DARK SHADOW OF CHERNOBYL TOUCHES FUKUSHIMA / IT'S TIME FOR ACTION

To fully understand the current folly and cover-up of Fukushima, you must understand the same folly, cover-up and consequences of Chernobyl in 1987 and recognize that this time we may not outlive the consequences. It's time now for populist direct action and Germany is a stunning blueprint for the success of that process: Allen L Roland

I thought Chernobyl was bad, until I saw this: Here's a time lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions that have taken place between 1945 to1998. It starts slowly but skip to 1962 and the buildup becomes overwhelming before the world seemingly comes to its senses ~ 7 minute video.

http://memolition.com/2013/10/16/time-lapse-map-of-every-nuclear-explosion-ever-on-earth/  

But now let's deal with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1987 when a simple experiment to see if the steam turbines could power the coolant pumps, if there was a loss of power, led quickly to a nuclear disaster on the night of April 26, 1986 ~ that nearly poisoned the world with a dose of lethal radiation.

Seconds From Disaster - Meltdown at Chernobyl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyqpVOxmw8s

Today, we have Arnie Gundersen putting up a new video on the upcoming fuel rod removal at the ongoing radiation disaster of Fukushima ~ and it cuts to the core of the worldwide radiation danger we now face at Fukushima. EPCO has produced a reassuring short video describing how the fuel removal process is supposed to go, mixing animation and documentary footage to soothe away any viewer’s worries. Arnie Gunderson calls it a “fantasy cartoon” and shows excerpts from the TEPCO production followed by his own explanations of how TEPCO is misleading the world / 17 minute video http://www.nukefree.org/fairewinds-video-fukushima-4-rod-removal

The nuclear power industry is an accident waiting to happen and only populist direct action, as demonstrated in Germany, can free a world that is now being held hostage by the nuclear power global corporate elite.

Meanwhile, in the partly evacuated Fukushima Prefecture, local officials are confirming an increase in thyroid cancer in children. The rate is more than 7 times higher than for the general population and reflects a similar pattern experienced around Chernobyl after the accident there.

A key to Germany’s anti-nuclear success is the persistent and uncompromising environmental movement that has used civil resistance and protest as well as independent electoral politics to achieve its goals. Popular Resistance.org  just featured a must read article on What The US Can Learn From Germany’s Stunning Environmental Movement.

Excerpt:  "Anti-nuclear protests, a staple of German environmentalism since the 1970s, had been heating up in the years preceding Fukushima. In early 2010, a full year before the tragedy, 120,000 Germans had formed a 75-mile human chain between two active nuclear plants. The day after the Fukushima tsunami hit, tens of thousands formed a similar chain across parts of southern Germany. Within three days of the meltdown, some 110,000 demonstrators had staged nearly 500 events in as many towns across the country. By the end of the month, massive rallies had engulfed Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Munich. National uproar continued as March led to April, and it was only in late May, after 25,000 protesters had converged on their party headquarters, that Chancellor Merkel and her government agreed to a ban."  See article: http://www.popularresistance.org/what-the-us-can-learn-from-germany/

It's time for action, not just words, for our very existence and survival is at stake. "Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed. This power becomes available to you just as you can change your beliefs." Aleksander Solzhenitsyn Allen L Roland http://allenlrolandsweblog.blogspot.com/2013/11/dark-shadow-of-chernobyl-touches.html Freelance Alternative Press Online columnist and transformational counselor Allen L Roland is available for comments, interviews, speaking engagements and private Skype consultations allen@allenroland.com   Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his web log and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on www.conscioustalk.net

Slow Creep Of Moral Apathy In America

SLOW CREEP OF MORAL APATHY IN AMERICA

Little by little America's freedoms are being marginalized and our moral apathy is much like Germany between 1938 to 1945 ~ when the people thought they were free but, in reality, hate and fear had left them morally apathetic and impotent: Allen L Roland

While President Obama and the Democrats keep bailing out the Banks, Health Insurance Industry, Nuclear Industry and now Oil Industry ( renewed Offshore drilling ) and Main Street staggers along with close to 20% real unemployment during this severe economic crisis ~ it becomes obvious that there is now only one party, through the magic of Clinton's and now Obama's triangulation, and it serves only the Corpocracy (or financial elite) and always at the expense of the American taxpayer.

