Interview with Polar Cities Research Institute Director Danny Bloom -- conducted by Jim Laughter

Note to readers: As author of the new climate thriller, Polar City Red, that was inspired by climate activist Danny Bloom, I decided to pick his brain about the current state of the Earth’s ecosystem. Danny has long been a proponent of the theory that global warming will eventually render the Earth’s atmosphere uninhabitable, causing the near-extinction of the human race if we are not careful and do not take steps to alleviate the problems now. I wrote Polar City Red based partly on his ideas, and centered on much of the research that he provided to me. Now I want to dig even deeper into the mind of this climate activist and unravel a few of his inner thoughts. Hang on. I have a feeling this is going to be an exciting ride!

-- JIM LAUGHTER, author of POLAR CITY RED

www.jimlaughter.com

JIM LAUGHTER: Dan, you were the inspiration for my novel titled ''Polar City Red'', and have been privy to every step of its development. Now, six months after publication, what's your take on the message of the book, and does it fall in line with how you see global warming affecting the Earth in the future?

DAN BLOOM: Jim, from the moment I began reading your novel chapter by chapter as you wrote it last year and this, I felt that you finally someone has put the concepts of what polar city life might be like inside the covers of a fiction novel. The arguments and statistics that scientists use to illustrate climate change and global warming -- and the arguments by the climate skeptics and climate denialists to say that climate change is a hox -- can only go so far in convincing the public it is real and to take action. But to put the ideas and emotions into a fiction novel with real characters interacting with time and space and climate science, you are a pioneer in the science fiction field, what I like to call CLI FI for climate fiction. Your book puts all the science and stats into a work of fiction and makes it all even more real. Your book touched me deeply. I do hope it finds a wide audience worldwide, and someday in tranlation as well, for readers in Japan and Germany and Sweden, among other nations.




JIM: Dan, according to your new ideas, taking into consideration humanity even back to the prehistoric caveman days, there have already been about 180,000 generations of humans on this planet. Now you predict the Earth can sustain only another 30 generations before the ecosystem causes humanity to become extinct or near extinct, with maybe just a few hundred thousands humans left on Earth. If this is true, what is your analysis, and more importantly, what is the solution to fix the problem?


DAN: You know, Jim, I cannot see the future, I can only guess and estimate and put forward some ideas. I do believe that we have about 30 generations left to fix the problems OR ELSE. And I am hopeful that we will find a way to fix the CO2 emissions problems and stop our use of coal and oil, and all fossil fuels. I am an optimist, and even as you novel ends in the epilogue on a positive, optimistic note, I also agree that huamns can solve the problems future generations face, but it's goinng to take some serious work.

QUESTION:  Dan, you’ve developed an idea that once global warming destroys the Earth’s ecosystem, the human race will be forced to escape to the Arctic Circle and other frigid areas of the world to survive, and they’ll do it living in what you’ve termed Polar Cities. Please explain how one of these ''polar cities'' will be established, how they’ll be governed, and how they’ll be maintained to ensure the survival of the human race.

DAN: Good question, Jim! Again, I am just postulating, I cannot "see" the future. But the way I see all this unfolding is this: Slowly, over the next few centures, the Earth warms up 4 to 7 degrees  and life in the central regions becomes impossible for humans due to lack of growing seasons, lack of food, lack of power and fuel and drought. As a result, slowly, in waves, people start making the trek north to Alaska and Canada. They find refuge as climate refugees in polar cities. They will be governed by the USA, Canada, Russia, etc, and also by the UN, which will by then be based in Greenland. Who will get in and who will not be admitted will become vexing questions. I do not have the answers. I see a kind of scary sci fi scenario pretty much as you wrote it in your novel.





QUESTION: Global warming to many people is like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. We’ve heard about them all of our lives but no one has ever actually seen them. What can you say to convince the average person on the street that global warming is real, and that it will eventually affect everything in their lives or the lives of their future generations?

DAN: You know, Jim, there is not much I can say to wake people up. They need to wake up on their own. We cannot force people to wake up. Nature might do it, as the recent Superstorm Sandy showed amazign images of destruction. Your book is a big wake up call. We need movies, TV shows, college courses about polar cities. But all that comes later. I do not know how to wake people up. But I am sure that anyone who reads your book cover to cover will never be the same.





