In English 日本語もあり ここです （http://blog.safecast.org/ja/）。 Nationwide readings. Proper measurements by independent worldwide volunteer organization called Safecast. If that link doesn't work, see: http://blog.safecast.org
There have been many recent stories of high radiation readings in Tokyo that were proven to be not related to Fukushima. For example, false alarms in the water, in Tokyo's Setagaya Ward, and a litany of others, Safecast data proves that Tokyo is well within safe limits and has lower radiation levels than major international cities such as Rome, Italy or Hong Kong, China.
Eight months after a tsunami caused a nuclear accident in Japan, ordinary people are using new technology and the power of crowdsourcing to find radiation hotspots. NewsHour science correspondent Miles O\'Brien reports from Japan.
The results still show several danger zones in and around Fukushima... The Tokyo areas show completely safe levels. Please check your area for yourself.
Every morning, like clockwork, I turn on my computer to do work and to write this blog. Every morning I see something on the top page of Yahoo that just makes me roll my eyes. (Yes, I know everyone uses Google, but I use Yahoo to get the financial and stock market news).
Everyday, at the top of the page, Yahoo has their 5 "hot" stories. These are always incredibly stupid and useless. Usually it is about an unusual football play (when, upon clicking, you see that it is not so unusual at all)... Or it it about some idiocy involving some Hollywood person getting a divorce or the dress s/he is wearing or something else.
Here's what was at the top of Yahoo this morning: $2.5 million dollar bra, Wal-Mart's sales, Golfer gets angry, 10 strange sports venues, Billy Crystal hosts Oscars? Hoo hum...
In a few words, God! American society is stupid!
You know this stuff is there because Yahoo is "giving people what they want"... There is never any news about anything that actually matters.
The article is just Hollywood fabulous. Let me quote:
Each season of "Dancing With the Stars" features a revolving line-up of contestants and professional dancers, but one thing remains the same: spray tans are a big part of the show. And that's where Julie Nostrand, the owner of South Seas Skin Care, comes in. All season long, she's spent every Sunday flying from Loveland, Colorado, to Los Angeles, to ensure celebs look luminous in the ballroom and in front of the camera. omg! caught up with Nostrand to find out more about what the stars do to get glam.
Isn't that just ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz......... Oh, where was I?
According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day (or 28 hours/week, or 2 months of nonstop TV-watching per year). In a 65-year life, that person will have spent 9 years glued to the tube.
The average child will watch 8,000 murders on TV before finishing elementary school. By age eighteen, the average American has seen 200,000 acts of violence on TV, including 40,000 murders. At a meeting in Nashville, TN last July, Dr. John Nelson of the American Medical Association (an endorser of National TV-Turnoff Week) said that if 2,888 out of 3,000 studies show that TV violence is a casual factor in real-life mayhem, "it's a public health problem." The American Psychiatric Association addressed this problem in its endorsement of National TV-Turnoff Week, stating, "We have had a long-standing concern with the impact of television on behavior, especially among children."
Millions of Americans are so hooked on television that they fit the criteria for substance abuse as defined in the official psychiatric manual, according to Rutgers University psychologist and TV-Free America board member Robert Kubey. Heavy TV viewers exhibit five dependency symptoms--two more than necessary to arrive at a clinical diagnosis of substance abuse. These include: 1) using TV as a sedative; 2) indiscriminate viewing; 3) feeling loss of control while viewing; 4) feeling angry with oneself for watching too much; 5) inability to stop watching; and 6) feeling miserable when kept from watching.
OK, 4 hours a day or 6.7 hours a day of watching TV!? Are you kidding me? Don't these people work? How can anyone, in this day and age, have the time to watch that much TV? Why would anyone want to watch that much TV? These people are truly sick, especially when they feel miserable when they cannot watch enough TV!
What's to watch on TV? Nothing good.
I heard from my friend who works at NHK that recent surveys in Japan show that the average Japanese under 30-year-old watches an average 20 minutes of TV per day.
If these statistics are true then the USA is definitely done for. People in the USA no longer read books, they don't know their basic geography. They don't know the difference between John and Yoko staying in bed to protest the war or Lenin doing the same. They think Falafel is a political party in Pakistan and the people in Eye-rack had nooklar weapons.
They think Mexico is in Central America even though Central America doesn't exist... And, they think Napoleon is an ice-cream sundae at 31 Flavors. They couldn't pick out "Grease" on a map of Europe and don't care about "Cheese eating surrender monkeys" anyway.
The night closes in. Read the surveys of what children know, what students in universities know. Approximately nothing. We have become wanton morons. As the intellectual shadows fall again, as literacy declines and minds grow dim in the new twilight, who will copy the parchments this time?
No longer are we a schooled people. Brash new peasants grin and peck at their iPods. Unknowing, incurious, they gaze at their screens and twiddle, twiddle. They will not preserve the works of five millenia. They cannot. They do not even know why.
Twilight really does come. Sales of books fall. Attention spans shorten. Music gives way to angry urban grunting. The young count on their fingers when they do not have a calculator, know less by the year. We have already seen the frist American generations less educated than their parents. College graduates do not know when World War One happened, or what the Raj was. They have read nothing except the nothing that they read, and little of that. Democracy was an interesting thought.
Ours will be a stranger Dark Age than the old one. Our peasants brush their teeth and wash, imagine themselves of the middle class, but their heads are empty.
We are witnessing the end times for the USA as we've known it for all these years.... It's too bad that, when the drunken giant in the room finally collapses, his fall is going to break everything on everyone else's tables.
