On defeating censorware

...at work, or if you surf out of a "corrupt, undemocratic, dictator-based government" like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, or the Pentagon, you can reach those blocked sites anyhow.

How?

* Google can act as a lightweight, proxy-like tool for accessing forbidden sites -- but don't rely on this method for anonymity. Link.

* The popular RSS reader Bloglines can offer lightweight help in some cases, too. Boing Boing reader Tom Jeziorny says, "I work for a BIG financial services company that apparently uses (not-so-) SmartFilter because BoingBoing has recently become a forbidden site. I use Bloglines as my RSS reader so that I can access the blogs I read from work and home. It turns out that Bloglines is acting as sort of a proxy, since it connects to your RSS feed and not my computer..."

* A group called Peacefire created proxy software called Circumventor to bypass censorware. Install this software on your home computer and allow others to use your proxy to access the web, or use your proxy from work or school to access any web site. (Thanks, Sean!)

* Bennett Haselton of Peacefire, who developed Circumventor, says:

"For 90% of users in the USA affected by SmartFilter, there is no reason to use anything but Circumventor. The reasons are:

1) It's simple to set up. Just run three simple point-and-click installers. We even have a wizard that comes up automatically to help you set up port forwarding on your router if you've never done it before.
2) You are not required to install anything on the "censored" computer, you just bring a URL in with you to work.
3) It works even if the censored network blocks direct connections to IP addresses outside the network (which would break some of the other solutions recommended in this guide).

"If you're in Iran, Saudi Arabia, or some other country censored by SmartFilter, then your best choices are (a) TOR, or (b) use a Circumventor if you can get someone in a "free country" to set one up for you. (The reason Circumventor works for 90% of workplace-filtered users in the U.S. is that they can almost always set it up on their home computer and take the URL in with them. But not everybody in a censored *country* has someone outside who can help them.)

"Circumventor is the *only* method (as far as I know) that will work reliably on computers where people are blocked from installing their own software (or even changing proxy settings) -- because after you install it on your home computer, all it gives you is a URL, and you can take that URL in with you to work and use it whenever you want. Many people in workplaces and libraries are blocked from installing software on their computers. Or even if they could, it would be a definite 'smoking gun' if anyone noticed that the software had been installed; whereas our software leaves fewer traces. (There is a 'smoking gun' in the form of a URL in the URL history, but that's much less likely to be noticed than a TOR icon on your desktop!)"

* Rich says, "This cgi-bin script is the guts inside Peacefire's Circumventor - a Perl CGI script that proxys for you. While Circumventor is a full script to get it working under Win2k/XP, the cgiproxy script alone lets you get it going on Linux and (presumeably) Mac OSX. And the best part - the setup is dirt simple - if you're already running a web server, pretty much just drop it in your cgi-bin directory.

* Access the TOR network. The more people who run Tor servers, the faster and more anonymous the network becomes.

* Using an SSH tunnel, VPN, or anonymous overlay to an unfiltered network is widely considered to be the best way to protect yourself while accessing "prohibited" content. (Thanks, chris)

* Chris says, "There is a new option in OpenSSH that allows for ethernet level tunneling using the kernel's TUN interface. This is probably the most powerful solution if you have access to a friendly system to use as the end point of the tunnel. Manual for ssh, see -w option: Link. For ssh_config, see Tunnel option: Link. And one more way to use SSH as a tunnel is to with SOCKS: Link. osx example script: Link.

* Breaking out of a Proxy Jail. Link (Thanks, Mutz!)

* Try Daveproxy, and other services listed on the proxy list at samair.ru/proxy together with AntiFirewall (a small app that tests proxies). (Thanks, Joao Barata!)

* Try Java Anonymous Proxy. JAP uses the TOR network, and installation is pretty easy for non-nerds. (Thanks, Jonas)

* The Bitty browser, while not initially designed as an anonymizing tool, has helped some of our readers work around corporate internet filters. (Thanks, Scott Matthews!)

* Some of our readers have found the Coral Content Distribution Network (CCDN) helpful for evading internet blocks. Just add ".nyud.net:8090" at the end of boingboing.net -- for example, instead of typing http://www.boingboing.net to your browser's address line, instead type http://www.boingboing.net.nyud.net:8090. (Thanks, Tian and Michael!)

* Check out the regularly updated list of public proxy servers at publicproxyservers.com.

* For BoingBoing readers in the UAE or Qatar, or other countries where BoingBoing is blocked, one anonymous reader tells us: "There is an internet via satellite called OPENSKY sold through www.broadsat.com which goes around these problems. Using VPN with normal dialup, the signal gets sent back from Europe, so, uncensored. Works really well and is cheap!"

* Andy Armstrong says, "I've also set up a proxy for boingboing at boingboing.hexten.net."

* Ben says, "You can also set your home computer up for remote access. Windows XP has the components built in. If you run XP at home it will take you about 30 min to set up. You can find instructions here. Once you set up remote access you can use Zone Edit freeware to set up a static IP, even if you are on a cable modem. If you really want to go all out register a website for $5 and have that point to the Zone Edit IP address. I can hit my home computer from anywhere with web access, and have its full functionality, including censor-free web browsing." Unfortunately so can anyone else who has your IP address. Even if you're password protected, you can be hacked.

* Marcus Aurelius says, "This is how I dodged Etisalat's (The UAE ISP and telco) proxy-server blacklist. It is only really useful for text-rich sites since it involves using Lynx a text browser."

* Abdul Aziz says, "It's a pain to know that countries and companies alike are blocking and censoring sites like Boing Boing. I face this at my office everyday. I've mentioned two ways on my site by which you can bypass these proxies and filters safely and securely without breaking any rules or arousing the network admin's suspicions." Link

More on how TOR works here.

The BoingBoing site will apparently keep updating this list of tricks, but remember it's a commercial site, and like Yahoo or AOL or Microsoft, it probably lists software with a few backdoors into your computer. The CIA uses the term "open source" with disdain, because anyone can access the code. Some compilers, like the people who put together the open source browser Firefox, have a good record for producing script that help evade corporate oversight.

Still, use at your own risk, especially if you don't understand the magic words.

Never trust an intelligent object when you can't see where it keeps its mind.  ¶ 9:05 PM 0 comments links to this post

  "...so Penguinesque from Batman"

Does it cc to the N.S.A and send your credit card number to the BCCI, too?

A story by Minnesota Public Radio reveals a disturbing new way that a political party is secretly grabbing sensitive personal information about voters.

This week the Minnesota Republican Party is distributing a new CD about a proposed state marriage amendment. Along with flashy graphics, the CD asks people their views on controversial issues such as abortion, gun control, illegal immigration, and so on.

The problem – the CD sends your answers back to headquarters, filed by name, address, and political views. No mention of that in the terms of use. No privacy policy at all. The story concludes: “So if you run the CD in your personal computer, by the end of it, the Minnesota GOP will not only know what you think on particular issues, but also who you are...”

You can bet all those ridiculous CDs AOL constantly sends out do the same sort of thing too. Purely for targeted advertising purposes, of course.

Thanks to Atrios for the link.  ¶ 8:34 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Politely Neglecting the 500-lb Gorilla in the Corner of the Room

Dear Leader says:

Our economy is healthy and vigorous, and growing faster than other major industrialized nations...

He says it with sincerity in his voice, and Congress reacts like they believe it.

He says that because when you factor in everybody's income, he's right.

This rosy scenario reports the average and neglects the median and the mode of the data.

The reality's more like Bill Moyers says:

...As great wealth has accumulated at the top, the rest of society has not been benefiting proportionally. In 1960 the gap between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was thirtyfold. Now it is seventy-five fold. Thirty years ago the average annual compensation of the top 100 chief executives in the country was 30 times the pay of the average worker. Today it is 1000 times the pay of the average worker. A recent article in The Financial Times reports on a study by the American economist Robert J. Gordon, who finds “little long-term change in workers’ share of U.S. income over the past half century.” Middle-ranking Americans are being squeezed, he says, because the top ten percent of earners have captured almost half the total income gains in the past four decades and the top one percent have gained the most of all – “more in fact, than all the bottom 50 percent.”

No wonder working men and women and their families are strained to cope with the rising cost of health care, pharmaceutical drugs, housing, higher education, and public transportation – all of which have risen faster in price than typical family incomes. The recent book, Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity , describes how “thirty zipcodes in America have become fabulously wealthy” while “whole urban and rural communities are languishing in unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, growing insecurity, and fear.”

Paul Krugman, Princeton Economist, ex-Carlyle Group advisor, agreed this way today:

...Mr. Bernanke [the new chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank] declared that "the most important factor" in rising inequality "is the rising skill premium, the increased return to education."

That's a fundamental misreading of what's happening to American society. What we're seeing isn't the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we're seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite.

I think of Mr. Bernanke's position, which one hears all the time, as the 80-20 fallacy. It's the notion that the winners in our increasingly unequal society are a fairly large group - that the 20 percent or so of American workers who have the skills to take advantage of new technology and globalization are pulling away from the 80 percent who don't have these skills.

The truth is quite different. Highly educated workers have done better than those with less education, but a college degree has hardly been a ticket to big income gains. The 2006 Economic Report of the President tells us that the real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004. Over the longer stretch from 1975 to 2004 the average earnings of college graduates rose, but by less than 1 percent per year.

So who are the winners from rising inequality? It's not the top 20 percent, or even the top 10 percent. The big gains have gone to a much smaller, much richer group than that.

A new research paper by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, "Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?," gives the details. Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains.

But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint.

Just to give you a sense of who we're talking about: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that this year the 99th percentile will correspond to an income of $402,306, and the 99.9th percentile to an income of $1,672,726. The center doesn't give a number for the 99.99th percentile, but it's probably well over $6 million a year...

Why would someone as smart and well informed as Mr. Bernanke get the nature of growing inequality wrong? Because the fallacy he fell into tends to dominate polite discussion about income trends, not because it's true, but because it's comforting. The notion that it's all about returns to education suggests that nobody is to blame for rising inequality, that it's just a case of supply and demand at work. And it also suggests that the way to mitigate inequality is to improve our educational system - and better education is a value to which just about every politician in America pays at least lip service.

The idea that we have a rising oligarchy is much more disturbing. It suggests that the growth of inequality may have as much to do with power relations as it does with market forces. Unfortunately, that's the real story."

Still, you have to be able to understand the concept of average, median, and mode to glean that information. So is it any wonder the education is going increasingly to the best heeled? You can't let the unqualified realize what the game's all about.  ¶ 11:50 AM 1 comments links to this post

  Free Trade Fundamentalism & Corporate Dominion

More David Sirota on the Dubai Deal:

...this is about far more than just one deal with one company or one country.

The Bush administration is unquestionably the most corporate-controlled administration in recent history, which means the White House doesn't sound the alarm unless corporate America is sounding the alarm. The veto threat is about preserving the rules of so-called "free trade" that big business relies on to maximize profit and that guide America's global economic policy.

Right now, the White House is putting the finishing touches on one of these free-trade agreements with the Emirates. If security concerns overturn the port deal -- and Dubai Ports World has offered to delay the takeover because of such concerns -- the free-trade accord and a subsequent Mideast regional trade pact will be jeopardized.

Free trade is all about allowing corporations to move capital wherever they please, without regard to the labor, human rights, environmental and -- yes -- security consequences of those moves. Nixing the Emirates port-security deal could set a new precedent, whereby our government would include security precautions in its trade policy and more aggressively regulate commerce based on those precautions.

That shift would create a new standard that could impede the as-yet uninhibited quest for profits. Put another way, trade policy would become not quite as free as big Business would like. Such a precedent would have global implications.

Suddenly, the public might want Congress to re-evaluate corporate subsidies with an eye to security. We might see a push, for instance, to rescind the billions in taxpayer-backed loans Congress provided last year to Westinghouse to build nuclear power facilities in China. The public might demand stricter security standards governing technology transfers and ownership privileges in future trade accords. Again, these moves are basic steps to protect our country -- but they would get in the way of companies who have eyes only for the bottom line.

This is why the president threatened his veto. His reflexes are trained to defend the corporate interests that bankrolled his political career. These are the same reflexes detailed in a September Government Accountability Office report chastising the Bush administration for employing overly narrow definitions of national security to expedite questionable transactions such as the Emirates port deal. Though President Bush won't admit this is what motivates his behavior, others are admitting it on his behalf.

Take Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Days ago he said of the Emirates deal, "We have to balance the paramount urgency of security against the fact that we still want to have a robust global trading system." He's technically right, of course -- we do have to balance those needs. But coming from him, the comments were telling. Could the Bush administration's skewed priorities be any more visible?

Similarly, the New York Times this week quoted a corporate consultant who says that Congress' concerns about the port security deal are "totally illogical." Why? Because, he says, "The location of the headquarters of a company in the age of globalism is irrelevant." This is free-trade fundamentalism. Companies, of course, can't be blamed for being governed by it -- they are in the business of making money, nothing else. But there is a clear danger to America when free-trade fundamentalism becomes government policy, as it has become today...

Corporations serve a valuable role in a free society when they're regulated.

But when society serves the corporations, it's no longer free.  ¶ 12:48 PM 1 comments links to this post

  What John Says

Right here.

Thanks, granny.  ¶ 7:58 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Underneath the Flat Earth

Globalization has many supporters, in the sunlit world and underneath.

So does the Dubai Deal:

WASHINGTON, D.C.—To hear the administration and its supporters talk, you'd think the workers in New York ports are carefully vetted by the Waterfront Commission, the ports themselves protected by the ever watchful Coast Guard, and routinely surveilled by U.S. Customs.

In truth,one administration after another has slashed the operational capability of the Coast Guard. Reagan even contemplated its privatization by a major defense firm. As for the Customs Service, it inspects as little as 5 percent of the cargo going through the New York ports.

This is a dream setup for any arms or dope dealer, and that's exactly what the United Arab Emirates is all about.The ties between its top officials and royal family with the Taliban and Al Qaeda go back at least a decade.

The UAE is not only the center of financial dealings in the Persian Gulf, it is switching central for dope and arms dealing. The dope comes out of Afghanistan into the UAE where tax monies are collected and used to buy arms, which were sent back in for the Taliban. Some of this money is thought to have helped finance the 9-11 attacks. A money trail is set forth in the government's filings in the Moussaoui case.

Long at the center of this operation is the mysterious Russian arms dealer, Victor Bout. The U.N. has accused Bout of providing arms to brutal regimes in Sierra Leone,Angola and to Charles Taylor in Liberia. The Center for Public Integrity, a Washington, D.C. research organization that operates a network of foreign correspondents, published a report on Bout in January 2002, citing Belgian intelligence documents from before the 9-11 attacks it had obtained. These documents reportedly show Bout earned $50 million in profits from selling weapons to the Taliban after they came to power in the late 1990s.

The Center states, "Another European intelligence source independently verified the sales, and intelligence documents from an African country in which Bout operates—obtained by the Center—claim that Bout ran guns for the Taliban 'on behalf of the Pakistan government.' "

Peter Hain, the British Foreign Office Minister for Europe who has led the international effort to expose criminal networks behind the conflict diamonds and small arms trade in Africa, told the Center's reporters, it was clear that Bout's supply of weapons to the Taliban "and to its ally, Osama bin Laden" posed a real danger...

...the United Arab Emirates have been viewed as hub for trade going and coming to Afghanistan, with drugs coming from Afghanistan on their way to the West, and weapons from Bout, going back. While transportation was via Bout's different air cargo interests, it also involved the Afghan state airlines, called Ariana Airlines. The airline was controlled by Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda agents masquerading as Ariana employees flew out of Afghanistan, through Sharjah, one of the emirates, and on to points west.

During the late 1990s Bout's center of operations was Ostend, Belgium, but when he came under pressure there, he left Belgium. The UAE office grew in importance.

Bout used various air cargo outfits. One of them was called Flying Dolphin, which in the early 2000s was owned by Sheikh Adbullah bin Zayed bin Saqr al Nayhan, a former UAE ambassador to the United States and member of the ruling family in Abu Dhabi. He was described by the United Nations as a "close business associate of Bout." According to the December 20, 2000, U.N. report, Zayed's company is registered in Liberia, but its operations office is in Dubai.

Guns, drugs, and money.  ¶ 8:28 PM 0 comments links to this post

  My Response to the Flat Earthers: What Goes Around Comes Around

Let me expand upon my response to grannyinsanity about a link to David Ignatius she sent me.

It rapidly goes downhill:

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." The acidulous wisdom of Mark Twain speaks to us across the ages, and never more than this week during the great congressional mobilization to save America's ports from the dreaded hand of Dubai.

The furor over Dubai is misplaced on so many levels... Is it? I think not, on many more levels. You're an idiot if you fall for this deal, David.

Congress-critters are egotistic idiots by definition. But the Dubai deal can fold right under the Congressional and Cheneyburton globalists. The globalists could care less about people on the globe. Their priorities lie in padding their own bank accounts.

Ignatius is probably right about one thing. The Emirates may have one of the best and most sophisticated intelligence machines in the world.

