"Only the mass media can put the kind of pressure on TEPCO and the Japanese government to bring about major change. This will cost at least 10 billion dollars if not 20-30 billion to clean up. It will take at least 10 years if not 20 and roughly 10,000 people working on the cleanup. The nuclear business is global. This needs an international effort to clean up Fukushima."
-- Nuclear Engineer Akira Tokuhiro
In an email today, Japanese born, U.S.-educated nuclear engineering professor Tokuhiro wrote the following. I want to bring up a sensitive point to many who are (may be) identified below.

There is a difference amongst the following: nuclear physicist, nuclear engineer, nuclear reactor operator, nuclear non-proliferation specialist. During the current crisis, all these 'experts' have been in the media. The ranking of 'experts' who REALLY know how the reactor accident took place is as follows.

1) Nuclear reactor operator (he/she is really the forensic surgeon, the auto mechanic who can build and drive the car)
2) Nuclear engineer (he/she is the forensic and internal/external medicine practitioner; the automobile design and analysis engineer)

As for the other two, they only understand the principles. It is as if they know the principles of driving a car but have never driven the car nor designed a car nor repaired a car. Would you ask a podiatrist about a medical heart condition? Would you ask a medical ethicist? I think you get my point. It takes all kinds of people to run the global nuclear industry. However, who do you trust in terms of knowledge?

There are only a handful of Japanese nuclear engineers working and teaching in the U.S. What Professor Tokuhiro was able to add also included a strong dose of a deep understanding of the Japanese culture. "There is a cultural element in this. The Japanese do not want to be embarrassed". He added that TEPCO is a large entity which only has to answer to the Prime Minister. He added that it is a bit of the "... Only small people pay taxes mentality". The mass media in Japan is only given the information TEPCO and the government want to give them. Labor practices in Japan, he says, are quite brutal and when you get to the bottom of the labor force, those at the top of society do not really care about them."

The numbers are disturbingly higher than we have been lead to believe, the number of homes in the villages which are contaminated, the rice paddies, the fact that the "official" six to nine month cleanup is virtually impossible, no matter how much they do accomplish... all of this is what has being kept off the front pages of the mass media.

The first conversation I had had with Akira Tokuhiro the previous week included the contracts for the clean-up, the bidding process for which was being kept highly secret and is the main reason France's President Sarkozy headed to Japan so soon after the earthquake and tsunami leading to the accident. It will take a very long time for the surveys to be carried out to determine exactly what needs to be decontaminated, and only so much water for example can be processed per day. TEPCO speaks of 500 to 1,000 people involved with the cleanup, but Tokuhiro claims it will take ten times that amount.

"They need to tell people it will take at least 10, maybe 20 years, at least 10 if not 20, or even $30 billion and at least 10,000 people working on this, " he repeated, "This is the most important thing they must tell people. They must be honest with the evacuees."

"It has now been over 60 days that this has been going on and people need information." He added that a mildly anti-nuclear group, CNIC, the Citizen's Nuclear Information Center, had pretty reliable information here.

An anonymous colleague in Japan told Tokuhiro this past week that there is no initiative taking place in terms of the health and measuring of those who have been exposed. The IAEA is supposedly sending around 20 experts to help with this, but even they do not have the kind of manpower to deal with such a human catastrophe (yet, Tokuhiro adds, they can find people to go to Iran and Iraq as weapons inspectors).
Virtually any nuclear engineer connected with the industry he or she supports cannot be fully trusted right now to give us the full truth about Fukushima because the truth is simply too damaging to the nuclear industry and they know it. The attitude the industry has as well as the ugly reality that this same energy is tied to the economy which supports full on capitalism must be scaled back Tokuhiro advised. He tells me it is difficult to speak of this in the U.S., but adds that we need to go back to a time when shops were closed on Sundays and we spent time with our families, not using up more energy but actually staying home. I added that we still do this on Sunday and it is often very difficult to find shops open here in France on Sunday except for the local outdoor markets.

A Japanese colleague of his inside of Japan, a radiation oncologist actually originally from Fukushima prefecture says there must be long term health monitoring at least 100,000 people will need to be monitored and they have this expertise in Japan because of the horrific experiences of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Professor Tokuhiro teaches in Idaho and as an academic he is still free to tell what he believes and believes almost all nuclear engineers following this disaster know, and have known since almost the beginning, that the reactors have melted through the core and that this has not been admitted until just these past few days when access to the computer data from the control rooms was obtained

Why is TEPCO not telling anyone the truth? That these 3 units have partially melted and that they have known this for 3-4 weeks at least. They release only small amounts of information every day. Many nuclear engineering professionals have known, were able to figure out almost from the beginning, in fact perhaps from March 15, sixteen hours or so after the accident, that the core had melted. Was there any operator error involved? He understood that TEPCO workers retreated on March 12 because the radiation readings were simply too high. He believes that within 16 hours after this they already knew the core had melted. And even though no one wants to waste precious time pointing fingers and blaming, this information is much needed in order to learn about how the events surrounding Fukushima and these numerous criticalities can be avoided in the future. We have many many of these plants operating, in the U.S. and around the world.

