Singularity
Just another Reality-based bubble in the foam of the multiverse.
Friday, March 31, 2006
Profit-driven Proliferation, from the Company to You
TomDispatch notes the takeover of the research arm of the government's nuclear program by Bechtel. This is an interesting development. The most obvious motivation is major league Pork, but that's just part of the pie.
Privatizing the Apocalypse
By Frida Berrigan
...Started as the super-secret "Project Y" in 1943, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has long been the keystone institution of the American nuclear-weapons producing complex. It was the birthplace of Fat Man and Little Boy, the two nuclear bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Last year, the University of California, which has managed the lab for the Department of Energy since its inception, decided to put Los Alamos on the auction block. In December 2005, construction giant Bechtel won a $553 million seven-year management contract to run the sprawling complex, which employs more than 13,000 people and has an estimated $2.2 billion annual budget...
At Los Alamos, the University of California has already been replaced by a "limited liability corporation," says Tyler Przybylek of the Department of Energy's Evaluation Board; and, more generally, the writing is on the containment wall. Nuclear laboratories are no longer to be intellectual institutions devoted to science but part of a corporate-business model where research, design, and ultimately the weapons themselves will become products to be marketed. The new dress code will be suits and ties, not lab coats and safety glasses. Under Bechtel, new management will lead to a "tightly structured organization" that will "drive efficiency," predicts John Browne, who directed the lab at Los Alamos from 1997-2003. "If there is a product the government wants," he concludes, "they will necessarily be focused on that. A lot more money will be at stake."
Los Alamos was the first to go. Now, the management contract for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is on the auction block as well...
...The California-based construction giant has a long history of big projects, big promises, bigger budgets and even bigger failures.
In Boston, Bechtel was put in charge of the "Big Dig," the reconstruction of Interstate 93 beneath the city. In 1985, the price tag for the project was estimated at about $2.5 billion. Now, it is a whopping $14.6 billion (or $1.8 billion a mile), making it the most expensive stretch of highway in the world. Near San Diego, citizens are still paying the bills for cost over-runs at a nuclear power plant where Bechtel installed one of the reactors backwards.
In 2003, Bechtel took this winning track record to Baghdad, where it blew billions in a string of unfinished projects and unfathomable errors. The company reaped tens of millions of dollars in contracts to repair Iraq's schools, for example, but an independent report found that many of the schools Bechtel claimed to have completely refitted, "haven't been touched," and a number of schools remained "in shambles." One "repaired" school was found by inspectors be overflowing with "unflushed sewage."
Bechtel also has a $1.03 billion contract to oversee important aspects of Iraq's infrastructure reconstruction, including water and sewage. Despite many promises, startling numbers of Iraqi families continue to lack access to clean water, according to information gathered by independent journalist Dahr Jamail. The company made providing potable water to southern Iraq one of its top priorities, promising delivery within the first 60 days of the program. One year later, rising epidemics of water-borne illnesses like cholera, kidney stones and diarrhea pointed to the failure of Bechtel's mission.
Outside of its ill-fated reconstruction contracts in Iraq, Bechtel is not known as a large military contractor, but the company has been quietly moving into the nuclear arena. It helped build a missile-defense site in the South Pacific, runs the Nevada Test Site where the United States once performed hundreds of above-and underground nuclear tests. Bechtel is also the "environmental manager" at the Oak Ridge National Lab, which stores highly-enriched uranium, and is carrying out design work at the Yucca Mountain repository where the plan to store 77,000 tons of nuclear waste has environmentalists and community activists up in arms.
At Washington State's Hanford Waste Treatment Plant, Bechtel is working on technology to turn nuclear waste into glass. But the estimated costs of building the facility to do that have doubled in one year to about $10 billion while the completion date slipped from 2011 to 2017. Members of Congress have proposed that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission take over management of the project from Bechtel because of its cost overruns and delays...
Given this track record, it's hard to make the case that Bechtel assumes the helm at Los Alamos out of an altruistic, even patriotic, desire to impose clean, lean corporate management on a complacent institution long overfed at the public trough. The question remains: Why this urge to privatize the apocalypse?
To answer that question, you have to begin with the post-Cold War quest of the nuclear laboratories for a new identity and raison d'être. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the loss of the other superpower as a nuclear twin and target, and an international shift in favor of nuclear disarmament sent Los Alamos and the whole U.S. nuclear complex into existential crisis: Who are we? What is our role? What do we do now that nuclear weapons have no obvious role in a world of, at best, medium-sized military enemies? Throughout the Clinton years, these questions multiplied while the nuclear arsenal remained relatively stable. More recently, with a lot of fancy footwork, a few friends in Congress, and the ear of a White House eager to be known for something other than the Long War on global terrorism, the labs finally came up with a winning solution that has Bechtel and other military contractors seeing dollar signs.
They found their salvation in a few lines of the Nuclear Posture Review, released in January 2002, where the Bush administration asserted: "The need is clear for a revitalized nuclear weapons complex that will be able, if directed, to design, develop, manufacture, and certify new warheads in response to new national requirements; and maintain readiness to resume underground testing if required."
There's gold in that there sentence. During the Cold War, spending on nuclear weapons averaged $4.2 billion a year (in current dollars). Almost two decades after the "nuclear animosity" between the two great superpowers ended, the United States is spending one-and-a-half times the Cold War average on nuclear weapons. In 2001, the weapons-activities budget of the Department of Energy, which oversees the nuclear weapons complex through its "semi-autonomous" National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), totaled $5.19 billion; and a "revitalized nuclear weapons complex," ready to "design, develop, manufacture, and certify new warheads," means a more than billion-dollar jump in spending to $6.4 billion by fiscal year 2006...
And that's just the beginning. The NNSA's five-year "National Security Plan" calls for annual increases to reach $7.76 billion by 2009...
Now that's not chump change, but that's likely not the whole story either.
Bechtel leading the nuclear weapons production research arm means the rest of the Company known as the Carlyle Group, the world's largest private equity firm, has an "in" on the ultimate tools for projecting Corporate clout into the world.
If they can manage to avoid any hostile takeovers, that is. ¶ 9:15 PM 0 comments links to this post
Privatizing the Apocalypse
By Frida Berrigan
...Started as the super-secret "Project Y" in 1943, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has long been the keystone institution of the American nuclear-weapons producing complex. It was the birthplace of Fat Man and Little Boy, the two nuclear bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Last year, the University of California, which has managed the lab for the Department of Energy since its inception, decided to put Los Alamos on the auction block. In December 2005, construction giant Bechtel won a $553 million seven-year management contract to run the sprawling complex, which employs more than 13,000 people and has an estimated $2.2 billion annual budget...
At Los Alamos, the University of California has already been replaced by a "limited liability corporation," says Tyler Przybylek of the Department of Energy's Evaluation Board; and, more generally, the writing is on the containment wall. Nuclear laboratories are no longer to be intellectual institutions devoted to science but part of a corporate-business model where research, design, and ultimately the weapons themselves will become products to be marketed. The new dress code will be suits and ties, not lab coats and safety glasses. Under Bechtel, new management will lead to a "tightly structured organization" that will "drive efficiency," predicts John Browne, who directed the lab at Los Alamos from 1997-2003. "If there is a product the government wants," he concludes, "they will necessarily be focused on that. A lot more money will be at stake."
Los Alamos was the first to go. Now, the management contract for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is on the auction block as well...
...The California-based construction giant has a long history of big projects, big promises, bigger budgets and even bigger failures.
In Boston, Bechtel was put in charge of the "Big Dig," the reconstruction of Interstate 93 beneath the city. In 1985, the price tag for the project was estimated at about $2.5 billion. Now, it is a whopping $14.6 billion (or $1.8 billion a mile), making it the most expensive stretch of highway in the world. Near San Diego, citizens are still paying the bills for cost over-runs at a nuclear power plant where Bechtel installed one of the reactors backwards.
In 2003, Bechtel took this winning track record to Baghdad, where it blew billions in a string of unfinished projects and unfathomable errors. The company reaped tens of millions of dollars in contracts to repair Iraq's schools, for example, but an independent report found that many of the schools Bechtel claimed to have completely refitted, "haven't been touched," and a number of schools remained "in shambles." One "repaired" school was found by inspectors be overflowing with "unflushed sewage."
Bechtel also has a $1.03 billion contract to oversee important aspects of Iraq's infrastructure reconstruction, including water and sewage. Despite many promises, startling numbers of Iraqi families continue to lack access to clean water, according to information gathered by independent journalist Dahr Jamail. The company made providing potable water to southern Iraq one of its top priorities, promising delivery within the first 60 days of the program. One year later, rising epidemics of water-borne illnesses like cholera, kidney stones and diarrhea pointed to the failure of Bechtel's mission.
Outside of its ill-fated reconstruction contracts in Iraq, Bechtel is not known as a large military contractor, but the company has been quietly moving into the nuclear arena. It helped build a missile-defense site in the South Pacific, runs the Nevada Test Site where the United States once performed hundreds of above-and underground nuclear tests. Bechtel is also the "environmental manager" at the Oak Ridge National Lab, which stores highly-enriched uranium, and is carrying out design work at the Yucca Mountain repository where the plan to store 77,000 tons of nuclear waste has environmentalists and community activists up in arms.
At Washington State's Hanford Waste Treatment Plant, Bechtel is working on technology to turn nuclear waste into glass. But the estimated costs of building the facility to do that have doubled in one year to about $10 billion while the completion date slipped from 2011 to 2017. Members of Congress have proposed that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission take over management of the project from Bechtel because of its cost overruns and delays...
Given this track record, it's hard to make the case that Bechtel assumes the helm at Los Alamos out of an altruistic, even patriotic, desire to impose clean, lean corporate management on a complacent institution long overfed at the public trough. The question remains: Why this urge to privatize the apocalypse?
To answer that question, you have to begin with the post-Cold War quest of the nuclear laboratories for a new identity and raison d'être. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the loss of the other superpower as a nuclear twin and target, and an international shift in favor of nuclear disarmament sent Los Alamos and the whole U.S. nuclear complex into existential crisis: Who are we? What is our role? What do we do now that nuclear weapons have no obvious role in a world of, at best, medium-sized military enemies? Throughout the Clinton years, these questions multiplied while the nuclear arsenal remained relatively stable. More recently, with a lot of fancy footwork, a few friends in Congress, and the ear of a White House eager to be known for something other than the Long War on global terrorism, the labs finally came up with a winning solution that has Bechtel and other military contractors seeing dollar signs.
