PLEASE STOP COMPARING THIS TO XRAYS, CT SCANS AND CROSS COUNTRY FLIGHTS!

I have to say, I think the person who posted about "apples and oranges" has a point. I understand the Berkeley Lab staff's desire to provide approximations for the sake of real-world, easily comprehensible comparisons, and I desire wholeheartedly that they continue to do so. However, isn't there a MASSIVE difference between "exposure" (that the OUTSIDE of the human body is subjected to, with all its thick dermal layers and defenses), and respiration / ingestion? That "relative dosage" from a chest X-ray might have VERY different effects on a human (or other) body when it's doing its nasty work of decay FROM THE INSIDE, where it has DIRECT INFLUENCE on the fragile cells of the lungs, GI tract, muscles, and blood...

I also want to make an observation. Right now there are several different strata of people (in the U.S., anyway):

- Those who have zero, or next to zero, "general" knowledge of this ongoing event (many even think it's "already over and done with")

- Those who have some knowledge, through conventional media sources like top-of-the-hour news bulletins, local news and national newscasts, who realize it's still ongoing but have become convinced that it's of very little interest or importance, for now anyway

- Those who have "kept up" with the ongoing crisis on the Internet, and are at least nominally aware that the situation is NOT "over" and that there are ongoing concerns, but primarily to Japan ONLY

- Those who have done some "independent research" and are monitoring events overseas with something approaching concern

- Those who access sites like this, and are beginning to become panicked by what they're reading -- and what it may mean for ALL OF US.

It's the LACK OF INFORMATION that's maddening. Everyone -- TEPCO, the oversight authorities in Japan, the Japanese government, and the U.S. Government included -- seems to be whistling past the graveyard and pretending that this ISN'T an immediate and grave danger to the entire global population. People in positions of power are playing at three monkeys: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, and there's a DEAFENING SILENCE from the REAL experts. Case in point: I've seen a dozen different nuclear scientists, many representing one or another corporate or industry interest, flapping their mouths about how "insignificant" expected "exposures" are for the general U.S. population. But I have yet to see ONE actual NUCLEAR MEDICINE expert who has been willing to exposit on the difference between EXTERNAL EXPOSURE and RESPIRATED OR INGESTED DOSES of quantities of iodine, cesium, etc. What gives? I don't normally give much credence to conspiracy theories, but at THIS point at least, I'd expect SOMEONE -- from the Union of Concerned Scientists, or Greenpeace, or, heck, the Sierra Club -- grabbing the microphone and speaking their mind. But... NOTHING. NO ONE is talking. And it's beginning, to me at least, to seem a little like Gene Krantz during "Apollo 13": When it was suspected that the re-entry capsule was underweight, and "shallowing" its angle of atmospheric interface, and might skip off the sky and head out into unrecoverable space, Krantz asked: "Is there anything we can do about it?" and received the answer, "Not now..." To which he responded:

"...THEN THEY [the Apollo flight crew] DON'T NEED TO KNOW, DO THEY?"

Is THAT what this is? We can't run from it, we can't hide; every single soul on earth is going to just have to take what's coming? 'Cause, while that might prevent panic in the short term, folks with knowledge and / or power and influence need to understand something: It is becoming evident that we -- the global population, I mean, is either being "handled" (especially by the so-called responsible parties in Japan, who are so inconsistent, mercurial, detached and daffy that they make the Keystone Kops look positively professional), or is being GROSSLY MIS-SERVED by The Powers That Be, from Fukushima to Tokyo to New York to Washington, D.C. to London to Vienna. There are some smart people who are getting SICK of the bad (or, even worse, "managed") information -- when there IS any -- the inconsistencies, the indecision, the lack of visibility, to say nothing of transparency, and, perhaps most damaging, the growing feeling that people who have the responsibility to inform, to act and to lead are fiddling while the world burns. There is a gnawing, growing dread out there, in its own way as cancerous and damaging as anything that might be in the air, on the land or in the seas; and there isn't much more time remaining before unsettled, nervous, scared people start acting out. With the shift in tone, here and in many other places on the Internet lately, I can state with confidence that this IS beginning to occur. That, at least, ought to light a fire under people with degrees, microphones and corner offices to start saying SOMETHING other than, "Nothing to see here, folks! Move along!"