"This must be an international effort," Tokuhiro emphasized again and again. He has come up with 20 Lessons Learned and states that an International Nuclear Cleanup Project must be undertaken in such a way the data and this experience help humanity to learn how to move forward. He asks where the leadership has been, where is the IAEA?
"We have an international effort to clean up Chernobyl. They just raised another 600 million or so". (25 years later and this is still needed).

I asked him about his own family in Tokyo and about Japanese culture in general regarding the lack of information. Akira replied that Japan is very centralized, Tokyo-centric and that these things seemed to be taking place very far away and that the people in Tokyo were not in shelters, evacuated perhaps forever from their homes. He told me about the diary he was reading online of one evacuee who had been a nuclear engineer working at Fukushima, who had been evacuated with his family. (It can be found in the original on the Japan Nuclear Industrial Forum here: www.jaif.or.jp). This man is an expert and he can be trusted to know what is going on and analyze the information.

He ended with the assertion that, "This is forcing the issue of what our energy portfolios for the next 15-20 years and longer will look like and what to do with all the nuclear waste. Politicians in an election year just want this to all go away". Then he asked, "If in the U.S. 20% of the energy is generated by nuclear, then can the U.S. economy right now afford a 20% slowdown?"

Fukushima differs from other nuclear reactors in that it uses a dirty fuel or MOX which is banned in many of the countries where nuclear power is a major energy source. My Swedish-Russian nuclear physicist friend is sending me links for reliable radioactivity readings and weather/wind patterns. We must remember some of what is posted on the internet are simulations, not actual readings. But he did add this:

The most terrifying fact is that the Japanese power plants are using 'dirty' fuel, which most countries have rejected and banned. Needless to say that the Americans built them. Since the Earth is moving Counterclockwise most of the fall-out will drop on U.S., unless very strong winds take it somewhere else.

In Sweden we have so far not measured increased levels of radiation. My only concern is what happened to the plutonium stored in the water tanks next to the reactor.

There are 23 reactors in the U.S. like the one in Fukushima. It takes a lot of money to build a reactor but then it becomes a money-maker once it is paid off and is run for as long as possible making as much profit as possible. This MUST become about our common future, and it does require an international effort. This is NOT a Wall Street bailout, this is much more serious and needs immediate attention and action. We MUST put the future of humanity and our planet before constant profits and crazy out of control capitalism.

A great deal of information has finally been coming out these past few days and if you need more information on the technical aspects of the core meltdowns and explanations which are updated fairly often, please follow Arnie Gunderson at www.fairewinds.com

I will update as I receive and am able to process all of this information and also include more links for very practical information with interpretations for laypeople outside this area to be able to use to make good choices.
Until then, take care, stay informed and be proactive with your information gathering. If there is one thing we have learned form this, it is that it is not going to be the mainstream media which will be taking the lead on getting this information out there. We must ask ourselves, "Why?"

Please follow me on twitter at: vivigive and be watching for our documentary coverage of the nuclear and economic events at: www.vigilante-vnm.com

