#LaVan Robinson

[krafty-page-chronicles]

C.A.P.S. Contributor of the Year

C.A.P.S. Contributor of the Year

A Heartfelt Thank You I want to take a moment to personally thank you for being the heart and soul of C.A.P.S. this year, earning the well-deserved title of Contributor of the Year. Your creativity, dedication, and genuine love for what we’re building have not only inspired everyone in our group but have also been a huge asset to KVI Network Creations and Krafty Page Chronicles. Whether through…

[yuisdad]

Since I’m sad that otome games don’t have English dubs when they get realeased in the west, I’ve decided to do English fan casts to alleviate the pain. (I get that they’re a niche genre, but let me have this)

Code Realize, Hakuoki, and Amnesia will have the same voice actors from their English dubs. One of the exception is Toma, since his voice actor is unfortunately dead. I would replace Toma’s voice actor with Mike Haimoto. Another exception is Sanosuke Harada’s voice actor since he’s been blacklisted and arrested due to grooming a 16 year old and marrying her in 2014. He’s already been replaced by Phil Hayes in the Hakuoki movies, so he’ll stay.

I’m not doing Collar X Malice at the moment since it’s getting a movie adaptation this year, and (hopefully) it will inevitably get an English dub. If it doesn’t, then I’ll do it on the future. 

The heroines are all voiced in English as well because I say so lol.

Norn 9:

Koharu: Jad Saxton

Mikoto Kuga: Kira Vincent-Davis

Nanami Shiranui: Brittney Karbowski

Sorata Suzuhara: Kiba Walker

Kakeru Yuiga: Blake Shepard

Senri Ichinose: Bryson Baugus

Masamune Toya: David Matranga

Natsuhiko Azuma: Mark Ivy

Sakuya Nijou: Michaela Laws

Itsuki Kagami: Howard Wang

Akito Shukuri: Daman Mills

Heishi Otomaru: Greg Ayres

Ron Muroboshi: David Wald

Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly:

Beniyuri: Emi Lo

Kikage: Johnny-Yong Bocsh

Yamato: Aleks Le

Karasuba: Griffin Puatu

Kagiha: Y Chang

Monshiro: Caleb Yen

Usagi: Xanthe Hyunh

Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk:

Eiar/Jed: Brina Palencia

Lavan: David Matranga

Levi: Aaron Dismuke

Lugus: Zeno Robinson

Tower Overlord/Ashen Hawk: J. Michael Tatum

Hugh: Ryan Colt Levy

Piofiore Fated Memories: 

Liliana Adornato: Felicia Angelle

Dante Falzone: Daman Mills

Gilbert Redford: Alejandro Saab

Yang: Y. Chang

Nicola Francesca: Jonah Scott

Orlok: Cedric Williams Jr.

Henri Lambert: Jonathan Bullock

Cafe Enchante:

Kotone Awaki: Maddie Matsumoto

Misyr Rex: Joshua David King

Canus Espada: Christopher Escalante

Il Fado de Rie: Dom Dinh

Ignis Carbunculus: Jalen K Cassell

Kaoru Rindo: Eric Bauza

Cupid Parasite:

Lynette Mirror: Amanda Lee

Gil Lovecraft: Corey Wilder

Shelby Snail: Danny Spiller

Ryuki F Keisaiin: Jacob Takanashi

Raul Aconite: Everett Van Maren

Allan Melville: Reagan Murdock

Peter Flage/Jupiter: Brandon Winkler

Bustafellows: 

Teuta Bridges: Stephanie Sheh

Limbo Scott Fitzgerald: Robbie Daymond

Shu Lyn O'Keefe: Matthew Mercer

Mozu Nile Shepard: Jakob Takanashi

Helvetica Orsted: Steve Warky Nunez

Scarecrow: Edward Mendoza

Adam Krylov: Nathan Sharp

Luka: Mikaela Krantz

Carmen: Kayleigh McKee

Anyone else is free to put in their own voice headcanons for otome games if they want to.

[washwashgalaxy]

Poem By LaVan Robinson

Patron: As bodies of the innocents flows like cascading waterfalls creating vast rivers of the residual effects of hatred upon the landscapes of the earth and precious hearts and souls of creative existence and humble origins. The violation of the inhumane nature of self is in full play as the assault on love and beauty truly begins. All is fair in this vicious cycle of destruction, misery and…

[heartsoundslikelove]

Book Launch - LaVan Robinson's - January 2022 Debut "Hard Pressed"

Book Launch – LaVan Robinson’s – January 2022 Debut “Hard Pressed”

Come to the Book Launch and Open Mic event on January 23 at 6 p.m. EST Bring your poetry and share in this event. It’s going to be fun! LaVan will be reading from his books to date and hopes to hear your fine works. Available on Prolific Pulse .com Event Link on Meetup.com

[dzeikobb]