Which is why when they participate in funding terror worldwide, and Al Qaeda right here, it's not exactly unintentional. When they promote and bankroll a CIA-connected bank that terrorists worldwide use, it is no accident. Nor is their substantial commercial influence worldwide, which enough to make the flat-earthers afraid to sail off the edge.

Yes, it is the Navy's port of choice in the Middle East. In fact, you could make a good case the whole Iraqi debacle exists to remove a potential threat from the Emirates. The same thing goes for the war Dear Leader, Darth Rumsfeld, and Cheneyburton want to spread into Iran.

Their populace- not their citizens, mind you, since most of their populace has non-citizen guest worker status- is mostly enslaved. Mind you, that's a Clinton era .gov report (if it doesn't get scrubbed soon). Under Dear Leader, the report is much cheerier.

And you're right, David Ignatius, they remove their capital, and the Saudis theirs too, and it would plunge the whole country into the economic abyss.

You know something? We're headed there anyway with these fascists running our economy, and every day we forestall the inevitable by appeasing these theocrats we just dig that abyss a little deeper.

These are the very creeps whose financial weight keeps the development of energy alternatives under wraps.

It's like Sirota says:

...This is where the culture of corruption meets national security policy - and, more specifically, where the unbridled corruption of on-the-take politicians are weakening America's security.

The fact that no politicians and almost no media wants to even explore this simple fact is telling. Here we have a major U.S. security scandal with the same country we are simultaneously negotiating a free trade pact with, and no one in Washington is saying a thing. The silence tells you all you need to know about a political/media establishment that is so totally owned by Big Money interests they won't even talk about what's potentially at the heart of a burgeoning national security scandal.  ¶ 10:55 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Explaining Ted Nugent: Just Say "No" to Venison

Science. 2006 Feb 24;311(5764):1117.
Prions in skeletal muscles of deer with chronic wasting disease.
Angers RC, Browning SR, Seward TS, Sigurdson CJ, Miller MW, Hoover EA, Telling GC.

The emergence of chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and elk in an increasingly wide geographic area, as well as the interspecies transmission of bovine spongiform encephalopathy to humans in the form of variant Creutzfeldt Jakob disease, have raised concerns about the zoonotic potential of CWD. Because meat consumption is the most likely means of exposure, it is important to determine whether skeletal muscle of diseased cervids contains prion infectivity. Here bioassays in transgenic mice expressing cervid prion protein revealed the presence of infectious prions in skeletal muscles of CWD-infected deer, demonstrating that humans consuming or handling meat from CWD-infected deer are at risk to prion exposure.

  ¶ 7:02 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Ed Sullivan & Lawrence Welk, No Doubt.

In the event of all-out nuclear war, the BBC was to distract the nation by broadcasting a mix of music and light entertainment shows, secret papers released by the Home Office reveal.

Hundreds of security-vetted BBC staff and a select band of unnamed radio artistes were to be clandestinely dispatched to transmission sites across the country at the first signs of international tension.

Just before the first missiles had reached Britain, the BBC was to use regional centres in Birmingham, Sheffield, Bristol and Middlesbrough to broadcast a national service that the Government hoped would create "a diversion to relieve strain and stress..."

That's what happens when you live in a country that doesn't care who Jennifer Anniston is dating.  ¶ 6:53 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Treason in a Time of War

So says the Pentagon

…the second in command at the Pentagon…said Thursday that people who publicly oppose allowing a Middle Eastern company to take over management of some U.S. ports could be threatening national security.

Thanks to the Pensito Review via BuzzFlash.

Lou Dobbs, your place in the chain gang is waiting.  ¶ 6:34 AM 2 comments links to this post

  So... what if the Sunnis didn't do it?

The Sunnis blame, of course, America and Israel for the bombing of the al-Askariyah shrine in Samarra.

Blaming America and Israel only perpetuates the Endless War. Remember who's making all the money off of Endless War? The ones cashing the Blank Check? You can blame George W. Bush and the TheoCon cabal he represents. The death squads Negroponte set up during his tenure in Iraq were likely involved. After all, some people like to kill others. Violently. It's not just a matter of money for them; it's a matter of ghoulish taste.

There are some Iraqi voices that feel the same way about the paid killers Dear Leader has unleashed there.

After the recent criminal attack on the Askariyah shrine in Samarra – which has never been attacked for centuries –, all Iraqis without exception have condemned the attack
. “This is a terrorist act that is aimed to fan a sectarian strife among Iraqis”, said Sheikh Ahmed Daye, member of the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars. The Occupation-appointed president Jalal Talabani said: “We are facing a major conspiracy that is targeting Iraq's unity. We should all stand hand in hand to prevent the danger of a civil war”. Others in the puppet government have pointed the finger at the U.S. Ambassador in Baghdad for inciting the violence and for interfering in Iraqi political and domestic affairs. Thousands of ordinary Iraqis took to the streets throughout Iraq denouncing the U.S. and Israel.

Samarra is like Fallujah. U.S. forces have attacked the Resistance city several times, and Donald Rumsfeld has threatened the city with destruction unless it surrenders. Iraqis believe that the attack is a pretext for the U.S. forces to invade the city. The attack was not something new; similar attacks were perpetuated against other Iraqi cities in the past. These attacks were well-orchestrated to provoke one group of Iraqis against the other, and bring in U.S. forces as “peace brokers...”

Peacekeepers, I'm sure.

Did the private contractors- like Blackwater, DynCorp, or someone else in Dear Leader's employ do this to ignite Civil War in Iraq on purpose?  ¶ 9:44 PM 2 comments links to this post

  Connecting Dots

Via shystee:

Lou Dobbs apparently threw the chair at Dear Leader over the Dubai Deal two nights ago.

It's a start. Lou even brought up the Carlyle Group connection. On prime time. CNN.

And it's nice to know that when Cheneyburton finishes building Dear Leader's new camps, they'll be saving Lou a spot along with us citizenship-stripped godless secular humanist Guest Workers.  ¶ 3:58 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Summer Camp for Those with the Right Stuff

Winter camp, too, it looks like:

“The administration has not only the right, but the duty, in my opinion, to pursue Fifth Column movements,” Graham, R-S.C., told Gonzales during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Feb. 6.

“I stand by this President’s ability, inherent to being Commander in Chief, to find out about Fifth Column movements, and I don’t think you need a warrant to do that,” Graham added, volunteering to work with the administration to draft guidelines for how best to neutralize this alleged threat.

“Senator,” a smiling Gonzales responded, “the President already said we’d be happy to listen to your ideas.”

In less paranoid times, Graham’s comments might be viewed by many Americans as a Republican trying to have it both ways – ingratiating himself to an administration of his own party while seeking some credit from Washington centrists for suggesting Congress should have at least a tiny say in how Bush runs the War on Terror.

But recent developments suggest that the Bush administration may already be contemplating what to do with Americans who are deemed insufficiently loyal or who disseminate information that may be considered helpful to the enemy.

Top U.S. officials have cited the need to challenge news that undercuts Bush’s actions as a key front in defeating the terrorists, who are aided by “news informers” in the words of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld...

...there was that curious development in January when the Army Corps of Engineers awarded Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root a $385 million contract to construct detention centers somewhere in the United States, to deal with “an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs,” KBR said.

Later, the New York Times reported that “KBR would build the centers for the Homeland Security Department for an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space.” [Feb. 4, 2006]

...There also was another little-noticed item posted at the U.S. Army Web site[a .pdf document], about the Pentagon’s Civilian Inmate Labor Program. This program “provides Army policy and guidance for establishing civilian inmate labor programs and civilian prison camps on Army installations.”

The Army document, first drafted in 1997, underwent a “rapid action revision” on Jan. 14, 2005. The revision provides a “template for developing agreements” between the Army and corrections facilities for the use of civilian inmate labor on Army installations.

On its face, the Army’s labor program refers to inmates housed in federal, state and local jails. The Army also cites various federal laws that govern the use of civilian labor and provide for the establishment of prison camps in the United States, including a federal statute that authorizes the Attorney General to “establish, equip, and maintain camps upon sites selected by him” and “make available … the services of United States prisoners” to various government departments, including the Department of Defense.

Though the timing of the document’s posting – within the past few weeks –may just be a coincidence, the reference to a “rapid action revision” and the KBR contract’s contemplation of “rapid development of new programs” have raised eyebrows about why this sudden need for urgency.

These developments also are drawing more attention now because of earlier Bush administration policies to involve the Pentagon in “counter-terrorism” operations inside the United States.

The Washington Post has reported that since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the Defense Department has been creating new agencies that gather and analyze intelligence within the United States. [Washington Post, Nov. 27, 2005]

The White House also is moving to expand the power of the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), created three years ago to consolidate counterintelligence operations. The White House proposal would transform CIFA into an office that has authority to investigate crimes such as treason, terrorist sabotage or economic espionage.

The Pentagon also has pushed legislation in Congress that would create an intelligence exception to the Privacy Act, allowing the FBI and others to share information about U.S. citizens with the Pentagon, CIA and other intelligence agencies. But some in the Pentagon don’t seem to think that new laws are even necessary.

In a 2001 Defense Department memo that surfaced in January 2006, the U.S. Army’s top intelligence officer wrote, “Contrary to popular belief, there is no absolute ban on [military] intelligence components collecting U.S. person information.”

Drawing a distinction between “collecting” information and “receiving” information on U.S. citizens, the memo argued that “MI [military intelligence] may receive information from anyone, anytime.” [See CQ.com, Jan. 31, 2005]

This receipt of information presumably would include data from the National Security Agency, which has been engaging in surveillance of U.S. citizens without court-approved warrants in apparent violation of the Foreign Intelligence Security Act. Bush approved the program of warrantless wiretaps shortly after 9/11.

There also may be an even more extensive surveillance program. Former NSA employee Russell D. Tice told a congressional committee on Feb. 14 that such a top-secret surveillance program existed, but he said he couldn’t discuss the details without breaking classification laws.

Tice added that the “special access” surveillance program may be violating the constitutional rights of millions of Americans. [UPI, Feb. 14, 2006]

With this expanded surveillance, the government’s list of terrorist suspects is rapidly swelling.

The Washington Post reported on Feb. 15 that the National Counterterrorism Center’s central repository now holds the names of 325,000 terrorist suspects, a four-fold increase since the fall of 2003...

A Defense Department document, entitled the “Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support,” has set out a military strategy against terrorism that envisions an “active, layered defense” both inside and outside U.S. territory. In the document, the Pentagon pledges to “transform U.S. military forces to execute homeland defense missions in the … U.S. homeland.”

The Pentagon strategy paper calls for increased military reconnaissance and surveillance to “defeat potential challengers before they threaten the United States.” The plan “maximizes threat awareness and seizes the initiative from those who would harm us.”

But there are concerns over how the Pentagon judges “threats” and who falls under the category “those who would harm us.” A Pentagon official said the Counterintelligence Field Activity’s TALON program has amassed files on antiwar protesters.

In December 2005, NBC News revealed the existence of a secret 400-page Pentagon document listing 1,500 “suspicious incidents” over a 10-month period, including dozens of small antiwar demonstrations that were classified as a “threat.”

The Defense Department also might be moving toward legitimizing the use of propaganda domestically, as part of its overall war strategy.

A secret Pentagon “Information Operations Roadmap,” approved by Rumsfeld in October 2003, calls for “full spectrum” information operations and notes that “information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP, increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa.”

“PSYOPS messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public,” the document states. The Pentagon argues, however, that “the distinction between foreign and domestic audiences becomes more a question of USG [U.S. government] intent rather than information dissemination practices.”

It calls for “boundaries” between information operations abroad and the news media at home, but does not outline any corresponding limits on PSYOP campaigns.

Similar to the distinction the Pentagon draws between “collecting” and “receiving” intelligence on U.S. citizens, the Information Operations Roadmap argues that as long as the American public is not intentionally “targeted,” any PSYOP propaganda consumed by the American public is acceptable.

The Pentagon plan also includes a strategy for taking over the Internet and controlling the flow of information, viewing the Web as a potential military adversary. The “roadmap” speaks of “fighting the net,” and implies that the Internet is the equivalent of “an enemy weapons system.”

In a speech on Feb. 17 to the Council on Foreign Relations, Rumsfeld elaborated on the administration’s perception that the battle over information would be a crucial front in the War on Terror, or as Rumsfeld calls it, the Long War.

“Let there be no doubt, the longer it takes to put a strategic communication framework into place, the more we can be certain that the vacuum will be filled by the enemy and by news informers that most assuredly will not paint an accurate picture of what is actually taking place,” Rumsfeld said.

The Department of Homeland Security also has demonstrated a tendency to deploy military operatives to deal with domestic crises.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the department dispatched “heavily armed paramilitary mercenaries from the Blackwater private security firm, infamous for their work in Iraq, (and had them) openly patrolling the streets of New Orleans,” reported journalists Jeremy Scahill and Daniela Crespo on Sept. 10, 2005.

Noting the reputation of the Blackwater mercenaries as “some of the most feared professional killers in the world,” Scahill and Crespo said Blackwater’s presence in New Orleans “raises alarming questions about why the government would allow men trained to kill with impunity in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to operate here...”

Who is the enemy? Certainly not these good citizens and partners in the War on Terra.  ¶ 5:46 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Prelude to the Next Act

While the Internet is still (more or less) free, you might want to keep up with- and download records of- what's happening/ happened in the reality-based world before Dear Leader manages to classify it all.

I recently found Killtown, and you should check it out if you haven't seen it.  ¶ 8:49 AM 0 comments links to this post

  The Security Preznit

The Central Intelligence Agency did not target Al Qaeda chief Osama bin laden once as he had the royal family of the United Arab Emirates with him in Afghanistan, the agency's director, George Tenet, told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States on Thursday.

Had the CIA targeted bin Laden, half the royal family would have been wiped out as well, he said...

Richard Clarke didn't like them either, but Dear Leader never paid him any mind anyway. Which is basically why 9-11 happened.

Full .pdf from the .gov 9-11 commission site with both Tenet and Clarke here.

The sheiks of the United Arab Emirates have been playing both sides for awhile now.

Apparently Dear Leader's minions didn't think them worth investigating and so ignored the statutes mandating one. Dear Leader is pulling the Sgt. Schultz defense on this one: he knew nothing about it. Of course he didn't, plausible deniability is a good smokescreen.

Thanks to digby , Atrios, and Think Progress for the links.

There's been substantial speculation that Osama bin Laden is dead and the Company is faking his latest messages. Dead? The evidence suggests he's sitting in a palace in Riyadh or Dubai living richly off his fortune, getting wealthier every day of a Long War on Terra. It's a struggle that he'll win as long as we play by his and Dear Leader's rules.

Responding to chicago dyke below: I have a hard time believing he's dead, but a very easy acceptance of the assertion that his communiques are being doctored to fit the Cheneyburton Company propaganda mainline.

And finally one more addendum to this post: Lambert's thinking that the easy ride the Emirs are getting is a reciprocal deal where we outsource torture to them too. Nice bunch of guys, eh?  ¶ 5:01 PM 3 comments links to this post

  Would You Buy a Used Camel From This Man?

Dear Leader is pissed.

He'll veto anything an upstart Congress sends him about the Dubai Port deal.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 — President Bush said this afternoon that he would veto any legislation seeking to block the administration's decision to allow a state-owned company from Dubai to assume control of port terminals in New York and other cities.

Mr. Bush's rare veto threat came as Republican leaders and many of their Democratic counterparts called up today for the port takeover to be put on hold. They demanded that the Bush administration conduct a further investigation of the Dubai company's acquisition of the British operator of the six American ports.

"After careful review by our government, I believe the transaction ought to go forward," Mr. Bush told reporters who were traveling with him on Air Force One to Washington, according to news agencies. "I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company..."

Might it have something to do with the UAE government (who owns the company) laundering money for Al Qaeda? That and the fact that the British have shown unconditional support of our government since 1914? It's that pesky history thing. No wonder Dear Leader's trying to erase it.

Let's continue. The New York Pravda, is after all a Carlyle Group tool, so it shouldn't take it long to back into the corporatist mainline about all of this.

And it doesn't:

...The confrontation between Mr. Bush and his own supporters escalated rapidly after the Senate Republican leader, Bill Frist, and the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert, joined Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Gov. George E. Pataki and a host of other Republicans in insisting that the transaction must be extensively reviewed, if not killed. That put them on essentially the same side of the issue as a chorus of Democrats [boo! hiss!] , who have seized on the issue [the opportunists!] to argue that Mr. Bush was ignoring a potential security threat.

The White House appeared stunned by the uprising [poor Dear Leader], over a transaction that they considered routine [Dear Leader kisses Saudi ass on a daily basis] — especially since China's biggest state-owned shipper runs major ports in the United States, as do a host of other foreign companies...

Now this isn't a number one great idea, but hey, even in Korea and Viet Nam, the Chinese never targeted American civilians. Nor have they ever financially supported anyone who did. Unlike Bandar Bush. Unlike the United Arab Emirates. And speaking of the UAE and shady business deals, does BCCI mean anything?

