Uncharted Territory

by J.S. Holland

Some people have expressed curiosity about my seeming cognitive dissonance re: Fukushima. One minute, I'm retweeting the latest horrific news revelations about how the radiation danger is far worse than the media previously led us to believe. Then in the next instant, I'm bouncing around being ultra-cheerful and optimistic about the future - and talking about plans I'm making as if there really is gonna be a future.

Bad news first:

Everything you have been told is wrong. Despite weeks of press conferences and press releases assuring the public that there was no danger of total meltdown, TEPCO now admits that the reactors were in meltdown from day one, but they "wanted to avoid public panic."

All the misleading charts, phony statistics, and calm-you-down stories people tell, like "it's no different than an extra X-ray" are deliberately designed to placate the public. The fact is this: radioactive dust, steam, smoke, fumes, and other particulate matter have been emanating from the Fukushima nuclear reactors all this time, and continue to do so now. Intensely radioactive molten fuel and contaminated water are leaking out of the reactors even now. It's going into the ocean, the soil, the groundwater, the air, and by extension, the jet stream and the rain. And there's no sign that it's going to stop, because when it comes to a "China Syndrome", once the genie is out of the bottle that's pretty much it. It's in our food, our milk, our rain, our tap water, and our bodies, and it's not going away by itself. (Fortunately, something can be done about it, but we'll discuss that in a future post.)

When you hear some shill tell you to relax because Iodine-131 has only a half-life of 8 days, ask them if they know what a "half-life" is. Chances are, they can't actually explain the concept, and they think it means that Iodine-131 becomes harmless and/or magically disappears after 8 days. Then remind them that Iodine-131 is by far the least harmful of all the highly radioactive particles flooding into the enviroment: Curium-244 has a half-life of 18.11 years, Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years, Plutonium-238 has a half-life of 87.7 years, and Plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,563 years. Obviously, the less radioactive particles that exist on Earth, the better - and yet it's being spontaneously generated right now by this unholy molten fireball that has grown so hot that nothing can contain it and no one can approach it.

Worse still, the Japanese are using Plutonium MOX, a sort-of super-toxic speedball that is among the most dangerous substances on Earth. Once a place gets infected with this crap, you can never return to that place again, not in your lifetime, and probably not in the lifetime of the human race as we know it. There are unconfirmed rumors that Technetium-99 (half-life of 211,000 years) and Plutonium-244 (half-life of 80 million years) have also been released into the environment from Japan.


The good news:

You're still alive. Not only that, but you're intact and feeling fine and not suffering. You have plenty of good years ahead of you and there's no barriers at all keeping you from using them wisely, other than those you have put in place yourself.

As horrible as everything I just laid out is (and believe me, there's plenty more I didn't even bother going into), the human race has faced far worse. You, in fact, face far worse every time you step into a car and get on the interstate. If you told you I wanted you to get inside a projectile that was made of soft metal, plastic and glass, and send you hurtling in it at speeds of 55-75 mph, does that sound very safe to you? What if I told you that your projectile had to stay within very narrow boundaries that are only slightly bigger than the projectile itself, and that you would be surrounded by other projectiles piloted by irrational, uneducated, substance-abusing morons going even faster than you? Sounds insane, doesn't it? But you do it every day. So do I.

There comes a point when you've gleaned enough information about the Fukushima situation, that you no longer need focus on each little detail of each new grisly news revelation. I have long since reached that point, and only continue to speak on the matter occasionally for the sake of my brethren who remain unconvinced that we are at a turning point in global history here. But listen, friend, this turning point is a good thing if you want it to be so, because what we are witnessing here is the end of one era and the birth of a new one. Avoid the chaos and stay on your own path and stick to your game plan. Now more than ever.

It's important not to get overly entrenched in the bad news about the Japanese radiation - or, for that matter, anything else. For some of us, that's a hard trick to learn. After all, we want to be as well-informed about "what's really going on" as possible, don't we? We don't want to be one of the "sheeple", right? But I say to you that there are two levels of sheeple - one, there's the people who stay ignorant of the ugly truths behind the news, but two, there's the people who glimpse the truth but instead of benefiting from the wisdom, they let it ruin their life (people who spend way too much time on conspiracy-theory forums are usually among this second category.) Many lazy louts are just looking for a reason to "give up" on life, and the latest depressing headlines of doom and disaster are always grist for their mill. Others use bad news as a crutch to explain and justify their own apathy.

But every passing moment is a chance to turn it all around.