QUESTION: When I wrote Polar City Red, I did it strictly as a fictional account of one possible outcome caused by global warming. How close to you think I got to reality?

DAN: As a mere reader, I think you hit the nail on the head! You used your novelist's imagination to take all the scientific statistics and theories and turn out an emotional adventure thriller that would make one hell of a TV movie of the week or even a National Geographic "what if" kind of documentary.





QUESTION:  You’ve been an ardent student of Dr. James Lovelock, a prominent advocate of global warming; a man that has written books about global warming, and who predicted the almost immediate end of the human race due to the effects of global warming. Now Dr. Lovelock has revised his theory and says the end of humanity may come much later than his previous predictions. As his student, how has his change of heart affected your personal outlook on the dangers of global warming?

DAN: Good question. Actually, Lovelock, who has seen my polar cities website and images and wrote back to me saying "this may very well happen and soon", still believes in climate change and global warming. But he just moved the time fram from 2100 AD to around 2500 AD or 3000 AD in his opinion. And that's fine. Nobody knows the real time frame. But it will happen. Climate chaos threatens the human species, but it won't happen real bad for another 100 to 1000 years. I am with Dr Lovelock and he is with me. He said the best retreat is toward the poles. I got that idea from him. Polar cities, the concept, comes from Dr Lovelock, directly. He is the genius here.





QUESTION: I saw an article that describes your vision of what Polar Cities will look like in the future. According to the pictures, they will be mostly underground structures designed for single and multiple families and will be sustained by geothermal energy and other non-fossil fuel energy sources. How do you propose to tap the energy sources of the Earth without causing further damage to the atmosphere and ecosystem?

DAN: You keep asking good questions, and I don't have the answers to that. But I can tell you this: we need to stop depending on coal and oil as soon as possible, we need to tighten the noose around coal and oil soon, yesterday! But to answer your qusetions, scientists can answer that best of all. You are a novelist and your novel answered the questions very well. I am just a dreamer with a sense of public relations. But I am not a scientist. I do hope wind and solar and ocean tide energy can be harnassed soon. No more oil or coal use, please!





QUESTION: If your Polar Cities theory becomes reality and humanity is forced to evacuate the lower hemisphere for a more northern climate, do you predict the surviving humans will live in an advanced technological state, or do you predict we’ll regress to a pre-industrial lifestyle? What is your reason for either answer?

DAN: Another great question! I predict that we will regress to pre-industrial lifestyles, and people will live
very much as people lived in the 1500s. It won't be a pretty picture. But some of our descendants will survive and make it through. I am an optimist. I see your book as an optimistic book. The ending is perfect.





QUESTION: In my book, Polar City Red, I’ve drawn attention a number of governmental conspiracy theories where the U.S. and other worldwide governments have been creating underground cities since the 1950s in order to save the wealthy elite of the world, leaving the rest of us poor slobs to slug it out for ourselves. If your Polar City theory becomes reality, how will you ensure that the average citizen is deemed worthy to survive?

DAN: You are so right, and your novel describes it well. Polar city life will be run by those who power and connections, and the average Joe will not get in. It will really be the scavengers against the polar city residents. Humanity will descend into chaos, and there will be billions of dead people. From a world population of say 10 billion or even 25 billion them, when the bad stuff happens, maybe at most 200,000 will survive in polar cities. I do hope people read your book and wake up. No more business as usual. And again, Superstorm Sandy, will not caused by global warming, is a wake up call, too. Or the images from it should be a global wake up call about sea level rises and disaster preparedness.







QUESTION: Dan, what's next for you and your Polar City project? Will you continue to hammer away at the politicians and scientists that have their heads buried in the sands of denial, or will you think to yourself, “Hell, I’ll be dead and gone before all of this crap hits the fan. Let the future generations fend for themselves?”