China never did anything like that...

But back to the Corporate Mainline from Pravda:

The ... firestorm of opposition to the deal drew a similarly intense expression of befuddlement by shipping industry and port experts.

The shipping business, they said, went global more than a decade ago and across the United States, foreign-based companies already control more than 30 percent of the port terminals.

That inventory includes APL Limited, which is controlled by the government of Singapore, and which operates terminals in Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and Dutch Harbor, Alaska. Globally, 24 of the top 25 ship terminal operators are foreign-based, meaning most of the containers sent to the United States leave terminals around the world that are operated by foreign government or foreign-based companies.

"This kind of reaction is totally illogical," said Philip Damas, research director at Drewry Shipping Consultants of London. "The location of the headquarters of a company in the age of globalism is irrelevant..."

Assuming, of course, the company isn't a front for funneling religious fanatics into the country and being used by other companies who want some of that blank check for endless war.

Globalization's funny like that.

Mr. Bush's aides defended their decision, saying the company, Dubai Ports World, which is owned by the United Arab Emirates, would have no control over security issues.

Some administration officials, refusing to be quoted by name, suggested that there was a whiff of racism in the objections to an Arab owner taking over the terminals. [Oh that must be it- racism! That's the ticket! And they should know bigotry when they see it! The DINOcrat dogs will salivate to the bell for sure!] The current operator of the six American terminals, P&O Port, is owned by the British company that Dubai Ports World is acquiring. The ports include those in New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia, as well as New York...

In Blue cities, all. Of course. Why not Houston, too?

Finally, Darth Rumsfeld weighs in on it:

At the Pentagon today, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld praised the Arab country as an important strategic military partner.

"Nothing changes with respect to security under the contract," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "The Coast Guard is in charge of security, not the corporation."

"We all deal with the U.A.E. on a regular basis," he added. "It's a country that's been involved in the global war on terror..."

Yes indeed, and they're making money on both sides of it, just like you and Dear Leader.

Just to ensure the right arrangements get made, of course, it helps to have a man on the inside. They've got a couple at least:

One is Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose agency heads the federal panel that signed off on the $6.8 billion sale of an English company to government-owned Dubai Ports World - giving it control of Manhattan's cruise ship terminal and Newark's container port.

Snow was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004, the year after Snow left for President Bush's cabinet.

The other connection is David Sanborn, who runs DP World's European and Latin American operations and was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration...

They're totally disinterested except for the stock options.

But isn't it an ownership society?  ¶ 8:34 PM 0 comments links to this post

  How to Use a Shotgun like a Smokescreen

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 — In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.

But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.

Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."

"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he said. "Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous."

After Mr. Aid and other historians complained, the archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees government classification, began an audit of the reclassification program, said J. William Leonard, director of the office.

Mr. Leonard said he ordered the audit after reviewing 16 withdrawn documents and concluding that none should be secret.

"If those sample records were removed because somebody thought they were classified, I'm shocked and disappointed," Mr. Leonard said in an interview. "It just boggles the mind..."

A group of historians, including representatives of the National Coalition for History and the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, wrote to Mr. Leonard on Friday to express concern about the reclassification program, which they believe has blocked access to some material at the presidential libraries as well as at the archives.

Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr. Aid found in his own files is a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001 even though it had been published by the State Department in 1996.

Another historian, William Burr, found a dozen documents he had copied years ago whose reclassification he considers "silly," including a 1962 telegram from George F. Kennan, then ambassador to Yugoslavia, containing an English translation of a Belgrade newspaper article on China's nuclear weapons program.

Under existing guidelines, government documents are supposed to be declassified after 25 years unless there is particular reason to keep them secret. While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago...

Among ten thousand harmless documents reclassified, there is likely one document Dear Leader's criminal syndicate would find embarassing. This is a shotgun smokescreen. There are so many items reclassified it's impossible to know what might be the critical document to unearth some very unpleasant facts. It would be impossible if you didn't know what to look for, that is.

Take, for example, the evidence that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was fabricated to propel us into VietNam.

Take, for example, the evidence that the Defense Department planned fake terrorist attacks on American soil to rouse the public against the scapegoat nations du jour: Operation Northwoods.

Take, for example, the MK-Ultra operations. In fact, the original .pdf links that were on the web are now gone. You have to go to private sites (hey- i represent that) to find them.

There's a lot more, from the land where tinfoil thickens into kelvar.

And you thought this was going to be about Rove using Cheney's accident as a diversion to get attention away from the NSA snooping, didn't you?  ¶ 6:04 AM 0 comments links to this post

  "I'm a lifelong Republican and I think the President's gone insane"

How, asks Gadiel, whose son James died in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, can a company owned by a terror-linked country get control of our nation's ports?

"I'm a lifelong Republican and I think the President's gone insane," said Gadiel, 58, who heads 9/11 Families for a Secure America.

Two of the 19 9/11 hijackers were citizens of Dubai, the Arab emirate whose bid to run ports in New York, New Jersey and four other cities was okayed by the White House even though investigators have found signs that money used to finance terrorism flowed through Dubai banks. Details here.

"How the hell could this happen?" fumed Bill Doyle, 58, a retired Staten Island stockbroker whose son Joseph also died when the Trade Center fell...

Welcome to the desert of the real, gentlemen.

Dear Leader isn't insane, sirs. He's just part of his family business, and the business has a plan. They're all on a mission from God- just ask them.  ¶ 9:03 PM 1 comments links to this post

  They're Thinking, There Goes the Neighborhood...

Astronomers searching for advanced life beyond Earth should focus their attention around beta CVn, a binary star roughly 26 light-years away that resembles our own Sun.

The recommendation comes from a shortlist of likely life-bearing systems compiled by Margaret Turnbull, at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St Louis, Missouri, US.

She adds that researchers looking for any kind of life - including basic forms that could not send communications to Earth - should take a particularly close look around another star epsilon Indi A.

Both the stars share similar traits, Turnbull says: "They're mature, very stable, calm stars. They're stars that are acting like they're taking care of someone."
Planetary picks

Turnbull began her analysis by looking at thousands of stars in a catalogue of stellar distances measured by the Hipparcos mission. In 2003, she had narrowed the list down to 30 stars that might harbour planets in so-called "habitable zones".

One star, 37 Gem, topped the list at that point. But Turnbull has now refined the criteria, meaning 37 Gem does not make the new shortlist of 10 stars. She says 37 Gem is simply further away from the now higher-ranking stars, making it more difficult for scientists to observe clearly.

The rationale for the stellar shortlist, says Turnbull, is to answer the question of "which stars are the absolute best ones for us to spend our telescope time on?" And she notes: "This all comes down to what we know about life on Earth..."

What we know about life on earth? Now that's a scary thought.

At 26 light-years away, if they're listening with better ears than we have, they'll be watching to see whether we elect Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan this fall.

Bad choices, radiating out to the galaxy at the speed of light, are bound to get us talked about.

By our standards, 26 light years is a long way using the speed limit in this bubble of the multiverse. Forewarned is forearmed. They don't need to bother with us if they get around using shortcuts. It doesn't look like we're going to go looking for them any time soon:

A planned life-hunting project is NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder, would look for life by imaging forms potentially habitable planets. That might reveal life that does not deliberately send any signals off their home planet.

But the mission, which some anticipated would launch in 2014, has been postponed due to cuts in NASA's science budget proposed by US President George W Bush on 6 February 2006. "TPF is essentially shelved," says Turnbull.

The budget cuts would mean that NASA's 2007 budget for astrobiology would be 50% of that in 2005, according to Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute.

It's because it's astrobiology. Dear Leader just knows any astrobiologist is also an astro secular humanist. Or is that a secular alienist?

If Big Time Dick thought they had oil you can bet Halliburton would be sending Dyncorp Special Op bots out to offer them a contract. Bechtel would be offering to build nukular reactors and the IAEA would be insisting they allow Carlyle Group operativesinspectors in to assess them. All the more reason for any aliens to avoid publically contacting us problem children any time soon.  ¶ 9:39 PM 0 comments links to this post

  It Makes You Wonder

How many of the physicians vocally skeptical of the benefits of vitamin D and calcium supplements in osteoporosis make a buck somewhere somehow off of Fosamax sales?

And how do the stats for the Women's Health Initiative change if you eliminate data gathered by these people? Yeah, I know, it's a subgroup, isn't it?  ¶ 9:31 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Science and Wreality-based Scientificality

It's not just the moonbats of the progressive blogsphere that have issues with the perception thing of the Bu$h family.

ST. LOUIS, Feb. 18 — David Baltimore, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist and president of the California Institute of Technology, is used to the Bush administration misrepresenting scientific findings to support its policy aims, he told an audience of fellow researchers Saturday. Each time it happens, he said, "I shrug and say, 'What do you expect?' "

But then, Dr. Baltimore went on, he began to read about the administration's embrace of the theory of the unitary executive, the idea that the executive branch has the power or even the obligation to act without restraint from Congress. And he began to see in a new light widely reported episodes of government scientists being restricted in what they could say in public.

"It's no accident that we are seeing such an extensive suppression of scientific freedom," he said. "It's part of the theory of government now, and it's a theory we need to vociferously oppose." Far from twisting science to suit its own goals, he said, the government should be "the guardian of intellectual freedom."

Dr. Baltimore spoke at a session here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Though it was organized too late for inclusion in the overall meeting catalogue, the session drew hundreds of scientists who crowded a large meeting room and applauded enthusiastically as speakers denounced administration policies they said threatened not just sound science but also the nation's research pre-eminence...

Another speaker, Susan F. Wood, former director of the office of women's health at the Food and Drug Administration, said administration interference with the agency's scientific and regulatory processes had left morale there at a "nadir."

Dr. Wood, who received a standing ovation from many in the audience, resigned in August to protest agency officials' unusual decision to overrule an expert panel and withhold marketing approval for Plan B, the so-called morning after pill, a form of emergency contraception. She said she feared that competent scientists would leave rather than remain at an agency where their work was ignored because "social conservatives have extreme undue influence."

Later, in response to a question, she said that she might have consulted the agency's inspector general over the Plan B decision, but that inspectors general often had to be prodded by Congress before taking action. Democrats have little power in this Congress, she said, and Republicans who care about science have been "remarkably silent."

Others in the audience said efforts to stifle researchers were attacks on more than science.

"Administrative legitimacy has been violated as much as scientific legitimacy," said Sheila Jasanoff, an expert on science policy who teaches at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. "You can't get the most solid possible basis for making a decision unless you have not just the most credible and legitimate form of science but also the most credible and legitimate administrative process."

Leslie Sussan, a lawyer with the Department of Health and Human Services who emphasized that she was speaking only for herself, drew applause when she said she saw the administration's science policies as "an attack on the rule of law as a basis for self-government and democracy."

Rule of law? Self-government? Democracy?

That's so pre 9-11 thinking.

Dear Leader knows what scientists are really doing with all their National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation money.

Lying about global warming as an attack on God-fearing Free Enterprise and trying to clone dinosaurs!

How does he know this? Look who he looks to get advice from (links are mine):

...Michael Crichton, whose 2004 best-selling novel, "State of Fear," suggests that global warming is an unproven theory and an overstated threat.

...Bush as "a dissenter on the theory of global warming," ... "avidly read" the novel and met the author after Karl Rove, his chief political adviser, arranged it. ... Bush and his guest "talked for an hour and were in near-total agreement."

"The visit was not made public for fear of outraging environmentalists all the more..."

And so it has, fueling a common perception among environmental groups that Mr. Crichton's dismissal of global warming, coupled with his popularity as a novelist and screenwriter, has undermined efforts to pass legislation intended to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas that leading scientists say causes climate change.

Mr. Crichton, whose views in "State of Fear" helped him win the American Association of Petroleum Geologists' annual journalism award this month, has been a leading doubter of global warming and last September appeared before a Senate committee to argue that the supporting science was mixed, at best.

"This shows the president is more interested in science fiction than science," Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, said after learning of the White House meeting. Mr. O'Donnell's group monitors environmental policy.

"This administration has put no limit on global warming pollution and has consistently rebuffed any suggestion to do so," he said.

Michael Crichton again? This isn't the first time his face has been associated with the White House. This fool gives his weighty personage to tell anyone what his oil company patrons want to hear said.

Mother Jones has tallied some 40 ExxonMobil-funded organizations that either have sought to undermine mainstream scientific findings on global climate change or have maintained affiliations with a small group of “skeptic” scientists who continue to do so. Beyond think tanks, the count also includes quasi-journalistic outlets like Tech CentralStation.com (a website providing “news, analysis, research, and commentary” that received $95,000 from ExxonMobil in 2003), a FoxNews.com columnist, and even religious and civil rights groups.
In total, these organizations received more than $8 million between 2000 and 2003 (the last year for which records are available; all figures below are for that range unless otherwise noted). ExxonMobil chairman and CEO Lee Raymond serves as vice chairman of the board of trustees for the AEI, which received $960,000 in funding from ExxonMobil. The AEI-Brookings Institution Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, which officially hosted Crichton, received another $55,000.
When asked about the event, the center’s executive director, Robert Hahn—who’s a fellow with the AEI—defended it, saying, “Climate science is a field in which reasonable experts can disagree.” (By contrast, on the day of the event, the Brookings Institution posted a scathing critique of Crichton’s book.)

During the question-and-answer period following his speech, Crichton drew an analogy between believers in global warming and Nazi eugenicists. “Auschwitz exists because of politicized science,” Crichton asserted, to gasps from some in the crowd. There was no acknowledgment that the AEI event was part of an attempt to do just that: politicize science.
The audience at hand was certainly full of partisans. Listening attentively was Myron Ebell, a man recently censured by the British House of Commons for “unfounded and insulting criticism of Sir David King, the Government’s Chief Scientist.” Ebell is the global warming and international policy director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which has received a whopping $1,380,000 from ExxonMobil. Sitting in the back of the room was Christopher Horner, the silver-haired counsel to the Cooler Heads Coalition who’s also a CEI senior fellow. Present also was Paul Driessen, a senior fellow with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow ($252,000) and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise ($40,000 in 2003).
Saying he’s “heartened that ExxonMobil and a couple of other groups have stood up and said, ‘this is not science,’” Driessen, who is white, has made it his mission to portray Kyoto-style emissions regulations as an attack on people of color—his recent book is entitled Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death (see “Black Gold?”). Driessen has also written about the role that think tanks can play in helping corporations achieve their objectives. Such outlets “can provide research, present credible independent voices on a host of issues, indirectly influence opinion and political leaders, and promote responsible social and economic agendas,” he advised companies in a 2001 essay published in Capital PR News. “They have extensive networks among scholars, academics, scientists, journalists, community leaders and politicians…. You will be amazed at how much they do with so little.”

When you're a has-been hack whose novels don't sell to the public at large, it helps if your patrons produce "bulk orders" that get you read by their own think tanks at least.  ¶ 2:08 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Funny Things About the War on Terra

Steve Clemmons notices:

One of the odd but real consequences of Bush's power is that Americans well, some of us anyway seem to be perceiving other world leaders through a Bush-modeled prism. This is particularly the case with Iran's populist demogogue president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad is clearly hell-bent on creating collisions -- first with Israel, less over its existence than in wanting to do some regional head-butting to establish Iran as a hegemonic rival and in order to embarrass and emasculate Egypt's and Jordan's Muslim leaders. Secondly, Ahmadinejad wants a collision with the West over Iran's nuclear activities to legitimate his revolutionary faction as the authentic national voice of Iran.

But what is strange is that there are numerous forces inside Iran working overtime to impede Ahmadinejad from fulfilling his ambitions -- while America and Europe are doing much to empower him and give him exactly what he wants.

The question of checks-and-balances in Iran is important -- whether they are theocratic or democratic institutions. We need to understand how executive authority in Iran flows -- or Europe and the U.S. may, out of ignorance, empower Iran's president while undermining other players who keep the blustery rhetoric of Ahmadinejad just that.

This fiery, anti-Israel, nuclear-obsessed President in Iran failed to get his preferred Oil Minister past the Majles-e-Shura-ye-Eslami, or Islamic Consultative Assembly three times. Finally, he had to compromise with other power centers in Iran's government -- who wanted competent manager in that post rather than one of Ahmadinejad's retainers...

Some enemies seem to be useful indeed.  ¶ 9:50 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Holocaust Deniers Right Here at Home

Jay Taber points to an incredibly disinformational post over at the History Network website, "Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?". I won't link to it directly, not wanting to give them any more hits. The consensus of the author is that they weren't. Read what Jay has to say about it.

That the History Network, a mainstream educational group could allow statements like this to appear for public consumption is a harbinger of the times.

They might as well pack it up and move to Iran or Saudi Arabia.

The terrorists have won again.  ¶ 3:04 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Education is Ignorance and other Corporate Truthiness

Corporate America's education myth by David Sirota

The New York Times has a piece today on the latest myth being peddled by our government and the corporate interests who run it. It goes something like this: job outsourcing and declining wages is happening in America because Americans are getting more stupid, and thus the only way for America to stop the bleeding is to produce more students educated in science and math. This is a brilliantly crafted storyline because it both reinforces Americans' concerns about its public school system and, more importantly, distracts from the corporate-written trade policies that are really at the heart of America's economic problems. Oh yeah, one other thing - the storyline is also a shameless lie.