20.01.2021

Leo Bersani - Homos

Monique Witting

Judith Butler

Michael Warner

Andre Gide, Jean Genet, Proust

desire for the same and desire for the lack

anticommunitarian impulses they discover in homosexual desire

The Immoralist, Sodome et Gomorrhe, Funeral Rites

how desire for the same can free us from oppresive psychology of desire as lack (a psychology that grounds sociality in trauma and castration)

a salutary devalorizing of difference

difference not as a trauma to overcome (it nourishes antagonistic relations between the sexes), but rather as a nonthreatening supplement to sameness

"Once we agreed to be seen, we also agreed to be policed"

a traditional sanctification of state authority

The Archaeology of Late Antique 'Paganism' edited by Luke Lavan, Michael Mulryan

Constructing Postmodernism By Brian McHale

reading modernistically - paranoiacally

New Criticism, New Critical institutionalization of modernism

paranoid reading is assumed to be the appropriate norm of reading

then postmodernist texts appear which assume and anticipate paranoid reading-habits

they incorporate representations of (fictional) paranoid interpretations (conspiracy theories) or paranoid reading practices, or they thematise paranoia itself, reflecting, anticipating, perhaps pre-empting actual readers' paranoid readings.

La Jalousie, Pale Fire, The Crying of Lot 49, De Lillo Running Dog/The Names/Libra, The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum

"the idea is not to discover the secret, but to construct it"

no longer an epistemological quest, but an enterprise unconstrained by criteria of truth and evidence (world-building?)

an experiment in self-conscious world-making, a cosmological matter (novel-writing enterprise is one as well)

one projects (calls into being) an entity, anticipating a response

Masons, Illuminati, Rosicrucians, Gender-LGBT

"he declares that the league exists so that people will then create it"

St Anselm ontological proof of God's existence

confusing existence in thought with existence in reality

but: they project into reality the non-existent entities

inventing nonsenses, but the public will want to pursue them if they hear of them

"we've shown the necessity of the impossible"

"we invented a non-existent Plan, and they not only believed it was real but convicted themselves that they had been part of it for ages, or rather they identified fragments of their muddled mythology as moments of our Plan"

ontological side effects of world-making: the projected world has begun to contaminate the real world

there might come a time when the projected world will supplant the real world

Frederick Jameson: Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

symptomatic works and diagnostic works

reflections or expressions of late-capitalist social and economic relations

diagnostic works aspire to produce some image/figure/representation of the unrepresentably complex multinational world-system in which we live

Kevin Andrew Lynch was an American urban planner and author. He is known for his work on the perceptual form of urban environments and was an early proponent of mental mapping.

cognitive mapping

Conspiracy paranoia is a recurrent cultural phenomenon especially in American political life, with successive waves of anti-Masonism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Communism etc

Hypothesis: Whenever the complexity of the social-economic system outstrips our capacity to represent it to ourselves, conspiracy theory arises to fill the gap as the "poor person's cognitive mapping"

The recurrence of crises of cognitive mapping

responses to successive crises of society's self-imagining

"fossilized" attempts at the cognitive mapping (reminds me of Deleuze and geology - paranoic geology of the psyche?)

late-capitalist high-tech versions of conspiracy and the postmodernist resurgence of traditional conspiracy theories

Constructivism's basic epistemological principle is that all our cognitive operations, including (or especially) perception itself, are theory-dependent. This means, first of all, that data do not exist independently of a theory that constitutes them as data.

Granted the theory-dependency of "facts", it follows that faithfulness to objective "truth" cannot be a criterion for evaluating versions of reality (since the truth will have been produced by the version that is being evaluated by its faithfulness to the truth, and so on, circularly). The appropriate criteria for evaluation now are, for instance, the explicitness of the version, its intersubjective accessibility, its "empirical-mindedness", i.e. its aspiration to be as empirical as possible, where empiricism is not a method but a horizon to be approached only asymptotically; and above all, the adequacy of the version to its intended purpose. In other words, constructions, or what I have been calling versions of reality, are strategic in nature, that is, designed with particular purposes in view.

cities constructed, not given or found

or are they?

Parisian structuralist narratology - Barthes, Bremond, Genette, Greimas, Todorov

21.20.2020

I have been watching protest of the Women's Strike. On my phone, at my desk, at home, later from bed. I have been unable to attend due to my deteriorating mental health condition. How to describe the feeling and the atmosphere of this protest? I will juxtapose the following:

Hierarchy - Presence - Genital - Narrative - Metaphysics - Determinacy - Construction of a world-model - Ontological certainty [modernism]

Anarchy - Absence - Polymorphous - Anti-narrative - Irony - Indeterminacy - Deconstruction of a world-model - Ontological uncertainty [postmodernism]

What I saw leads me to believe that I should associate my perception of protests with the latter column.

A plot: events arranged in temporal sequence, a causal motivation for the sequence

modernism and postmodernism not as period styles, one of them current and the other outdated, more like alternative stylistic options between which contemporary writers are free to choose without that choice necessarily identifying them as either avant-garde or arriere-garde.