They found their salvation in a few lines of the Nuclear Posture Review, released in January 2002, where the Bush administration asserted: "The need is clear for a revitalized nuclear weapons complex that will be able, if directed, to design, develop, manufacture, and certify new warheads in response to new national requirements; and maintain readiness to resume underground testing if required."
There's gold in that there sentence. During the Cold War, spending on nuclear weapons averaged $4.2 billion a year (in current dollars). Almost two decades after the "nuclear animosity" between the two great superpowers ended, the United States is spending one-and-a-half times the Cold War average on nuclear weapons. In 2001, the weapons-activities budget of the Department of Energy, which oversees the nuclear weapons complex through its "semi-autonomous" National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), totaled $5.19 billion; and a "revitalized nuclear weapons complex," ready to "design, develop, manufacture, and certify new warheads," means a more than billion-dollar jump in spending to $6.4 billion by fiscal year 2006...
And that's just the beginning. The NNSA's five-year "National Security Plan" calls for annual increases to reach $7.76 billion by 2009...
Now that's not chump change, but that's likely not the whole story either.
Bechtel leading the nuclear weapons production research arm means the rest of the Company known as the Carlyle Group, the world's largest private equity firm, has an "in" on the ultimate tools for projecting Corporate clout into the world.
If they can manage to avoid any hostile takeovers, that is. ¶ 9:15 PM 0 comments links to this post
Rumsfeld Goes Gently into the Night?
It's a rumor.
It is likely wishful thinking. There's a lot of that in progressive circles. I can't imagine this Dark Lord of the Sith being given a pink slip.
There's too much history.
If Dear Leader tries to depose redruM against his wishes, there will be heads rolling in Washington.
Literally. ¶ 8:39 AM 0 comments links to this post
It is likely wishful thinking. There's a lot of that in progressive circles. I can't imagine this Dark Lord of the Sith being given a pink slip.
There's too much history.
If Dear Leader tries to depose redruM against his wishes, there will be heads rolling in Washington.
Literally. ¶ 8:39 AM 0 comments links to this post
Thursday, March 30, 2006
The Transformation from Capitalism to Corporate Feudalism
Undermining the ownership society
David Sirota
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Away from the cameras covering the Enron trial and largely hidden from view on the evening news, a war is being waged over the most basic rights of ownership that undergird our economy.
Most economic conflicts arise between those who own property and those who do not. Management versus labor. Landlords versus tenants. Rich versus poor. But now, the persecution is being directed at owners from those who manage what is owned. It is corporate executives versus stockholders.
Today, trillions of shares of stock are owned by pension funds and 401(k) plans -- that is, owned by millions of workers. Politicians say we need to move toward an "ownership society" -- but, we, the citizens, already own a pretty big share of Corporate America. For years, much of that ownership was passive -- many investors made gains, and didn't ask questions. But since Enron and other corporate scandals damaged the economy, many citizen investors, primarily through their pension and union funds, have tried to exercise their rights to demand reforms at the companies they own -- reforms that would increase companies' bottom line by cracking down on executive abuses.
For instance, the Coca-Cola Company recently agreed to obtain stockholder permission before approving large executive severance packages. Since 2000, three departing Coke executives were given $180 million in severance pay. Though opposed to the new policy, management was forced to accept it, thanks to a shareholder resolution by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The union owns shares of the company, and thus has a fiduciary responsibility to help make the company as efficient and profitable as possible. Reining in exorbitant executive pay packages that are draining resources is one way to do that.
Similarly, New York City's public pension funds are demanding that six major firms -- Wal-Mart, Chevron, Southern Company, Union Pacific, AmSouth Bancorporation and Cinergy -- start disclosing political contributions made with company cash. The pension funds own $1 billion of these companies' stock, and the demands follow agreements by other corporations to disclose political expenditures...
In December, the Financial Times reported that major companies are now "hiring shareholder surveillance companies to find out who their shareholders are and which might be likely to cause trouble." As if out of a cloak-and-dagger film, the Financial Times quoted Tim Vaeth, an analyst, as saying, "Companies want to know who owns their stock, what their investors' intentions are and what their voting history is." His firm, Shareholder Intelligence, issued a report fretting that shareholders have "taken critical steps toward increasing their influence in the boardroom."
Following up last month, the Financial Times reported that "Merrill Lynch is poised to become the first investment bank to dedicate a team to advise companies on the growing threat of activist investors." Meanwhile, in an interview with Business Week this month, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce angrily denounced shareholders "who want to have some degree of leverage over companies."
The language is telling. Shareholders -- the actual owners of companies -- are now seen by executives as "threats" who dare to desire "leverage over companies" they own. That is seen as "causing trouble," and thus requiring "surveillance" by company management -- or worse, from America's corrupt government.
Yes, federal and state officials have forcefully backed executives' war on owners. For example, in Congress, Republican and Democratic lawmakers joined hands in 1996 to override President Bill Clinton's veto of the Private Securities and Litigation Reform Act -- a bill limiting shareholders' ability to file lawsuits against executives who are abusing power. As one market analyst noted, the bill "paved the way for corporate chieftains basically to lie without fear of being sued." Last year, a U.S. Senate highway funding bill included language forcing corporate executives to personally certify the accuracy of their companies' tax statements. The provisions were aimed at deterring financial shell games that might put companies in legal jeopardy. But when the final legislation was negotiated behind closed doors, the measures were deleted.
The executive branch is no different. The Securities and Exchange Commission -- the agency whose purpose is to protect shareholders -- got an injection of anti-owner ideology in 2005 when its reformist chairman William Donaldson was forced out. In his place, President Bush appointed Chris Cox, a corporate-lawyer-turned-California-congressman, who authored the Private Securities and Litigation Reform Act. Now, the U.S. Supreme Court is joining in. Last year, justices issued a unanimous ruling making it more difficult for shareholders to win damages when executives deceive them about company finances. Last week, justices interpreted a 1998 law as barring shareholders from bringing class-action suits against company management when management commits stock fraud.
Politicians, of course, claim they want an "ownership society" -- while aggressively helping corporate executives undermine the rights and privileges that make ownership so attractive. They are, in short, helping disenfranchise owners from their property, meaning an even greater chance that citizen investors will be bilked in the future. ¶ 10:27 PM 1 comments links to this post
David Sirota
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Away from the cameras covering the Enron trial and largely hidden from view on the evening news, a war is being waged over the most basic rights of ownership that undergird our economy.
Most economic conflicts arise between those who own property and those who do not. Management versus labor. Landlords versus tenants. Rich versus poor. But now, the persecution is being directed at owners from those who manage what is owned. It is corporate executives versus stockholders.
Today, trillions of shares of stock are owned by pension funds and 401(k) plans -- that is, owned by millions of workers. Politicians say we need to move toward an "ownership society" -- but, we, the citizens, already own a pretty big share of Corporate America. For years, much of that ownership was passive -- many investors made gains, and didn't ask questions. But since Enron and other corporate scandals damaged the economy, many citizen investors, primarily through their pension and union funds, have tried to exercise their rights to demand reforms at the companies they own -- reforms that would increase companies' bottom line by cracking down on executive abuses.
For instance, the Coca-Cola Company recently agreed to obtain stockholder permission before approving large executive severance packages. Since 2000, three departing Coke executives were given $180 million in severance pay. Though opposed to the new policy, management was forced to accept it, thanks to a shareholder resolution by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The union owns shares of the company, and thus has a fiduciary responsibility to help make the company as efficient and profitable as possible. Reining in exorbitant executive pay packages that are draining resources is one way to do that.
Similarly, New York City's public pension funds are demanding that six major firms -- Wal-Mart, Chevron, Southern Company, Union Pacific, AmSouth Bancorporation and Cinergy -- start disclosing political contributions made with company cash. The pension funds own $1 billion of these companies' stock, and the demands follow agreements by other corporations to disclose political expenditures...
In December, the Financial Times reported that major companies are now "hiring shareholder surveillance companies to find out who their shareholders are and which might be likely to cause trouble." As if out of a cloak-and-dagger film, the Financial Times quoted Tim Vaeth, an analyst, as saying, "Companies want to know who owns their stock, what their investors' intentions are and what their voting history is." His firm, Shareholder Intelligence, issued a report fretting that shareholders have "taken critical steps toward increasing their influence in the boardroom."
Following up last month, the Financial Times reported that "Merrill Lynch is poised to become the first investment bank to dedicate a team to advise companies on the growing threat of activist investors." Meanwhile, in an interview with Business Week this month, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce angrily denounced shareholders "who want to have some degree of leverage over companies."
The language is telling. Shareholders -- the actual owners of companies -- are now seen by executives as "threats" who dare to desire "leverage over companies" they own. That is seen as "causing trouble," and thus requiring "surveillance" by company management -- or worse, from America's corrupt government.
Yes, federal and state officials have forcefully backed executives' war on owners. For example, in Congress, Republican and Democratic lawmakers joined hands in 1996 to override President Bill Clinton's veto of the Private Securities and Litigation Reform Act -- a bill limiting shareholders' ability to file lawsuits against executives who are abusing power. As one market analyst noted, the bill "paved the way for corporate chieftains basically to lie without fear of being sued." Last year, a U.S. Senate highway funding bill included language forcing corporate executives to personally certify the accuracy of their companies' tax statements. The provisions were aimed at deterring financial shell games that might put companies in legal jeopardy. But when the final legislation was negotiated behind closed doors, the measures were deleted.
The executive branch is no different. The Securities and Exchange Commission -- the agency whose purpose is to protect shareholders -- got an injection of anti-owner ideology in 2005 when its reformist chairman William Donaldson was forced out. In his place, President Bush appointed Chris Cox, a corporate-lawyer-turned-California-congressman, who authored the Private Securities and Litigation Reform Act. Now, the U.S. Supreme Court is joining in. Last year, justices issued a unanimous ruling making it more difficult for shareholders to win damages when executives deceive them about company finances. Last week, justices interpreted a 1998 law as barring shareholders from bringing class-action suits against company management when management commits stock fraud.