The Times' piece describes a new report showing that many major corporations - who continue to pocket billions in American-taxpayer-funded corporate welfare - are going to be shifting research and development jobs overseas to places like China and India. The Times obediently reports without any question at all that "the study contended that lower labor costs in emerging markets are not the major reason for hiring researchers overseas." We shouldn't be surprised at that - corporate executives are smart enough to know how to lie. And they are lying.

If you take 2 minutes and actually think about what's going on, you will realize the painful intellectual acrobatics it takes to try to claim otherwise. Low wages - and the trade policy that forces Americans to compete with low wages - is at the heart of this, nothing else.

Think for a moment about this education argument. The United States has the best universities in the world. While our education system certainly needs upgrading, the concept that we are not producing enough good graduates for R&D jobs is just silly. And the idea that India and China have better schools producing better-trained workers is also ridiculous. These countries may be quickly developing - but last I checked, most of the world's most prominent technical colleges and universities are here in the good old U.S. of A.

So now think like a corporate executive trying to maximize profits. You have one set of R&D workers here in the United States, and another set of less-skilled, less-educated R&D workers in the developing world. You can do one of two things - afford to pay fewer workers in America. Or, you can go to India or China, spend a fraction of what you'd spend here on wages, and be able to hire an army of researchers. Granted, each researcher overseas might be less-skilled than each researcher in the United States - but the sheer numbers of researchers you can get over there makes the economics of outsourcing work...

...Here's the truth these folks don't want to talk about. We can spend more money and train more science/math graduates, but unless we also train those graduates to accept working at slave wages, free trade makes sure those graduates have to enter into a competition for jobs with oppressed workers in the developing world...

Science training still does that. The scientific establishment works to make monastic tradesmen and women that work long hours with little reward other than the tradesperson experience. Is it any wonder corporations look to exploit them?

Society still looks askance at people who spend energy learning how the world works as opposed to how much they can plunder from it. I'll never forget an old ex-girlfriend laughing in my face when I told her how much I'd be making as a post-doc. It was less than what she made as a receptionist at an advertising firm before she'd finished college. She's the stay-at-home wife of a Wall Street hedge fund manager living in the Long Island suburbs spending the millions her husband makes and probably very satisfied with her life even though every cent she spends is legally exploited from others.

Most people just don't think that deeply with their conscious mind.

The unconscious disquiet is there, though. It leads to a fanatic devotion to religion in some. It's a disquiet effectively manipulated for the War on Terra. Seeing to the roots of it is something you just don't do in polite society.

It doesn't matter to most Americans that few know how to produce, or create, or analyze anything not related to manipulating others in order to make the most money.

The ruling Party has the nation led back to the Root, Hog, or Die ethic. It's no longer a world of limitless resources, but that's something they're in denial about. After all, you can take what you need, whether its native American oil rights or land in the Middle East. When the inevitable Malthusian crisis of this ethic develops, it will be like Easter Island when they cut the last palm.  ¶ 11:31 AM 5 comments links to this post

  Onward Christian Soldiers!

WASHINGTON, DC—In the wake of several major lobbying scandals, the Senate Select Committee on Ethics announced Tuesday that it will hold a special series of intensive sessions inside its recently completed 200-room Ethics Mansion.

...Committee members say the isolated environment allows them to tackle weighty ethical issues without the distractions, temptations, and conflicts of interest that pervade Washington culture.

"When one needs to ruminate on, say, improper gift-giving to government officials by corporations or corrupt foreign officials, it's in the public interest to do so in a quiet retreat," said chairman of the ethics committee Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH), sitting in an overstuffed leather armchair provided by the Ohio Beef Council. "Ideally with an 83-year-old scotch and a good Cuban cigar in hand."

Ah, morality. Where would we be without it. Amoral, one supposes, making decisions without the appropriate compass. A moral compass like Elmer Gantry's.

“This is the year God wants to make you a millionaire.” The visiting evangelist stomped back and forth on the stage of the rented school building. His “hallelujahs” and “praise God” crescendos were followed by jumping up and down. Sweat ran down his face as he proclaimed that the church members would not need to be afraid if the economy collapses and their neighbors houses are foreclosed upon because they are blessed and will have all of their needs met. The service ended with the explanation that the first step to becoming a millionaire is to pledge $200 of “seed faith money” to the church ...

Ted Taggard of mega church New Life Fellowship in Colorado Springs explained that Spirituality is a “commodity “ to be bought and sold...

Obviously, if you have a freelance spiritual moment you're infringing on Somebody's God Copyright and will be contacted by their lawyers.

More about Goodie Ted Taggard's views:

... Free-market economics is a “truth” Ted says he learned in his first job in professional Christendom, as a Bible smuggler in Eastern Europe. Globalization, he believes, is merely a vehicle for the spread of Christianity. He means Protestantism in particular; Catholics, he said, “constantly look back.” He went on: “And the nations dominated by Catholicism look back. They don’t tend to create our greatest entrepreneurs, inventors, research and development. Typically, Catholic nations aren’t shooting people into space. Protestantism, though, always looks to the future. A typical kid raised in Protestantism dreams about the future. A typical kid raised in Catholicism values and relishes the past, the saints, the history. That is one of the changes that is happening in America. In America the descendants of the Protestants, the Puritan descendants, we want to create a better future, and our speakers say that sort of thing. But with the influx of people from Mexico, they don’t tend to be the ones that go to universities and become our research-and-development people. And so in that way I see a little clash of civilizations.”

So the Catholics are out, and the battle boils down to evangelicals versus Islam. “My fear,” he says, “is that my children will grow up in an Islamic state.”

And that is why he believes spiritual war requires a virile, worldly counterpart. “I teach a strong ideology of the use of power,” he says, “of military might, as a public service.” He is for preemptive war, because he believes the Bible’s exhortations against sin set for us a preemptive paradigm, and he is for ferocious war, because “the Bible’s bloody. There’s a lot about blood...”

The Man is the Christ; the Woman is the Body. He is coming; she is the church; she must open her doors. United, they are the Kingdom, ready for battle. “The Christian home,” preached Pastor Ted, “is to be in a constant state of war.” This made many so happy they put their hands in the air, antennae for spirit transmissions. “Massive warfare!” Ted cried out.

The language of the Christian right was, I realized, hardening, collapsing. “Spiritual war,” a metaphor as old as the Gospels, has been invoked for the sake of power before—the Crusades, the conquest of the Americas—but for most of Christian history it has been no more bellicose than “jihad,” a term that once referred primarily to internal struggle. But the imagination of the Christian right has failed, and its language has become all-encompassing, mapped across not just theology but also emotions; across not just the Church but the entire world.

This, incidently, is reportedly one of the biggest Protestant megachurches in America in Colorado Springs.

Baby factory, kindergarten, school, and new home of higher indoctrination for the Dominion.

But back to Karen Horst Cobb on false Christianity:

The Evangelical Christian right is working to insure a manmade apocalypse develops in the Middle east. This powerful political faction runs parallel to the economic foreign policies of the slightly more secular neo-conservative “republican” party which has visions of empire and military rule as outlined in the Project for a New American Century's "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century" [pdf format]. It was written a year before 9/11, and, prophetically, the plan to put bases throughout the Middle East is right on schedule. John Hagee’s latest book is Jerusalem Countdown which can be viewed on his website. Evidently, it presents Iran as a horrible nuclear threat to Israel and the United States. Just for a quick check with reality here is the score on nuclear weapons: Iran-0, Israel-200, US-10,600 (as of 2002). Please explain to me who are these "people of faith” and what do they put their faith in? Experts agree that Iran is at the very least ten years away from obtaining even one nuclear warhead. Ten years is a lot of time to wage peace.

Peace being one of those values you abandon once you take refuge with Jesus the Barbarian.  ¶ 7:01 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Glacial Speed Up: Neither Fair nor Balanced in Greenland

The amount of ice flowing into the sea from large glaciers in southern Greenland has almost doubled in the last 10 years, possibly requiring scientists to increase estimates of how much the world's oceans could rise under the influence of global warming, according to a study being published today in the journal Science.

The study said there was evidence that the rise in flows would soon spread to glaciers farther north in Greenland, which is covered with an ancient ice sheet nearly two miles thick in places, and which holds enough water to raise global sea levels 20 feet or more should it all flow into the ocean.

The study compared various satellite measurements of the creeping ice in 1996, 2000 and 2005, and was done by researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the University of Kansas...

Sometimes the rate of movement in a particular glacier can change abruptly, but the speedup in Greenland has been detected simultaneously in many glaciers, said Eric J. Rignot, the study's author, who has extensively studied glacier flows at both ends of the earth.

"When you have this widespread behavior of the glaciers, where they all speed up, it's clearly a climate signal," he said in an interview. "The fact that this has been going on now over 10 years in southern Greenland suggests this is not a short-lived phenomenon."

Richard B. Alley, an expert on Greenland's ice at Pennsylvania State University who did not participate in the study, agreed that the speedup of glaciers in various places supported the idea that this was an important new trend and not some fluke.

For educational purposes only, let's go to the original paper:

Science 17 February 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5763, pp. 986 - 990
DOI: 10.1126/science.1121381

Changes in the Velocity Structure of the Greenland Ice Sheet
Eric Rignot1* and Pannir Kanagaratnam2*

Using satellite radar interferometry observations of Greenland, we detected widespread glacier acceleration below 66° north between 1996 and 2000, which rapidly expanded to 70° north in 2005. Accelerated ice discharge in the west and particularly in the east doubled the ice sheet mass deficit in the last decade from 90 to 220 cubic kilometers per year. As more glaciers accelerate farther north, the contribution of Greenland to sea-level rise will continue to increase.

...Repeat-pass airborne laser altimetry measurements (1) showed that the ice sheet is nearly in balance in the interior but its periphery is thinning, with deterioration concentrated along the channels occupied by outlet glaciers (2). The most recent surveys revealed that the mass loss from the periphery is increasing with time, with approximately half of the increase caused by enhanced runoff and half by enhanced glacier flow (3).

Although these airborne surveys crisscrossed a large fraction of Greenland, they left major gaps in glacier coverage, particularly in the southeast and northwest. The mass loss from nonsurveyed glaciers was estimated using an ice melt model, thereby assuming no temporal changes in ice flow. If glacier dynamics is an important factor, the contribution to sea level from Greenland is underestimated using this approach. To address this issue and understand the exact partitioning between surface mass balance and ice dynamics, it is essential to estimate glacier discharge and its variability over time.

Here, we measure glacier velocities using satellite radar interferometry data collected by Radarsat-1 in fall 2000 (4, 5) along the entire coast of Greenland except the southwest (Fig. 1) and repeatedly in spring and summer 2005 along selected tracks covering major glaciers. We also use European Remote Sensing satellites ERS-1 and ERS-2 data from winter 1996 in the north, east, northwest, and central west, and Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) data from summer 2004 in the southwest. Ice velocity is measured with a precision of 10 to 30 m/year depending on satellite, data quality, and processing and is combined with ice thickness to calculate ice discharge.


Fig. 1. Ice-velocity mosaic of the Greenland Ice Sheet assembled from year 2000 Radarsat-1 radar data, color coded on a logarithmic scale from 1 m/year (brown) to 3 km/year (purple), overlaid on a map of radar brightness from ERS-1/Radarsat-1/Envisat. Drainage boundaries for flux gates in Table 1 are in red. Drainage boundaries with no flux estimates but discussed in the text are in blue. Numbers refer to drainage basins in Table 1

(Table 1 is not shown due to size. Losses in areas and changes in velocity over the last ten years are compared for 31 different glaciers as summarized in Fig.1 above. Likewise, I omit a technical discussion of the changes in the glaciers, broken down by regional differences, and their significance for the change in the ice mass.)

...Greenland's mass loss therefore doubled in the last decade, well beyond error bounds. Its contribution to sea-level rise increased from 0.23 ± 0.08 mm/year in 1996 to 0.57 ± 0.1 mm/year in 2005. Two-thirds of the loss is caused by ice dynamics; the rest is due to enhanced runoff minus accumulation. Ice dynamics therefore dominates the contribution to sea-level rise from the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Glacier acceleration in the east probably resulted from climate warming. Temperature records at Angmassalik (65.6°N, 37.6°E) show a +3°C increase in yearly air temperature from 1981–1983 to 2003–2005. The processes that control the timing and magnitude of glacier changes are, however, not completely characterized and understood at present. Glacier accelerations have been related to enhanced surface meltwater production penetrating to the bed to lubricate its motion (20), and ice-shelf removal (13), ice-front retreat, and glacier ungrounding (21, 22) that reduce resistance to flow. The magnitude of the glacier response to changes in air temperature (surface melting) and ocean temperature (submarine melting at calving faces) also depends on the glacier-bed properties, geometry, and depth below sea level and the characteristics of the subglacial and englacial water-storage systems (3, 20). Current models used to project the contribution to sea level from the Greenland Ice Sheet in a changing climate do not include such physical processes and hence do not account for the effect of glacier dynamics. As such, they only provide lower limits to the potential contribution of Greenland to sea-level rise. If more glaciers accelerate farther north, especially along the west coast, the mass loss from Greenland will continue to increase well above predictions.

References and Notes

* 1. W. Krabill et al., Science 289, 428 (2000).
* 2. W. Abdalati et al., J. Geophys. Res. 106, 33279 (2001).
* 3. W. Krabill et al., Geophys. Res. Lett. 31, L24402 (2004).
* 4. The methodology used to map ice velocity has been developed in the 1990s with ERS-1/2 interferometric phase in north Greenland [e.g., (5, 23)], augmented with speckle tracking data from Radarsat-1 in the 2000s (24) during the background mission of the second Antarctic mapping (25), which we also applied to 35-day repeat ERS-1 data.
* 5. E. Rignot, S. Gogineni, W. Krabill, S. Ekholm, Science 276, 934 (1997).
* 6. P. Gogineni, T. Chuah, C. Allen, K. Jezek, R. Moore et al., J. Glaciol. 44, 659 (1998).
* 7. Snow accumulation averaged for the period 1960 to 1990 is from (12). Surface melt is from a degree day model parameterized with 1960s temperatures (23), which should represent average conditions in 1960 to 1990. These models yield 265 ± 26 km3 ice/year runoff and 573 ± 50 km 3 ice/year accumulation for the 1.7-million-km2 ice sheet, consistent with published estimates.
* 8. A. Luckman, T. Murray, Geophys. Res. Lett. 32, L08501 (2005).
* 9. R. Krimmel, B. Vaughn, J. Geophys. Res. 92, 8961 (1987).
* 10. O. Olesen, N. Reeh, Grønlands Geologiske Undersogelse Rep. 21, 41 (1969).
* 11. R. Thomas et al., Geophys. Res. Lett. 27, 1291 (2000).
* 12. E. Rignot, D. Braaten, S. Gogineni, W. Krabill, J. McConnell, Geophys. Res. Lett. 31, L10401 (2004).
* 13. I. Joughin, W. Abdalati, M. Fahnestock, Nature 432, 608 (2004). [ISI] [Medline]
* 14. A. Weidick, N. Mikkelsen, C. Mayer, S. Podlech, Geol. Surv. Denm. Greenl. Bull. 4, 85 (2003).
* 15. R. Thomas et al., J. Glaciol. 49, 231 (2003).
* 16. T. Clarke, K. Echelmeyer, J. Glaciol. 42, 219 (1996).
* 17. A. Weidick in, Satellite Image Atlas of Glaciers of the World, U.S. Geol. Surv. Prof. Pap. 1386C, C1 (1995).
* 18. M. Carbonnell, A. Bauer, "Exploitation des couvertures photographiques aériennes répétées du front des glaciers vêlant dans Disko Bugt et Umanak Fjord, Juin-Juillet 1964" (Meddelelser om Grønland, Rep. 173, no. 5, 1968).
* 19. E. Hanna et al., J. Geophys. Res. 110, D13108 (2004).
* 20. H. J. Zwally et al., Science 297, 218 (2002).
* 21. R. Thomas, J. Glaciol. 50, 57 (2004).
* 22. I. Howat, I. Joughin, S. Tulaczyk, S. Gogineni, Geophys. Res. Lett. 32, L22502 (2005).
* 23. E. Rignot, W. Krabill, S. Gogineni, I. Joughin, J. Geophys. Res. 106, 34007 (2001). [CrossRef]
* 24. R. Michel, E. Rignot, J. Glaciol. 45, 93 (1999).
* 25. K. Jezek, R. Carande, K. Farness, N. Labelle-Hamer, X. Wu, Radio Sci. 38, 8067 (2003).   ¶ 10:27 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Not Missiles. Spaceships!

The space tourism industry, its millionaire would-be passengers impatiently tapping on their platinum credit cards, just got a little more crowded, with the announcements of a new rocket development company and of plans to build a $265 million spaceport in the United Arab Emirates.

