Runit is a small island in the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Where are the Marshall Islands? Here’s a tiny reference map to orient you.

And why would you want to visit Runit? Well, for one thing, Runit is home to a very impressive concrete dome built there during the late 70’s. After seeing the photo below, I’m sure you’ll want to see it in person:

<- click for larger

Spectacular, isn’t it? The concrete cap is 18″ thick and 350 feet wide. The tiny dots on the dome are people. So yes, it’s big.

The dome was kind of like a gift from the United States to the people of the Marshall Islands. Why? Well, after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union were both engaged in an unfriendly game of nuclear oneupmanship. As part of this competition the United States used various sites in the Marshall Islands from 1946-1958 to test nuclear weapons. Of course this resulted in enormous amounts of radioactive contamination to the environment and all life forms in the area, but fortunately 20 years later the U.S. was kind enough to scrape up some of the contaminated everything and dump it all into one of the atomic bomb craters. Then they poured concrete on the whole thing. The dome has developed lots of cracks in its surface and it’s leaking toxic stuff into the environment, but the U.S. government says it has “no formal custodial responsibilities for the site”, which I can only assume means that it’s safe. So the next time you feel yourself desiring a tropical island getaway, don’t forget Runit.

- Bunny

P.S. Almost forgot - here’s a short excerpt from a recent news story about the legacy of atomic testing in the Marshall Islands (The Sydney Morning Herald, Aug. 18, 2008). You might want to read it.

Later I meet Lemeyo Abon. She - like 90 per cent of the children from her island of Rongelap who were exposed to radiation during the test era - has cancer, in her case thyroid cancer.

She vividly describes the morning of March 1, 1954, when a flash of light eclipsed the sun and white powder drifted down from the sky.

“It was fallout from Castle Bravo, the largest nuclear bomb the US ever detonated and one of the world’s worst radiological disasters,” says the 68-year-old grandmother.

Her warm, weathered face speaks of a life lived but not of the anguish. “First, there were lots of miscarriages among the women,” she says. “Soon afterwards came the deformed babies - the ‘jelly babies’ or ‘octopus babies’ we called them.

“The birth defects have passed down the generations. My own granddaughter was born with a tail,” she says, as if this were scarcely out of the ordinary. “She was medevaced to Honolulu for surgery and now she’s 14. Sue’s her name … what a smart girl.”

Read the whole story here.

A couple of weeks ago I launched our Teacher’s Survey to help us collect data about what people think about our videos, our website, and other stuff. One of the things that quickly became apparent when we started analyzing the data returned from the survey: people really like videos. Nearly all the surveys we got back told us that they consider the videos on our site - not only videos we’ve produced but also videos by others we’ve re-presented - to be extremely useful, which I guess is very good news. This blog, on the other hand, received only a ’somehwat useful’ rating from most site visitors.

Pinky and I had been assuming that people like this blog because the blog pages actually receive a lot of visitor traffic. But now that we have data to look at, we realize that a lot of people might be reading this blog without finding it too useful! And since we are all about doing work that others will hopefully find useful, I think it makes a lot of sense that we should spend less time writing in this blog and more time making or finding good videos for people to watch and use.

We’ll probably just keep this blog on the website because there are a lot of times we just feel like writing something with no intention of further developing it into an episode. It’s a relatively quick way to get an idea out there. But since neither of us are fast writers it does take time away from other things so probably we should use our time more wisely.

So! On that note, tonight I will post a nice YouTube video here that made me feel really good when I watched it. I know some of you think we (cats) are really down on human beings for all the stupid things they do, and to a certain extent I guess that’s true, but I am also very impressed with some human activity from time to time. Like these people in the video, for example. They are young people who are taking the responsibility to make their life’s work all about helping the planet. When the majority of people decide to make the majority of all their waking hours count - instead of thinking of service to humanity, animals, and the planet as some kind of spare-time activity - then I think this planet will survive. Thanks to Life of the Land for the video.

When the Anna Rose talked about her response to seeing the coal ships on the horizon exporting climate chaos to the rest of the world, I almost choked. Can’t be that she was the only one to see that - which makes me wonder: Why is it that, presented with disturbing or otherwise challenging information, some people will change their lives in order to fight for change, while others will continue on, business as usual? Pinky and I have been trying to figure this one out for a few years but still have no real explanation.

Bunny

Okay, I know just yesterday Bunny said we’re not gonna blog so much anymore and here I am making a diary entry for the second day in a row. (sorry?) But I wanted to post this very interesting YouTube video titled An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube. It’s kind of long but also very fascinating. I think everybody intuitively knows that YouTube is somehow a very important social and cultural phenomena, but most of us don’t really understand what it is, who it is, and why it is. So if that’s you then here’s a useful video.

Thank you to Lynette for telling me to watch this!

Okay I think I’m going to go to sleep early tonight. Goodnight everybody. ~ pinky

You ever get the idea that your life is trying to teach you something? Recently I’ve had a bunch of separate things happening to me that, taken all together, is making me rethink what I value about relationships. I won’t bore you with all the details of the individual occurrences, but still, I think I’d like to write about it a little if you don’t mind, so I can figure it out a bit.

The past couple of years Bunny and I have put a lot of effort into trying to make The Pinky Show more popular. Especially this last year, we’ve spent an enormous amount of time writing e-mails or talking on the telephone with people making working relationships that we think will help get the word out. We think our message is important so we want a ton of viewers. (I hope that doesn’t sound too arrogant, I just mean that we have an important job to do and we take it very seriously.) Recently we went over 6 million PS episode views, so it does look like something is working, but one of the things that I’ve been thinking about more is this: Are we approaching relationship building the right way? What kind of relationships do we want?