Politicians, of course, claim they want an "ownership society" -- while aggressively helping corporate executives undermine the rights and privileges that make ownership so attractive. They are, in short, helping disenfranchise owners from their property, meaning an even greater chance that citizen investors will be bilked in the future. ¶ 10:27 PM 1 comments links to this post
The Downhill Slide From Soldier to Company Man
From Amanda at Think Progress
This week at a conference in Jordan, Blackwater USA vice chairman Cofer Black announced that the private security company is ready to shift from a security role to a more “overt combat role,” essentially becoming an army for hire.
The Bush administration has shown itself more than willing to call in Blackwater in place of U.S. troops.
In Aug. 2003, the Bush administration awarded Blackwater a $21.3 million contract to guard then Amb. Paul Bremer. The average senior special operations officer makes $50,000 a year from the U.S. government. Employees in private security firms in Iraq often make more than $1,000 a day from government contracts. This arrangement is “depleting the ranks of the special forces,” luring them into lucrative private jobs.
Some military analysts initially welcomed the administration’s private security arrangement with Blackwater because it allowed “regular military troops to concentrate on fighting.” But Blackwater’s new proposal would shift some of the fighting to the private sector, further diminishing the role of the all-volunteer army.
But they aren't mercenaries, oh no.
And they're only the people whose atrocities ticked off the insurgency in the first place.
Something tells me this is going to get much worse.
Something else tells me it's supposed to get much worse. ¶ 5:31 PM 0 comments links to this post
This week at a conference in Jordan, Blackwater USA vice chairman Cofer Black announced that the private security company is ready to shift from a security role to a more “overt combat role,” essentially becoming an army for hire.
The Bush administration has shown itself more than willing to call in Blackwater in place of U.S. troops.
In Aug. 2003, the Bush administration awarded Blackwater a $21.3 million contract to guard then Amb. Paul Bremer. The average senior special operations officer makes $50,000 a year from the U.S. government. Employees in private security firms in Iraq often make more than $1,000 a day from government contracts. This arrangement is “depleting the ranks of the special forces,” luring them into lucrative private jobs.
Some military analysts initially welcomed the administration’s private security arrangement with Blackwater because it allowed “regular military troops to concentrate on fighting.” But Blackwater’s new proposal would shift some of the fighting to the private sector, further diminishing the role of the all-volunteer army.
But they aren't mercenaries, oh no.
And they're only the people whose atrocities ticked off the insurgency in the first place.
Something tells me this is going to get much worse.
Something else tells me it's supposed to get much worse. ¶ 5:31 PM 0 comments links to this post
So when do we invade?
BERLIN (AFX) - Saudi Arabia is working secretly on a nuclear program, with help from Pakistani experts, the German magazine Cicero reported in its latest edition, citing Western security sources.
It says that during the Haj pilgrimages to Mecca in 2003 through 2005, Pakistani scientists posed as pilgrims to come to Saudi Arabia.
Between October 2004 and January 2005, some of them slipped off from pilgrimages, sometimes for up to three weeks, the report quoted German security expert Udo Ulfkotte as saying.
According to Western security services, the magazine added, Saudi scientists have been working since the mid-1990s in Pakistan, a nuclear power since 1998.
Cicero, which will appear on newstands tomorrow, also quoted a US military analyst, John Pike, as saying that Saudi bar codes can be found on half of Pakistan's nuclear weapons 'because it is Saudi Arabia which ultimately co-financed the Pakistani atomic nuclear program.'
The magazine also said satellite images indicate that Saudi Arabia has set up a program in Al-Sulaiyil, south of Riyadh, a secret underground city and dozens of underground silos for missiles.
According to some Western security services, long-range Ghauri-type missiles of Pakistani-origin are housed inside the silos.
To be used only for goodness and niceness and jihad, I'm sure.
Thanks to Holden for the heads up. ¶ 12:29 PM 0 comments links to this post
It says that during the Haj pilgrimages to Mecca in 2003 through 2005, Pakistani scientists posed as pilgrims to come to Saudi Arabia.
Between October 2004 and January 2005, some of them slipped off from pilgrimages, sometimes for up to three weeks, the report quoted German security expert Udo Ulfkotte as saying.
According to Western security services, the magazine added, Saudi scientists have been working since the mid-1990s in Pakistan, a nuclear power since 1998.
Cicero, which will appear on newstands tomorrow, also quoted a US military analyst, John Pike, as saying that Saudi bar codes can be found on half of Pakistan's nuclear weapons 'because it is Saudi Arabia which ultimately co-financed the Pakistani atomic nuclear program.'
The magazine also said satellite images indicate that Saudi Arabia has set up a program in Al-Sulaiyil, south of Riyadh, a secret underground city and dozens of underground silos for missiles.
According to some Western security services, long-range Ghauri-type missiles of Pakistani-origin are housed inside the silos.
To be used only for goodness and niceness and jihad, I'm sure.
Thanks to Holden for the heads up. ¶ 12:29 PM 0 comments links to this post
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Let It Happen or Made It Happen?
For awhile, I've been "they let it happen".
After reviewing this and watching this video (take the whole hour and a half- it's free, and be patient), no more.
There are traitors running loose and running this country, make no mistake.
Made it happen. ¶ 10:52 PM 0 comments links to this post
After reviewing this and watching this video (take the whole hour and a half- it's free, and be patient), no more.
There are traitors running loose and running this country, make no mistake.
Made it happen. ¶ 10:52 PM 0 comments links to this post
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
"We Don' Need No Steenkin' WMDs..."
The New York Pravda delivers the most damning report of Dear Leader's excellent adventure to date:
...behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons...
Although the United States and Britain aggressively sought a second United Nations resolution against Iraq — which they failed to obtain — the president said repeatedly that he did not believe he needed it for an invasion.
Stamped "extremely sensitive," the five-page memorandum, which was circulated among a handful of Mr. Blair's most senior aides, had not been made public. Several highlights were first published in January in the book "Lawless World," which was written by a British lawyer and international law professor, Philippe Sands...
The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.
The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein...
It's a rare occasion when a Northwoods Operation sees the the light of day. The AfterDowningStreet.org people have the memo here. In the end, of course, no Gulf of Tonkin incident was needed.
Although the information is being leaked now to the main$tream media, whether it will be sustained or will be simply the harbinger of a new disinformation campaign is questionable.
Not to mention the motivations of the leakers, or the willingness of the Company to see it in press.
Perhaps what we're seeing is a good spanking of some members of the Group by the Board, or of Junior by Poppy, or an oversized tiff between Poppy and Babs.
Perhaps the Company professionals don't like to see amateurs working for the Mayberry Machiavellis getting their dirty fingers on the tapestry of global hegemony.
Perhaps it's the old bait and switch in a Congressional $election year. ¶ 8:21 PM 0 comments links to this post
...behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons...
Although the United States and Britain aggressively sought a second United Nations resolution against Iraq — which they failed to obtain — the president said repeatedly that he did not believe he needed it for an invasion.
Stamped "extremely sensitive," the five-page memorandum, which was circulated among a handful of Mr. Blair's most senior aides, had not been made public. Several highlights were first published in January in the book "Lawless World," which was written by a British lawyer and international law professor, Philippe Sands...
The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.
The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein...
It's a rare occasion when a Northwoods Operation sees the the light of day. The AfterDowningStreet.org people have the memo here. In the end, of course, no Gulf of Tonkin incident was needed.
Although the information is being leaked now to the main$tream media, whether it will be sustained or will be simply the harbinger of a new disinformation campaign is questionable.
Not to mention the motivations of the leakers, or the willingness of the Company to see it in press.
Perhaps what we're seeing is a good spanking of some members of the Group by the Board, or of Junior by Poppy, or an oversized tiff between Poppy and Babs.
Perhaps the Company professionals don't like to see amateurs working for the Mayberry Machiavellis getting their dirty fingers on the tapestry of global hegemony.
Perhaps it's the old bait and switch in a Congressional $election year. ¶ 8:21 PM 0 comments links to this post
Monday, March 27, 2006
They Can Only Kill You
The farmer links to Out of Fear, a review of four documentaries about Argentina's recent brush with fascism.
If you don't know this story, you should, if you want to keep your freedom here at home. ¶ 9:54 PM 0 comments links to this post
If you don't know this story, you should, if you want to keep your freedom here at home. ¶ 9:54 PM 0 comments links to this post
More Atrocity, Right on Time
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's ruling parties demanded U.S. forces cede control of security on Monday as the government launched an inquiry into a raid on a Shi'ite mosque that ministers said saw "cold blooded" killings by U.S.-led troops.
As Shi'ite militiamen fulminated over Sunday's deaths of 20 or more people in Baghdad, an al Qaeda-led group said it carried out one of the bloodiest Sunni insurgent attacks in months. A suicide bomber killed 40 Iraqi army recruits in northern Iraq.
The Iraqi Defence Ministry said a suicide bomber wearing an explosive belt also wounded 30 at a base near Mosul.
After a confusing 24 hours following the bloodshed around Baghdad's Mustafa mosque in which the U.S. military restricted itself to issuing one somewhat opaque statement, U.S. officials distanced themselves from the operation, calling it Iraqi-led.
Officials in Baghdad appeared to wait for input from Washington, underlining the sensitivity of the confrontation between Iraq's Iranian-linked Shi'ite Islamist leaders and the U.S. forces at a time when Washington is pressing them to forge a unity government with minority Sunnis to avert civil war.
A day later, three broad versions of the events that led to the deaths of some 20 -- or possibly more -- people persisted.
Iraq's security minister accused U.S. and Iraqi forces of killing 37 unarmed civilians in the mosque after tying them up.
Residents and police, who put the death toll among the troops' opponents at around 20, spoke of a fierce battle between the soldiers and gunmen from the Mehdi Army militia of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose followers ran the mosque.
And U.S. officials, finally confirming they were describing the same incident, stuck by a statement saying Iraqi special forces, advised by U.S. troops, killed 16 "insurgents" who fired on them first. They also insisted no troops entered any mosque and had freed an Iraqi being held prisoner...
It looks like Darth Rumsfeld's excellent strategery is working just like Black Spot planned.
Given all the newvictimsinsurgents they're about to create right here at home, it looks like those new guest worker camps will get plenty of use.
