We are in desperate need of documentary filmmakers at Fukushima.

The Japanese government is about to pass a national censorship law clearly meant to make it impossible to know what’s going on there.

Massive quantities of radioactive water have been flowing through the site since the 3/11/11 earthquake/tsunami.

At thousand flimsy tanks hold still more thousands of tons of radioactive water which would pour into the Pacific should they collapse.

An earthquake and two typhoons have have just hit there, flushing still more radioactive water into the sea.

The shutdown is has ended. But is the corporate takeover of our political system no longer an issue? During the past couple of years, hundreds of schools have been closed around the country and programs such as Food Stamps are under attack as the budgets of cities, states and the federal government are squeezed while as much as hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue, maybe more, are lost to tax havens, high-end tax evasion, and tax cuts for the uber-rich and companies that have replaced American workers with low-wage workers in other countries, some of whom are essentially slaves.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- The Dalai Lama said he supports the use of medical marijuana, but if a person smokes the plant to get "a crazy mind, that's not good."

Tenzin Gyatso, the self-exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader, made the remarks in Mexico in response to a question during an event hosted by former Mexican president Vicente Fox.

When asked if he favors legalization of marijuana, the Dalai Lama replied that "the exception" would be for medical purposes, according to Agence France-Presse.

"But otherwise, if it's just an issue of somebody [using the drug to have] a crazy mind, that's not good," he said on Tuesday (Oct. 15) at the outdoor event in Guanajuato state.

Fox "laughed when the question was asked to the Dalai Lama," AFP reported.

The former president is a vocal supporter of marijuana's legalization to cut "a major revenue stream for ultra-violent drug cartels," according to AFP.

The Dalai Lama, 78, is not known to use marijuana for any illness.

In 2008, he underwent laparoscopic surgery to have a gallstone removed, his spokesman Chhime R. Chhoekyapa said at the time.

When the State Department revoked Edward Snowden’s passport four months ago, the move was a reprisal from a surveillance-and-warfare state that operates largely in the shadows. Top officials in Washington were furious. Snowden had suddenly exposed what couldn’t stand the light of day, blowing the cover of the world’s Biggest Brother.

Cancelation of the passport wasn’t just an effort to prevent the whistleblower from getting to a country that might grant political asylum. It was also a declaration that the U.S. government can nullify the right to travel just as surely as it can nullify the right to privacy.

“Although I am convicted of nothing,” Snowden said in a July 1 statement after a week at a Moscow airport terminal, the U.S. government “has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person. Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum.”