The dissolution of the library and the world

And then collecting the fragments (relics) of the burned library

What if the library does not burn, but is flooded?

What if it dissolves into a flood of meaningless text

An overflow of meanings leading to the ultimate loss of all meaning

An overabundance of points and places in the map causing the map to become illegible

Alain Robbe-Grillet: Instead of having to deal with a series of scenes which are connected by causal links, one has the impression that the same scene is constantly repeating itself, but with variations"

"narrative as a systematic application of the logical fallacy denounced by scholasticism under the formula post hoc, ergo propter hoc"

"a complex web of responses to and repetitions of earlier works, visual and textual, creative and critical" (isn't any text/work such a web?)

Gradiva - Novel by Wilhelm Jensen

Topologie d'un cite phantome Robber-Grillet

"a narrative which has abandoned any sense of progress and explores the past as a set of variations on a split and dispersed present"

Vigo-Atlantis on the connecting point of three continents-islands

it is inundated in never-stopping rain

Ruins of Warsaw after World War 2 turned into a closed-off monument and after the fall of communism, into a "tragedy-amusement park", somewhat like Westerplatte

a participant of the Warsaw Uprising and a young Jew-Robinson (a descendant of other Robinsons) who survived hiding in ruins until present time both emerge and react differently: the insurgent tries to kill tourists thinking they are Germans and is killed by security himself and the Robinson goes back to hiding, understanding that the world has experienced an apocalypse and a new world has emerged, in which there is no place for him.

22.01.2020

Właśnie przechodzę przez kolejny nawrót depresji, nie stać mnie na terapię, nie jestem w stanie z kimkolwiek rozmawiać, nienawidzę stanu, w którym jest moja skóra i ciało, za bardzo się wstydzę, by naprzykrzać się komukolwiek opowiadaniem o moich problemach, mam za mało pieniędzy, prawie nie mam pracy, nie mam dokąd uciec, nie mogę nawet wyjechać za granicę, rzuciłem studia po raz piąty w życiu i ignoruję te kilka osób, którym jeszcze choć trochę na mnie zależy.

[therealjerryyonekura]

There's no such thing as a free lunch they acccept GCash/ GCredit guys!😂 Thanks for the 30k credit limit 🤪 AwKuyawan! #CashIn #PayBills #Gsave etc. to incresase your GScore 😍 From Moalboal, Cebu to Robi Lavan! THEIR FOOD IS THE BEST! 😍 #TheAdventureOfTheRealJerryYonekura Please subscribe to my YouTube channel for more ADVENTURE! https://m.youtube.com/user/jerrymabia Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therealjerryyonekura/ Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/therealjerryyonekura Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/jerrymabia (at Brique, Robinson's Galleria Cebu) https://www.instagram.com/p/CU9MKJDlwjf/?utm_medium=tumblr

[bahamas-paradise-island]