DAN: Jim, this is now my life's work. I will continue 24/7 until I am dead. And then I hope others will carrry on the Polar City ideas. I care about the future. I care about people 500 years from now. I don't know why, but I do. I really do care. I think it's because I love life so much and I love what human beings have achieved, too. I don't want to see this human species end. It would be a shame if it did. So I am speaking out until I am dead. Your book will last a long time, perhaps for 500 years in print and in electronic archives.

FINAL NOTE FROM JIM LAUGHTER: Thanks, Dan, for letting me pick your brain. I hope you enjoyed ''Polar City Red'', and I hope other people around the world will buy it, read it, enjoy it, and heed its warning.
-- Jim Laughter

BLURB & EXCERPT: ''POLAR CITY RED''

POLAR CITY RED

a novel by Jim Laughter


BLURB: ''I was drawn into the story with the first paragraph. Mr. Laughter's descriptive phrasing helped me visualize the frightening possibility of our planet truly experiencing this devastation. He does an excellent job with characterization, showing his depth of research into the subject of global warming and the intricacies man frailties. A very interesting book.''



EXCERPT: The crown jewel of creation, humanity is the only species on the planet capable of destroying itself and bringing about its own extinction. It doesn’t really matter whether that destruction come through war or pestilence, neglect or invention, genius or stupidity; human beings are the only species that seeks ways to save their environment while inventing new ways to cause its demise.

From his earliest history, man has found ways to pollute the Earth. Clouds of smoke rose from wood-burning communal fires long before the advent of fossil fuel-burning modern machinery, and before factory smokestacks spilled their noxious fumes into the atmosphere. Whaling ships sailed the open seas in search of their elusive prey, each one belching carbon dioxide from their processing fires. Countries bent on growth and commerce mined coal from the Earth, filling fireplaces in homes and factories. Great passenger liners set out to sea, their holds filled with coal to burn, or their tanks full of kerosene to power their great engines. Oil-drilling platforms littered Europe’s North Atlantic, the Bering Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico, draining billions of barrels of crude oil from deep within the Earth. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and members of OPEC such as Argentina, Ecuador, and Venezuela, robbed the Earth of her fossil fuels and provided the refineries of the world with their precious cargo, enabling man to transport and heat himself into oblivion.


www.jimlaughter.com


http://jimlaughter.blogspot.com

''POLAR CITY RED'' - BLURB & EXCERPT

POLAR CITY RED

by Jim Laughter


BLURB: Jim Laughter's book about the possible impact of global warming on our society is fascinating, but also frightening -- scary because of the possible future reality of this fictional story.



EXCERPT: Again, Romanov stood and crossed the room to the window. He had watched this city grow from a frozen wilderness camp to a thriving, viable community. Of course, there had been sacrifices. Everyone had made them. No one was exempt from the hardships. People had died; people that could have survived had it not been for the circumstances they found themselves faced with. But they were faced with them, and nothing could change that. Instead, they resisted the easy path of every-man-for-himself and forged life from certain death.

“These women, Dr. Moore,” Romanov said, his back still turned to the couple, “are not cattle used for breeding.” He turned and faced the couple. “They are treasures in the eyes of men fortunate enough to be worthy of them.”

The Moores continued to stare at Romanov. LouEllen’s heart was still hardened against the idea of using young women as concubines to service the sexual desires of multiple partners. She envisioned her own daughter, Abby, now only twelve years old but who would soon blossom into a woman. What was to become of her? Would she be forced into sexual servitude?



www.jimlaughter.com

http://jimlaughter.blogspot.com

"Second Screeners" is a term coined by Tim Arthur in North Carolina

"Second Screeners" is a term first coined by Tim Arthur in North Carolina in the USA, although the term is popular in the UK, too.

Mr Arthur's website reads:

Second Screeners is all about how we share what we watch and consume in terms of content and leisure activity. Whether its TV, movies, theater shows, concerts, video games, or books, computer and mobile device experience sharing has changed the way we watch, listen, play, and read.




The “second screen” connects us to each other. Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as second screen social sharing applications allow us to share our content experiences with each other, and offer new opportunities for content distributors to engage the audience.



We’ll bring you the latest news in Social TV, TV/Film reviews, and thoughts on how entertainment is changing.



Each week, you’ll want to check out our weekly internet broadcast “Second Screeners,” which will be available live streaming, and as an archive on the site and iTunes.



