This time it will kill us all, FOR SURE! We promise!

Recently, Asia Times ran this story recapping and analyzing what actually happened at Fukushima during the minutes of the March earthquake that led to the even greater disaster as the tsunami hit. The entire Fukushima site was in trouble with safety inspectors for years, coming to a head in 2002, but problems persisted for years afterward. Even without the one-two punch of the natural disasters, it seems likely from this story that a serious accident at Fukushima was merely a matter of time. Also, if you missed it last week, the IEEE has republished blog posts made by an anonymous cleanup worker who operates a robot in the facility to remove materials where the radiation is too high for humans. The posts, which were extremely critical of TEPCO management of the cleanup operations, were deleted from their original website after drawing attention, but the IEEE recovered the posts and republished them to much attention. Last week, Naoto Kan, the prime minister of Japan, resigned because of criticism of the government’s handling of the crisis.

If you get your news from the American news media, you probably didn’t hear this tidbit: the U.S. government has negotiated an agreement to leave up to 25,000 troops in Afghanistan until 2024. You hear a lot about the troops coming home in 2014, but not so much about the “special advisors” staying for at least another full decade in the single biggest waste of money and materiel in the history of humankind. That, of course, presumes that we haven’t completely bankrupted ourselves before then.

PZ Meyers had this story about a “pastor” who thinks it would be great if there could be a national registry of all of us atheists just like they have for “convicted sex offenders, ex-convicts, terrorist cells…” and other undesirables. It would be for “information purposes”:

Now , many (especially the atheists ) , may ask “Why do this , what’s the purpose ?” Duhhh , Mr. Atheist , for the same purpose many States put the names and photos of convicted sex offenders and other ex-felons on the I-Net – to INFORM the public ! I mean , in the City of Miramar , Florida , where I live , the population is approx. 109,000 . My family and I would sure like to know how many of those 109,000 are ADMITTED atheists ! Perhaps we may actually know some . In which case we could begin to witness to them and warn them of the dangers of atheism . Or perhaps they are radical atheists , whose hearts are as hard as Pharaoh’s , in that case , if they are business owners , we would encourage all our Christian friends , as well as the various churches and their congregations NOT to patronize them as we would only be “feeding” Satan .

Gee, wouldn’t it just be easier if we all wore a patch or something?

Former BBC producer Jo Glanville has written an in-depth piece for the London Review of Books chronicling the battle over the future of one of the (if not THE) pre-eminent broadcasting institutions, the BBC World Service. While the mission of the World Service unquestionably needs to be re-evaluated in the era of the Internet, British domestic politics may have more to do with its fate than the information age.

Anything else I can help you feel bad about today? I’ve got plenty of links.

And when it comes to the Pentagon, that’s just a start. Massive expansion in all directions has been its m.o. since 9/11. Its soaring budget hit about $700 billion for fiscal year 2010 (when you include a war-fighting supplemental bill of $33 billion) — an increase of only 4.7% in otherwise budget-slashing times — and is now projected to hit $726 billion in fiscal year 2011. Some experts claim, however, that the real figure may come closer to the trillion-dollar mark when all aspects of national security are factored in. Not surprisingly, it has taken over a spectrum of State Department-controlled civilian activities, ranging from humanitarian relief and development (aka “nation-building”) to actual diplomacy. And don’t forget its growing roles as a domestic-disaster manager and a global arms dealer, or even as a Green Revolution energy innovator. You could certainly think of the Pentagon as the Blob on the American horizon, and yet, looking around, you might hardly be aware of the ways your country continues to be militarized.

This is a photograph of my mother holding Charlotte when she was about four and a half months old. As we were visiting with my mother that weekend, indeed, as I took this photograph, George W. Bush was on television announcing that American troops were beginning their invasion of Afghanistan.