¶ 9:20 PM 0 comments
links to this post
As Shi'ite militiamen fulminated over Sunday's deaths of 20 or more people in Baghdad, an al Qaeda-led group said it carried out one of the bloodiest Sunni insurgent attacks in months. A suicide bomber killed 40 Iraqi army recruits in northern Iraq.
The Iraqi Defence Ministry said a suicide bomber wearing an explosive belt also wounded 30 at a base near Mosul.
After a confusing 24 hours following the bloodshed around Baghdad's Mustafa mosque in which the U.S. military restricted itself to issuing one somewhat opaque statement, U.S. officials distanced themselves from the operation, calling it Iraqi-led.
Officials in Baghdad appeared to wait for input from Washington, underlining the sensitivity of the confrontation between Iraq's Iranian-linked Shi'ite Islamist leaders and the U.S. forces at a time when Washington is pressing them to forge a unity government with minority Sunnis to avert civil war.
A day later, three broad versions of the events that led to the deaths of some 20 -- or possibly more -- people persisted.
Iraq's security minister accused U.S. and Iraqi forces of killing 37 unarmed civilians in the mosque after tying them up.
Residents and police, who put the death toll among the troops' opponents at around 20, spoke of a fierce battle between the soldiers and gunmen from the Mehdi Army militia of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose followers ran the mosque.
And U.S. officials, finally confirming they were describing the same incident, stuck by a statement saying Iraqi special forces, advised by U.S. troops, killed 16 "insurgents" who fired on them first. They also insisted no troops entered any mosque and had freed an Iraqi being held prisoner...
It looks like Darth Rumsfeld's excellent strategery is working just like Black Spot planned.
Given all the new
"...a self-perpetuating justification..."
from Incompetent Design
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 27 March 2006
... I am going to find a china shop somewhere in the city and walk in with a free-swinging baseball bat. My goal, which will be clearly stated, will be to improve upon the place. I will spend the next three years meticulously destroying everything I see inside, from the cash registers to the display cases to the nice Royal Albert tea sets in the corner. Along the way, I will batter the brains out of any poor sod unfortunate enough to get in my way. When I am done, I will claim with as much self-righteousness as I can muster that none of the mess is my responsibility. I will then, of course, refuse to leave.
Hey, if the president can do it, it must be legal, right? Unfortunately, the difference between my china shop analogy and what the Bush administration is doing in Iraq is that I won't get anything out of it except an arrest record and a chance to enjoy my state's municipal accommodations. Bush and crew are reaping far better benefits from the mayhem they have caused.
Here's the deal, in case anyone is wondering: none of this, not one bit of it, can be or should be chalked up to "incompetence" on the part of Bush or anyone else within his administration. This was not a mishandled situation. Bush and the boys have gotten exactly, precisely what they wanted out of Iraq, and are now looking forward to fobbing it off on the next poor dupe who staggers into the Oval Office. They got what they came for, and have quit.
Consider the facts. For two elections in a row, 2002 and 2004, the GOP was able to successfully demagogue the rafters off the roof about supporting the troops and being patriotic, placing anyone who questioned the merits of the invasion squarely into the category of "traitor." Meanwhile, military contractors with umbilical ties to the administration have cashed in to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
The same goes for the petroleum industries; did you know there are gas lines today in oil-rich Iraq? It's true. The oil infrastructure is fine; indeed, it is the most well-guarded point of pressure in Iraq. There are gas lines because companies like Halliburton are not pumping the oil. They are sitting on it, keeping it as a nice little nest egg.
One would think this administration would be worried about the violence and chaos in Iraq. They aren't, because the violence has become the justification for "staying the course." Bush will mouth platitudes about bring democracy to the region, but that is merely the billboard. What he and his friends from the Project for the New American Century wanted in the first place, and what they have now, is a permanent military presence over there. There was never any consideration of a timetable for withdrawal, because there was never any intention to withdraw. The violence today is a self-perpetuating justification, a perfect circle lubricated by blood, oil and currency...
Pitt seems to disagree with his title. By his own estimate, given what Dear Leader really wants, he's quite competent indeed. ¶ 8:46 PM 1 comments links to this post
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 27 March 2006
... I am going to find a china shop somewhere in the city and walk in with a free-swinging baseball bat. My goal, which will be clearly stated, will be to improve upon the place. I will spend the next three years meticulously destroying everything I see inside, from the cash registers to the display cases to the nice Royal Albert tea sets in the corner. Along the way, I will batter the brains out of any poor sod unfortunate enough to get in my way. When I am done, I will claim with as much self-righteousness as I can muster that none of the mess is my responsibility. I will then, of course, refuse to leave.
Hey, if the president can do it, it must be legal, right? Unfortunately, the difference between my china shop analogy and what the Bush administration is doing in Iraq is that I won't get anything out of it except an arrest record and a chance to enjoy my state's municipal accommodations. Bush and crew are reaping far better benefits from the mayhem they have caused.
Here's the deal, in case anyone is wondering: none of this, not one bit of it, can be or should be chalked up to "incompetence" on the part of Bush or anyone else within his administration. This was not a mishandled situation. Bush and the boys have gotten exactly, precisely what they wanted out of Iraq, and are now looking forward to fobbing it off on the next poor dupe who staggers into the Oval Office. They got what they came for, and have quit.
Consider the facts. For two elections in a row, 2002 and 2004, the GOP was able to successfully demagogue the rafters off the roof about supporting the troops and being patriotic, placing anyone who questioned the merits of the invasion squarely into the category of "traitor." Meanwhile, military contractors with umbilical ties to the administration have cashed in to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
The same goes for the petroleum industries; did you know there are gas lines today in oil-rich Iraq? It's true. The oil infrastructure is fine; indeed, it is the most well-guarded point of pressure in Iraq. There are gas lines because companies like Halliburton are not pumping the oil. They are sitting on it, keeping it as a nice little nest egg.
One would think this administration would be worried about the violence and chaos in Iraq. They aren't, because the violence has become the justification for "staying the course." Bush will mouth platitudes about bring democracy to the region, but that is merely the billboard. What he and his friends from the Project for the New American Century wanted in the first place, and what they have now, is a permanent military presence over there. There was never any consideration of a timetable for withdrawal, because there was never any intention to withdraw. The violence today is a self-perpetuating justification, a perfect circle lubricated by blood, oil and currency...
Pitt seems to disagree with his title. By his own estimate, given what Dear Leader really wants, he's quite competent indeed. ¶ 8:46 PM 1 comments links to this post
Sunday, March 26, 2006
The Evolution of the NeoCon into Neo-Confederate
More from the Los Angeles Pravda:
More Than 500,000 Rally in L.A. for Immigrants' Rights
By Teresa Watanabe and Anna Gorman, Times Staff Writer
2:51 PM PST, March 25, 2006
Joining what some are calling the nation's largest mobilization of immigrants ever, hundreds of thousands of people boisterously marched in downtown Los Angeles Saturday to protest federal legislation that would crack down on undocumented immigrants, penalize those who help them and build a security wall on the U.S. southern border. Spirited crowds representing labor, religious groups, civil-rights advocates and ordinary immigrants stretched over 26 blocks of downtown Los Angeles from Adams Blvd. along Spring Street and Broadway to City Hall, tooting kazoos, waving American flags and chanting "Si se puede!" (Yes we can!). The crowd, estimated by police at more than 500.000, represented one of the largest protest marches in Los Angeles history, surpassing Vietnam War demonstrations and the 70,000 who rallied downtown against Proposition 187, a 1994 state initiative that denied public benefits to undocumented migrants...
Saturday's rally, spurred by anger over legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives last December, was part of what many say is an unprecedented effort to organize immigrants and their supporters across the nation. The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee is to take up efforts Monday to complete work on a comprehensive immigration reform proposal. Unlike the House bill, which beefed up border security and toughened immigration laws, the Senate committee's version is expected to include a guest worker program and a path to legalization for the nation's 10 to 12 million undocumented immigrants...
Throughout the afternoon, protesters heard speakers demand a path toward legalization and denounce HR 4437, which would tighten border enforcement and crack down on employers who hire undocumented workers...
If by "tightened border enforcement" you mean an iron curtain between America and Mexico and "crack down" you mean turn the undocumented- and everyone who helps them- into felons, why, yes, that.
Mr. Sensenbrenner is a piece of work. This is the same clown of a Representative that wanted to abolish the 22nd Amendment and make Bu$hie preznit for life. That wanted to subject the Katrina victims to more stringent bankruptcy laws. The same intellect that wanted everyone to carry a national ID- with all their information on a single chip. The same charitable individual who wanted to draft every man, woman, and child into the War on Drugs- and make a felony if you didn't co-operate.
The man's a republican from Wisconsin, but he might as well be a Dixiecrat.
This tool of a Wrethuglican is definitely playing a Neo-Confederate race card:
...Hispanics are immigrating in large numbers now into the Southeast, or I should say the former Confederate states, excepting Texas and Southern Florida. It isn't something largely confined to the Southwest and major urban centers outside the South. This is where the base of the Republican party is. There has developed a reaction against this immigration in these areas. The Neo-Confederate movement and a lot of other movements have taken up this issue...
These reactionary elements and others see immigration as an issue to take control of conservatism in the South, if not the nation...
Suddenly the Republican party is going to have to try to get votes from two groups that will be increasingly at odds with each other. Also, what happens to Hispanics in Alabama will get back to Hispanics in California.
Hispanic immigrants didn't grow up as minorities and don't have the habits of deference or accomodations to prejudice. They may be poor or disadvantaged materially, but they don't have internalized anti-Hispanic values.
They will have no inclination to accommodate themselves to a subordinated role, and no prior history of accomodation to subordination. They will challenge anti-Hispanic tactics and efforts in the Southeast, not give in to them. They will not have religious leaders saying that some anti-Hispanic measure is okay.
Of course, illegal immigration in America is caused by the same forces that cause massive unemployment in Detroit.
The Corporate States of America want slaves, not workers earning a real wage.
