Tales from San Onofre: Of nukes and nudes

We’ve written about Southern California’s San Onofre beach many times before, always in the context of nuclear power.

San Onofre’s located on the northern San Diego County coastline adjacent to the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton, and it houses two nuclear reactors run by San Diego Gas and Electric.

The site is located directly on the beach and along an earthquake faultline, and the Fukushima earthquake-spawned nuclear disaster has sent some spines a-quivering, especially when word came out last year of leaks that forced a shutdown.

Now comes even more bad news, reported by Mitch Blacher of Channel 10 News in San Diego:

An inside source gave Team 10 a picture snapped inside the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) showing plastic bags, masking tape and broom sticks used to stem a massive leaky pipe.

San Onofre owner Southern California Edison (SCE), confirms the picture was taken inside Unit Three, but did not say when. The anonymous source said the picture was taken in December 2012.

Unit Three is the same unit that leaked radiation in January 2012.  SONGS has been shutdown since then as a precaution.

Read the rest.

Blacher’s report comes three days after after this Channel 10 report:

But then there’s another San Onofre controversy, this one reported by Fox 6 News in San Diego:

We guess the common thread is coverups involving catching some rays. . .

Headlines of the day: Looking for patterns?

From the London Telegraph:

Europe’s leaders paralysed as EMU jobless rate hits record high

Eurozone unemployment reached a record 12pc in February and looks certain to ratchet higher as fiscal cuts deepen and manufacturing continues to struggle, raising the spectre of social explosion across southern Europe

From the London Daily Mail:

U.S. sees highest poverty spike since the 1960s, leaving 50 million Americans poor as government cuts billions in spending… so does that mean there’s no way out?

From The Independent:

Pregnant women ‘more likely to miscarry as result of cuts to Government spending’

From The Guardian:

Extreme poverty could be wiped out by 2030, World Bank estimates show

World Bank head speaks of ‘auspicious moment in history’ amid criticism rhetoric is not being matched with detailed policies

From the Irish Independent:

IMF wants faster home repossessions

From Ekathemerini:

Golden Dawn wants death penalty for violent migrants

From Keep Talking Greece:

German policemen at Greek airports to check travellers bound to Germany

Fox Follies: Boob apologizing for boobs

First, the story. From Daniela Altimari of the Hartford Courant:

FOX CT apologized Wednesday for airing what it called “inappropriate file footage” of women during a Morning News report on Women’s Day at the state Capitol.

“The video should never have aired,” the company said in a statement. “FOX CT will publicly apologize on today’s newscasts, as well as through our social media platforms. We are also implementing procedures to keep this from happening in the future.”

The footage, of fully clothed women, focused on their breasts and drew immediate criticism on Facebook, Twitter and other online news sites.

Read the rest.

And the reason for the tempest in a tube:

H/T to Jim Romensko.

Banking on a case of he said/she said

Attorney General Eric Holder, responding to Sen. Charles Grassley:

I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.  And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, putting it all in proper perspective:

You know, if you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you’re going to go to jail. If it happens repeatedly, you may go to jail for the rest of your life. But evidently, if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night, every single individual associated with this. I think that’s fundamentally wrong.

Keiser Report: Horror Bankers Attack!

In one of his best episodes yet, Max exposes the confidence game that is quantitative easing after a delightful little excursion into the surrealism of modern banking praxis with co-host and inamorata Stacy Herbert.

The program notes:

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss Ben ‘Horror Frog’ Bernanke ripping the legs off the global reserve currency in order to defend itself from deflation, while in Europe, the Magritte and Dali of policymakers worry not about bankruptcy as long as the fraud flow fees keep flowing, or F-cubed. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to Simon Rose of SaveOurSavers.co.uk about his recent experience giving evidence to the Treasury Select Committee and about the moochers living on the dole of quantitative easing while the Bank of England sits on one third of the stock of gilts with a ‘cunning’ plan to sell them one day and theoretically make a profit.

Headline of the day: Sin in the City of Angels

From the Los Angeles Times:

Priests’ ecclesiastical missteps treated more sternly than abuse

Files detail cases in which L.A. Archdiocese officials displayed outrage over a priest’s violation of canon law while doing little for victims of his sexual abuse

An esnl PSA: CATNIP: EGRESS TO OBLIVION?

