skimming the tops of the news waves

Stuff that fires my boilers this morning:

-- Fukushima disaster evacuees told to return to abandoned homes

People who fled after March 2011 nuclear meltdown face losing housing subsidies if they do not go back, despite radiation fears

I smell a financial rodent: If there is a lot of money to be made with nuclear power, let's just declare the bomb zone "safe" and prove it by forcing those who once lived safely to return to a place the government cannot yet make safe. A couple of steps further and this might be called murder with a pay day.

-- Harking back to the apposite nature of the Japanese saying, "Don't fix the blame; fix the problem," it occurred to me that this is Donald Trump's central issue. He likes to fix the blame but is incapable of fixing the problem .... so he affixes more headline-grabbing blame.

--  Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, has dismissed a basic scientific understanding of climate change by denying that carbon dioxide emissions are a primary cause of global warming....
This stance puts Pruitt at odds with his own agency, which states on its website that carbon dioxide is the “primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to recent climate change”. This finding is backed by Nasa, which calls CO2 “the most important long-lived ‘fsorcing’ of climate change”.

-- The Pentagon is sending about 400 Marines to Syria to help local fighters wrest control of Raqqa, which ISIS considers its capital.
The Pentagon says the new troops will fire artillery rounds at ISIS fighters in support of the local forces, as well as provide security for the Marine artillerymen, as NPR's Phil Ewing reports.
These 400 troops will bring the number of U.S. forces on the ground in Syria to about 900, Phil says.

Wasn't it 15 minutes ago that excoriating Syria for its dictatorship and its gas attacks on civilians was par for the talking-head pundits? Wasn't blowing Syria back into the Stone Age a U.S. position? I guess a build-up for a Middle East war is to be expected. The poverty of imagination and effort is ... historically logical, I guess. But sad ... oh so fucking sad.