But here's the rub: without real wages, there's no real consumption. No real consumption is deadly for big business. Correction: for consumer-based big business. The Carlyle boys will be happy as long as there's a strongman somewhere who wants what they sell. ¶ 6:22 PM 0 comments links to this post
More Than 500,000 Rally in L.A. for Immigrants' Rights
By Teresa Watanabe and Anna Gorman, Times Staff Writer
2:51 PM PST, March 25, 2006
Joining what some are calling the nation's largest mobilization of immigrants ever, hundreds of thousands of people boisterously marched in downtown Los Angeles Saturday to protest federal legislation that would crack down on undocumented immigrants, penalize those who help them and build a security wall on the U.S. southern border. Spirited crowds representing labor, religious groups, civil-rights advocates and ordinary immigrants stretched over 26 blocks of downtown Los Angeles from Adams Blvd. along Spring Street and Broadway to City Hall, tooting kazoos, waving American flags and chanting "Si se puede!" (Yes we can!). The crowd, estimated by police at more than 500.000, represented one of the largest protest marches in Los Angeles history, surpassing Vietnam War demonstrations and the 70,000 who rallied downtown against Proposition 187, a 1994 state initiative that denied public benefits to undocumented migrants...
Saturday's rally, spurred by anger over legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives last December, was part of what many say is an unprecedented effort to organize immigrants and their supporters across the nation. The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee is to take up efforts Monday to complete work on a comprehensive immigration reform proposal. Unlike the House bill, which beefed up border security and toughened immigration laws, the Senate committee's version is expected to include a guest worker program and a path to legalization for the nation's 10 to 12 million undocumented immigrants...
Throughout the afternoon, protesters heard speakers demand a path toward legalization and denounce HR 4437, which would tighten border enforcement and crack down on employers who hire undocumented workers...
If by "tightened border enforcement" you mean an iron curtain between America and Mexico and "crack down" you mean turn the undocumented- and everyone who helps them- into felons, why, yes, that.
Mr. Sensenbrenner is a piece of work. This is the same clown of a Representative that wanted to abolish the 22nd Amendment and make Bu$hie preznit for life. That wanted to subject the Katrina victims to more stringent bankruptcy laws. The same intellect that wanted everyone to carry a national ID- with all their information on a single chip. The same charitable individual who wanted to draft every man, woman, and child into the War on Drugs- and make a felony if you didn't co-operate.
The man's a republican from Wisconsin, but he might as well be a Dixiecrat.
This tool of a Wrethuglican is definitely playing a Neo-Confederate race card:
...Hispanics are immigrating in large numbers now into the Southeast, or I should say the former Confederate states, excepting Texas and Southern Florida. It isn't something largely confined to the Southwest and major urban centers outside the South. This is where the base of the Republican party is. There has developed a reaction against this immigration in these areas. The Neo-Confederate movement and a lot of other movements have taken up this issue...
These reactionary elements and others see immigration as an issue to take control of conservatism in the South, if not the nation...
Suddenly the Republican party is going to have to try to get votes from two groups that will be increasingly at odds with each other. Also, what happens to Hispanics in Alabama will get back to Hispanics in California.
Hispanic immigrants didn't grow up as minorities and don't have the habits of deference or accomodations to prejudice. They may be poor or disadvantaged materially, but they don't have internalized anti-Hispanic values.
They will have no inclination to accommodate themselves to a subordinated role, and no prior history of accomodation to subordination. They will challenge anti-Hispanic tactics and efforts in the Southeast, not give in to them. They will not have religious leaders saying that some anti-Hispanic measure is okay.
Of course, illegal immigration in America is caused by the same forces that cause massive unemployment in Detroit.
The Corporate States of America want slaves, not workers earning a real wage.
But here's the rub: without real wages, there's no real consumption. No real consumption is deadly for big business. Correction: for consumer-based big business. The Carlyle boys will be happy as long as there's a strongman somewhere who wants what they sell. ¶ 6:22 PM 0 comments links to this post
Ownership Society
Cookie Jill at skippy's place points to an LA Pravda article:
The national group that oversees organ transplants placed UCI Medical Center on probation Thursday after a scandal that closed its liver transplant program, but stopped short of a more severe penalty that could have closed other transplant services.
This marks just the second time the United Network for Organ Sharing, a federal contractor, has publicly disciplined a transplant center. The probationary status means the UC Irvine hospital, in Orange, will be allowed to continue performing kidney and pancreas transplants but will have to ensure that it has adequate staffing and meets patient care standards. The probation will last until UCI can show it has corrected its problems...
UCI closed its liver transplant program in November after The Times reported that 32 patients had died awaiting operations in 2004 and 2005, when the hospital turned down scores of organs, sometimes because no surgeon was available. Though the hospital often cited poor organ quality or patient unsuitability in the rejections, most of the organs were successfully transplanted into patients at other facilities...
St. Vincent conceded in September that its doctors had improperly arranged for a liver transplant to a Saudi national, bypassing 50 people on a regional waiting list whose conditions were more dire, and that hospital staff falsified records to hide the arrangement. The Saudi Embassy paid $339,000 for the operation, as much as 30% more than the hospital would have received from the government or insurance.
Delmonico said the lying made the St. Vincent case worse than UCI's. "It was the intentional falsification of data which was so egregious about St. Vincent," he said.
Separately, the organ network board took steps to increase its oversight in light of the problems at St. Vincent and UCI. It will require transplant centers to notify the network within five days when regulators take action that threatens the programs' ability to perform transplants. UCI had not notified the network of a highly critical inspection last summer by federal regulators...
But free enterprise makes the American medical system the best in the world!
For those that can afford it- and obviously being able to meet the market rate with a little raise helps, too. ¶ 5:51 PM 0 comments links to this post
The national group that oversees organ transplants placed UCI Medical Center on probation Thursday after a scandal that closed its liver transplant program, but stopped short of a more severe penalty that could have closed other transplant services.
This marks just the second time the United Network for Organ Sharing, a federal contractor, has publicly disciplined a transplant center. The probationary status means the UC Irvine hospital, in Orange, will be allowed to continue performing kidney and pancreas transplants but will have to ensure that it has adequate staffing and meets patient care standards. The probation will last until UCI can show it has corrected its problems...
UCI closed its liver transplant program in November after The Times reported that 32 patients had died awaiting operations in 2004 and 2005, when the hospital turned down scores of organs, sometimes because no surgeon was available. Though the hospital often cited poor organ quality or patient unsuitability in the rejections, most of the organs were successfully transplanted into patients at other facilities...
St. Vincent conceded in September that its doctors had improperly arranged for a liver transplant to a Saudi national, bypassing 50 people on a regional waiting list whose conditions were more dire, and that hospital staff falsified records to hide the arrangement. The Saudi Embassy paid $339,000 for the operation, as much as 30% more than the hospital would have received from the government or insurance.
Delmonico said the lying made the St. Vincent case worse than UCI's. "It was the intentional falsification of data which was so egregious about St. Vincent," he said.
Separately, the organ network board took steps to increase its oversight in light of the problems at St. Vincent and UCI. It will require transplant centers to notify the network within five days when regulators take action that threatens the programs' ability to perform transplants. UCI had not notified the network of a highly critical inspection last summer by federal regulators...
But free enterprise makes the American medical system the best in the world!
For those that can afford it- and obviously being able to meet the market rate with a little raise helps, too. ¶ 5:51 PM 0 comments links to this post
Intelligence Startups and Hostile Takeovers
When your own spies insist on giving you the reality-based facts and telling you where to go if you don't heed them, while you're more interested in spinning your own reality, Dear Leader knows you just hire your own intelligence.
But if you're going to set up a super duper secret private spy company, it helps if you simply circumvent the patriots, work with the proper Company connections, listen to Poppy for strategery, and don't work closely with a Boss Hawg on the cheap.
SAN DIEGO - Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham tearfully resigned Monday after pleading guilty to bribery and admitting he took $2.4 million to steer defense contracts to conspirators using his leadership position on a congressional subcommittee...
Authorities said Cunningham secured defense contracts worth tens of millions of dollars for the people who bribed him. The case grew from an investigation into the sale of his home in wealthy Del Mar to a wide-ranging conspiracy involving payments in cash, vacations and antiques from unidentified conspirators...
The case began when authorities started investigating whether Cunningham and his wife, Nancy, used proceeds from the $1,675,000 sale of their home in Del Mar to defense contractor Mitchell Wade to buy a $2.55 million mansion in ritzy Rancho Santa Fe. Wade put the Del Mar house back on the market and sold it after nearly a year for $975,000 - a loss of $700,000...
In addition to buying Cunningham's home at an inflated price, Wade let him live rent-free on his yacht, the Duke Stir, at the Capital Yacht Club. His firm, MZM Inc., donated generously to Cunningham's campaigns. Prosecutors did not specify if those allegations were part of Cunningham's guilty pleas.
Around the same time, MZM was winning valuable defense contracts, and Cunningham sat on the House Appropriations subcommittee that controls defense dollars. In 2004 the little-known company based in Washington, D.C., tripled its revenue and nearly quadrupled its staff, according to information posted on the company Web site before Wade stepped down as president and the company was sold to a private equity firm.
An associate of Wade, Brent Wilkes, president of a Poway company called ADCS Inc., also gave Cunningham campaign cash and favors. Wilkes reportedly flew Cunningham in a corporate jet to go hunting in Idaho and golfing in Hawaii, and a charitable foundation Wilkes started spent $36,000 hosting a black tie "Tribute to Heroes" gala in 2002 that feted Cunningham with a trophy naming him a hero.
ADCS, which specializes into turning paper records into digital files, has received tens of millions in Defense Department contracts since the late 1990s.
Laura Rozen's been following this story closely from the beginning.
This is a rough game. Every player, from the Pentagon on down has a hand in it. They're all competing with each other as much as anyone else for hegemony.
When you don't play the game by the unwritten rules, getting voted off the island often lands you in jail.
If you're still breathing, that is. ¶ 6:54 AM 0 comments links to this post
But if you're going to set up a super duper secret private spy company, it helps if you simply circumvent the patriots, work with the proper Company connections, listen to Poppy for strategery, and don't work closely with a Boss Hawg on the cheap.
SAN DIEGO - Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham tearfully resigned Monday after pleading guilty to bribery and admitting he took $2.4 million to steer defense contracts to conspirators using his leadership position on a congressional subcommittee...