In light of our musings on medical cannabis, we provide an equal time response opportunity in the form of a Sundance-debuting, audience award-winning public service announcement:

The program notes:

Debuting at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and available only on YouTube

Catnip is all the rage with today’s modern feline, but do we really understand it? This film frankly discusses the facts about this controversial substance.

Watch more short films curated by Sundance Institute.

Written and Directed by Jason Willis. Starring Giovanni Dominice, Neil Kight and Terry Easley.

Chemo Chronicles: From fug to fugue

Despite the nausea, constipation, and other sundry physical effects of the cancer chemotherapy we’re undergoing, we’d have to say the worst impact has been the creeping mental miasma.

Regular esnl readers have no doubt detected the results in the decline of frequency and depth of our posts, initially the result of the simple shock that comes from learning your body has turned on itself, followed by the physical shock of two surgeries.

Besides the loss of a cancerous bladder and prostate, we also find ourselves with a new means of draining our kidneys, thanks to the removal of a section of intestine and its reshaping into a conduct to carry urine from our surgically truncated uterers into a puckering pink urine-dripping extrusion [stoma] to the right of our navel.

There was pain after both surgeries [the first via catheter, the second by a large incision now commemorated in in a scar running betwixt navel to pubis, we stopped taking painkillers two days after leaving the hospital, leaving us an unwanted surplus of Percocets.

While the process of getting used to wearing what’s colorfully called an “urostomy bag” proved something of a trial, we managed to adapt to the stoma-drip-catching self-adhesive bags with the minimum of extra trips to the laundry.

But the biopsy showed the cancer, a rather rare micropapillary breed, had spread to at least one lymph node, and hence the four-month chemo regime, starting with our first double hit 8 January.

Of our three monthly sessions, the first is the real shit-kicker, a double dose of chemical cocktails administered over five hours. The nausea began on the second day, and lingered two more days, kept in relative check by another two-part chemical cocktail. Nine days of constipation began on the second day after the session, adding a whole new level of discomfort and ended only by a trip to the emergency room.

What still lingered was a peculiar sort of mental lethargy, a lingering mentational malady which allowed us to read a dozen hours a day but without the fuel to synthesize my responses into writing. Hence the decline in frequency of posting.

Our progeny and several friends had been urging us to get a medical marijuana letter, so we finally did, overcoming our natural inclination to add our name to yet another list.

So we became a member of a local medical marijuana club, and have now procured our first-ever California-legal weed. The only previous legal drugs we’d experienced had been our first dose of LSD in 1966, swallowed the night before it became illegal in Nevada, and hashish we bought at an Amsterdam coffee house in 2006 on the same trip where we bought a batch of just-plucked Psilocybin mushrooms procured from one of those now-closed Smart Shops legally offering both ’shrooms and live peyote cacti.

We mention this because we’re no strangers to cannabis, and we’ve done more than our share [1966-72] of psychedelics, with 2006 being our last experience of the latter.

We learned a lot about mind-altering drugs during our three-year service as scribe and block print carver for a Tantric Hindu artist and non-guru guru. The Tantrics and Shavites have developed a Prime Directive of cannabis use which we still follow: Never consume or ingest cannabis within three hours of eating. The reason is simple: Cannabis pulls blood into the brain, and when you consume while you’re digesting you create a conflict, with blood craved by the brain diverted to the digestive system, and leading to lethargy and sleepiness.

29 January 2013, Panasonic DMZ-ZS19, ISO 400, 12.5 mm, 1/50 sec, f5

With a chemo-sensitized gut, we followed the rules today, and the result has been a distinct lifting of the mental lethargy, using the fruits of our visit to the Berkeley club a block from Casa esnl: A free Rhino Pellet [a cinnamon cookie made with cannabis-infused butter], an oral nocturnal cannabis and essential oil tincture [left], and a pinch of hash to brighten up our minor remnant of some seven-year-old Humboldt homegrown.

Our stomach is calm, our energy and mood increased to the point we tackled some serious house cleaning/organizing, and we’ve also done more posts than usual.

Intimations of other benefits

We also bear in mind that a growing body of research indicates that a non-psychoactive component of cannabis inhibits growth in cancer cells.