Three telecommunications entrepreneurs from Texas have joined with Space Adventures Ltd., the company that sent the first paying passengers to the International Space Station, to develop passenger spacecraft for suborbital flights.

The vehicles would be designed by a Russian company, and the first ships could be ready before 2008, said one of the entrepreneurs, Hamid Ansari, who with his wife, Ansousheh, and brother, Amir, helped finance the Ansari X Prize competition — the one that resulted in the first private flight to the edge of space, in 2004.

And Space Adventures announced today that it would build the spaceport in the emirate of Ras al Khaimah with an initial $30 million investment from its government. Eric Anderson, president and chief executive of Space Adventures, said Singapore would soon announce spaceport plans of its own.

These and other recent developments increase the likelihood that within a few years, nonastronauts who can afford a six-figure ticket will have the chance at a few minutes of weightlessness and black sky...

Of course, to put spacefaring technology into the hands of the UAE also gives them and their Al Qaeda sympathizers and their North Korean and Iranian clients technology for intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Just sayin'.  ¶ 10:01 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Giving the Business to Family Friends

The kind of people Dear Leader trusts just like family.

Cookie Christine finds at Think Progress that they're keeping your Homeland Safe for you, outsourcing the security contracts to a company owned by the United Arab Emirates. The $6.8 billion sale would mean that the state-controlled Dubai Ports World would control “the ports of New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.”

Lucky you.

Think Progress finds some details (a .pdf document) about our contracted Port Protectors.

– The UAE was one of three countries in the world to recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.

– The UAE has been a key transfer point for illegal shipments of nuclear components to Iran, North Korea and Lybia.

– According to the FBI, money was transferred to the 9/11 hijackers through the UAE banking system.

– After 9/11, the Treasury Department reported that the UAE was not cooperating in efforts to track down Osama Bin Laden’s bank accounts.

This is what I call keeping it all in the family.  ¶ 9:13 PM 0 comments links to this post

  It's Not Science Fiction

Welcome to the 21st Century. This guy was banned by Kos, but when his medication's working he's ever so lucid. Feverishly so:

...So, let's see what we've got: when Plame was outed by Cheney's office she was working on the Iran file, tracking WMD technologies; the congressional probe into NSA spying will likely now be dropped; new photos of Abu Ghraib frat pranks have filtered out; an Ohio Republican county commissioner has been charged with the attempted abduction of a 14-year old ("come here, little girl"), and Democratic senate hopeful Paul Hackett has been pressured by his party to drop out of a race the popular Iraq war vet could probably win to ensure a slot for a career politician who probably won't.

What's missing? Oh yeah: Harry Whittington has a pellet in his liver, now too, as well as in his heart (though he's said to be doing "extremely well"); Dick Cheney admits to drinking; and the ballistics just don't make sense at the reported distance of 30 yards.

Anything else? Just everything. Everything touched by the fallen angel of the American republic has become a farce, begetting tragedy. It's why The Daily Show has become the premier news program in the United States, because citizen/viewers are permitted to laugh at their condition, but powerless to do anything to change it.

It seems a defining characteristic of the present hegemon that if they deny it, it must be true. Should Bush ever deny having danced the hokey pokey with Jack Abramoff, the next week we'll see the pictures of the two in the Oval Office, shaking it all about.

Many Democrats, bless their blinkered souls, thinks all this means they're winning. That historic low poll numbers for Bush will translate into great gains next Fall and a sure victory for a safe, DLC candidate in 2008. They think, if they can't impeach the President for taking the country to war on a lie or the de facto President for Plame, then surely to God Cheney will be forced to resign for shooting a man.

As if. He's not going anywhere unless the "Lord calls him home" - whoever, and wherever, that may be for Dick Cheney - because even though Life Goes On for most people as if it isn't really happening, the Big Show with Iran is just ramping up. So Dick won't be leaving just yet.

It's wrong, I think, to call what's coming the "War with Iran," when actually it's just another campaign in the Long War that's intended to survive us, and walk the world through its greatest crisis of conflict and resolution. This is spelled out clearer than ever in the Pentagon's latest Quadrennial Defense Review, a .pdf of which can be read here. (See also this thread on the RI discussion board.)

As Bill van Auken notes, the language has been massaged so the enemy is no longer identified as "terrorists" but as "extremists" or "violent extremists." US forces are transitioning from "battle-ready" to "battle-hardened" to meet the "new strategic environment" in which the United States will not only be going to war with nations, but also "conducting war in countries we are not at war with." The Pentagon also intends to "provide US NORTHCOM with authority to stage forces and equipment domestically prior to potential incidents when possible."

How long has it been since you watched Starship Troopers? Perhaps you should again. I caught some of it last week on television, and I was surprised at how reality has outpaced it. I don't mean the space travel and the giant bugs; I mean the abandonment of democracy and dutiful dissent and the remodeling of America into a martial society. The bugs, of course, were never bugs anyway. They're the eternal, dehumanized other that needs only extermination. (The original title of 2002's giant spider movie Eight Legged Freaks was "Arac Attack.")

Paul Verhoeven's film is smart enough to satirize Robert Heinlein's rather straight-ahead authoritarianism (for instance, citizenship is a privilege of those who sign up for "federal service"), though satire seems a hard thing to grok for those who were disgusted by the story of "Hitler Youth in love..."

...In an interview six weeks before 9/11, Bob Dylan said "We are living in a science-fiction world where Disney and Disney's science-fiction have won. This is the real world. Science-fiction has become the real world, whether we realize it or not."

That's true, even though we're not fighting the giant bugs yet. It's true, because enough people have been made to see no difference, and we who do are now the "extremists."  ¶ 9:34 PM 2 comments links to this post

  War- What is it Good For?

A killing, as predicted.

And business just keeps growing lately.

...Carlyle Managing Director Glenn A. Youngkin, who put together the Qinetiq deal and has sat on the company board since 2003, convinced Qinetiq's managers that the real opportunity was not in the private sector, but in the U.S. government market, where federal agencies were spending hundreds of billions on new technologies for homeland defense and high-tech warfare.

So Qinetiq went on a shopping spree, buying four U.S. companies in three years that do business with defense, intelligence and civilian government agencies here. Its most recent deal was last year's $288 million purchase of McLean systems contractor Apogen Technologies Inc.

The same acquisition strategy has been pursued by other large defense and technology companies, such as fellow British contractor BAE Systems and Falls Church-based General Dynamics Corp., in a buying binge that made dozens of owners of small and mid-size technology contractors rich in recent years.

About $600 million of Qinetiq's $1.5 billion in 2005 revenue came from the U.S. defense market. Carlyle and Qinetiq executives say that the company's U.S. growth, and the growing profitability of its British and European operations, account for what has been a quick and large rise in Qinetiq's value -- from an estimated $870 million when Carlyle acquired its interest three years ago, to around $2.3 billion when shares began trading on Friday...

Carlyle sold Qinetiq stock worth $281 million in Friday's offering, earning four times its initial investment right off the bat. Further, Carlyle still owns stock worth nearly $300 million. That makes nearly an 800 percent return...

War is very good business for some.

It always has been.  ¶ 9:52 PM 0 comments links to this post

  "Guest" Facilities

...The idea that dissidents could be sent to detention facilities is perhaps the most widely circulated theory, and it is as popular under President George W. Bush as it was under President Bill Clinton. And though Daniel Ellsberg has also suggested that dissidents could be targeted, most of the theories rest upon circumstantial evidence and long stretches of the imagination.

What we do know, however, thanks to the Sydney Morning Herald's investigation into Reagan-era initiatives, alongside documents leaked to the Miami Herald in 1987, is that when Col. Oliver North helped draft contingency plans in the early 80s, one of the reasons cited for possible martial law and internment was "national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad" -- a scenario which would become more likely with additional wars and in the event of the return of the draft.

Last year, the Project for a New American Century, the think tank that famously advocated preemptive strikes and wars on multiple fronts, called upon Congress to "take the steps necessary to increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps." Such steps should be relatively easy, given that since PNAC's "Rebuilding America's Defenses" was first published, states have been linking driver's license applications to selective service registration. According to the Selective Service System's Web site, "As of August 5, 2005, 35 states, 3 territories, and the District of Columbia have enacted driver's license laws supporting SSS registration."

With the military stretched to the breaking point, questions of conscription and subsequent draft-dodging are hardly far-fetched, but the very act of protesting, in and of itself, could become a federal offense... former White House counsel John Dean as early as Oct. 2001, ... wrote that, thanks to the hastily passed Patriot Act, the "right to dissent" is in jeopardy, with protesters possibly considered "terrorists."

Dean considered this an "unintended consequence" of the new anti-terror legislation, but the Oakland Tribune later reported that California's anti-terrorism intelligence center was already "blurring the line between terrorism and political dissent" and National Lawyers Guild president Michael Avery said that the Bush administration was "trying to criminalize dissent, characterize protesters as terrorists and trying to intimidate and marginalize those opposed to its policies"...

Even so, detention camp jitters could prove to be nothing more than Waitsian paranoia. After all, Kellogg Brown & Root held US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracts from 2000 to 2005 without building a single camp...

That's likely classified information. Are you certain you'd know about it if they had?  ¶ 9:30 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Starting Over Elsewhere: Why Build a Death Star When There's All That Real Estate?

They could even lease mineral rights...

ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico – NASA is fleshing out details of launch vehicles, robotic and human exploration systems that can enable a sustained back to the Moon effort, including possible establishment of an Antarctic-like lunar outpost.

"The first step to Mars and beyond is getting back to the Moon," said Scott Horowitz, NASA Associate Administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at the Space Technology & Applications International Forum (STAIF) held here this week.

Horowitz outlined aspects of the space agency’s Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS), noting that a new study is underway on what future astronauts can carry out once replanted on the Moon.

NASA is on course to pick a single industrial developer in August of the Crew Exploration Vehicle—a spacecraft slightly larger than that used in the Apollo program to haul astronauts to the Moon in the 1960s to the early 1970s, Horowitz said.

Progress is being made too on designing a Crew Launch Vehicle, Horowitz reported, as well as a mega-cargo carrier that has the growth potential to toss over 300,000 pounds into low Earth orbit—more than the Saturn 5 booster utilized in the Apollo Moon program.

The two launchers are both borrowing heavily from solid rocket booster and external tank work honed within the space shuttle program. The shuttle is due to be retired in 2010. Also on tap for use in the two launchers is incorporating a Saturn 5-era J-2 upper stage engine—a motor capable of being started in flight and restarted anytime, Horowitz explained.

Horowitz said that conceptual looks at a four-person lunar lander have been done. Those initial studies of the vehicle show that it must be far more capable than the two-person Apollo lunar lander. For one, he said, a 21st century Moon lander must permit crews to put down anywhere on the lunar surface—and that means hauling lots of fuel in lots of tanks.

"The goal is four people at up to 7 days a shot," Horowitz said. An airlock on the lunar lander would permit ease of access to and from the lunar surface, he said...

NASA’s story for the Moon may well lead to a lunar outpost—infrastructure that can be utilized by international teams for scientific and exploration pursuits.

"In my mind, I kind of relate back to here on Earth…going to Antarctica," Horowitz told SPACE.com. Once crews have gone back to the Moon, they will learn to survive there in sortie mode. Finding locales on the Moon with usable resources—such as water ice—would be home base from which crews can then branch out to other parts of the Moon, he said.

"We do see an outpost of some sort," Horowitz said. "We just don’t know what it looks like yet."

Fortress Luna doubtless, a place to point your nukes back home.

Still, Dear Leader (or at least someone who could explain it to him) must have been impressed by the Titan fly-by. All those hydrocarbons without a rig. And no pollution standards to break, either.  ¶ 4:58 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Winning Hearts and Minds and Livers Again Worldwide

Jeanne d'Arc at This Modern World discusses officially sanctioned terrorism- by allied Peacekeepers on civilians.

That Geneva Convention thing. I guess you had to be there to understand it. That was then, this is the "f*ck you" age where the person in the way of Big Time Dick must be at fault.

The 70 farm-raised quail he shot before he bagged his lawyer must have hated America:

Monday's hunting trip to Pennsylvania by Vice President Dick Cheney in which he reportedly shot more than 70 stocked pheasants and an unknown number of mallard ducks at an exclusive private club places a spotlight on an increasingly popular and deplorable form of hunting, in which birds are pen-reared and released to be shot in large numbers by patrons. The ethics of these hunts are called into question by rank-and-file sportsmen, who hunt animals in their native habitat and do not shoot confined or pen-raised animals that cannot escape...

Speaking of torturing animals in pens, reading Jeanne reminds me of this tidbit I hadn't time to write about this week until now:

"The CIA’s top counter-terrorism official was fired this week, by the way, for the crime of being anti-torture, and perhaps for not being sufficiently diligent about shutting people up."

More:

Robert Grenier, head of the CIA counter-terrorism centre, was relieved of his post after a year in the job. One intelligence official said he was “not quite as aggressive as he might have been” in pursuing Al-Qaeda leaders and networks.

Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of counter-terrorism at the agency, said: “It is not that Grenier wasn’t aggressive enough, it is that he wasn’t ‘with the programme’. He expressed misgivings about the secret prisons in Europe and the rendition of terrorists.”

Grenier also opposed “excessive” interrogation, such as strapping suspects to boards and dunking them in water, according to Cannistraro.

Porter Goss, who was appointed head of the CIA in August 2004 with a mission to “clean house”, has been angered by a series of leaks from CIA insiders, including revelations about “black sites” in Europe where top Al-Qaeda detainees were said to have been held...

But not angry about leaks about people who were actually doing their job and trying to tell us there was no reason for war in Iraq. Steve Clemmons posts this analysis about what Valerie Plame was doing when Cheney told Scooter to blow her cover:

As we now start down a path towards harder-edged threats against Iran, allies will naturally question the quality of our intelligence given our failures on Iraq WMDs.

If Cheney & Co. outed one of the key intelligence operations monitoring the inputs and outputs of Iran's nuclear program -- then Cheney & Co. did vast damage to our ability to know what is real and contrived inside Iran.

The Bu$hCo/ Cheneyburton syndicate is causing vast damage to our nation in more ways than you might imagine.

For example, remember when we had National Parks? No longer- they're reserves for oil companies.

New projections, buried in the Interior Department's just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.

Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.

Administration officials say that the benefits are dictated by law...

They're only following orders. Amazing and versatile, the Colonel Klink defense is. The budget as a tool for policy, reform, and piracy.

It's an ownership society indeed... just don't let these butchers get a lien on you.  ¶ 9:38 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Mugging in Ohio

A Valentine from the DINOcratic leadership:

Paul Hackett, an Iraq war veteran and popular Democratic candidate in Ohio's closely watched Senate contest, said yesterday that he was dropping out of the race and leaving politics altogether as a result of pressure from party leaders.

Mr. Hackett said Senators Charles E. Schumer of New York and Harry Reid of Nevada, the same party leaders who he said persuaded him last August to enter the Senate race, had pushed him to step aside so that Representative Sherrod Brown, a longtime member of Congress, could take on Senator Mike DeWine, the Republican incumbent.

Mr. Hackett staged a surprisingly strong Congressional run last year in an overwhelmingly Republican district and gained national prominence for his scathing criticism of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq War. It was his performance in the Congressional race that led party leaders to recruit him for the Senate race.

But for the last two weeks, he said, state and national Democratic Party leaders have urged him to drop his Senate campaign and again run for Congress.

"This is an extremely disappointing decision that I feel has been forced on me," said Mr. Hackett, whose announcement comes two days before the state's filing deadline for candidates. He said he was outraged to learn that party leaders were calling his donors and asking them to stop giving and said he would not enter the Second District Congressional race.

"For me, this is a second betrayal," Mr. Hackett said. "First, my government misused and mismanaged the military in Iraq, and now my own party is afraid to support candidates like me."  ¶ 5:10 PM 1 comments links to this post

  Who Ever Said a Free Press Was Free?

Not Dear Leader! He recognizes what it takes to grease the lever of the old propaganda catapult:

How much is good press worth? To the Bush administration, about $1.6 billion.

That's how much seven federal departments spent from 2003 through the second quarter of 2005 on 343 contracts with public relations firms, advertising agencies, media organizations and individuals, according to a new Government Accountability Office report...

Needless to say, all I get out of that is hits from .mil sites.

Thanks again to xan for the link.  ¶ 4:22 PM 0 comments links to this post

  A Warm Day in January



More data here.

...The jet stream remained unusually far to the north during January 2006, trapping cold air in Canada and Alaska, while allowing relatively warm Pacific air to influence the temperatures across the contiguous U.S. This led to the nationally warm conditions. The jet stream is currently giving way to a more typical winter pattern, according to the NOAA Climate Prediction Center. The February outlook calls for below normal temperatures in the mid-Atlantic, the Southeast, and the inter-mountain West, and above-normal temperatures in the Southwest, the northern Plains and Alaska.

Throughout January 2006, none of the contiguous U.S. experienced below-average temperatures—each state was warmer than the long-term mean. Fifteen states in the northern Plains, Great Lakes and Midwest had record high temperatures for the month, with an additional 26 states having temperatures much above average. More than 74 percent of the country was classified as "much above normal" when compared to the 1961-1990 climate normal. Only twice since 1895 has more than 74 percent of the nation had a much above-normal temperature—March 1910 and November 1999. None of the contiguous U.S. fell into the 'much below normal' category last month. The second warmest January on record was in 1953, which was 2.3 degrees F cooler than January 2006...

What we need is balance. The facts are clearly partisan. Or is it the other way around: the Party is not reality-based?  ¶ 12:03 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Why Do They Hate Us?

Because they only see us feeding the leaders of their own corrupt Islamo fascist states. Then their own corrupt Islamo fascist leaders blame us for Israel to their own people. It's that simple, and that's just for our "allies" in the Middle East.

Exhibit A, a "friendly" Islamo fascist state like Egypt:

EGYPTIANS were hardly astonished when a ferry packed with more than 1,400 passengers sank in the Red Sea. Anyone who has struggled to navigate daily life here knows safety standards are virtually nonexistent, and the value of human life is often overlooked by a government widely considered to be driven by corruption and favoritism.

But the loss of the ferry, Al Salam, on Feb. 3, and the government's delayed and limited response to the emergency, have implications that extend beyond the scope of the disaster, and beyond the borders of Egypt.

The calamity speaks directly to the slow burn that consumes many Egyptians — and many other Arabs — who live under governments that rule with virtual impunity no matter how bumbling, incompetent or abusive they are. Similar frustrations, if over other issues, play out around the region, in places like Syria, Jordan, Yemen, and among the Palestinians.

It is difficult to draw an absolute link between the ferry disaster and the violence that exploded across much of the Muslim world last week in response to Danish cartoons that had lampooned the Prophet Muhammad. Many Muslims feel it was blasphemous to draw the Prophet at all, let alone in a mocking manner.

But in the coincidence of the two events, there is a clue to a dynamic that has played out in this region for many years: Leaders often call attention to external enemies — most often the Israelis — as a device to allow their own subjects to blow off steam. The anger itself is almost always home grown...

...While the West speaks of democracy and freedom, Muslims here tend to speak of justice. There is widespread feeling that the region's governments deny their people justice, and this feeling has been instrumental in the increased support for Islamists throughout the Middle East, whether the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or Hamas among the Palestinians.

"It has reached to the point where Egyptians do not feel entitled to anything, and all they want is justice," said Ibrahim Aslan, a leading Egyptian writer. "Across history, in literature, Egyptian peasants asked for justice, not for freedom or democracy. Just justice. Social justice."

Islamists promise not just piety, but an end to corruption and misrule. That challenge helps explain the eagerness of established governments to pursue the conflict over the Danish cartoons — to increase their own credibility on religious issues and resist the Islamists' rising popularity.

Corruption has no monopoly on the Middle East, although it seems that Dear Leader has been taking lessons here as well.

In certain Middle Eastern governments critique of the local strong man can lead you to the slammer. Now, if you work for the Feds, and your boss is Neo/TheoCon, it can get you charged with sedition to write a letter to your local newspaper Editor dissing Dear Leader over Katrina. Welcome to the Third World.

Now you know why they hate us. It's not our Democracy. It's our lack of it. It's not our Justice. It's the injustice of the commissars we appoint. It's the same reason we all complain about martinet politicians and beaureaucrats.

People tend not to like you if you say one thing and do another.  ¶ 4:39 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Personality Cult

True Father has taught Dear Leader well.

And it shows.

Glenn Greenwald asks Do Bush followers have a political ideology?

That's a good question.  ¶ 4:15 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Long War, the Wrong War, and the War Against Vision

As mentioned here before, Darth Rumsfeld has recently spoken of his plans for the future of your tax dollars, the lives of your children possibly, and maybe even your life too.

The first step in seizing control of people's minds is to stake a claim on the language they use to describe an idea. Thus we now find the blank check for endless war has been given a monniker that reeks of propaganda designed to appeal to Greatest Generation wanna-bees, the Long War.

You can find the whole hoary document here as .pdf file (with a tip o' the tinfoil hat to dr. sardonicus).

The BBC has concisely summarized the verbiage on "information operations" here and the greater plan here:

The document identifies four categories of threat:

* Traditional challenges - other nation states fielding conventional militaries which will compete with the US

* Irregular challenges - terrorism and insurgency chief among them

* Catastrophic challenges - the use of weapons of mass destruction by international terrorist networks or "rogue states"

* Disruptive challenges - an enemy's ability to counter or interfere with US capabilities, perhaps through new technologies.

Xan says it seems Americans who diss Dear Leader or the manliness of Darth Rumsfeld and write or talk about it fall into the last category:

WASHINGTON -- The government concluded its "Cyber Storm" wargame Friday, its biggest-ever exercise to test how it would respond to devastating attacks over the Internet from anti-globalization activists, underground hackers and bloggers.

Bloggers?

Participants confirmed parts of the worldwide simulation challenged government officials and industry executives to respond to deliberate misinformation campaigns and activist calls by Internet bloggers, online diarists whose "Web logs" include political rantings and musings about current events.

At least we don't have American nukes and Death Stars aimed at us. For a different slant, let's look at the Chinese government-sanctioned analysis (as any website out of Hong Kong must be) of the situation. Written for American consumption by an Arab private contractor for the D.o'D. based in Alexandria, Virginia (read the credits at the bottom of the linked page), of course, and thus likely to be its own kind of propaganda on multiple levels:

"Long War" is the Pentagon's latest template to fight the "war on terror". The importance of this concept will be signified by the fact that it will be capitalized in all future official military documents, a la "Cold War". The expectation is that eventually it will catch on the same way as "war on terror", which was in the process of being replaced by another phrase, "war against extremism". However, that phrase was not catchy enough. The expectation is that "Long War" will be...

The Long War is an intricate concept. No one should dismiss it as just one more mindless phrase-making exercise in the jargon-laden world of the Pentagon. A lot of thinking seems to have been done before deciding to underscore it. There also appears to be an elaborate coordination between the Pentagon and the newly created office of the director of national intelligence (DNI). In his maiden appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee as DNI, John Negroponte identified terrorism as "the pre-eminent threat" to the US, both domestically and abroad, and the globalization of technology as a reason underlying the spread of weapons of mass destruction. (No one then missed the significance of the ongoing conflict between Iran and the US on the issue.)

In emphasizing the Long War, the US is developing its thinking along the same path that formulated the intricate concept of the Cold War. Considering that the US won that war, a powerful driving force underlying the Long War is that an elaborate and enduring strategy - which also contains a repertoire of political-military operations and tactics - would result in another victory.

Given the highly plan-oriented world of the US military, resources have to be allocated for several years in a row. For that reason alone, a military-oriented anchor had to be found to make a case for future military campaigns. During the Cold War years, there was that mammoth Soviet Union, which was depicted as a supposedly indefatigable and unrelenting enemy. However, when it imploded in 1991 - largely as a result of its acute internal contradictions and as a result of the severely misplaced planning that emphasized expenditures to build military power at the expense of economic power - no other enemy of a colossal proportion took its place. (China is being envisaged now in that capacity in Washington. However, realistically speaking, the military capabilities of that rising power are no match for the awesome conventional and nuclear prowess of the US.)

...In a synchronized endeavor, the US intelligence agencies (the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, and even the Federal Bureau of Investigation) are preparing themselves to understand the intricacies related to global jihad. They stress whenever possible the long-term threats that global jihadis pose to the US, and are coordinating their actions and linking intelligence with the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, as well as the security agencies of America's allies...

That viewpoint is one amazing breakdown and window into the situation. As usual, what's not said with the rhetorical hooks is important in breaking down this piece of infotainment. Who's jihading whom, and does the jihad eminate from Mecca, Tehran, Tel Aviv, or Houston?

The other point is hilariously correct and ironic and a window into the competition's own strategery in the Long War on Terra. Let's repeat it to emphasize it:

...[the U.S.S.R] imploded in 1991 - largely as a result of its acute internal contradictions and as a result of the severely misplaced planning that emphasized expenditures to build military power at the expense of economic power...

Yes indeed. Ignore your own manufacturing and production infrastructure and human capital in the interests of producing a militaristic corporatist police state. Squelch and imprison the most creative in your society in the interest of control. Do your best to produce a post-modern post-industrial feudalism world wide, trashing your own economy to enrich the celebrities and aristocrats with the Right Stuff, and rewarding the Party middle management suck-ups on the corporate teat.

Watch the Patriots snuggle up for their Long War against reality as they slide down the Hubbert curve.

Pootie-poot thinks its funny, too.

Implode, beotches!  ¶ 6:19 AM 1 comments links to this post

  Meltdown On Ice

Last summer 84 out of 91 glaciers in the Swiss Alps retreated by as much as 600 feet from their extent in 2004, an alert reader informs me.

There's been a recent post here over the events in the Arctic last summer and in Greenland as well.

Breakup of the Ross ice shelf in Antarctica has been seen over the last year. Last fall the Antartic glaciers were observed to breakup at an unusual rate. But perhaps as a result of the current political climate of NASA, recent pictures of Antartica aren't easily accessible: about the latest that can be easily Googled are from 2002.  ¶ 10:09 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Stonewall the Profits

Warning Urged on Stimulants Like Ritalin

GAITHERSBURG, Md., Feb. 9 — Stimulants like Ritalin could have dangerous effects on the heart, and federal regulators should require manufacturers to provide written guides to patients and place prominent warnings on drug labels describing these risks, a federal advisory panel voted on Thursday.

The committee's action was unexpected. The Food and Drug Administration had convened the panel to help it determine how to research possible heart risks of the drugs. The agency had not asked the committee to address the drugs' labels, and agency officials seemed taken aback by the votes, saying they would not act on the committee's recommendations anytime soon...

The committee voted unanimously to recommend patient guides, and it voted 8 to 7 to suggest that stimulant labels carry the most serious of the agency's drug-risk warnings — a "black box."

"I must say that I have grave concerns about the use of these drugs and grave concerns about the harm they may cause," said Dr. Steven Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic and a panel member.

The votes came after F.D.A. medical officers described reports of 25 sudden deaths among people taking stimulants — the deaths were mostly children — and a preliminary analysis of millions of health records that suggested stimulants might increase the risks of strokes and serious arrhythmias in children and adults. The reports of sudden deaths never exceeded one in a million for any stimulant drug, although the F.D.A. usually receives reports of only a fraction of drug problems.

The preliminary analysis suggested that the stimulants might increase heart risks more than twofold. Such an increase may not be significant in children, whose heart risks are low, but could cause concern in adults, panel members said.

One of the drugs, Ritalin, has been marketed since 1955, and dozens of studies have shown it to be safe and effective. But no studies have been of sufficient duration or included enough participants to evaluate stimulants' long-term effects on the heart.

...Dr. Thomas R. Fleming, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington and a panel member, said stimulants might be far more dangerous to the heart than Vioxx or Bextra, drugs that were withdrawn over the past two years because of their ill effects on the heart...

Methylphenidate ( Ritalin ) is chemically related to amphetamine and has similar if less potent effects on the body and mind.

Adderall is amphetamine, and to suggest it has any different long term effects than amphetamine abuse is sheer marketing.

Drugs like these make hundreds of millions of dollars for drug companies every year. For this reason there is no incentive for drug companies, or physicians or psychologists or basic researchers who are financed by drug companies to examine their effects carefully. I imagine the FDA was taken aback alright.

But that's what happens when cardiologists get to examine data that psychologists feel is irrelevant, and why science works best when data is freely available for examination by all.  ¶ 9:43 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Checking Their Spines at the Door

Another Cave-In on the Patriot Act

Published: February 11, 2006

The Patriot Act has been one of the few issues on which Congress has shown backbone lately. Last year, it refused to renew expiring parts of the act until greater civil liberties protections were added. But key members of the Senate have now caved, agreeing to renew these provisions in exchange for only minimal improvements. At a time when the public is growing increasingly concerned about the lawlessness of the Bush administration's domestic spying, the Senate should insist that any reauthorization agreement do more to protect Americans against improper secret searches...

...This week, four key Republican senators — later backed by two Democrats — said that they had agreed to a deal with the White House. It is one that does little to protect Americans from government invasions of their privacy.

One of the most troubling aspects of the Patriot Act is the "gag order" imposed by Section 215, which prohibits anyone holding financial, medical and other private records of ordinary Americans from saying anything when the government issues a subpoena for those records. That means that a person whose records are being taken, and whose privacy is being invaded, has no way to know about the subpoena and no way to challenge it...

...another problem with Section 215: it lets the government go on fishing expeditions, spying on Americans with no connection to terrorism or foreign powers. The act should require the government, in order to get a subpoena, to show that there is a connection between the information it is seeking and a terrorist or a spy.

But the deal would allow subpoenas in instances when there are reasonable grounds for simply believing that information is relevant to a terrorism investigation. That is an extremely low bar.

One of the most well-publicized objections to the Patriot Act is the fact that it allows the government to issue national security letters, an extremely broad investigative tool, to libraries, forcing them to turn over their patrons' Internet records. The wording of the compromise is unclear. If it actually says that national security letters cannot be used to get Internet records from libraries, that would be an improvement, but it is not clear that it does.

In late December, it looked as if there was bipartisan interest in the Senate for changing the worst Patriot Act provisions and standing up for Americans' privacy rights. Now the hope of making the needed improvements has faded considerably.

All of a sudden, when people even within the Republican party are questioning the motivations of Dear Leader, Abu Gonzales, and the NSA data mining, we have capitulation on Patriot 2.

A question comes to mind: who in Congress is not being secretly blackmailed by this administration in the guise of national security?  ¶ 9:22 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Patriot 2 Patriot

Ready or not, here it comes.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — Four recalcitrant Senate Republicans said Thursday that they had reached agreement with the White House on the broad antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act, and two leading Democrats said they would now support the bill. The moves possibly clear the way for passage of the legislation, which has been bottled up in a dispute over civil liberties.

The Republicans, led by Senator John E. Sununu of New Hampshire, joined with Democrats last year in a filibuster that blocked the revised bill. Their deal involved three changes that, they said, would place greater restraints on the government's latitude in obtaining personal information like library records and business transactions.

...Critics said the changes were cosmetic.

...The administration would still have the power to obtain information about terror suspects who use libraries to gain access to the Internet by seeking that information not directly from libraries, but from their Internet service providers...

Who might these Patriotic DINOcrats be? Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, said the deal appeared to be "a step in the right direction.". I'm sure that's what Harry's casino buddies at MGM Mirage think, too. Perfectly legally, of course. The Senate DINOcratic leadership would never be associated with organized criminals like Abramoff that are controlled by the Rethuglican party. That would be scandalous and damaging to Dear Leader, too, wouldn't it?

Cheneyburton's building the work camps for the Patriotically incorrect who must be stripped of their citizenship but will be "allowed" to remain as Guests.

Are you ready for the country?  ¶ 10:06 AM 0 comments links to this post

  ...Only Following Orders...

Falling back from the Sargent Schultz to the Colonel Klink Defense, via Atrios:

Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been "authorized" by Cheney and other White House "superiors" in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.

Libby specifically claimed that in one instance he had been authorized to divulge portions of a then-still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein's purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to correspondence recently filed in federal court by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

Beyond what was stated in the court paper, say people with firsthand knowledge of the matter, Libby also indicated what he will offer as a broad defense during his upcoming criminal trial: that Vice President Cheney and other senior Bush administration officials had earlier encouraged and authorized him to share classified information with journalists to build public support for going to war. Later, after the war began in 2003, Cheney authorized Libby to release additional classified information, including details of the NIE, to defend the administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case for war.

What does Cheneyburton care? They own the Court, now.

So what's the real reason for Libby doing this? Has the worm turned, or is this part of a shell game strategery? I'd bet on the latter. The Klink Defense is never what it seems. Who's stealing what from whom?  ¶ 10:02 PM 1 comments links to this post

  The Little People in the Big City

Join the government and see the world
Garrison Keillor, Tribune Media Services
Published February 8, 2006

The headline of the AP story was "Bush urges confidence in his leadership"--which is like "Author says memoir is true" or "FEMA offers contingency plan"--and I didn't bother to read further. The Old Brush Cutter never got the knack of urging, and whenever he tries, he looks small and petulant, like a cartoon of himself. He photographs well in formal situations, and he is good at keeping a low profile when necessary, which is a key to survival in politics, as in boxing, but when it comes to the hortatory, he gets all hissy and squinty.

As a preacher, he is not in the top 50 percentile, and if his name were J. Ralph Cooter he would be hard put to find work in any of the persuasive professions. But there he is, giving the State of the Union, and so long as he refrains from perjury and tax increases and doesn't wear a dress to the Easter egg roll, he will probably slide along OK.