Authorities said Cunningham secured defense contracts worth tens of millions of dollars for the people who bribed him. The case grew from an investigation into the sale of his home in wealthy Del Mar to a wide-ranging conspiracy involving payments in cash, vacations and antiques from unidentified conspirators...
The case began when authorities started investigating whether Cunningham and his wife, Nancy, used proceeds from the $1,675,000 sale of their home in Del Mar to defense contractor Mitchell Wade to buy a $2.55 million mansion in ritzy Rancho Santa Fe. Wade put the Del Mar house back on the market and sold it after nearly a year for $975,000 - a loss of $700,000...
In addition to buying Cunningham's home at an inflated price, Wade let him live rent-free on his yacht, the Duke Stir, at the Capital Yacht Club. His firm, MZM Inc., donated generously to Cunningham's campaigns. Prosecutors did not specify if those allegations were part of Cunningham's guilty pleas.
Around the same time, MZM was winning valuable defense contracts, and Cunningham sat on the House Appropriations subcommittee that controls defense dollars. In 2004 the little-known company based in Washington, D.C., tripled its revenue and nearly quadrupled its staff, according to information posted on the company Web site before Wade stepped down as president and the company was sold to a private equity firm.
An associate of Wade, Brent Wilkes, president of a Poway company called ADCS Inc., also gave Cunningham campaign cash and favors. Wilkes reportedly flew Cunningham in a corporate jet to go hunting in Idaho and golfing in Hawaii, and a charitable foundation Wilkes started spent $36,000 hosting a black tie "Tribute to Heroes" gala in 2002 that feted Cunningham with a trophy naming him a hero.
ADCS, which specializes into turning paper records into digital files, has received tens of millions in Defense Department contracts since the late 1990s.
Laura Rozen's been following this story closely from the beginning.
This is a rough game. Every player, from the Pentagon on down has a hand in it. They're all competing with each other as much as anyone else for hegemony.
When you don't play the game by the unwritten rules, getting voted off the island often lands you in jail.
If you're still breathing, that is. ¶ 6:54 AM 0 comments links to this post
Saturday, March 25, 2006
The Impeachable Offense
Running out of gas and making money off of it.
Richard Heinberg, via James Wolcott, via Avedon Carol... "it's not exactly reassuring to know that, as with 9/11 and Katrina, George Bush has been told - and doesn't seem to care."
Dear Leader isn't alone with his policymakers in this, on any given day 95% of our elected representatives in Congress are acting the same way. Democrats or Republicans, they're both exploiting their constituents, and the difference is only one of degree. Admittedly, if you're scimming a few hundred billion out of the Treasury, you're a bigger crook than if you're only scamming Uncle Sugar for a few hundred thousand here and there.
But if you're creating a system that enables Halliburton and DynCorp to set up global feudal empires so your casino buddies can operate legally in the desert without hassle, guess what? That's aiding and abetting all the crimes all down the line. ¶ 5:34 AM 0 comments links to this post
Richard Heinberg, via James Wolcott, via Avedon Carol... "it's not exactly reassuring to know that, as with 9/11 and Katrina, George Bush has been told - and doesn't seem to care."
Dear Leader isn't alone with his policymakers in this, on any given day 95% of our elected representatives in Congress are acting the same way. Democrats or Republicans, they're both exploiting their constituents, and the difference is only one of degree. Admittedly, if you're scimming a few hundred billion out of the Treasury, you're a bigger crook than if you're only scamming Uncle Sugar for a few hundred thousand here and there.
But if you're creating a system that enables Halliburton and DynCorp to set up global feudal empires so your casino buddies can operate legally in the desert without hassle, guess what? That's aiding and abetting all the crimes all down the line. ¶ 5:34 AM 0 comments links to this post
Thursday, March 23, 2006
High Tide in the Lower South
The latest issue of Science has a series of leading articles devoted to climate change. Some of them are dramatic enough to get the attention of the main$tream media. This, today:
WASHINGTON - The Earth is already shaking beneath melting ice as rising temperatures threaten to shrink polar glaciers and raise sea levels around the world.
By the end of this century, Arctic readings could rise to levels not seen in 130,000 years — when the oceans were several feet higher than now, according to new research appearing in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
Even now, giant glaciers lubricated by melting water have begun causing earthquakes in Greenland as they lurch toward the ocean, other scientists report in the same journal.
In principal findings:
• At the current warming rate, Earth's temperature by 2100 will probably be at least 4 degrees warmer than now, with the Arctic at least as warm as it was 130,000 years ago, reports a research group led by Jonathan T. Overpeck of the University of Arizona.
• Computer models indicate that warming could raise the average temperature in parts of Greenland above freezing for multiple months and could have a substantial impact on melting of the polar ice sheets, says a second paper by researchers led by Bette Otto-Bliesner of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Melting could raise sea level one to three feet over the next 100 to 150 years, she said.
• And a team led by Goeran Ekstroem of Harvard University reported an increase in "glacial earthquakes," which occur when giant rivers of ice — some as big as Manhattan — move suddenly as meltwater eases their path. That sudden movement causes the ground to tremble.
Otto-Bliesner and Overpeck wrote separate papers and also worked together, studying ancient climate and whether modern computer climate models correctly reflect those earlier times. That allowed them to use the models to look at possible future conditions. The researchers studied ancient coral reefs, ice cores and other natural climate records.
"Although the focus of our work is polar, the implications are global," Otto-Bliesner said. "These ice sheets have melted before and sea levels rose. The warmth needed isn't that much above present conditions."
According to the studies, increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the next century could raise Arctic temperatures as much as 5 to 8 degrees...
So what do our coastlines look like if Greenland melts? Let's look at what's being said.
Going under? Global warming might trigger a 6-meter rise in sea level that would inundate coasts (red) worldwide. Southern Louisiana (left) and South Florida (lower right) would be hard hit.
CREDIT: IMAGE BY JEREMY L. WEISS AND JONATHAN T. OVERPECK/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
...If the recent behavior of ice sheets is not fully understood, their future is largely a blank. "We don't actually understand what's driving these higher velocities," says Dowdeswell, so "it's difficult to say whether that's going to continue," or spread.
At the moment, ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica combined is contributing less than half of the ongoing 2-millimetersper- year rise in sea level; the rest comes from melting mountain glaciers and the simple thermal expansion of seawater. If the recent surge of ice to the sea continues, sea level might reach something like half a meter higher by 2100. That would be substantial but not catastrophic. To produce really scary rises really fast (say, a meter or more per century), the air and water will have to continue warming in the right--or wrong--places. The temperature rise will have to spread northward around Greenland and in the south around West Antarctica, reaching the big ice shelves where most of that ice sheet drains. And glacier accelerations triggered near the sea must propagate far inland to draw on the bulk of an ice sheet.
Faced with uncertainty about the present, paleoclimatologists look to the past. About 130,000 years ago, between the last two ice ages, the poles may have warmed as much as they will with only a couple of degrees of global warming. But sea level was considerably higher then, something like 3 to 4 meters higher...
The Figure above is using the model discussed in this paper. The paper is reproduced here in part for educational purposes only:
Paleoclimatic Evidence for Future Ice-Sheet Instability and Rapid Sea-Level Rise
Jonathan T. Overpeck, Bette L. Otto-Bliesner, Gifford H. Miller, Daniel R. Muhs, Richard B. Alley, Jeffrey T. Kiehl
Science 24 March 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5768, pp. 1747 - 1750
DOI: 10.1126/science.1115159
Sea-level rise from melting of polar ice sheets is one of the largest potential threats of future climate change. Polar warming by the year 2100 may reach levels similar to those of 130,000 to 127,000 years ago that were associated with sea levels several meters above modern levels; both the Greenland Ice Sheet and portions of the Antarctic Ice Sheet may be vulnerable. The record of past ice-sheet melting indicates that the rate of future melting and related sea-level rise could be faster than widely thought...
Simulated climate for each of four time periods, from left to right: present day (Modern), 130,000 years ago (anomalies from present day, {Delta} LIG), 2100 A.D. (the time atmosphere reaches three times preindustrial CO2 levels, climate anomalies from present day, {Delta} AD 2100), and 2130 A.D. (four times preindustrial CO2 levels, climate anomalies from present day, {Delta} AD 2130). Shown for each time period are peak summertime (July to August and January to February means) surface air temperature and annual snow depth. Note significant warming at north polar latitudes and the lack of any summer warming over Antarctic at 130,000 years ago. LIG stands for the Latest InterGlacial period, from about 150,000 to 116,000 years ago.
These rates of change assume the current linear accumulations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If some other models are right, and the rate of change itself accelerates, the sea level rises will be faster than these models predict. They might also be more extensive, because the warmer it gets, the more likely other reservoirs of deep ice will melt. Continental Antarctica is the size of North America, and with an ice shield two miles high.
The other parameter to bear in mind is that this won't be a steady creep of the sea level upwards. Land loss will occur one hurricane at a time. Given last year, and the way this year's begun, I'd say we have a stormy ride ahead. ¶ 5:44 PM 0 comments links to this post
WASHINGTON - The Earth is already shaking beneath melting ice as rising temperatures threaten to shrink polar glaciers and raise sea levels around the world.
By the end of this century, Arctic readings could rise to levels not seen in 130,000 years — when the oceans were several feet higher than now, according to new research appearing in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
Even now, giant glaciers lubricated by melting water have begun causing earthquakes in Greenland as they lurch toward the ocean, other scientists report in the same journal.
In principal findings:
• At the current warming rate, Earth's temperature by 2100 will probably be at least 4 degrees warmer than now, with the Arctic at least as warm as it was 130,000 years ago, reports a research group led by Jonathan T. Overpeck of the University of Arizona.
• Computer models indicate that warming could raise the average temperature in parts of Greenland above freezing for multiple months and could have a substantial impact on melting of the polar ice sheets, says a second paper by researchers led by Bette Otto-Bliesner of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Melting could raise sea level one to three feet over the next 100 to 150 years, she said.
• And a team led by Goeran Ekstroem of Harvard University reported an increase in "glacial earthquakes," which occur when giant rivers of ice — some as big as Manhattan — move suddenly as meltwater eases their path. That sudden movement causes the ground to tremble.
Otto-Bliesner and Overpeck wrote separate papers and also worked together, studying ancient climate and whether modern computer climate models correctly reflect those earlier times. That allowed them to use the models to look at possible future conditions. The researchers studied ancient coral reefs, ice cores and other natural climate records.
