Hover over each satellite photo to view the devastation caused by the earthquake and tsunami.

ABC News - Japan Earthquake: before and after

The plate boundary off the coast of Sendai had not had a “mega-quake” in the modern era. It may not have suffered a major rupture like this for more than 1,000 years. The closest analog may be a tremor recorded by monks in the year 869, according to Dave Applegate, a senior earthquake specialist at the U.S. Geological Survey...

“This is a continuation in a sense of the cold shower that we got in Sumatra — these mega-earthquakes take place in places we do not expect them,” said Emile Okal, a Northwestern University geophysicist reached in Tahiti, where he was preparing to evacuate in advance of the tsunami generated by the quake. The huge Sumatra earthquake six years ago that generated the devastating tsunami along the rim of the Indian Ocean happened on what had been presumed to be a relatively quiescent stretch of a subduction zone.

“That means that on a global scale we should consider that all subduction zones are potential locations for such events,” Okal said.

Earthquake probability data is wrong

If the venting of gases from the overheated reactors was as harmless as the Japanese government has been reporting, it does not seem as though this would be physically possible:

Of the 100 people evacuated by bus, nine had been tested and one had been shown initially with a radiation count of 100,000cpm -- a level at which experts say a person needs to be decontaminated.

Nor would this announcement be necessary:

Public broadcaster NHK flashed instructions to evacuees to close doors and windows, switch off air-conditioning fans and place wet towels over the nose and mouth, as well as to cover up as much as possible.

Either
A: The gas venting is more dangerous than reported.
B: There has been a containment breach.

Either way, the Baghdad Bob style "there is no problem here" statements may be putting people in danger.

There is a problem with Japanese government nuke statements

Before and after pictures.

YouTube - Minamisanriku footage

Tools that help you think won't do you much good if you don't know how to think for yourself.

The problem with the Manning situation is that what he is alleged to have done is arguably treasonous but it wasn't necessarily motivated by the same desires, nor did it have the same consequences. The government has no choice but to nail him to the wall, to send a message to other employees to not violate their confidentiality agreements. But you look at who he actually is and what the real world consequences have been as a result of his actions and its hard to reach the tenor of those shouting for his death. There is no good answer to this problem.

I don't actually think he is being mistreated in prison. I think prison sucks, and they are genuinely afraid that either he will kill himself or one of the other prisoners will kill him (I imagine that most of his cellmates think him a traitor). In that event the exact same people who are screeching about his treatment will be screeching about their failure to protect him.

The drama is really about frustration over the fact that the government has to throw the book at him. The fact that laws meant for enemy spies don't really fit this situation exactly. This isn't exactly the same sort of situation, and the legal system hasn't really contemplated this. What sort of consequence is demanded here? I can't think of a way to balance the reality of the situation with the need to effectively deter others from doing the same thing.

Nevertheless it must be understood that every card carrying liberal in this country would be up in arms about Manning if this whole thing had gone down 6 years ago. Failure to see that is a sort of blindness I have trouble comprehending. He is against "their" war. He blew the whistle. He is being mistreated in "their" prisons. Its the invasion of Iraq and Abu Ghraib all wrapped up into a bow and the left are keeping their mouths shut about it, as well as Obama's detention policies, and his surveillance policies, etc...

The fact is that most of these people care more for their partisan allegiances than for their own internal sense of right and wrong. Their ability to follow the crowd is far more developed than their ability to decide what they think.

Democratic politicians and their loyalists, who opportunistically pretended to care about such things when doing so produced partisan advantage (when there was a GOP President), but now ignore them because they no longer do (because there's a Democratic President).

Corruption.

MSNBC - "Enormous hypocrisy on the left."

I had hoped that Obama, as a law professor, would be able to wade into the Constitutional crisis created by the Bush administration and establish a functional framework.

No.

In typical Obama style, we've got the core of the Bush policy - indefinite detention without trial - with a few tweaks.

Apparently they've stopped torturing people. I feel like the real reason for that is because they've run out of people to torture. They're still detaining people forever without trial. In other words, there is no law. What protections exist in our system against the government seizing people off the street and torturing them and holding them indefinitely? I seriously don't see anything at this point.

Obama is keeping these people imprisoned without any charges, and then pointing to secret torture-obtained evidence to justify that imprisonment.  He's not even prosecuting them using torture-obtained evidence.  He's going beyond that:  he's imprisoning them without bothering to prosecute them, while his supporters publicly claim that we know they're guilty -- or "dangerous" -- by citing untested, unseen evidence that the government claims can't be used because it was coerced.

Greenwald persuasively argues that it would be better to present the evidence in these cases than to suppress is because it was obtained illegally. Allowing the evidence to be admitted won't reward the government for their illegal acts any more than not having a trial at all and just operating on a presumption of guilt does!

Perhaps the problem is of the other variety - that the evidence we have is a secret. We can't even show it to you.

Just trust us.

:-)

The "Bush-tortured" excuse for indefinite detention - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

We're like the creepy neighbors of the IT industry.

How I've Become One With The Rest Of The World - Darkreading

"You’ve crossed a line. This is wrong."

Manning’s Father Condemns Treatment of Imprisoned Son | Threat Level | Wired.com