Follow Vivian Norris on Twitter: www.twitter.com/vivigive

Now France is leading the way as more and more nations stand behind the decision to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya. Twenty five years ago France refused (under Mitterrand) to let the US fly over. The bombs in the metro, on the Champs Elysees that year (I had two close calls in a number of days) and the threat of more violence that spring meant that many of my fellow American junior year abroad friends left France and went back home. I had worked and saved up my money to come and I sure as heck was not going to bail, even if it meant nervous weeks observing fellow passengers in the metro and any suspicious bag.
President Reagan approved the go ahead for the bombing of Libya in April. By may another bigger disaster was looming. While down near Nice on a boat for several days, I celebrated my twentieth birthday with friends, enjoying myself in the sun which I had not been informed, was shining through Chernobyl's nuclear cloud.
Somehow the cloud had miraculously stopped at the French border and news on the event within France was difficult to come by. I recall programs which resembled weather reports and the odd photograph from the disaster, which seemed much further away than it was.
The world has changed. The world has remained the same. We have learned absolutely nothing.
Up in Norway where I traveled soon after the Chernobyl disaster, the news was much more out in the open and people were told not to bring small children to the beaches as they might eat contaminated sand. The government had all the reindeer, the mainstay livelihood of the Saami people up North, killed and the meat destroyed as the cloud had hung around the Nordic countries for a god bit before heading down to France and Italy.
Three and a half years later, I became very sick, my immune system an absolute mess. The doctors could not figure out what was wrong with me, was it Lupus that a cousin had had and my great grandmother had died from? Negative. I moved to Seattle to go to grad school, and slowly became better. It took over a year to begin to feel normal. The doctor at the University medical center told me I had decontaminated myself through eating only organic, moving to what was then a clean part of the US, doing yoga, etc. You can decontaminate yourself. You can rebuild your immune system. I wondered if my immune system had been weakened by that time in France and Norway, and I made a decision not to have children for some time, instinctively knowing I should wait. My body was not ready, not decontaminated enough yet.
Back in France, another woman a few years older than myself, who had spent a great deal of time in the South of France, did become ill and died around the time I became ill. Her husband wondered if the Chernobyl cloud over France, which we slowly grew to learn the truth about, had been the cause. Many many people in France and Scandinavia as well as the hundreds of thousands of people in and around Chernobyl have died, over a million total, as a result of that contamination. The increase in especially thyroid cancer has been huge. In certain parts of France you still should not eat the mushrooms and truffles.
As I watch with absolute horror and sadness what is happening in Japan, and imagine the ways that contamination will spread, and as we once again decide to go after Libya, I wonder, when will it end? When will we learn?
Will my now twelve-year-old daughter's life be a repeat of what I lived? Will her world be even more contaminated, polluted with even more violence and hardship? When I decided I wanted to have a child it was because I believed in a better future. I still do. But we must open our eyes and our hearts and actually learn something from all this.
As Rilke wrote, "There is no place which does not see you. You must change your life".
And it starts with every one of us, making the decision to change the way we live. All revolutions begin in the minds and hearts of individuals. We can build a better world, a saner less wasteful world, one without violence, a cleaner world.
This is a wake up call.
Follow Vivian Norris on Twitter: www.twitter.com/vivigive

I received the following email a few days ago from a Russian nuclear physicist friend who is an expert on the kinds of gases being released at Fukushima. Here is what he wrote:
About Japan: the problem is that the reactor uses "dirty" fuel. It is a combination of plutonium and uranium (MOX). I suspect that the old fuel rods have bean spread out due to the explosion and the surrounding area is contaminated with plutonium which means you can never return to this place again. It is like a new Tchernobyl. Personally, I am not surprised that the authority has not informed people about this.

I have been following the Fukushima story very closely since the earthquake and devastating tsunami. I have asked scientists I know, nuclear physicists and others about where they find real information. I have also watched as the news has virtually disappeared. There is something extremely disturbing going on, and having lived through the media blackout in France back in April and early May 1986, and speaking to doctors who are deeply concerned by the dramatic increase in cancers appearing at very young ages, it is obvious that information is being held back. We are still told not to eat mushrooms and truffles from parts of Europe, not wild boar and reindeer from Germany and Finland 25 years later.
A special thanks to people like European Representative Michele Rivasi, who has followed this issue since Chernobyl: Rivasi, a Green MEP and founder of France's Commission for Independent Research and Information on Radioactivity, told EurActiv that she was worried the tests would cover up nuclear risks and reinstate business as usual.
"It's very important to have scientists who are not already paid by the nuclear power industry," she said. "If they are the same people from Euratom and national authorities they use today, why would they say anything different to what they say all the time?"
One resource for information on Chernobyl deaths and cancers/illnesses was only just recently translated and can be found online: "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment" by Alexey Yablokov, Vassily Nesterenko, and Alexey Nesterenko.
Another very good report on Chernobyl is this one, which also outlines the disturbing relationship between WHO and the nuclear industry.
The best site I have found for up-to-date information by nuclear industry experts is here.
Arnie Gundersen was a high-level executive for years and analyzes the information he has been receiving in a calm and scientific way. His latest update is entitled, "Fukushima Groundwater Contamination Worst in Nuclear History." Gundersen is in touch with senior members of the Japanese nuclear establishment. What is highly disturbing is that the main reason Japan does not appear to be as bad a Chernobyl is that the wind was blowing out to sea and not for the most part towards land. But all this has done is spread the cancers out into the worldwide population as opposed to concentrating it all in Japan. It will be very difficult to tell, as it was in France, Scandinavia and other places, where the Chernobyl cloud traveled in the days following the disaster. I will summarize some of Gunderson's very disturbing and important information here:
1. There was a hydrogen explosion, and it was a detonation, not a deflagration -- in other words the fire burned up not burned down.
2. A frame-by-frame analysis shows a flame that confirms that the fuel pool is burning as a result of an explosion which started as a hydrogen explosion but that could not have lifted the fuel into the air so there must have been a violent explosion at the bottom of the fuel pool. But more data is needed.
3. Gunderson speaks about past criticalities in other nuclear reactors around the world, and I find it odd we are not hearing about these and how they can teach us about what is going on now at Fukushima.
4. Radioactive water is being pumped out and groundwater is contaminated, so there must be a leak or leaks, and this disaster is in no way contained. There will be contamination for a long time to come and this groundwater contamination is moving inland. One town is reporting radioactive sewage sludge from ground water or rainwater.
5. The Greenpeace ship Rainbow water has requested the Japanese government to test the waters near Japan, and Japan has refused this independent data request. The EPA has also shut down all inspection centers and is NOT inspecting fish. (Why the silence?)
Since Gunderson made this latest video, just a day or so ago new photo evidence seems to be showing burning and new fires taking place at Fukushima (from TBS JNN Japan):

