Alcohol Causes Cancer!? Of course...

Hey!  Who would have thought that introducing small quantities of a poisonous substance into your body on a frequent basis to purposely impair motor skills and brain function would over a long duration of time increase your chances of developing cancer?  uggg... I don't think this will slow down the Koreans one bit.  They haven't even started to pretend like they'll stop smoking and smoking was linked to cancer half a century ago.

Source:

A new study says alcohol helps cause a substantial number of cancer cases. 

The study done in Europe looked at 100,000 men and 250,000 women. It found that drinking too much alcohol can be blamed for causing ten percent of cancers in men and three percent in women. 

Experts say smoking has long been known to be a cancer cause, but they say not enough attention has been paid to the cancer risk alcohol poses. 

Researchers found alcohol was most likely to increase the risk of mouth, throat and esophageal cancer.

Anyone want to go out and get a drink with me this weekend?  This news is really bumming me out and I need something to take my mind off it.

You Got a Snow Day? Ha! Korea's got Radioactive Rain Days!

If you teach in South Korea and spend any amount of time on Facebook, you probably saw people posting like crazy about the potential scare of radioactive rain drifting west from Japan to the Korean peninsula.  The government has been doing everything it can to calm fears and assure people there is no possibility of radioactive rain:

Heavy rains, expected to fall Thursday, will not contain radioactive materials released directly from the crippled Japanese nuclear plant, Korea’s weather agency said Wednesday. 

Citizens here have expressed concerns over “radioactive rainfall” that would continue for a prolonged period following the widening nuclear crisis in quake-hit Japan. 

Adding to the atomic fears, weather agencies in Norway and Germany, respectively, warned earlier this week that radioactive materials will reach the Korean Peninsula in the coming five days. 

However, the Korea Meteorological Administration on Wednesday dismissed the overseas forecasts, saying the air current near the nuclear power plant has shifted to east. [...]

Despite the confidence that the Korean government has that the rain will not contain dangerous levels of radioactive particles, hundreds of schools across Korea shut their doors today and told their students to stay home and stay away from the rain.  Strange indeed for school officials to be cancelling school if there actually is no danger...

Source VOA News:

Showers on the Korean peninsula prompted some schools to close Thursday. Many parents were worried about exposing children to "radioactive rain." They were not reassured by South Korean authorities, who said there is no risk to children, even if some radioactive particles might be detected in rain water.

Fears about radiation in rain prompted classes to be canceled at some schools in South Korea. In Gyeonggi province, 125 kindergartens and elementary schools gave students the day off.
A spokesman for the provincial education office, Cho Byung-lae, says all institutions there were asked to curtail outdoor activities, but it was left up to school principals to decide whether to cancel instruction. 

Cho says they did not decide to close schools because of radiation, calling that a rather remote risk. But, he explains because there was such strong concern expressed by many parents, school authorities decided to relieve their anxiety. [...]

I wouldn't mind getting some more days off work.  Last year was the great swince flu scare, and not it is radioactive rain... geesh...

Radioactive Trace Elements Spread Across Korea

This is from the Gwangju Blog:

Traces of the radioactive element iodine-131 leaked from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan have been detected throughout Korea. The particles are expected to keep floating into Korea from Japan until after the crisis is brought under control.

But the amounts are too small to have an impact on drinking water and food. Even if exposed all year round to iodine-131, which was detected at 12 nationwide radiation detection stations, people would get a mere one-200,000th to one-30,000th of 1mSV, the annual maximum permissible dose, a spokesman for the Korea Institute of Nuclear Safety said Tuesday.

Top Seven Reasons Not To Use Nuclear Power

I drew some heat last week amongst friends and readers for my opinion on nuclear energy.  A reader was kind enough to leave a detailed comment and challenged me to explain my position.  It was a comment left by Hastey Words on a previous post:

Hey, just wanted to say first that I generally enjoy your blog quite a bit. That said, it seems that predictions of catastrophic fallout from the Fukushima plant are overreactions, and that despite a magnitute 9 earthquake and massive tsunami, the plant will not pose serious danger even to nearby residents in Japan, much less people further away [http://www.businessinsider.com/japan-reactors-pose-no-risk-2011-3]. 

