reuters news service has, in the days since the japan nuclear clusterfuck began, continuously brought its readers a bewildering array of good-news reports, an upbeat counterpoint to other news services whose dispatches -- while hopeful -- contained sobering details of a situation going completely off the meter.
the way my main news aggregation site, google, presents the headlines, there would be two unsettling reports, and then the reuters alternative -- which always seemed to suggest things weren't that bad.
well, they are that bad, and even reuters can't gloss over the tragedy unfolding in our pacific neighbor's lands:
Japan's nuclear crisis may have taken its most dangerous turn yet after a U.S. official said one of the pools containing highly radioactive spent fuel rods at the stricken plant had run dry.
One nuclear expert said that there was now even a possibility that the disaster may approach the extent of the Chernobyl accident, the worst ever in the industry's history. When the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine exploded in 1986 it spewed a radiation cloud over a large area of Europe.
i see no point in engaging in any "i told you so" bravado, but look at it for what it is: this nuclear facility was ill-conceived, and every system deployed to mitigate the effects of another failure itself failed, until all of them were hosed beyond hope.
even as of last weekend, it was clear that the situation was far beyond bad or dicey or getting out of hand. we were already somewhere between desperation and resignation. when things were looking bad to the authorities, privately they already knew the outlook was dismal. there can be no two ways about it.
the next step is to accept the fact that an ecological catastrophe has occurred, and after that, to put those greedy bastards who caused this permanently out of business.
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