As San Francisco Chronicle reporter Victoria Colliver wrote last 18 September:

A growing body of early research shows a compound found in marijuana – one that does not produce the plant’s psychotropic high – seems to have the ability to “turn off” the activity of a gene responsible for metastasis in breast and other types of cancers.

Two scientists at San Francisco’s California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute first released data five years ago that showed how this compound – called cannabidiol – reduced the aggressiveness of human breast cancer cells in the lab.

>snip<

“The preclinical trial data is very strong, and there’s no toxicity. There’s really a lot of research to move ahead with and to get people excited,” said Sean McAllister, who along with scientist Pierre Desprez, has been studying the active molecules in marijuana – called cannabinoids – as potent inhibitors of metastatic disease for the past decade.

Red the rest.

The National Cancer Institute website is less adulatory on its Cannabis and Cannabinoids web page, noting only this:

No clinical trials of Cannabis as a treatment for cancer in humans were identified in a PubMed search; however, a single small study of intratumoral injection of delta-9-THC in patients with recurrent glioblastoma multiforme reported potential antitumoral activity.

Donald Abrams, chief of oncology at UCSF physician said this to NBC News:

“If this plant were discovered in the Amazon today, scientists would be falling all over each other to be the first to bring it to market.”

And consider this, from the Science Updates blog of Cancer Research UK:

Through many detailed experiments, handily summarised in this recent article in the journal Nature Reviews Cancer, scientists have discovered that various cannabinoids (both natural and synthetic) have a wide range of effects in the lab, including:

• Triggering cell death, through a mechanism called apoptosis
• Stopping cells from dividing
• Preventing new blood vessels from growing into tumours
• Reducing the chances of cancer cells spreading through the body, by stopping cells from moving or invading neighbouring tissue
• Speeding up the cell’s internal ‘waste disposal machine’ – a process known as autophagy – which can lead to cell death

All these effects are thought to be caused by cannabinoids locking onto the CB1 and CB2 cannabinoid receptors. It also looks like cannabinoids can exert effects on cancer cells that don’t involve cannabinoid receptors, although it isn’t yet clear exactly what’s going on there.

Read the rest.

And go here [PDF] for a 2010 metareview of medical studies, including Multiple Sclerosis, chronic pain, glaucoma, HIV/AIDS, nausea, brain cancer, and more.

And another wrapup’s here.

The bottom line: Since we’re engaged in fighting cancer, we’ll take all the help we can get.

[Oh, and as for psilocybin, see here and here.]

What the hell is it with the Catholic church?

Now we’re not the religious sort, and we think the notion that eating round crackers is an act sacred cannibalism is a bit daft, but we’re also sure that some of the things we believe, seen from the perspective of the future or by a visitor from Alpha Centauri would seem equally loopy.

So let’s forget things theological and look only at things criminal, like using the power of the priestly office as a handy dandy lever for exploiting the orifices of small children, all whilst professing to practice sacred celibacy — something which seems to happen a lot.

In a sane world, priests who do such things should be defrocked and handed over to secular authorities, but the reality has been something quite different.

Rather than strip the fucking Fathers of their office, the church often plays a shell game, shifting them from parish to parish, archdiocese to archdiocese, apparently to give them the opportunity to sample as many prepubescent bodies as possible. What other reason could there be? If the bishops and cardinals really wanted to scupper their ruts, then they could banish them to isolated, nearly empty monasteries, of which the church owns plenty.

Consider the latest nasty revelations from Los Angeles, where the central player in a vicious little coverup was a hugely popular cardinal.

From Victoria Kim, Ashley Powers, and Harriet Ryan of the Los Angeles Times:

Fifteen years before the clergy sex abuse scandal came to light, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and a top advisor discussed ways to conceal the molestation of children from law enforcement, according to internal Catholic church records released Monday.

The archdiocese’s failure to purge pedophile clergy and reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement has previously been known. But the memos written in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese’s chief advisor on sex abuse cases, offer the strongest evidence yet of a concerted effort by officials in the nation’s largest Catholic diocese to shield abusers from police. The newly released records, which the archdiocese fought for years to keep secret, reveal in church leaders’ own words a desire to keep authorities from discovering that children were being abused.

In the confidential letters, filed this month as evidence in a civil court case, Curry proposed strategies to prevent police from investigating three priests who had admitted to church officials that they abused young boys. Curry suggested to Mahony that they prevent them from seeing therapists who might alert authorities and that they give the priests out-of-state assignments to avoid criminal investigators.