Yesterday was the ninth anniversary of that moment. This is Charlotte now:

For all but eighteen weeks of her life, this country has been fighting a war that had no legitimate purpose, no clear goals or objectives, has bankrupted the richest nation in the history of the world, resulted in the deaths of over 2000 coalition troops and countless thousands of Afghan civilians (though nowhere near as many as in Iraq), and imperiled the fundamental civil liberties on which this country was founded. My child was born in a country where peace and prosperity were still the norm, but before she could even walk those conditions would cease to be, possibly forever. And even though the torch of power was handed from the instigator of this conflict, a puppet of the rich and powerful who are the only ones to genuinely benefit from it, that power was handed to a man whose cynical calculus led him to believe that it would be in his own political benefit to continue and even expand the war.

Nine years hence it would not surprise me one whit to revisit this with a picture of my daughter fully grown and this quagmire still in progress. The “Global War On Terror” from its very inception has been nothing but a way for the security state apparatus to create a self-sustaining set of conditions after the collapse of the charade of the Cold War, and as such can never be won, can never be demonstrated for its inherent fallacies, and can be used to justify anything the state wishes to pursue as its prerogative from war to secret tribunals to torture to surveillance to total authoritarianism. If she is lucky, the state will not have imposed conscription to continue to feed its need for fresh troops to throw at the situation, but the balance of her entire life will be spent living with the consequences of something that began on a day that otherwise seemed so joyful and hopeful in her world.

For this, there can be no forgiveness granted to the people who foisted such a tragedy on her and millions of others. One can only hope that in time some proper accounting of it is made and the instigators and enablers alike are given due punishment for their deeds.

“We are in this to win” — General David Petraeus

• Afghanistan Sitrep July 1, 2010 — William K. Polk at Counterpunch
• “When Does Afghanistan Officially Qualify As A ‘Quagmire’?” — Brynn Jacobs at Dangerous Intersection
• “America’s Skewed National Security Priorities” — Andrew Bacevich in the Boston Globe

And it has only taken ONE TRILLION DOLLARS!

As of September, 2009, the Taliban and affiliated warlords and insurgents dominate 80% of the countryside in Afghanistan, as indicated on the map above.

The cost of sending ONE soldier to Afghanistan for one year is $1,000,000 according to estimates used by the White House. The much-debated 40,000-troop escalation would add $40 BILLION per year to the cost of the war, which was already budgeted for $144 billion in Fiscal 2009, on top of the approximately $250 billion already spent (and note that these figures do not include the cost of the war in Iraq). According to this story at The Daily Beast, $40 billion a year would pay for about half of the cost of the health care reform bill being debated in Congress, or could be used to double the Department of Homeland Security’s annual budget.

Not considered in these calculations is the enormous cost incurred through fuel consumption. The per capita consumption of fuel in Afghanistan is 22 gallons PER DAY. And, according to that linked article, the U.S. Navy says the cost per gallon for that fuel is somewhere between $300 and $400, largely due to the expense of transporting the fuel to the battle theater. Based on those figures, the cost of fuel for 40,000 troops would be a staggering $112 billion per year.

Meanwhile, back in this country, a study conducted by researchers at Harvard concluded that 2,266 military veterans died last year due to lack of heath care, compared to 115 troops killed in-theater. Approximately 1.5 million veterans lack any sort of health care coverage, private or VA-provided.

Here’s a recent video essay from Bill Moyers, who considers the troop increase and the absurdity of this war, not just in terms of the billions of dollars being wasted, but also in the futility of the mission itself.

Today is Human Rights Day, the anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

For the next year, the UN will be celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Declaration with a variety of events, public education efforts, and other programs. The theme of the year will be “Dignity and justice — for all of us”.

The United States has decided to celebrate by destroying videotapes of CIA torture sessions, lying about it to the media, and falsifying intelligence about Iran to justify going to war.

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact. — 1984 by George Orwell

In the latest issue of Time Magazine, former U.S. Army General and CENTCOM Commander John Abizaid is quoted as telling an audience at Carnegie Mellon University this week that American troops are likely to remain in Iraq and the Middle East for the next 50 years.