Why is this not on the front page of every single newspaper in the world? Why are official agencies not measuring from many places around the world and reporting on what is going on in terms of contamination every single day since this disaster happened? Radioactivity has been being released now for almost two full months! Even small amounts when released continuously, and in fact especially continuous exposure to small amounts of radioactivity, can cause all kinds of increases in cancers.
One reason no one is reporting on this nor allowed to go inside the exclusion zone nor even measure the waters off of Japan is because of the following compiled by Makiko Segawa, a staff writer at the Shingetsu News Agency. She prepared this report from Fukushima and Tokyo for www.japanfocus.org:
Freelance journalists and foreign media are pursuing the facts, even going into the radiation exclusion zone. However, surprisingly, the Japan government continues to prevent freelance journalists and overseas media from gaining access to official press conferences at the prime minister's house and government.

Uesugi stated that since March 11th, the government has excluded all internet media and all foreign media from official press conferences on the "Emergency Situation." While foreign media have scrambled to gather information about the Fukushima Reactor, they have been denied access to the direct information provided by the government and one consequence of this is that "rumor-rife news has been broadcast overseas."
In fact, access has been limited in two ways. First, while Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio holds twice daily press conferences for representatives of the big Japanese media, registered representatives of freelance and internet media are limited to a single press conference per week. Second, in contrast to Japanese media who are briefed regularly by Edano and periodically by Prime Miniser Kan, foreign media are briefed exclusively by administrative staff.
Uesugi also notes that at TEPCO press conferences, which are now being held at company headquarters, foreign correspondents and Japanese freelancers regularly ask probing questions while mainstream journalists simply record and report company statements reiterating that the situation is basically under control and there is nothing to worry about. One reason for this, Uesugi suggests, is that TEPCO, a giant media sponsor, has an annual 20 billion yen advertising budget. "The media keeps defending the information from TEPCO!" "The Japanese media today is no different from the wartime propaganda media that kept repeating to the very end that 'Japan is winning the war against America,'" Uesugi exclaimed.
There is one particularly telling example of the media shielding TEPCO by suppressing information. This concerns "plutonium." According to Uesugi, after the reactor blew up on March 14, there was concern about the leakage of plutonium. However, astonishingly, until two weeks later when Uesugi asked, not a single media representative had raised the question of plutonium at TEPCO's press conferences.
On March 26, in response to Uesugi's query, TEPCO stated, "We do not measure the level of plutonium and do not even have a detector to scale it." Ironically, the next day, Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano announced that "plutonium was detected."
When TEPCO finally released data on radioactive plutonium on March 28, it stated that plutonium -238, -239, and -240 were found in the ground, but insisted that it posed no human risk. Since TEPCO provided no clarification of the meaning of the plutonium radiation findings, the mainstream press merely reported the presence of the radiation without assessment (link). Nippon Television on March 29 headlined its interview with Tokyo University Prof. Nakagawa Keiichi, a radiation specialist, "Plutonium from the power plant--No effect on neighbors."
On March 15, Uesugi criticized TEPCO for its closed attitude toward information on a TBS radio program. For this, he was immediately dismissed from his regular program. The scandal involving TEPCO's silencing of the media took an interesting turn two weeks later. At the time of the disaster on March 11, TEPCO Chairman Katsumata Tsunehisa was hosting dozens of mainstream media executives on a "study session" in China. When asked about this fact by freelance journalist Tanaka Ryusaku at a TEPCO press conference on March 30, Katsumata defended the practice.
"It is a fact that we traveled together to China," he said. "[TEPCO] did not pay all the expenses of the trip, but we paid more than they did. Certainly they are executives of the mass media, but they are all members of the study session."
When Tanaka requested the names of the media executives hosted by TEPCO in China, Katsumata retorted, "I cannot reveal their names since this is private information." But it is precisely such collusive relations between mainstream media, the government and TEPCO, that results in the censorship of information concerning nuclear problems.
Now the Japanese government has moved to crack down on independent reportage and criticism of the government's policies in the wake of the disaster by deciding what citizens may or may not talk about in public. A new project team has been created by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, the National Police Agency, and METI to combat "rumors" deemed harmful to Japanese security in the wake of the Fukushima disaster."
We need to demonstrate and write to our representatives and demand that measuring be done around the world continuously. Fukushima's nuclear disaster is still going on. People need accurate information to protect themselves. Here is how after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Chernobyl doctors worked with those who had been contaminated to decontaminate them (Sources: Tatsuichiro Akizuki, M.D., Nagasaki 1945 (London: Quartet Books, 1981); Tatsuichiro Akizuki, "How We Survived Nagasaki," East West Journal, December 1980):
Macrobiotic Diet Prevents Radiation Sickness Among A-Bomb Survivors in Japan - In August, 1945, at the time of the atomic bombing of Japan, Tatsuichiro Akizuki, M.D., was director of the Department of Internal Medicine at St. Francis's Hospital in Nagasaki. Most patients in the hospital, located one mile from the center of the blast, survived the initial effects of the bomb, but soon after came down with symptoms of radiation sickness from the fallout that had been released. Dr. Akizuki fed his staff and patients a strict macrobiotic diet of brown rice, miso soup, wakame and other sea vegetables, Hokkaido pumpkin, and sea salt and prohibited the consumption of sugar and sweets. As a result, he saved everyone in his hospital, while many other survivors in the city perished from radiation sickness.
I gave the cooks and staff strict orders that they should make unpolished whole-grain rice balls, adding some salt to them, prepare strong miso soup for each meal, and never use sugar. When they didn't follow my orders, I scolded them without mercy, 'Never take sugar. Sugar will destroy your blood!'...
This dietary method made it possible for me to remain alive and go on working vigorously as a doctor. The radioactivity may not have been a fatal dose, but thanks to this method, Brother Iwanaga, Reverend Noguchi, Chief Nurse Miss Murai, other staff members and in-patients, as well as myself, all kept on living on the lethal ashes of the bombed ruins. It was thanks to this food that all of us could work for people day after day, overcoming fatigue or symptoms of atomic disease and survive the disaster" free from severe symptoms of radioactivity.
People need answers, data and honest information to help them deal with what is going on. Media blackouts, propaganda and greedy self-interested industries, of any kind, who allow human beings' health to be affected, and deaths to occur, must be stopped now. That senior TEPCO man and the leading nuclear academic in Japan did not break down crying and resign their positions because all was well at Fukushima. Think about it world, and act now before it is too late.
Follow Vivian Norris on Twitter: www.twitter.com/vivigive