Read the rest.

We suggest that the proper place for such scofflaws as Mahony is the general population of one of the state’s prisons, where inmates provide a special form of ministration to folks who sexually abuse small children.

Cardinal sins indeed.

UPDATE: It’s happened in Germany, too. And this year.

What would MLK think of Barack Obama?

First, consider this excerpt from his final speech, delivered at Mason Temple in Memphis 3 April 1968, the night before his assassination. Then consider the deplorable record of the Obama administration:

Next, consider this speech, delivered almost exactly a year earlier [4 April 1967] to the gathering of meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in Manhattan, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence.” Then consider the case of a chief executive who arrogates to himself the powers of judge, jury, and executioner of those he declares enemies of the state:

Headline of the day: Now that’s an original sinner!

From the Connecticut Post:

Sources: Cross-dressing meth priest liked sex in rectory

Quote of the day: Fiscal cliffs and sunny days

James Howard Kunstler at his acerbic best, writing on the meaninglessness of the “fiscal cliff” crisis at his blog, Clusterfuck Nation:

Do people like Barack Obama and John Boehner think we’re going to re-start another round of suburban expansion (a.k.a. the housing market)? That’s largely what the old economy was based on, and what Wall Street fed off of parasitically the past twenty years. That is so over. Do they believe that when absolutely every task in America is computerized there will be any gainful work outside of a sort of janitorial IT to tend all the computers. We’ve already seen what happens with the telephone system: after 30 years of techno-innovation in “communications,” it’s now impossible to get a live human being on the phone and robots call you incessantly during the dinner hour. Anyway, we don’t really have the energy resources to supply the electricity for all this crap indefinitely, or probably even another twenty years.

All the tendencies and trends in contemporary life are reaching their limits at the same time, and as they do things will crack up and fall apart, whether it involves the despotic reach of a government, or a tyrannical corporation, or a hedge fund server farm stuffed with algo-crunching computers sucking the life out of every honest market transaction until the markets are zombies. The euphoria that greeted the end of the fiscal cliff ritual has settled back into the feckless collective state-of-mind that we call “bullish.” It’s all noise and the madness of crowds now. And black swans shitting on your head some sunny day.

And for those who don’t get his final “some sunny day” reference, here’s the closing scene from Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb:

Headline of the day: Getting a rise out of Utah

From the Salt Lake Tribune:

Lehi scraps Morning Glory Road name due to erection connection

Petition » Software company feared visions of male anatomy would distract consumers

Newspeak and the semantic antics of spin

RT’s Marina Portnaya tackles one of our favorite bugbears, the surrender of the American news media to the neologisms of political spinmeisters:

And don’t you just love “low information voters”? As opposed to, say, ignorant voters? But then that latter term would rightly direct some of the blame towards the news media, which do so much to insure that very ignorance. . .

Quote of the day: Oarless boating up fecal creek

From James Howard Kunstler, writing at his delightfully named blog, Clusterfuck Nation:

We’re now entering the seventh year of a smoke-and-mirrors, extend-and-pretend, can-kicking phase of history in which everything possible is being done to conceal the true condition of the economy, with the vain hope of somehow holding things together until a miracle rescue remedy — some new kind of cheap or even free energy — comes on the scene to save all our complex arrangements from implosion. The chief device to delay the reckoning has been accounting fraud in banking and government, essentially misreporting everything on all balance sheets and in statistical reports to give the appearance of well-being where there is actually grave illness, like the cosmetics and prosthetics Michael Jackson used in his final years to pretend he still had a face on the front of his head.

The secondary tactic has been intervention in markets wherever possible and the intemperate manipulation of interest rates, all of which has the effect of defeating the principle purpose of markets: price discovery — the process by which the true value of things is established based on what people will freely pay. For instance the price of money-on-loan. The functionally less-than-zero percent interest rates on money loaned between giant institutions like central banks and their client “primary dealers” (the Too Big To Fails) essentially pays these outfits for borrowing, which is obviously a distortion in the natural order of things (because it violates the second law of thermodynamics: entropy) as well as an arrant racket. The campaign of intervention and manipulation also deeply impairs the other purpose of markets, capital formation, by the resultant mismanagement and misallocation of whatever real surplus wealth remains in this society. What’s more, it allows these TBTF banks to become ever-bigger monsters which hold everybody else hostage by threatening to crash the system if they are molested or interfered with.