Chris Hedges mirrors my thoughts when he wrote ~ " All traditional standards and beliefs are shattered in a severe economic crisis. The moral order is turned upside down. The honest and industrious are wiped out while the gangsters, profiteers and speculators walk away with millions. The elite will retreat, as Naomi Klein has written in The Shock Doctrine, into gated communities where they will have access to services, food, amenities and security denied to the rest of us. We will begin a period in human history when there will be only masters and serfs. The corporate forces, which will seek to make an alliance with the radical Christian right and other extremists, will use fear, chaos, the rage at the ruling elites and the specter of left-wing dissent and terrorism to impose draconian controls to ruthlessly extinguish opposition movements. And while they do it, they will be waving the American flag, chanting patriotic slogans, promising law and order and clutching the Christian cross."
http://www.alternet.org/story/146005/we_stand_on_the_cusp_of_one_of_humanity%27s_most_dangerous_moments?page=entire

Most of Obama's pre-election progressive promises have been broken ~ much like Hitler's were in 1938 after he had gained power during a severe economic crisis. Here's the current list ~ Keeping the Guantánamo torture camp open, Continuing the war against Iraq, Renewing the USA Patriot Act, Continuing "military commission" kangaroo trials, Reserving the right to torture, and Continuing the NSA's "domestic surveillance" program of spying on innocent Americans' emails and phone calls. Note the slow marginalizing of our freedoms against a backdrop of public moral indifference. The dead canary in the mineshaft of public apathy is the growing suicide rate of both active and returning veterans.

In addition, the Obama administration has defended and justified in court almost every moral atrocity that the Bush / Cheney administration perpetrated on international law, human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

Milton Meyer wrote of this same creep of moral apathy in his classic They Thought They Were Free, The Germans 1938 -1945 ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955 )

Excerpt: " What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people. And it became always wider.....the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think....for people who did not want to think anyway gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about.....and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated..... by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us..... "Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures'.....must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.....Each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.
"You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone.....you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.
"That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed ~ "You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father.....could never have imagined."

We Americans are already seemingly in denial of the well over 1.3 million Iraqis who have been killed and displaced in our illegal war and occupation of Iraq which is now being replicated in Afghanistan ~ an occupation which benefits only the coffers of the Military / Industrial complex while economically starving Main Street .

Think of what could have happened if the German people in 1938 refused to be controlled by fear and instead ~ made a moral stand for social justice and altruism versus funding their Military / Industrial Machine's global designs of Empire building ~ while millions of innocent people died. Sound familiar ?

But let me point out that this indifference to the suffering of others is precisely what ultimately made fascism and the Holocaust possible ~ "The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people." Philosopher Theodor Adorno

As Hedges correctly points out ~ " Our mediocre and bankrupt elite is desperately trying to save a system that cannot be saved " because, I would add, the same debt bubble that blew up in 2008 cannot be re-inflated ~ particularly when Main Street is bankrupt and jobless with no manufacturing base while Wall Street remains unregulated, unchecked and unsupervised.

So what's the answer ? Stop our morally out of control Military / Industrial Complex in its tracks by defunding our two illegal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and electing politicians who are committed to that promise in November, 2010.

It may be too late ~ but anything less will be morally suicidal for our staggering Republic.

Allen L Roland
http://allenlrolandsweblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/slow-creep-of-moral-apathy-in-america.html

This weblog is sustained through donations from people like yourself. Please send check or Money Order to Allen L. Roland, PO Box 1221, Sonoma,CA 95476 Also accept Visa, MasterCard and Discover ~ call (707) 935-1908.

Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his weblog and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on www.conscioustalk.net

Freelance Alternative Press Online columnist and psychotherapist Allen L Roland is also available for comments, interviews, speaking engagements and private consultations ( allen@allenroland.com )

ONLY THE TRUTH IS REVOLUTIONARY

What Is The Pope Hiding ?

WHAT IS THE POPE HIDING ?

Amid fresh revelations of obstruction of justice ~ barely one in six Germans have confidence in the Catholic Church. People are leaving the dioceses in record numbers and Papal infallibility has become rightfully laughable. What is the Pope hiding ~ and what is behind the great Catholic cover-up ? : Allen L Roland

Palm Sunday commemorates Christ's triumpant entry into Jerusalem and is the official start of Holy Week ~ which includes the Good Friday re-enactment of Christ's crucifixion and his resurrection on Easter Sunday. But this year, the Vicar of Christ, Pope Benedict XVI, enters Holy Week badly discolored by a clerical abuse scandal that has spread across Europe and even to the Pope's native Germany.

Amid fresh revelations that Pope Benedict XVI mishandled the case of a paedophile priest in his former archdiocese of Munich as well as accusations by Hans Kueng, the dissident Catholic theologian from Switzerland, that Pope Benedict XVI played a key role since 2001 in keeping sex-abuse claims against priests out of the public eye ~ it appears that the Pope is not only fallible but that he is consciously hiding many unpleasant crimes regarding the Catholic church.

As Mike Whitney writes today in ICH ~ " This is obstruction of justice, pure and simple. Benedict better hire a good attorney or he'll wind up in leg-irons. No man is above the law; not even the pope. Religious freedom isn't license to inflict suffering on others."
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25101.htm

Slate's Christopher Hitchens calls it The Great Catholic Cover- Up and pulls no punches when he writes that "The pope's entire career has the stench of evil about it."

Excerpt: " Very much more serious is the role of Joseph Ratzinger, before the church decided to make him supreme leader, in obstructing justice on a global scale. After his promotion to cardinal, he was put in charge of the so-called "Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith" (formerly known as the Inquisition). In 2001, Pope John Paul II placed this department in charge of the investigation of child rape and torture by Catholic priests. In May of that year, Ratzinger issued a confidential letter to every bishop. In it, he reminded them of the extreme gravity of a certain crime. But that crime was the reporting of the rape and torture. The accusations, intoned Ratzinger, were only treatable within the church's own exclusive jurisdiction. Any sharing of the evidence with legal authorities or the press was utterly forbidden. Charges were to be investigated "in the most secretive way ... restrained by a perpetual silence ... and everyone ... is to observe the strictest secret which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office … under the penalty of excommunication." Nobody has yet been excommunicated for the rape and torture of children, but exposing the offense could get you into serious trouble. And this is the church that warns us against moral relativism! (See, for more on this appalling document, two reports in the London Observer of April 24, 2005, by Jamie Doward.)" http://www.slate.com/id/2247861/

The Pope can't hide behind his 'Divine' office much longer and what better time than Easter week for us to face the uncomfortable reality, as Hitchens writes ~ " that the Roman Catholic Church is headed by a mediocre Bavarian bureaucrat once tasked with the concealment of the foulest iniquity, whose ineptitude in that job now shows him to us as a man personally and professionally responsible for enabling a filthy wave of crime."

The truth has a way of eventually bringing down the self righteous, exposing evil and leveling the playing field of humankind and, in that regard, the Catholic Church has long been ripe for plucking.

Allen L Roland
http://allenlrolandsweblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/what-is-pope-hiding.html

This weblog is sustained through donations from people like yourself. Please send check or Money Order to Allen L. Roland, PO Box 1221, Sonoma,CA 95476 Also accept Visa, MasterCard and Discover ~ call (707) 935-1908.

Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his weblog and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on www.conscioustalk.net

Freelance Alternative Press Online columnist and psychotherapist Allen L Roland is also available for comments, interviews, speaking engagements and private consultations ( allen@allenroland.com )

ONLY THE TRUTH IS REVOLUTIONARY