As to the dangers of nuclear plants generally, it's true that people living within 50 miles of a plant are exposed to some radiation, but a nuclear plant produces less than a third of the background radiation produced by a coal plant. In fact, you are exposed to more radiation by eating a banana than by living 50 miles from a nuclear plant for a year. [http://xkcd.com/radiation/].

Finally, nuclear power is linked to fewer deaths per terawatt hour than power from virtually any other source: coal, natural gas, solar, wind, you name it. [http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html]

Why then, should we be so concerned about nuclear energy instead of embracing it as a safe, clean energy?

Okay!  I choose to not embrace nuclear energy as a safe and clean energy because it is neither.  First, I concede that I am not an expert and nobody reading this should think of me as one, but here are my reasons for opposing nuclear energy based on the facts I think are important:

Reason #7 - Safety is a myth.  The Chernobyl incident was in 1986.  That accident caused (or in time directly contributed to) the deaths of anywhere from 4,000 to upwards of a half a million people depending on the estimate.  It has been 26 years since Chernobyl and there have been 22 significant nuclear power accidents since, 15 of which led to the release of radioactive substances into the world biosphere.  Not everything has been reported as widely as Fukushima, but this technology needs to be respected at all times and the potential danger can never be eliminated.  Nothing will ever make nuclear energy a 100% safe guarantee to the world community.

What Fukushima has accomplished is alerting the world to the potential of natural disasters on nuclear power plants.  Natural disasters must be factored in when discussing the safety of nuclear power.  This is true for not only Japan, but the rest of the world.  Anyone with the basic understandings of earth sciences could have anticipated that Japan was going to have a 9.0 magnitude (or greater) on their east coast sometime in the next 100 years.  Planning a country's energy policy should reflect the anticipation for several large and devastating natural disasters.  Japan knew this and even designed the facility to withstand a severe earthquake and tsunami.  The failure at the plant is proof you cannot guarantee safety no matter how good of a design or how many precautions you take.

If the process and technology of nuclear energy cannot withstand a 9.0+ earthquake, then it has to abandoned (at least for Japan).  The epicenter of this 9.0 earthquake was nearly 200 kilometers away from Fukushima.  What happens if next time it is only 20 kilometers from a nuclear power plant and the earthquake is a 9.2? (which is almost three times larger than a 9.0 on a the logarithmic scale and very possible)  No amount of safety planning and design can guarantee the facility can contain its radioactive materials.  If a plume goes up, hundreds of thousands could die as a result.  The workers at Fukushima are heroes and the worst case scenario may have been averted there, but is every country capable of averting such a disaster?

Reason #6 - If nuclear energy is the answer to the world's energy problems, then who gets to have it?  People make the argument that safety standards are always improving, and that we can trust energy companies to expand nuclear power.  That might be great for first world nations like the USA, Japan, and France, but who do we not trust to start or expand their civilian nuclear program?  Can Libya or Egypt have one?  How about Cuba?  What about Iran or North Korea?  When talking about the future of energy consumption needs, we are talking about a global society.  If the USA says nuclear is their long-term answer to sustainable energy, then every developing country is going to want it as well and they will not take no for an answer.  Japan, France, and the USA might have the best trained technicians, highest safety standards, and most-thorough government oversight to ensure nothing disastrous happens, but what about developing nations or nations with authoritarian leaders?  A catastrophic accident anywhere in the world will not respect our arbitrary political boundaries.  Nuclear power is dangerous, more so in the hands of less developed nations.  Its global expansion should be halted and reversed.  First world nations should serve as an example to follow.

Reason #5 - What about the glowing green waste?  Nuclear power is not a clean energy source.  It produces both low and high-level radioactive waste that remains dangerous for several hundred thousand years.  Currently, over 2,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste and 12 million cubic feet of low level radioactive waste are produced annually by the 103 operating reactors in the United States alone.  No country in the world has found a final solution for their waste.  Building more nuclear plants world-wide would mean the production of much more of this dangerous waste with nowhere safe for it to go.  The hundreds of thousands of metric tons of high-level radioactive waste created from nuclear energy (and the unimaginable amount yet to be created by advocates of nuclear energy) have to be sealed and successfully kept separate from the entire world's biosphere.  If any of it is lost track of by incompetence or neglect over the next couple hundred thousands years, then people start dying.

Reason #4 - Who has got the time?  The world is already facing an energy crisis.  It is only going to get worse in the near future.  In the USA alone, no new nuclear power plants have been built in the last thirty years and it was not until the energy bill of 2005 that plans were set in motion for the design and development of new facilities.  Because nuclear power is so dangerous, costly, and complicated, the time frame needed for the formalities, planing, and building of a new nuclear power generation plant is in the range of 20 to 30 years.  It is impossible to build new nuclear power plants in the short run to meet our immediate power needs.  Our time would be better spent investing and furthering new and renewable, emerging technologies.

Reason # 3 - It is not a cheaper energy source.  Nuclear power cannot survive and compete on its own without the aid and use of government handouts and tax payer dollars.  The list of benefits the nuclear power industry gets from the United States Federal government goes on and on.  Limits on primary insurance, covering the costs of licensing applications, reimbursing up to half the costs of research and development programs, taxpayer-finance new plant constructions costs, production tax credits, loan guarantees and power purchase agreements, shutdown subsidies, and anti-trust exemptions.  The aggregate estimate of subsidization for the nuclear power industry in the United States is estimated at over $150 billion dollars over the last 50 years.  This is a subsidy intensity (government support per kWh output) normally exceeding 30% of the market value of the energy produced.  In the European Union, the rate is almost as bad approaching $45 billion over the last thirty years.  If all of this money had been put into developing and mass producing true renewable energies such as geothermal, wind, solar, and tidal, we might have already solved all of the world's energy problems.

Reason #2 - Uranium is a finite resource like coal and oil.  The world's future energy needs cannot be solved by investing in a finite resource.  Coal is finite.  Oil is finite.  Uranium is finite.  The true irony of advocating nuclear power as an alternative to the other two is that of those three, the world will run out of uranium first.  This is no joke, the world is running out of raw materials for everything.  At the current expected rate of consumption and demand, we will run out of Antimony in 15-20 years, Hafnium in 10 years, Indium in 5-10 years, Platinum in 15 years, Silver in 15-20 years, Tantalum in 20-30 years, Zinc in 20-30 years and Uranium in 30-40 years.  Unless you plan on dying in the next five years, this will happen in your lifetime.  The world must start investing in alternative energies right now that draw energy from infinite sources, such as the sun, the Earth's core, and the Earth's wind and waves.

Reason #1 - Terrorists are still trying to do their thing.  The world we live in is very dangerous.  Every power plant in the world is a vulnerable target.  The 9/11 Commission noted in June 2004 that al Qaeda's original plan for September 11 was to hijack 10 airplanes and crash two of them into nuclear plants.  A successful attack would release "large quantities of radioactive materials to the environment."  A September 2004 study by Dr. Ed Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, using the NRC's own analysis method, found that a worst-case accident or attack at the Indian Point nuclear plant 35 miles north of New York City could cause up to 43,700 immediate fatalities and up to 518,000 long-term cancer deaths.  Such a release could cost up to $2.1 trillion and would force the permanent relocation of 11.1 million people.

Additionally, the proliferation of civilian nuclear technology can all too easily lead to the proliferation of military nuclear technology.  The more rogue and unstable nations with nuclear materials (Iran, Pakistan, North Korea) the greater the chance a terrorist organization can obtain enough nuclear materials to make a dirty bomb and detonate it in a heavily populated city.  The more that nuclear technology is expanded, the greater the inevitable risk this worst-case scenario will happen.  Instead, research and development should go into renewable energies and then that technology should be shared with developing nations to deter them from pursuing nuclear technology.


*** I want to let everyone know that I am deeply concerned for the victims of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.  My thoughts and well wishes go out to the citizens of Japan.  Reading and watching daily about the response of search and rescue teams and humanitarian organizations has been very heart-warming and inspiring.

This post was not intended to be insensitive towards the victims of the quake.  I have already been told it is inappropriate to be having this debate so recently after the tragedy, but I respectfully disagree.  This is the most important time to have the debate because the world is listening right now and I believe in my argument.  I believe that it can save lives in the future.  Thanks.

Japan Confirms Radioactive Leak

Japan has now confirmed to the world that the reactors at Fukushima have leaked enough radioactive material to harm human life.  Even more alarming is that the workers at the Fukushima plant trying to cool the reactors have just been evacuated because the level of radiation at the plant is enough to cause them immediate harm.

Here is the scary map that has been floating around on the internet showing where the radiation will blow.  This map in not verifiable, but it follows common sense.  Because of the gulf stream, ironically, most of Japan and all of Asia will be immediately spared from the most concentrated amounts of radiation.  The Pacific Ocean and the west coast of North America will eventually be where a lot of these radioactive particles will settle down.  Scary stuff.

Tokyo - "The City Waiting to Die"

Last year I read A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.  It was a fantastic read of basically the history of modern scientific discovery.  I recommend it.

When I read it last year, there was a quote that caught my attention on page 138:

The most common types of earthquakes are those where two plates meet, as in California along the San Andreas Fault. As the plates push against each other, pressures build up until one or the other gives way. In general, the longer the interval between quakes, the greater the pent-up pressure and thus the greater the scope for a really big jolt. This is a particular worry for Tokyo, which Bill McGuire, a hazards specialist at University College London, describes as “the city waiting to die” (not a motto you will find on many tourism leaflets). Tokyo stands on the boundary of three tectonic plates in a country already well known for its seismic instability. In 1995, as you will remember, the city of Kobe, three hundred miles to the west, was struck by a magnitude 7.2 quake, which killed 6,394 people. The damage was estimated at $99 billion. But that was as nothing—well, as comparatively little—compared with what may await Tokyo. 

Tokyo has already suffered one of the most devastating earthquakes in modern times. On September 1, 1923, just before noon, the city was hit by what is known as the Great Kanto quake—an event more than ten times more powerful than Kobe’s earthquake. Two hundred thousand people were killed. Since that time, Tokyo has been eerily quiet, so the strain beneath the surface has been building for eighty years. Eventually it is bound to snap. In 1923, Tokyo had a population of about three million. Today it is approaching thirty million. Nobody cares to guess how many people might die, but the potential economic cost has been put as high as $7 trillion.

Japan endures 20 percent of the world's powerful earthquakes and the reason is obvious.  The country lies at the crossing of four tectonic plates - the Eurasian, North American, Philippine and Pacific plates.  A major fault line goes directly under the world's largest city, Tokyo.  Although this latest earthquake was horrific, it happened off the coast and not below a major metropolitan city.  Most of the totaled economic destruction from this earthquake will be a result of the tsunami that followed it.  Also, the tsunami took time to travel across the ocean and residents along the coastline had advanced warning to evacuate to higher ground.  Japan, thanks to their preparations and advanced warning systems, did a tremendous job to minimize the loss of human life.  Eventually, however, Tokyo is going to take a big one and there is nothing that they can do to prevent an even worse tragedy than the one that has taken place this week.

Raw Video of Japanese Natural Disaster

I don't have much to say.  This was a horrible global catastrophe and the full effects of this earthquake in terms of human life and economic value will be unknown for quite sometime.  The whole world is watching the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant and hoping that the situation does not get any more worse than it already is.

Here is some raw video of the earthquake and the tsunami that follow.  I also learned this week that "tsunami" is a Japanese word and it simply means "harbor wave".  Pretty scary stuff.

Happy Lunar New Years

Happy New Years everyone!  I spent my Chinese Lunar New Years ironically in Japan, which doesn't observe the Lunar New Years.  On my flight home to South Korea, I got to fly on one of those Starcraft II Korean Airlines special planes.  Only South Korea would have a major international airlines service that would tramp stamp a video game on all their planes.  Excellence in flight... and excellence in online gaming addiction.

I vacationed and went sightseeing on the major island of Kyushu.  A big volcano erupted while I was down there and it dominated the local news and headlines.  I joked about a volcano going off before I went there and sure enough...

Source:

Shinmoedake, a volcano on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu that was featured in the James Bond movie ‘You Only Live Twice,’ erupted for the second time today and ninth time in a week, Japan’s Meteorological Agency said.

The 1,421-meter (4,660 feet) volcano in the Kirishima range erupted at 12:17 p.m. local time, spewing a cloud of smoke and ash as high as 2,500 meters that drifted east-northeast toward Miyazaki Prefecture’s Pacific coastline, a branch division of the agency said in a statement today. The eruption followed an earlier one at 3 a.m., the agency said. [...]

Shinmoedake erupted for the first time in 52 years on Jan. 27, according to the JMA. The agency said yesterday a lava dome in the crater has grown to about 600 meters across from 10 meters when the eruptions started, and may spill out, creating a lava flow. Authorities are maintaining a restricted zone of 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) around the volcano.

Video:

South Korea Introduces "Green" Credit Cards

South Korea basically has to import almost all of its oil and natural gas energy needs.  Korea has always had to conserve and regulate their energy usage.  Recently, the government has been pushing for alternative energies and ways to reduce (or slow down the acceleration) their energy consumption.  Now with the issue of global climate change, the government is trying to come up with innovative ways to allow ordinary people to get involved.

Reuters has the story of one idea:

(Reuters) - Kim Yong-sook is an idealist who longs for a greener lifestyle, which means walking more and wasting less. But she never dreamed that her credit card could help save the planet.

The 59-year-old stay-at-home mother is one of many set to take advantage of a new program in South Korea that will offer "green credits" for consumers who embrace a low-carbon lifestyle. Credit cards have become more than a purchasing tool in South Korea, offering discounts on movies or food and freebies. Now a new government program will add energy consumption incentives to that list.

Indeed, according to a new 2011 policy plan announced by the Ministry of Environment, buying eco-friendly products or living green in ways such as taking public transit by using a so-called green credit card, will be good both for the environment and your wallet. The credits can be redeemed for cash or be used to lower utility bills.

"Accumulating green credits does not sound bothersome at all," said Kim.

The combination of credit and green consumerism, the ministry said, is part of a drive to reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent from projected levels by 2020.

"You can earn bonus points in daily life when you buy a carbon-less labeling detergent or collect used batteries," said Hwang Suk-tae, a senior official at the Climate Change Cooperation division at the ministry.

Just saying no to a paper cup at coffee shops can add to carbon points, as the government terms them, which then can turn into cash rebates.

"We have a chance to change the current mantra that living green is tough to achieve," said Hong Sung-pyo, head of the Korea Green Purchasing Network. [...]

Others had mixed feelings about the plan.

"I am not sure how big this green credit card project will grown, and some can criticize this for encouraging spending," said Choi Ye-yong, director at the Asian Citizen's Center for Environment and Health, Korea Federation for Environmental Movements.

"I also think that the more incentives become available, the more people will join. But it may provide momentum to induce us to take action."

The national government is not the only one getting into the act.

Seoul is launching an eco-mileage credit card this month, allowing participants to get discount coupons toward the purchase of hybrid cars and eco-friendly appliances in return for conserving electricity and water, with both Samsung Electronics and Hyundai Motor also taking part.

[...]

I see the good intentions, but consumption is the driving force behind climate change.  Humans need to consume less and live more reasonably.  This conflicts with capitalism and the government's desire to grow an economy at 7% each year.  It is better than nothing, but maybe not by much.

Promoting awareness is also important.  Governments and corporations easily have the greatest control over reducing green house gas emissions, not ordinary citizens.  It just takes political and public pressure to make the tough decisions and that can only come from ordinary people.  Awareness is key.

If you want to learn more about how climate change works, this is one of the best and most concise videos I have seen about it.

Happy Winter Solstice 2010

In Seoul the sun rose at 7:43am today and will set at 5:17pm.  Starting tomorrow, the days will again start to have more sunlight and the nights will get shorter.

In addition to being the Winter Solstice, it was also a full moon and a total lunar eclipse from the perspective of people living in North America.  How often does that happen?  The shortest day of the year and the light source from the full moon is eclipsed by the Earth?

Scientists Discover "Koreaceratops"

A new dinosaur was recently discovered on the peninsula and has been named in its honor.  I hear this dinosaur ate a lot of kimchi, usually only slept four hours a night, and hated the Japanese...

Source:

Triceratops has a new cousin -- one from a distant continent, that is.

Scientists from South Korea, the United States and Japan just announced the discovery of a new horned dinosaur, based on an analysis of fossil evidence found in South Korea. Dubbed "Koreaceratops" after its country of origin, the new dinosaur fossil was found in 2008 in a block of rock along the Tando Basin reservoir.

At approximately 5 to 6 feet long and weighing between 60 and 100 pounds, the animal was relatively small compared to its geologically younger, giant relatives like North America's Triceratops. 

Koreaceratops had a parrot-like face with a beak at the front of its jaws, indicating it was an herbivore. The claws on its hind feet suggest that it was bipedal and moved at a fairly rapid speed. Koreaceratops had a unique fan-shaped tail formed by long neural spines, which suggests it may have been a good swimmer, and spent part of its time hunting for aquatic food.

It is one of the first articulated dinosaurs known from Korea, said said Michael J. Ryan, curator and head of Vertebrate Paleontology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who co-authored the research.

"This is a rare find," said Ryan in a release announcing the discovery. "Fossils of dinosaurs have not typically been found in this region, whereas evidence of dinosaur eggs and footprints occur more commonly. This specimen is significant because it fills in a missing 20 million-year gap in the fossil record between the origin of these dinosaurs in Asia and their first appearance in North America."

The newly identified genus, Koreaceratops hwaseongensis, lived about 103 million years ago during the late Early Cretaceous period. The specimen is the first ceratopsian dinosaur from the Korean peninsula. The partial skeleton includes a significant portion of the animal's backbone, hip bone, partial hind limbs and a nearly complete tail. 

Results from the analysis of the specimen were published in the November 18 online edition of the journal Naturwissenchaften: The Science of Nature. 

Cool.

China's Rare Earth Element Monopoly

The Rare Earth Elements are a collection of 17 chemical elements that have become essential in the production of a long list of modern day technologies.  The process of mining for them is expensive and complicated.  Currently, China produces more than 95% of the elements for the world's technology industry and countries like Japan and starting to realize that such a monopoly is dangerous when the Chinese government uses it to punish other countries for political means.

UFOs! 4 Reelz, Yo!

There are UFO sightings everywhere all the time now.  Governments do not even talk about them anymore.  They used to make up BS excuses to explain them... but now they just never give a comment.  They are becoming so frequent that new agencies do not even know what to do with the sheer volume of reports.

It is one thing when a drunk redneck in the back of his pick-up truck claims he was abducted by aliens and then anal-probed.  But these UFOs have been shutting down airports and diverting planes.  They have been hovering over nuclear weapons sites and causing them to either fail or become active with warning.

Just this week the Korea Times reports of a UFO siting in inner Mongolia:

This is the third report of UFO witnessed in China this year. 

British tabloid The Sun reported on Oct. 5 (local time) that the airport in Boutou, Inner Mongolia, was temporarily closed as UFO resembling a flat dish had shown up.

UFO was sighted about 4km east from the airport around 8 at night. According to the eyewitnesses, the UFO suddenly disappeared after circling around in the air. 

The airport received the report about the UFO from the authorities of Huhehaote, the capital of autonomous district, and spotted the UFO by using the radar of the control tower. 

However, they decided to close the airport soon after they had failed the communication with the flying object to avoid the collision of the UFO and other planes.

It was the only choice they could make. The airport was closed for about an hour, and three planes scheduled for Beijing and Shanghai had to be moved to a nearby airport. 

The Shaoshan airport in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, had to be closed for several days last July for the appearance of a strange luminous object. Soon after this, there was another report of UFO in Hong Kong.

The central government of China refused to discuss about the UFO.

Last month 120 retired US military personal came forward and published a report stating that UFOs have been interfering with nuclear launch sites for decades and the United States government has been covering it up.  Click here for the full CBS article:

One of the more out-of-the-ordinary press conferences held in Washington this week consisted of former Air Force personnel testifying to the existence of UFOs and their ability to neutralize American and Russian nuclear missiles. 

UFO researcher Robert Hastings of Albuquerque, N.M., who organized the National Press Club briefing, said more than 120 former service members had told him they'd seen unidentified flying objects near nuclear weapon storage and testing grounds. 

Star & Stripes quoted former Air Force Capt. Robert Salas, who was at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana in 1967 when 10 ICMs he was overseeing suddenly became inoperative - at the same time base security informed him of a mysterious red glowing object in the sky. 

Robert Jamison, a retired USAF nuclear missile targeting officer, told of several occasions having to go out and "re-start" missiles that had been deactivated, after UFOs were sighted nearby. 

Similar sightings at nuclear sites in the former Soviet Union and in Britain were related. 