Which brings us to the third tactic for pretending everything is all right: complete lack of enforcement and regulation by all the authorities charged with making sure that rules are followed in money matters. This includes the alphabet soup of agencies from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, to the Federal Housing Authority, and so on (the list of responsible parties is very long) not to mention the Big Kahunas: the US Department of Justice, and the federal and state courts. Aside from Bernie Madoff and a few Hedge Fund mavericks nipped for insider trading and arrant fraud, absolutely nobody in the TBTF banking community has been prosecuted or even charged for the monumental swindles of our time, while the regulators have behaved in ways that would be considered criminally negligent at best, and sheer racketeering at less-than-best, in any self-respecting polity. The crime runs so deep and thick through all the levels of money management and regulation that one can say the whole system has gone rogue, up to the President of the US himself, the chief enforcement officer of the land, who has not lifted a finger to discipline any of the parties involved. The  fact that Jon Corzine, late of MF Global, is still at large says it all.

Fourth-and-finally, the news media in league with the public relations industry have undertaken a campaign of happy talk to persuade the public that everything is okay and all the machinations cited above are kosher so that there is absolutely no political agitation over these crimes against their own interest, which is to say, the public interest. The PR/media happy talk racket is also aimed at maintaining various subsidiary  fictions about the economy, such as the fibs that the housing market is bouncing back, that “recovery” is ongoing, and that the channel-stuffing monkeyshines of the car industry amount to booming sales of new vehicles. Perhaps the most pernicious big lie is the bundle of fairy tales surrounding shale oil and shale gas, including the idea that America will shortly become “energy independent” or that we have “a hundred years of shale gas” as President Obama was mis-advised to tell the nation. It is pernicious because it gives us collectively an excuse to do nothing about changing our behavior or preparing for the new arrangements in daily life that the future will require of us.

Bono: Do they know it’s Christmas (in America)?

Poor Bono, the guy just can’t get no respect. First punk poet John Cooper Clarke takes him down on the latest Keiser Report [see below], and now comes this subversive takedown by TheJuiceMedia.com, the folks who bring you Rap News:

From the program notes:

In gratitude for your patience, as we gear up for new content and fresh juice in 2013, we send out this Christmas greeting to all of our friends and subscribers:

This festive season, while many of us enjoy feeling the bosoms of our families, we at Juice Rap News feel it is important to remember those much much much much less fortunate than us. And in the time honoured tradition of misguided Western pop charity singles, we invited the legendary Irish piece of shit, (Cui) Bono to resurrect the execrable post colonial anthem ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ in which he featured during the 1980’s.

Written by Giordano & Hugo; performed by Giordano; vocals by Damian Tapley and Luke Ferris from ME (the original ungoogleables).

Keiser Report: Ho, Ho, Freaking Ho!

Max and Stacy bring us a Christmas special, replete with punk poetry, high dudgeon, and existential absurdity. Come for the coat, stay for the laughs:

RT’s program notes:

In this episode, Max Keiser first talks to punk poet John Cooper Clarke about Who Stole Bongo’s Trousers, private equity rock stars, the music business and onesies as the next big thing in fashion. In the second half, Max is joined by Stacy to talk about the ‘poverty barons’ financed by the British taxpayer.

Headline of the day: Gee, who’d a-thunk it?

From Medical Daily:

No, Teen Marijuana Use Doesn’t Cause Brain Damage, But Alcohol Does

A new study has found that while marijuana had no effect on the health of teenagers’ brain tissue, alcohol did

Quote of the day: He’s shocked [Yeah, right]

From California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, quoted in the New York Times:

“It’s shocking, from my perspective, the number of people that we all know who are recreational marijuana users. These are incredibly upstanding citizens: Leaders in our community, and exceptional people. Increasingly, people are willing to share how they use it and not be ashamed of it.”

Headline of the day: Retirees as ‘useless eaters’

From the London Mirror, reporting on remarks to parliament by Lord Bichard, a member of the House of Lords:

Work for charity… or lose your pension: Fury at lord’s claim that retired people are “burden on the state”

We leave the comments to another Brit, Mark McGowan, the Artist Taxi Driver: