theresa's presswatch

kboo

2010-04-08T22:53:00.000-07:00

All further posts at kboo.fm.....

Methane

2009-09-03T09:45:00.000-07:00

The methane bomb: is it happening right under our noses?

Regular listeners to this program will recall that I have passed on irregular warnings from global climate scientists about the 'clathrate burst theory' or the 'methane bomb.' The question is whether global warming is creating a situation in which, at a certain temperature threshold, billions of tons of methane, which had been locked in a stable state in permafrost and under the seas, will suddenly come tumbling out into the atmosphere, thereby warming the globe several degrees and raising planetary havoc.

I suppose "planetary havoc" is a rather mild choice of words when I'm talking about mass extinction, and my own demise along with yours. Forget the glaciers, like that NorthWest forest? It'll burn away in a year. That sort of change is what I'm on about here-- oh yeah, and then there's the displacement of oxygen to the point that anyone who couldn't breathe at sixteen thousand feet will have to --ah--stop that breathing business.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090831/ap_on_re_ca/cn_climate_09_troubling_bubbles

(thanks to Tyger for that reference)

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http://www.fona.de/de/8290
Arctic warming triggering methane release, study reveals (excerpt)
Rising temperatures in the Arctic are triggering the release of methane from the seabed, according to new research by German and British scientists published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Quelle: Cordis

21.08.2009. During a research cruise in autumn 2008, the team discovered over 250 plumes of methane gas bubbling up from the seabed at depths of less than 400 metres off the coast of the Norwegian island Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean. The extent of the plumes came as a surprise to the researchers.

'Our survey was designed to work out how much methane might be released by future ocean warming; we did not expect to discover such strong evidence that this process has already started,' commented Professor Tim Minshull of the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton in the UK.

The methane is released from methane hydrates found in marine sediments on the sea floor. Methane hydrate is an ice-like substance made up of water and methane that is stable at high pressures and low temperatures. Researchers have predicted for some time that as ocean temperatures rise, methane will be released as methane hydrates become unstable at ever greater depths.

According to the researchers, 30 years ago methane hydrate was stable at depths of 360 metres. Today, it is only stable at depths of 400 metres.

On board the research ship RRS James Clark Ross, the team used sonar to detect plumes of bubbles, then deployed a water-bottle sampling system to pick up bubble samples from different depths.

In total they found over 250 plumes of methane at depths shallower than 400 metres; some plumes were even discovered in water shallower than 200 metres. The strength of the plumes varied widely; some of the plumes were so powerful that they came to within 50 metres of the water's surface before the gases dissolved into the water.

The researchers believe that some plumes may be strong enough to release methane directly into the atmosphere on occasion. As well as contributing to climate change, dissolved methane makes the ocean more acidic and reduces the amount of oxygen dissolved in the water, making it a serious threat to much marine life.

Over the past 30 years, the temperature of the stretch of ocean covered by this study rose by 1°C, moving the zone under which hydrates remain stable from a depth of around 360 metres to 396 metres.

'If this process becomes widespread along Arctic continental margins, tens of megatonnes of methane per year - equivalent to 5% to 10% of the total amount released globally by natural sources - could be released into the ocean,' said Graham Westbrook of the University of Birmingham in the UK.

The researchers are now carrying out further investigations of the newly discovered plumes. 'Further exploration of hydrate and monitoring of methane release are needed to quantify the likely magnitude of future emissions,' the scientists conclude.

The study is a contribution to the International Polar Year (IPY), which drew to a close earlier this year.

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http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/news/story.aspx?id=516
Warming waters release methane plumes into Arctic sea (excerpt)

24 August 2009, by Tom Marshall

Scientists have found more than 250 plumes of methane gas rising from the seabed near Svalbard in the Arctic Circle.

A paper in Geophysical Research Letters details the findings, made on an expedition in Autumn 2008 in the British research ship RRS James Clark Ross.

The team of scientists from Birmingham University, the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton and Royal Holloway University think the gas is being released from methane hydrate beneath the seabed, which is melting because of warming waters above.

Similar gas plumes have been found elsewhere in places like the Black Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, but this is the first time scientists have found them in where the conditions for their occurrence can be clearly attributed to climate warming.

'Various people have predicted this for several years, and methane from hydrate beneath the sea bed has been strongly appealed to by scientists looking to explain past climate shifts,' says Professor Graham Westbrook, a geophysicist at Birmingham University. 'But this is first time anyone's discovered a situation where it actually seems to be happening now as a result of rising water temperatures,' he adds.

The gas plumes rise from the seabed between 150m and 400m deep, and can reach 50m from the surface before petering out. The team found them with a sonar system designed to track shoals of fish, and subsequently took water samples and measurements of temperature and salinity at different depths.

Methane hydrate is a solid material composed of water and methane. It forms at high pressures and low temperatures. 'Hydrate looks just like ice, but when you get it to the surface it begins to fizz - once you remove it from the stability zone it immediately starts breaking down to methane gas and water,' says Westbrook. 'You can even set light to it - you end up with what looks like a piece of ice in your hand, with flames coming from it.'

Normally hydrate exists only in what scientists call the gas hydrate stability zone, or GHSZ. This zone begins at the seabed and stretches down several hundred metres until the Earth's heat becomes too great for hydrate to form.

The West Spitsbergen current, which flows northward through the area, has warmed by 1°C over the last 30 years. Westbrook believes this has caused the top of the GHSZ to move deeper - it used to start around 360m beneath the seabed, and now it starts around 400m. Hydrate that was once in its upper reaches is now outside the GHSZ and hence has broken down, releasing methane.

If this happened across the Arctic, large amounts of methane could be released - Westbrook estimates that tens of teragrammes could escape every year.

If this methane reached the atmosphere, it could potentially contribute to climate change, leading to a vicious circle of more methane leading to higher temperatures, in turn melting more methane hydrates.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, trapping heat in the Earth's atmosphere more than 20 times more effectively than carbon dioxide. Indeed, some scientists have suggested increased release of methane from the seafloor could have been partly responsible for rapid changes in the ancient climate.

But Westbrook remains cautious about the methane's potential impact on the climate. Few of the gas bubbles even reach the surface, and in those that do much of the original methane has dissolved into the surrounding waters on the way up, to be replaced by nitrogen.

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Under corporate rule, you and I are supposed to pretend that this is the natural order of things and that nothing can be done. Certainly, any sudden, massive effort will require a new tax structure, thereby undermining the hegemony of the super-rich--our rulers, like the four heirs of the Walmart fortune who each year receive over $70 billion stolen from the dreams, vitality, and wages of millions of low-wage workers. The four heirs would have to be taxed down to, say, a billion each, and their armies of lawyers, and for that matter their armies of armies, won't stand for that. We need a revolution to save this planet, so I guess it's a matter of whether you'd prefer to die fighting, or die on your knees fighting for breath.

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Not so long ago there was a decision to invade Afghanistan. Others had done it before and failed miserably, but in this case the technology was vastly superior to anything the Afghans could lay their hands on. The goal was officially to restore the legitimate government, which had been taken over by whackos and thieves. But as it turned out the original invasion force wasn't sufficient to pacify the country, so additional troops had to be sent in.

The Western forces fought their way through the Bolan Pass, swept through Kandahar and conquered Kabul. Soon afterwards Atkinson was released from duty, thereby escaping the catastrophe which awaited his comrades. During the subsequent rebellion the British political agent was beheaded and an estimated 16,000 Western soldiers, and their dependents, every last one of them that is, were slaughtered in a week by the Afghans defense forces. The only Briton known to have escaped was Dr. William Brydon, though a few others were captured.

That was in the Eighteen-Forties. Has anything changed?

http://news.antiwar.com/2009/09/02/officials-us-to-add-14000-combat-troops-in-afghanistan/print/

Officials: US to Add 14,000 Combat Troops in Afghanistan

Posted By Jason Ditz

In what seems to be just the latest move in the ongoing US escalation in Afghanistan, Pentagon officials have indicated that they intend to swap out 14,000 support troops in favor of another 14,000 combat troops, which they called “trigger pullers.”

The move comes just days after it was reported that General Stanley McChrystal is planning to ask for another 20,000 combat troops, but does not appear to be a consequence of that, as officials say McChrystal may still request additional combat forces on top of this sometime soon.

The 14,000 non-combat troops which are being “rotated out” for this plan also does not really mean the number of forces on the ground will remain static, as the official said most of them would likely be replaced by additional private contractors.

NATO Secretary General Anders Rasmussen says that regardless of how poorly August’s elections are perceived, the alliance remains committed to continuing and escalating the war as well. He did however say he hoped the election, despite widespread fraud and intimidation, would be considered “credible.”

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(Considered credible by, say, the US corporate talking heads and the sheep they lead?)

quarantine

2009-08-06T13:04:00.000-07:00

Right after today's show was broadcast, I found an article that says there was a sudden-cyanosis type death from H1n1 in Malaysia:

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2009/8/3/nation/4443150&sec=nation

This is significant because, as you'll see from my swine flu story below, the big worry (and one that the CDC evidently shares) is that H1N1 (which is actually the Spanish Flu returned) may well do its Jekyll and Hyde transformation as in 1918. One important aspect of that transformation (possibly caused by "passaging," look it up) was that the lungs were attacked so rapidly that persons afflicted could not draw oxygen, and died turning dark blue, often within hours of symptoms appearing. This was a terrifying situation, as you can imagine, and at first the Spanish Flu was thought to be the Black Death.

And now, here's the rest of today's script:

Sometimes the surprise in the news is the absence of the expected. There have been no hurricanes and no substantial tropical storms in the Atlantic so far this year. What's up with that?

ZACH HOFFMAN writes in Disaster News Network:

http://www.disasternews.net/news/article.php?articleid=3922

So far the 2009 hurricane season has been slow to start but forecasters warn that we’re not in the clear just yet.

On Tuesday, for the second time this year, Phil Klotzbach and William Gray, of Colorado State University's Tropical Meteorology Project, trimmed their predictions – but just by one tropical storm and one hurricane. They expect 10 tropical storms and predict at least four will become hurricanes.

“Over the last few years a slow season is not very typical; however, in the long-term, the idea of not having a storm show up until August is not unusual,” said Letro.

He recalled the hurricane events in 1983, “There were only four named storms the whole year, and the first storm didn’t show up until August 15.”

“You would assume that was a real quiet year, but you wouldn’t want to tell that to the people in Galveston and Houston, Texas.”

The first storm to appear that year was hurricane Alicia; it drifted slowly over the western end of Galveston Island spawning 23 reported tornadoes and causing tremendous damage to the Gulf Coast.

For 2009, the Weather Research Center (WRC) in Houston forecasts at least seven named storms in the Atlantic Basin with four of these tropical storms intensifying into hurricanes.

“WRC’s Hurricane Orbital Cyclone Strike Index gives the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to Alabama the highest chance of experiencing a tropical storm or hurricane this summer,” according to forecasters.

"Louisiana is no stranger to hurricane activity; in 2008, hurricane Gustav made landfall over Louisiana causing over $20 million in damages, then just a short time later Ike re-flooded the areas beginning the recovery process from Gustav.

"Faith-based organizations like Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA) are still looking for volunteers to aid in long-term rebuilding efforts for last year’s hurricanes in Louisiana and Mississippi, and even from Katrina in 2005.

“We are using this time to make preparations for what we are being told is going to be a fairly normal hurricane season once it gets here,” said John Robinson of PDA. “What we have seen previously is that late hurricanes catch people off guard.”
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, currently on his “Louisisana Working Tour” to promote economic development and job creation in the state, has been awarding grants to individual parishes that will go towards hurricane recovery efforts, hazard mitigation and infrastructure improvements.

“After Gustav and Ike struck, we rejected the idea of creating yet another process filled with bureaucracy to distribute hurricane recovery funds. We’re helping to expedite the rebuilding process by distributing funds to parishes so that officials on the ground can make their own decisions about how best to rebuild and prepare for future storms,” Jindal said.

"Chief Long-Range and Hurricane Forecaster Joe Bastardi of the AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center holds a different forecast for this season. "Anywhere along the United States coast is susceptible to an impact, but the Texas coast early in the season and East Coast from Carolinas northward during the heart of the season are areas that have us worried," he said.

"Bastardi points to several factors lowering the overall number of storms; a developing El Niño in the Pacific ocean could have a suppressing effect on the Atlantic activity, strong easterly trade winds across northern Africa will introduce dry air into the Atlantic inhibiting hurricane formation, and cooler water temperatures in the tropics tends to reduce hurricane activity and intensity.

“Tropical storms by nature are creatures of heat,” ....[snip]

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Meanwhile solar energy hasn't been up to snuff, either. Scientists who study the sun expected more sunspots by now, but they aren't forthcoming as of the last 24 days or so. As a matter of fact, as of the last information I have, there are no sunspots at all right now. This is surely good news for anyone who hoped for more time to deal with human-induced global warming, but there's no guarantee it will continue. Would a goodly round of sunspots whip up some hurricanes, or is the heating period longer than that for such events? I don't know, but I have noted some very high water temperatures along the US Gulf Coast, so any storm that brews there long enough will surely pack a punch.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/science/space/21sunspot.html?bl&ex=1248408000&en=26edfbfbe564636f&ei=5087%0A

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John Bolton fulminates for war in the Wall Street Journal.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052970203609204574316093622744808.html

--Yes, this is THE John Bolton who used to shoot his mouth off so badly that he repeatedly embarrassed even the Bush Junior Administration, and had to be forced from his comfy leather chair at the UN. He wrote:

"The public outcome of Mr. Gates's visit appeared polite but inconclusive. Yet Iran's progress with nuclear weapons and air defenses means Israel's military option is declining over time. It will have to make a decision soon, and it will be no surprise if Israel strikes by year's end.
Israel's choice could determine whether Iran obtains nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future."

Note that Bolton can breezily insert the phrase "military option" as if the world or the UN charter legitimized wars of aggression. And make no mistake that he is talking about a war of aggression, instigated by Israel and funded and logistically backed up by the United States. The "pre-emptive war" excuse is what got us into Baghdad, and for that matter it got Germany into Poland. It was never acceptable to rational people. But I would not accuse John Bolton of being a rational person. Bolton knows his war propaganda, though, so he tags on the long-discredited ruse that Iran's nuclear program is for war. We're supposed to forget the the IAEA has found no evidence of bomb-making.

Bolton seems worried that Israel might feel hampered in its desire for war. He also writes:

"Beyond that, Mr. Obama's [Iran] negotiation strategy faces insuperable time pressure. French President Nicolas Sarkozy proclaimed that Iran must re-start negotiations with the West by September's G-20 summit. But this means little when, with each passing day, Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile laboratories, production facilities and military bases are all churning. Israel is focused on these facts, not the illusion of "tough" diplomacy."

Terrifying, isn't it? Never mind that Israel's war machine has been churning indeed, stockpiling bunker-buster weapons and even practicing air maneuvers over the Nevada desert. Never mind that the nuclear reactor at Dimona has produced hundreds of deliverable nuclear weapons, now mounted on Israeli missiles, F-16s, Dolphin submarines, and who knows where else.

There's something more here that never gets mentioned. The imperial powers never shared oil refinery technology with Iran, because like all post-colonial economies, it was expected to produce raw product at or below cost, so that Western corporations could profit by adding value to the product. It's the same deal from Albania to Zanzibar. Iran has made terrific strides in technology lately, for example launching their first satellites into orbit. It's only a matter of time before they start refining their own oil, and then where will the multinational corporate profits come from? What would keep them from competing eventually with a wide range of Israeli and US products, including war weaponry? That's the real issue here. Iran could not hope to threaten Israel with nuclear destruction, because the game is already set, and they pray to god every day that no nuclear weapon goes off in the US or Israel, because they know they would then suffer complete destruction.

Bolton asks in the WSJ article "...how will Iran be tamed?" Bolton is the kind of jerk that is comfortable speaking of whole nations of people as if they were animals. One tames animals, not people, of course. He ends the article:

"Striking Iran's nuclear program will not be precipitous or poorly thought out. Israel's attack, if it happens, will have followed enormously difficult deliberation over terrible imponderables, and years of patiently waiting on innumerable failed diplomatic efforts. Absent Israeli action, prepare for a nuclear Iran."

So you see, the poor things have been forced into war! Forced, I tell you!

The monster has spoken: war is acceptable and probable. Sit back and watch it on the news. And don't you dare protest, unless you want a file with the US military:

By Amy Goodman (also reported yesterday on Democracy Now)
truthdig.com

"Anti-war activists in Olympia, Wash., have exposed Army spying and infiltration of their groups, as well as intelligence gathering by the Air Force, the federal Capitol Police and the Coast Guard.

"The infiltration appears to be in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act preventing U.S. military deployment for domestic law enforcement and may strengthen congressional demands for a full-scale investigation of U.S. intelligence activities, like the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s.

" Brendan Maslauskas Dunn asked the city of Olympia for documents or e-mails about communications between the Olympia police and the military relating to anarchists, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) or the Industrial Workers of the World (Dunn's union). Dunn received hundreds of documents. One e-mail contained reference to a "John J. Towery II," who activists discovered was the same person as their fellow activist "John Jacob." [snip]

[Note: Jenka Soderberg of KBOO Evening News first broke this story worldwide. Go Jenka!] kboo.fm
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I was just kidding about not protesting, by the way. The whole idea of this sort of infiltration is to undermine dissent by injecting fear into the activist community. There are far too many of us to effectively track, so feel free and easy joining or creating a protest group. Few things are more fun, and of course it's healthy and might eventually contribute to an outbreak of freedom, equality, liberty and democracy. That would be nice to see. Then when you travel, you can honestly point out that you've been trying to stop US imperial war policies.
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footnote:
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debka.com

Debka, the warmongering militarist Israeli site, had the following to say about the US envoys' trip to Israel last week:
.... secretary of state Hillary Clinton broadcast to Tehran Sunday, July 28, over NBC: "... if you're pursuing nuclear weapons for the purpose of intimidating, or projecting your power, we are not going to let that happen," she said. "Your pursuit is futile. We believe as a matter of policy it is unacceptable for Iran to have nuclear weapons." [end]

This is the Clinton who campaigned for President saying that she would nuke Iran if need be. So the meaning of "unacceptable" has already been made clear to the Persians. Meanwhile she has nothing to say about Israel's rogue stash of nuclear weapons, created without IAEA oversight by diverting fuel from the Dimona reactor complex, and poised to destroy the region.
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SWINE FLU

The following is an excerpt of a CDC news release:

http://www.cdc.gov/media/pressrel/2009/r090729b.htm

CDC Advisors Make Recommendations for Use of Vaccine Against Novel H1N1

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) met [...last week] to make recommendations for use of vaccine against novel influenza A (H1N1).

The committee met to develop recommendations on who should receive vaccine against novel influenza A (H1N1) when it becomes available, and to determine which groups of the population should be prioritized if the vaccine is initially available in extremely limited quantities.

The committee recommended the vaccination efforts focus on five key populations. Vaccination efforts are designed to help reduce the impact and spread of novel H1N1. The key populations include those who are at higher risk of disease or complications, those who are likely to come in contact with novel H1N1, and those who could infect young infants. When vaccine is first available, the committee recommended that programs and providers try to vaccinate:

* pregnant women,

* people who live with or care for children younger than 6 months of age,

* health care and emergency services personnel,

* persons between the ages of 6 months through 24 years of age, and

* people from ages 25 through 64 years who are at higher risk for novel H1N1 because of chronic health disorders or compromised immune systems.

The groups listed above total approximately 159 million people in the United States.

The committee does not expect that there will be a shortage of novel H1N1 vaccine, but availability and demand can be unpredictable. There is some possibility that initially the vaccine will be available in limited quantities. In this setting, the committee recommended that the following groups receive the vaccine before others:

* pregnant women,

* people who live with or care for children younger than 6 months of age,

* health care and emergency services personnel with direct patient contact,

* children 6 months through 4 years of age, and

* children 5 through 18 years of age who have chronic medical conditions.

The committee recognized the need to assess supply and demand issues at the local level. The committee further recommended that once the demand for vaccine for these prioritized groups has been met at the local level, programs and providers should begin vaccinating everyone from ages 25 through 64 years. Current studies indicate the risk for infection among persons age 65 or older is less than the risk for younger age groups. Therefore, as vaccine supply and demand for vaccine among younger age groups is being met, programs and providers should offer vaccination to people over the age of 65.

The committee also stressed that people over the age of 65 receive the seasonal vaccine as soon as it is available. Even if novel H1N1 vaccine is initially only available in limited quantities, supply and availability will continue, so the committee stressed that programs and providers continue to vaccinate unimmunized patients and not keep vaccine in reserve for later administration of the second dose.

The novel H1N1 vaccine is not intended to replace the seasonal flu vaccine. It is intended to be used alongside seasonal flu vaccine to protect people. Seasonal flu and novel H1N1 vaccines may be administered on the same day.

####

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

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Notice that the CDC post begins by saying that it does not anticipate a shortage of vaccine--and then states "there is some possibility that initially the vaccine will be available in limited quantities." Or in other words, there might be a shortage. And then it turns out that this shortage is evidently anticipated to be severe enough that they are issuing triage guidelines before the stuff is even available.

But wait, who cares, right? If H1N1 is milder than seasonal flu, as we've all been hearing, why worry so much? Why issue guidelines, as I just read--and incredibly, I might add--that everyone is to be vaccinated? We don't currently try to vaccinate everyone against seasonal flu. On the contrary, it's quite the casual thing, recommended for the aged or infirm, available if you want it and never mind if you don't, even if it does kill thirty thousand people per year.

There is in fact something else going on here: The swine flu is, in fact, pretty much the 1918 Spanish Influenza.

We know this because persons who survived the 1918 flu have antibodies to it and are immune. Yoshihiro Kawaok discovered this fact at the University of Wisconsin.

http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/Non-food/Disease/140720090625_1918_spanish_flu_survivors_immune_to_swine_flu.html

The influenza pathogen, in its various forms, has been referred to as a "mutant swarm" because one of its chief characteristic is its constant ability to mutate and change, to avoid immune system response. So it is highly unlikely that the current virus is anything but the Spanish Flu. The CDC knows this, and also knows that the Spanish Flu was present in the US in the summer preceding its disastrous Fall 1918 outbreak. They know that there is every possibility that a super-deadly outbreak may occur as soon as this Winter, killing millions. Remember that the 1918 Spanish Flu sometimes killed within 24 hours of first symptoms, destroying intestinal linings, ravaging the lungs so badly that secondary infection set in within one day. Twenty million died worldwide, and that was when the world population was much smaller. And this flu is already mutating so that Tamiflu does not affect it.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gurley/detail?entry_id=44301

We no longer have, in the United States, sufficient hospital beds nor respirators to deal with a severe influenza outbreak. This is because excess capacity beds were long ago stripped away to reduce staffing and overhead costs, so that higher salaries and/or profits could be paid to the very rich.

And what effect does that have?

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25877367-23289,00.html

No bed for swine flu man on life support

Natasha Bita | August 04, 2009
Article from: The Australian

A SWINE flu patient on life support was flown 700km between four Queensland hospitals in search of a bed, forcing Queensland Health to apologise to the man's family yesterday for the medical milk run.

The 48-year-old man, attached to a ventilator to help him breathe, was flown from hospital in the north Queensland town of Atherton to Cairns hospital, but the intensive care unit was full.

The chopper then refuelled and flew the man south to Townsville, which was also full.

He was then transferred to a second helicopter so the first one could return to base. After four hours, the desperately ill man arrived at the Mackay hospital, where he remains in a stable yet critical condition in the intensive care unit.

Patients dangerously ill with swine flu are taking up one in five intensive care beds in Queensland, which has started cancelling elective surgery to cope with a peak in infections expected at the end of this month.

The nation's chief health officers will meet in Melbourne on Friday to decide who will get priority for immunisation once a vaccine becomes available in October. Swine flu has killed 67 Australians and landed 105 in intensive care.
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I have written Congress about this and I urge you to do the same. Corporate health denial must die now, right now, and respirators, beds, and personnel must be brought into availability. If they are not needed for the swine flu, they will be needed for earthquake, bird flu, or some other calamity, and as we are not immune to history, we no longer can afford to act irrationally purely to benefit the owning class. Who has a greater right to live, a health denial corporation's profits, or you and your loved ones?

Ironically, a severe crisis would force the government to deal with health issues directly. Are you willing to die or go to a quarantine camp, to bring about socialized medicine in the US? Of course, that would be "socialized" as in militarized:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14629

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, August 4, 2009

According to CNN, the Pentagon is "to establish regional teams of military personnel to assist civilian authorities in the event of a significant outbreak of the H1N1 virus this fall, according to Defense Department officials."

"The proposal is awaiting final approval from Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

The officials would not be identified because the proposal from U.S. Northern Command's Gen. Victor Renuart has not been approved by the secretary.

The plan calls for military task forces to work in conjunction with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. There is no final decision on how the military effort would be manned, but one source said it would likely include personnel from all branches of the military.

It has yet to be determined how many troops would be needed and whether they would come from the active duty or the National Guard and Reserve forces.

Civilian authorities would lead any relief efforts in the event of a major outbreak, the official said. The military, as they would for a natural disaster or other significant emergency situation, could provide support and fulfill any tasks that civilian authorities could not, such as air transport or testing of large numbers of viral samples from infected patients.

As a first step, Gates is being asked to sign a so-called "execution order" that would authorize the military to begin to conduct the detailed planning to execute the proposed plan.

Orders to deploy actual forces would be reviewed later, depending on how much of a health threat the flu poses this fall, the officials said." (CNN, Military planning for possible H1N1 outbreak, July 2009, emphasis added)

The implications are far-reaching.

The decision points towards the militarization of civilian institutions, including law enforcement and public health.

A nationwide vaccination program is already planned for the Fall.

The pharmaceutical industry is slated to deliver 160 million vaccine doses by the Fall, enough doses to vaccinate more than half of America's population.

The Pentagon is already planning on the number of troops to be deployed,. with a view to supporting a mass vaccination program.

It is worth noting that this involvement of the military is not being decided by the President, but by the Secretary of Defense, which suggests that the Pentagon is, in a key issue of of national interest, overriding the President and Commander in Chief. The US Congress has not been consulted on the issue.

This decision to mobilise the Armed Forces in the vaccination campaign is taken in anticipation of a national emergency. Although no national emergency has been called, the presumption is that a national public health emergency will occur, using the WHO Level 6 Pandemic as a pretext and a justification.

Other countries, including Canada, the UK and France may follow suit, calling upon their Armed Forces to play a role in support of the H1N1 vaccination program.
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Chussodovsky, however, is skeptical of the danger of swine flu and points out that it will be very profitable for pharmaceutical corporations:

"The Pandemic serves the interests of Big Pharma. The WHO is planning for the production of 4.9 billion dose, enough to inoculate a large share of the World's population. Big Pharma including Baxter, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Sanofi-Aventis and AstraZeneca have signed procurement contracts with some 50 governments. (Reuters, July 16, 2009). For these companies, compulsory vaccination is a highly lucrative undertaking...."

For myself, whereas I consider it possible, given the proclivities of our secret police societies as revealed by the Anthrax non-investigation, and by earlier publications such as the Search for The
Manchurian Candidate by John D. Marks, that swine flu was resurrected and released in order to bring about wild profits under a fascist military crackdown, I also think that preparations need to be underway. This pandemic still retains the capacity to be a monster.

It has another monster waiting to help it along: our capitalist health-denial system.

revolution2009

2009-07-23T10:13:00.000-07:00

The emergency we are faced with is corporate rule. We are ruled by multinational corporations.

Here are some of the symptoms:

The war industry keeps our legislatures like concubines. Contributions for just last year amount to nearly $24 million, and 59% of that went to Democrats. You know, the rational, liberal party that's going to get us out of the wars? That one. fifty-nine percent. and it works. In past years the lions' share went to the Republicans. It's not a matter of ideology. It's whoever is in power.

http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=D

We have imperial bases in most nations; in many, our soldiers are despised for their violence and arrogance. A BBC report from last February is typical: "In the latest of a string of incidents involving US troops, the man is accused of raping a Filipino woman at a hotel.

"The alleged rape happened before a 24-hour curfew was imposed on US troops, their families and civilians working for the military on Okinawa. "....Another American serviceman is accused of rape on Okinawa, the second alleged incident in 10 days.

"The first complaint was made by a 14-year-old schoolgirl, the second by a woman from the Philippines who says she was attacked in a hotel. In the last few days another soldier was found drunk asleep on a sofa in a house he had broken into, while another was arrested for drunk-driving."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7256056.stm

The BBC article has a certain familiarity to it. Move thousands of miles to the Koreas, and the story is the same. "According to the south Korean government's official statistics, 50,082 crimes were committed by US soldiers from 1967 to 1998 (including those by soldiers' families), and 56,904 US soldiers were involved (including soldiers' families) in these crimes. "

http://www.iacenter.org/Koreafiles/ktc-civilnetwork.htm

We don't call the war industry "the war industry." We call it "the defense industry." That's because it defends us against having to act likhttp://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=De reasonable people to the rest of the world. It defends itself against the change that the people desire. It defends the fortunes of the hyper-rich. It defends against liberty, equality, and compassion, and keeps us all in fear. Now we have two inexcusable wars of aggression and occupation, but at least we have the infotainment industry to keep us abreast of developments. For example, during one of the invasions of Iraq, Jay Leno made a joke about how old some US soldiers were, saying they could do the job, but might leave the left turn signal on the tank blinking all the way to Baghdad. Everyone laughed, remember? Then he told the one about so-called smart munitions, about the guy who found his wife's arm two blocks away, with her hand still holding the teapot. Remember that one? I don't either. That's because Jay Leno will never tell that joke. Actual war isn't funny, but propaganda is a laugh riot. NBC profits depend on that.

