nbcdnzr comments

Gary Raynor:

I don't know how long your local 7-11 or Lawsons will accept the responsibility, it must be hurting their financial pockets in local taxes, but once they stop, it'll be Netherlands Mk 2 in the large Japanese cities.

I'm from the Netherlands, and I don't have a clue what you mean by this. I would say in international comparison the Netherlands is above average in cleanliness, not some poster child for out-of-control trash. Am I missing something here?

Not even 9/11, eh? 3,000 Americans murdered in a single day in the heart of Manhattan. Nope, no news value there.

I didn't say it doesn't have news value. It obviously does. But international terrorism shouldn't be dominating the debate on protecting the American people. Even looking just at violent deaths, 3000 is just 10% of gun related deaths each year.

If American lives were really the issue, international terrorism wouldn't make it to the top 10 of issues. Instead we'd be talking about cancer screening, traffic safety, environmental pollution, suicide, gun deaths, etc. The point is that people are scared, far more than they should be. And it's taking attention away from the real issues. Scare mongering media have done more to make people scared than the terrorists themselves.

Nobody wants to see violence but at this point it's a bit hypocritical to lecture the rioters on the rule of law when European governments have broken their own laws by allowing refugees to shop around for asylum in the second, third, fourth and fifth safe country which they pass through. Either the laws apply equally to everyone (The government, the refugees, the citizens) or they apply to no-one.

This is just an attempt at obfuscation. The rules for asylum seeker settlement within Europe are agreements between governments that each government can implement as they see fit. This is quite far removed from a group of individuals deciding to ignore criminal law.

As for the responsibility of the US and other countries to take in refugees, that is a basic act of human decency and kindness. And it is not unilaterally decided by president Obama, it has been standing practice in the US since the signing of the UN Refugee Protocol in 1968. And let's not go into the road of banning the immigration of specific religious groups. The US doesn't have a state religion, even though some like to think it does.

For a second I thought you were being sarcastic Wc626 , but I fear it's genuine. You are of course wrong to say they have every right to riot. They have the right to peacefully protest, but not to use violence and intimidation. There is a word for xenophobic ideology in combination with the use of violence and intimidation to influence political decisions, it's called fascism. And that is the real danger.

I agree with gcbel, I'd rather have 2000 refugees in my town than these thugs.

Brian:

once the oil and coal has run out what are you going to use?

If only we could safely use the oil and coal there wouldn't be such a big problem. There's enough in the ground, especially coal, but we have to leave almost all of it in the ground if we don't want to drastically and irrevocably change the climate.

Heda:

There's plenty of information out there to suggest why modern nuclear power plants are the way to go.

Besides safety risks there's still the problem of nuclear waste. Even modern nuclear power plants don't have a solution for that yet.

Kiyoshi

People. Please forget about sun power. You get about 10-20 watts/hour Per square meter of solar panel. My small air conditioner unit uses 700watts/hour average. So I will need like 60 SQUARE METERS of solar panels to power my air conditioner.

If you're interested more comprehensive numbers: Average insolation (received sunlight) in Japan: 4.5 kWh/(m2 x day). With current panel efficiency of around 20%, production per m2 per year would be: 0.2 x 4.5 x 365=328 kWh. At a consumption per capita of 8000 kWh per year in Japan (source: Worldbank), you'd need 24.4 m2 per person. That would be 3050 km2 for the whole population of Japan, or 0.8% of the total surface area. It's also less than 4 times the size of the Fukushima exclusion zone declared permanently unfit for human habitation (800 km2). I don't think that's an unreasonable amount of land to set aside for the national power production. With the number of villages that are expected to be abandoned in the coming decades there's all possibility to achieve that kind of surface area. Of course in practice you'd need to mix in other like wind, but there's no reason to discount solar because of surface area.