Moody’s cuts Japan rating, blames politics…

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

(Reuters) – Moody’s Investors Service cut its rating on Japan’s government debt by one notch to Aa3 on Wednesday, blaming a build-up of debt since the 2009 global recession and revolving-door political leadership that has hampered effective economic strategies.

Japan is preparing to elect its sixth leader in five years to replace unpopular Prime Minister Naoto Kan, under fire for his handling of the response to a March tsunami and subsequent radiation crisis at a crippled nuclear power plant.

The downgrade, while not out of the blue, served as another reminder of the debt burdens that nearly all of the world’s major advanced economies shoulder. The United States lost its top-tier AAA rating from Standard & Poor’s earlier this month, and Moody’s warned in June that it may downgrade Italy as Europe’s sovereign debt crisis festers.

Fukushima Now Radiating Everyone: ‘Unspeakable’ Reality ‘Will Impact All Of Humanity’…

~what’s scary is the fact that the Internet community for the most part has been saying this since the accident happened and people laughed~jude

Australia’s CBS exposed the “unspeakable” realities of the Japanese catastrophe in its 60 Minutes program Sunday night during which leading nuclear scientist Dr. Michio Kaku said radiation from Fukushima will impact of all of humanity. The nuclear energy power industry violation of the right to health is apparent throughout the new Australian report.

“In fact the whole world will be exposed from the radiation from Fukushima,” Dr. Kaku told CBS reporter Liz Hayes.

Related articles

• You: Fukushima fallout said 30 times Hiroshima’s (search.japantimes.co.jp)
• Fukushima disaster: residents may never return to radiation-hit homes | World news | The Guardian (habwwe.wordpress.com)
• China Finds 100,000 SQ Miles of Radiation In Pacific Ocean Up 300 Times Higher Than Normal (pprnnews.wordpress.com)
• Dr. Michio Kaku: Fukushima and radiation in food supply, interviewed by Cindy Sheehan (dandelionsalad.wordpress.com)
• Fukushima Now Radiating Everyone: ‘Unspeakable’ Reality ‘Will Impact All Of Humanity’. CBS 60 minutes (worldnewsrecord.wordpress.com)

Who in the world is most in debt?…

Image via Wikipedia

As bad as the Greek financial crisis seems, the land of Pericles is only the second-most-indebted nation in the world. The government of Japan holds top honors: Its debt equals 234% of its GDP. The reason Japan hasn’t been in financial-crisis mode is that it owes most of that money to itself. By contrast, the U.S., seventh on our list, owes $4.4 trillion to foreigners. To China alone Uncle Sam owes a cool $1.1 trillion. Of course, when measured by total debt, the U.S. has the biggest IOU: $14.3 trillion.

By Brian Dumaine / Graphic by Nicolas Rapp

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/08/09/who-in-the-world-is-most-in-debt/

Related articles

• Think US debt is high? Take a look at Europe’s most indebted nations. (csmonitor.com)
• Op-Ed Contributors: The Downgrading of a Debtor Nation (nytimes.com)
• Just Another Step Towards Hell? (lewrockwell.com)

Fukushima is the greatest nuclear and environmental disaster in human history …

by Steven C. Jones

Past Peak Oil – Why Time Is Now Short…

The Severity of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster: Comparing Chernobyl and Fukushima…

By Prof. Matthew Penney and Prof. Mark Selden

On April 12, 2011 the Japanese government officially announced that the severity of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster had reached level 7, the highest on the International Nuclear Event Scale. Before Fukushima, the only level 7 case was the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, whose 25^th anniversary was marked on April 26. Two and a half months after the 3.11 catastrophe, the first to affect multiple reactors, TEPCO and the Japanese government continue to struggle to bring the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi under control. TEPCO estimates that the problems could be solved in six to nine months now appearing extraordinarily optimistic and plans have been announced to close nuclear power plants deemed of particularly high risk such as the Hamaoka facility.

Fukushima explosion

 

Following the upgrade to level 7, Japan’s Prime Minister’s Office released a statement comparing Fukushima and Chernobyl. (Source)

The Japanese government argues that apart from children who contracted thyroid cancer from drinking contaminated milk, there have been no health effects among ordinary citizens as a result of Chernobyl radiation. Is this really the case? Given the Japanese government’s precautions against thyroid cancer in children, is there reason to believe that the Fukushima accident will take no lives except those exposed to the highest dangers in the plant clean-up? (Source)

On April 15, Kyodo, Japan’s major news service, ran an English language piece by Russian scientist Alexey V. Yablokov (source).  Yablokov’s stern warnings about the threat of even low levels of radiation had been ignored by the major media but was reported in Japanese in the Nishi Nippon Shimbun. (Source)

The English only Kyodo piece, however, ties Yablokov’s extensive Chernobyl research with the unfolding Fukushima crisis. Under the headline “How to minimize consequences of the Fukushima catastrophe,” Yablokov observed that

The analysis of the health impact of radioactive land contamination by the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, made by Professor Chris Busby (the European Committee of Radiation Risk) based on official Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology data, has shown that over the next 50 years it would be possible to have around 400,000 additional cancer patients within a 200-kilometer radius of the plant.

This number can be lower and can be even higher, depending on strategies to minimize the consequences. Underestimation is more dangerous for the people and for the country than overestimation.