The emergency is corporate rule, the symptom is war.

Desperation and poverty are increasing. "The Real Unemployment Rate Hits a 68-Year High

Comparing the Bureau of Labor Statistics' “U-3” and “U-6” rates.

By John Miller

"Although you have to dig into the statistics to know it, unemployment in the United States is now worse than at any time since the end of the Great Depression.

"From December 2007, when the recession began, to May of this year, 6.0 million U.S. workers lost their jobs. The big three U.S. automakers are closing plants and letting white-collar workers go too. Chrysler, the worst off of the three, will lay off one-quarter of its workforce even if it survives. Heavy equipment manufacturer Caterpillar and giant banking conglomerate Citigroup have both laid off thousands of workers. Alcoa, the aluminum maker, has let workers go. Computer maker Dell and express shipper DHL have both canned many of their workers. Circuit City, the leading electronics retailer, went out of business, costing its 40,000 workers their jobs. Lawyers in large national firms are getting the ax. Even on Sesame Street, workers are losing their jobs.

"The official unemployment rate hit 9.4% in May-already as high as the peak unemployment rates in all but the 1982 recession, the worst since World War II. And topping the 1982 recession's peak rate of 10.8% is now distinctly possible. The current downturn has pushed up unemployment rates by more than any previous postwar recession ...."

http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/0709miller.html

The emergency is corporate rule, the symptom is mass unemployment.

Education is nearly inaccessible to the poor, and ignorance is the new normal. In an international measurement of quality of life, the US slipped from second in 1980 to fifteenth today.

"The American Human Development Index is calculated from measures of three dimensions:

• A long and healthy life is measured using life expectancy at birth, calculated from mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, and population data from the U.S. Census Bureau, 2005.

• Access to knowledge is measured using two indicators: school enrollment for the population age three and older, and educational degree attainment for the population twenty-five years and older. Both indicators are from the American Community Survey, U.S. Census Bureau, 2005.

• Decent standard of living is measured using median earnings from the American Community Survey, U.S. Census Bureau, 2005.

http://www.openleft.com/diary/13658/the-human-development-indexa-better-measure-of-where-we-stand

We're fifteenth. We're next to Turkey now.

The emergency is corporate rule, the symptom is misery.

Health care is inaccessible to unemployed and poor, and often inadequate even for the middle class. According to an article in the BBC:

"The American healthcare system is a paradox of excess and deprivation. The United States spends more money on medical care than other nation: $2.5tn in 2009, over $8,000 per person.

Yet 46 million Americans - 15% of the population - don't have any health insurance. They are disproportionately the working poor, often employed by small firms that cannot afford to offer healthcare coverage (most Americans under age 65 get health insurance from their employers). Even many insured Americans lack adequate protection against the financial risks of illness. Medical care is consequently a leading cause of bankruptcy in the US."

Ron Williams - Aetna

Total Compensation: $24,300,112

Details: Williams earned $24,300,112 in total compensation for 2008, with more than half of that ($13,537,365) coming from option awards. He also received an additional $6,456,630 in stock awards to go along with his base salary of $1,091,764.

Personal use of a corporate aircraft and vehicle, as well as financial planning and 401(k) company matches added up to $101,487 for Williams.

....H. Edward Hanway - CIGNA

Total Compensation: $12,236,740....

Angela Braly - WellPoint

Total Compensation: $9,844,212.......

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/5/26/735411/-Health-insurance-industry-CEO-salary-survey,-stay-calm-for-this

The emergency is corporate rule, the symptom is death.

It's really too bad about corporate health care denial. Too bad if you die from it. Too bad if you're born, according to a report from the Environmental Working Group studying the umbilical cords of newborn babies. The body burden pollution, the melange of pthalates,mercury, lead, flame retardants, biphenyls, polymers, et cetera, comes with the act of birth now.

EPW writes "Of the 287 chemicals we detected in umbilical cord blood, we know that 180 cause cancer in humans or animals, 217 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 208 cause birth defects or abnormal development in animal tests. The dangers of pre- or post-natal exposure to this complex mixture of carcinogens, developmental toxins and neurotoxins have never been studied."

http://www.ewg.org/reports/bodyburden2/execsumm.php

The emergency is corporate rule; the symptoms are: Forests destroyed, rivers polluted,Appalachia is a moonscape, our oceans are dying, the atmosphere is overheating, glaciers are melting.

The emergency is corporate rule; the symptom is an elected President who is a collaborationist with the Fascist state that brought us Guantanamo, shoeless airports, police who are feared by minorities, and deadly dangerous to all.

The emergency is corporate rule, the symptoms are: Prisons are overcrowded, 2.3 million in chains, 7 million are under probation, parole, or incarceration.

Trillions have been given away to the hyper-rich banker class, undermining the currency.

Habeas corpus has been lost, the 4th Amendment is lost.

Enough!

Close all imperial bases, close Guantanamo

Cease fire and really withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan

Open the prisons, release the prisoners of our racist drug war. Institute corrections not revenge.

Minimum wage $15/hour, 36 hour work week, 6 weeks vacation,

Maximum allowed personal wealth $3 million per year, $3 million property

Outlaw rents and mortgages/guarantee land rights to all

Seize and reorganize all corporations over $1 million sales as cooperatives

Nationalize banks, seize offshore assets, guarantee work or pensions

Outlaw all coal production after one year

Create an emergency mobilization project to decentralize the power grid, add solar/wind/wave/geothermal power

Socialize medicine and higher education

Institute people's newspapers, journalists, and media, elect and pay staff from tax

Sunset gasoline and diesel transportation, implement $3/gallon tax

Cease all night contrail formation

Restore full habeas corpus rights, cease all torture, prosecute torturers and war schemers

Restore all human rights, instantly shut down factory farming

Start a Manhattan project to remediate pollutionand the toxic body burden

Mandate media election coverage, ban all election media sales

Revolution................

.....................................................................................

Vice President Joe Biden said today that Guantanamo Bay's anti-habeas-corpus prison would be shut down by next January. AFP and BBC report this quote:

"We are going through every single detainee's records... to make a judgement about whether or not they should be tried [or] ... released and if so, what country might take them if we can't get them back to the country of origin because they're going to be tortured or mistreated," he said.

Speaking during a trip to eastern Europe taking in Georgia and Ukraine, he added: "We expect before January -- well before January -- we will have a decision on each and every individual being held." The Catholic Worker reported that one boy of 13 years of age, arrested in Afghanistan in 2002, was held in solitary for more than a year at Bagram and Guantanamo, and made to stand in stress position and deprived of sleep. If you were listening to Democracy Now earlier this morning, you heard the following: "The Obama administration meanwhile is facing a Friday deadline on whether to continue jailing Guantanamo Bay prisoner Mohamed Jawad. The American Civil Liberties Union has challenged Jawad's indefinite imprisonment, saying he's been abused, threatened, and deprived of sleep in US custody. The case has received further scrutiny because it's believed Jawad was jailed when he was twelve years old. Federal District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle has given the Justice Department until tomorrow to explain why Jawad should still be jailed. Huvelle called the government's current case “an outrage” and “riddled with holes.” [no excuse.]

..............................................

From waynemadsenreport.com

THAILAND Flu toll rises to 44, with 6,776 infected

Writer: BangkokPost.com

Published: 22/07/2009 at 12:32 PM

The swine flu death toll has more than doubled from 20 last week to 44, while the total number of confirmed A(H1N1) flu cases has rocketed to 6,776, the Public Health Ministry reported on Wednesday.

Health deputy permanent secretary Paichit Varachit said 6,697 patients had recovered. Thirty-five others remained in hospitals and seven of them were in critical condition.

Public Health Minister Witthaya Kaewparadai said he had instructed provincial governors, doctors and nurses nationwide to implement more stringent measures to curb the A(H1N1) flu outbreak.

"Provincial authorities need to educate people about the disease and ways to protect themselves from being infected so they do not panic," Dr Witthaya said.

Government officials and employees of state enterprises with flu-like symptoms can rest at home without having to get medical certificates, and they would not lose their holidays and other benefits, he said.

"Thailand's ranking in the number of swine flu cases and fatalities has not really risen to fourth place, as other countries have stopped reporting on the flu situation," the minister said.

He also expressed his concern for people who go to watch the friendly soccer match between Thailand and Liverpool on Wednesday evening. People with flu symptoms should definitely not go to the game, he said.

..........................................................

Intensive Care Beds Fill in New Zealand as Flu Hits (Update2)

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601081&sid=aPH1AdRquEIY

By Jason Gale

July 21 (Bloomberg) -- Intensive care units in some New Zealand hospitals are full and a spike in flu cases has prompted doctors to postpone non-essential surgery to ease pressure on medical services, the country's health ministry said.

Seventy-four people are hospitalized with the H1N1 pandemic virus, also known as swine flu, with 26 in intensive care, in the nation of 4.2 million people, the ministry said in a statement today.

New Zealand, suffering the worst influenza season in more than a decade, may be a harbinger for other countries that have yet to experience the pandemic virus during winter, when colder, drier weather favors transmission. Disease trackers are watching how the pandemic evolves during the Southern Hemisphere winter to gauge its impact in the U.S. and Europe.

“It's a salutary warning to other countries,” said Lance Jennings, a clinical virologist with Canterbury Health Laboratories in Christchurch. “It's certainly been a strain on resources.”

Shortages of equipment, including respiratory support units, have been localized, Jennings said. Even with the pressure from both pandemic and seasonal flu, the nation's health services “are coping well,” Health Minister Tony Ryall said. Hospitals, some of which have deferred elective surgeries, may come under more strain as the flu season worsens, he said.

...................................................................................................

http://www.kcna.co.jp/index-e.htm

KCNA Terms Story of "Chain Reaction" Hypocritical

Pyongyang, July 22 (KCNA) -- The U.S. is now spreading in the countries around the DPRK the rumor that "chain reaction" may occur in Japan and south Korea unless the DPRK's access to nukes is checked.

The rumor has it that the DPRK's access to nukes may prompt Japan and south Korea to go nuclear, fearful of its "threat".

It sounds plausible at first but one can easily guess this is a sheer speculation as it is a departure from a reality.

Humankind wishes to see a nuclear-free world.

Had countries vied with each other to have access to nukes because of nuclear threat there might have already appeared a great number of nuclear weapons states in the world.

When a country is exposed to very potential and serious nuclear threats and when it finds no other way to cope with them, it is compelled to have access to nukes as its last resort.

...........................................................................................................

americOINK

2009-07-02T08:13:00.000-07:00

Obama ambassadorships bought:
http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2009/07/another-batch-of-obamas-ambass.html

Bailout salary limit evaded:
http://www.toomuchonline.org/articlenew_2009/june15a.html

Sachs behind crashes:
http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/07/rolling-stone-expose-goldman-sachs-behind-every-market-crash-since-1920s/

Ultra-rich doing just fine:
http://www.toomuchonline.org/articlenew_2009/june29a.html

EPA global warming censorship fraud:
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/07/climate_skeptic_i_was_hoping_people_at_epa_would_p.php?ref=fpb

Sea ice melting:
http://www.livescience.com/environment/090701-shrinking-sea-ice.html

Melting raises seas:
www.chinaview.cn 2009-07-02 16:07:52

Swine flu mutation escaping notice
http://www.recombinomics.com/News/06300901/H274Y_Swine_Silent.html

Swine flu serious in Argentina
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jQwSxWr8T5XODB8rmTgb2MKuHNVw

..........................................................................
This is PressWatch, counterpropaganda and Left opinion on KBOO community multimedia. I'm Theresa Mitchell; join me for a brief peek behind the video veil, and an examination of the News You're Not Supposed To Know....

I've had an awesome vacation and now I'm back after two weeks' absence, which is a geologic era so far as radio is concerned, especially weekly radio. So I'll re-introduce myself. I am Theresa Mitchell, a transgendered woman, actually a hermaphrodite mutated by Lily Pharmaceutical's now-banned drug diethylstilbestrol. Pleased to meet you. I'm also an anarcho-socialist firebrand, and I come to you once per week to attempt to destroy the manufactured consensus that corporate media produces in order to keep us all in quiet, orderly, grateful lines to the factory farm slaughterhouse.

While I was away I did think about what changes were necessary to the program, and so I'm going to post my comments on the Web in a different way. This time, and subsequently, I'm going to have a little list at the top of the page, which will essentially be a list of topics, with each topic followed by a(n) URL link. So if you're wondering where the hell I get my ideas and facts, the answer will be right there on top, click and voila! --you're there. That is, unless my idea has come merely from the rusting pile of facts and memories in my aging brain, in which case you can use your favorite search engine or just decide what you will.

I hope to have kboo.fm/presswatch working some time today, but failing that, you'll find the list of topics and links, followed by part of today's script, at theresaspresswatch.blogspot.com .
................................................................

If you ask yourself what it is you really want in health care-- I mean for yourself and for people you care about-- the answer is easy and simple. You want to be able to get medical care when you need it; nor would you deny health care to anyone. That's true for everyone. We all agree that it's cruel to withhold needed care; if someone comes to you with a bleeding cut, and you have a bandage, you give it to them. It's human nature.

We all know, too, that other, more civilized countries have health care. So we insist to our legislators, for decade after decade, that health care must be provided. Sometimes they make more noise in response to our request, and other times they ignore it, but the bottom line is always the same, the same answer: No. No, you can't have health care, America. The rich would be inconvenienced by it. And no, you're certainly not allowed to ask for "single payer" socialized medicine.

Why is this?

It's a free country, after all, as the saying goes, which is odd in view of the fact that this is the world's most imprisoned country, but you're free to participate in politics--and on an equal basis, at that. Your dollar contributed to a politician's media election fund goes just as far as each of the other half-million dollars contributed in bundle by a rich person, and your voice is therefore proportionately considered. One million votes for two rich people, and fifty votes for you and your spouse. Perfectly reasonable, no? Would we expect any rational media-buying politician to act otherwise? They wouldn't get elected if they did. (Of course, some say that media should be forced to run free election ads, and that money should be banned from politics. Those radicals!)

Meanwhile, in the Land of the Free, you can get whatever you want with a half-million dollar contribution, and for that matter, you can stop any group of people from getting what they want, if it goes against your money. Why stop at preserving your health insurance stock investments? Why not leave it all behind, and find yourself a fabulous lifestyle in a foreign country, say as a real Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary for the United States of America? Buying ambassadorships is a long American tradition, and it's become even more common since Reagan. According to opensecrets.org:

"...[President] Obama, to date, has nominated 50 individuals for ambassadorships. Of these, 19 have been career officers in the Foreign Service, 26 have given money to political candidates and five are not career diplomats but nor do they have known histories of campaign contributions.

"These 26 individuals, along with their immediate family members, have contributed roughly $3 million to federal candidates, committees and parties since 1989, with 92 percent of that going to Democrats — including more than $139,800 to Obama and $43,100 to former Sen. Hillary Clinton, who now heads the State Department.

"Sixteen of them are also responsible for bundling at least $5 million to Obama's campaign committee and at least $500,000 to the campaign of Obama's Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain. Additionally, according to Public Citizen's records, eight of these bundlers also directed at least $1.78 million toward his inaugural committee."

For example:
"Bruce J. Oreck, [nominated] for ambassador to Finland. Oreck, a lawyer who previously served as general counsel and vice president of his family's famous vacuum company, bundled more than $500,000 to Obama's presidential campaign. He and his wife, Charlotte, also bundled another $75,000 Obama's inauguration. (Existing disclosure requirements for inauguration bundlers don't make it clear whether that includes his personal contribution of $50,000.) Along with his wife and children, he has contributed $261,550 to federal Democratic candidates, parties and committees since 1989. That includes $9,200 to Obama and $1,000 to Hillary Clinton last cycle.

(more at http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2009/07/another-batch-of-obamas-ambass.html )
..........................................................

But it's not fair to say that the ultra-rich are simply buying whatever items they want on the Washington menu. Not fair at all. In fact, the situation is far worse than that--they've been buying whatever they want for so long that the waiters--excuse mean, I mean the elected representatives, Senators, President, and appointees--rush to the table with an eager smile, and a little white towel, and know without being told exactly how to act. Take this whole business of executive pay caps--you didn't really think that the ultra-rich were going to let you, the stingy know-nothing tax payer, get away with limiting their annual bonus to half a million dollars, did you? Oh, sure, you can whine away about it being your tax money being used in a bailout, and that you intended it to stimulate the economy not line their pockets when they're obviously failing in their jobs, yada yada yada. God, you little people can be annoying. But rest assured it's not going to happen.
From an article in Too Much online by Sam Pizzigati :

http://www.toomuchonline.org/articlenew_2009/june15a.html

"Geithner’s new directives essentially erase the executive pay cap President Obama announced in February. Geithner's new rules, in effect, turn that $500,000 maximum into a minimum.
Under these rules, a new federal pay czar will “automatically approve” any pay package the nation’s most troubled enterprises dish out that doesn’t top half a million."

In the same article, we read:

"How high above this half million can these pay packages now go? The original White House $500,000 cap on cash compensation did allow execs to collect additional stock awards, on an unlimited basis, so long as they didn’t cash those awards out until their firms had paid back their bailouts.

"But the bonus restriction that Congress then passed — limiting bonuses to one-third of total pay — effectively placed a lid on these additional awards at $250,000, a figure that would translate into one-third of total pay if cash compensation were limited to $500,000.

"The new regs Geithner released last week knock this lid off. They turn full responsibility for executive pay at firms now getting “exceptional assistance” — a group that now includes AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, Chrysler, GM, GMAC, and Chrysler Financial — over to a new pay czar, Washington superlawyer Kenneth Feinberg.

"Feinberg, for his part, spent last week reassuring Wall Street how reasonable his pay judgments will be. He even urged reporters not to call him a “czar.”

“It makes it sound as if my goal is to impose certain restrictions on the private marketplace,” Feinberg explained, “whereas I am much more interested in working with these companies.”

................................................................
But surely this confindence is justified! From Raw Story today:

http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/07/rolling-stone-expose-goldman-sachs-behind-every-market-crash-since-1920s/

Rolling Stone expose: Goldman Sachs behind every market crash since 1920s

Goldman Sachs has played a crucial role in creating every market bubble since the 1920s -- and has profited from not only the bubbles, but from the crash that followed as well, says a new expose in Rolling Stone magazine.

An article in the July 9-23 issue of the magazine, written by Matt Taibbi, lists five asset bubbles that the 140-year-old investment bank helped create -- and one that Taibbi asserts the firm is currently working to make happen.

The five bubbles the article says Goldman was central to creating are the Wall Street stock bubble in the 1920s, which led to the Great Depression; the tech-stock bubble of the late 1990s, which ended in the 2001 recession; the housing bubble of the past decade, which resulted in the current economic crisis; the oil price run-up last summer, when oil shot up to $140 a barrel, likely helping tilt the entire world into recession; and what Taibbi describes as "rigging the bailout," when Goldman Sachs' well-placed alumni inside the U.S. government engineered last fall's bank bailout in such a way that the company profited massively.
....
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But wait a minute, am I being to harsh on the ultra-rich? Didn't they take it hard in the stock crash? Not according to Pizzigati:
............................................................

http://www.toomuchonline.org/articlenew_2009/june29a.html

"The world’s high net worth individuals turn out to have ended 2008 with $32.8 trillion in wealth, not much less than the $33.4 trillion they held at the end of 2005. In other words, 2008’s great meltdown cost the world’s wealthy the gains they registered in 2006 and 2007 — and nothing more.

"These wealthy, especially those individuals who fall into the World Wealth Report “ultra” high net worth category, continue to hold a stunningly disproportionate share of the world’s wealth.

"About 80,000 individuals worldwide qualify as ultras. These super rich make up roughly 0.001 percent of the world’s population. They hold, even after the 2008 economic collapse, 10 percent of our planet’s entire wealth.

"These wealthy, to be sure, did “scale back” some on their personal spending in 2008. In the United States, home to 28.7 percent of the world’s high net worth individuals, fine art auction sales totaled only $2.9 billion in 2009, “down $1 billion from 2007,” the new World Wealth Report relates, and U.S. sales of Lamborghini luxury cars dropped 21 percent last year.

"But the amount of cash sloshing in wealthy pockets, meltdown notwithstanding, remains enormous. In December 2008, the new World Wealth Report observes, one historic diamond gaveled off in London for $24.3 million, “the highest price for any diamond or jewel ever sold at auction.”

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Remember when the head of NASA was officially silenced by the Bush Administration, so that he could not talk about global climate change from a scientific perspective? Evidently someone in the corporate Right's propaganda mill does, because they've been trying to create an opposite story to stick in your ear.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/07/climate_skeptic_i_was_hoping_people_at_epa_would_p.php?ref=fpb

By Zachary Roth - July 1, 2009, 8:43AM
"Conservatives are jumping up and down over a report by an EPA analyst expressing skepticism about climate change, which, they claim, was suppressed by agency brass because it didn't conform to Obama administration orthodoxy on global warming. The story has sparked explosive claims, on Fox News and other right-wing outlets, that the EPA censored scientific data for political reasons. And Monday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) called for an outright criminal investigation into the matter.

"But [Roth writes,] it's hard to blame EPA for not paying much attention to the study. And it's more than a little ironic that DC Republicans have chosen its author as their new standard-bearer in the defense of pure science against politics. Because the author, EPA veteran Al Carlin, is an economist, not a climate scientist. EPA says no one at the agency solicited the report. And Carlin appears to have taken up the global warming topic largely as a hobby on his own time. In fact, a NASA climatologist has called the report -- whose existence was first publicized last week by the industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) -- "a ragbag collection of un-peer reviewed web pages, an unhealthy dose of sunstroke, a dash of astrology and more cherries than you can poke a cocktail stick at."
................................................................

The question is, may we please have some serious action against the devastation promised by global climate change? And the answer is No. Raising this question has alerted your handlers that there is some agitation en route to the slaughterhouse platform, and so you are being goaded with the ideological cattle pod. Git along there, little dawgies, nothing to see here. Unless it's this:

http://www.livescience.com/environment/090701-shrinking-sea-ice.html
"A reconstruction of sea ice reveals the lowest levels in 800 years, according to new research published in the journal Climate Dynamics.

"Researchers modeled sea ice levels between Greenland and Svalbard, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean north of Europe, from the 13th century to present using data from a natural climate "archive" and from historic human records.

"We have combined information about the climate found in ice cores from an ice cap on Svalbard and from the annual growth rings of trees in Finland and this gave us a curve of the past climate," Aslak Grinsted said in a press release. Grinsted is a geophysicist with the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. "We see that the sea ice is shrinking to a level which has not been seen in more than 800 years."

"The scientists also combed through harbor records and logbooks of ships that traveled the area to record human observation of sea ice levels. Then they pieced together a picture of how much sea ice has existed through this time period.

"Sea ice melting and re-freezing is a complicated process that is influenced by a number of factors such as wind patterns, ocean currents, and how much ice has frozen or melted in recent years. The authors did not point to any causes for the changes in sea ice levels in their study.

"The scientists noted that even though the 13th century was a relatively warm period and ice levels were low then, 20th century sea ice levels are still the lowest. The "Little Ice Age," from 1700 to 1800 had the greatest cover of sea ice, according to their data.

"Other studies have found that Arctic ice is getting thinner over time, so that when the normal summer melt occurs, the entire polar cap is retreating compared to decades past. Last year, this melting opened up the fabled Northwest Passage, as a substantial amount of older ice melted. Climate scientists say the North Pole could be ice-free during summer within a few decades.
[....]
................................................

--Aaaaand what effect might that have?
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-07/02/content_11640463.htm

NZ scientist warns of Antarctic ice melt, sea rise
www.chinaview.cn 2009-07-02 16:07:52 Print

WELLINGTON, July 2 (Xinhua) -- A New Zealand scientist warned on Thursday of rising sea levels due to Antarctic ice melt.

Tim Naish said new evidence showed that changes to Antarctica's most vulnerable element, the West Antarctic ice sheet, could raise global sea levels by up to 5 metres (16 feet).

The Director of Victoria University's Antarctic Research Centre will present this new evidence at his inaugural professorial lecture on July 7 at Victoria University.

"Polar ice sheets have grown and collapsed at least 40 times over the past 5 million years, causing major sea-level fluctuations," he said in a media release. "The most recent ' interglacial' has lasted 10,000 years, during which time global sea-level and atmospheric temperatures have remained more or less constant, and human civilisation has flourished."

Professor Naish said much of his research has focused on the international drilling program in the sedimentary layers of the West Antarctic ice sheet.

"Evidence shows that this sheet is expected to melt first, along with Greenland. West Antarctica sits below sea level, so as the ocean warms, the ice sheet also warms. ... [....]
.............................................................

Here's the latest on the swine flu pandemic from Dr. Henry Niman:

http://www.recombinomics.com/News/06300901/H274Y_Swine_Silent.html

...[A] patient ...[in Denmark has] developed a pandemic H1N1 infection while taking a prophylactic dose of oseltamivir (Tamiflu). The [reported lapse of] five days suggests the patient was infected after her contact, who was infected overseas, returned. The patient was given Tamiflu because of her infected contact, and developed flu-like symptoms while taking Tamiflu, which led to the isolation of the virus and sequence data (generated in Denmark and England), showing [that her infection had developed] resistance ...[to Tamiflu]).

The ... [foreign press] description [of the infection incident] made no mention of [the existence of] an isolate from the patient who traveled overseas, and no indication that an isolate was collected. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that a wild type sequence from the overseas traveler or the patient with resistant H1N1 exists. This absence was also signaled by statements from Roche and other agencies who used the qualifiers of "appears" and "probably" when describing the development of resistance, because there is no evidence that resistance developed in the patient in Denmark.

A more likely scenario involves the silent spread of oseltamivir resistant H1N1. Denmark, like most countries in Europe, has focused on detection of H1N1 in travelers and contacts. Consequently, the number of H1N1 positive cases has been low.
[....]
The publicity associated with the Danish case will likely lead to more isolates and more sequences, and the explosion of cases in England may lead to a more serious approach toward testing for community spread in European countries like Denmark, which are focused on airport travelers and contacts.
Airport screening will only detect a small subset of infected patients, because those infected shortly prior to travel will not yet have symptoms, and about 30% of infected patients don't develop a high fever. Moreover, others take medication for flu-like symptoms, which lowers fevers. Thus, infected patients have been flying into these countries undetected for months, and community spread is significant, but not reported because of a lack of testing.

The detection of H274Y in pandemic H1N1 has parallels with H274Y in seasonal H1N1. The resistance was widely reported in early 2008 in Norway, but subsequent testing demonstrated that the resistance was widespread in the fall of 2007 and had silently circulated for months prior to detection. The limited number of NA sequences for most countries outside of North America allows for a repeat of [the] silent spread of Tamiflu resistant pandemic H1N1 at this time. [....]
........................................................
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jQwSxWr8T5XODB8rmTgb2MKuHNVw

Buenos Aires (AFP) - the number of dead by h1n1 influenza in Argentina has registered a great increase in the last five days, elevating from 26 to 43 , according to the minister of Health, Juan Manzur. " Between 43 and 44 deaths" , Manzur responded, referring to the swine influenza in this South American country, where official data had not been reported on the evolution of the disease from the past Friday. With this number, Argentina is the third country of the world in number of died by pig influenza, behind the United States and Mexico. The situation by the pig influenza is serious, diffícult" , the civil servant said, and warned that " we are attending a curve that still is in ascension" , in relation to the austral winter period and the seasonal increase of the influenza and the respiratory diseases. In its first contact with the press, Manzur announced a series of measures, among them, the creation of a special account in the scope of the ministry of Health with an allocation of 1,000 million pesos (263.1 million dollars) to fortify the sanitary structure in all the country. The civil servant anticipated in addition the decision to protect vulnerable social groups, like pregnant women, and informed that they will be able to ask for a preventive license in his works as of this Thursday and by a lapse of 15 days. Mazur summoned to the sectors of the health public, deprived and of union social works to face the pandemic and explained that any patient who enters a state hospital and needs internment, could be derived to any private hospital, and the cost will be confronted by the State. Before the advance of the epidemic, the provincial cities presented/displayed during the day an almost total paralysis and 17 of the 24 districts of the country advanced receso winter student they extended and it until July end. The governments of the Argentine capital and the province of Buenos Aires (center-this), the majors districts with almost 18 million inhabitants and where the greater amount of deaths was concentrated, declared the sanitary emergency. The Buenosairean provincial government announced the call to 2,000 professionals of the health, even retired and advanced Medicine students, to contain the increase of the demand for services. " We have a 40% of absenteeism within the system of health due to the contagion by A" influenza; , it said the minister of Buenosairean Health, Claudius Zin. ....

................................................................
(breaking) --biggest US operations since Fallujah
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i1AG3j0rXOC1d2LtkRdbFcK3PoVg

porkopalypse

2009-04-30T13:25:00.000-07:00

The outbreak of H1N1 recombinant influenza seems to have inspired quite a range of emotion, from racist rants by Michelle Malkin and Michael Savage(http://www.alternet.org/immigration/138859/michelle_malkin_and_michael_savage_use_swine_flu_crisis_to_peddle_their_xenophobia/) against Mexican immigrants, to disturbing theories of artificial origin (http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/) and a hilarious send-up by John Stewart. Leftists seem to have their own brand of sneering dismissal.
The question is whether the current situation has the potential to cause widespread misery and death, and it is a little comparable to having been shot in the leg by an unknown assailant; although it is very relevant to ask who has perpetrated the crime, the first thing to do is to take action to save one's life, to stop the bleeding and call an ambulance. In order to develop a political and historic analysis of the flu outbreak, it is necessary to look at global, journalistic, and scientific sources, as well as comprehensive examinations like John M. Barry's book The Great Influenza. By coincidence, if you believe in that sort of thing, I picked up a copy of that book this February, purely out of curiosity. The account it tells of the 1918 outbreak is quite disturbing.

Here is a quote:
"No medicine and none of the vaccines developed then could prevent influenza. The masks worn by millions were useless as designed and could not prevent influenza. Only preventing exposure to the virus could Nothing today can cure influenza, though vaccines can provide significant--but nowhere near complete--protection, and several antiviral drugs can mitigate its severity."
John Barry also wrote: "...the closing orders that most cities issued could not prevent exposure; they were not extreme enough. Closing saloons and theaters and churches meant nothing if significant numbers of people continued to climb onto streetcars, continued to go to work, continued to go to the grocer. Even where fear closed down businesses, where both store owners and customers refused to stand face-to-face and left orders on sidewalks, there was still too much interaction to break the chain of infection."

Consider that, and consider the photographs in the news of people going about Mexico City with their face masks. They have been closing schools and stadiums too, and it is clear that if the virus is contagious enough, if it is like the 1918 virus in that regard, they will ultimately gain little from these precautions, and neither will we. We can wash our hands until the cows come home, and a sufficiently transmissible virus will still find its way into our bodies. The advice is to wear a mask and to avoid touching the eyes and mouth--but if you really think you can avoid touching your eyes unconsciously, try putting habanero pepper juice on your fingers, letting it dry, and try to go for eight hours without touching your eyes. You will touch your eyes. So, again, the question is whether the pandemic is likely to turn deadly.

The issue here is not how many people have died so far--a small number indeed compared to the world population or even to annual flu deaths--but rather what sort of process has been set into place. The experts are not sanguine.

NYT/Denise Grady 4/29/09

"A global swine-flu pandemic is likely, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Wednesday as it raised its alert level to Phase 5, the next-to-highest level in the worldwide warning system.

Phase 5 never has been declared before. Phase 6 means a pandemic is under way. WHO said its decision was based on the continuing spread of swine flu in the United States and Mexico, particularly the increasing numbers of unexplained cases."

What details can be gleaned from research scientists?

The following information is gleaned from a partial transcript I made last night from an interview on WPXI with Dr. Henry Niman, who holds a medical Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, and has worked with the prestigious Scripps Clinic, and also at the University of Pittsburgh and with Harvard University research teams.

In the WPXI interview earlier this week, Dr. Henry Niman pointed out that an influenza virus markedly similar to the current outbreak in its transmissibility, timing, and immune-refractory characteristics left 20-50 million people dead in 1918, at a time when the World population was a third of today's. A third of world's population was infected at that time, he said. If--and he points out that this is a big if--if it follows the 1918 pattern, it could 'kind of disappear,' or rather become less threatening over the Summer, and then reappear with greater violence this Fall. Adding to the list of 1918 similarities, Niman points out that most of the influenza deaths in Mexico are in a tight age group, 25-44 year olds.

Existing vaccines won't work, Niman says. An effort to produce a new vaccine will now get under way. The fact that there are few fatalities in the US at this time is probably a timing issue, he says; there would be a similar level of deaths if the number of infected persons rises to levels currently seen in Mexico. Within a month, the US flu-tracking map will "be covered in dots."

[This would seem to be echoed by a doctor in Mexico, Justino Regalado Pineda, an epidemiologist with the Health Ministry, who was cited in the Washington Post today:

"He speculated that one reason people have died in Mexico as opposed to the United States is that the life span of the virus could have been longer in Mexico. "]

Whereas the state of the pandemic is still mild even in Mexico, the number of actual cases, Dr. Niman says, are likely 10 or 100 times the reported number; most of these persons will experience a "mild course" similar to seasonal flu, because of the initial nature of the virus.

Counteractants will include tamiflu, an antiviral drug; however, Niman said, influenza generally is already resistant to one such drug, amantadine. He said seasonal flu is already resistant to tamiflu, so as the flu interacts with victims(recombines), there is a "good chance that that resistance will transfer to the swine virus" on the N gene; hence virus emerging in Fall might be resistant to Tamiflu.

It is still early in the pandemic process, so there is no guarantee that the disease will ebb in the Summer. Niman noted ruefully that there has been an announcement that testing is to stop on milder cases, to concentrate on severe symptoms. The new recombinant flu is widespread, Niman said; in the next week or two most cases will be from those "returned from Mexico," but that will change. An intensive vaccine effort will ensue, along with a "major effort" to monitor the virus; there will be no border closings, however, because the virus has already moved about --[as President Obama said last night].

The risk group for fatalities will be healthy adults, because of the "robust immune response.... that ends up killing the patient," similar to 1918. Commenting on the general threat level of the virus, Niman said that it is still early, and the virus might not sustain itself --but the number of people infected in Mexico militates against that forecast. He pointed out that earlier this week, one or two dozen students returned to the US who had gone to Mexico; days later, 150 were infected, 45 confirmed, and now parents are infected.

There is a lot more surveillance now than in 1918, Niman noted, so we can see the pandemic unfold at its early stages; but it is unlikely the virus will burn itself out, paradoxically because it is mild at this point, and is not eliminating the population. "People have a tendency to go to work, go to school, take public transportation," he said, thereby providing the opportunity for the disease to spread.

See kboo.fm/presswatch or theresaspresswatch.blogspot.com for the video URL of the interview.

http://www.wpxi.com/video/19313969/index.html

Niman's comments on the similarities with 1918 may be borne out by breaking reports, such as this one from El Manana Nacional (and several other sources) in Mexico City:

One 24-year-old man started with a stomach ache and chills; he was initially treated by a private doctor, but the situation rapidly grew worse, and by the time he was taken to the hospital he was unconscious and having difficulty breathing. He died; "it began with cough and temperatures of 39 (102.2F) degrees, pain in the throat, diarrhea, vomiting, discomfort, and nausea."

http://www.elmanana.com.mx/notas.asp?id=117546

This would be further underlined by a report in the Washington Post today (4/30/09), which said in part:

"Most of the fatal cases involved extensive lung damage, requiring doctors to prescribe mechanical breathing assistance. Exactly what caused the lung damage is not known."

The influenza outbreak in Mexico has been associated with numerous cases of "atypical pneumonia" although specifics seem to be hard to come by so far (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/29/AR2009042904911.html). John M. Barry wrote in his NYT bestselling book The Great Influenza [pp. 242-243] "It was the lungs that had attracted attention from pathologists first. Physicians and pathologists had many times seen lungs of those dead of pneumonia. Many of the deaths from influenzal pneumonia did look like these normal pneumonias. And the later in the epidemic a victim died, the higher was the percentage of autopsy findings that resembled normal pneumonia, bacterial pneumonia.

Those who died very quickly, a day or less after the first symptoms, however, most likely died of an overwhelming and massive invasion of the virus itself. The virus destroyed enough cells in the lung to block the exchange of oxygen. This alone was unusual and puzzling. But the lungs of the men and women who died two days, three days, four days after the first symptom of influenza bore no resemblance to normal pneumonias at all. They were more unusual, more puzzling."

Note, then, this report of a rapid death from the Las Cruces Sun/News, New Mexico, by Ashley Meeks, seeming to bear out Niman's warning already:

April 29th 2009

"LAS CRUCES - A 6-year-old student in Las Cruces died Tuesday afternoon after being sent home from school sick that day with nausea and a fever, according to the Doña Ana Sheriff's Office.

By Friday, preliminary autopsy results should determine whether Columbia Elementary School first-grader Cody Scarborough had contracted swine flu, said Sgt. Joe Reynaud, who said the death had originally seemed to be caused by a heart attack.

"It's out of the ordinary to have a death of a 6-year-old. It could be anything from carbon monoxide to a birth defect," said Reynaud, who said Scarborough's mother had picked him up from school with a fever. "The child did not exhibit any symptoms previous to yesterday.""

http://www.lcsun-news.com/ci_12255212?source=most_emailed

If this sort of incident gains in frequency, it might be an indicator of the 'cytokine storm,' , the hyper-immune response that apparently killed many in 1918.

Doctor Henry Niman does not represent unanimous opinion in the scientific community, however:

Reuters reports "Masato Tashiro, head of the influenza virus research center at Japan's National Institute of Infectious Disease and a member of the WHO emergency committee, told Japan's Nikkei newspaper it appeared the H1N1 strain was far less dangerous than avian flu.

"The virus is relatively weak and about the same as regular influenza viruses passed on via human-to-human contact. I don't believe it will become virulent," he was quoted as saying.

"The threat to health from the avian influenza and its fatality rate is much greater than the new flu," he said.

"I am very worried that we will use up the stockpile of anti-flu medicine and be unarmed before we need to fight against the avian influenza. The greatest threat to mankind remains the H5N1 avian influenza.""
http://www.reuters.com/article/africaCrisis/idUSSP370581

Tashiro's confidence is interesting in view of the fact that the virus has been reported to be composed of avian influenza as well as swine flu and H1N1 genetic components; due to intense pressure from corporate farmers, the disease may be renamed anyway.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/business/economy/29trade.html)

If hand-washing, quarantine, and public closures are to be of no use, what can one do? But it is still, frustratingly, too early to determine if we are facing a November full of the reek of death and disease, or clear sailing to the next outbreak. Perhaps some strategem can be devised to defeat the influenza. Or maybe we're all just meat animals in a factory farm, waiting for the time of slaughter.

MichioKakuLive

2009-04-13T22:46:00.000-07:00

KBOO interview: Michio Kaku on his book "Physics of the Impossible" http://kboo.fm/node/13358

It was a blast getting to meet Michio Kaku, the co-founder of String Theory. The man is a titan, not because he's eclipsing Hawking's and Sagan's video legacy, but because he's constantly contributing to the cutting edge of theoretical physics. One of the first (off-air) things I asked him was whether he was the exercising sort, because I couldn't figure out how he did so many things without collapsing from exhaustion--he's been on book tour for a month now, has another month to go, he's being filmed for a new 12-part series based on his book Physics of the Impossible--and he seemed quite poised. But he says he's not an exerciser, although he likes to figure-skate (!!).

Well, when conducting the interview on air, I figured it out. At one point in the audio ( http://kboo.fm/node/13358 ) you can hear him say the phrase "like this phone interview." But he was right in front of me. I noticed then that his eyes drifted to his right while he was expounding, and his left eye had an occasional rapid dance to it. He was working on his theory as he responded to my questions! I think he was probably developing mathematical solutions--just a feeling. But it was clear that he could meta-multi-task. I mean, I had his attention, it's just that he had SO MUCH MORE BRAINPOWER to work with, that he could have a lively conversation with me, and do some intellectual heavy lifting at the same time. Damn. Imagine that!

So do listen to the interview, it's a blast. Now 'scuse me while I go read the book again.

Theresa

capitaleezm

2009-01-22T09:36:00.001-08:00

First, the good news:

"WASHINGTON — President Obama is expected to sign executive orders Thursday directing the Central Intelligence Agency to shut what remains of its network of secret prisons and ordering the closing of the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, government officials said." --New York Times

But ongoing:

At least 716,760 people have been killed, and
1,397,255 seriously injured in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Actually, we've killed a million in Iraq and displaced two million.

Gaza's death count from Israeli attacks: 1,284. 4,336 wounded. Vast majority were civilians.

And here's the latest on Bushite fascism:

The NSA spied on everyone.....(Raw Story/Edwards/Kane)
Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice, who helped expose the NSA's warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, has now come forward with even more startling allegations. Tice told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Wednesday that the programs that spied on Americans were not only much broader than previously acknowledged but specifically targeted journalists.

"The National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications -- faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications," Tice claimed. "It didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, in the middle of the country, and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications."

Tice further explained that "even for the NSA it's impossible to literally collect all communications. ... What was done was sort of an ability to look at the metadata ... and ferret that information to determine what communications would ultimately be collected."

According to Tice, in addition to this "low-tech, dragnet" approach, the NSA also had the ability to hone in on specific groups, and that was the aspect he himself was involved with. However, even within the NSA there was a cover story meant to prevent people like Tice from realizing what they were doing.

"In one of the operations that I was in, we looked at organizations, just supposedly so that we would not target them," Tice told Olbermann. "What I was finding out, though, is that the collection on those organizations was 24/7 and 365 days a year -- and it made no sense. ... I started to investigate that. That's about the time when they came after me to fire me."
http://rawstory.com//printstory.php?story=13973
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Flagging the Inauguration

Remember the great Flag Frenzy of 2001? Do you remember the little plastic flags fluttering from every car, the flag stickers, the flag t-shirts, the flag everything, and the insistence against all logic that these displays were about citizen solidarity only, and not about conformity with the new regime of secrecy, hierarchy, insecurity, imperialism, fascism, and acceptance of the lie of 9/11, that some terrible change had occurred that forced us all to accept a degradation and diminution of life, liberty, and happiness? Do you remember all the damned flags? They're still with us; at my day job, they're on the vehicles in two places, they're sewn onto the shoulders of many workers even though there are strict rules about uniforms. And the flags still mean conformity, blind obedience, the rule of the faceless mob, the kneejerk elevation of militarism to stainless heroism. Well, the flag means that today. But for a few hours Tuesday, the flag meant something different.

I realized as I headed to work Tuesday that, with the ascension of Barack Obama to office, there was a small window of time in which the US flag took on a largely celebratory tone. Tuesday morning (that is, Pacific time), waving the flag meant that one might be celebrating the inauguration of some different qualities to the Office of the President of the United States.
Don't get me wrong, I'm ready to take on Barack Obama's regime for its imperialism and corporate capitalism. But Barack Obama is intelligent--a teacher of Constitutional interpretation--genuinely compassionate to all appearances, sane, steady, forthright, and a complete repudiation of the sort of NASCAR Bubba politics that brought forth the security gates and the flag patches that gall me at work daily.
Believe me, there are a number of my fellow union workers --maybe not the majority, but a number-- who were very uncomfortable Tuesday morning about the state of affairs. After all, their hero George Bush was fading away under a cloud of anger and accusations, and The One that they had been warned about--"the Messiah," as one worker bitterly and sarcastically muttered to me--was taking the sacred Commander In Chief slot away from them, and thus taking away their years of smug association with righteous power. Well, there was no way I was going to soften the blow.

So imagine the dismay and confusion when the American US Red White And Blue Flag walks into the workplace --a six foot cloth banner-- wrapped around the shoulders of a despised leftist transsexual. "Thank you," a National Guard member said, when she saw the flag, then mumbled, "I think." Clearly there was something wrong with this picture. It took a second, but they caught on to the fact that I was up to something. To wield the flag like that, I needed some sort of Bubba authority--like military service, or at least church affiliation. I clearly wasn't American enough to wave a flag. Tolerating my presence in the workplace is enough of a strain, now I'm picking up the sacred emblem of righteousness and wearing it around?

How could things get any worse, they asked themselves, and I could see it on their faces, and I asked myself the same question. How could things get any worse, so that I can rub their years of triumphant hypocrisy in their faces?
Well, it got worse, when I whipped the flag off my shoulders and whooped with joy, when Barack Hussein Obama corrected that jackass Supreme Court Chief and took the Oath of Office. Funny, there were no eyes cast with a glaze of adoration at the flag then, as it swirled majestically over their heads, lightly tickling the television glow of the Inauguration. No, funny thing, the flag seemed to have an opposite effect. There was no cheer in NASCAR Mudville that day, even though one of their own, the bigot Rick Warren, had been chosen to spew Jesusisms all over the stage. That was a sop and they knew it. That flag wasn't supposed to be in the hands of an abomination like me--but in the sudden confusion of Bubba emotions, no one could articulate their rage. It was beautiful.

So the flag got stuffed into my backpack. I'll bring it out later, when Obama invades Iran, continues to occupy Iraq, and escalates in Afghanistan--then I'll burn it. It was definitely five bucks well spent, even if the money did go to a Chinese capitalist.
.............................................................

President Obama has a capitalism problem. He had to use every bit of his political clout to get the Democratic Congress to release the second half, the $350 billion of the legislative bank bailout. One might think that the money would be easier to release to Obama's Administration, since after all it went with so much speed to the notoriously corrupt Bushites, but that may itself be the problem. Banks took the money and aren't lending it out. They have contractual, and thus legal obligations to their stockholders, and they aren't going to give out money that won't be paid back as corporations collapse in the financial earthquake. And of course they don't give a damn about the average worker, they built their fortunes by squeezing the blood out of the working class and if the workers perish, that's not their problem. Maybe the masses can get a job cleaning the pool. Let them eat canned corn.

The latest Great Leap Sideways is the concept of the aggregator bank, sometimes called the Bad Bank. In this scheme, the bad loans are gathered together and sold off to a government bank, thereby cleaning up the remaining portfolios in the commercial banks. The government then tries to squeeze something from its Bad Bank assets, and confetti falls from the majestic towers of Wall Street as America gets back to work. The problem is, no matter how many goodies we give to the inheritance class and their banks, they're not going to lend it out. They're not in the charity business, as they will be quick to tell you. So the Bad Bank is a bad idea, and it will lead to further collapse and loss of government funds.

However, something is going to have to be done. The system is collapsing at an accelerating rate. For the inheritance class, this means that democracy may raise its ugly head.

(WSWS.org) Patrick O'Connor has this to say about Obama's plans as revealed in the Geithner confirmation hearings:

"No one objected from either party when Geithner, in his opening statement, indicated that the Obama administration intends to deal with ballooning budget deficits resulting from government handouts to the banks by slashing bedrock social programs such as Social Security and Medicare. He told the committee, "Our program to restore economic growth has to be accompanied—and I want to emphasize this—has to be accompanied by a clear strategy to get us back as quickly as possible to a sustainable fiscal position." It was necessary to demonstrate, he added, that "we as a nation will return to living within our means."

"Marketwatch noted: "He [Geithner] said the budget would have to tamed on a five-year horizon. Along these lines, Obama is looking for a 'mechanism' to move forward on entitlement reform on a bipartisan basis."

"Meanwhile, the banks are being rewarded with a new bailout package involving sums of public money substantially larger than that already committed by the Bush administration under TARP and related programs."
http://wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/econ-j22.shtml

There are some cogent comments on this from Michael Parenti on globalresearch.ca., titled "Capitalism's self-inflicted apocalypse." Here is a small excerpt:

"Democracy becomes a problem for corporate America not when it fails to work but when it works too well, helping the populace move toward a more equitable and livable social order, narrowing the gap, however modestly, between the superrich and the rest of us. So democracy must be diluted and subverted, smothered with disinformation, media puffery, and mountains of campaign costs; with rigged electoral contests and partially disfranchised publics, bringing faux victories to more or less politically safe major-party candidates.

"The corporate capitalists no more encourage prosperity than do they propagate democracy. Most of the world is capitalist, and most of the world is neither prosperous nor particularly democratic. One need only think of capitalist Nigeria, capitalist Indonesia, capitalist Thailand, capitalist Haiti, capitalist Colombia, capitalist Pakistan, capitalist South Africa, capitalist Latvia, and various other members of the Free World--more accurately, the Free Market World.

"A prosperous, politically literate populace with high expectations about its standard of living and a keen sense of entitlement, pushing for continually better social conditions, is not the plutocracy's notion of an ideal workforce and a properly pliant polity. Corporate investors prefer poor populations. The poorer you are, the harder you will work—for less. The poorer you are, the less equipped you are to defend yourself against the abuses of wealth. [Words of Michael Parenti on globalresearch.ca]

"In the corporate world of "free-trade," the number of billionaires is increasing faster than ever while the number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world's population. Poverty spreads as wealth accumulates.

"Consider the United States. In the last eight years alone, while vast fortunes accrued at record rates, an additional six million Americans sank below the poverty level; median family income declined by over $2,000; consumer debt more than doubled; over seven million Americans lost their health insurance, and more than four million lost their pensions; meanwhile homelessness increased and housing foreclosures reached pandemic levels.

"It is only in countries where capitalism has been reined in to some degree by social democracy that the populace has been able to secure a measure of prosperity; northern European nations such as Sweden, Norway, Finland, and "Denmark come to mind. But even in these social democracies popular gains are always at risk of being rolled back.

"It is ironic to credit capitalism with the genius of economic prosperity when most attempts at material betterment have been vehemently and sometimes violently resisted by the capitalist class. The history of labor struggle provides endless illustration of this.

"To the extent that life is bearable under the present U.S. economic order, it is because millions of people have waged bitter class struggles to advance their living standards and their rights as citizens, bringing some measure of humanity to an otherwise heartless politico-economic order."

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11929
[That is just a small excerpt of Parenti's excellent article; read more at global research.]

The new Administration, however, isn't as isolated as the previous one, and no doubt would like to get the ball rolling. The funny thing is, they can't, not by giving more billions to banks. They do have a way of getting things going quickly, though, and they'll get around to it only when every other avenue has been closed off and the wolves are closing in. You know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about socialism.

We need socialism now. We need, for a start, fully socialized health care--not a bailout of the bloated health care profit industry, but a direct nationalization of the hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies. No more profit from sickness! That sould be our rallying cry. I demand nothing less, and in fact nothing less will keep this society from a health disaster.

Now for the fun part: I demand that the banks surrender. They should not just be nationalized--that's in the cards and they know it. No, there should be no mere takeover of their clandestine, Byzantine, corrupt functioning, as their profiteers sail off to sunny destinations on their two-hundred-foot helicopter-pad-equipped yachts. No, I say we take their semisecret, illegal offshore assets, the ones held in the Lesser Antilles and other tax havens literally by the trillions. They took it from us, let's take it from them, in the name of justice and survival, and let's use it to build a new society. And it'll be easy. A couple of gunboats per island will do the trick. Sail the US Nimitz to Aruba, and we'll see how long they'll hang on to those trillions.

I'm talking about revolution here, and as usual I'm far too early. I think maybe my lifetime is far too early, but I'm willing to put it to the test. After all there have been other surprises--just ask Jesse Jackson. Revolution! And the first thing to do is to raise our desires for that new society by imagining just how good it could be.
Why not, for example, decentralize power distribution? The only real reason we have central power plants, wasting half their energy through the inefficiencies of long-distance power distribution, is so that money can be concentrated in the hands of the inheritance class. Coal power plants aren't needed at all; with a combination of decentralized solar, geothermal, wind power, and conservation, we could all have just as high a standard of living. Imagine neighborhood power plants distributing electricity to as few as ten homes each, supplemented by each household's solar panels. We could have that, and full employment, and the parasite class could go hang. We could have that, if we take our money back.

How much wealth is healthy for a human being? Do you think you could be satisfied in your efforts and toils with three million per year? I agree, and I think wealth should be limited to that amount. Anyone who feels they need more than three million per year can have a fully-funded, top-quality socialized CAT scan to see what is wrong with their head. Corporations should be abolished and replaced with transparent cooperatives, responsible to the society and to their workers. Once we do that, we'll wonder how we were ever so crazy as to create vast inpenetrable hierarchies. Our grandchildren will ask us, 'Why did people put up with corporations?' What were we thinking? 'Why were there two million people in jail and the streets swarming with brutal cops, grandma? What was that all about? Were people just crazy? Did we really kill a million people for oil profits?'
...................................................

Regular listeners will recall that I recently read part of a statement by the often-censored head of Nasa's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, James Hansen, warning that time was running out to reverse climate change. It will come as no surprise he hear now that time has indeed run out for deliberations about palliative measures. Here is part of an interview this week in the Guardian (in Great Britain).

"Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen, who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama's first administration, he added.

Soaring carbon emissions are already causing ice-cap melting and threaten to trigger global flooding, widespread species loss and major disruptions of weather patterns in the near future. "We cannot afford to put off change any longer," said Hansen. "We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead."

Hansen said current carbon levels in the atmosphere were already too high to prevent runaway greenhouse warming. Yet the levels are still rising despite all the efforts of politicians and scientists.

Only the US now had the political muscle to lead the world and halt the rise, Hansen said. Having refused to recognise that global warming posed any risk at all over the past eight years, the US now had to take a lead as the world's greatest carbon emitter and the planet's largest economy. Cap-and-trade schemes, in which emission permits are bought and sold, have failed, he said, and must now be replaced by a carbon tax that will imposed on all producers of fossil fuels. At the same time, there must be a moratorium on new power plants that burn coal - the world's worst carbon emitter.

Hansen - head of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies and winner of the WWF's top conservation award - first warned Earth was in danger from climate change in 1988 and has been the victim of several unsuccessful attempts by the White House administration of George Bush to silence his views.

Hansen's institute monitors temperature fluctuations at thousands of sites round the world, data that has led him to conclude that most estimates of sea level rises triggered by rising atmospheric temperatures are too low and too conservative. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says a rise of between 20cm and 60cm can be expected by the end of the century.

However, Hansen said feedbacks in the climate system are already accelerating ice melt and are threatening to lead to the collapse of ice sheets. Sea-level rises will therefore be far greater - a claim backed last week by a group of British, Danish and Finnish scientists who said studies of past variations in climate indicate that a far more likely figure for sea-level rise will be about 1.4 metres, enough to cause devastating flooding of many of the world's major cities and of low-lying areas of Holland, Bangladesh and other nations. ....[more at Guardian.co.uk]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hansen-obama
................................................................

predictions

2009-01-11T19:04:00.000-08:00

I could start with the easy prediction: Propaganda mindsets will prevail in 2009.

Thus, instead of asking why Afghanistan is occupied by US troops-- since even the FBI admits there is no evidence proving that Bin Laden, with the collaboration of the Afghans, perpetrated the 9/11 hijackings-- US citizens will ask "what is the best way to help Afghanistan help itself?" The chauvinism, racism, and pure violent evil of such a question will not come up in public discourse. Likewise, the fact that the Gaza prisoners' rockets have retaliated at a rate of 1/100th the rate of Israeli violence for the last several years will remain obscure. It will be an unwelcome fact. Here's another one we won't talk about: we negotiatied to free all Iraqi prisoners that weren't charged with a crime. But we haven't.

Maybe it's a terrorist fact, skulking around in the bushes somewhere. Some facts are just plain offensive to decent people. Like those pictures of Gaza toddlers' severed heads-- they will be denounced as hysterical demagoguery. How dare they. Is there no decency?

We think as we are told. Thus we do not say "Every penny of the Treasury/Fed/legislated bailout for those rich bankers must be accounted for! What, their wages come to $1000.00/hour? How outrageous! It must be their damnably corrupt Banker's Union!" No, we do not say that. We are meek. Quiet. We hand over the keys to the mint and step backward, bowing, bowing. Not looking up.

Accountability, I prophesy, won't happen. I have a vision of Christo--remember him?--wrapping up the Statue Of Liberty like a mummy, to show that after the failure to impeach, the failure to prosecute the telecom spying, the failure to prosecute torturers and warmongers, Liberty is but a mummified zombie (he could include a loudspeaker at Liberty's mouth endlessly repeating "BRAINZZZ..." in an asthmatic monotone)--but no. Uh uh.

I'm pretty sure these predictions are correct, so you can start calling me Swami. Other predictions are a little more difficult, but not impossible--like the economy; you'd think with all the hand-wringing, I'd be inclined to get all contrary, and say things will be all right. But that's not the case at all; I'd say there isn't nearly enough hand wringing right now. Now is the time to wring your fool hands off, say I. One word: hyperinflation.

Yup, hyperinflation. Not only does 'hyperinflation' have an impressive five syllables, it is the word to describe what happens when you attempt to print your way out of national bankruptcy. Who is going to buy up the debt on all those trillions? "Not us," say the Chinese. "Not us," say the Japanese. "Who you looking at," say the Saudis. I, Swami, say that hyperinflation may come hop-hop-hopping our way, maybe before the year is out. If I lose my Swami status over this, I'll be okay with it. Just buy me a drink or something (or trade hoarded beans for it).

Now, if I were an adept Swami, I'd tell you whether the sunspot maximum, coming this way after a too-long sunspot minimum, will knock out power grids worldwide or not. There's no telling, really, though it is tempting to speculate that oscillation in one direction--towards the just-ended and too-long minimum--might be followed by a pendulum swing the other way. Last time the Sun got really cranky, nineteenth-century telegraph lines caught fire. Everything else kept on keeping on, though, because it was the nineteenth century, and everything from the electrical, sewer and water supply to ship navigation was NOT dependent on feeble electrical patterns pulsing in silicon flakes. So this is an either-or: either it's not a problem, or we're all gonna die.

Screaming.

script

2009-01-08T09:45:00.000-08:00

Before I talk about the war on Gaza, I’d like to present a little background information.

Not long ago the Palestinians were informed of the decree establishing the sealing of Gaza.
Gaza was sealed off by checkpoints and a high wall. Its construction took many months to complete. The work was carried out by the construction firm Schmidt & Münstermann. The Gaza wall was 3.5 m high, topped by glass and barbed wire.
There were already 445 deaths in Gaza. The death toll thereafter rose rapidly: in January 2009 to 898. Then the monthly figure fluctuated.
Gaza's ties with the outside world were handled by the Transferstelle, an Israeli authority that was in charge of the traffic of goods, both into and out of Gaza.
Several methods were employed to carry out the smuggling operations: through buildings that were connected with buildings on the Israeli side, across the wall, through camouflaged openings in the wall and through underground tunnels. Smuggling on a larger scale also took place at the gates. Policemen, soldiers, Palestinians, and Jews were involved, bribery was the order of the day. The tunnels were bombed mercilessly.
And despite that, without paying attention to the victims, the smuggling never stopped for a moment. When the street was still slippery with the blood that had been spilled, other [smugglers] already set out, as soon as the "candles"** had signaled that the way was clear, to carry on with the work....
Children and women were also engaged on a smaller scale, risking their lives too. Every day smugglers were caught, paying the ultimate sacrifice. According to press accounts the necessary food, smuggled into Gaza, represented 80% of all the products brought in.
.................