Final Rites and Burial for the late Mrs. Brenda Maria Saunders Age 78yrs, a resident of The Grove West Bay Street, will be held on Saturday March 21st 2020, 11:00 am.  At Faith United Baptist Church Nassau Bahamas, Officiating will be  Rev. Dr. William Thompson,  assisted by Rev. George Kelly and Rev. Greg Major  and Interment will follow in the Woodlawn Gardens Cemetery. Brenda is predeceased by her: Husband: the Rev. Godfrey A. Saunders Mother: Eliza Humes Father: Neville Butler Left to cherish memories are:Daughters: Dr. Hadassah Saunders of Annapolis, MDand Inderia Saunders-Lindeman. Sons: Gregory Saunders, Lovell Saunders of Washington, DC and Walton Saunders of Annapolis, MD. Grandchildren: Rasheed, Leo, Mia and Caleb Saunders. Step-Grandchildren: Skylar and Maya Lindeman; Lia Armbrister. Son-in-Law: Franciscus Lindeman. Sisters: Sheila Francis and Antoinette Smith of Freeport, Grand Bahama. Predeceased: Sandra Newton and Maxine Smith of Miami, Florida. Brothers: Willie Hayward Sr.(Ellery Hayward) of Miami, FL; Anthony Carey (Sylvia Carey); Ronald “Tippy” Butler; Neville Butler Jr. (Janet Butler) of Charlotte, N.C.; Vincent Butler (Cheryline Butler) of Philadelphia, PA; Francis Butler of New York.. Adopted Children: Clarice Rolle of Atlanta, GA and Cheyanne Rolle. Sisters-in-Law: Bernadine(Samuel) Rigby; Maureen Saunders; Angela Saunders;Judymae Saunders; Joanna Johnson. Brothers-in-Law: Wilfred (Melva) Saunders; Israel (Esther) Saunders; Clifford Saunders. Nieces: Sonia (Dillon) Knowles; Charmaine Francis; Shanelle Taylor, Charan Francis, Chevette (Victor) Bowe, Francine Smith, TravillaBogan, Amber Hayward-Carr (Robert Jr.); Charmayne Sands; Daphne Riley, Racquel Wallace-Rolle; Psyche, Eleanor and Shelley Saunders, Stephany Saunders-Ranger (Darrell), Lisa Saunders, Latania Bastian, Kaye Saunders, Tanisha Sweeting and JulacaTynes. Nephews: Keith (Mary) Bastian, Olin Jr.,(Kim Bogan), Lavan(Raquel) Butler, Devon Francis, Sharadd Taylor, Dencil Newton, Cliff and Clinton Smith, Willie Hayward Jr. (Keisha); Aja Hayward; Rodney (Ingrid) Saunders; Jason (Sian) Saunders; Warren and Ryan Saunders; Sheldon (Erica) Saunders; Sean Saunders, Giovanni (Dede) Sands; Rico (Judy) Sands; Lambert Ranger; Ashley Forbes. Aunt: Sylvia Campbell. Best Friend: Mavis Dean and family. Other family members including: Louise Saunders and family of Smith’s Bay, Cat Island; The Campbell family of Hollywood, Florida; The descendants of the late Bishop and Hattie Saunders family; Prince Francis & family; The Burrows; The Butler, Marche, Smith, Cooper and Cash families of New Providence;Descendants of the late David and Sidney Young, Jane Poitier & Ruth Davis. Helen Johnson & family, Perrilyn Hudson & family, Betty Knowles & family, Merlene Woodside & family, Gwendolyn Cunningham & family, Judy Alleyne &family, Opal Bastian & family, Jervis Humes & family, Cleveland Humes Jr. & familyBarbara Saunders, T’noya Bethel, Delores Mansburg, Betty Humes Williams & family, Ivy Humes Patrick & family (Connecticut) Albertha Berryman & family (of England) & the entire Humes family. Special Friends and Family, including: Deon (Vivian) Swann of Virginia; Sis Thelcine Simms & family; the Deal family, Violet Dixon, Carl & Yvonne Rolle and Family; Shirley Evans and family, Beverly Smith& Jacquelyn Robinson; the Wallace family, the Rasulo family of Maryland, the Owens family of Maryland, Alexandria Smith & Family, Debbie Rolle & Family, Cherian Rolle; Rev. George Kelly; Rev Greg and Eloise Major, and Family; The Christie family; Sis. Patsy Bowleg, Judy Major & family, Irvin Lightbourne and family, the Narines, Shirley Greenslade& Family; Elvis Thurston; John and Rosalyn Peters of Bowie Maryland, Antoinette Bowe & family, The Metropolitan Baptist Church family, the Ardyss family of Maryland, The PMH Medical Records family; The Bahamas Association of Ministers Wives and Widows. And a host of other family and friends too numerous to name… The body will repose at the Chapel of the Saints Sweeting’s Colonial Mortuary and Crematorium, #84 Blue Hill Rd. from 10.00 am on Friday until 5:00pm and on Saturday from 10:00 am until service at the Church. The post Mrs. Brenda Maria Saunders | Funeral Service appeared first on The Nassau Guardian. source https://thenassauguardian.com/2020/03/18/mrs-brenda-maria-saunders-funeral-service/

http://scuba-ct.blogspot.com/2020/03/mrs-brenda-maria-saunders-funeral.html

[albstone94]

“Possibly Unethical” but No Legal Malpractice

“While defendants’ representation of plaintiff was not perfect, and was possibly unethical (see 22 NYCRR § 1200 [Rule 1.7]), their concurrent representation of three parties with differing interests does not, in and of itself, state a claim for either cause of action.”  So writes Justice Jaffe in Picarella v Liddle & Robinson L.L.P.  2019 NY Slip Op 30440(U)  February 26, 2019,   Supreme Court, New York County  Docket Number: 154213/2018.  The story of representation, multiple representation and failure at trial is Hollywood worthy.

“On or about May 5, 2011, plaintiff became employed at HSBC Securities (USA) Inc. as Senior Vice President for Institutional Sales and Chief Operational Officer/Deputy Head of Business Development for the Americas. His immediate supervisor was non-party Eileen Hedges. Seated between plaintiff and Hedges on the trading floor for HSBC was non-party Melissa Parvis, an analyst for Institutional Sales who also reported to Hedges.

Plaintiff had observed Hedges disparaging and sexually harassing Parvis, repeatedly engaging her in sexual banter and innuendo, discussing her own sexual activities, and once, exposing her breasts to plaintiff and Parvis on the HSBC trading floor. Plaintiff unsuccessfully and repeatedly asked Hedges to stop. She then began to retaliate against him.

Plaintiff reported Hedges’s sexual harassment of Parvis to his supervisors and other members of the HSBC management team, including those in human resources, which resulted in Hedges’ s harassment of plaintiff and disparagement of him within the organization. Plaintiff then reported Hedges’ s retaliatory conduct to members of the HSBC management team.”