"Slow down," Nassim tells me as we walk towards the Luxembourg gardens from Odeon in Paris this afternoon, "You're walking too fast."
The former trader-turned-author had said the same words to me the first time we walked and talked together across Ile de la Cite a few days before the mathematician, Benoit Mandelbrot, to whom his best-selling book, The Black Swan is dedicated, passed away. (Disclaimer: Taleb's book has absolutely nothing to do with the recent Aronofsky ballet film, though Taleb said that absurdly the film's release had seemed to increase book sales.)
Calmly taking it down a notch to more of a stroll, the often admired and sometimes despised author explained how physical exertion should follow a pattern of the juxtaposition of slow walking with intense strength training. It comes down to robustness. He has extrapolated this to our financial markets, which also need to be robust, to survive and thrive, even in the presence of the inevitable Black Swan event. That doesn't look like where we are right now in the West. We are not only less than robust, we appear to be rigged to blow up in ways that are undermining America more than any "foreign" terrorist ever did. This frail architecture is American-made and has been exported around the world via virtual-reality-type financial products which next to no one understands, are next to impossible if not indeed impossible to unwind, and which represent debt that has next to no chance of being repaid.
There is not only no robustness, there is no there there.
Taleb has recently taken a step back, away from the media spotlight these past few months, following an intense period of media appearances as a result of the financial crash of 2008, where it was proclaimed that his 2007 Black Swan book had foreseen the disaster to come. He prefers now to edit books of citations, read the classics, lunch with philosophy professors, teach and recharge. One of his latest works, The Bed of Procrustes, is not officially about finance at all, but full of "philosophical and practical aphorisms." On occasion, as he did in Paris, he speaks to groups of bankers, economists, and the odd journalist. As we continued at a snail's pace to make our way from Luxembourg towards the Sorbonne, where he offered me a dictionary of Latin and Greek quotes from a famous philosophical bookstore (in France The Black Swan sells in the Philosophy section, not filed under Economics), he explained why he had turned from markets to penning aphorisms such as:
"The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself."
"The best revenge on a liar is to convince him that you believe what he said." (This is one of my favorites.)
"Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment."
And perhaps the most important:
"What I learned on my own I still remember."
I also attended a more official event, where Taleb spoke to bankers, economists and a mostly male audience of the financial French establishment. As Taleb spoke, these men listened to his assertion that "optimization" does not play out, neither in financial markets nor in biology. If an optimist (and not God or some more intuitive evolutionary process) had designed the human body, we would have one not two kidneys, as we do not actually need both of them. The mathematical formulas and algorithms put in place by banks to monetize every millisecond milli-transaction and squeeze profits out of them and our ever-increasing interconnectedness mean that a small unforeseen event now ripples around the world faster than the next banker has the time to take out his Blackberry and check the markets. In fact, says Taleb, it was precisely the access to a Blackberry in the hands of investors and bankers around the world that allowed for the crash in the first place. Interconnectedness and technology has made us more fragile, not more robust. Walking too fast, instead of strolling at a leisurely pace, has proven deadly as we missed so much along the way, passing by too quickly, while the bubble was growing ready to burst. But this latest financial crisis is not that unusual, and it is not just a repeat of the Great Depression, but rather something worse, as we are now less robust than we were back then, and more interconnected in ways that allow this lack of robustness to ripple around the world so quickly that the Ponzi schemes collapse all at once.
Nobel prize-winning economists, hired by hedge funds and banks, were stamped with authority that allowed them to create his mess in the first place. Taleb even claims on his website, www.fooledbyrandomness.com, that the Nobel committee, which voted for the Economics Prize (not an official original Nobel, by the way, but added decades later), should be held liable for having placed the stamp of approval on these men in the first place.
Taleb has been criticized, but he tells it as he sees it, whether or not everyone agrees. He is taken seriously by everyone from the UK's David Cameron to politician Ralph Nader. Not to mention NYU Polytechnic Institute, which granted him Distinguished Professor status. Yet he falls somewhere between academic and finance guy, his approach to both is philosophical.
In the end, Taleb said, risks can indeed still be taken but they must only be taken by those financial groups robust enough to withstand heavy losses from Black Swan-type events. And we must protect those who are not able to protect themselves. Society at large should not be paying for and saving too big to fail banks nor any financial groups that take risks for which they are not designed.
Taleb and I said goodbye down Boulevard Saint Germain and I watched as he walked slowly back towards his hotel to take a nap. As he walked very slowly yet with a determined pace, back towards the heart of the Left Bank and St. Germain des Pres, I was reminded of his aphorism:
"To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly."
And so he has.
Read his latest book, which began as notes added to The Black Swan, and appropriately entitled, Force and Fragility. I would also suggest that people read Technical Papers Associated with The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007-­2010) at www.fooledbyrandomness.com/Technicalpapers.pdf.
Follow Vivian Norris on Twitter: www.twitter.com/vivigive