You will notice that there are inaccuracies and peculiarities in the account I just read. That is because it is not an account of the condition of Gaza, it is a pastiche of accounts of conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto. I just changed a few words--I changed "ghetto" for "Gaza," German for Israeli, 1941 for 2009, and I added the phrase "the tunnels were bombed mercilessly" out of whole cloth. But the sealing of the area, the desperation, the intent of extermination, is much the same. To be fair, Israel intends to let starvation do the work entirely, rather than rushing the Palestinians off to death camps.

Does Israel intend a wider war? More on that in a moment.

You may wish to call Oregon Senator Ron Wyden at 503-326-7525, to give him your opinion. His motto is "standing up for Oregon."

comingXupXonXkbooXradio

2008-12-21T19:58:00.000-08:00

This December 25th, I'll be talking about Mithra and his visit from the Three Kings generations before the Christ legend was ever thought up. Why should people cling to a religion that was cooked up for State control sixteen hundred years ago? Yeah, that's right, sixteen hundred and change, not two thousand...that's at 9AM Thursday, Yule/Saturnalia/Solis Invictus Day, also known as Christmas.

There will be a brief interview with the Freedom From Religion Foundation, too! Call in with your favorite drink recipes (especially mimosas!), and get ready to sing along with satiric tunes. Oh yeah, and Merry Solstice to all!

gayToday

2008-11-06T10:49:00.000-08:00

The triumph of Barack Hussein Obama was remarkable for a number of reasons, not least the extent and ferocity of the coordinated Republican attempt to remove whole communities of voters from participation. The Republicans did their best to cover their crimes—they produced three persons in Tennessee who claimed that their votes had been flipped to Obama, but then those persons disappeared and it became obvious that they were frauds. There was the whole unjustified attack on ACORN community organizing, too, but after the truth came out, that ACORN had been perfectly responsible in its registration drives, that meme only worked up the god, guns, and gays base, and had no effect outside those pointy-headed borders.

The roll of election theft incidents is truly too large to address in this space.

This is the time and the opportunity to replace the US broken elections system with a nationwide, independent, internationally supervised election system. In civilized countries, like Canada and Australia, there are no problems with local yokels trying to disenfranchise voters by the thousands; everyone votes on a paper, with a big box next to each candidate or issue that you put a check in, yes or no, the ballots are hand-counted, and the results are ready that evening. It's not rocket science. There are no constantly-breaking-down secret-squirrel ES&S or Diebold machines—there never was a need for them. The need is for a commitment to actual citizen participation on an equal basis, and that is where our me-first video-game SUV-owning culture breaks down. But despite decades of indoctrination, you and I aren't consumers. That word should be viewed as the insult it is. We are citizens, and we should be fully vetted participants in society. We have a right to vote, therefore we have a right to free and accessible information and education. Education and information should never have been turned over to plutocrats, whose agenda is the domestication of the popular mind.

............
Measure 8 has passed in California, and the queer-bashing will begin anew.

As a queer with a 14-year relationship, I am infuriated at the vicious and underhanded attempts by religious bigots to undermine my marriage. My marriage is sacred—it's a joyous union of life partners, not a three-year consumerist breeding agreement punctuated by divorce. My marriage is as sacred as any other, because I'm a human being with human rights, and among those rights is equality. If you can get married, so can I. If you should get your partner's Social Security and pension after your partner's passing, so should my partner. Who would deny it to her? Who would go to my partner after my passing, and say "I'm sorry Ani, but since your partner changed gender, you are condemned to poverty?" Who among you would do this evil deed?

There are some who argue that their god demands that queers be punished by stoning to death, and I stand by their right to argue for that idiotic god. They just can't act on its recommendations. This is a secular society, and anyone who expects me to abide by the rules of their god must first bring their god along and show it to me. Let it impress me with its wisdom and power and the fact of its existence. Until then, the queer-hating god has no power over me. No fair shooting me or beating me to death with a baseball bat, and saying God told you to. Oh no. You trot that god out here right now and it can just explain its business right before my eyes. Nor can you open up a Bible or a Koran, I don't care what they have written down—people wrote those words, and they were wrong. So bring the god itself, or else admit that the whole anti-queer religious concept is your personal or cultural speculation, and nothing to do with reality nor science.

Likewise, I'd like to have someone explain to me how the Constitution or civil society countenances a procedure in which a referendum can be used to deny human rights to some segment—any segment—of the population. We the people developed these democratic instruments to expand human rights, not to restrict and deny them. The anti-queer movement is a pitiful thing, a puppet of neocons since the beginning, a successful effort to turn the working class against itself. The logical extension of its illogic is the ovens where Hitler burned a million genocided queers just prior to 1945. There is a monument in Amsterdam to that occurrence, and it serves to remind everyone of the logical end of queer-bashing. Queerness is obviously an evolutionary advantage for large mammaliam populations, and it won't go away, and even Hitler did not burn it out, because it's in our genetic code, thank goodness. The brain of Evolution is older and wiser than the brain of Hitler, thank goodness.

So I think we need a queer monument in this town, something big. But times are getting tight, so no need to spend a lot of money on it. We'll just rename Hawthorne Bridge. Right now it's named after the head of a bygone asylum for the insane, which of course included persons who were merely transgender or queer. So from now on it's the Queer Memorial Bridge, and I call on the City Council to provide a large bronze plaque giving the history of the Gay holocaust, and some buckets of pink paint. I'm serious. Who will go to the City Council with me? Hooray for the Queer Bridge! The Queer Bridge connects East and West with a cheerful pink lift span. All who travel it will affirm human rights for all. Celebrate the Queer Bridge!

yeswedid

2008-11-05T14:31:00.001-08:00

Obama Acceptance Speech

Theme: UNITY

Boilerplate aside, this was an interesting speech. As the French horns lingered in cascading sixth chords, President Elect Obama stressed again and again the need for everyone to come together. In his litany of the types of Americans making up the whole, he included "gays and straights" along with everyone else—something unimaginable for a Bush or McCain Presidency. Of course he also set the furniture for a new Camelot, mentioning his wife Michelle and his children Sasha and Meliya, and a First Dog yet to be named. Young partiers whooped and stalked the streets in cities across the nation, as the new President urged Americans to abandon cynicism and embrace the idea that "change has come."

An acceptance speech may be viewed as the first act of a new Presidency, though the Inauguration will not come for a couple of months. Obama emphasized the two occupations, which he called the "two wars," as challenges for his new Administration, but he also pointed to the financial meltdown, and, encouragingly, mentioned "a planet in peril" in the same breath. As I listened to the list of agenda items that followed, I was pleased to note that this euphemism for climate change had come in the first tier. Following that primary category of challenges, the shovel-list continued: Healthcare, education, jobs—"putting our people back to work," as he said, which is a better formulation than the usual boilerplate indicating breaks for the rich that we've heard since Reagan—and then he acknowledged that he needed to "repair alliances" with the globe, and he then called for patience.

He will need a lot of patience, not least because his entire prospective treasury has already been robbed, in a maneuver of arrogance, cynicism and collaborationism that he also voted for. I believe that this is the time to lay the groundwork for a completely utilitarian and necessary maneuver, one that is unthinkable now but will become inevitable later, that is, that Obama will be unable to move forward without confiscating the wealth of the great corporations. Obama will need to nationalize Exxon, Mobil, and BP, and he will need a solid groundswell of support from all of us. So start talking about it, please!

Obama also departed from the toxic attitude of the Bush Administration by stating directly, though not in as many words, that he would be open to dissent. Dissent has been nearly criminalized under the neocon regime. What a breath of fresh air that is.

Citing the experience of a 106-year old African American voter, Obama pointed to what he called the genius of America—the ability to change. He had already stated that only here could he have such social mobility—a point easily challenged by anyone familiar with social mobility statistics in France, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, of Finland, but a hopeful sentiment all the same.

debate

2008-10-16T10:14:00.000-07:00

It's amazing how far we have been browbeaten to the Right. This society is well domesticated, so that we turn to a man who proposes to expand a sadistic, immoral occupation of Afghanistan, a man who supports the provision of vouchers to religious parents so that they can avoid the secularizing effect of the real world on their children, a man who poses as morally superior to gays, reserving marriage only to nongays--to this man, the Left looks with great hope and longing, and throws its collective shoulder to the wheel of his election. It's absurd, disturbing, disheartening, and it's only rational. Because on his right, as the other major candidate to aspire the Executive Branch, an angry poseur awaits his appointment by caging rules, voter purges, voter intimidation, midnight electronic voter machine chicanery, or even the Supreme Court.

On this side, imperialism and corporate hegemony; on that side, imperialism, corporate hegemony, and a bizarrely fascistic military/industrial theology that promises to make all of us cowering serfs. I'll be fleeing to the same side of the cage as the rest of you, but let no one say I believe the cage is open.

McCain is truly disgusting. In last night's debate he was a caricature of frozen grimaces, angry sneers, "air quotes" to show his disdain for the idea of taking women's health seriously, and even rolling eyes--this last his
reaction to Obama's seemingly ordinary but actually quite shocking revelation of the facts on the ground in Colombia, where death squads rule the day and democratic union leaders are assassinated regularly and with impunity. You're not supposed to be allowed to be a Senator, to get that far in the US political process, and ever say that sort of truth out loud, but Obama doesn't seem to understand that yet, and it clearly irritates Grandpa Heart Attack. Shut the hell up, Grandpa was mugging, no one cares about the god damn little people in Colombia. But apparently Obama does still make that kind of mistake. I like that.

One of the funnier moments was the whole "Joe the Plumber" meme, which comes in a long line of traditional easy visual references for the Great Unwashed--that's supposed to be you and me--you know, "Harry and Louise," or in Reagan's 1980 campaign, "the bear in the woods." A simple image for simple folk. That was McCain's nuclear assault, if you will, and Obama treated it like a softball lob and batted it out of the park. Turns out "Joe the Plumber" actually has a handy quarter million to buy out a business with, which is more than you and I will ever see, and McCain wanted to pretend that he was just some working-class shmo who wanted to get by; but Obama pointed out that if Joe had really been so ordinary, he would pay nothing under Obama's tax adjustment, which merely restores some mild taxation to the owning class. The Republican Party has a long-standing sucker play in which the masses are reeled in by thinking that by removing reasonable taxation and regulation from the parasite class, from the billionaires, they will be allowed to become billionaires too someday. It's easy to show, with comparative data from social democracies, that the US system works against class ascension and not for it, that Joe will never, ever become a billionaire no matter how hard and how intelligently he works; but the myth has seemed unbreakable until yesterday, when Obama simply pulled out a pin and popped it. McCain's attempts to bluster the meme back into life fell flat. And I liked that too. Maybe McCain's slurs against Obama as a socialist terrorist would have carried some strength to the casual observer, if McCain hadn't come off as a superannuated ranting nut.

And I'll say this about age: It wouldn't matter if McCain had actually released all of his medical data, and if he didn't insist on the rightness of his grossly privileged and sexist life. He cannot appear modern in the presence of his trophy wife, who he obtained after dumping his first wife after a disfiguring car accident. Modern people point to the rightness of their path wile acknowledging the errors of their past, but McCain would rather no one dare ever mention his trail of smashed aircraft and destroyed Savings and Loans. That's what makes him look old--his angry response to ordinary examination, as if he were a member of an untouchable class, the sort of class the US population wishes to dispense with, to move onward to an egalitarian future.

इ किल्लेद Capitalism

2008-09-29T13:37:00.000-07:00

Okay, I admit it. I killed Capitalism. It was me--calling and emailing my Representatives and Senators, demanding that they stop the bailout.

I couldn't be happier about this. At this writing, the stock market (the DJIA anyway) has apparently stopped trading after sliding 770 points. It's almost at the magic 10,000 mark! Will the bosses get off our backs yet?

Oh yeah, I know, we haven't build up a shadow socialist economy yet, so there'll be that little affair of mass starvation, riots, looting, you know. The rough stuff. But at least I killed capitalism. Ding dong, the rich is dead! Which rich is that? The wicked rich!

There will be SOME who say that capitalism isn't dead. Well, fine. So I exaggerated. There are others, however, who are already pointing to the Left and saying that Neocon prosperity could have gone on forever if nasty Reds like me hadn't poisoned the well and prevented the bailout. I like to think that they're right. That I killed capitalism. Ahhhhhhh. 770 pointsssss.......

getonyourface

2008-09-04T08:13:00.000-07:00

GET ON YOUR FACE!

Well the latest news is in and it turns out our vigilant anti-anarchist spy heroes have saved the day again. Here's an excerpt of their gleanings, from a report in Raw Story:

"Over the course of a year before the convention, the self-described anarchists appealed to like-minded groups in more than 67 cities and met several times to hash out plans, according to the charges. A separate affidavit from undercover agents who infiltrated the group said members had discussed stretching chains across a nearby highway, kidnapping delegates, and disrupting the convention with burning tires, urine and feces, and explosives including Molotov cocktails. Other plans included posing as workers or volunteers to sneak into the convention hall and block its outside air intake vent. They discussed using street puppets to hide weapons, and throwing marbles to trip up police horses and pedestrians, the affidavit said."

Isn't it monstrous what those groups discussed? Of course, no dump-trucks full of marbles nor exploding puppets have been found. One guy did have some Molotov cocktails, I've heard. But they did say the words. And they probably laughed in a sinister anarchistic way. You and I have had those discussions, haven't we? How it would be great if the cops were distracted by loud noises elsewhere, or wouldn't it be great if we all smeared cougar urine on our shoes to scare off the cop horses, or how about diverting them with cartons of donuts. And now you're guilty, too.

[n.b. This is the radio script. --ed.]
That's right, the words "exploding puppets" and "marbles" were just on your radio, just now, on a station you chose to tune in to. Don't try to deny it. You've discussed these things now, we have proof. So stay right where you are. Don't move. Freeze.

You're under arrest.

Oh, sure, you can complain to the judge, if you ever get one. "That provocateur Theresa Mitchell is the one that brought it up," you'll probably say. They all do. You terrorists are all alike, and the first sign of your guilt is all that pious claptrap about the First Amendment, and Due Process, and all those namby-pamby liberal ideas you got from not doing enough pushups. Well, it's all over now, baby blue. You're under arrest. Get your face on the pavement.

Actually, "get your face on the pavement" is what the Salvadoran death squad cops used to shout when they were doing their thing, back in the good old Reagan years. It's one of those things that got my attention back then, a sort of thing I was really glad didn't happen in my neck of the woods. It's a standard practice for dictatorship police squads, and of course US police now do it, too. It's not necessary by the wildest stretch of the imagination when arresting an unarmed protester, but it sure is fun. "You can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride," the good old boys say, and ain't it true?

So get your face on the pavement. Now! NOW!

God, that's a blast, isn't it? Every little boy and girl can grow up to be a cop or prison guard in our wonderful free society. See them throwing each other onto the concrete outside the kindergarten class, shouting, "get your face on the pavement!" It's so cute!

What was that George Orwell line about the future..."If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." Isn't it funny how facts overtake fiction; the future is now, Oceania is here. By now you've heard the audio of Democracy Now!'s reporter Salazar getting arrested:

NICOLE SALAZAR: Watch out! Watch out! Press!

POLICE OFFICER: Get out of here! Move!

NICOLE SALAZAR: Where are we supposed to go? Where are we supposed to go?

POLICE OFFICER: Get out of here!

NICOLE SALAZAR: Dude, I can’t see! Ow! Press! Press! Press!

POLICE OFFICER: Get down! Get down on your face! On your face!

NICOLE SALAZAR: I’m on my face! [I want a t-shirt with that on it. Doesn't that sum it all up? "I'm on my face already Mister Cop Dude!" "Well, that ain't enough anymore! You should have been on your face when you got here!"]

POLICE OFFICER: Get down on your face!

NICOLE SALAZAR: Ow! Press! Press! [Apparently the cop took that word as a verb.]

'Cause that's what faces are for now--you thought they were for expressions, and eating, and kissing, and silly stuff like that, but now you know what your face is really good for--it's for grinding little bloody smear marks into asphalt as you're stomped and chained by Democracy's guardians. These are the days of progress and versatility, so maybe you could practice throwing your face on the pavement a few times this morning, just to get ready for your next peaceful assembly to petition your government for redress of grievances. Just because you're peaceful doesn't mean the government has to be, right? Oh, don't give me that Constitution stuff. Get on your face!

Did I say peaceful protesters? Come to think of it, there wasn't a single shotgun or rifle found among them. No grenades, not even a pistol. Hundreds of arrests and no guns--the NRA is downright aggrieved, I'm sure. Funny but the shotgun-free protesters don't seem to be presented as peaceful in the press. You'd think in the context of our lovely surgical weapons, you know, cluster bombs, napalm, white phosphorus, things we use to surgically correct wayward populations, that the absence of anything that could, say, level a block, would be proof of peaceful intent. "Lighten up, officer, this antitank weapon isn't loaded!"

But seriously, the cops that arrested Kouddous and Salazar were confronted by Democracy Now producer Amy Goodman, who was arrested immediately and brutally, and stripped of her credentials, since she evidently forgot to bring a rifle squadron with her. Maybe Ms. Goodman thought she was in some place that respected the press more, say Indonesia or something, where they don't automatically assault small middle-aged women carrying full press credentials. Anyway I'd like to suggest you pull up Democracy Now dot org on your Internet tube and follow the prompts to send an email to the proud and stainless judiciary there in Minnesota, because the charges haven't been dropped last I heard, and they are serious charges, felonies and misdemeanors, Failure to Lick Republican Guccis, heavy stuff. Come on now, an email is easy and you're probably sending one to someone else right now, so get on it. One million emails please.

This has been an exciting couple of weeks for news--first the Good Cop Convention with Obama and then the Bad Cop convention with McCain and his new partner Hanna Montana. Check out the youtube video to see McCain exercising the testosterone in his optic nerves, raking the would-be Veep with his lust laser. And this just in--the US has bombed a nuclear armed country!

Here's a literal blast from the past, you'll remember this--it's from CNN, dated ten years ago, May 30, 1998:
)

"ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN) -- Pakistan conducted one more nuclear test Saturday, completing a series of tests, Pakistan's Foreign Secretary said. But the Pakistani government did not say whether it plans another series of tests.

The explosion in Pakistan's remote southwest came two days after the government said it detonated five other devices in the same area.
....

Pakistani defense experts told CNN the government had now gathered all the data it needed from the six nuclear tests.

"The devices tested corresponded to a weapons configuration compatible with our delivery system," the Pakistan government said Saturday.

"The fact of our existence as the neighbor of an expansionist and a hegemonistic power taught us the inevitable lesson that we must search for security. Contemporary history held only one lesson for us. The answer lay in credible deterrence," the spokesman said."

Fast forward to right now: (Christian Science Monitor)

"United States forces conducted their first ground assaults into Pakistani territory from bases in Afghanistan early Wednesday morning in a raid on a suspected Taliban stronghold in South Waziristan, one of Pakistan's lawless tribal areas. The attack has caused an uproar in Pakistan and raised concerns of a new period of tension between the US and its valuable, nuclear-armed ally in the war on terror, which has entered a period of political uncertainty after the resignation of long-serving president Pervez Musharraf last month.

The US has not officially commented on the raid, and leaders of the US-led NATO peacekeeping force in Afghanistan deny any knowledge of the attack, reports Reuters. But one US official, speaking to CNN on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the attack had occurred.

The Pentagon has refused to comment officially on the attack, but several defense officials acknowledged that U.S. military activity had taken place inside Pakistan.

The senior U.S. official said a small number of U.S. helicopters landed troops in the village near Angoor Adda in South Waziristan, where Taliban and al Qaeda fighters have hunkered down over the years.

Local media reports said the troops came out of a chopper and fired on civilians. The U.S. official said there may have been a small number of women and children in the immediate vicinity, but when the mission began "everybody came out firing" from the compound. [Everyone knows that babies can be used to hide grenades. 'Shoot that baby again soldier! You can't move on until the scene is secured!']

patriarchy

2008-08-21T07:23:00.001-07:00

Rape a woman, go to jail. The woman goes to jail, that is. Turn to the foreign press to find out what it means for Uncle Sam to be in charge in Afghanistan:

The Independent/ Terri Judd/Afghanistan

"....Two-thirds of the women in Lashkar Gah's medieval-looking jail have been convicted of illegal sexual relations, but most are simply rape victims – mirroring the situation nationwide. The system does not distinguish between those who have been attacked and those who have chosen to run off with a man.

Sitting among the plastic flowers around his desk, where an optimistic United Nations scales of justice poster competed for space with images of Afghanistan's President, Hamid Karzai, Colonel Ghulam Ali, a high-ranking regional security officer, explained sternly that he supported the authorities' right to convict victims of rape. "In Afghanistan whether it is forced or not forced it is a crime because the Islamic rules say that it is," he claimed. "I think it is good. There are many diseases that can be created in today's world, such as HIV, through illegal sexual relations."....

Judd writes in the Independent article that the youngest in the jail is only thirteen. This is happening not just under the noses but under the silent gun barrels of the US and its NATO allies in Afghanistan. Those gun barrels speak long and loud when aimed at the Taliban or anyone who opposes military rule. They do not speak to protect or honor the women. The situation, however, is no accident, but a reflection of the US government's attitude towards people who do not matter--and towards women in particular. This horror is brought to you by the same people in the Bush regime who have recently been attempting to label birth control in the US as abortion practice, in order to get it banned.

If women in the US don't matter, then women in the occupied lands matter even less, right? Oh, but I have been speaking of the holy war in Afghanistan, where despite the fact that no investigation was conducted, we are supposed to believe that the government, and by extension the people, were guilty of collaboration in the 2001 airplane crashes. (If there had been an investigation, the crime scene would have been preserved as in all crime scenes. Who knows what would have been brought to light?) In Afghanistan, though we disrespect the people to the point of strafing their wedding parties and selecting their government, the issue of women-as-chattel is too sensitive. We can't offend the men, it seems. We kill them by the score, but Heaven forfend we should abrogate their right to rape women.

Patriarchy is alive and well in the US. Economically, if manifests via the disparate wages for women, not just within a given job classification, but overall as a reflection of the fact that childrearing is still stubbornly applied to women. It's like housework--the man might dabble in it now and again as a favor, but it's really up to the women to get it done. Without cultural mandates from the churches nor equal parenting time off, women are forced time and again to tsacrifice either their careers or their children, while men are praised roundly just for taking the kids now and again, if they do that much. This all reflects an attitude so basic that it is taboo to say it out loud: officially and as a result of US policy and religious doctrine, women do not matter in the US. Why? Because men are superior.

That's what is called living a lie. We all suffer from it every day, because it forces us into false gender roles. It isn't natural to pretend that men are more important, that they're better, smarter, stronger.

Whoops, did I imply men are not stronger? I meant that. Men go through a multi-year phase in which they are quite strong, and stronger than women the same age. This lasts, typically, from about the age of fourteen to the mid-sixties. Girls are stronger than boys from around eight to thirteen, and women are often stronger than men from age sixty-five to ninety. By 'stronger' here I mean not just more able, but capable of surviving longer. Childrearing does indeed begin in the comparatively strong arms of the mother; who is stronger then, the baby boy or the mother? But we do not hear that women are superior for their strategic endurance. I mention all this by way of stating what should be obvious: we cannot afford to pretend that masculinity is superior to femininity.

Yet we do. We constantly dramatize and glorify a brutal exaggeration of masculinity in our television programs, movies, and visual and literary arts. All this has led to undeveloped psyches in women and in men. Men especially are alienated from their emotions, and eventually, their capability for emotion. US men are shamed into thinking themselves far apart from children and women, shamed into pretending that they do not share the spectrum of feelings associated with life among other ages and genders. Men should be equal participants in all aspects of life, including caring for elders and children. Instead men are trappped into a sort of false constant warrior mode. Their psyches are thus vulnerable to tampering with those who understand their weakness.

This brings me to the conservative corporate rulers, who easily tap into the minds of men by threatening them with feminization. A man is insufficiently manly, they imply, if he allows women the rights to their bodies, if he agrees with ordinary measures to protect the weak and the poor, if he tolerates or even sides with gays, and of course if he is gay then he's not even properly a man. These are the insidious lies that fatten the parasite class. Most men can be expected to fall for these canards, because --since the posture of manliness as it is defined under patriarchy is so false-- few men can afford to risk even the appearance of disloyalty to cultural conservatism. Weakness poses as strength, strength is attacked as weakness. So it is that Senator McCain can participate in the bombing of Vietnam, and stand against abortion rights for women, and look manly in the eyes of the domesticated US male. In fact he is the paragon of weakness. He is weak mentally and psychically, because though he is aged and infirm, he must pose as a swaggering fighter to be the icon of the sexists. Likewise Senator Obama can participate in threatening puny Iran--a reprehensibly weak act--in order to look manly. It's pitiful, really.

I can spot the weakest person in any crowd right away--it's the man taking a bellicose posture against me for being a male-to-female transgendered person. This should be a warning to anyone who thinks that culturally conservative attitudes are just a sort of social flavor. On the contrary, our minds are domesticated by our fear of the feminine. Anyone who wants to understand and overthrow corporate dominance has to understand that. So it's not just a sideshow when the Republicans attack equal rights for glbt persons. It's not some minor affair, and as long as we flinch and look the other way, we will suffer the dominance of the parasite class. Their Karl Roves and their Senator Santorums understand that they can control a third of the electorate directly, and uneasily sway a larger portion, by attacking gays as the subconscious symbol of everyone's repressed spectrum of orientation, gender, and passion. To defend against this, we must each admit that we are equal morally. And that is where the conservatives can dig into the psyche, getting us to betray ourselves first to accept the thought-chains that they offer. As long as we repeat phrases llke "lifestyle choice," let alone firebrand phrases like "homosexual agenda," weare participating in our own domestication.

Break the mind control of conservatism. Admit that gays, lesbians, bisexual, transgender, and questioning behavior is natural and evolutionarily necessary to animal and human survival. Reject the anti-scientific, anti-human argument that passion, bonding, and gender orientation must always serve reproduction directly. It can't, it shouldn't, and our brains are fare more complex than that, thank goodness. We are not mere insects, we are people. Admit that gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning behavior has some corner of yoiur brain right now. It cannot be otherwise--the mind abhors a vacuum, and whether or not you ever take on one of those labels, the capacity resides in your mind somewhere. 'Heterosexual' is an overapplied and artificial concept; we're all queer to some degree, at some time in our lives. As long as we pretend otherwise, we give our psychic autonomy away to the controlling class. Those who utterly reject patriarchy and its pattern of shaming have taken control of their own lives.

Just to punctuate this screed, I'd like to point to two separate incidents in which men reacted to my appearance. The first was years ago, when I was first transitioning from male to female; I went to a late-night pharmacy to refill my estrogen pills. The pharmacist that night was a man who had recently immigrated from a culture that is not far from the patriarchalist hell I described in Afghanistan. He paused when he saw the prescription slip, then looked at me again, and then started laughing. He laughed long and hard, and tried to catch his breath, and then started laughing again. His eyes took on a desperate look. He could scarcely communicate. The laughter took on a brittle, spasmic tone, and it became clear to me that he was trying to stop laughing. He could not. His mind was trapped in a loop that he could not reconcile. I left, pitying him, feeling guilty and wondering if I had broken his mind. But I was only the catalyst. I could hear his desperate laughter as I left the pharmacy that night.

The second incident occurred at my day job, driving a city bus. I helped a middle-aged man in a wheelchair into the bus, using the hydraulic lift and the retracting chair restraints. He was accompanied by a woman, probably his wife, and it was obvious that he was not used to being in the mobility device. He and his wife did not have that practiced ease that comes with long usage, moreover, he seemed to resist his wife's efforts to aid him. I've been in a wheelchair myself and I know how confining it is, how everyone makes you invisible. This man was clearly still dealing with the loss of his agency, and, more importantly for this little story, his place in the male-dominated hierarchy. He accepted my assistance graciously enough until he 'read' me, that is, until he discovered that I am transgendered. Then he broke. He got that same glazed, desperate look in his eye, and he started laughing uncontrollably. This incident happened just a month ago. He tried to justify his spasm by insulting me and arguing with his wife, but he could not stop laughing. It was obvious that he wanted to stop, and his wife was desperately humiliated by his behavior and told him so, but he could not control it, because he wasn't there anymore.

Ironically, this second incident was very liberating to me. Don't get me wrong, this was not a victory for me; I felt terrible to be the last domino in his ugly public mental breakdown. But it finally got the idea through my head that all the public confrontations against me have come from a place of emptiness and weakness. The new wheelchair rider couldn't accept that he had reached such a nadir that his body should be aided and strapped into a bus by someone he deemed a monster, a gender apostate, a mockery of his fall from the apex of patriarchy. For me the incident shows the destructive power of agreeing with patriarcy. For the men, it is a false role that will crumble, inexorably, sooner or later. For the rest of us it is unacceptable domination. Let's face our internal damage, get some strength about us, and move on.

.....................................

preview

2008-08-12T11:39:00.000-07:00

I'm working on Thursday's show (9AM KBOO 90.7 FM/kboo.fm), thinking that since there was no US protest prior to the invasion of Georgia/Ossetia, it is likely some deal was made. And Thom Hartman played a clip this morning of Bush referring to some "assurances" that Russia had made regarding limitation of the invasion--which makes me more suspicious. The US has the best spy satellites in the world, so they knew Russia was massing troops, tanks and equipment on the border well before the invasion--yet there was nothing in the lapdog press. So, is the deal "you eat Georgia, we'll eat Iran?" More soon....

war

2008-08-08T11:32:00.000-07:00

The USS Theodore Roosevelt and the USS Ronald Reagan, nuclear aircraft carriers, may be moving in to the Persian Gulf area now. They will be accompanied by a flotilla of warships, and all will be joining the ships surrounding the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. The "marine carrier" USS Peleliu is also in the Gulf.

US Fifth Fleet Combined Maritime Command, located in Bahrain, said it could not comment on the ship movements, due to "force-protection policy" secrecy.

US warships (a destroyer and a submarine) are also gathering to the West of Iran, passing through the Suez with Israeli capital ships. Kuwait is said to be implementing emergency war measures.

All this is happening as Russian tanks flood into the Northern border of Georgia.

amerithrax

2008-08-07T15:02:00.000-07:00

The attempt by the FBI to close the Amerithrax case represents some of the worst propaganda and corruption we have to endure as a society. To be sure, there are ongoing horrors such as the daily disproportionate arrest, sentencing, and prison chaining of African-Americans--and the anthrax scare is largely behind us now, although it's still possible to scare the wits out of some people by spilling some flour. But, really, the anthrax propaganda takes the cake.

We're supposed to believe now that a certain Mister Ivins was solely reponsible for processing American Ames-strain anthrax into a static-polarized bundle, something done only at the most advanced US production facilities. Amazingly, he did this with no other help. We are to disregard the fact that his own colleagues find the accusation fantastic, that he developed an anti-anthrax vaccine after the attacks, and that despite all of this activity the FBI could not find one spore of Ames anthrax on his clothing, automobiles, house, or office.

He appears to have had some nasty ultra-conservative views about civil liberties and Arabs. If that were an indicator for terrorist activity, it would implicate a grat many people in the US government and armed forces.

We are, then, supposed to forget about the former head at Fort Detrick, Maryland, where the spores were produced. I haven't forgotten; his name is (or was) Lt. Col. Philip Zack. When Zack was in charge, 27 ultra-deadly pathogens, supposedly all killed by formaldehyde, went missing from the lab. But that's just a starter. Zack, after all, was gone from the lab in the early Nineties. Except that he was not gone.

Here's a blast from the past, six years ago in the Hartford Courant:

Source: The Hartford Courant, January 20, 2002.

Anthrax Missing From Army Lab

By JACK DOLAN And DAVE ALTIMARI, Courant Staff Writers

Lab specimens of anthrax spores, Ebola virus and other pathogens disappeared from the Army's biological warfare research facility in the early 1990s, during a turbulent period of labor complaints and recriminations among rival scientists there, documents from an internal Army inquiry show.

The 1992 inquiry also found evidence that someone was secretly entering a lab late at night to conduct unauthorized research, apparently involving anthrax. A numerical counter on a piece of lab equipment had been rolled back to hide work done by the mystery researcher, who left the misspelled label "antrax" in the machine's electronic memory, according to the documents obtained by The Courant.

Experts disagree on whether the lost specimens pose a danger. An Army spokesperson said they do not because they would have been effectively killed by chemicals in preparation for microscopic study. A prominent molecular biologist said, however, that resilient anthrax spores could possibly be retrieved from a treated specimen.

In addition, a scientist who once worked at the Army facility said that because of poor inventory controls, it is possible some of the specimens disappeared while still viable, before being treated.

--snip--...........
Some samples, particularly viruses, are also irradiated with gamma rays before they are handled by the pathology lab.

Whether all of the lost samples went through this treatment process is unclear. Vander-Linden said the samples had to have been rendered inert if they were being worked on in the pathology lab.

But Dr. Ayaad Assaad, a former Fort Detrick scientist who had extensive dealings with the lab, said that because some samples were received at the lab while still alive - with the expectation they would be treated before being worked on - it is possible some became missing before treatment. A phony "log slip" could then have been entered into the lab computer, making it appear they had been processed and logged.

In fact, Army investigators appear to have wondered if some of the anthrax specimens reported missing had ever really been logged in. When an investigator produced a log slip and asked Langford if "these exist or [are they] just made up on a data entry form," Langford replied that he didn't know.

--snip--

...[American Federation of Scientist researcher Barbara Hatch] Rosenberg's analysis of the anthrax attacks, which has been widely reported, concludes that the culprit is probably a government insider, possibly someone from Fort Detrick. The Army facility manufactured anthrax before biological weapons were banned in 1969, and it has experimented with the Ames strain for defensive research since the early 1980s.

--snip--

Late-Night Research

More troubling to Langford than the missing specimens was what investigators called "surreptitious" work being done in the pathology lab late at night and on weekends.

Dr. Mary Beth Downs told investigators that she had come to work several times in January and February of 1992 to find that someone had been in the lab at odd hours, clumsily using the sophisticated electron microscope to conduct some kind of off-the-books research.

After one weekend in February, Downs discovered that someone had been in the lab using the microscope to take photos of slides, and apparently had forgotten to reset a feature on the microscope that imprints each photo with a label. After taking a few pictures of her own slides that morning, Downs was surprised to see "Antrax 005" emblazoned on her negatives.

Downs also noted that an automatic counter on the camera, like an odometer on a car, had been rolled back to hide the fact that pictures had been taken over the weekend. She wrote of her findings in a memo to Langford, noting that whoever was using the microscope was "either in a big hurry or didn't know what they were doing."

It is unclear if the Army ever got to the bottom of the incident, and some lab insiders believed concerns about it were overblown. Brown said many Army officers did not understand the scientific process, which he said doesn't always follow a 9-to-5 schedule.

"People all over the base knew that they could come in at anytime and get on the microscope," Brown said. "If you had security clearance, the guard isn't going to ask you if you are qualified to use the equipment. I'm sure people used it often without our knowledge."

Documents from the inquiry show that one unauthorized person who was observed entering the lab building at night was Langford's predecessor, Lt. Col. Philip Zack, who at the time no longer worked at Fort Detrick. A surveillance camera recorded Zack being let in at 8:40 p.m. on Jan. 23, 1992, apparently by Dr. Marian Rippy, a lab pathologist and close friend of Zack's, according to a report filed by a security guard.

Zack could not be reached for comment. In an interview this week, Rippy said that she doesn't remember letting Zack in, but that he occasionally stopped by after he was transferred off the base.

"After he left, he had no [authorized] access to the building. Other people let him in," she said. "He knew a lot of people there and he was still part of the military. I can tell you, there was no suspicious stuff going on there with specimens."

Zack left Fort Detrick in December 1991, after a controversy over allegations of unprofessional behavior by Zack, Rippy, Brown and others who worked in the pathology division. They had formed a clique that was accused of harassing the Egyptian-born Assaad, who later sued the Army, claiming discrimination.

Assaad said he had believed the harassment was behind him until last October, until after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

He said that is when the FBI contacted him, saying someone had mailed an anonymous letter - a few days before the existence of anthrax-laced mail became known - naming Assaad as a potential bioterrorist. FBI agents decided the note was a hoax after interviewing Assaad.

But Assaad said he believes the note's timing makes the author a suspect in the anthrax attacks, and he is convinced that details of his work contained in the letter mean the author must be a former Fort Detrick colleague.

Brown said that he doesn't know who sent the letter, but that Assaad's nationality and expertise in biological agents made him an obvious subject of concern after Sept. 11.

[end]

SO--let's review that last paragraph or so. Scientist Assaad received a letter, during the anthrax attacks, that must have brought up in his mind all that harrassment activity in the 90s--they don't mention it here but it included a toy camel with sex toys stuck to it--obviously from a person or person who were in that Zack clique. The intention of the letter was to direct official attention and blame to Assaad--Asaad, the eternal scapegoat for the Zack bunch. No one is claiming that Ivins wrote the letter, but we are supposed to forget all about Zack and Rippy and the gang. If there were a real investigation of the anthrax attacks, rather than a Geronimo Pratt-style political propaganda effort going down, FBI agents would be all over Zack and Rippy and the gang, rather than offering Ivin's son thousands of dollars and a fancy car if he would agree to denounce his own dad.

Meanwhile, the propaganda is getting even thicker, and New York Times editors are getting in on the action.

.......................................................
from Oped news, 8-1-08, by Scott Creighton:

.... I was reading the New York Times article which had some interesting facts that the other MSM sources didn't.

Guess what? That 2 page story, as I was reading it, when I went from page one to page two, refreshed page 1… because that is all that was there. THEY REPOSTED THE STORY WITHOUT THE ODDITIES THAT THE OTHER MSM DIDN'T HAVE!!!

They shortened the story to one page by taking out some KEY information that they had originally posted with the story. I knew I should have copy and pasted it! (If anyone still has the original, please let me know!)

What they took out was very interesting. They quoted a doctor, who worked with the guy who is now being accused of the anthrax attacks, as saying he didn't think the guy did it. They took that part out! They also took out the part where this guy received the highest Pentagon award a civilian can get for his research into an anthrax vaccine to be given to our troops in 2003. They took that out!And they also took out the part where this guy was cited for testing areas outside the restricted area for anthrax spores. And he found them, in someones secretary's desk and keyboard! Remember how this stuff was found on the mail from the drop box? It bleeds through the envelope. So, when he found it in someones secretary's desk and then on her keyboard, that might be a good place to start looking for the culprit. But they took that part out!

But they did add one thing. The reason I was reading the story again was because I was/am working on a story about the one thing they missed: motive. The guy had no motive and the original story lacked any mention of a motive….

Nowhere in the first story and many other MSM versions of this do they mention a possible motive. Nowhere. Well, it seems whomever is checking up on the "official" stories out there caught that little tidbit as well, and they have now added one. On line now in the story that was NOT in the original;

"Authorities were investigating whether Ivins released the anthrax as a way to test his vaccine, officials said." NYT.

There we have it! The "official story" complete with motive from the ghostly, unnamed, who the heck were they… "officials". Because that is what "they" said.

The problem with that? It makes no sense!
....[more at opednews.com]
http://willyloman.wordpress.com/

...............................................................................

And Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon, says this in part, in his third update to an article on Amerithrax:

"Long-time anthrax expert Dr. Meryl Nass (Curriculum Vitae here) uses crystal clear rationality to point out just some of the glaring flaws in what the FBI presented today. The fact that the FBI is plainly unable to place him near Princeton, New Jersey on either of the two dates on which the letters were sent -- and, worse, the fact that the FBI included several facts which cut against such a finding -- is, as Dr. Nass points out, by itself an enormous omission:

Put up or shut up: this is the most critical evidence in this case. If Ivins cannot be placed in New Jersey on those dates, he is not the attacker, or he did not act alone."

...................................................................

I have to ask: what is the purpose of all this false closure in the 9/11 scares? Recently there was a ridiculous piece circulating in the msm that attempted to repeat the mantra that 20-minute fires and external damage from falling debris was able to magically vaporize the steel in WTC 7, that third building that went down without explanation. Like the other buildings' debris, the steel from WTC 7 was taken away and guarded, rather than made available for normal forensic examination. No one died in WTC 7, so I guess the official excuse that the crime scene debris was sacred to the grieving survivors doesn't apply, but I haven't heard anyone actually say that.

I will say, though, that it is obvious to anyone who really wants to look, that the US government is engaging in a massive mind-control propaganda campaign over 9/11 issues like the anthrax investigation. The closure of the Amerithrax investigation is just another lie like the 'weapons of mass destruction' ruse for invading Iraq. Right now we're getting increasing propaganda against Iran, in the very same vein, and it's obvious that the Cheney/Bush administration wants to commit some horrible act of terror against those people. First our minds have to be softened up a bit more, so that we'll fear imaginary Iranian threats. As I go about my daily duties, carting Americans to and from their jobs, I hear just how effective all this propaganda is. KBOO is a great tool against this sort of zombification but it's really up to you to find an opinion leader in your workplace, and stop the automatic assent with imperial war and internal fascism. You're the one that has to risk it.

anthrax

2008-08-03T23:13:00.000-07:00

For those of you who suspect the FBI claim that the "suicide" of Mr. Ivins puts an end to the anthrax story, consider these posts:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/NYT-Changes-Anthrax-Story--by-scott-creighton-080801-753.html

Why would the NYT see fit to edit such an interesting story in midstream?

And then there's the real story, which has been sitting around for several years now:

http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/anthraxmissingarmylab.html

But as we all know, if the FBI says the Moon is made of green cheese, then that's that. Ask Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt.

correction

2008-07-31T16:50:00.001-07:00

I stated on today's KBOO Presswatch program that Karl Rove had been cited for contempt. Wrong!

Here is part of the New York Times' article about Rove:

"WASHINGTON — Democrats on both sides of the Capitol assailed the administration’s handling of the Justice Department yet again on Wednesday, and a House committee recommended contempt charges against Karl Rove, who was President Bush’s top political adviser.

The House Judiciary Committee voted along party lines, 20 to 14, to cite Mr. Rove for defying its subpoena to testify in an inquiry into improper political meddling in the department.

“Mr. Rove has left us no option,” said Representative John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the committee. Mr. Conyers expressed regret that the committee had been forced to use its subpoena power.

“Today’s vote was an important statement by this Committee that no person — not even Karl Rove — is above the law,” Mr. Conyers said. (....)"

--So you'll notice here that actually, they voted to recommend Rove for a vote on contempt, rather than actually citing him--so I was wrong, and I apologize for the error.

houseonfire

2008-07-31T08:12:00.000-07:00

If you're familiar with the internets tubes, you can get on and put “snow ice” into the NOAA satellite servers. I do this, and then select a polar view, and put on a 30-day animation, to watch the polar ice cap melt. As of today you can see the NorthWest Passage pop right out of legend and into reality along the coasts of Canada, Alaska and Russia. This view is made more alarming by the following report:

ESSICA LEEDER
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
July 29, 2008 at 3:39 AM EDT
A four-square-kilometre chunk has broken off Ward Hunt Ice Shelf - the largest remaining ice shelf in the Arctic - threatening the future of the giant frozen mass that northern explorers have used for years as the starting point for their treks.
Scientists say the break, the largest on record since 2005, is the latest indication that climate change is forcing the drastic reshaping of the Arctic coastline, where 9,000 square kilometres of ice have been whittled down to less than 1,000 over the past century, and are only showing signs of decreasing further.
"Once you unleash this process by cracking the ice shelf in multiple spots, of course we're going to see this continuing," said Derek Mueller, a leading expert on the North who discovered the ice shelf's first major crack in 2002.
Dr. Mueller was part of a team monitoring ice along the northern coast of Ellesmere Island last April that discovered deep new cracks - 18 kilometres long and 40 metres wide - on the edge of Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, a 350-square-kilometre mass of ice that joins tiny Ward Hunt Island to the bigger Ellesmere. The cracks indicated a split was likely coming.
"It may weaken over time; it may melt away slowly, then all of a sudden you pass this threshold," Dr. Mueller said. "It's like a bar of soap. If you use the soap over and over again, it gets thinner and thinner. Then all of a sudden, it could break.” \\

I bring you this minutiae because it is just another sign of disaster. We needed that ice shelf and all the others like it that have melted away, because we needed the heat-moderating reflectivity to survive the rays of the Sun. This ice shelf, the Northern Polar mass, and subsequently the Greenland glaciers are all at risk now and are suddenly changing, and events such as the loss of ice described here are accelerating. We don't know how much longer we have, but if I may draw a metaphor, the house is already on fire.

Global climate change is the greatest danger to our survival. Here in the NorthWest we are just beginning to see economic consequences, as we suffered damage to apple, pear, and cherry crops. Of course the flooding in the MidWest did away with millions of acres of corn and other crops. Tornado Alley continues its march North, as reports of freak twisters appear in places like Germany and Vancouver, Washington. My sister wrote me of tornadic winds on her property in Maryland this week, saying “The not-tornado (cone that didn't quite reach the ground) from the storm Saturday had a jump-path down one side of the street and then across the other. It started way up on top of the hill, came down the cleared area (logging path) until it got behind the house next door, hopped the fence and roto-tillered next to my backyard, then hopped over the front-yard trees and roto-tillered the creekbed, whacked all of the poplars and smaller trees and the two big pines by the creek (one is seen laying across my driveway, the other is a jagged stump in the pic showing the McMansion in back), then jumped across the street and over into Shirley's woods for about 20 feet, then went back up. There were more than one 'conewall of tree-snapping whirlwinds'...going around but
ours did the most damage for this area, and the planes and camera crews were around yesterday to document it. I saw the cone, a big white half-tube above one of the (surviving) pines, during the storm - we had pebble-hail and sheetwall rain right before it showed up, and right after I saw it there was a blinding, deafening crack of lightning that seemed to be right overhead. But the trees weren't smoking at all when we checked, so the wind was the tree-killer.”
Reports like my sister's have gone over the wires many times now, for many such events, and it brings to fore the fact that the situation is rapidly deteriorating. Meanwhile in Washington where the Dictator sits, the official word is that needed dramatic action against global climate change is a'la Nancy Pelosi “off the table.”

US environmental agency silences employees on climate change
Elana Schor in Washington
guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday July 29 2008

Amid intensifying scrutiny of its failure to act on climate change, the US environmental protection agency (EPA) has ordered employees not to talk to internal auditors, Congress or the media, according to a leaked email released yesterday by green campaigners.
The EPA has refused repeated requests from Congress to explain its December denial of California's request to regulate greenhouse gas emissions - a move that overruled the agency's own career scientists.
Three Democratic senators have scheduled a press conference today to discuss the controversy.
On June 16, after an email from the campaign group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer), the EPA told its enforcement officials not to answer questions on the issue - even those from the agency's in-house auditors.
"If you are contacted directly by the [auditors'] office or [congressional investigators] requesting information of any kind … please do not respond to questions or make any statements," the email said.
--more at guardian.co.uk...........

Al Gore's Climate Institute scientist Michael McCracken has the following prescription:
“....avoiding the most catastrophic potential aspects of climate change will require reducing emissions sharply by 2050 and to near zero by 2100.....”
(Climate Institute)
“To accomplish this difficult challenge, he proposes a reciprocal arrangement under which "(1) developed nations move rapidly to demonstrate that a modern society can function without reliance on technologies that release carbon dioxide (CO2) and other non-CO2 greenhouse gases to the atmosphere; and (2) … developing nations act in the near-term to sharply limit their non-CO2 emissions while minimizing growth in CO2 emissions, and then in the long-term join with the developed nations to reduce all emissions as cost effective technologies are developed.” Under this approach developing nations at the outset would focus on low hanging fruit--emissions reductions with significant ability to limit radiative forcing and that are achievable at low relative cost. These include greatly reducing emissions of methane, air pollutants that contribute to tropospheric ozone, and black soot, which blackens glaciers, in turn causing greater absorption of solar radiation and melting of glaciers that are crucial to the water supply of a large portion of humanity. Initially, the primary efforts to limit CO2 emissions in developing nations would focus on ending deforestation and on implementing energy efficiency measures--e.g. reducing power consumption for lighting, reducing conversion loss and transmission loss, and encouraging energy recycling including combined heat and power.” (more at climate.org)
...................
So, to return to the point, since we are faced with extinction or at least severe hardship from climate change and since the Bush Administration has failed to take needed emergency actions, how do we defend our lives? By what methods can we undertake the massive change necessary to our self-defense, since we have no recourse from the corrupted former government of the US?

It seems to me that for a start we could demand that local officials begin to coordinate with other officials. That is to say, city council can contact city council, mayors' offices can contact mayor's offices, and so on right up the regional authority lines to State governments. Since this is indeed a life-threatening crisis that will require the mobilization of tremendous assets, as well as the careful and democratic consideration of planned activities, it could well develop an added benefit—it could create a new paradigm of cooperation that overshadows and replaces the sadly corrupted and irrelevant US government. Climate change mobilization could give us the peaceful revolution we've been needing.

In any event, massive extinctions, crop failures, and life-threatening storms are already happening, so this is the time to take action—and we don't have time for wistful nostalgia about how great the old US of A used to be. That paradigm failed us, and I say let's get on with revolution, unless you just like dying for no particular good reason.

From Climate.org:

EXTREME WEATHER
Most of the potentially damaging consequences relating to climate change are associated with extremes - the number of heat waves, floods, or severe storms, for example. Since extreme weather events cause loss of life and property, it is important to understand what impact global warming may have on their occurrence.
Global climate change has different effects on different regions of the Earth. Although regional climate forecasts are improving, they are still uncertain. However, we know that a warmer atmosphere will result in a greater number of tropical storms, extreme heat waves, floods and droughts.
Intense tropical cyclone activity has increased since 1970 in the North Atlantic and is projected to worsen, because tropical storms are powered by factors affected by climate change. In order to occur, tropical storms need warm ocean temperatures, no strong changes in wind speed or direction, and high humidity. Two of these factors have increased as a result of global warming; oceans have become warmer, and humidity and water vapor have increased 4% since 1970 because warm air holds more vapor than cold air.
Hurricanes occur when surface temperatures exceed 79° F (26°C). As moist, hot air rises, the lower air pressure at sea level pulls the surrounding air into a rotating pattern. Then, the water-vapor laden air spirals and rises to the higher altitudes that cool it and releases heat as it condenses into rain. Hurricanes are fed by evaporation and condensation, which bring the ocean’s heat energy into the vortex.
(much more at climate.org)
..................................

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 31, 2008; Page A02
The "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, an area on the seabed with too little oxygen to support fish, shrimp, crabs and other forms of marine life, is nearly the largest on record this year, about 8,000 square miles, researchers said this week.
Only the churning effects of Hurricane Dolly last week, they said, prevented the dead zone from being the largest ever.
The problem of hypoxia -- very low levels of dissolved oxygen -- is a downstream effect of fertilizers used for agriculture in the Mississippi River watershed. Nitrogen is the major culprit, flowing into the Gulf and spurring the growth of algae. Animals called zooplankton eat the algae, excreting pellets that sink to the bottom like tiny stones. This organic matter decays in a process that depletes the water of oxygen.
Researchers expected the dead zone to set a record -- even more than the 8,500 square miles observed in 2002 -- after the Mississippi, swollen with floodwaters, carried an extraordinary amount of nitrates into the Gulf, about 37 percent more than last year and the most since measuring these factors was begun in 1970.

Global warming affects insurance

By Alan Markoff, alan@cfp,ky
Tuesday 29th July, 2008 Posted: 15:38 CIT (20:38 GMT)
> Comment on this story
Computerised catastrophe modelling that factors the impact global warming might have on the frequency and intensity of hurricanes is increasingly being used by re–insurers to price their insurance rates.
The practice has drawn criticism in the United States, partially because scientists not only have differing views on the effects climate change will have on the frequency and intensity of hurricanes, but also on whether global warming is a long–term phenomenon or just a cyclical warming of the earth’s oceans.
Island Heritage Chief Marketing Officer Nigel Twohey said he spoke to representatives of Munich Re, an active reinsurer in the Caribbean, about this issue in June at an insurance conference.
“Reinsurers are aware of the probable effects of global warming on sea temperatures and are making provisions for this in pricing and deductibles,” Mr. Twohey said. (more at whatdoesitmean.com)
.........................
OSLO (Reuters) - Birds have been moving north in Europe over the past 25 years because of climate change in the vanguard of likely huge shifts in the ranges of plants and animals, scientists said on Wednesday.
A study of 42 rare bird species in Britain showed that southern European bird species such as the Dartford warbler, Cirl bunting, little egret or Cetti's warbler had become more common in Britain from 1980-2004.
And species usually found in northern Europe, such as the fieldfare, redwing or Slavonian grebe, had become less frequent in Britain.
"The species are almost certainly responding to the changing climate," said Brian Huntley of Durham University in England of a report he wrote with researchers at Cambridge University and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
The study tried to filter out other factors that would affect counts of rare birds, including growing public interest that could mean more sightings. Shifts in farming, pollution, expansion of cities and conservation efforts have all affected wildlife.
Birds and butterflies are among the first to adapt to climate change because they can fly long distances to seek a cooler habitat. Other creatures and plants can take far longer if their traditional range gets too warm.
"It depends on the mobility of the species. Birds and butterflies are two of the groups where there is the best evidence that species are already showing responses to the changing climate," Huntley told Reuters of the study in Royal Society journal Biology Letters.
GREENHOUSE GASES
The shifts in the birds' ranges since 1980 were also consistent with scientists' expectations because of global warming, blamed by the U.N. Climate Panel on human use of fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars, he said.
(more at reuters.com)
................................

recombinomics.com:
Mystery Fatal Hemorrhagic Disease in Shandong China
Recombinomics Commentary 03:05
July 28, 2008

"China reported that approximately 20 days ago, a man suddenly died from an unidentified disease in Wanjiakou Village, Xiaoguan Town, Wendeng City, Shandong Province. His entire body turned dark purple, and he bled from his mouth, nostrils, ears, and eyes just as he died.

Shortly after the man died, 2 other men who been in contact with him, died showing the same symptoms. Villagers who had left the village to work said "3 people died 10 days ago. 6 or 7 more are being treated in the Wendeng Central Hospital. People have been to the area to investigate, but they are unable to classify the disease."
(more at recombinomics.com)
............................
Wed Jul 30, 12:16 PM ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States reaffirmed Wednesday a weekend deadline for Iran to give a final answer to world powers seeking a breakthrough in the nuclear crisis, warning of consequences on any defiance by the Islamic republic.

Iran was given a two-week deadline expiring Saturday to give a final answer to a package of incentives offered by the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany aimed at persuading it to freeze its sensitive nuclear activities.
But Iran has rejected any deadline, saying it was only agreed that it would during a two-week period examine the proposal put forward by the international community.
The US State Department said Wednesday that the Iranians were aware of and had acknowledged the Saturday deadline following talks in Geneva on July 19 with representatives of the six powers, including EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
(more at antiwar.com)

list

2008-07-03T07:24:00.000-07:00

list-o-lies
(just a reminder: this is a partial radio script, hence the call for "Callers")

1." John McCain is a strong war hero who will lead us with integrity."

McCain was a pilot who got shot down during the Vietnam war. He was in an F-4 fighter-bomber jet, which was known for its high explosive and napalm runs.
He cracked under torture and went on TV to denounce his country and his fellow pilots. Later he said he hadn't bombed any civilians, which is certainly
a lie. Napalm is not a surgical implement. Nevertheless McCain was viewed widely as a hero until he signed on with President Bush's pro-torture legislation,
thus betraying his POW buddies and anyone who was ever tortured.

1a. McCain is a weak war zero, the privileged son of an admiral, who will stand as a figurehead much as Bush Junior does now.

2. "Barack Hussein Obama is a secret Muslim who attended a madrassa.
'
A madrassa is a religious school for Muslim boys. Barack Hussein Obama was abandoned
by his Kenyan dad as a baby, and was raised Christian, hence the carefully edited and context-free rantings of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright. The emphasis
by the right-wing of his middle name Hussein is intended to stoke racial fears. Hence I am changing my middle name to Hussein until the inauguration. I'm
Theresa Hussein Mitchell, you're caller Hussein, we're all Husseins on this bus.

3. "Iran is a terrible threat to Israel, and Iran's leader threatened to blow Israel off the map." Iran is a large oil-selling country which, according to the International Atomic
Energy Agency is enriching uranium to 3% in order to use it in a reactor. The IAEA has found no evidence of the 95% enrichment necessary to create fissionable
material for fission bombs. IAEA has its inspectors in Iran now and is being granted access. President Ahmadinajad, who does not hold the war powers as the
Mullahs do in Iran, has said that history will remove Israel from the map as it does all countries. That statement has been mistranslated and repeated in order to
frighten you. As it is repeated in its mistranslation, it is implied that Ahmadinajad has the Iranian authority to carry out such a genocidal threat. He does not.
Israel, on the other hand, has had sufficient deliverable fission/fusion atomic weaponry to utterly genocide Iran. The Iranians know this.

4 "Liberal conservationists, protecting distant and irrelevant wildlife, have driven up the price of gas." Half of the rise in oil price is due to the catastrophic drop in the
international value of the dollar, a condition brought about by deficit spending and borrowing for imperial war and occupation. Much of the rest is due to speculators
trying to decide what oil will sell for after the US or Israel attack Iran, cutting off the tanker supply at the Strait of Hormuz. The price of gas and diesel in the US is
a separate thing, driven by oligarchical corporate control, which has reduced the number of operating refineries to a minimum level. The demand has dropped, yet
the price of the supply keeps building--a violation of free market dynamics, because this is not a free market. The US doesn't need ANWAR or increased offshore
drilling, it needs an implementation of the Sherman Antitrust act or better yet the confiscation of EXXON, Unocal Texaco, BP and the rest for violation of their corporate
charters, and for repeat violations of environmental and tax and regulatory laws.

5. "Global warming is a liberal hoax designed to put you out of your SUV and into a wimpy gas-sipper, and the North Pole is melting only due to volcanic activities." Volcanic activity was present at the North Pole a decade ago, as scientists can now see more easily due to the extensive Summer melt. The volcanoes, according to the geologists who studied them, are now largely dormant and did not contribute to the now-thin Summer ice, which may indeed, depending of weather conditions, melt entirely through this September. If it does, it will exacerbate the Greenland melt. Greenland has vast miles-thick glaciers which can plunge off the continent into the sea. If they do so, the immediate climate effect will be turbulent indeed, possibly creating a year without a Summer on the European and northern America seaboard, followed by destruction of the thermohaline gyre, massive storms, further heating, and the release of enough methane clathrates to displace much of the breathable oxygen on Planet Earth. Other than that it's a silly liberal hoax.

science

2008-06-19T09:33:00.000-07:00

Science is a tool, not a god. Science may function at times to contrast with society or religion, but it holds no such intrinsic intent. When we make a decision to adhere to a religion or a culture or a government, and we ignore science, we do so at out own peril. There are consequences.

On right wing talk radio, for example, it has been popular to sneer at the science of global climate change. This has contributed to a social atmosphere in which it is difficult to talk about glabal climate change, much less take the drastic actions that we now need. To counter this inertia, perhaps a small gathering of facts will serve.