“In or about June 2012, concerned with HSBC’s failure to address Hedges’s conduct, the firing of Parvis, and Hedges’s conduct toward him following his initial complaints, plaintiff sought legal advice from defendant Hubbard, a partner at defendant L&R. In July 2012, plaintiff signed a retainer agreement with L&R to represent him in connection with any claims he might have against HSBC. Hubbard asked that plaintiff keep him informed of any developments concerning his employment and treatment at HSBC so that it could be determined whether he had a viable claim. ”

“At or about this same time, Hubbard asked that plaintiff introduce him to Parvis in order to represent her, and plaintiff agreed. In the fall of 2012, Parvis retained L&R to represent her in connection with her claims against HSBC, which plaintiff became aware of in October 2012. Due to Rist’s relationship with Parvis, HSBC retaliated against him as well. He too retained Hubbard to represent him, of which plaintiff learned in or around December 2012. ”

“Absent a specific allegation in the complaint as to how plaintiffs outcome would have been different had plaintiffs action been filed before Parvis’ s, plaintiff does not state a cause of action for legal malpractice. (See Wagner Davis P.C. v Gargano, 116 AD3d 426, 426 [1st Dept 2014]). In Wagner, an attorney’s former clients alleged that they would have prevailed on a motion seeking a preliminary injunction if it had been filed earlier, whereas the attorney argued that the delay was intended to allow a new expert to prepare a report. (Id.). In affirming the trial court’s rejection of the malpractice claim based thereon, the Court held that the former clients had “failed to establish that they would have been successful on the motion absent counsel’s delay,” and that in any event, the decision to delay filing the motion to allow for a new expert report was a nonactionable strategic decision. (Id.). Here too, not only does plaintiff fail in his complaint to allege how the outcome would have been different had his case been prosecuted first, but the complaint sets forth defendants’ reasonable strategic determination to obtain an adjudication of whether Parvis was harassed, a determination that plaintiff does not challenge beyond conclusorily stating that his case should have preceded Parvis’s. ”

“Even if defendants’ “refusal” to call Parvis was the product of a conflict of interest, the allegation remains fatally conclusory. In any event, plaintiff alleges in the complaint that Parvis’ s settlement with HSBC precluded her from talking about her claims and the terms of her settlement, thereby posing no obstacle to her testifying about the alleged retaliation against plaintiff, and HSBC stipulated to the fact of Parvis’s harassment. Consequently, any alleged conflict arising from defendants’ concurrent representation of Parvis was not the cause of her failure to testify. And even if the settlement agreement effectively precluded her from testifying for plaintiff, nowhere in his complaint does plaintiff allege that independent counsel would have been able to negotiate such a provision out of the agreement with HSBC or that Parvis was otherwise willing to testify or able to testify about HSBC’s retaliation against him. Rather, there is no factual basis within the four comers of the complaint from which it may be reasonably inferred that Parvis would have useful testimony to offer plaintiff, as HSBC did not designate plaintiff a “problem case” or reduce his responsibilities until after Parvis had been fired. All told, plaintiffs allegations reflect a disagreement with defendants’ strategic decisions, as opposed to legal malpractice. ”

“Plaintiffs complaint is overwhelmingly based on conclusory and speculative assertions that require the drawing of too many inferences to state causes of action for legal malpractice and a breach of fiduciary duty. (See Heritage Partners, LLC v Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP, 133 AD3d 428, 429 [1st Dept 2015], lv denied 27 NY3d 904 [2016] [the “gross speculation of future events” in the plaintiffs’ allegations were insufficient to satisfy “but for” causation element required to state malpractice claim]).

While defendants’ representation of plaintiff was not perfect, and was possibly unethical (see 22 NYCRR § 1200 [Rule 1.7]), their concurrent representation of three parties with differing interests does not, in and of itself, state a claim for either cause of action. That another member of L&R told plaintiff that he “should consider” seeking new counsel “without explanation” does not constitute an admission of a disqualifying conflict, nor does plaintiff so allege. Although plaintiff need not entirely eliminate alternative factors contributing to his loss in the complaint, he failed to allege facts sufficient to show that but for defendants’ malpractice and breach, he would not have sustained loss. (See Voluto Ventures, LLC v Jenkens & Gilchrist Parker Chapin LLP, 46 AD3d 354, 355 [1st Dept 2007] [evidence of other factors contributing to loss not considered at pleading stage, but plaintiff must allege that legal malpractice was proximate cause of damages]). ”

  “Possibly Unethical” but No Legal Malpractice

[aabany-group]

AABANY congratulates the AABANY members who have been named Top Super Lawyers and Rising Stars in the New York Metro 2018 edition.

Both recognitions of Super Lawyer and Rising Star involve a very selective and intense process in which the selected attorney is nominated and approved by his or her peers in the same area of practice.

Selections are made on an annual basis. Only 5% of attorneys are recognized as Super Lawyers, and only 2.5% of attorneys under 40 years of age are selected as Rising Stars.  The attorney must prove to be ethical, have excellent client records and proven results. The 2018 digital edition of Super Lawyer and Rising Star can be found by following the link in the title.