Why did I vote for President Obama? I trusted him, and I still do. Why do so many Americans want Elizabeth Warren in a position of power and financial decision-making? Because they trust her to tell them the truth and do right by them. Why is the Banker to the Poor, Muhammad Yunus (who earns around 400 euros per month) trusted by millions around the world, yet the CEOs, CFOs and Presidents of major financial institutions are not only not trusted, they are despised? It all comes down to trust. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. And I don't want to be fooled again. Neither do 300 million Americans. Neither does much of the rest of the world.
In other words, we are over these guys in suits with their private jets and trophy wives. We are over the tennis buddy behind the scenes deal making insider information trading buying our politicians and leaving us with the bill and our president with a mess to clean up...it stops now.
Ironically, the very word for "credit" credire...means to believe in or trust. Trust is behind the entire concept of banking. What do the poorest of the poor in Muhammad Yunus Microcredit world and the wealthiest financial institutions have in common? Access to credit with no collateral to back up the loans. Yet the poorest of the poor in the Grameen Bank world pay back at rates as high as 99%. Those big banks not only did not pay back, they took from us and paid themselves bonuses. Hmmm...guess they aren't very good bankers are they? Because they have destroyed the very trust they need to get us to give them our money, invest it and give us something back. It feels like they are, well, stealing our money doesn't it?
Perhaps the reason there is still trust in Dr Yunus' world is because 98% of the poorest of the poor Grameen borrowers who are trying to make better lives for themselves and their children are women? Yunus noticed that women paid back better than the men, and used the money and profits from their small businesses to help their families so he focused on loaning to them. It is looking like most of the mess in the Western financial world is being caused by a handful of men, men with inflated egos, Narcissists so removed from how most people live their lives that one begins to feel that they actually believe they are somehow not entirely human.
But the fact is, they are human, just like all of the rest of us. And we simply do not trust them anymore, and most likely never will again. So let's get the investors and board members and depositors to change things, shake it up, remove these guys and put some women in charge, and those in whom we actually have trust again.
Then and only then will America have a banking system worth believing in, and until then, well, it's pretty much Us against Them. And I have a pretty strong feeling They are going to Lose. Because there are more of us, and we actually are rediscovering our power both politically and economically. Move your money. Call your representatives. Educate your children about the political process. Rebuild your communities and help those in need. There are so many people not finding work after losing their jobs. There is so much good will and energy among young people who want to remain optimistic about their future. America will be whole again and it will be even better now that we have woken up from this fantasy.
Turn off the TV. Dust off your bicycle. Have a block party and get to know your neighbors. Grow a garden. Learn to cook really healthy meals. Spend time with your partner and children. Read! It is time to slow down and rethink things. Use this time wisely. Become informed about the world. You are more powerful than you know. You can make a decision and act on it. Once you shift your perspective and take action, everything begins to shift. If we all do it together, a wave of good will and rebuilding will take root. It already is.
P.S. -- After taking a real vacation this summer, turning off the cell phone and disconnecting from email, I realized how very important it is to make time for doing nothing in order to come back re-energized and with new ideas. Check out some of them here.
Follow Vivian Norris de Montaigu on Twitter: www.twitter.com/vivigive