Our crops are failing. If we lived in an agriculturally aware society, it would not be necessary to say so; it would be the talk of the town. Everyone would know. But in this case I'm talking about a global phenomenon, and it's something that has to pass the normal buzz of the ag report. I don't mean merely that the crops are failing locally. I mean that there are crop failures increasing globally.

What does that mean? Right now you can still go to the vending machine and get a packet of chips. You can still find the store canned foods, and even a fresh produce section full of quality edibles. They cost a little more. We're not in one of those oh-so-profitable parts of the globe, where people are already beginning to starve.

Jpseph Romm, interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, said:...., the media is covering this as this all sort of unconnected events, just regular weather maybe gone a little wacky. But, in fact, the scientific community has predicted for more than two decades now that as we pour more heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the planet will heat up, and that would redistribute water. If you heat up the planet, then places that are kind of arid will lose soil moisture, and they’ll become drier, whereas you put—you heat up the planet, you evaporate more water, and areas that are wetter will tend to see more intense rainfall and deluges and earlier snowmelts, and all that will lead to flooding. So what we’re seeing is exactly what scientists have been telling us would happen because of human emissions.

But we are not exempt. Locally, here in Cascadia, the cherry crop is pitiful, because of the weather. A strong Pacific wind has been pushing cold ocean air over this area, causing snow flurries in April right down to the valley floor, blocking the Sun and lowering temperatures even now, in June. The apple crop has failed. The pear crop has failed.

Massive and powerful storms have struck Iowa, Indiana, and the Midwest generally. Corn and soy crops are under water by the millions of acres. Hogs have been washed out of their barns. Hog lagoon waste poisons the floodwaters, sickening anyone who comes into contact with it. Last weekend the Iowa state government was quoted in the local papers saying “Residents who have to come into contact with river water should ask their doctor for advice on shots, and should bathe as soon as possible after leaving the floodwaters. The contaminants can cause severe intestinal illness and skin, eye and ear infections.”

The loss of food is quantified as dollar losses, as in the excerpt from Dow Jones:

CHICAGO -(Dow Jones)- Four million acres of flooded Iowa farmland has put a damper on a three-year string of profits for the companies that underwrite crop insurance.

The flooding has caused as much as $3 billion in crop losses so far. Some claims are already coming in under so-called prevented planting coverage, said a spokeswoman with the Risk Management Agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which manages the public-private program. Prevented planting coverage reimburses farmers for a portion of a crop's insured value when bad weather delays planting until too late in the season.

That reimbursement is one form of crop insurance. Premiums, pegged to crop prices and set by the government, have risen in recent years, driving up profits for the 16 insurers that underwrite the program, including Wells Fargo & Co., American Financial Group Inc. and ACE .

"Companies that insure crops were very upbeat at the beginning of the season because (corn, wheat, and other crop) prices kept going up because of global demand," said Elizabeth Malone, an insurance analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets, in an interview Monday. "Today, I think a lot of crop insurers are quite worried, given what has happened with the weather in the Midwest. This is a one- in-500-year storm."

Dave Miller, the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation's director of research and commodity services, estimated the flooding has caused $3 billion in economic losses to Iowa farmers so far, with losses in other states including Indiana, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota adding more to the total. A separate estimate by researchers at Ball State University and the University of Tennessee put Iowa crop losses at $2.6 billion.

......................

We have insulted Mother Nature, and we will pay. But that's just a way of saying that we have collectively agreed to ignore our useful tool, Science. Science got in the way of short-term profits for manufacturers, automobile sales, coal plant operators, et cetera, and so science—in this case, global climate change-- has been make out to be tinfoil-hat hysteria. But that's like cutting off our collective nose to spite our face.

Here's another sign of the times from AP:

MOSCOW: Russia has been sending food aid shipments by train to North Korea.

Russia's Foreign Ministry says in a statement posted on its Web site late Wednesday that deliveries of 2,860 metric (3,150 tons) of wheat flour began last week and will be distributed through the United Nations' World Food Program.

North Korea's food situation has worsened this year because of last year's devastating floods that destroyed more than 11 percent of the country's crops.

The U.N. has warned that North Korea urgently needs outside aid to avert a worse humanitarian disaster.

...................................

BANGKOK, June 18 (Reuters) - More than 50,000 farmers in cyclone-hit Myanmar will be unable to plant a new rice crop by August unless they receive immediate aid, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Wednesday.

In the first major assessment of the damage wrought by the May 2 cyclone on Myanmar's rice bowl, the FAO said 570,000 hectares of land was submerged in 11 badly-affected townships surveyed by the U.N. agency and government officials.

..........................................................

VOA news: The most severe drought for 100 years in Australia is getting worse. Farmers warn that this winter's wheat crop could be even smaller than last year's if rain does not come soon. Most Australian grain is exported and empty Outback grain silos have contributed to shortages and rising global prices. Australia is the third-biggest wheat exporter behind the U.S. and Canada.

...........................................................

Australian Broadcasting Company: ....“The UNHCR says climate change is expected to drive increasing numbers of people from their homes as more conflicts are fuelled by water scarcity and a lack of food.

They also say the number of displaced people in the world is at an unprecedented level. Last year the total number jumped to just over 37 million, an increase of more than three million.

The former Portuguese prime minister, Antonio Guterres, is now the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees.

He says climate change is an ever-growing problem, fuelling conflict and thus indirectly fuelling the growth in refugee numbers, as in the case of Darfur.

"In Darfur, in the past years rainfall has always been decreasing, population has been growing," Mr Guterres said.

"There is an increased competition for water resources. We need a political solution for Darfur, but that solution will not be stable, if at the same time we don't solve the underlying problems of dwindling water resources.

"What climate change is doing is in many circumstances reducing resources, increasing the competition for resources and because of that, triggering or amplifying conflicts."

Mr Guterres says he has no doubt climate change will contribute more to conflict and thus to the number of refugees.

"The combination of climate change, increased prices, increased population, all those things make life more difficult, make competition for resources tougher and amplify conflicts everywhere," he said.

[Oh, and by the way:]

The UNHCR says nearly half the world's displaced people (three million) are Afghan while two million are Iraqi. The numbers in Iraq increased by 600,000 last year.”

........................gee, I wonder who displaced 'em?....................

This from Roger Highfield in the UK Telegraph:

The top few hundred metres of the world's oceans have warmed 50 per cent faster than previously thought during the past half century, a discovery that has solved an enduring puzzle about the world's rising sea levels. Sea-level rise is a key consequence of of climate change but the actual change has been higher than scientists had predicted.

Now scientists believe they understand the rise in sea levels observed since 1961, and can link them to the expansion of the oceans as they warmed, along with melting of glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets.

The new study by Australian and US climate researchers, published in the journal Nature, concludes that the upper 700 metres of the world's oceans warmed at a rate 50 per cent faster in the last four decades of 20th century than documented in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report, which produces a consensus view of scientists around the world.

...........................

In addition to crop loss and ocean rise, we may already be experiencing a global-warming increase in earthquakes, according to this article:

(AP) New research compiled by Australian scientist Dr. Tom Chalko shows that global seismic activity on Earth is now five times more energetic than it was just 20 years ago.

The research proves that destructive ability of earthquakes on Earth increases alarmingly fast and that this trend is set to continue, unless the problem of "global warming" is comprehensively and urgently addressed.

The analysis of more than 386,000 earthquakes between 1973 and 2007 recorded on the US Geological Survey database proved that the global annual energy of earthquakes on Earth began increasing very fast since 1990.

Dr. Chalko said that global seismic activity was increasing faster than any other global warming indicator on Earth and that this increase is extremely alarming.

"The most serious environmental danger we face on Earth may not be climate change, but rapidly and systematically increasing seismic, tectonic and volcanic activity," said Dr. Chalko.

"Increase in the annual energy of earthquakes is the strongest symptom yet of planetary overheating.

"NASA measurements from space confirm that Earth as a whole absorbs at least 0.85 Megawatt per square kilometer more energy from the Sun than it is able to radiate back to space. This 'thermal imbalance' means that heat generated in the planetary interior cannot escape and that the planetary interior must overheat. Increase in seismic, tectonic and volcanic activities is an unavoidable consequence of the observed thermal imbalance of the planet," said Dr. Chalko.

Dr. Chalko has urged other scientists to maximize international awareness of the rapid increase in seismic activity, pointing out that this increase is not theoretical but that it is an Observable Fact.

"Unless the problem of global warming (the problem of persistent thermal imbalance of Earth) is addressed urgently and comprehensively - the rapid increase in global seismic, volcanic and tectonic activity is certain. Consequences of inaction can only be catastrophic. There is no time for half-measures."

.........................

Are we ready for regime change yet? Al Gore won his Nobel Prize for going around with his charts and speeches, trying to explain that we would be experiencing what we are now experiencing. Does that global climate engineering sound so wacky now? Would you rather just ride the tiger and see where it goes? [Your comments....]

Speaking of ignoring science, it has been fashionable in the past decades to pretend that normal human sexual and gender variations are instead some sort of voluntary or arbitrary perversion. There have been many studies—talking about science here—that show that human and animal populations have always harbored lesbian, gay and trans behaviors, because group survival requires that sex, identity and pleasure serve more functions than merely reproduction. One consequence of ignoring that science has been a severe degrading of the Army's ability to translate Arabic since the famous firing of so many translators under the Don't Ask Don't Tell era of military aggression against gays. The society is of course generally degraded when one minority or another is oppressed for no reason.

The marriage of gays and lesbians in California is fodder for the hating class, and though it is a cheering case of progress in human compassion and societal peacemaking, the controversy is being used to distract from issues requiring collective action. Like war, I mean, and climate change, and whether we will ever reverse the US apartheid state and its Jim Crow drug war. Yet these issues of social tolerance and intolerance hit home.

In my case, for example, over the past few days, I have been confronted with social aggression ranging from casual conversations in my presence about what gender I might be and how disgusting that is, to screams of hatred from a passing car. My workplace has lost untold days of productivity as I attempt to heal my stress from this sort of constant confrontation. Most recently I was off for nine months for panic disorder, scarcely able to leave my house. These days I use relaxation techniques, calmatives, and careful application of dress, makeup, and demeanor to attempt to avoid hostile reactions from the public. But I'm always fighting a losing battle, because I am barred from getting the recommended medical care for my condition, which would make me much less visible as a transwoman. My workplace has a written ban in place to prevent the medical sciences from implementing their recommendations in my case. Health care is provided fully for everyone else there. It's technically illegal, but with this vicious zeitgeist in place, the management knows it doesn't have to budge.

Now, to my surprise, the historically crusty American Medical Association has issued a statement denouncing such tactics. This is from an article in Page One Q by Nick Langewis:

The American Medical Association is calling on health insurers to cooperate with doctors in providing proper care to meet transgender patients' needs.

Resolutions 114, 115 and 122 were passed by the AMA's House of Delegates at its annual conference in Chicago, which concludes today. Noting that Gender Identity Disorder is an internationally recognized medical condition, the Delegates highlight the need to combat the emotional pain and physical incongruity associated with gender dysphoria with proper access to mental health services, hormone treatments, and surgical procedures.

The National Center for Transgender Equality has hailed the resolution. "America's physicians," said NCTE Executive Director Mara Keisling, "are saying that transgender people, like all others, deserve competent medical care based on what individual doctors and their patients determine is healthiest for each person."

The AMA asserts that when discriminatory financial barriers are placed between the transgender community and proper health care by dismissing treatments as "cosmetic" or "experimental," even when covered for other patients with other recognized medical conditions, more expensive problems can develop as a result, such as depression, substance abuse problems, and stress-related illness.

"Doctors and patients, not insurance companies, should be making those choices," Keisling added. "We are so glad that the AMA has taken a leadership role against the rampant discrimination that transgender people have faced for so many years in receiving appropriate medical care and equitable insurance coverage."

The resolutions are available at the links below, in Microsoft Word format.

Resolution 114: Removing Barriers to Care for Transgender Patients
Resolution 115: Removing Insurance Barriers to Care for Transgender Patients
Resolution 122: Removing Financial Barriers to Care for Transgender Patients

ice

2008-05-30T14:37:00.000-07:00

I have to wonder how protesters could manage to interrupt Senator McPain just as he’s trying to defend the Iraq occupation. How could it be that they get through the infamous Republican sieve? Has the party decided to change tactics, and open up candidates’ appearances to just anyone? Is there a fissure in the Fascist front?

Of course not. This is Tricky Dick’s 1968 campaign tactic warmed over: allow some noisy protesters in during a recorded appearance, so that it seems as if the pro-war candidate is a victim of anti-free-speech forces. Nixon got all sorts of sympathy out of that trick. Maybe it’ll work for McPain—who knows.

Meanwhile the occupations just get meaner. Imperialism isn’t on the table for the Presidential elections—the US will go on menacing the globe with 200 or so military bases. Nor is accountability for imperial crimes an issue. Our representatives have made it manifestly clear that we are not going to see any break in their collaboration with war criminals. We’re not even allowed to talk about it—even supposedly liberal congress members will rebuke the interviewer if impeachment even comes up. The clock has pretty much run out, and the message from the Democratic and Republican ruling corporate parties is clear: Shut up, America. We heard you ask for impeachment, and we said no. We don’t represent you, we represent corporate stability. You want impeachment? Earl Blumenauer and every other Democrat says “shut up.”

And I hear that message, too, which is why I’m here to call for complete destruction of corporate rule, revolution in our time, and the construction of a transparent, participatory system of cooperation, in place of the fascist oligarchy that is now destroying freedom with one hand and the entire planet’s ecosystems with the other.

Let’s start by destroying the legitimacy of corporate capitalism.

Capitalism is not synonymous with economic activity. Economic activity is fun, satisfying, and vital to our survival as interacting humans. Capitalism is deadly. When a corporation asserts that it—meaning usually a collection of wealthy men—has the right to keep its doings secret, generate pollution, destroy the commons, and maintain a class of inferiors called “employees,” it is asserting the illegitimate rule of capital. Basically, this means that if you have money up front, you can tell people what to do forever. It’s an extension of feudalism, which asserted that God gave the rulers power. Replace God with money and you get capitalism. Expose a corporation’s secrets, distribute its wealth according to worker input, force it to cooperate with society, and you destroy its capitalism along with its parasitic class of rulers. Capitalism is the opposite of democracy. If you love this Earth, and if you love people enough to want to see their full potential in an educated, participatory, transparent society, then you hate capitalism.

Capitalism, and especially corporate capitalism, depends on secrets. That is why we have corporate media. Secrets can be cleverly kept by simply distracting attention, which is why a killdeer runs around its nest as if wounded. It is also why you may have forgotten that there is, for example, a ten dollar minimum corporate tax in the State of Oregon, which the legislature conveniently forgets to do anything about year after year. Enron’s parasite puppet PGE, famously bankrupt but still raising your power bills, has paid ten dollars per year in State taxes for many years. How much to you pay in State taxes? That’s because you don’t have puppets doing your bidding in the State House. What happened to the investigation to those 9 billion dollars in bundled hundred dollar bills that disappeared en route to Iraq? Anyone?

What about capitalism-induced global warming?

From the BBC:
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website

Damage to forests, rivers, marine life and other aspects of nature could halve living standards for the world's poor, a major report has concluded.
Current rates of natural decline might reduce global GDP by about 7% by 2050.
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) review is modelled on the Stern Review of climate change.
It will be released at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meeting in Bonn, where 60 leaders have pledged to halt deforestation by 2020.
"You come up with answers like 6% or 8% of global GDP when you think about the benefits of intact ecosystems, for example in controlling water, controlling floods and droughts, the flow of nutrients from forest to field," said the project's leader Pavan Sukhdev.
"But then you realise that the major beneficiaries [of nature] are the billion and a half of the world's poor; these natural systems account for as much as 40%-50% of what we define as the 'GDP of the poor'," he told BBC News.
[more at bbc.co.uk]…………………………………………

ELAINE REGUS
The Press-Enterprise

Global warming could release long-dormant stores of methane gas trapped beneath the Arctic permafrost, causing an abrupt and catastrophic climate change like one that occurred 635 million years ago, UC Riverside researchers have determined.

Back then, the sheets of ice that covered Earth started to collapse, releasing methane gas that warmed the planet and caused the ice to retreat over a period of 100 to 1,000 years, said Martin Kennedy, a geology professor in UCR's Department of Earth Sciences. Kennedy led the research team.

"It was the greatest global-warming event of Earth's history almost certainly," he said.
The researchers' findings are published in today's issue of Nature.

They suggest that methane ice sheets still exist beneath Arctic ice sheets that are being degraded by rising carbon-dioxide levels in Earth's atmosphere.

Recent research indicates that the ice sheets are melting and methane gas is being released at a much higher rate than previously thought, he said.

"It doesn't make one feel a lot better about the future," Kennedy said.

If a similar phenomenon occurred today, the most noticeable change would be a rise in sea level, he said. If the Greenland ice sheet collapsed, the sea level would rise about 20 feet, inundating major coastal cities. Accompanying drought could lead to crop failures and widespread famine, he said.

Mary Droser, chairwoman of UCR's department of earth sciences, said the world spends a lot of time and energy worrying about global climate change, and this is an example of an abrupt change through a process that could repeat itself today.
Kennedy said computer models cannot predict nor explain past climate changes. Those answers are available only by studying past geologic records, which is what Kennedy and his colleagues are doing.

They analyzed hundreds of marine sediment samples from South Australia looking for stable isotopes, a tool used in climate reconstruction. They found the greatest variation of the oxygen isotope ever reported from marine sediments, which they attributed to the melting ice sheets and methane gas release.

The next step will be to try to estimate how much of that temperature change was due solely to methane, a greenhouse gas that reacts with oxygen to form carbon dioxide.

[more]
……………………………………
David Shukman, BBC Environment correspondent:

Dramatic evidence of the break-up of the Arctic ice-cap has emerged from research during an expedition by the Canadian military.
Scientists travelling with the troops found major new fractures during an assessment of the state of giant ice shelves in Canada's far north.
The team found a network of cracks that stretched for more than 10 miles (16km) on Ward Hunt, the area's largest shelf.
The fate of the vast ice blocks is seen as a key indicator of climate change.
[more]……………………….
Alexis Madrigal, Wired.com blog

A new paper published appearing Thursday in the prestigious scientific journal Nature presents the worst-case scenario for runaway climate change that could leave the Earth entirely ice-free within a generation.
If global temperatures continue to rise, massive amounts of methane gas could be released from the 10,000 gigaton reserves of frozen methane that are currently locked in the world's deep oceans and permafrost. Passing this climate tipping point would result in runaway global warming that would be far worse and more rapid than scientists' current estimates.
The new paper suggests that exactly this type of cascading release of methane reserves rapidly warmed the Earth 635 million years ago, replacing an Ice Age with a period of tropical heat. The study's lead author suggests it could happen again, and fast -- not over thousands or millions of years, but possibly within a century.
[much more]....

Could our epitaph as a species be titled "methane clathrates?" They tend to pop up to the ocean surface when disturbed--and burst into flame. It's quite dramatic. Maybe our end will be known as "the Great Death Fart of 2012." Time will tell. But the corporate media won't.

loyalty

2008-05-22T08:52:00.000-07:00

Richard Cheney, the Chief Hegemon of the Oligarchy of the United States also known as the Vice President, is feeling a little off balance. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing…I know you’re thinking “Well we don’t want him getting cranky and sending in his sappers to plant thermate in the Sears Tower too,” which is understandable under the circumstances, but I mean that he’s off balance because it seems for once things aren’t going his way, aren’t going as planned, hence the headline in Raw Story this morning that reflects his statement at a Coast Guard grad ceremony—quoting here—“The only way to lose this fight is to quit. That would be irresponsible," Cheney said. "More than that, quitting would be an act of betrayal and dishonor. And it's not going to happen on our watch."

Betrayal? Dishonor? Disloyalty? Did somebody say the ‘q’ word?

Oh yeah, maybe I did, a few zillion times, and maybe you were with me chanting it past the robo-cop assemblies. Dick never took notice, though, because at that time we were rather isolated and ignored, weren’t we? But the times seem to be a-changin,’ and it seems some more politicians might be heading for office who have less enthusiasm for imperialism than Dick has. And he isn’t happy about that.

Of course, you might wonder why Dick was addressing the Coast Guard—don’t they guard the Coast? Well, yes and no. Being in the Coast Guard gives no guarantee of staying out of Iraq these days, as the Armed Forces in their desperation are likely to send you Over There with a gun and a pat on the back for good luck. Of course I’m kidding about the pat on the back.

That Darn-those-disloyal-whoevers attitude has been heard before, and yes I’m thinking about Tricky Dick Nixon bemoaning the lack of fervor for his doomed and violent machinations in Vietnam. That other Tricky Dick was rather alarmed at times that people just weren’t saluting when he said to, and he sensed that a seachange was afoot, long before he go shoved out of office. Well, maybe Tricky Dick Cheney is feeling that squeeze—though without progress towards impeachment, I doubt he stays up nights.

There’s a reason he rails about loyalty, though; American blind loyalty has been the stock-in-trade for Dick’s fearmongering Administration. And he has a rich vein of the stuff to mine, which is why he and his minions have elevated the fundamentalists and the military to their current favored status. Just to hedge his bets, fundamentalism and militarism have been increasingly combined, and veterans report that they were under constant pressure to give in to evangelical Christian chaplains while in uniform. Remember all those silly damned plastic flags that everyone displayed—well, almost everyone—in the months and years following September ’01? Maybe you remember how the flag was incorporated into every newscast thereafter, on lapels, on the screen, behind the podium, decorating the background—everywhere. And maybe you know now that the true meaning of the US flag is mind control. Or maybe you don’t.

My point is that there are certain US thought habits that are easily and constantly exploited by hegemons like Cheney. As long as we keep thinking in certain ways, we can be led around by our noses. Take the US judgmental attitude, for example. When we’re confronted (as we rarely are) with the fact that we have more people in prison –total- than Communist China, the usual response devolves towards blaming the inmates. Yet if everyone who ever broke a drug law was imprisoned, we’d have sixty million in prison, not 2.3 million. And if we could break away from judgmentalism, we’d collectively say “hold on, we’ve been duped, there’s no reason to plunge millions into misery for the sake of hypocritical drug laws.” And then we’d have that much more peace—because the Jim Crow drug war is a civil war, you know—and we’d have that much more strength. But we remain loyal to judgmentalism.

Or I could say, we’re passively loyal to judgmentalism—because passivity is an American thought flaw, too. Some of it comes from despair after all these years of trying to get change in a system that is designed to resist change, from corporate campaign contributions to the bicameral legislature. There’s progress, we sigh, and congress.

Certainly the corporate-owned media build up a mighty wall of passivity in every aspect of political decision-making. In part they do this by simply taking issues off the agenda, by not mentioning certain things like our absurd and horrifying prison state, our 2.3 or however many tortured souls in chains. Global warming is another example--quick, what’s the latest on clathrate releases, or what’s you position on the debate in the scientific community on emergency global sun blocking? I’ll bet you never heard of either issue, but they’re both real and are going to affect you soon, maybe affect you right into your grave. By finding quack scientists to obfuscate the issue, and mentioning the whole topic only rarely, you’re being led by that same nose into a catastrophe of—well—global proportions.

And there are other thought habits that imprison us. That is the nature of prisons, by the way—they’re not really made of walls, they’re made of fear and passivity. I remember a case a few years back in which an inmate convinced ten other inmates to slam a metal table –one, two, three, all together now—into a brick wall, which collapsed, liberating the lot of them. But what are those other habits? Well, have you ever noticed how much your femininity is insulted and degraded, particularly in times of war? And here I’m talking about the femininity of men as well as that of women. Suddenly it’s bad to be feminine, or rather worse than usual. It works so well that some of you men are already confused—did I say the femininity of men? Yes, I did. You were raised by a mother, weren’t you? You men have a feminine side, it’s part of your humanity. But if you can be made to fear and deny your own feminine feelings, you can be led straight into the boot camp. It takes a cattle prod to lead farm animals to slaughter, but you men are easy. All I have to do is insult you by putting down your feminine nature. As if you didn’t have any. Easy. Always works.

So since this is the News You’re Not Supposed To Know, let’s get right into one of those off-the-agenda topics, shall we?

……………………
Alan Robock writes in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that geoengineering has its drawbacks—twenty of them at least. What the heck is geoengineering, anyway? Well might you ask…it is the science of dealing with the global climate directly, on an emergency basis. Geoengineering exists because the corporate-owned media, responding to Dick Cheney’s fellow oligarchs in the oil industry, have succeeded in accelerating global warming to the point that we all face death by starvation, storms, or possibly by asphyxiation by ocean methane held in clathrates. Huh?—you say. What? –yeah, it’s like that.

To be more specific about your impending doom, Robock points out that the globe is rapidly approaching the 450ppm of carbon pollution that would signal rapid biosystem failure—moving up from the 385 ppm we currently measure. That’s up from 280ppm prior to the Industrial Revolution. So we’re moving rapidly towards what scientists like to call “screwed.”

Some of the proposals include dumping iron-based fertilizer into the oceans to create algal blooms, to suck up carbon. Others say there should be giant sprayers to create clouds from seawater. And there are proposals to launch mirrors into orbit, or to dust the upper atmosphere with sulfur to block the sun.

These proposals might make things worse, Robock notes. And I’m sure he’s right. No doubt you’ve seen the pros and cons of these proposals on endless lengthy television programs and newspaper specials. What’s that, you haven’t? Nothing at all? Funny that.

Maybe you haven’t heard that the oceans sit on to of a layer of methane-bearing substances called clathrates, and that once a certain threshold of temperature is breached, the clathrates will burst to the surface, releasing so much methane that it will displace oxygen in your lungs, simulating the amount of oxygen now available at sixteen thousand feet altitude. What’s that, you think you might have trouble breathing at sixteen thousand feet? Well, I know I would. It’s kind of a problem. I’d say it’s the sort of thing one would seek to avoid, something that one might take precautions against, whatever the actual probability. But that’s just me. I’m just kinda extreme in that pro-breathing sort of way.

michiokakucomingtoKBOO

2008-04-03T13:00:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the questions I'm lining up for physicist Michio Kaku's upcoming (next week interview!

Kaku Michio, physics professor and TV and media science commentator, is the author of several academic textbooks on string theory and quantum field theory, and has had more than 70 articles published in respected journals, covering superstring theory, supergravity supersymmetry, and hadronic physics. He is also author of several popular books, Visions, Hyperspace, and Parallel Worlds, and he co-authored Beyond Einstein with Jennifer Thompson. Hyperspace was a best-seller and was voted one of the best science books of the year by both the New York Times[1] and the Washington Post. Parallel Worlds was a finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction in Great Britain.
His latest book, Physics of the Impossible, examines the technologies of invisibility, teleportation, telepathy, star ships, anti-matter engines, time travel, all regarded as not possible today, but might be feasible in future. In Physics of the Impossible, he ranks these subjects according to when, if ever, these technologies might become reality. In March, Physics of the Impossible hit the New York Times Best-seller list.

Welcome back to KBOO, Dr. Kaku! Our previous discussion sparked a great deal of enthusiastic discussion in the KBOO community.

Class I ideas -- -- force fields, invisibility, phasers and death stars, teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, robots, extraterrestrials and UFOs, starships, antimatter and anti-universes -- could come true within a hundred years. Class II impossibilities, such as travel faster than light, time travel and parallel universes, may be possible in the next millennium. Class III ideas, like perpetual motion machines and precognition, may never be possible, given the underlying science.

As Kaku explores his subjects, he uses references anyone can understand: Star Trek, Back to the Future, The Wizard of Oz, Flash Gordon, Men in Black. The result is an imminently readable physics primer.

How would a force field work? Wouldn’t it just fry anyone entering it?

Is the human brain a purely Cartesian, Newtonian biological thinking device, or is it in part a conversion device for a thinking mind that exceeds current measurement abilities?
Would an artificial intelligence take on the same characteristics as a human mind?

Dr. Kaku, is there a relationship between the observer effect noted in the famous photon gun diffraction experiments, and psychokinesis? Isn’t the observer effect instantaneous over distance? How could this be true, and have no corollary possibilities of the development of extrasensory perception? What is the power of consciousness?

What’s the difference between string theory and moving dimensions theory? How do these fit into the theory of everything?
Has time been visibly altered in experiments? Doesn’t gravity alter perceived time, so that a person on the surface of the Earth experiences slower time? Is this due to the acceleration-like aspects of gravity?

(much of this is from wikkipedia, like the following (slightly altered):

Kaku has been vocal with his concerns and criticism over social concerns including the anthropogenic cause of global warming; also nuclear armament, nuclear power, and the general misuse of science.[2] He was a staunch opponent of the Cassini-Huygens space probe because of the plutonium contained in the craft for use by its radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Fearing the possibility that its fuel should somehow be dispersed into the environment, and the significant health effects and thousands of casualties caused by the resulting contamination, he charged NASA's risk assessment with scientific dishonesty.[3] Despite his and other objections, the probe was launched and went on to complete its mission without incident so far.

theBarackbomb

2008-03-20T09:50:00.000-07:00

Hey, maybe if I type the title without spaces it won't convert to Hindi....

I expect political speeches to be shallow. This expectation could be characterized as cynicism, but it derives from conditioning. The shallowness comes from the American politicians’ desire to manipulate, and from their cold indifference to the needs of the masses. It comes from megalomaniac personalities and an inability to analyze political dynamics outside the accepted parameters. This is doubly true for speeches from the winnowed few who curry the favor of the multinational corporations.

Imagine my surprise and relief, then, to hear Barack Obama’s Nation United speech, delivered in Philadelphia earlier this week. Instead of cant, I heard careful analysis. In place of manipulation, I heard compassion, and an effective gesture of healing. This speech was intended to heal America’s racial divide, and it actually opened a door to doing just that. It was more than a speech—it was an historic event.