Of greater interest than the president's remarks to Congress was the report of the Office of Personnel Management showing that the federal government continues to grow under Republican rule. The executive branch now employs 1.85 million at an average salary of $63,125. In our nation's capital, the average is a handsome $80,425. Of course, the hiring of screeners at airports raised the total, but screeners' average salary is around $27,000 a year, which pulls down the average, which means there must be many happy folks in the higher ranges, assistant pooh-bahs and panjandrums and dukes of earl who are adept at taking a small acorn and weaving a seven-hour day around it, for which they enjoy job security, 13 paid holidays and 21 vacation days, and retirement at up to 80 percent of salary.

Not a bad gig, considering. There are mature gifted musicians scuffling for less than screeners earn, and farm families scraping along despite prayer and hard labor, and genius comedians scrapping for spare change. So a young Republican lady or gent could be tickled pink to land a job as assistant secretary for compliance assurance and get an 18-by-24 office with a window looking out on the Washington Monument and spend the day in meetings after which you will write memos of ingenious persiflage and obfuscation, like a cat smoothing the litter box.

Republicans believe in smaller government and deregulation, but it takes more and more of their friends and loved ones to not regulate us, and who can blame them? Washington is the perfect place for the slacker child who flubbed his way through college and flopped in business and whom friends and family kept having to prop up--find him a government job. Government service is a broadening experience. It certainly has been for President Bush. He has traveled to China and Europe and other places that never interested him before. He has come into contact with the poor people of New Orleans in a way that never would have occurred to him in his earlier years. He has met opera singers and jazz musicians and journalists. This is all good.

And he has met the families of soldiers killed in Iraq and visited with young people horribly wounded in the war, which would be a soul-searing experience for any commander. To see a beautiful young woman who must now live without an arm as a direct result of decisions you made--who could see this and not scour the depths of your conscience? And to suffer pangs of conscience even as you exhort the public to have confidence in you--this has to be an interesting experience. Your mistakes are responsible for terrible suffering, but you stand among your victims and urge public support for your policies as a sign of support for the people those policies have injured. This is a plot worthy of Shakespeare.

So why does he still seem so small, our president? In his presidential library, he'll be portrayed as Abraham Lincoln after Chancellorsville and FDR after Corregidor, but to most of us, the crisis in Washington today stems from a man intellectually and temperamentally unequipped to rise to the challenge. Most of us sense that when, decades from now, the story of this administration comes out, it will be one of ordinary incompetence, of rigid and incurious people overwhelmed by events in a world they don't dare look around and see.  ¶ 9:31 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Trojan Horse

Bush's Social Security Sleight of Hand
By Allan Sloan
Wednesday, February 8, 2006

If you read enough numbers, you never know what you'll find. Take President Bush and private Social Security accounts.

Last year, even though Bush talked endlessly about the supposed joys of private accounts, he never proposed a specific plan to Congress and never put privatization costs in the budget. But this year, with no fanfare whatsoever, Bush stuck a big Social Security privatization plan in the federal budget proposal, which he sent to Congress on Monday.

His plan would let people set up private accounts starting in 2010 and would divert more than $700 billion of Social Security tax revenues to pay for them over the first seven years.

If this comes as a surprise to you, have no fear. You're not alone. Bush didn't pitch private Social Security accounts in his State of the Union message last week.

First, he drew a mocking standing ovation from Democrats by saying that "Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security," even though, as I said, he'd never submitted specific legislation.

Then he seemed to be kicking the Social Security problem a few years down the road in typical Washington fashion when he asked Congress "to join me in creating a commission to examine the full impact of baby boom retirements on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid," adding that the commission would be bipartisan "and offer bipartisan solutions."

But anyone who thought that Bush would wait for bipartisanship to deal with Social Security was wrong. Instead, he stuck his own privatization proposals into his proposed budget...

He doesn't really care even a Republican Congress voted it down.

He really thought that every one else wouldn't notice it. After all, who reads the fine print. He doesn't: that's what he pays Abu Gonzales to do for him.

Thanks to Avedon Carol / Josh Marshall for the tip.

Call your Representative today.  ¶ 8:56 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Teamwork

President Bush called on governments around the world to halt the violence that has followed the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in Europe, as three more protesters were killed in Afghanistan.

The deaths, which took place when Afghan police fired into a crowd marching on an American military base, brought the total of people killed in protests in Afghanistan in recent days to 11.

Across the globe, protests continued even as world leaders stepped up efforts to restrain the violence, which the Bush administration said had been encouraged by Iran and Syria. But there was little sign that the furor would abate anytime soon...

After a mob attacked Danish diplomatic offices in Syria last week, Bush administration officials said such an act could not have happened without government acquiescence.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeated that assertion today. "I don't have any doubt that given the control of the Syrian government in Syria, given the control of the Iranian government — which, by the way, hasn't even hidden its hand in this — that Iran and Syria have gone out of their way to inflame sentiment and to use this to their own purposes," she said...

It takes two to tango, baby. Consider the sustained effort behind the publication, and reiteration, and re-distribution of these cartoons, which were published first 6 months ago in a very conservative Danish magazine and not funny to begin with. It has a feel to it. Let's call it that "Orange Revolution in the Ukraine" feel.

Big bang for very little CIA buck.

It seems there's another Islamo fascist government- but one we never call by that name- that's been having these street protests- unusual in a nation where open demonstrations are government approved only.

Now, what would that other government be?

Over at Attytood, it's noticed that the agitation is getting some circulation from good friends of Dear Leader:

When the rest of the world was paying little attention to what was once a local issue over cartoons in one Danish newspaper, the Saudis were right in the thick of things, making sure it became a big deal.

When the cartoons were published in September, it was actually our other close ally Egypt seeking to make this an international incident, pushing the Danish government. From the Washington Times (of course) of last Nov. 18:

' "The Arab Muslim world must take a stand on this," said Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit, who has announced that "this caricature affair," as one Egyptian diplomat called it, will be high on the agenda in December when the Organization of the Islamic Conference meets in Mecca. '

In January, several leading multi-national Muslim groups, all based in Saudi Arabia, condemned the cartoons. Then on Jan. 24, from the Indo-Asian News Agency:

'Saudi Arabia has denounced "certain European newspapers" for cartoons "defiling" Prophet Mohammed, warning that such actions would spread hatred and animosity among people of different faiths, the daily Arab News reported Tuesday.

' "The Council of Ministers expressed the kingdom's condemnation of what is published by certain European newspapers defiling the prophet Mohammed," the Saudi daily quoted the cabinet as saying in reference to cartoons almost four months earlier in Denmark and Norway. '

Two days later, the Saudis took the fairly harsh step of withdrawing their Danish ambassador. Here, according to an AP report, was what was going on the streets of a nation where things don't happen in the streets without the government's knowledge and consent:

'The anger over the drawings was evident throughout the Saudi capital on Thursday. Outside al-Sarhan and al-Athim malls in downtown Riyadh, huge signs read: "Dear brothers, you should hold out purchasing any Danish food stuff because the Danes desecrated our prophet."

'A flurry of text messages were sent via mobile phones, urging a boycott of Danish goods, such as cheese and cosmetics. "We call on the merchant brothers to stop importing all Danish products for the sake of our beloved prophet," read one message.

'A convoy of young men drove down al-Alia Street with white cloth banners streaming from their windows. "We demand all the brothers stop buying Danish products!" one read. "Remove all Danish products from your markets," another urged.

Some bloggers on Saudi Web sites asking Saudis to boycott anything carrying the label, "Made in Denmark." '

You know the rest of the story.

It's touching when close partners work together to make something happen.

Suggested reading with more links than you can shake your moneymaker at: Top 10 'Conspiracy Theories' about George W. Bush, Part 1 and Part 2, by Maureen Farell.  ¶ 10:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Reptilicans vs. Rethuglicans: Progressives Win One

George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.

Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.

The resignation came as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was preparing to review its policies for communicating science to the public. The review was ordered Friday by Michael D. Griffin, the NASA administrator, after a week in which many agency scientists and midlevel public affairs officials described to The New York Times instances in which they said political pressure was applied to limit or flavor discussions of topics uncomfortable to the Bush administration, particularly global warming...

Mr. Deutsch, 24, was offered a job as a writer and editor in NASA's public affairs office in Washington last year after working on President Bush's re-election campaign and inaugural committee, according to his résumé. No one has disputed those parts of the document.

According to his résumé, Mr. Deutsch received a "Bachelor of Arts in journalism, Class of 2003."

Yesterday, officials at Texas A&M said that was not the case...

Mr. Deutsch's educational record was first challenged on Monday by Nick Anthis, who graduated from Texas A&M last year with a biochemistry degree and has been writing a Web log on science policy, scientificactivist.blogspot.com.

...Mr. Deutsch played a small but significant role in an intensifying effort at the agency to exert political control over the flow of information to the public.

Such complaints came to the fore starting in late January, when James E. Hansen, the climate scientist, and several midlevel public affairs officers told The Times that political appointees, including Mr. Deutsch, were pressing to limit Dr. Hansen's speaking and interviews on the threats posed by global warming.

Yesterday, Dr. Hansen said that the questions about Mr. Deutsch's credentials were important, but were a distraction from the broader issue of political control of scientific information.

"He's only a bit player," Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Deutsch. " The problem is much broader and much deeper and it goes across agencies. That's what I'm really concerned about."

"On climate, the public has been misinformed and not informed," he said. "The foundation of a democracy is an informed public, which obviously means an honestly informed public. That's the big issue here."

Even with the elimination of the obvious incompetents, open science will not occur with Michael Griffin at the helm of NASA. The man is a Star Wars minion of Rumsfeld and DynCorp/ CSC. Unlike the Heritage Foundation stooges, he's intelligently evil.

Despite his promises to his peers that enabled his appointment at NASA, he's looting the science budget for Star Wars-related projects.

NASA wants to divert money from its science programme to help pay for billions of dollars of projected space shuttle cost overruns, says the agency's chief, Mike Griffin. The cuts mean several key science missions will be delayed indefinitely and have sparked criticism from space enthusiasts and law makers.

Griffin and other NASA officials announced the cuts on Monday during a press briefing on US president George Bush's 2007 budget request to Congress. In the proposed budget, NASA would receive $16.8 billion in 2007, an increase of 3.2% over the amount Congress appropriated for the agency for 2006.

NASA removing $2 billion from the science budget over the next five years to help cover projected cost overruns of $3 billion to $5 billion to fly the shuttles safely until they are retired in 2010.

Redistributing NASA's budget this way represents a turnaround for Griffin, who in September 2005 specifically vowed not to take "one thin dime" from the science budget to pay for human spaceflight.

When asked about his earlier statement, Griffin stunned reporters by admitting he had to go back on his word. "I wish we hadn't had to do it; I didn't want to. But that's what we needed to do," he said. "One plain fact is NASA can simply not afford to do everything our many constituencies would like us to do."

The science programmes affected include:

• Delayed indefinitely – the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), a mission to detect and study Earth-like planets

• Delayed by about three years – the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), designed to map stars with unprecedented accuracy and search for planets slightly larger than Earth will now launch no earlier than 2015

• Cancelled – four to six 1.8-metre "outrigger" telescopes designed to bolster the twin 10-metre Keck telescopes in Hawaii. The outriggers would have searched for planets and imaged newborn stars

• Delayed indefinitely – the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a 2.5-metre infrared telescope built into a Boeing 747 plane, will be put under "review" because it is behind schedule. It has been given no funding for the foreseeable future

• Delayed indefinitely – NASA's cosmology programme, "Beyond Einstein", is under review. Two of its missions – LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna), to search for ripples in space-time called gravitational waves, and Constellation-X, to study black holes – will be delayed indefinitely

• Cancelled/Delayed indefinitely – Mars research has been cut by $243.3 million to $700.2 million. This reflects the cancellation or indefinite postponement of missions such as the Mars Sample Return Mission and the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter

• Cut – solar system research, largely in astrobiology, has been cut by $96.5 million to $273.6 million.

NASA, and America's progressive science innovation, won't recover until all of the Administration's appointees are gone.  ¶ 9:11 AM 1 comments links to this post

  Chances are, Dear Leader thinks it's Super Spy Ware

Classified Top Seekrit Stuff.

Remember, we're talking about the son of the man who was astounded by things like bar code readers in the supermarkets.

For that matter, Cheney probably hasn't told Dear Leader we aren't really going to end our addiction to oil, although Big Time Dick had somebody march out Energy officials the day after the State of the Union to de-brief us all.

There's only so much Dear Leader can handle before nap-time.

Besides, by now he's probably completely forgotten he ever said that.

The level of disconnect in Washington increases almost hourly. The difference between what the people who think they control things think is going on, and what the people in the driver's seat are doing has never been greater. For example, the Pentagon says it really doesn't matter what Congress or international arms control treaties or even the Bomb experts say: they're going to design new H-bombs and they're going to test them.

You see, it's a post-9-11 world.

This brave new world somehow increasingly resembles the pre-1776 world, an ancien régime.  ¶ 9:47 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Abu Gonzales Speaks Truthiness

Alberto:President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance on a far broader scale.

Not exactly in those words, but to that effect.

Check out the video clip.

Thanks to Atrios for the link.

You can not make this stuff up!  ¶ 8:33 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Do Not Be Confused

...The incident that occurred on September 11, 2001 was, straight up, by definition, a strategic behind-the-lines guerilla attack by a group that had declared war on us. It was not random. It was a carefully planned assault on two strategic targets. It was an act of war.

The World Trade Center is exactly what it says it is. It is where we manipulate their economy in the Middle East. It was a strategic target that was taken out for a reason. They don't like the way that we screw with their economy.

The Pentagon? It's a very real stretch to call attacking the Pentagon attacking a "symbolic" target. I'm sorry, but there's nothing "symbolic" about the Pentagon. That was not a terrorist attack. That was an act of war.

The idea that the fourth plane, the one that went down in Pennsylvania, was headed for the White House or some other symbolic target is pure hokum. The target assigned to that plane was the other side of the Pentagon. The two fires would have fed off of each other and the resulting conflagration would have not only destroyed the building, but, not unlike our napalm hits on Saddam's Republican Guard bunkers in the first Gulf War, it would have sucked the air out of the underground chambers and killed everyone inside.

Even my little idiot brain can figure that much out. It was an act of War.

The response, invading Afghanistan, was as appropriate as any response could be against an ephemeral foe. It does seem that the headquarters of the group was there at the time, so the government of that country certainly needed to be destroyed. That's the American way. Who's going to miss the Taliban anyway?

But then we found out that most of the people involved in the attack were actually from Saudi Arabia, so immediately we flew into the next phase of our counter-attack and invaded..and here's where I keep getting confused...

If you're confused, that's according to plan, in my humble opinion.

We have seen the Enemy, and he owns the Oval Office. He wanted us to take out Iraq, a big competitor. He wants us to take out his other big competitor in Iran.

Do not be confused about this.  ¶ 12:11 PM 2 comments links to this post

  Bait and Switch (Again)

Abramoff and his thefts for GOP contributions have been covered here before, but Wampum has put together a story you should really be aware of.

The excellent links that tell the whole story are listed and can be followed here:

Down the Wrong Rabbit Hole
A Clue! A Clue!
Forget About the Little Fish
The Metaphysics of Indian Hating Redux
It's just about Indian casinos, doncha know?
Transitions...
So what happened in 1994?
More on J. Steven Griles

If you're attention-span challenged (i represent that insult!), you might appreciate a summary of the story Lambert has put together:

1. Interior, now run by Bush appointee Gale Norton, controls a humongous money flow from Indian Trust Indian lands leased out to oil and gas companies for drilling.

2. The courts have ordered Interior to give the tribes an audit of the money owed to them under the leasing agreements.

3. Forensic accountants for the tribes estimate the audit would show that $150 billion—that’s one hundred and fifty billion dollars, or, numerically, $150,000,000,000,000 are missing due to fraud, underpayment, and accumulated interest.

4. Interior has lost or destroyed many records needed for the audit.

5. The oil companies are an alternative source for the records. (If you can’t get the rent receipt from the landlord, try the tenant).

6. In Cobell v. Norton, the largest class action in history, the Indians are suing the oil companies to open their books for the audit.

7. The administration keeps appealing Cobell v. Norton and keeps losing. This makes the oil companies, and their allies in Congress, very nervous.

8. The administration’s fallback is to get Congress to order a settlement for some fraction of the $150 billion.

9. Jack “I won’t use the word bagman’ but feel free to think it” Abramoff is running a slush fund to get the administration’s fallback position through Congress using the Republican playbook of cushy jobs for insiders, disinformation in the press, campaign contributions, and money laundering front organizations (specifically, CREA, the Council for Republican Environmental Advocacy).

10. And this is the chutzpah part: Arbramoff is using the Indian’s own money to finance the slush fund—the payments they made to him to lobby for their gambling interests.  ¶ 4:14 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Dissent in the Ranks: the Rethuglicans vs. the Reptilicans

Dr. Jim Hansen has his little problem, but apparently Young Rethuglican propaganda operatives from the Heritage Foundation have decided to make NASA like the Air Force Academy, and a long-time minion of Darth Rumsfeld is uneasy about it.