Based on the adherence to the Chatham House Rules, no individuals nor companies will be identified by name.
A remote location near St. Andrews, Scotland, was a somehow ideal place for bankers and their technology bedfellows to discuss their common future, held under gray clouds and bad financial news brewing in nearby Ireland, and austerity protests in much of Europe. Except these bankers were 90% from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The rare European and even rarer (expat) American, although often dominating the speaking space, added little to the reality of those who attended. Underlining this fact was a Kenyan banker who announced a 36% yearly profit or an Indian CEO expanding internationally taking the stage just after a gloom and doom American analyst or frankly depressing former Central Bank representative from the West.
Will the emerging market economies be able to sustain this optimism or will yet another wave of crisis hit those markets as well? Or had they learned from the '97 crisis (bankers from countries such as Thailand helped to put that crisis in perspective) and were thus in better shape to deal with any new ones to come? And is this crisis in the West not a kind of karmic payback for that '97 Asian Financial Crisis, without which China and much of Asia would have already been much stronger? Africa, without violence, famine and AIDS too would have risen up as a financial leader much earlier. At last these parts of the world, where the majority of the poor, those Bottom of the Pyramid citizens of the world, were seeing a brighter future. Our crisis in the West should not be hindering their prosperity, nor should globalization force those who have begun pulling themselves out of dire poverty, fall back because of rising food prices or debts to the IMF and World Bank. Ironically those same countries, which were told they could not bail out their own banks when times became rough, have been watching closely as the US bailed out its own banks. This kind of hypocrisy does not go down well. I doubt that kind of advice will be listened to again. Yet one hopes they do not follow in our Western footsteps and that regulations will indeed hinder the kind of hyper-speculation and virtual splicing, bundling and reselling of thin air.
Ironically we ran into an old friend who had been an executive at a large bank in the US (which had failed) who happened to be vacationing, golfing in St Andrews. When he found out we were attending a banking conference he asked questions, and the answers we provided demonstrated that not all was gloom and doom. The demographic charts showed the aging US and Europe while most of the developing world has young populations that are energetic and entrepreneurial... and which can trade with one another. In other words, speaking from a US perspective, in some ways, they simply do not need us. The former banker friend went on to work with manual laborers and has been questioning the way things were done in the past. He witnessed firsthand how cheap credit and over-expansion brought down a once strong economy.
And though the first evening a former Irish rock star turned philanthropist and humanitarian took the stage to address and scold those he perhaps believed to be a Goldman Sachs and City crowd, the reality was that I spent much of the free time discussing with Indian, African and expat US bankers, about the good being done by banking the unbanked, how technology could help speed up that process, and how the BRIC economies were not looking towards their Western colleagues for how to build their economies, but rather trying out new architectures and customer-focused approaches that we in the West would be wise to learn from and implement. Microcredit, women, microsavings were all discussed with bankers who all focused on the human needs in their countries. I was impressed time and again that they did not ignore these difficult topics but were extremely straightforward. I was also frankly shocked as I spoke to several expat American former bankers and analysts who had seen the crisis coming and has moved to Australia and other parts of the world. All of them stated they had done so to ensure their children a better future. WE in the West are now finding ourselves having to stare poverty in the face as much of our population is suffering and without work.
There was talk of the end of banks as we know it, mobile banking and bank branches in a box, but also maintaining a human connection and knowing the customer. But the most exciting ideas came from ex-bankers or those who had been running big banks and who were focusing on funding projects and businesses created by women, or looking at how the poorest of the poor were fulfilling their financial needs via new technologies. African telecoms buying up banks, non-banks doing business that used to be monopolized by banks -- local investments in Africa and Asia were paying off.
But perhaps the most moving part of the event was the final evening, as we were bussed to a farm for a Scottish dinner and dance, accompanied by traditional music of the bagpipes and a farewell sendoff by the Scottish guards. As we stood there, bankers who came in many cases from former European, especially former British empire colonies, watching the cultural manifestation of a fading glory, I realized that the world has already changed, things will never be as they once were, and that is for the best. It is a new time. We need to learn from those we thought we were helping, as they will save us in the end.
Follow Vivian Norris de Montaigu on Twitter: www.twitter.com/vivigive