So again, imagine my surprise. I could not believe my ears. We have great analytical minds in US politics, people like Karl Rove, who sensitively divine every turn of the zeitgeist, and use it for their advantage. Senator Obama’s speech revealed keen insight, but unlike Rove and his ilk, Obama used that insight as a healing scalpel. The speech was a response to constant attacks from the corporate right media to smear him as a hater of Whites. Obama didn’t just respond, he cleared the deck.

I cannot overemphasize the importance of getting your own copy of the speech, and listening or reading the whole thing. It is best to listen to it. It is readily available –it’s on truthout.org, it’s on youtube, it’s printed on the local chain daily’s website. This speech has the legs of a colossus and will keep walking across the landscape whether I recommend it or not. With the Nation United speech, Obama changed the discourse, marginalized the sniping Right, and won the Presidency. The speech made me weep with long-denied relief and happiness. This man actually intends to set things right.

Did you hear that from me, the cynic, the anarcho-socialist who scoffs at the corporate charade of US presidential politics? Yes you did, and I haven’t changed a bit. I don’t expect Obama to make any changes that his psyche and political education are not ready for. There’s no single-payer health plan in his platform. He probably has no idea of the advanced nature of the climate crisis. But this is not the same man who won the Illinois Senate seat, and I’m not sure if it’s the same man who started the run for the Oval Office. Whoever he is, he has changed the game, and he has done so with a great heart, a greater leadership than anything that has appeared in the A-list presidential dock since 1968. Suddenly, a great light has spread over the continent, one that reveals Barack’s competitors as the scurrying mice that they are. Suddenly, a great light….

…………

You’ll be pleased to know that Dick Cheney has been having a good time in the Middle East, fishing from the Sultan of Oman’s private yacht, and ginning up a war against Iran. Scott Ritter, the former arms inspector in Baghdad, and Sy Hersh, the great American journalist, have both written whole books revealing that the buildup of war materiel and constant vast war exercises aimed at Iran have made war all but inevitable. Indeed the pile of equipment grows larger, as for example with the addition of the USS Wasp and its complement of vertical take-off planes (which are as dangerous to its pilots and crew as to anyone else). I have also pointed to this military mobbing, but I wonder if it is as Noam Chomsky has been saying for more than a year now, that the US intends to confront Iran as it has North Korea, constantly threatening in order to wear down the society with constant defense expenses and procedures, and with all the stress that accompanies such preparations. Be that as it may, it is my duty to point to these extensive war preparations, especially as the election grow nearer. Even the success of Barack Obama makes the likelihood of war grow nearer, not by his intention of course, but by the nature of the fascist manipulators who stole the Presidency eight years ago. They face an interesting set of challenges. Clearly they have a deal with the collaborators like Nancy Pelosi not to hold them accountable for false war, invasion, occupation, torture, spying, and outrageous corruption. But will Pelosi maintain power in the same way? How can they guarantee that they will not face some new power arrangement that will throw them into their own Guantanamo?

It seems from Cheney’s peregrinations that the answer is more war—specifically, an extensive aerial bombardment of Iranian cities. The fact that Iran is innocent of any attack against the US matters nothing. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel will need to cooperate for such an atrocity, and that’s exactly where Cheney has been. The former US Captain Eric May and his Ghost Troop organization continue to call for vigilance against a false flag attack, and May further speculates that the date may have a numerological resonance like 7/7 or 9/11; hence March 22nd, for example, becomes a date to look at. I think it is probably still true that such an attack would frighten US citizens into mindless compliance. I was wrong about Obama, so maybe I’m wrong about the American people. Maybe people would see right through some further 9/11 atrocity, and would rise up in anger against the bloody-handed fascists. Who knows? I can only hope.

Here's an email comment that came in during the KBOO PressWatch broadcast:

"The one thing that worries me about Barack is his
proximity to
Brzezinski - the infamous co-author of the Middle
East as we know it -
sole author of "The Grand Chessboard" - a
descendant of Polish faux
aristocrats whose life-long mission is to destroy
Russia

jtg"

--That worries me, too, jtg.

she said what?

2008-03-06T06:43:00.001-08:00

[thurs AM update: go to antiwar.com (not otherwise endorsed) to find stories on the US/Venezuela/Ecuador/Colombia saber rattling (remembering that Colombia is a US client state and recently received 400 main battle tanks), and also note the article on the US naval buildup opposite Lebanon....]

I’ve noticed that all the discussions about the Presidential candidates are done with chains on brains. That is, the context in which these people seek political power is not to be discussed. So naturally I would like to bring out some of that context.

The fascist coup which destroyed Constitutional rule in this nation took place in the Supreme Court; five justices selected a dictator against the expressed will of the people. Although there was protest at the time it was not nationally organized. I admit I did not recognize the coup for what it was, since at the time an unreformed Al Gore, the one who sneered at the Congressional Black Caucus as they pled for Constitutional rule, had run for president with Joe Lieberman, now revealed to be the Republican representative for Israel. Indeed I think had the Supremes not shredded the Constitution in that way, the fascists would have found some other way to implement rule by fiat, perhaps in some variation of the empty Cessna which reminded the former President Clinton that he had gone to far. The corporate press keeps the issues shallow, and roars with rage when anyone points out that the World Trade Centers were obviously detonated, as the Vice President illegally directed military air traffic on that day in 2001.

The Presidential vote fraud of 2004 is not mentioned, either, so that the millions are encouraged to believe that a vote is still a vote in this country.

All unacceptable discussion has been purged from the Primaries, through the icy rejection by the corporate-controlled cameras. We may gingerly discuss how long to carry out our wars, but we dare not speak of withdrawal and war reparations. Impeachment is off the table. Prosecutions for torture and war crimes are off the table. Single payer health care has been skillfully excluded.

Given these circumstances, I would like to present an unhampered exhibition of what I would like to see as a change. The remaining campaigns all talk about change, but by that they mean superficial change.

I would like to limit wealth to one million dollars income annually, and two million dollars property. This would be a substantial change for multi-billionaires like Warren Buffet, but he would be guided through the shock by the free single-payer health care that we could thereby afford. I want a restoral of the dynasty tax, wrongly called the death tax; we need no dynasties, and the Constitution writers were right to take steps against them. We should also confiscate the wealth of repeat-offender corporations and take away their human status. So Exxon-Mobil, and Archer Daniels Midland and hundreds of others could cough up their wealth, even and especially the trillions hidden in semilegal tax dodge accounts in the Caribbean. This might require a show of force in Barbados and Aruba, but I’m okay with that. It could be fun, we could run a Jolly Roger flag up the masts of the big missile ships and aircraft carriers.

Oh yeah, and I would tax churches and force them to open their books. Repeat child offender churches would be disbanded as a menace to society.

My campaign platform, then, is total destruction of corporate rule, seizure of their assets, and movement towards a just society. I would free all nonviolent criminals from our astonishing, record-breaking, racist, three-million-strong prison state, and repeal all minimum-sentence rules. Since we would have plenty of money from the long-overdue confiscations, we could use the liberated labor to perform useful green infrastructure rebuilding—at family wages, of course. There is much to be done, including emergency weather remediation efforts to save the North Pole ice and the Greenland ice cap and of course out precious inland glaciers. No time like the present.

Naturally my Administration demands immediate withdrawal from invaded countries and the payment of substantial war reparations. This would traumatize our soldiers who have been lied into committing terrible acts of violence, but as I said, after confiscating criminal corporate wealth, we can afford to restore their sanity.

If this seems whimsical I would remind you that all freedoms and reforms seem like fairy tales until someone actually thinks the concepts true, and then takes steps to make it reality. The defiance of the idea is the groundbreaking start. If we agree to confine our thoughts and words to meek acceptance, then all we can hope for is mercy from the oppressors. I propose we overthrow the state instead.

I’ll give you an example of this paradigm from my own experience this week. I was driving my municipal bus through an area where three or four young men keep a sort of bus-riding tradition going. I had not driven the route for years and was surprised to see the same guys; I recognized them when they recognized me, and engaged in their time-honored tradition of fingering their genitalia while glaring at me. Since I am a transwoman and they have expressed their violent contempt in the past, their message is clear enough. It is a rapist gesture, intended to get under my skin. It works. I haven’t asked these guys what they do for a living, but it evidently has to do with prison-walking, cell phones, swift package exchanges in the back of the bus, and women who walk three steps behind them with their heads down.

So what to do? Nothing? I’m not Supertrans. There’s only so much I can do. So I got a marker pen, and wrote on the outside of my right arm the phrase “death to rapists.”

This put an immediate end to the crotch-feeling. Instead, two young men read the phrase out loud as they stepped on the bus. I smiled and nodded. Who wants to stand up for rapists? But the funny thing was, as I drove on through the morning, how many men were shaken by the phrase. One young man said, and I quote, “Bor-uh-buh--…as he pointed to my arm, and then recovering, said “two zones please.” I gave him his ticket with a warm smile. It seems a lot of young (and not so young) men have an unconscious or at least unexamined identification with the concept “rapist.”

As a pitiful aside, I also remember that several women spoke to me with real gratitude. Are we --as a society--sick, or what? And yes, I was raped at the age of twelve, by –of course—a Boy Scout leader.

Back to the larger political point, we have to be able to think in terms of what we want, and we have to be able to accept that what we want is legitimate. We have to be able to say “Capitalist” and “Imperialist” or equivalent words. We have to acknowledge that a society ruled by signing statements, manufactured fear, militarization of air and rail terminals, unprecedented prison-packing, and endless pointless war is a fascist society. Say it. Say “I live in a fascist society.” Now I ask you, what sort of society would you like to live in?

a lovely day for revolution

2008-02-29T08:39:00.000-08:00

Years after left commentators (like myself) began pointing out that we had a million people in prison--no, two million--no, more than any other country in history--no, two-point-two million--it's come out that one in a hundred persons is actually behind bars in this massive prison state:

http://rawstory.com//printstory.php?story=9483

What's left to say? If punishment stopped drug use, it would have ended in the Seventies, and if capitalism were the ultimate system, it would not be constantly associated with crime. I maintain that a capitalist society deserves crime--especially a cruel capitalist nutcase society like this one, in which people must rob banks to pay for their young children's cancer treatments. Well, no one can argue now that we aren't getting what we deserve! One in a hundred--incredible! Nearly three million completely chained and enslaved!

This is not enough for the police-state mentality, which also wants to criminalize dissent. Dig this:

"DEVICE WILL HELP SAN JOSE CONTROL LOUD CROWDS

By Sean Webby

San Jose Mercury News (2/25/08)

Think louder than a jet engine. Think the front row of a Metallica concert. Think of the piercing scream of a smoke alarm - inches from your ear.

Now, imagine a bad guy, holed up with hostages, refusing to budge, surrounded by sharp-shooters and anxious neighbors. [notice how the discussion is immediately drawn to scary criminals rather than to the demonstrators this will be used on--tm]
Instead of bullets, San Jose police can blast him with the latest in high-tech cop gadgetry: a dish-shaped, sonic weapon.
This ear-splitting, mind-blowing device is growing in popularity around the globe, used by soldiers flushing terrorists out of caves in Afghanistan to cruise ships scaring off pirates in the sea off Somalia.
So why did San Jose plunk down $27,000 in state grant money for its own Long Range Acoustic Device?
Police say it will be used mostly as a high-grade sound system to clearly amplify a police officer's order at great distances. But it can also be used as another of the department's "less-lethal" weapons, along with Tasers and 40mm projectile guns.

....[more at san jose mercury news]
----------
Of course, LRAD is not just a loudspeaker, but a focused sound device that can torture an individual in a crowd or make her think the voice of God or demons or whatever is speaking only to her.

Our mental conditioning towards fascist collaboration is at an advanced stage. I had to attend a training class for security and safety on my job—I drive a municipal bus—and in stead of teaching us how to deal with the inevitable strong earthquake for this region, or how to manage after strong storms, we were shown pictures of bombs and told to sweep the bus after every trip. We were told about the appearance of weaponized anthrax, and warned to call if someone left their backpack on the bus.

I was furious at this blatant fearmongering and risked my job speaking out against it at the meeting. The response was interesting; it was as if I could not be heard. I was ignored studiously, as if I were the voice of Satan. “Anthrax?” I jeered, “there’s no anthrax.” And indeed the only weaponized anthrax available, Ft. Detrick’s special de-staticized powder, was unlikely to re-appear considering that Lt. Col Philip Zack is out of the country. But we were to pretend that the stuff could appear at any time, and we’re expected to help create a a hysteria, the next time someone spills their flour or Coffee-Mate or whatever.

If there were any truth to the post-9/11 fearmongering, one might expect some furious defense from the instructor of the class when I raised objections. But there is of course no reason to do all the ridiculous things we do in the name of security, because the threat is far less significant than the threat of car accidents, smoking-related disease and deaths, alcohol-related injury and deaths, and deaths from poor nutrition. Compare the numbers of deaths in the US over the past ten years, add in death and injury from crime, and the ratio is staggering. Terrorism is not a statistically significant problem in the US. The only reason to undertake all of these ridiculous measures is to keep the population fearful and under control. And it’s worked beautifully. I refused to let some poor shmo put his gasoline-powered scooter on the bus, because of course the potential gas spill could injure dozens. He was too dim to understand, and felt persecuted, but there was nothing I could do; as I drove away, another Einstein commented that it was a good thing I had not allowed the man on, because ‘he could be a terrorist and might have wanted to blow us up.’ I don’t blame people with mental disabilities for their condition; it’s shocking to think on, but nonetheless true, that half the population, by definition, has an IQ in the double digits. I blame vicious demagogues for taking advantage of them. And as the neocon demagogues know, there is a strong intimidation factor to a blatantly false idea, when it is repeated as gospel by the masses of weak-minded, politically uneducated people.

Don't let it stand. Say something.

burp

2008-02-21T07:50:00.000-08:00

Well I suppose you heard the great news that the dictator has resigned. Yep, and there are great hopes that reforms and even democracy will break out in the long-dominated nation—oh wait, that was Cuba. Damn.

Regarding the mysterious cuts in undersea communications cables, one may apply some basic logical tools—such as Occam’s razor. What is the simplest explanation for the cutting of six cables within weeks of each other, given that there was no seismic activity that could have rent the cables asunder? The cables all carried internet and, importantly, banking internet traffic for major Middle East countries, and their disfunction caused considerable consternation from Egypt to Saudi Arabia to Iran.

So, if not a seaquake, what cut them? Did a giant undersea-cable-chomping crab suddenly get hungry? Occam’s razor says no. Did six ships with six sharp anchors go adrift in heavy seas—over several hundred miles—and cut the cables as they fought to stay afloat? Well, there were no heavy seas. Occam’s razor says that explanation won’t cut it.

No, the simplest explanation is that a nation with advanced submarine assets operating in the area cut the cable. The US has several submarines in the area; they cut the cables.

As for motive for the crime, the other logical tool to apply is Cui Bono—who benefits? With the subprime mortgage sector spreading its disintegrating weight to several other financial instruments, the dollar has weakened considerably, and investors in Saudi and Iran were very interested in transferring their assets—via internet transactions carried by the cables—out of the dollar and into safer funds. After the cable cuts that process was very much slowed down, and an unmistakable threat was sent to the dollar-transferers: Slow down, or we’ll cut you off altogether. It was an act of war, an act of violence, from a humiliated George Dumbya Bush, whose pleadings and scrapings fell on deaf ears in Saudi Arabia earlier this year. Who benefits? US imperial power benefits; Exxon/Mobil and Texaco/BP benefit. The massive sell-off of dollars has been delayed, perhaps with the taint of intimidation in the air; maybe it’ll hold off until the elections. If I were Saudi I’d be interpreting it that way, but then if I were Saudi I’d be part of a movement against women, and who knows ho brains like that function.

We may apply like measures to the news that the US used an antisatellite missile this week. Here is the official lapdog press phrase, in this case the BBC’s: ”But it is not yet known how successful the operation was - the missile needed to pierce the bus-sized satellite's fuel tank, containing more than 450kg (1,000lbs) of toxic hydrazine, which would otherwise be expected to survive re-entry."

If the BBC reporter had done a bit of research on the pablum spouted by the US military instead of reporting it at face value, he would have discovered that the fuel tank was of necessity quite thin and would be rather unlikely to survive the heat and turbulence of a re-entry from space, and in any event its explosive hydrazine would have burned up in the crater. So it wasn’t any more of a threat than any of dozens of other satellites that have fallen in recent years. No, this was a gesture towards China not to bother developing more nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. It’s another sign of our lying military careening out of control. It seems lying is in season, as we are also to believe this week that a kangaroo court conducted on a no-man’s-land six years after the destruction of all evidence relating to charges and several years after the defendants were tortured, is instead a free and fair trial reflecting values of democracy. I am reminded of Khalil Gibran, and certain silver-plated commodities.

“By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent Mon Feb 4, 5:27 PM ET

OSLO (Reuters) - Global warming this century could trigger a runaway thaw of Greenland's ice sheet and other abrupt shifts such as a dieback of the Amazon rainforest, scientists said on Monday.

They urged governments to be more aware of "tipping points" in nature, tiny shifts that can bring big and almost always damaging changes such as a melt of Arctic summer sea ice or a collapse of the Indian monsoon.

"Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change," the scientists at British, German and U.S. institutes wrote in a report saying there were many little-understood thresholds in nature.
"Tipping elements in the tropics, the boreal zone, and west Antarctica are surrounded by large uncertainty," they wrote, pointing to more potential abrupt shifts than seen in a 2007 report by the U.N. Climate Panel.

A projected drying of the Amazon basin, linked both to logging and to global warming, could set off a dieback of the rainforest.

"Many of these tipping points could be closer than we thought," lead author Timothy Lenton, of the University of East Anglia in England, told Reuters of the study.

Other sudden changes linked to climate change, stoked by human use of fossil fuels, included a dieback of northern pine forests, or a stronger warming of the Pacific under El Nino weather events that can disrupt weather worldwide, they wrote.

[UN Climate Panel:] The report also identified risks such as damage to northern pine forests -- widely exploited by the pulp industry -- because of factors such as more frequent fires and vulnerability to pests in warmer, drier conditions.

But it played down some other fears, such as of a runaway melt of Siberian permafrost, releasing stores of methane which is a powerful greenhouse gas.”[end]

The fact that the UN climate change panel should play down the methane threat is not in itself comforting to me; quite the opposite, in fact. These are people who have staked their reputations on stating very little in terms of projections, and their profession demands that they make all such speculation highly conservative, no matter how dramatic the looming facts may be.

The Siberian peat fields are already offgassing, as we know from fist-hand reports. That tipping point has been reached, and passed. The North Pole very nearly melted just a few years ago and of course will follow its current mathematically predicable trajectory to Summer oblivion. That is another tipping point passed. The UN Climate panel will not say the obvious, that the barbarians have breached the gate and the city is doomed. That would be unprofessional.

Yet it is professionals who have cored the ancient glaciers and found evidence of sudden climate-borne extinctions. We don’t know the cause of the tipping points previously, but we do know that once the ball is rolling, we will suddenly find ourselves in a situation in which less than a quarter of the oxygen now available to us at every breath can be had. Once the oceanic clathrates boil up from their slumber, the methane will displace the oxygen and that will be that. At first you’ll get a shocking headache, and at some point you’ll want to go to sleep, You will awaken several times, each time more confused, and then you will not waken.

But that’s a kind and conservative view of climate-change clathrate eruption. It assumes that the methane will somehow get mixed evenly, right away. But that’s not physically possible. There will be places and times in which the bubble of methane will simply displace the rest of the atmosphere, and in those places—I assume hundreds if not thousands of miles wide—there will simply be no oxygen, and death will come far more quickly for you, me, everyone you love, the geese that decorate the field, the squirrel in the tree, this city, that elementary school—every breathing thing, dead.

But excuse me, I don’t want to get overdramatic here. No need to clamor for extraordinary or emergency measures here. I could be wrong. Even though one of the first clathrate burps was caught on video recently off Santa Barbara. Forget what I said. Forget now. Now you are forgetting. Hey, great eclipse last night.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080204/sc_nm/climate_tipping_dc_2

http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/07/contrails.climate/

http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2008/01/080115102706.htm

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:impIRiEdpikJ:oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/03windows/background/education/media/03win_badday.pdf+clathrate+burp&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us&client=safari

http://aphriza.wordpress.com/2006/07/31/pulling-the-clathrate-trigger/

हैप्पी कांतेम्प्त ऑफ़ कांग्रेस वीकएंड!

2008-02-15T07:36:00.000-08:00

Hee-lariously, the headline above was transliterated into Bengali. I have no idea why. I don't remember what it said, either.

This week's PressWatch was able to take its first 'live' email (to theresa58x@yahoo.com) thanks to the generosity of Chris Andrae, who loaned me her laptop for half an hour.

I used the occasion to rant about Infragard--it's not something protecting InfraMan's crotch, but rather a James Bond Junior program for "corporate leaders." It's the weirdest, most fascist thing to come down the pike since Antonin Scalia--read more about it at the progressive.org website.

Get this--after all these months of delaying:

"The House voted Thursday to hold two of President Bush’s confidants in contempt for failing to cooperate with an inquiry into whether a purge of federal prosecutors was politically motivated. Angry Republicans boycotted the vote and staged a walkout.

The vote was 223-32 Thursday to hold presidential chief of staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers in contempt. The citations charge Miers with failing to testify and accuse her and Bolten of refusing Congress’ demands for documents related to the 2006-2007 [Federal Attorney] firings.....The White House said the Justice Department would not ask the U.S. attorney to pursue the House contempt charges."

That's a section of the mainstream media take on the contempt charges. I had given up on them, after all these months of sneaking one-month extensions at the last minute. Note that the last line says that the Bushites won't cooperate-- the arrogant swine.... Now it's time to contact Conyers (and the whole Gang That Can't Shoot Straight Because They Won't Even Load Their Damn Guns) that they should proceed with instructing the House Sergeant of Arms to ARREST THEIR SORRY ASSES ANYWAY and deputize anyone they need to get 'er done. (I volunteer.) To the tune of That's Entertainment: "That's Constitution...." La la la.

And in the meantime, I have some questions--just a few--about the Guantanamo trials: (1) Why six+ years later? (2) Why military trials when we all want to see the evidence? (3) Where is the evidence? (4) Why was the evidence (of the destroyed buildings, etc.) carted away and never examined forensically, in complete defiance of all laws of investigation? (5) How is Guantanamo gulag legal anyway? (6) How is it ok to torture and then try someone? (7) How is it American if it doesn’t use the Bill of Rights, particularly the 4th and 5th Amendments? (8) How is it 2008, if we’re going back to 1215 before King John signed the Magna Carta and allowed habeas corpus?

So long as I'm asking questions about torture and detentions: Where are the KBR detention camps that have been paid for by Congress, and what manner of transport has been devised to fill them up?

Oy.

imperialism starts at home

2008-02-07T17:51:00.000-08:00

While I was at my workplace yesterday, I heard a recording of Hillary Clinton’s voice saying that her mother, who was present at the speech, was born before the right for women to vote. There was an appropriately enthusiastic response from the crowd at the implication that things have now improved to the point that a woman can seriously run for President. And I remember thinking, yeah, now we have equal rights to be bloody imperial warmongers, hoorah. I did begin to think about gender, however. It seems to me that the original precedent for thinking of another human being as the other, as a lesser, as someone who may be exploited for work without respectful compense—the original sin, as it were, lies in gender.

I was brought up as a boy, and confusing as that was for me at times, I learned that I was expected to sort of herd my younger sister. Far from being accepted as a rival, she was to be a sort of livestock. Talking over her was expected, correcting her—although as it happens she’s quite a bit more intelligent than I am. Every male learns these things to lesser or greater degrees at an early age, and then the society sets in with a theater-wardrobe of oppressive roles. One of the more lasting oppressions is the disastrous idea that women are exclusively responsible for home care and child care. I see that weakening around the edges in Portland’s liberal Hawthorne District, but I don’t hear discussion about it nationally. The economic benefit to men of this poisonous idea is undeniable; conversely, the economic weakening and social exclusion that it hangs on women is devastating. Meanwhile the religious fanatics picket the local Planned Parenthood, trying to intimidate women from removing a blastocyst the size of a pinhead, on the absurd theory that it represents the equivalent of a fully formed baby.

It’s as if children don’t exist except as a purview of women; further, women, who certainly cannot produce children without the enthusiastic cooperation of men, are somehow solely to blame for their existence. And they are to blame for the economic devastation and workplace exclusion of single parenting; and they are to blame if the children suffer.

Imagine if a man earning a living wage—let’s say at least eighteen dollars an hour with health benefits—wanted to pay properly for the care of three small children. Let’s allow him no exploitation; he pays the same wage, for after all raising and educating children is more than full-time work. He would then expend all of his wage, and have nothing for himself. Or he could abandon his good job and take care of the kids. He would then live in poverty. His peers would then doubtless chastise himself for his choice and say that he had a right to his own dreams, and perhaps imply that he was weak for not pursuing them while he was raising the children.

Of course, most divorcees and widowers do nothing of the sort. They immediately find a woman to exploit for child care. This is called love.

It is child care, more than any other economic paradigm, that enforces the gender apartheid system we live in. That is not to denigrate the myriad insults and injuries that women face as they grow to maturity, from exclusion from activities to that old standard, molestation and rape. Rape is the enforcement arm of patriarchy. But this is where we learn—male and female—from an early age that there is an other, someone inherently lesser, someone to whom it is allowable and necessary to assign punishment, disdain, banishing, death. It starts with gender.

We are told this is the natural order of things, which is a blasphemy against the universe if ever I heard one. It is the unnatural order of things, and one of the more poisonous aspects of it is that it can then be transferred to any person or group that is not viewed as accepted or virtuous—and that certainly includes any group not well known, which then falls under xenophobic suspicion. Gender apartheid is a mental disorder that swiftly spreads into gaybashing, warmongering, racism, chauvinism, and hatred of dissent. There’s no mystery to it; once you can withdraw your feelings from your won women kin, you can even more easily designate others as targets rather than people, or as unbekannte as Hitler once said. Notice that societies that are more brutal generally also treat women like livestock—Saudi Arabia, for example, where women are forbidden to drive, where some women live in special compounds where they live out their lives as sex objects and zoo animals, after having been abducted from around the world, yes, including from the United States.

So I am glad to see that Hillary is able to run for President, and I am glad to see that Obama is also succeeding so far, if only because superficially they represent a weakening of the standards of oppression. Their corporate funding reveals just how superficial that impression is. The real wheeling and dealing goes on, and I fear the wars will go on, including the upcoming aerial bombing war with Iran.

And the denigration and punishment of all that is feminine goes on, in its many forms; we are barraged with images of women as lithe and lonesome and young and vulnerable, selling everything from makeup to cars. And then there’s me, the ultimate insult to the gender apartheid system, altering a male-appearing body to a somewhat feminine appearance. The insults, aggression, and assaults I face from the public are directly linked to the reasons women can’t drive in Saudi Arabia. It’s the same dynamic that lets men create and direct wars against others across the world. It’s the same reason we have 2.2 million people, disproportionately people of color, languishing in our foul and terrifying prisons: we accept exploitation as a way of life, and we learned the ways of exploitation by starting with our own mothers and sisters. One crime feeds another.

war preparations

2008-02-01T15:03:00.000-08:00

I mentioned on KBOO yesterday that the nuclear supercarriers Truman, Eisenhower, and Stennis were present in the Persian Gulf along with their associated flotillas (missile destroyers, submarines, et cetera). Wayne Madsen reports today that a third underwater communications cable has been cut in the region. The BBC also has it:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7222536.stm

Although the perpetrator of the three cable cuts is of course not known, the US has the technology and the motive to do the deed. I view this as a warning flag. Time to organize!

No War With Iran!

experiment

2008-02-01T07:48:00.000-08:00

When I try to post on this thing, it often reverts on my screen to rows of question marks...so I have no idea if this will work, but--

I want to thank everyone who called KBOO yesterday and sent in ten thousand bucks just like we asked! It was very heartening to see the immediate support. KBOO has proven time after time that we can break the rules and still keep kicking. That's because KBOO really IS community radio and doesn't just claim the title.

Yesterday I broadcast the "news you're not supposed to know," which included a fair amount--okay, a really overwhelming amount of fundraising pitches by yours truly. I got in at least $915 (I know that others mentioned my show when donating later) and I'm proud of that, and thankful. I got to sign a copy of my book "Jeezus"--I still have a few hard copies (if you want one you can use the search bar at lulu.com and order it online, or contact me directly).

I spoke of the ongoing buildup of the coming war against Iran--mostly by following the nuclear aircraft carriers (Stennis, Eisenhower, and Truman) which have gathered in the Persian Gulf (the imperial fascists now want you to call it the "Arabian Gulf" but I won't. Well, maybe if I were waterboarded, but in that case I'd probably mostly say "momeeeeeeeee!!"). I think the Kearsarge is thereabouts--that's an 888-foot-long Marine carrier--but I'm not sure.

I also brought up the Great Methane Death, also known as the "clathrate burp." Clathrates are semisolid methane compounds that layer the ocean bottom. They are unstable at just a few degrees above their current temperature. The articl I read from was four years old, and had the tone of "In the worst scenario"--and of course, events measured by climate scientists now pass the worst scenarios. Long story short: we're all gonna die.

Yeah, I hate to admit it, but that 2012 apocalypse talk might be true. Once these clathrates pop to the surface (they burn on exposure to oxygen, so we have the scenario of the oceans burning--whoa--)they will displace so much oxygen that you and I will be sucking in air that has the reduced availability of oxygen normally found at sixteen thousand feet altitude.

I don't know about you, but I'm turning 50 this year, I haven't been particularly active, and I suspect that if you took me to a mountain-top at sixteen thousand feet, I would turn blue and die. Of suffocation. My spouse and my daughter have asthma. So do a lot of people. We're really looking at a decimation of the human population.