[...]Several of the ex-servicemembers speaking Monday said when they'd brought their concern of such appearances to superiors, they'd been told it was "top secret" or that it "didn't happen." 

Hastings suggested the presence of such phenomena meant that aliens were monitoring our weapons, and perhaps warning us - "a sign to Washington and Moscow that we are playing with fire," as he was quoted in theTelegraph. 

Hastings predicted a "paradigm shift" in the mindset of humanity owing to the existence of alien life. 

"Traditional institutions such as religions, governments, other social institutions may be threatened by what is coming. That is just the logical consequence of what is about to occur." 

The U.S. Air Force ended its 22-year-long "Project Blue Book" investigation of UFO sightings after investigating 12,618 sightings; all but 701 were explained, and the reminder categorized as "unidentified" due to sketchy reports, a Pentagon spokesman said in 1997. 

"We cannot substantiate the existence of UFOs, and we are not harboring the remains of UFOs," said Pentagon spokesperson Kenneth Bacon in 1997. "I can't be more clear about it than that."

 Here's a video report on the conference from RT:

Book author Leslie Kean was also recently on the August 23rd episode of the Colbert Report and seemed to catch Stephen off guard with the growing consensus of UFO sightings and appearances.  It was an interesting video that will probably lead you to doing some google searching after you watch it.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Leslie Kean
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

Something important to note is that there is no evidence of aliens, just advanced technologies.  These UFOs could be Bill Gates, or the Church of Scientology, or the last remnants of Hitler's Third Reich.  The point is they are real and they are happening everywhere all the time and nobody can explain them.
.

Remember Swine Flu? You Weren't Helping

If you were unfortunate enough to live in South Korea last year during the swine flu scare, you had to put up with a lot of bad science and quasi fear mongering in the public school system.  Childrens' temperatures were taken every day, teachers were forced to wear masks, anyone who sneezed was sent home on the spot, and schools were being continuously doused with special chemicals.

Then there was the hand sanitizer.  Lots and lots of hand sanitizer.  I had bottles of hand sanitizer shoved in my face at least five times a day.  I was required to put some on the second I walked onto the school grounds.

I already knew this, because it is should be common sense to everyone, but antibacterial soap and hand sanitizers are effective at killing bacteria... not viruses.  Bacteria and viruses are different things, and antibacterial soaps and hand sanitizers do nothing to stop viruses.  Swine flu is a virus.  I tried explaining this to a couple Koreans last year, but to no avail.

Some alcohol based hand sanitizers claim to kill viruses, but it turns out it does nothing to stop the spread of airborne viruses like swine flu.

Article in the LA Times:

Spoiler alert: If the presence of all those alcohol-based hand sanitizers makes you feel safe from disease, skip this blog post.

The sanitizers – Purell, Germ-X and the like – started popping up everywhere last year following the outbreak of the H1N1 “swine flu” virus. But new research out of the University of Virginia finds that they are of no particular use in warding off the flu. They also failed to ward off rhinovirus, a major cause of the common cold.

The researchers, led by Dr. Ronald B. Turner, tested the sanitizers in real-world conditions. They asked 116 volunteers to carry around a sanitizer with “enhanced antiviral activity” and use it every three hours while they were awake. Another group of 96 volunteers followed their usual routines.

Researchers tracked them for 10 weeks, collecting specimens once a week to test for flu and rhinovirus. Additional samples were taken whenever a study participant complained of cold or flu-like symptoms.

It turned out that sanitizer users developed 12 flu infections per 100 volunteers, compared with 15 cases of flu per 100 volunteers in the group that didn’t do anything special. In addition, there were 42 cases of rhinovirus per 100 volunteers among the sanitizer users, versus 51 for the control group. Neither difference was statistically significant.

The researchers surmise that hand transmission is less important for these viruses than previously thought. Perhaps public health officials should pay more attention to how these viruses spread through the air, they said.

Previously, Turner and colleagues had established that alcohol-based sanitizers removed rhinovirus from hands better than soap and water.

The results were presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in Boston. The study was funded by the Dial Corp., which makes hand sanitizers and old-school soap.

The study was funded by the Dial Corp.  So it is ironic that they published findings that would hurt the sales of their own products.

I first heard about this on the Colbert Report.  Check out this clip, this was one of the best threat downs I've ever seen on his show.  Some funny stuff.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
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Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

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