Show creators:
Tim Arthur (@timarthur on Twitter)
Ryan Boyles (@therab on Twitter)
http://secondscreeners.com/

Crying glacier face in Norway photo was faked, digitally altered, photoshopped by the wire agency that purchased the raw negative and then had every right to fake it any way it wanted to.....

A dramatic picture taken by US wildlife photographer Michael S. Nolan has been dubbed ''the face of Mother Nature crying on a canvas of melting ice and cascading water on a Norwegian Glacier''.  Climate activist Danny Bloom frist discovered this amazing photo in 2009 which allegedly shows a crying face in an ice cap located on Nordaustlandet, in the Svalbard archipelago of Norway.

The so-called and alleged ''tears'' of this natural sculpture were ''created'' by a waterfall of glacial water cascading from one of the face’s eyes, thus allegedly painting an alarming ''wake up call'' kind of picture warning the world about the effects of global warming and excess co2 emissions. Michael Nolan is a marine photographer and environmental lecturer for National Geographic and other magazines. He took the photo that he sold to Barcroft Media wire photo agency in the UK in 2009, the contract of the sale allowing them to alter the photo digitally any way they wanted to and they did. Nolan has always said he took the snap while on a 2009 voyage to observe the glacier and surrounding wildlife.

It’s best to ''quote'' Nolan’s words on this. althought they might not be Nolan's words per se, but words put in his mouth by the PR mavens at Barcroft Media in the UK, which is known for faking tabloid photos left and right:




''This is how one would imagine mother nature would express her sentiments about our inability to reduce global warming. It seemed an obvious place for her to appear, on a retreating ice shelf, crying.”

Weeping Crying Glacier Wall Face in Arctic Ice in 2009? Nick Gillespie of REASON magazine revisits his original post

HEADLINE BACK THEN WAS:

Weeping Face in Arctic Ice! Or, Global Warmingers' Version of the Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich Revealed!

HEADLINE TODAY IS:

Was that photo I ridiculed photoshopped, maybe?


by ''Nick Gillespie'' (scare quotes mine)
Sept. 3, 2009 and 2012



Remember the good ol' days in Bush's  America when the religious freaks where shaming fetuses by making them ask morally outraged pharmacists for the Plan B emergency contraceptive after having unprotected sex? When we were awash in magical (read: religious) thinking and right-wing Christians were seeing the grim visage of apocalyptoid preacher John Hagee every time they split open a pomegranate?
And if you don't remember any of that, you surely remember the Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich saga and the tale of the Jesus Potato, don't you? Those were signs of how gullible we were as a society, right?
Yeah, those sure were good times. But now that we've pushed past all that religious crap in everyday culture and can finally breathe good, clean, cosmopolitan air,  we can take a gander at secular versions of the same crap. Now in 2009 it's global warming that's making ''found'' sculptures. Can you say PHOTOSHOPPED?

THIS sad face of 2009, published by a UK tabloid famous for its altered states of photoshopped fotos, and now eerily etched into melting Arctic ice, has been dubbed ''Mother Nature in Tears'' by astonished environment experts. But fast forward to 2012 and let's see if that photo was ever a real photo, raw and untouched....

The weeping image was reported by the UK SUN newspaper, famous for its unprofessional faked photos by the wagonload, to be somehow "sculpted" by water pouring from a glacier retreating under the effects of global warming. The man who took the photo Mike S. Nolan of the USA, never said that. The UK agency that paid him for the photo and then did what it wanted with the photo, said all that. So don't blame Nolan. Blame Barcroft Media. They are notorious for this kind of thing!

Michael Nolan ALLEGEDLY ''captured'' the photo at Norway's Austfonna ice-shelf in 2009. The glacier has been vanishing at the rate of 160 ft a year for 12 years.
Michael, from Arizona, USA, and Alaska, regularly visits the area. He REPORTEDLY TOLD THE UK MEDIA via the interview fashioned by BARCROFT MEDIA and allegedly said: "Every summer there is less ice. I was struck by this image of a face - a saddened, motherly face, crying about our inability to reduce global warming." BUT Mike never said those words. They were put into this mouth by Barcroft's savvy PR mavens. And it worked! The entire world got punked.