The stock market had a real bad day today because of Eurozone and Italy worries and things there are going to get worse. Nevertheless, after Groupon's IPO, even with the Bear Market rallies, Groupon has been a loser three days in a row.
Nov. 7, 2011. Dow Jones rises 0.71% yet Groupon drops 0.54% (after hours drop another 0.85%)
Nov. 8, 2011. Dow Jones rises 0.84%... Yet Groupon drops a massive 4.12% (after hours drop another 0.12%)
Today, Wednesday Nov. 9, 2011 (USA time) Dow Jones takes a beating on Euro news and sinks 3.20%. Groupon decline accelerates and drops another massive 3.53% (after hours drop another 0.08%)
In three days, Groupon shares have lost 14% of their value. I predict Groupon is heading for penny stock within 2 years. This is a serious opportunity to short this company stocks.
On top of that, the news is all bad for Groupon. From the Wall Street Journal just today!:
Competitors are threatening the daily deal site leader by offering quicker payment to merchants, possibly jeopardizing a key part of the company's business model.
Groupon, which offers online deals for local merchants, keeps itself in cash by collecting money immediately when it sells its daily coupons to consumers while dragging out payments to the merchants over 60 days.
As I have said many times before, the Groupo business model won’t work. All business deals, in order to be successful, must be beneficial for all sides concerned. The business owners who make deals with Groupon lose out big time.
From that same article:
"The payment timing is so erratic you can't count on any of that money helping to pay your bills," says Mark Grohman, owner of Meridian Restaurant in Winston-Salem, N.C.
After running three Groupon promotions this year and last, Mr. Grohman says he won't use the service again in part because it puts too big a strain on his cash flow. "With smaller margins in restaurants, you need that capital in the bank as fast as possible," he says.
Heissam Jebailey, co-owner of two Menchie's frozen-yogurt franchises in Winter Park, Fla., says he also has begun to view Groupon's installment payments as too slow.
"You want to get paid in full as quickly as possible," says Mr. Jebailey, who has run deals with both Groupon and its rival LivingSocial Inc. offering customers $10 of frozen yogurt for $5. He says both promotions were successful but that he'd only use Groupon again if the service promises to pay faster. "We're the ones that have to cover the cost of goods for giving away everything at half price," he says. "I will not do another deal with Groupon unless they agree to my terms."
The lawyers for Godzilla seem to claim that any sort of dinosaur image usage or use of the word "Zilla" is an infringement upon their rights for the Godzilla character. I think I can show you today where they are wrong.
The cartoon is not nearly as bloody and gutsy as American anime at the time, but you can sense the subtleties of the Japanese mindset and just how "dark" a society Japan really was at the time (I still think, in many ways, Japan is a very "dark" country... But that's a post for another time).
The cartoon is Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors. In Japanese: 桃太郎 海の神兵（ももたろう うみのしんぺい）"Momotaro Umi no shinpei." Interestingly, there's an entire Wikipedia entry in English no less (saves me a lot of work!)
Momotarō: Umi no Shinpei (桃太郎 海の神兵, lit. Momotaro's Gods-Blessed Sea Warriors or Momotaro, Sacred Sailors) is the first Japanese feature-lengthanimated film.[3] It was directed by Mitsuyo Seo, who was ordered to make a propaganda film for the war by the Japanese Naval Ministry. Shochiku Moving Picture Laboratory shot the 74-minute film in 1944 and screened it on April 12, 1945. It is a sequel to Momotarō no Umiwashi, a 37-minute film released in 1943 by the same director. It is black and white.
Plot: After completing naval training, a bear cub, a monkey, a pheasant, and a puppy say goodbye to their families. Like the prior film, the movie features the "Peach Boy" character of Japanese folklore. The film is about the surprise maneuver on Sulawesi island, depicting parachute troops' actions. The monkey, puppy and bear cub are the ones that become parachute jumpers while the pheasant becomes a pilot. The whole movie also depicts the Japanese "liberation of Asia", as proclaimed by the Government at the time.
There are some musical scenes. Of note is The Song of AIUEO (アイウエオの歌AIUEO no Uta), a scene where Japanese soldiers teach local animals how to speak.
Background: The Naval Ministry previously showed Seo Fantasia, a 1940Disney film. Inspired by this, Seo tried to give dreams to children, as well as to instill the hope for peace, just as he did in the prequel movie, Momotaro's Sea Eagles.
The Song of AIUEO (アイウエオの歌 AIUEO no Uta) is famous for being given a homage in the series Kimba the White Lion (ジャングル大帝 Janguru Taitei) by Osamu Tezuka (Tezuka watched the film in April 1945. He later said that he was moved to tears by the movie's hints of dreams and hopes, hidden under the appearance of war propaganda).
For a long time, the film was presumed to have been confiscated and burnt by the American occupation. However, a negative copy of the film was found in Shochiku's Ofuna warehouse in 1983 and was re released in 1984.A reproduced movie was later screened and the VHS package is now available in Japan.
So, without further ado, here is the cartoon Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors in it's entirety (parts 1/9 to 9/9). I placed them all here for your convenience so you wouldn't have to search for them.
If you just want to get the gist of the film, I suggest watching the first part and the very last part... The lunacy of war. Why do we do this?
By the way, the foreign soldiers in the final scene are British and not Americans... But the very last scene where the Japanese kids are jumping out of a tree onto a map of the USA drawn on the ground is, quite, well, "interesting."
Minister Louis Farrakhan is one of the few people in the USA left telling the truth... Sometimes, even Islam has the "word"... Something to think about.