A week after NASA's top climate scientist complained that the space agency's public-affairs office was trying to silence his statements on global warming, the agency's administrator, Michael D. Griffin, issued a sharply worded statement yesterday calling for "scientific openness" throughout the agency.

"It is not the job of public-affairs officers," Dr. Griffin wrote in an e-mail message to the agency's 19,000 employees, "to alter, filter or adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA's technical staff."

The statement came six days after The New York Times quoted the scientist, James E. Hansen, as saying he was threatened with "dire consequences" if he continued to call for prompt action to limit emissions of heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. He and intermediaries in the agency's 350-member public-affairs staff said the warnings came from White House appointees in NASA headquarters.

Other National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists and public-affairs employees came forward this week to say that beyond Dr. Hansen's case, there were several other instances in which political appointees had sought to control the flow of scientific information from the agency.

They called or e-mailed The Times and sent documents showing that news releases were delayed or altered to mesh with Bush administration policies...

Climate science has been a thorny issue for the administration since 2001, when Mr. Bush abandoned a campaign pledge to restrict power plant emissions of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming, and said the United States would not join the Kyoto Protocol, the first climate treaty requiring reductions.

But the accusations of political interference with the language of news releases and other public information on science go beyond climate change.

In interviews this week, more than a dozen public-affairs officials, along with half a dozen agency scientists, spoke of growing efforts by political appointees to control the flow of scientific information...

One NASA scientist, William Patzert, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, confirmed the general tone of the agency that year.

"That was the time when NASA was reorganizing and all of a sudden earth science disappeared," Mr. Patzert said. "Earth kind of got relegated to just being one of the 9 or 10 planets. It was ludicrous..."

The Big Bang memo came from Mr. George Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen's public statements.

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."

It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."

The memo also noted that The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual specified the phrasing "Big Bang theory." Mr. Acosta, Mr. Deutsch's boss, said in an interview yesterday that for that reason, it should be used in all NASA documents.

The Deutsch memo was provided by an official at NASA headquarters who said he was upset with the effort to justify changes to descriptions of science by referring to politically charged issues like intelligent design. Senior NASA officials did not dispute the message's authenticity...

More about this tool here.

Memo to the Dominionists: it's hard to use your nukular capability to convert the heathen with Faith-based missile guidance systems.

Although if there's someone who deserves an admonishment from Darth Rumsfeld about his disturbing lack of Faith, it is Michael Griffin, the Computer Sciences Corporation a.k.a. DynCorp link to Star Wars.

Like Paryngula says, this rot goes deep. It's part of the mindset of the Dominionist 30% of us who would support Dear Leader if he disbanded Congress tomorrow and sent all Undesirables to re-education camps. If you haven't read this about the War on Science division of the War on Terra, you need to.  ¶ 8:08 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Mission Accomplished in Afghanistan, Too

Taleban clash 'leaves many dead'

Nearly 20 combatants have been killed in a battle between Afghan troops and Taleban fighters in the southern province of Helmand, officials say.

Helmand's deputy governor told the BBC that at one point, he and 100 soldiers were surrounded by 200 Taleban...

The Deputy Governor, Haji Mullah Mir, said that he and the surrounded troops only managed to break through the Taleban after 200 more soldiers arrived to help them.

He said the fighting started after a local police commander travelled to Helmand's Sangeen district in pursuit of Taleban forces from the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, at about 0700 local time.

A US military spokesman in Kabul said US aircraft, including A-10 attack planes, had also joined in the fighting, the Associated Press (AP) news agency reports...

Endless War- mission accomplished for Halliburton, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grummon, Computer Sciences Corporation, and the rest of the Carlyle Group... and the Al Qaeda faction of the Saudi Royal House, of course.  ¶ 7:35 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Alternative Realities Before 5PM Friday

In the same news release:

$70 Billion More Is Sought for Military in War Zones

WASHINGTON, Feb. 2 — The Bush administration said Thursday that it would seek about $120 billion in additional financing to pay for continuing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2006.

The request shows that the cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan has remained at virtually the same level for several years, despite hopes that a large number of the American troops may leave Iraq by the end of the year...

Confused yet? You're 'pozed to be.

...The $120 billion includes money for the fiscal year that began in October in the form of a $70 billion supplemental spending request, which had been expected. It also includes $50 billion in the overall budget request for the first months of the 2007 fiscal year that President Bush will submit to Congress on Monday, a figure that was described as basically a placeholder until a more specific number can be developed...

Does the term "shell game" apply here? Maybe the better question is: when does it not apply to any thing these thugs do?

Bait-and-switch, smash-and-grab, and fan dance are policies of Rule for the Reptilican Party and their Dear Leader.  ¶ 8:51 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Pork by Any Other Name Crunches As Sweetly

Memo to our Saudi Overlords: don't sweat the State of the Unitary song and dance routine.

Alternative fuel development is, as we say, under control.

Science 3 February 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5761, pp. 594 - 595
DOI: 10.1126/science.311.5761.594b

U.S. INNOVATION:
Bandwagon Builds for Energy Research
Eli Kintisch

Influential Washington policymakers have decided that bolstering U.S. technical know-how and tackling energy challenges should go hand in hand. Their solutions are featured in a series of recent legislative proposals, including the bipartisan Protecting America's Competitive Edge (PACE) package, introduced in the Senate last week. The more-than-$70-billion package, like several other bills introduced in December, includes more money for researchers and science educators funded by the Department of Energy (DOE)... New funding proposals would boost energy research for areas such as photovoltaics and inherently safe nuclear power.

Inherently safe nuclear power. Got that, beotches?

...Previewing his State of the Union address earlier this week, President George W. Bush told Bob Schieffer of CBS News that an effort "to promote and actively advance new technologies" could make the U.S. "independent from foreign sources of oil."

That rhetoric signals the demise of an era in which "congressional support of science was built on the pillars of defense and health," says former Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Charles Vest, who predicts that energy-environment, competitiveness-innovation, and health will be the new drivers of research funding.

That's right folks. Congressional support of science will now be spent on Defense and Energy. That's nukular, beotches.

But back to our story.

Some would like to recreate the excitement of the Apollo space program in the 1960s by picking a challenging technological target that could weld research with national priorities. Norman Augustine, former chair and CEO of Lockheed Martin, chaired the academies' panel, which considered a so-called National Energy Initiative. Likewise, lawmakers crafting the PACE act at one point toyed with targeting development in specific energy areas such as nuclear energy. But the "decision was to let that happen [naturally]," says PACE co-sponsor Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM).

...One proposal in several of the bills is a new DOE research agency modeled on the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Aimed at encouraging risky, high-payoff energy science, the new agency, dubbed ARPA-E, would recruit academic and industrial leaders for short periods to craft and manage innovative research initiatives. Nobelist Steve Chu, director of DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, says that such an agency would help "bridge the funding gap" that now exists between well-established yet risky science, such as fusion research, and basic work with hard-to-anticipate benefits, such as that in particle physics. ARPA-E is also part of a package of bills introduced in December by Representative Bart Gordon (D-TN), ranking Democrat on the House Science Committee, and a recent proposal by Senate Democrats. Although not mentioned by name, the approach is also endorsed in a December innovation bill introduced by Senators John Ensign (R-NV) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT).

With Nevada Reptilicans and DINOcrats like Holy Joe on board, you can bet this programs going places, alright.

Loot the Treasury, beotches!  ¶ 9:40 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Commander Codpiece Chokes Again

Atrios also notices the rapid backpedaling and genuflection to Dear Leader's creditors in the House of Saud over Middle Eastern oil and alternative energy.

It's not just Commander Codpiece doing it either. It's the entire Washington and business elite of the country. It seems they don't want him mentioning that even to try to sedate the masses who realize what's going on down the road.

The Saudis realize that alternative energy not only would put them out of business, but Dear Leader's entire Bu$hCo-Cheneyburton enterprise as well.

This is a part of the TheoCon desire to shut down recombinant DNA technology.

We now splice human insulin genes into bacteria to produce the recombinant insulin that keeps diabetics fighting and alive.

We could splice together various microbial genes to make a methanogenic bacteria capable of making fuel oil. We could produce a recombinant blue green algae that harnessed sunlight to make hydrogen and oxygen from water. But not if the TheoCons and Wahhabis have their way.  ¶ 8:47 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Hard Questions for the Unitary Presidency

Since he was kind enough to raise the point last night.

...An online cottage industry of theorists, theory debunkers and debunker debunkers has flourished since 9/11. Sometimes the flimsy theories are easy to spot -- come on, if the four passenger jets didn't crash where it appears they did, where did they go? More often, though, the cases aren't so obvious.

A group of experts and academicians 'devoted to applying the principles of scientific reasoning to the available evidence, `letting the chips fall where they may,' '' last week accused the government of covering up evidence that the three destroyed New York City buildings were brought down that day by controlled demolition rather than structural failure. The group, called Scholars for 9/11 Truth, has a website, www.st911.org.

The reflexive first reaction is incredulity -- how, one asks, could anyone even contemplate, never mind actually do such a barbaric thing? But before you shut your mind, check the resumés -- these aren't Generation X geeks subsisting on potato chips and PlayStation. Then look at the case they present.

''I am a professional philosopher who has spent 35 years teaching logic, critical thinking and scientific reasoning,'' group co-founder and University of Minnesota professor James H. Fetzer told me. ``When I come to 9/11, it's not hard for me to determine what is going on. This is a scientific question. And it is so elementary that I don't think you can find a single physicist who could disagree with the idea that this was a controlled demolition.''

The group asks, for example,

• How did a fire fed by jet fuel, which at most burns at 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit, cause the collapse of the Twin Towers, built of steel that melts at 2,800 degrees? (Most experts agree that the impact of airliners, made mostly of lightweight aluminum, should not have been enough alone to cause structural failure.) How could a single planeload of burning jet fuel -- most of which flared off in the initial fireball -- cause the South World Trade Center tower to collapse in just 56 minutes?

• Why did building WTC-7 fall, though no aircraft struck it? Fire alone had never before caused a steel skyscraper to collapse.

• Why did all three buildings collapse largely into their own footprints -- in the style of a controlled demolition?

• Why did no U.S. military jet intercept the wayward aircraft?

• Why has there been no investigation of BBC reports that five of the alleged 9/11 hijackers were alive and accounted for after the event?

More questions over on kos here.

Because to not question the Official Story would be the worst sort of treason.  ¶ 10:21 PM 1 comments links to this post

  But it sounded kewl to say it, right?

Administration backs off Bush's vow to reduce Mideast oil imports
By Kevin G. Hall
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.

What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.

But America still would import oil from the Middle East, because that's where the greatest oil supplies are.

The president's State of the Union reference to Mideast oil made headlines nationwide Wednesday because of his assertion that "America is addicted to oil" and his call to "break this addiction."

Bush vowed to fund research into better batteries for hybrid vehicles and more production of the alternative fuel ethanol, setting a lofty goal of replacing "more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025."

He pledged to "move beyond a petroleum-based economy and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past."

Not exactly, though, it turns out.

"This was purely an example," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.

He said the broad goal was to displace foreign oil imports, from anywhere, with domestic alternatives. He acknowledged that oil is a freely traded commodity bought and sold globally by private firms. Consequently, it would be very difficult to reduce imports from any single region, especially the most oil-rich region on Earth.

Asked why the president used the words "the Middle East" when he didn't really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that "every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands."

Thanks to kos for the link.  ¶ 10:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Fact Checking the State of the Unitary

Never let the facts stop you from catapulting the propaganda.

By Peter Wallsten and Maura Reynolds, Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON — President Bush received a roaring ovation Tuesday for his prime-time defense of wiretapping phone calls without warrants. But Bush's explanation relied on assumptions that have been widely questioned by experts who say the president offers a debatable interpretation of history.

Defending the surveillance program as crucial in a time of war, Bush said that "previous presidents have used the same constitutional authority" that he did. "And," he added, "federal courts have approved the use of that authority."

Bush did not name names, but was apparently reiterating the argument offered earlier this month by Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, who invoked Presidents Lincoln, Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt for their use of executive authority.

However, warrantless surveillance within the United States for national security purposes was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 — long after Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt stopped issuing orders. That led to the 1978 passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that Bush essentially bypassed in authorizing the program after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Since the surveillance law was enacted, establishing secret courts to approve surveillance, "the Supreme Court has not touched this issue in the area of national security," said William Banks, a national security expert at Syracuse Law School.

"He might be speaking in the broadest possible sense about the president exercising his authority as commander-in-chief to conduct a war, which of course federal courts have upheld since the beginning of the nation," Banks said. "If he was talking more particularly about the use of warrantless surveillance, then he is wrong."

Bush's historical reference on domestic spying marked one of several points in his speech in which he backed up assertions with selective uses of fact, or seemed to place a positive spin on his own interpretation.

On his headline-grabbing pledge to decrease U.S. reliance on Middle East oil by 75% over the next 20 years, Bush's words seemed to suggest a dramatic new program to reduce dependence on foreign oil.

But experts point out that the U.S. gets only a fraction — about 10% — of its oil imports from the Middle East. In fact, the majority now comes from Canada and Mexico — and Bush said nothing on Tuesday about them.

Speaking about Iraq, Bush argued that "our coalition has been relentless in shutting off terrorist infiltration." But he may have left the wrong impression about how far U.S.-led forces have gotten in closing off the huge border areas, especially the 375-mile-long one between Syria and Iraq.

Administration officials have often complained that the Syrian government does little to police the border and have said it may not be possible to close it, given its size.

Two weeks ago, Rep. H. James Saxton (R-N.J.), chairman of a House Armed Services subcommittee, complained in a column in the Washington Times that the border is "extremely porous" and called for new steps to cut off the flow of enemy fighters.

Bush made a number of claims for his economic stewardship that were technically accurate but told only a part of the story.

"In the last 2 1/2 years, America has created 4.6 million new jobs," Bush said. Although the claim is essentially true, he did not say that the United States lost 2.6 million jobs in the first 2 1/2 years of his presidency.

"In the last five years," Bush continued, "the tax relief you passed has left $880 billion in the hands of American workers, investors, small businesses and families, and they have used it to help produce more than four years of uninterrupted economic growth."

But to many economists, the cause-and-effect relationship is not so stark; they credit tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 with helping to turn around a stagnant economy, but now they worry that the resulting deficits may retard it.

"Every year of my presidency, we have reduced the growth of non-security discretionary spending," Bush said. True again, but this represents less than 20% of all spending. Including defense and the giant benefit programs such as Social Security and Medicare, spending has risen by about 30% in the five Bush years.

The president also seemed to ignore Supreme Court precedent when he called for Congress to give him the "line item veto." But Congress did that once, in 1996, and it was used once, by former President Clinton. But in 1998, a federal judge ruled that it was unconstitutional. That was affirmed by a 6-3 decision of the Supreme Court.

Bush praised his administration's efforts to help the Gulf Coast recover from Hurricane Katrina. "A hopeful society comes to the aid of fellow citizens in times of suffering and emergency, and stays at it until they are back on their feet," he said.

But Bush omitted any mention of tensions between Gulf State officials and the administration over responsibility for the botched response to the storm. "There was nothing in terms of new money," said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.). Perhaps Bush's most controversial language came as he defended the surveillance program.

The president echoed earlier administration assertions that the domestic surveillance program would have been useful before the Sept. 11 attacks. Bush said two Sept. 11 hijackers living in San Diego made telephone calls to Al Qaeda associates overseas, but that "we did not know about their plans until it was too late."

However, The Times has previously reported that some U.S. counterterrorism officials knowledgeable about the case blame an interagency communications breakdown, not a surveillance failure or shortcomings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

*

Times staff writers Richard B. Schmitt, Josh Meyer, Janet Hook, Nicole Gaouette, Joel Havemann, Paul Richter and researcher Robin Cochran in Washington contributed to this report.

Thanks to xan for the link.

Then there's his equating stem cell research with the Island of Dr. Moreau.

The legitimate use of splicing some human genes into mice to study human genetic disease is discussed by Tom Tomorrow here and by Pharyngula here.

It's pure political calculus. He throws away the mad scientist and pig-man vote, and wins the religious ignoramus vote… and we know which one has the majority here.

But guess what? Creating chimeras is legitimate and useful scientific research; it's really happening. Of course, it isn't with the intent of creating monstrous half-animal/half-human slaves or something evil like that, and scientists are well aware (or should be well aware) of the ethical concerns, and it's the topic of ongoing debate.

Of course, what Dear Leader was damning was totally unrelated to what people are doing and why. They aren't making human-animal chimeras. They've taking human genes or mutant genes for individual proteins and cloning them into animals to figure how they function or why they screw up normal processes. Nobody's trying to make a mouse with human brains, or a gorilla-man that can soldier.

The only people in the world that might try that kind of thing work for Darth Rumsfeld. Shackeling the National Institutes of Health with TheoCon paranoid fantasies won't stop DARPA from doing whatever it pleases with its black budget. It will serve to ice the advance of science in this country, which is what our feudal lord wanna-bees want to see happen here.  ¶ 12:06 PM 0 comments links to this post