But now it's 2012 and maybe some savvy forensics photoshop apps can find out if the photo in question was ever digitally altered for IMPACT. Might take another 3 years to get the truth out. Patience.

Seth Fiegerman in 2012 goes one step further, writing at MASHABLE:

''This Startup Can Tell You if a 2009 Iconic Photo Is Fake''


In the age of Photoshop, it’s almost impossible to say with absolute certainty whether any given image is real, but one former Photoshop employee hopes to change that.
Fourandsix Technologies, a startup founded by a former Adobe Photoshop executive and a digital forensics expert, unveiled its first piece of software this week, which promises to help law enforcement determine whether a photo is authentic or not.
The software, called FourMatch, analyzes the meta data in picture files to quickly determine if a photo has been modified. FourMatch relies on a comprehensive database of more than 70,000 “signatures” that are left on a file from each piece of hardware and software that goes into creating it. As the company explains in a description of the product, “Once an image has been edited and resaved from a software product, this signature is changed to match the software rather than the original capture device.”
FourMatch is primarily intended for police and lawyers who need to determine whether a photograph has been tampered with in any way between the time it was first captured and submitted as evidence. However, the software won’t tell you exactly how the image has been altered — if it has been at all — because it only analyzes the file data rather than the image itself. For this reason, it can just tell you if a file has been touched by another application.

“This first product we’ve put out is not a magic bullet that will tell you everything you need to know about an image,” Kevin Connor, the company’s president and co-founder who worked at Adobe for 15 years, told Mashable. “This is sort of a first step and there are certain scenarios when it will be very valuable, particularly in the law enforcement space.” Indeed, the software currently retails for US$19 so it’s clearly intended for the average consumer.

In the future, though, the startup plans to release other tools to determine the authenticity of pictures that should have broader use. In particular, Connor sees a growing need for technology that can detect photo fraud in medical research, help media companies assess whether their photographers have been too liberal editing their photos and sift through pictures going viral on social media to figure out whether they’re real. Likewise, he thinks tools like this could help banks verify the authenticity of pictures of checks and other payments taken by customers.
“People are using images more and more to communicate and facilitate transactions,” Connor said. “There will be more situations when you might want to be able to verify that it’s true.”

Forensic Photoshop Program Might Explain If Iconic 2009 Tabloid Photo of "Crying Face on Glacier Wall" is Fake

SEE PHOTO HERE

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1210706/Caught-camera-Mother-Nature-cries-river-tears-global-warming-threatens-planet.html?openGraphAuthor=%2Fhome%2Fsearch.html%3Fs%3D%26authornamef%3DAlex%2BMillson

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1210706/Caught-camera-Mother-Nature-cries-river-tears-global-warming-threatens-planet.html#ixzz28g3sOlbP

Pictured: Haunting face crying a river of tears as glacier melts into the sea

By Alex Millson
3 September 2009

At first glimpse it looks like any other glacier you might find in the freezing Arctic wastes of Norway.



But on closer inspection an eerie face is depicted in the melting ice wall that appears to be crying a river of tears.

The forlorn-looking 'Mother Nature' figure appeared to locals during a thaw, with the melting ice and snow falling towards the sea below.

The striking image of the Austfonna ice cap, located on Nordaustlandet in the Svalbard archipelago, would seem certain to be heavily used by environmentalists protesting against climate change.





Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1210706/Caught-camera-Mother-Nature-cries-river-tears-global-warming-threatens-planet.html#ixzz28g3sOlbP

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A new Forensic Photoshop Program Might Explain If Iconic 2009 Tabloid Photo of "Crying Face on Glacier Wall" is Fake. yes, FourMatch is an extension for Adobe Photoshop that instantly analyzes

any open JPEG image to determine whether it is an untouched original

from a digital camera. Now, you can quickly identify files that have

not previously been edited.

By instituting a controlled workflow that requires the submission of

pristine camera originals, you can easily flag images that require

closer scrutiny.