Congratulations to you all on your efforts and achievements!

New York Metro Super Lawyers

Eugene L. Chang, Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP

Kenneth Chin, Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP

Sylvia Chin, White & Case LLP

Jane Chuang, Lee Anav Chung White Kim Ruger & Richter LLP

Huhnsik Chung, Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP

Eve C. Guillergan, Eve Guillergan PLLC

Andrew T. Hahn, Hawkins Delafield & Wood LLP

Lan Hoang, Baker & Hostetler LLP

Benjamin C. Hsing, Baker & Hostetler LLP

Annie Huang, Robins Kaplan LLP

Richard Kim, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz

David K. Lam, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz

Glenn Lau-Kee, Lau-Kee Law Group, PLLC

Kenneth E. Lee, Levine Lee LLP

Lawrence G. Lee, Lynch Daskal Emery LLP

Lisa S. Lim, Akerman LLP

Raymond Y. Lin, Latham & Watkins LLP

Marie Ng, Sullivan Papain Block McGrath & Cannavo P.C.

Tai H. Park, Park Jensen Bennett LLP

Eric Su, FordHarrison LLP

Vinoo Varghese, Varghese & Associates, P.C.

Ona Wang, Baker & Hostetler LLP

Allen Wong, Raimond & Wong LLC

Arjay G. Yao, Morris, Duffy, Alonso & Faley

Tsui H. Yee, Law Offices of Tsui H. Yee, P.C.

Pauline Yeung-Ha, Grimaldi & Yeung LLP

Andrew J. Yoon, Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP

New York Metro Rising Stars

Keala Fumiko, Chan Hubbard

Joanna K. Chan, Cohen & Gresser LLP

Emily S. Chow, Ginsburg & Misk

Anthony K.C. Fong, Anthony K.C. Fong, Esq.

Zheng Gao, Kevin Kerveng Tung, P.C.

Ligee Gu, Halperin Battaglia Benzija, LLP

Yin Huang, Zuber Lawler & Del Duca LLP

Hanh Huynh, Rubin LLC

Jing Jin, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP

Joyce E. Kung, Sive, Paget & Riesel P.C.

Tiffany Ma, Young & Ma LLP

Claudia Pak, Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP

Anna J. Wang, Robinson & Cole LLP

Jennifer H. Wu, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP 

Shengyang Wu, Caesar and Napoli, P.C.

Ruofei Xiang, Mazzola Lindstrom LLP

Stephenie Yeh, Grimaldi & Yeung LLP

Vanessa Y. Yen, King & Spalding LLP

William Yeung, Law Office of Yeung & Wang PLLC

Michael D. Yim, Putney, Twombly, Hall & Hirson LLP

Ji-Young (Rachel) Yoo, Law offices of Rachel J. Yoo, LLC

Sojin Yoon, Kelley Drye & Warren LLP

[verschwoerer]

Killer 'hot particle': Sellafield coast 'like Chernobyl and Fukushima exclusion zones'

The discovery of a tiny but deadly radioactive 'hot particle' in mud from the Esk estuary near Sellafield has highlighted the dangers the nuclear site poses to residents and visitors, writes Chris Busby. Independent measures of radiation show far higher levels that those of regulators, similar to readings in the Chernobyl and Fukushima exclusion zones. Local villages should be evacuated.

I am angry to the depths of my soul that the earth has been so injured while we were all bemused by supposed monuments of value and intellect, vaults of bogus cultural riches... Sellafield, which pours waste plutonium into the world's natural environment, and bomb grade plutonium into the world's political environment. For money.

So wrote US author Marilynne Robinson in Mother Country in 1989, a few years after the 1983 discovery by Yorkshire TV(video embed below) of the child leukemia excess (ten times the expected number) at Seascale, a village next to the Sellafield nuclear site.

In the documentary, presented by a young David Dimbleby, we see the evidence and a debate between Professor Ed Radford (who started me out on my radiation enquiry in 1991) and a young Wilks on one side, and two men from British Nuclear Fuels.

Despite the Black Inquiry [1], a court case (Reay and Hope vs BNFL), several reports from the National Radiological Protection Board NRPB and their Alice in Wonderland Mirror, COMARE, no one pointed out that the science behind all the protestations of innocence is bogus.

The court case was lost for the same reason. Martyn Day the solicitor was advised to use the fathers' exposures and genetic risk as a strategy - a mistake that cost them the case. It was the direct exposures from the beaches that were the cause of the child leukemias, not the fathers.

So all BNFL had to do to win, was to show that there were leukemia children whose fathers did not work at Sellafield. Which there were.

There is no single measure of 'radiation'

The essential problem was that everyone assumed that there was a valid scientific way of measuring radiation which applied equally to all kinds of exposure, and that it produced a number, called the 'dose' which could be used to quantify biological damage (and therefore child leukemia).

