Baruch Spinoza (Hebrew: ברוך שפינוזה‎ Baruch Shpinoza, Portuguese: Bento de Espinosa, Latin: Benedictus de Spinoza) and later Benedict Spinoza (November 24, 1632 – February 21, 1677)

Saturday Morning EDT/
Saturday Evening Japan Time
"I don't have to tell you things are bad." Update

Today's Inspiration Comes From The Philosopher and Lens Grinder Baruch Spinoza. 

"Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it, 
we must direct our lives so as to please the fancy of men."

Workers at the shattered Fukushima Daiichi site are battling a plethora of problems. It seems one solution leads to a new set of problems.

Plug the water leak out of reactor two. Water rises in the steam condenser at reactor three. 

Huge amounts of water continue to be added to the various cooling pools and reactors at the site resulting in huge amounts of radioactive water that must go somewhere according to the Laws of Free Surface Hydraulics. That somewhere, lacking integral and waterproof structures and forms to confine the water, is the lowest level available which is the nearby sea. 

Workers are feverishly pumping nitrogen into reactor shell one to avoid another catastrophic explosion of flammable hydrogen being generated in the core of the reactor, even though TEPCO insists the chances of such an explosion are "extremely low".

TEPCO is constructing an arrangement of barriers and walls to try to keep highly radioactive water from reaching the sea reports the Wall Street Journal today.
This appears to be an infinite loop.
Logic tells us that as long as they are pouring water on the site they are going to have to build a higher gigantic dam around the site to prevent the new radioactive water from flowing away. 

"God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things."

TEPCO has commissioned Honeywell to fly an unmanned T-Hawk helicopter drone over the plant complex today to allow close  inspection of damage to high radiation areas at the various reactor sites. 

"A miracle signifies nothing more than an event... the cause of which cannot be explained by another familiar instance, or.... which the narrator is unable to explain."

The Kyodo news agency reports that much cash has been found by rescue workers and survivors of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Police in the affected area have reported receiving "tons of cash" found everyday in the rubble. Some 10% has been returned to the owners but survivors are urging authorities to use if for reconstruction until  the owners can be found. 

"I believe that a triangle, if it could speak, would say that God is eminently triangular, and a circle that the divine nature is eminently circular; and thus would every one ascribe his own attributes to God."

An umbrella organization of German utility companies has called for a "swift and complete" abolishment of nuclear power by 2020 reports Bloomberg/Business Week. 

"I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion."

Water is still rising in plant two. TEPCO announced that radioactive water will be pumped into the sea until tomorrow as an emergency measure. TEPCO says it does not understand why the water is rising in the plant yet this is the plant that was releasing highly radioactive water into the sea through a maintenance pit until TEPCO blocked the water to the pit earlier this week. It seems perfectly logical to me that water which previously was draining from the plant, once blocked, is now building up in the plant.

"The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free."

Spinoza's Proposition 9 states: "The more reality or being each thing has, the more attributes belong to it." which illuminates the difference between east and west.

"All the prejudices I here undertake to expose depend on this one: that men commonly suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end; indeed, they maintain as certain that God himself directs all things to some certain end, for they say that God has made all things for man, and man that he might worship God."

A New Fox Poll  reveals another curious contradiction of the American mind. 

83% of Americans think a nuclear crisis such as is happening in Japan could happen in the United States.

Yet the same poll reveals that 49% of Americans think nuclear power is safe. 

Mencken's booboisie is alive and well. 

Hypnos, British Museum