How it works: FourMatch leverages the fact that there is nearly

endless variety to exactly how hardware and software products can

choose to store a JPEG file. This variety results in a distinctive set

of “signatures” from each hardware and software product. Once an image

has been edited and resaved from a software product, this signature is

changed to match the software rather than the original capture device.

Thus, when a file signature correctly matches a known signature from

the device that captured the photo, you can be confident that the

photo has not been edited.



The power of the FourMatch database: Fourandsix has built a database

of more than 70,000 signatures representing more than 2,400 camera

models and mobile devices, as well as signatures from a variety of

image editing programs and online services. When you purchase a copy

of FourMatch, you’re also purchasing access to this valuable database,

which is updated frequently as new devices become available. Loaded

with this database, FourMatch can quickly assess the authenticity of

many images.

War-time 'diary' recalls life of Taiwanese conscript in Japan war

BLACK URINE: An unhappy visit to a 'comfort woman' brothel in Indonesia, air raids over Japanese bases in New Guinea and a bout with malaria were an old Taiwanese man's memories of World War II

When Tony Kuo, a retired high school English teacher in Chiayi City,
decided a few years ago to translate his late father's handwritten war-time ''diary'' of his life as a civilian conscript in the Japanese Imperial Army when he was in his early 20s,
Kuo took on a challenge: translating the Japanese kanji his elderly farmer father had used to write down his memoirs into both Chinese and English and then finding a printing shop to turn out readable copies of a small part of Taiwanese history.

He also wanted to honor his father, he said, who had died in southern Taiwan in 2001 at the age of 83.

The memoir, titled "The Peaceful Gunfire" in English, shines a revealing spotlight on an important part of Taiwan's war-time history, especially on colonialist Japan's conscription of Taiwanese men to work and wage war in the southern Pacific theater.

"My father's diary, written much later after the war, after he retired from farming in Tainan County, is a slice of life that I wanted to make available for historians, academics and anyone else who might want to read this," Kuo said over coffee at a local sidewalk cafe in Chiayi.

"My father was bsed first in Papua New Guenia and then later in

Indonesia. He left by ship in 1943 and came back by ship in 1946."



Conscripted to work for the Mitsui Company as a rice

warehouse laborer, the senior Kuo, a native of Kaoshiung, shipped out

from Taiwan on July 29, 1943, and although the war ended in 1945, he was not able to make it back until 1946.



In writing down his memories in old age, the elderly Taiwanese banana farmer

was able to recollect such detailed memories as U.S. air raids over

Japanese bases where he was stationed in New Guinea, a near fatal bout

with malaria that saw

him pass "black urine", sightings of so-called "comfort women" aboard a Japanese

troop ship and a one-night, unhappy visit to a brothel in

Indonesia.



Kuo's father was not a soldier in the Japanese Imperial Army, but he was constripted as a civilian worker for a Japanese company connected to the war effort in southeast Asia. After leaving Kaohsiung by ship in 1943, the first time he ever left Taiwan, the 21 year old man spent 10 months in New Guinea. As the only son

of a widowed mother, he spent a lot of his time there thinking about his mother back home and writing her letters which he never knew if she received until he got back home three years later.



"I sometimes missed my

hometown very much because my mother had always been plagued with

chronic asthma, and I was worried about her," he wrote in one of his diary entries, adding: "Here in New Guinea it is

March and we have summer all year long here, but in Taiwan, it is

winter. How is my mother's health? I have

written about ten letters home already, but I never know if she

received them. And I never receive any mail from her since I am at one

of the frontlines of the war. So getting mail from home is

impossible.''



The day Kuo passed "black urine" was something he would never forget, he told his son back in Taiwan long after the war, but he wrote about it in a dairy entry about a fellow Taiwanese conscript who had recently died from malaria, after just a three-day illness.



"Two months later, I also got malaria and had to stay in bed," Kuo noted in his diary. "To my utter astonishment, the

color of my urine had turned very dark after two days of this terrible

sickness. I thought I would soon die, too."



Kuo was bouyed, however, by memories he had of a local medical treatment

in Taiwan he had heard about as a youth, where local people would drink coconut milk when they had

malaria.