In the brilliant 1983 film Trading Places the WASPish commodity-trading brothers of Philadelphia's Duke&Duke, decide to teach Billy Ray (Eddie Murphy) about the Commodities market:
Little does Billy Ray know both he and the fallen frat-boy character played by Dan Aykroyd, have been set up by the fraudulent pair, who are trying to corner and rig the markets by buying inside information. Their big trade is in frozen orange futures juice and they bribe/pay a shady character to receive the Department of Agriculture report a few days before its public announcement, thus providing them time to place their trades. But by then, Murphy and Akroyd's characters, along with a butler and a prostitute, have swapped the briefcases, the Duke brothers end up not only losing everything, their almost century-old trading firm wiped out, they end up going to jail.
This is called MORAL HAZARD. It is what should happen when those "playing" in the financial markets have access to inside information, and manipulate the markets. It means that the markets are rigged and the rest of us innocent investors, or even those of us with simple retirement and savings accounts, get, well... you know... %#*ed over! The moral hazard should also extend to the Fed and those inside the government who knowingly rub shoulders with and pass on the juicy tidbits to their former colleagues in the financial industry!
Now one might further analyze this film by remarking that the Murphy and Aykroyd characters who also use the insider information to invest the retirement savings for the butler and the prostitute, to help them all win big, but... who cares? They did not hurt anyone (except the manipulating Duke brothers), and took their winnings and retired to the Caribbean and were happy! In fact the pensions of the average workers won! Unfortunately for us, the banks are more like the Duke brothers who were so greedy they played with people's lives, manipulated the markets, thus hurting normal humans even more, AND they did not even have the good sense to retire, but rather spent their every waking moment thinking about and maliciously trying to earn even more and more money, mostly illegally with inside information. Symbolically, they belong to an elite men's club, and they dine with regulators, receiving information others do not have.
This is precisely what has been going on for way too long not just in the US, but around the world. While reading both Too Big to Fail and the recent French book, Goldman: Comment Goldman Sachs Dirige le Monde, I was horrified to learn about preferential treatment of clients, and of the banks' own funds based on inside information linked to underwriting and the crossover between the Fed, the government and the bank. Though I knew a lot about those invited into as early investors in questionable IPOs, especially in 2000, in biotech and other areas. Those investors made a killing. The suckers who bought shares soon after the IPO watched the prices crash after the insiders got out. Many of those who were "invited in" also tend to be huge donors for political parties... hmmm... a novel way of fundraising? Unfortunately it has been going on for decades! You had to have a half a million dollars to invest (and win big) in the GM IPO! That alone eliminated the average investor. Take a look at who made money off of that and you will see all kinds of I'll scratch your back you scratch mine! (Let's look even further into how our pension funds were being trafficked by pay to play. GM is just one of many many of these kickback-paying scenarios).
But now another huge insider scandal is brewing. And foreign hedge funds and some pretty angry billionaires are well aware of it. In the past six months a huge fraud concerning manipulation and racketeering in the silver market (and now it seems also gold) looks like the making of a horror film (in which the monster just never dies and keeps coming back again and again... we just cannot kill those to big to fail) movie thriller, less like the 80s friendly and funny Trading Places and more like Saw III or The Firm or even The Da Vinci Code. Substitute monsters, chainsaws, Opus Dei or corporate lawyers for a few of the inside circle who dine at the Four Seasons in New York, or these days, in their private dining rooms in fear of being confronted by those who have lost out.
A whistleblower, an independent trader in the Commodities Market in London, communicated what he had heard from JP Morgan and HSBC silver traders, to the CFTC and the next day he and his wife were almost killed when a car ran them down while shopping.
A few weeks ago a new lawsuit, brought by the Southern District of New York against JPMorgan and HSBC for racketeering was filed.
A few people out there are calling for the naked short selling and manipulation of these banks to be exposed by asking citizens around the world to simply purchase one silver coin and thus take physical delivery of silver as opposed to the manipulated paper market. This would create a situation in which the "naked shorts" would be exposed and could undermine their manipulation. One well-loved blog in the financial industry, Zerohedge, is calling for everyone to expose this lie of too big to fail.
Send them to jail, the real culprits not the secretaries and lower down the hierarchy folks, but those who tacitly approved this undermining of the trust in our markets and thus in America itself. We need to bring back Moral Hazard in a big way, and President Obama is the man to do the job. But it won't be easy. Whenever a president confronts the mob, he takes huge risks. And these folks aren't going to disappear without taking down a lot more with them (or creating a terrorist threat or bring us to war!). Funny how they will learn who their true friends are when they have to testify against one another. Oh, and make sure the judges are clean please. We the People, the consumers who have been hurt by this rigging of our markets need people such as Elizabeth Warren to help us clan things up and restore trust. Like yesterday. We've had enough, they're doing it right under our noses, stealing our money, our pensions, and our futures!
America, let's do some serious Trading of Places and help benefit the nation and not the elite few! It is only through being bound to one another's good fortune and acting in solidarity that we as a great country will rise to provide some kind of leadership in this world.
Follow Vivian Norris on Twitter: www.twitter.com/vivigive