A Letter to Rachel Maddow: Quoting from an MSNBC story: "Crucial to the effort to regain control over the Fukushima plant is laying a new power line to the plant, allowing operators to restore cooling systems. The operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., missed a deadline late Thursday but said Friday that workers hoped to complete the effort in 10 to 15 hours, said nuclear safety agency spokesman Minoru Ohgoda. But the utility is not sure the cooling systems will still function. If they don't, electricity won't help."

This is, in my non expert opinion, Chernobyl on steroids. What the hell will they connect electricity to? Rachel so well has shown the ugliness and destruction of those plants. They are, understatedly, a total MESS. It would be one thing if it were just another area but it's NOT it is a NUCLEAR area and nuclear reactors that are destroyed. A prediction: ALL of those reactors will be encased ultimately by the Japanese in cement with Borax as Chernobyl was forever. The area surrounding them will be uninhabitable for decades maybe centuries. There will possibly not be at least part of a northern Japan that will exist for human habitation. I cannot say how much I HOPE I am in error, I am wrong and I eat my words. I would love nothing more than to do so.

The optimism does a disservice. People MUST be given the truth for their own physical safety. I believe a cloud will pay a visit to our west coast relatively soon -- not as badly as Japan but who needs it AND if they do not get it under control the plants will still be spewing radioactive material and STILL incurring a multi-meltdown possibility the resulting danger of which will grow exponentially, over years. There will in the future be an increase in deaths from cancer (thyroid, leukemia, bone) especially in the young, the sick and the elderly. There will, of course, be the inevitable birth defects in future generations. Again, I surely want to be in error. The risk of nuclear power is simply not worth it. When it runs well it is wonderfully clean BUT it takes only ONE failure whether human or natural to create an epic catastrophe.

On another bleak front: A THIRD war is opening up in the Middle East similar to Iraq. IF the UN (the US, France, Britain, Germany, etc.) wins we will be there for DECADES with the US in the lead and they will resent our footprint. One only need hear one of history's greats our own Secretary of Defense Gates: He said IF we put another soldier in another country in the Middle East we are crazy. I think we are CRAZY. If we don't win, well, I cannot even contemplate that! And how about that deficit?

President Obama's policy on this one has been sorely lacking as the military industrial complex and neocons wield their ugly might again. Who can stop them? I believe, if one in halls of power advocates for war THEY must physically fight it, Congress should declare it and there should be a draft. They, of course, will not do that as the American public by all polls wants OUT of war in the Middle East and would in Vietnamesque fashion revolt.

If we are dropping bombs on Libya for humanitarian purposes then why did we not go into Dafur? We all know why. Oil, money and the power it bestows are unstoppable. Humanitarian rationales are a Trojan Horse!

UPDATE: Libya Declared a cease fire. This story is still developing. I would LOVE to eat my words on this one!