives” want and are marching in the streets to get.

The Climate Alarmists’ Real Goals

Former Washington State Democratic governor Dixy Lee Ray saw the second Treaty of Paris coming many years ago. “The future is to be [One] World Government with central planning by the United Nations,” she said. “Fear of environmental crises – whether real or not – is expected to lead to compliance.”

Last year, UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres stated bluntly:

"Our aim is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to change the global economic system…. This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history"

In simpler terms, she intends to replace free enterprise, entrepreneurial capitalism with UN-controlled, centralized, socialized One World government and economic control.

In November 2010, IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer presented an additional reason for UN climate policies. “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy,” he said. It is not. It is actually about how “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”

In addition to everything else that is wrong, destructive and simply perverse about energy and climate policies, these are truly scary developments. And to top it all off, the Obama administration’s Justice Department is now seriously considering the idea of joining state attorneys general in prosecuting companies, organizations and individuals who dare to think independently and refute claims that human-driven global warming is the greatest danger of all to our future well-being.

All of this sounds a lot more like pre-world war two Germany than the United States of America. It is certainly a trend that we should worry about far more than any honestly conceivable threat from any nearly imperceptible human contribution to the climate changes that have always buffeted humanity and our planet.

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Mad Muslim says Islamophobia accelerates global warming

EVERYTHING does!

A recent lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explored the possible impact of Islamophobia on global warming.

The lecture, titled “Is Islamophobia Accelerating Global Warming?” has been reported by Fox News and other outlets and mocked on social media. It took place Monday evening and was presented by the university’s Ecology and Justice Forum In Global Studies and Languages, according to an online advertisement.

The event sought to explore “the relation between Islamophobia as the dominant form of racism today and the ecological crisis.”

“It looks at the three common ways in which the two phenomena are seen to be linked: as an entanglement of two crises, metaphorically related with one being a source of imagery for the other and both originating in colonial forms of capitalist accumulation,” the advertisement explained.

“The talk proposes a fourth way of linking the two: an argument that they are both emanating from a similar mode of being, or enmeshment, in the world, what is referred to as ‘generalized domestication.’”

The talk was administered by Ghassan Hage, currently a future generation professor at the University of Melbourne’s School of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry. Hage is currently working on a book of the same title as the lecture and is known for his 2002 book White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society.

Hage, who was born in Lebanon, openly supports the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement. Hage compared Israelis to “slave owners” on Twitter in 2013, Fox News highlighted, and also suggested that Palestinian militants are “freedom fighters” in an essay published in 2010.

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

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