"I tried the same coconut milk cure," he wrote. "The next day, sure enough, the color of

my urine rerturned to normal yellow. After this incident, I kept drinking

coconut milk as often as I could, and I thanked the heavens for

blessing me with life."



Being a young single man far away from home, Kuo decided to go to a local

brother during his stay in Indonesia. Most likely, the young Dutch and Indonesian girls who worked there were the euphemistically-named "comfort women," so Kuo was about to see it all up close and personal. He reasoned that as an unmarried man, he might as well get to know what sex was all about so that when he did get married one day back in Taiwan, he would know how to please his wife. But things did not turn out as planned.



"I chose a girl and went into

her room, but to tell the truth I felt disgusted by what I was doing and almost vomited," he confessed in his diary. "Was

this really a place to soothe one's body and mind? The girl I was with

was about the same age as me. I reasoned that I could have my first sexual

experience so that when I got married later in the future, I would not be

teased by my future wife in Taiwan for having a lack of sexual experience."



So far so good, but Kuo was sopon to come up against something that some men suffer from from time to tine.



"A most embarrassing thing happened that night at the brothel. I often suffer from

irrational fears and phobias about cleanliness and sexual diseases,

and I had also heard from the army doctors about the dangers of catching a veneral disease. As those thoughts and images came to my mind, my sex drive completely disappeared and I could not get an erection

even though the girl was 'comforting' me."



It got worse, Kuo confessed to his diary: "No matter how hard I tried, I

just could not do it. Even though I had prepared two condoms to

protect me, I never used them. After thirty minutes of this, I walked out of the

room without having done the deed."

Kuo said he hopes his father's "memoir" will reach interested readers in the two languages he has translated it into, in addition to the original Japanese text.

"This is not a commerical book and it is not for sale in bookstores or online," Kuo said. "I just wanted to try my hand at doing the translations and making the booklets available in Taiwan to whoever might benefit from reading them. It was all just a labor of love."

END

'Polar Cities' climate activist to work with Tuvalu on climate project

A local artist said recently that he is planning to launch a project with Tuvalu on the sidelines of a climate summit in Doha to highlight the threat of rising sea levels caused by global warming.

Danny Bloom, who visited the South Pacific island nation in mid-September to present his art video based on ''a graduation speech to the class of 2099'' at Tuvalu High School, said in a recent interview that his eco-arts video speech project has been warmly welcomed by the Tuvalu government.



“They sent a message” of willingness to jointly launch an arts project during a U.N. climate change conference set to take place in Doha Nov. 26-Dec. 7, Bloom said after meetings with top government officials in Tuvalu.



During a four-day stay in Tuvalu that began Sept. 17, Bloom set up an installation that featrured his YouTube video titled "A Virtual Graduation Speech to the Class of 2099 at Tuvalu High School."


It symbolizes the end of the world's reliance on oil and a move back toward a life of simplicity, Bloom said, adding that he is not even sure if there will be a class of 2099 at Tuvalu High School in the future.

Bloom said he wrote the speech and created the video  inspired by oil giant Royal Dutch Shell's plan to drill for oil in the Arctic.

Oil exploration causes environmental damage and continued global warming could put Tuvalu in an even more precarious situation as a result of rising sea levels, the 65-year-old climate activist with a stent in his heart said.



Governor-General Sir Iakoba Taeia Italeli of Tuvalu expressed gratitude for Bloom's concern on the issue of climate change and his efforts to draw attention to the fact that Tuvalu would be one of the first victims of a rise in sea levels as a result of global warming, and long before 2099.



“I think this kind of assistance is so important to us,” the governor-general said in a video in which he commented on Bloom's speech.



Bloom's video speech project in Tuvalu coincided with a visit to the islands by the UK's Prince William and his wife Sept. 18-19, which the activist said would help his graduation speech to the class of 2099 gain more international media attention. It already has over 10,000 hits on YouTube.



During a previous trip to Tuvalu in 2010, Bloom said that we have just 30 more generations of humankind left to turn the climate troubles around, or it's curtains for the human race. "30 more generations and I hope we can do it," he said. If not, the human species will become extinct. Bloom's "30 Generations Project" and his "Polar Cities Project" dovetail very nicely with his 2099 class graduation speech, he said.

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