"Although the focus of our work is polar, the implications are global," Otto-Bliesner said. "These ice sheets have melted before and sea levels rose. The warmth needed isn't that much above present conditions."
According to the studies, increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the next century could raise Arctic temperatures as much as 5 to 8 degrees...
So what do our coastlines look like if Greenland melts? Let's look at what's being said.
Going under? Global warming might trigger a 6-meter rise in sea level that would inundate coasts (red) worldwide. Southern Louisiana (left) and South Florida (lower right) would be hard hit.
CREDIT: IMAGE BY JEREMY L. WEISS AND JONATHAN T. OVERPECK/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
...If the recent behavior of ice sheets is not fully understood, their future is largely a blank. "We don't actually understand what's driving these higher velocities," says Dowdeswell, so "it's difficult to say whether that's going to continue," or spread.
At the moment, ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica combined is contributing less than half of the ongoing 2-millimetersper- year rise in sea level; the rest comes from melting mountain glaciers and the simple thermal expansion of seawater. If the recent surge of ice to the sea continues, sea level might reach something like half a meter higher by 2100. That would be substantial but not catastrophic. To produce really scary rises really fast (say, a meter or more per century), the air and water will have to continue warming in the right--or wrong--places. The temperature rise will have to spread northward around Greenland and in the south around West Antarctica, reaching the big ice shelves where most of that ice sheet drains. And glacier accelerations triggered near the sea must propagate far inland to draw on the bulk of an ice sheet.
Faced with uncertainty about the present, paleoclimatologists look to the past. About 130,000 years ago, between the last two ice ages, the poles may have warmed as much as they will with only a couple of degrees of global warming. But sea level was considerably higher then, something like 3 to 4 meters higher...
The Figure above is using the model discussed in this paper. The paper is reproduced here in part for educational purposes only:
Paleoclimatic Evidence for Future Ice-Sheet Instability and Rapid Sea-Level Rise
Jonathan T. Overpeck, Bette L. Otto-Bliesner, Gifford H. Miller, Daniel R. Muhs, Richard B. Alley, Jeffrey T. Kiehl
Science 24 March 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5768, pp. 1747 - 1750
DOI: 10.1126/science.1115159
Sea-level rise from melting of polar ice sheets is one of the largest potential threats of future climate change. Polar warming by the year 2100 may reach levels similar to those of 130,000 to 127,000 years ago that were associated with sea levels several meters above modern levels; both the Greenland Ice Sheet and portions of the Antarctic Ice Sheet may be vulnerable. The record of past ice-sheet melting indicates that the rate of future melting and related sea-level rise could be faster than widely thought...
Simulated climate for each of four time periods, from left to right: present day (Modern), 130,000 years ago (anomalies from present day, {Delta} LIG), 2100 A.D. (the time atmosphere reaches three times preindustrial CO2 levels, climate anomalies from present day, {Delta} AD 2100), and 2130 A.D. (four times preindustrial CO2 levels, climate anomalies from present day, {Delta} AD 2130). Shown for each time period are peak summertime (July to August and January to February means) surface air temperature and annual snow depth. Note significant warming at north polar latitudes and the lack of any summer warming over Antarctic at 130,000 years ago. LIG stands for the Latest InterGlacial period, from about 150,000 to 116,000 years ago.
These rates of change assume the current linear accumulations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If some other models are right, and the rate of change itself accelerates, the sea level rises will be faster than these models predict. They might also be more extensive, because the warmer it gets, the more likely other reservoirs of deep ice will melt. Continental Antarctica is the size of North America, and with an ice shield two miles high.
The other parameter to bear in mind is that this won't be a steady creep of the sea level upwards. Land loss will occur one hurricane at a time. Given last year, and the way this year's begun, I'd say we have a stormy ride ahead. ¶ 5:44 PM 0 comments links to this post
Rewriting History One Press Conference at a Time
...but isn't that what cheerleading C-average history majors from Yale do?
So there you have it.
There's so much water under the bridge at this point. But the president just won't stop lying about the immediate exigencies of his decision to go to war. Here's how he described it this morning in an exchange with Helen Thomas ...
"I also saw a threat in Iraq. I was hoping to solve this problem diplomatically. That's why I went to the Security Council; that's why it was important to pass 1441, which was unanimously passed. And the world said, disarm, disclose, or face serious consequences ... and therefore, we worked with the world, we worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did, and the world is safer for it."
Of course, that's not what happened. We were there. We remember. It wasn't a century ago. We got the resolution passed. Saddam called our bluff and allowed the inspectors in. President Bush pressed ahead with the invasion.
His lies are so blatant that I must constantly check myself so as not to assume that he is simply delusional or has blocked out whole chains of events from the past.
For those who are interested, here's the complete exchange ... ¶ 9:15 AM 0 comments links to this post
So there you have it.
There's so much water under the bridge at this point. But the president just won't stop lying about the immediate exigencies of his decision to go to war. Here's how he described it this morning in an exchange with Helen Thomas ...
"I also saw a threat in Iraq. I was hoping to solve this problem diplomatically. That's why I went to the Security Council; that's why it was important to pass 1441, which was unanimously passed. And the world said, disarm, disclose, or face serious consequences ... and therefore, we worked with the world, we worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did, and the world is safer for it."
Of course, that's not what happened. We were there. We remember. It wasn't a century ago. We got the resolution passed. Saddam called our bluff and allowed the inspectors in. President Bush pressed ahead with the invasion.
His lies are so blatant that I must constantly check myself so as not to assume that he is simply delusional or has blocked out whole chains of events from the past.
For those who are interested, here's the complete exchange ... ¶ 9:15 AM 0 comments links to this post
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Malpractice from Dr. Frist a.k.a. "Quicksilver Cat"
Top Republican so-called leaders—Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) and House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL)—recently sold the future of our children to Big Pharma for a paltry $4 bucks a pop. That’s the additional cost to produce a safe vaccine, a vaccine minus the mercury-based preservative thimerosal. Mercury is a deadly neurotoxin that has long been known to cause serious learning disabilities, autism, and death.
According to the California Public Schools Autism Prevalence Report for the School Years 1992-2003, the increase in autism prevalence is systemic across the entire United States “and should be an urgent public health concern…The disease frequency of autism now surpasses that of all types of cancer combined.” The report notes a 1,086% cumulative growth rate of autism over the period, with a 23% average annual growth rate.
A recent study published in the Spring 2006 volume of the peer-reviewed Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons shows that the rate of neurodevelopmental disorders in children has decreased following the removal of thimerosal from most American childhood vaccines. However, only about a third of the 11 million children vaccinated for influenza this year will receive mercury-free vaccines.
At the end of last year, President Bush signed the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREPA), granting blanket immunity to pharmaceutical companies for vaccine-induced injuries. The measure is a carte blanche for industry, allowing it even to reintroduce mercury in vaccines that are currently clean, and under the behest of the World Health Organization, to continue shipping tainted vaccine to the “developing world.”
The federal government has known enough to stop the use of mercury in vaccines for more than a decade. Industry has known of the dangers of thimerosal since at least 1991.[1] But using the preservative made the sale of vaccines more profitable. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has at times seemed just as concerned about these profits as the companies themselves! Cynics have noted the “revolving door” between industry and government that seems to alter the perspective of both.
In 1999, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommended “the elimination of thimerosal as soon as possible.” In 2002, the CDC stated in a press release “all vaccines will be thimerosal-free as soon as adequate supplies are available.” Yet, last year the CDC rejected an offer from vaccine manufacturer Sanofi Pasteur to supply the entire country with safe influenza vaccines, claiming “no preference for thimerosal-free vaccines.”
In order to secure passage of the PREPA, Senators Frist and Ted Stevens (R-AL), joined by Speaker Hastert, lied to members of the House-Senate conference committee. These leaders assured their colleagues that immunity for the drug companies would not go forward as a tack-on to the 2006 defense appropriations bill. There were no public hearings on the immunity provision, no debate, no disclosure of the proceedings of the committee. Press coverage was virtually non-existent.
According to one prominent member of the committee, Rep. David Obey (D-WI), “This legislation was unilaterally and arrogantly inserted into the bill after the conference committee was over. It was a blatant power play by the two most powerful men in Congress.” Sen. Ted Kennedy called the legislation “a blank check for the industry.” Sen. Robert Byrd, dean of Senate rules, opined: “There should be no dispute. The processes leading to passage of this bill [was] an absolute travesty.”[2]
The PREPA is unconstitutional. It removes the right to due process and judicial review for persons injured by vaccines, thus granting a virtual license to kill. Under the new law, companies making vaccines can be grossly negligent and act with wanton recklessness and still escape liability as long as they can show that their misconduct wasn’t “willful.”
It is impossible to conceive of a lower standard for the drug companies or a higher burden of proof for injured parties.
The refusal of the drug companies to take responsibility for the products they produce, and the complicity of the highest levels of government in their refusal, will diminish public confidence in the entire US vaccination program. Already, thousands of mothers, including our own daughters, are fearful of having their infants and toddlers vaccinated.
The PREPA also preempts the laws of states like California that have passed legislation outlawing mercury in childhood vaccinations. Meanwhile, the CDC continues to send its henchmen into state legislatures around the country in attempts to abort measures banning mercury...
[1] Dr. Thomas Verstraeten, Vaccine Safety Datalink study for the CDC, 1999. Other major studies include: the 1994 study done by the Institute of Medicine that concluded “the balance of evidence is consistent with a causal relationship between mercury and autism;” the 1996 study by the National Childhood Encephalopathy Institute demonstrating that “a significant association exists between mercury and autism;” and the 2006 study by Dr. Mark R. Geier and David A. Geier published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons that noted a marked decrease in reported cases of autism with the removal of thimerosal from most childhood vaccinations after 2003.
[2] “Hastert, Frist said to rig bill for drug firms,” Bill Theobald, The Tennessean, Feb. 9, 2006
Thimerosal (ethylmercurithiosalicylic acid) is an organo-mercurial compound that dissociates as 49.6% ethyl mercury by weight, and thiosalicylic acid.
FDA publications acknowledge the neurotoxicity of organomercurials but go to great lengths to assure that thimerosal is safe.