BNFL argued that the fact that there was a lot of plutonium on the beach and in the houses at Seascale was not enough. To get enough 'dose' from plutonium, the children would have had to eat some kilograms of house dust. Accepting this nonsense, the late Prof Gardner (and the court case) attempted to get around this by arguing that it was a genetic effect delivered by the fathers' sperm.

A mistake, as I wrote to Martyn Day at the time, and also to Gardner. But Gardner (aged 50, not a smoker) went into hospital with lung cancer just after I sent my letter, and never came out.

The 1984 Black Inquiry was less easily fooled. Sir Douglas Black recommended two new independent outfits to investigate the problem. They were the Small Area Health Statistics Unit (SAHSU) and the Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment, (COMARE).

COMARE was quickly infiltrated by the nuclear industry faithful, and produced one biased report after another exonerating Sellafield as a cause of the child cancers. It used the same 'dose' argument as BNFL in the documentary, as did NRPB's evidence to Sir Douglas.

Initially COMARE toyed with the idea of population mixing and an unknown virus as the cause, but conceded there was no population mixing at Sellafield. However, its latest 17th Report, published last year, finally gave way and decided that it was population mixing after all.

Contamination of the seashore? What contamination?

This seashore contamination has, since 1983, spread to the coast of north Wales where it is measured and where there was a 18-fold child cancer excess by 2004, and to Carlingford in Ireland (see Wolves of Water, Busby 2007) with similar effects.

Well, what is the fuss about? What should the locals and holidaymakers be afraid of?

[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQmFeAGCpC0  ]

Video: 'Windscale - The Nuclear Laundry', first broadcast on Yorkshire TV, 1st November 1983.

I was sent a scanning electron microscope (SEM) photograph by Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment (CORE) the local anti-nuclear NGO. A sample from the tidal estuary of the river Esk near a popular coastal path. I was asked to comment. I show the SEM picture in Figure 1 (above right).

It was collected by CORE for Arnie Gundersen during his brief visit to Cumbria and given to Dr Marco Kaltofen from Boston MA, USA who measures particles. Marco told me on the phone that there were many such particles found in this mud sample. His machine also uses X-ray fluorescence, and can identify the elemental composition of any particle. The XRF spectrum is inset. It shows that the particle is made from Plutonium and Americium.

I knew already that the mud in that area was highly contaminated with plutonium. CORE had sent me samples in the 1990s which I still have and which I use to calibrate my gamma spectrometers. One of those had 22,000Bq/kg Plutonium-239 together with about the same amount of Cs-137 and a host of other nasty isotopes.

Killer isotope of the future: Americium 241

But this is the first time I had seen the villain of the piece, the hot particle. You need some fancy gear for that. Plutonium-241 is a major effluent from Sellafield, a beta emitter with a half-life of just 14 years turning into the alpha emitter Americium-241 with a half-life of 432 years.

For this reason, the concentration of the Am-241 in the Irish Sea sediments is increasing, even if they shut the pipeline tomorrow. Waves of this material reached the Irish coast in the late 1990s and by now has contaminated the beaches near Dublin and will soon (or may have already) reached Waterford. It has been along the coast of Wales since the 1980s, building up in the Menai and on a big tidal sediment bank called the Lavan Sands.

Marco used gamma spectrometry to show that the bulk sample had a radioactivity of 390 kBq/kg (390,000) with signals from Caesium-137 and Americium 241. A Becquerel is one disintegration per second. One click on a Geiger counter.

So what about the individual particles? The one in the picture is about 50 microns diameter. Marco says the XRF suggests about 50% Americium and perhaps 20% Plutonium. I can use these figures to calculate that the activity of the particle itself is about 150,000 Bq of alpha radiation and about 500,000 Bq of beta radiation.

This is a single particle of diameter slightly smaller than the average human hair, invisible to the naked eye. Such a particle is easily resuspended in the air by wind, and indeed will automatically fly itself into the air as a result of the electrostatic charge it builds up as it emits charge in the form of beta and alpha radiation.

That such material is brought ashore over kilometre distances by 'sea-to-land' transfer was discovered by scientists from Harwell in the 1980s. Plutonium from Sellafield has been measured in childrens' teeth right across England [2].

Radiation levels on Sellafield beach 50 times inland levels

We can get some idea of the general level of contamination here. CORE have a Geiger counter which they have used for a long time to astound journalists, school parties, students and campaigners. The meter jumps from a background inland of 5 to 10 to 200 to 300 counts per Second in the area where the sample was taken.

This equates to a dose rate of about 3 microSieverts per hour (uSv/h) over the contamination. That fits reasonably well with Marco's result for the bulk sample. Prof Imanaka from Kyoto University visited the area in 2014 and took some samples back to Japan: he found Cs-137 and Americium-241, but at lower levels, around 1,000 Bq/kg.

In passing, there are some odd results in the official data, the annual Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries RIFE reports. They seem to be misreporting the dose rates over the contamination. In the latest 2015 report we see 500 Bq/kg of Cs-137 and 1,200 Bq/kg Am-241. If we assume a depth of 50cm, this translates into a surface activity of about 400 kBq/m2, which is roughly what Prof Sanderson found in his 1990 aerial gamma survey.