Here's the probable sequence of events: The Northern polar ice cap, which is scheduled to disappear in the next few years under global warming, will simply be gone in the Summer. This Summer? Maybe. Maybe next. In any event, it will go and the albedo--the reflectivity--that was formerly provided by the ice will go with it, producing rain storms that will accelerate the melt of the Greenland ice cap. And the Greenland cap is on the move, baby. It's full of holes that direct water underneath the glaciers, lubricating their slide to the sea.

It would be nice to think that shucking so much ice off of Greenland will then produce so much cloud and storm activity that the polar cap re-forms right away. Why not? It could happen.

My point is that I can see that emergency measures could be taken right now to prevent this catastrophe. A low-orbit cloud of (pick your material) could be detonated over low North Pole orbit, and voila, the ice stays. But no. The governments that could direct that activity are instead sparring over who gets the freaking oil to be found under the melted ice cap!

So, long story short: the Polar ice goes, Greenland slides, the clathrates burst to the surface, massively accelerating global warming and choking us all (mostly) to death. Not my idea of a good time. Not what I would do to my daughter, my love, to all humanity, to what's left of the world's ecosystems. Not okay by me.

But--who's listening anyway?

the personal as political

2008-01-25T10:33:00.000-08:00

I conceived this blog as an auxilary to my PressWatch broadcasts on KBOO 90.7 FM Community Radio (kboo.fm), so I intended at first to post my notes for the programs; but it occurs to me that re-use of material under "fair use" probably doesn't apply as well to this electronic forum, so I'm going to stop doing that.

Instead I'll post URLs for the kboo.fm webcasts. Here's the link (you'll have to cut and paste) for last week's comments on reversing global warming (see also the post below):

http://www.kboo.fm/node/5651

--and here's the link for this week's program on war, corruption, and the economic meltdown:

http://www.kboo.fm/node/5650

There. This week on PressWatch, I started off with a mention of cocaine shenanigans from madcowprod.com--go there, you'll be shocked, and that isn't easy these days, is it? I also quoted George Soros at length, about the reason that, this time, the economic crash will keep crashing. It's about the end of a paradigm, the logical result of all these years of Reagan voodoo economics. I suppose there's a reason George Bush Junior got bad grades in economics.

Now, to the personal. I have just come close to losing my house, just like so many others--not because I had adjustable rate mortgages (mine are fixed). Not because I had no savings--I had four months' worth. No--it's because I was off work for nine months and more; and the only reason I'm working at all is because I'm a union member.

Yep, that old dinosaur, the supposedly corrupt Union, saved my transgendered ass. I was able to return to work , not because the Company wanted me (at all) but because the union contract preserved my eligibility after all those months. Herein lies the moral of today's lesson. Now go home.

Kidding. Because there's more to say; the reason I was off work was due to the collapse of my ability to concentrate--pathologized as Panic Disorder. But there's more still; I had panic disorder because of gender harrassment. And the reason I suffer so much gender harrassment, in part, is because the neocons, the Republicans, and the conservative Democrats learned long ago that they could mobilize people based on their fears. It's difficult and even a little frightening, under our system of patriarchy and gender apartheid, to accept transwomen as members of society--and so it was quite easy to get people to fear and hate. Not a day passes without an insult, or some harrassment, or a threat, or actual violence. It's enough to drive anyone nuts. It took years to break me.

But now I'm "cured" and I'm back, driving a city bus. My mortgages will be saved, and I'll stay in my home. I don't want to paint a saintly picture of the Union--in fact, a majority (but not an essential supermajority) of Union members in my workplace voted to support an anti-gay measure just a couple of years ago. But it's the basic human right of organization for collective bargaining that kept my job--a good thing, because I didn't find any other workplace that wanted to hire me. Who wants trouble?

to the barricades!

2008-01-17T05:50:00.000-08:00

There is a mechanism for reversing global warming. Not slowing--REVERSING. And you can do something about it. Read, copy and paste (with url) the following articles and commentary, which show that, amazingly, we have the capacity to create a world-wide ENGINE TO REVERSE GLOBAL WARMING simply by demanding some simple changes in air traffic patterns!
................

http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/07/contrails.climate/

(CNN) -- The thin wisps of condensation that trail jet airliners have a significant influence on the climate, according to scientists who studied U.S. skies during a rare interruption in national air traffic after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

During the three-day commercial flight hiatus, when the artificial clouds known as contrails all but disappeared, the variations in high and low temperatures increased by 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) each day, said meteorological researchers.

While the temperature range is significant, whether the jet clouds have a net effect on global warming remains unknown.

"I think what we've shown are that contrails are capable of affecting temperatures," said lead scientist David Travis of the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. "Which direction, in terms of net heating or cooling, is still up in the air."
Contrails Explainer:
Long white wisps of artificial clouds high in the atmosphere, contrails are the condensation trails left behind by jet airplanes.
Similar to human exhalation making a fog in chilly weather, contrails form when warm humid engine exhaust meets extremely cool air in the atmosphere.
Air temperatures where contrails form are generally lower than minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 40 degrees Celsius).
Like natural cirrus clouds, contrails insulate the planet, blocking out incoming solar energy from above and keeping in heat down below.
Scientists estimate that contrails cover some 0.1 percent of the Earth's overall surface, with regional concentrations as high as 20 percent.

In many ways, contrails behave in the same manner as cirrus clouds, thin high-altitude floaters that block out solar energy from above and trap in heat below. n many ways, contrails behave in the same manner as cirrus clouds, thin high-altitude floaters that block out solar energy from above and trap in heat below.

As a result, they help reduce the daily range in daytime highs and nighttime lows. Contrails, by providing additional insulation, further reduce the variability.

With air traffic growing and contrails becoming more prevalent, the natural variation will further decline and could disrupt regional ecosystems, some scientists speculate.

....(read more at the above url)....

Here's more on that topic:

http://www.rps.psu.edu/probing/contrails.html
Katie Green, Penn State:

[snip]....

Looking at daytime highs and nighttime lows, Carleton and Travis found the average daily temperature range across the no-fly period to be almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit larger than when jets do fly. This implies, Carleton explains, that contrails lower daytime maximum temperatures and increase nighttime low temperatures—probably in the same way that cirrus clouds do, by blocking some solar radiation from reaching earth's surface during the day, and insulating against heat loss at night.

Since finding this association, Carleton has used contrails as a sort of metric for measuring meteorological and climatic change. Because these jet signatures can only form when the upper atmosphere is humid and cold, they mostly appear over the Midwest and Northeast. Interestingly, notes Carleton, since the 1970s the frequency of contrail formation has outpaced the increase of air traffic in these areas. If this trend continues, he says, it could further decrease daily temperature ranges and even evaporation for those regions, a change that could be detrimental to certain trees, plants or insects sensitive to temperature and moisture changes.

Will such climate change prompt airlines to seek to reduce jet emissions, similar to automotive companies?

"Given the financial problems of the larger airlines in recent years, contrails are not likely to gain their attention," Carleton says. But governments in Europe and Britain "where jets also hash mark the sky" are becoming concerned, he says. Some steps that could cut down on contrails, he suggests, would be reducing the amount of sulfur in jet fuel, and re-routing flight paths either to lower altitudes, where the air is warmer, or higher altitudes, where it's often dryer.

—Katie Greene [end article]
…………………..

This data suggests obvious mechanisms for reversing global climate change. Flight patterns for jets should be altered for maximum contrail formation during the day and eliminated at night. David Travis’ studies showed that contrails very significantly reduce warming during daylight hours, and he also showed that night-radiation of heat into space is more efficient absent the contrails.

Kate Greene commented in her article that airline corporations are unlikely to be interested in making the change—and that’s where you come in. The airlines must be forced into the new schedule of global warming reversal by an unstoppable demand from the people. Forward these articles and their urls to your friends and to public officials. Get their attention with a follow-up phone call.

Call the NOAA and get them on board. Call your representatives, Senators, and any politician who doesn’t want to waste away the planet with the catastrophic events that will follow the total polar melt, which as I mentioned last week, may come any summer now and probably before 2013. The airlines must be put on notice worldwide to route their planes over high-humidity areas during the day, and to stop all flights at night through contrail-forming thermoclines, or raise their cruising levels above the contrail-forming layers.

Don’t let the planet’s ecosystem die while you stand around doing nothing. We have a means to save ourselves and repair the world for our children and future generations, and we can’t afford to let corporate rule get in the way.

By the way, this suggestion for saving the planet is UNTESTED. I do know, however, of an absolutely certain way to force global warming into the methane-clathrate-exposure stage, into the most-everyone-dies stage, and that's by doing nothing--and doing nothing includes limiting your power and car use, riding a bicycle, recycling--those are all admirable things and you should keep doing them, but they won't stop this global warming, which has already gone into a momentum that greenhouse-gas reduction can't stop in our lifetimes. This plan for contrail shielding is the only method available to us to reverse global warming. This is it. There's no time to dawdle or sneer.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
1401 Constitution Avenue, NW
Room 6217
Washington, DC 20230
Phone: (202) 482-6090
Fax: (202) 482-3154

Sen. Ron Weyden
Portland, OR
1220 SW 3rd Avenue
Suite 585
Portland, OR 97204
(503) 326-7525

Senator Gordon Smith
Portland, OR Office
One World Trade Center
121 SW Salmon Street, Suite 1250
Portland, OR 97204
Phone: 503.326.3386
Fax: 503.326.2900

Rep. Earl Blumenauer

729 N.E. Oregon Street
Suite 115
Portland, OR 97232
(503) 231-2300
Fax: (503) 230-5413
Fax for Scheduling Requests: (503) 230-5413

Of course these agencies and politicians also have web forms for contact.

And now for bad news (DID YOU CALL OR FAX YET??)

ScienceDaily (Jan. 16, 2008) — An international team of scientists, led by Dr Edward Hanna at the University of Sheffield, has demonstrated that recent warm summers have caused the most extreme Greenland ice melting in 50 years.
The new research provides further evidence of a key impact of global warming and helps scientists place recent satellite observations of Greenland´s shrinking ice mass in a longer-term climatic context.
Dr Hanna of the University´s Department of Geography, alongside some of the World´s leading Greenland glaciologists and climatologists, analysed a combination of key meteorological and glaciological records spanning a number of decades as part of the research.
The findings show how the Greenland Ice Sheet responded to more regional, rather than global, changes in climate between the 1960s and early 1990s. However the last fifteen years has seen an increase in ice melting and a striking correspondence of Greenland with global temperature variations, demonstrating Greenland´s recent response to global warming.
Summer 2003 was exceptionally warm around the margins of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which resulted in the second-highest meltwater running off from the Ice Sheet of the last 50 years. Summer 2005 experienced a record-high melt, which was very recently superseded in summer 2007 – a year almost as warm as 2003.
....(read more at:)

University of Sheffield (2008, January 16). Record Warm Summers Cause Extreme Ice Melt In Greenland. ScienceDaily. http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2008/01/080115102706.htm
...........................
War research for today's PressWatch:

A massive naval buildup is taking place in the Persian Gulf. USS Lincoln leaving port today for ‘training,’ USS Stennis information is consistently blocked, the USS Truman is in the Persian ("Arabian") Gulf, USS Enterprise is also in the Persian Gulf, and the USS Nimitz just arrived at the Persian Gulf; all those are vast nuclear-powered aircraft carriers with their attendant warship, submarine and supply flotillas. The supercarrier USS Kitty Hawk (not nuclear) may be in Yokosuka port.

…………….
Globalresearch.ca

Bush: Iran guilty if US ships are hit
Remarks made after US Navy withdrew allegations against Iran

Global Research, January 15, 2008
Press TV (Iran)

US President George W. Bush says the White House would hold Iran responsible if American ships were attacked in the Persian Gulf.
Bush insisted that Tehran had behaved provocatively during an incident in the Strait of Hormuz involving an identification check by Iranian boats.
The remarks came after the US Navy withdrew the allegation that Iran had harassed US warships in the Persian Gulf.
"If they hit our ships, we will hold Iran responsible," said the president. [more at globalresearch.ca]

………………

Here's some official bullstuff from Associated Press:

TERENCE HUNT
AP News

Jan 13, 2008 02:36 EST

A naval commander told President Bush on Sunday that he is taking the recent confrontation between Iranian and U.S. Navy forces in the Persian Gulf "deadly seriously."

White House press secretary Dana Perino said Bush did not raise the showdown in the Hormuz Strait when he spoke with U.S. Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, commander of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, which patrols the Gulf. But Perino said Cosgriff told the president that he took it very seriously when an Iranian fleet of high-speed boats on Jan. 6 charged at and threatened to blow up a three-ship U.S. Navy convoy passing near Iranian waters. The Iranian naval forces vanished as the American ship commanders were preparing to open fire....
------------------------

Grim enough for you? Take a laugh break with my new satire "Jeezus!" If you loved "Left Behind," you'll despise "Jeezus!"
http://www.lulu.com/content/1011766

buildup

2008-01-12T17:25:00.001-08:00

As far as I can tell from trolling info sites on the Web, the nuclear carrier battle groups Enterprise, Truman, and Nimitz are in the Persian Gulf area, and the Marine carrier Kearsarge is in Haifa port.

Good flying weather is on the way.

LHS/Diebold, Rove, and global meltdown

2008-01-10T09:52:00.000-08:00

Welcome KBOO listeners!

This is the first post-PressWatch blog post, which is to say it's the first following a mention on KBOO. I think it will take several weeks' shows to produce that cyber-response, but it's worth the wait, because I'm eager to be on board with the new form of radio, the interactive radio-plus-Web that will hopefully increase participation on both ends and build a new information paradigm that will challenge the corporate-owned mind-control press.

You can find the most recent PressWatch audio on kboo.fm.

Why has the corporate-owned media accepted the New Hampshire voting results for Clinton when (a) they are at variance with the polls, unlike all other results (b) they are on LHS/Diebold hackable machines (c) they favor Rove's predicted/favored winner for the Democratic primaries and (d) Rove himself, despite his involvement in Plame's outing and the attorney/caging corruption, is writing for the New York Times as a "respectable" elections commentator? If there is a name to anti-democracy, it is Karl Rove. Did someone forget? Are we all supposed to obediently pretend it ain't so?

On global warming's absence from the MSM, it's useful to follow the money--as in this machine translation from
Deutsche Welle: "…[The governments of] Russia, Canada, the USA, Denmark and Norway have waited exactly for this instant. Still the assumed treasures are hidden under the eternal ice, but the more the ice cover abates, the closer the possibility of mining these treasures comes. Russian researchers estimate ten billion tons of oil and gas in the Lomonossow, a submarine mountain range, which extends between Greenland and east Siberia and runs rather exactly under the north pole. "

They may not have long to wait: Polar melt may occur by 2013; if we assume that will be in August, we have 2,065 days left to sit on our hands or demand action from US and world governments. The melting of the pole may trigger storms or release more tundra methane or ocean clathrates, worsening the situation.

Here is some of the copy I used for this week's show--first, from the BBC:

Arctic summers ice-free 'by 2013'

By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News, San Francisco

Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice.
Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.
Summer melting this year reduced the ice cover to 4.13 million sq km, the smallest ever extent in modern times.
Remarkably, this stunning low point was not even incorporated into the model runs of Professor Maslowski and his team, which used data sets from 1979 to 2004 to constrain their future projections.

In the end, it will just melt away quite suddenly

Professor Peter Wadhams:
"Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007," the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC.

"So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative."
[....]
But it is has become apparent in recent years that the real, observed rate of summer ice melting is now starting to run well ahead of the models.
The minimum ice extent reached in September 2007 shattered the previous record for ice withdrawal set in 2005, of 5.32 million square km.
The long-term average minimum, based on data from 1979 to 2000, is 6.74 million square km. In comparison, 2007 was lower by 2.61 million square km, an area approximately equal to the size of Alaska and Texas combined, or the size of 10 United Kingdoms.
.....[There is much more to that report--find it at:]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7139797.stm

Could it get worse? Yes:

(AP) OSLO -- The next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change should deal with the "frightening" possibility Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets start melting at the same time, the chief UN climate scientist said yesterday.

The panel, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with U.S. activist and politician Al Gore, has released four climate assessment reports already, including summaries for policy makers that are approved by government representatives.

Though there are no firm plans for a fifth report, the panel is still inviting scientists to submit material on glaciers in the far north and south, IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said.

"My hope is the next report, if there is one, will be able to provide much better information on the possibility of these two large bodies of ice possibly melting, in what seems like a frightening situation," Pachauri said during a visit to Oslo.

Go ahead--add to the comments and vote in the poll!

Theresa

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

2008-01-06T16:14:00.000-08:00

I've been researching some technology, as best I can, without scientific training. It isn't easy; when I see a phrase describing a device like the "spl sim/50-mW peak power 4.3-THz quantum cascade laser," I have to look at the abbreviations and slowly tease the meaning out. I know I'm on thin ice.

The key words in this case are "thz laser," which refers to a device that uses terahertz-frequency light. It seems that this near-infrared frequency is quite useful for peering into brain metabolism. Apparently (according to a Japanese study) it causes brain cells to add adenosine triphosphate, after prolonged exposure. It's used for detecting tumors, too, but my interest here is in what our corporate-and-government scientists want to do with it. Here's a hint:

"Enormous efforts are made to achieve advances in image quality and acquisition time of today's standard medical imaging modalities as X-ray fluoroscopy, computed tomography, magnetic resonance and ultrasound. However, new principal diagnostic insights cannot be expected from the linear extension of the physical principles of these methods. In this paper a review is given on imaging modalities in the 1012 Hz - 1014 Hz domain that include new physical principles as terahertz and diffuse optical imaging or well known principles - that had been rejected some years ago and are recently raised to interest by detector advances - as thermography."
(http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1616778&isnumber=33900)

Or in other words, we'd gone as far as we could with MRIs and CAT scans, but now we've got terahertz.

Thermography, computer aided tomography and terahertz lasers--add 'em all together, develop an analytical software based on observations, and you've got real-time mind reading technology.

Raw Story (rawstory.com) ran an article in '06 stating that the ACLU had lodged a complaint about mind reading technology being sold to the US government (http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/ACLU_objects_as_two_companies_offer_0628.html). But it turns out that information is sooooo '06. THAT old article is merely about magnetic image resonance:

"Two private companies have announced that they will begin to offer "lie detection" services using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), as early as this summer. fMRI can produce live, real-time images of people's brains as they answer questions, view images, listen to sounds, and respond to other stimuli.
These companies are marketing their services to federal government agencies, including the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, the National Security Agency and the CIA, and to state and local police departments."

Pff. Bosh. We scoff at that rusty old stuff. Heck, with that old machine you would have to physically restrain your victim--er, I mean suspected terrorist--while torturing, excuse me I mean interrogating. Well, to be fair, I suppose a non-lethal dose of scopalomine, while terrifying, would produce the necessary more-or-less temporary paralysis. But this is the shiny new year, and with the portability of terahertz lasers, our saviors in the secret police agencies will be able to read our minds' metabolic traces and signatures--at a distance.

Well, what's the big deal?--you may ask. After all, you've never had a stray thought. Have you?

I didn't generate this information (I'm sorry to say) from my buh-RILLiant analysis of scientific progress. No, it would have slipped right past my high-school-educated nose without an article in globalresearch.ca: "Intrusive Brain Reading Surveillance Technology: Hacking the Mind," by Carole Smith, Global Research, December 13, 2007. (Rather than paste in another clumsy url, I'll just let you use the search bar at the site.) Smith says that the US army has already deployed a nasty mess-with-your-head device called the Long Range Audio Device (LRAD), which uses diffractive microwave beams to project a voice (or voices or nasty suggestions) directly into your head, making you think that you're suffering from audio hallucinations, or possibly instructions from God. Now it will be possible to coordinate such flimflammery with direct observations of your mental process.

Smith says the ball is already rolling, quoting the Guardian:

"A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person’s brain and read their intentions before they act.

The research breaks controversial new ground in scientists’ ability to probe people’s minds and eavesdrop on their thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading technology may be used in the future.

‘Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out something that from the outside there's no way you could possibly tell is in there. It's like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall,’ said John-Dylan Haynes at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, who led the study with colleagues at University College London and Oxford University."

You don't suppose that our good ol' Uncle Sam might use such technology to, say, snoop on dissenters or drive people mad....do you?

Because that would be an awfully disloyal thought. What kind of terrorist sympathizer or potential homegrown terrorist thinks a thought like that? Better put it out of your mind.

Fast.

off the agenda

2008-01-04T11:24:00.000-08:00

Take a look at some of the posts over the last year on gregpalast.com or blackboxvoting.org, and you'll see part of the problem I have with the US Presidential election season, namely, that the whole question of whether we actually get to vote is unanswered. We have the chair of the Kansas GOP actually putting to print his brag that he has successfully "caged" (i.e. stolen) votes in a wholesale manner. It's the tip of an ongoing 50-state Republican antidemocracy effort, started and previously supervised by a certain Mr. Rove. That's on top of the already exposed thrown election in 2004 Ohio, on top of all manner of vote "spoilage," topped off by outright theft, like Diebold machines that switch votes right in your face.

Shall I make a list of other things off the Obama/Huckabee agenda? There's:

Socialized medicine

The vicious and escalating air war against Iraq

The planned-for-Spring air war versus Iran

Accountability for torture, Presidential signing statements, illegal war we were lied into, etc. (no impeachments, all pardoned)

Global climate change--the polar ice cap is to melt by 2013, is anyone awake? Hello?!

Millions of new Americans without documents or access to their own Social Security payments (Bienvenidos, indeed!)

--And that's just a start.

Oh, did I say "millions of new Americans?" Yes, I meant that. I didn't sign on to Left and progressive ideas just to select a class of people and sneer at them as "illegals." It was illegal to free slaves once here, but now we celebrate those who did it. We on the Left need to show some BIG solidarity for Hispanic immigrants or else admit that we have lost our hearts and our ideals. Writer and professor Aviva Chomsky points out in her book "They Take Our Jobs!" that nuestra hermanas y hermanos put $7 BILLION per year into Social Security. They have to leave it here, too. We can take a snot-nosed attitude towards millions of working class people and say they have to leave, or we can admit that they're already US Americans, stand up for their inalienable human rights, and form an unstoppable coalition. Not a tough choice if you ask me. Who's with me? (Is that a cricket?)

I didn't say it would be easy; I'm talking about by-and-large Catholics, and yes, the Pope's a Nazi (see my previous post). So what. We either have the guts for revolution, or we don't.

But to return to the point: With all these items off the agenda, the Presidential elections serve mostly as a mind-control forum conducted by the corporate media. Wherever their corporatist agenda is threatened, they attack--as in the Howard Dean audio-manipulated "scream," as in asking Dennis Kucinich about freaking UFOs, as in keeping Ron Paul off the FOX debates even though he outranks Giuliani in any poll (no, I'm not for Ron Paul).

The TV stays off.

The Pope strikes a blow for Peace

2008-01-03T07:14:00.000-08:00

The latest New Year's statement from Pope Benedict implies that the presence of gay and lesbian couples is deleterious to world peace. His argument, if I follow it correctly, is that peace can only prevail if male-and-female couples produce children. It's an argument that does not fall far from his former Fuhrer's position that gays, lesbians and trans persons were a threat to the cleanliness of the State. That was the policy while Johnny Ratzinger, now Pope, was serving in the Hitler Youth, and then as an antiaircraft gunner in the Wehrmacht. I think Johnny learned it well.

I'm about to go take a test to see if I'm smart enough to clean buses. I had a superior position driving the buses for years, a better paying (twice as much) position that brought me into contact with the public, where I received the occasional compliment and safe driving award. I was driven from that job by individuals, and sometimes groups of people, who saw me as a sort of uber-queer, a person who was so obviously homosexual that I wore a dress to a job (a job many of them would kill for, one of the last blue-collar union jobs in the US).

These defenders of Purity are egged on by the Karl Roves, the Popes, the Huckabees, and other demagogues of this world, who long ago figured out that if one cannot articulate a helpful or progressive policy in order to unify the masses, a common enemy will do, and the weaker that enemy the better. In my case, the masses are told that I am a danger to their children. Anyone knows that anything goes defending one's kids! Hence the cavalcade of insults, threats, and assaults that literally destroyed my ability to safely concentrate on driving a 13-ton behemoth.

The phenomenon is made weirder and more ironic, by the fact that some of the worst perpetrators are sadly closeted individuals themselves. Lately the gaysplosions that revealed Haggard and Craig are in the news; previously it was J. Edgar Hoover, likely next it'll be Carl Rove and the Pope. As I go off, pencil in hand, hoping for work after eight months off for panic disorder, I wonder if people are slowly catching on that bigotry is a convenient harness and rein for the masters.

Update: I passed the test, and found out that there were only as many applicants as available positions! Hooray for probable solvency!

the as-if factor in Iowa

2008-01-02T00:27:00.000-08:00

There's a reason I put off looking at the US Presidential races--it's not just the glossy shallowness of the media coverage, but the whole As If factor. What, for example, does Hilary Clinton stand for? Here's a snippet: ""As we start this new year, America is at a crossroads....We're a nation at war in a dangerous world. We have a faltering economy and 47 million people without health care." There's your meat and potatoes. There's your substance.

As If. As if Hilary had the guts or the plans to push forward socialized health care, thereby bringing US citizens into the civilized world. Oh no hell no, she has never stood for such a thing. And the "dangerous world" is a lot more dangerous because of her votes fot the Iraq war and the upcoming Iran war. (Sure, Iranatrocity's still on the agenda, otherwise you'd see plenty of expensive and obvious military demobilization.) Obama has at least criticized Clinton for her Iraq war vote, but neither he nor Edwards will come out with a troops withdrawal proposal. And Kucinich--well, he's been sufficiently starved of media coverage, that he now must advise his supporters to come out for Obama, wherever they number under fifteen percent in the caucus.

Ugh. Blech. Yeccch. I hate looking at the Presidential races. It's as if...as if we had some sort of pseudo-election system, in which candidates had to compete for attention by buying multimillion-dollar ad packages on corporate media, that they obtained by sucking up to corporate interests, so that they could never really represent the majority of the people. It's as if the inheritance class had the game sewed up tight. As if.

Then there are the Republicans, who somehow go out and pretend that they're legitimate standard-bearers, and not representatives of a criminal confederation with an indelible history of war, poverty, hatred, and division. Huckabee (this is just FASCINATING) turns out to be more Godly than Romney, apparently because his Christian gay-hating weirdness is somehow more acceptable than Romney's Christian gay-hating weirdness. What I want to know is, how are the snake-handling rapturists gonna vote, when their choice is limited to two anti-evolutionists? Will they turn on Romney over the Jesus Jammies issue? Maybe they want some real choice, like anacondas versus cottonmouth rattlers.

Joining the twenty-first century

2008-01-01T19:31:00.000-08:00

I have to thank my sister Kat for prodding me into this effort. I was pleased to see that there were no photos on Google Images of me, so I'll be providing a photograph via scanner, I think (that's another avenue of technology I am presently insufficiently aware of).

However, I am up to speed on the conduct of the corporate-owned government, or so I do flatter myself, and it is in that spirit that I offer the following imaginary

Omnibus Antifascist and Democracy Restoral act of 2008:

(cornet fanfare in A Major, flat seven)

Be it resolved by the People of the United States in Congress Assembled, that

The Bill of Rights, the Ten Amendments appended to the Constitution
of the United States, are reaffirmed as supreme Constitutional Law in
the United States, and are not now nor ever to be superseded by mere
legislative corruptions such as the Patriot Act, nor any Emergency
Declarations by the President or others; nor shall the freedoms and
rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights be diminished or replaced by
misguided contradictions, as one might find in the Warren Defense Act,
the Sedition Act, the Homegrown Terrorism Act, or any other inferior
document or Presidential decree. The War on Terror is disbanded as an
agent of deception and corruption, and shall not be used as further
excuse for any acts of imperialism, repression or fascism. The
Separation of Powers enshrined in the Constitution remains in effect,
and thus immediately reverses all Wars not declared by Congress, and
removes any President not elected by a vote of the People, and any
Agency not dedicated to the Freedom and Welfare of the American
People. All Secret Police agencies are now disbanded and rendered
null and void, and all Prisons held for the purpose of intimidating
enemies and dissenters are now to be emptied and immediately
destroyed. All Funding of the US government shall be appropriated by
the House of Representatives in the manner prescribed by the
Constitution, and no Secret Funding will be allowed.

As the Preamble to the Constitution directs, the Government of the
United States is and shall remain in service to all of the People of
the United States and in no wise may be construed to exist for the
benefit of mere Corporations. Furthermore no Corporation shall be
granted unnatural rights or status similar to that of natural Persons.

There. That should set some things right. Now wouldn't you prefer that your legislatures work on stuff like that, rather than on the Thoughtcrime Act ( Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act) or the Hooray for Christmas Act?

(Here's a link that I'll try pasting in 21st-Century Style (ohh me back narrr!))

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-giraldi/the-violent-radicalizatio_b_74091.html

(Did it work?) This Act is still cooking and would criminalize you and me and the NAACP lunch counter sitters.

....................

I'm not doing my KBOO show this week 'cause I have to take an employment test.

If you want a copy of my book JEEZUS!, you're out of luck. You should have pledged! Oh wait, that's a BIG FAT LIE and in fact all you have to do is go to the self-publisher website lulu.com and type my name and/or the book name into the search bar, and then pay them to have a copy shipped to you; or else you can find me personally (lots of luck) and see if one of the six remaining copies in my possession is still available; or you can procrastinate still further, because I'm (nervously) going to try to punch little buttons on this 'puter until some sort of advertisement appears for it on this blog. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee

theresa mitchell