Based on the Chernobyl experience, he made the following recommendations:

Is The Human Race Doomed? Deutsche Bank On “One The Most Important (Future) Turning Points In History”…

by JOE

Discussing population dynamics in elite (or is that elitist, let’s just call it Wall Street) circles has always had an aura of taboo about it, due to the inevitable degeneration of any conversation into Malthusian rhetoric, especially if one of the speakers had had a little too much to drink. And for better or worse, name-dropping Malthus does not garner brownie points, nor will it lead to another horrendous straight to HBO faux morality tale about this or that. That stigma, however (and luckily) has not prevented Deutsche Bank’s Sanjeev Sanyal (yes, there are people at DB who do think originally and whose day is not taken up by trips to and fro Englewood Cliffs) from penning a must read macro analysis titled “The End of Population Growth” which we will discuss more in depth shortly, but wanted to bring readers’ attention to one particular chart: namely that comparing world fertility rates in 1950-1955 and 2010-2015. The surprising implication of the below chart leads Sanyal to declare that the period set to begin in just 10 years “will be one of the most important turning points in history” simply because: “the human race will no longer be replacing itself by the early 2020s. Population growth will continue for a few more decades because of momentum from the age structure and people living longer but, reproductively speaking, our species will no longer be growing.” And since global reproduction will not be net additive, it will be net subtractive… and on a long-enough timeline the world’s population will drop to zero…

From Deutsche Bank:

Some fascinating clarification:

Fukushima Reactor 1 Fuel Rods Fully Exposed, Reactor 4 In Danger Of Collapsing…

Submitted by Tyler Durden

Remember Fukushima? The exploded nuclear power plant that everyone was talking about two months ago and now the media has imposed a complete blackout on, because out of print/page views, means out of radioactive spewage, right? Wrong. According to the latest update from a now government funded TEPCO, “fuel rods are fully exposed in the No. 1 reactor at its stricken Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, setting back the utility’s plan to resolve the crisis. The water level is 1 meter (3.3 feet) below the base of the fuel assembly, Junichi Matsumoto, a general manager at the utility known as Tepco, told reporters at a briefing in Tokyo. Melted fuel has dropped to the bottom of the pressure vessel and is still being cooled, Matsumoto said. The company doesn’t know how long the rods have been exposed, he said.” And apparently even more skeptics are emerging: ““I’ve been saying from the beginning the water tomb plan won’t work,” said Tadashi Narabayashi, a professor of nuclear engineering at Hokkaido University. “Tepco must work on a water circulation cooling system as soon as possible. They’ve been going round and round in circles and now realize this is what they need to do.” And the kicker: “It’s unlikely the situation has worsened with the discovery the rods are exposed because they’ve probably been out of the water since shortly after the crisis started, Narabayashi said.“ Which means that the situtation has indeed been dire from the very beginning, that TEPCO and the government have been lying, that radiation has been spewing, and that prevalent radiation is likely far higher than most have conceived. Pretty much as was predicted on Zero Hedge long ago.

http://www.zerohedge.com/

Related articles

• Greater than expected damage seen at Japan reactor (foxnews.com)
• REMEMBER FUKUSHIMA? Workers Discover Exposed Rods, And Damage Worse Than Thought (businessinsider.com)
• Reactor 1 fuel rods melted, sank to bottom (search.japantimes.co.jp)
• New water leaks at Japan nuclear plant (calgaryherald.com)

HAARP Magnetometer Data Shows JAPAN EARTHQUAKE Was Induced…Not conspiracy, please read…

IMPORTANT NEWS FOR THE WHOLE WORLD
PRESS Core – March 15th, 2011

The United States Air Force and Navy has provided a visual insight into what caused the 9.0 magnitude off of Japan on March 11, 2011 at 05:46:23 UTC. The image above was downloaded from the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) website. It is a time-frequency spectrogram, which shows the frequency content of signals recorded by the HAARP Induction Magnetometer. This instrument, provided by the University of Tokyo, measures temporal variations in the geomagnetic field (Earth’s magnetosphere) in the ULF (ultra-low frequency) range of 0-5 Hz. Notions have been added to the image to show you what was happening the day the Japan earthquake and tsunami struck.

By looking at the accompanying HAARP spectrum chart above you can see when the 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck – red line drawn vertically – and what was happening before and after the earthquake. What you can also see is a constant ULF frequency of 2.5 Hz being recorded by the magnetometer. The ULF 2.5 Hz frequency is evidence of an induced earthquake. The chart recorded this constant before, during and after the 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck. On March 11, 2011 the 2.5 Hz ULF frequency was being emitted and recorded from 0:00 hours to about 10:00 hours – or for 10 hours. We know for a fact that the Japan earthquake lasted only a few minutes so why was the earthquake signature frequency (2.5 Hz) being recorded for 10 hours on the morning of March 11, 2011? Because a HAARP phased array antenna system was broadcasting (transmitting) the 2.5Hz ULF frequency and it triggered the Japan earthquake and ensuing tsunami.

If you go to HAARP’s official website you can see for yourself that the 2.5 Hz ULF frequency wasn’t only being broadcated for 10 hours, it was constantly being broadcasted for 2 days prior to the earthquake. Broadcasting began on March 8, 2011, just before midnight as you can see on HAARP’s website page - http://maestro.haarp.alaska.edu/cgi-bin/scmag/disp-scmag.cgi?20110308 Click on the Next Day link to see that the earthquake inducing 2.5 Hz ULF frequency was being broadcasted for the entire days of March 9, 2011 and March 10, 2011. Even though the signature frequency of an earthquake was shown throughout March 9 and March 10 there were no constant earthquakes occurring off the east coast of Japan.

It’s started…Videos Uploaded to Google Video Will Be Removed Next Month…VIP!!!

Image via CrunchBase