It is technically straightforward [3] to turn this surface contamination into a gamma dose rate at 1 metre above the ground. We get 1.9 uSv/h. So this roughly agrees with CORE since my calculation is only for the Cs-137. But RIFE reports around 0.1 to 0.2 uSv/h.

Perhaps they took their gamma readings at high tide? Reducing measurements by 90%

So although RIFE contamination levels agree with the independent measurements, the official dose rates (including Prof Sanderson's) are about 10 to 20 times too low. Of course, at estuary high tide, all this gamma activity is covered by water and the dose rate will fall by a factor of 10. Maybe RIFE only get out their gear when the water has covered up the contamination?

What do all these numbers mean to the non-scientist? Well, the Geiger counter dose rate of 3 uSv/h tells us that the area contamination is about 900 kBq/m2 in that tidal area of the River Esk. The particle analysis tells us that the radioactivity is mainly in Plutonium and Americium hot particles with some Caesium-137.

This hot particle scenario is the same as in the inner Chernobyl contamination zones. The dose rate is about equal to the level of contamination in the 30km zone of the Fukushima reactors shortly after the disaster.

Recently, BBC reporter Rupert Wingfield Hayes measured 3 uSv/h in the Fukushima exclusion zone; the clip being where radiation expert Geraldine 'Gerry' Thomas made her classic arithmetical gaffe.

The United Nations developed a contamination classification scheme after Chernobyl. Its definition of contaminated land was 37-185 kBq/m2. The Chernobyl Zone of Permanent Control was set at 185-555 kBq/m2 [4]. So we can say that the estuary is 'radioactively contaminated land' and should be a 'zone of permanent control' under the United Nations definition.

Suppressing the inconvenient truth

A number of questions arise in the mind of the man on the Clapham Omnibus.

First, how is it that it took a TV company to draw attention to the dead bodies of the children, rather than the health authority?

Second, how is it that it takes the investigation of a sample obtained by ordinary people and a helpful scientist in America to show a picture of what there is in the sand and mud down there? Why wasn't this done by COMARE, NRPB, BNFL, Harwell, and so forth?

Third, how is it that none of the authorities there have measured the radioactivity and the particles and fenced it all off?

This would happen in the Soviet Union, it would happen in the USA. CORE have consistently complained to the local authorities and the Sellafield Environmental Health watchdog Group about these contaminations, but have been ever ignored or fobbed off. They tell me that one Sellafield PR response was that it did not matter as people usually wore gumboots.

Finally, how is it that no one connected the hot particles with the childhood cancers and calculated the huge doses that even one of these particles, inhaled and internalised, would deliver to local tissue in organs of the body?

Well the answer is simple. It is that the nuclear military complex, lobby, mafia, however you describe it, it is powerful and real, and continues to keep a death grip on the scientific picture of radiation and health. And COMARE, like the other 'independent' scientific agencies and committees that provide the governmental theatricals, are populated with idiots, placemen and dodgy characters.

COMARE was intended by Sir Douglas Black, at the Seascale Inquiry, to provide investigative research independent from NRPB. But they share the same site at UK Atomic Energy Research Harwell. One of the first secretaries, John Cooper, went on to become Director of NRPB, now called Public Health England, though he disappeared rapidly when the German sea-dumping documentary caught him out on TV (below).

[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcaOX2rW0gc  ]

Death in a grain of dust

On COMARE there's Richard Wakeford, ex BNFL. Any conflict of interest there? None reported. And there's Frank de Vocht, who writes for Sense about Science and attacks all my published papers.

SAHSU, the epidemiological wing of this cover-up (now known in epidemiology circles as the 'cluster-busters') is no better: it spent its energy (and government money) developing epidemiological tools to prove the childhood leukemia clusters like Seascale, were due to random chance. I wrote a poem about this in 2003 entitled 'Paul Elliott' after its Director.

At Sellafield, along that coast, Out of the corner of your eye You'll maybe see a little ghost A girl who didn't have to die If you're lucky, you may see her dance Sadly along that altered shore It's certain she's only there by chance That's what I'm told: I can't say more.

So let's look at the overall picture. Sticking with poetry, TS Eliot's line, "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" seems the most appropriate summary. Only it's worse: death on Sellafield beach is lurking in a single grain of dust so tiny as to be invisible, yet spitting out 650,000 alpha and beta particles every second.

And Sellafield, the largest legitimized source of radioactive pollution in the world, has turned that beautiful coast into Eliot's Waste Land.

But there are no United Nations warning notices at the beaches and estuaries near Sellafield.

The areas should be fenced off. The coastal villages must be evacuated.

http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2988776/killer_hot_particle_sellafield_coast_like_chernobyl_and_fukushima_exclusion_zones.html

[washwashgalaxy]

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[heartsoundslikelove]

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[heartsoundslikelove]

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