I ask this now because I’ve noticed I’ve been feeling weirder about people as our project gains popularity. It’s not that people are becoming weirder (I’m not crazy - I do realize it’s not everybody around me that’s changed…), I just think the problem is I’m spending way too much time communicating with people I don’t actually know. As our project has gotten more popular, Bunny and I find ourselves spending more and more time doing ‘relationship building’ with people we’ll probably never meet. I’m sure most of these individuals are perfectly nice and in real life they’d be wonderful to chat with over coffee. But to be realistic, for 99.9% of the people we communicate with, we’ll probably never have a chance to meet them face to face.

I know having allies is really, really important. We have common political objectives and I realize we all need to work together to achieve specific goals. But I also think I haven’t thought enough about ‘working relationships’ via the internet and how that’s connected to how I’m put together emotionally. Bunny, Mimi, Kim, and I are actually very private and introverted. We’re not un-friendly but I know we all tend to like relating to less people more deeply, instead of a ton of people just a little bit (or not at all). And the latter is exactly the direction that our lives have gone in the past couple of years! My gut feeling is I think that’s some kind of problem.

The bottom line is I think it’s really important for me to keep 1:1 relationships the center of my life. Considering the nature of our work, I’m not really sure how I’m going to do that, but I think it’s definitely a good idea.

I’m going to try to make it a priority to strike a better balance in our relationship-building activities. We’re not going to stop working to increase our audience, because that really is a basic requirement necessary for the success of our project. But I also think I need to fundamentally change my mindset about how I interact with others. I need to be more picky-choosy about who we spend our time working with. I think it’s okay if Bunny and I approach our work as if we are making all this stuff for ourselves and each other, and oh, by the way, it just so happens we have a few million people watching. Something like that.

Every day we get a ton of e-mails from people and a good number of them want something: can you do “X” for me/my organization, I need an answer regarding “Y”, make an episode on subject “Z”, and so on. It only occurred to me this morning that we don’t really have a way to ask these people something simple like: “Who are you?”

~ pinky

Pinky & Bunny are busy audio recording today so I’m bored and blogging.

First thing I want to say is “Everything has a spirit.” I have no proof of this, but I think it’s totally okay to write diary entries about things that are not yet proven as facts but maybe fall under the big category of “beliefs”. Question though - how can something like this be proven? I have no idea and I don’t really care. When I was younger I could hear almost everything talking to me, even fruit and staplers. Everybody thought I was crazy, even Mimi. Or they said “She’s just a kitten.” It’s not just cats who like to pretend that we are so unique in the spirit-world, I notice human beings are the same way. Actually, deep down I think lots of people want to believe everything has a spirit but if they stop and think about it using the officially approved thinking methods, then they make conclusions, “No, only we are so special to have a spirit” which to me is totally ridiculous. But as I said earlier I have no proof. This is funny though - if you put fake eyes on a picture of anything suddenly people will say “Hey look at that talking stapler!”, no problem.

Related topic: Here is a very, very rare audio recording of Gandhi. Everybody’s heard of Gandhi but almost no one has heard his voice before. Maybe you saw a movie about him but that’s not the same thing.

(click on the picture to play audio)

Come to think of it how do we know this is really Gandhi’s voice? Unless you were there and made the recording yourself, why would you believe me that this is Gandhi? Do you believe me just because I showed you an old album cover?

I think it’s very unpredictable what we are willing to accept as proof of something on a day to day basis.

Posted by Kim

Posted by Mimi.

My friend Corie went to the vet today because her tail was sore and swollen (she got bitten by a dog). She needed surgery, and luckily her big one had $500. Imagine what happens to people who don’t have health insurance. (believe me - human being surgeries don’t cost “only” $500!)

Healthcare is a right. Yet 47 million Americans are uninsured and millions more are underinsured. 18,000 people die every year because they are uninsured. People with insurance are bankrupted when they have a serious illness. People want universal healthcare and physicians want universal healthcare. We cats don’t understand why American people still don’t have universal healthcare. Watch this video!

>> Health of the Nation – Coverage for All Americans <<

In the video, the panelists discuss problems with the current health care system. Seems like everyone is dissatisfied with the current system.

Currently, about 60% of the U.S. healthcare system is financed by the government (taxes). These funds pay for Medicare, Medicaid, the VA (Veterans Administration), and coverage for public employees (including police and school teachers), elected officials, military personnel, etc. About 20% is financed by the people directly through out-of-pocket payments such as co-pays, deductibles, and insurance premiums. About 21% is financed by private employers. Under the current system, the poor pay a much higher percentage of their income for healthcare than higher income individuals.

In fact, American people can have universal healthcare at essentially no additional cost. A universal public healthcare system can be funded by savings from eliminating administrative wastes under the current system (at least 30% healthcare costs). People may pay a little more in taxes, but this would be more than offset by all current out-of-pocket payments. For the vast majority of people, the cost would be less than the current system. See Physicians for a National Health Program: http://www.pnhp.org.

Shouldn’t a government take care of its people? Is it more important to save lives (for no additional cost) than to save Wallstreet (for $700 billion)? We would’ve been very sad if Corie had died today because of a stupid little bite.

[ note from Bunny: Mimi is a practicing physician and before that worked as an economist. ]

Happy Birthday video for Lori from pinky.