I question that this is unbiased. The compound spontaneously breaks down to produce a mole of ethyl mercury per mole thimerosal. This compound is unsafe to give anyone although it's still used in many vaccines. ¶ 9:26 PM 0 comments links to this post
According to the California Public Schools Autism Prevalence Report for the School Years 1992-2003, the increase in autism prevalence is systemic across the entire United States “and should be an urgent public health concern…The disease frequency of autism now surpasses that of all types of cancer combined.” The report notes a 1,086% cumulative growth rate of autism over the period, with a 23% average annual growth rate.
A recent study published in the Spring 2006 volume of the peer-reviewed Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons shows that the rate of neurodevelopmental disorders in children has decreased following the removal of thimerosal from most American childhood vaccines. However, only about a third of the 11 million children vaccinated for influenza this year will receive mercury-free vaccines.
At the end of last year, President Bush signed the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREPA), granting blanket immunity to pharmaceutical companies for vaccine-induced injuries. The measure is a carte blanche for industry, allowing it even to reintroduce mercury in vaccines that are currently clean, and under the behest of the World Health Organization, to continue shipping tainted vaccine to the “developing world.”
The federal government has known enough to stop the use of mercury in vaccines for more than a decade. Industry has known of the dangers of thimerosal since at least 1991.[1] But using the preservative made the sale of vaccines more profitable. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has at times seemed just as concerned about these profits as the companies themselves! Cynics have noted the “revolving door” between industry and government that seems to alter the perspective of both.
In 1999, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommended “the elimination of thimerosal as soon as possible.” In 2002, the CDC stated in a press release “all vaccines will be thimerosal-free as soon as adequate supplies are available.” Yet, last year the CDC rejected an offer from vaccine manufacturer Sanofi Pasteur to supply the entire country with safe influenza vaccines, claiming “no preference for thimerosal-free vaccines.”
In order to secure passage of the PREPA, Senators Frist and Ted Stevens (R-AL), joined by Speaker Hastert, lied to members of the House-Senate conference committee. These leaders assured their colleagues that immunity for the drug companies would not go forward as a tack-on to the 2006 defense appropriations bill. There were no public hearings on the immunity provision, no debate, no disclosure of the proceedings of the committee. Press coverage was virtually non-existent.
According to one prominent member of the committee, Rep. David Obey (D-WI), “This legislation was unilaterally and arrogantly inserted into the bill after the conference committee was over. It was a blatant power play by the two most powerful men in Congress.” Sen. Ted Kennedy called the legislation “a blank check for the industry.” Sen. Robert Byrd, dean of Senate rules, opined: “There should be no dispute. The processes leading to passage of this bill [was] an absolute travesty.”[2]
The PREPA is unconstitutional. It removes the right to due process and judicial review for persons injured by vaccines, thus granting a virtual license to kill. Under the new law, companies making vaccines can be grossly negligent and act with wanton recklessness and still escape liability as long as they can show that their misconduct wasn’t “willful.”
It is impossible to conceive of a lower standard for the drug companies or a higher burden of proof for injured parties.
The refusal of the drug companies to take responsibility for the products they produce, and the complicity of the highest levels of government in their refusal, will diminish public confidence in the entire US vaccination program. Already, thousands of mothers, including our own daughters, are fearful of having their infants and toddlers vaccinated.
The PREPA also preempts the laws of states like California that have passed legislation outlawing mercury in childhood vaccinations. Meanwhile, the CDC continues to send its henchmen into state legislatures around the country in attempts to abort measures banning mercury...
[1] Dr. Thomas Verstraeten, Vaccine Safety Datalink study for the CDC, 1999. Other major studies include: the 1994 study done by the Institute of Medicine that concluded “the balance of evidence is consistent with a causal relationship between mercury and autism;” the 1996 study by the National Childhood Encephalopathy Institute demonstrating that “a significant association exists between mercury and autism;” and the 2006 study by Dr. Mark R. Geier and David A. Geier published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons that noted a marked decrease in reported cases of autism with the removal of thimerosal from most childhood vaccinations after 2003.
[2] “Hastert, Frist said to rig bill for drug firms,” Bill Theobald, The Tennessean, Feb. 9, 2006
Thimerosal (ethylmercurithiosalicylic acid) is an organo-mercurial compound that dissociates as 49.6% ethyl mercury by weight, and thiosalicylic acid.
FDA publications acknowledge the neurotoxicity of organomercurials but go to great lengths to assure that thimerosal is safe.
I question that this is unbiased. The compound spontaneously breaks down to produce a mole of ethyl mercury per mole thimerosal. This compound is unsafe to give anyone although it's still used in many vaccines. ¶ 9:26 PM 0 comments links to this post
Corporate Objective Analysis and Other Oxymorons
Drug trials: Stacking the deck
by Jim Giles
Nature 440, 270-272 (16 March 2006) | doi:10.1038/440270a
They answer only the questions they want to answer. They ignore evidence that does not fit with their story. They set up and knock down straw men. Levelled at politicians, such accusations would come as no surprise. But what if the target were the researchers who test drugs? And what if the allegations came not from the tabloid press, but from studies published in prestigious medical journals?
...Although outright deception is rare, there is now ample evidence to show that our view of drugs' effectiveness is being subtly distorted. And the motivation, say the researchers, is financial gain and personal ambition.
"Patients volunteer for trials, but finances and career motives decide what gets published," says Peter Gøtzsche, an expert in clinical trials and director of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen. "This is ethically indefensible. Change is not easy, but we must get there."
It is a dramatic conclusion to come from a field of study with no proper name, staffed by part-time volunteers. Most are journal editors, medical statisticians or public-health experts, united by fears for the integrity of clinical trials. For the devotees of 'journalology' or 'research into research', the literature on clinical trials is their raw data and patterns of bias are their results.
Some of these researchers are using their findings to change medical journals and make it harder for authors to misrepresent results. Others are working on what could become the biggest reform of clinical-trial reporting for decades: the creation of a comprehensive international registry of all clinical trials. It is a powerful idea, which could one day make all trial information public. It is also an idea that has pitched pharmaceutical companies against advocates for reform, in a tussle over whether transparency or commercial confidentiality best serves medical science.
One of the biggest problems with clinical-trial reporting, the suppression of negative results, shows the importance of such debates. Because clinical researchers are not obliged to publish their findings, ambiguous or negative results can languish in filing cabinets, resulting in what Christine Laine, an editor at the Annals of Internal Medicine in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, calls "phantom papers". If that happens, the journal record will give an over-optimistic impression of the treatments studied, with consequences for peer reviewers, government regulators and patients.
One alleged example hit the headlines in 2004. At that time, the antidepressant Paxil (paroxetine), made by London-based drug giant GlaxoSmithKline, was a popular treatment for adolescents in the United States. But doctors have now been warned off prescribing Paxil to youngsters, after evidence emerged that it increases the risk of suicidal behaviour. It was claimed in a court case brought in the United States that GlaxoSmithKline had suppressed data showing this since 1998. Rick Koenig, a spokesman for GlaxoSmithKline, says the company thought the charges unfounded, but agreed to pay $2.5 million to avoid the costs and time of litigation.
Phantom papers can be tracked down through trial protocols — the document describing how a trial will be run and what outcomes will be measured — which have to be registered with local ethics committees. By matching papers with protocols, several groups have shown that many trials are completed but not published. And that, notes Laine, makes it impossible for journals and health agencies to assess potential drugs. "You never quite know if other data are out there that would influence your conclusions," she says.
Last year, for example, a French team showed that only 40% of trials registered with its country's ethics committees in 1984 had been published by 2002, despite more than twice as many having been completed [Decullier, E. , Lhéritier, V. & Chapuis, F. Br. Med. J. 331, 19–22 (2005)]. Crucially, papers with inconclusive results not only took longer to publish (see graph), they were less likely to see the light of day at all. Researchers in any field can sit on negative or inconclusive results. But critics say that clinical researchers carry a greater ethical burden, as their findings inform decisions about the licensing of drugs.
Nor do the problems end when a trial hits an editor's desk. Results from a trial of the arthritis drug Celebrex (celecoxib) looked good when they were published in 2000, for example, but less so when physicians scrutinized the full data set. The original paper, which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), dismissed fears that Celebrex could cause ulcers. But that was based on data collected over six months. When other physicians analysed a full year's worth — which the authors already had at the time of their JAMA submission — they claimed that Celebrex seemed to cause ulcers just as often as other treatments [Hrachovec, J. B. & Mora, M. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 286, 2398 (2001)]. The original study's authors say that the later data were too unreliable to be included, but acknowledge that they could have "avoided confusion" by explaining to editors why they had omitted them.
But even with all the data, journal editors face another challenge: hype...
The hype shows up in a paper's conclusions. In 2003, epidemiologist Bodil Als-Nielsen and her colleagues at the University of Copenhagen looked at factors that might influence researchers' conclusions about a drug's efficacy or safety [Als-Nielsen, B. , Chen, W. , Gluud, C. & Kjaergard, L. L. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 290, 921–928 (2003)]. Their analysis of 370 trials showed that the strongest predictor of the authors' conclusions was not the nature of the data, but the type of sponsor.
Trials funded by for-profit organizations were significantly more likely to reach a favourable verdict than those sponsored by charities or governments. Critically, the association was not explained by the papers having more positive results. In a study under review, Gøtzsche and his colleagues show that industry-funded meta-analyses — studies that combine results from several clinical trials of a drug — are similarly prone to draw positive conclusions that are not supported by the data.
For many clinical-trials experts, these funding biases explain all the others. For each act, be it the suppression of results or the omission of outcomes, there is a financial motive for the company whose drug is being tested. In many cases, the company funding the study also employs one or more of the authors. Given the combination of motive and opportunity, many see drug-company influence as an inevitably distorting factor... ¶ 8:51 PM 1 comments links to this post
by Jim Giles
Nature 440, 270-272 (16 March 2006) | doi:10.1038/440270a
They answer only the questions they want to answer. They ignore evidence that does not fit with their story. They set up and knock down straw men. Levelled at politicians, such accusations would come as no surprise. But what if the target were the researchers who test drugs? And what if the allegations came not from the tabloid press, but from studies published in prestigious medical journals?
...Although outright deception is rare, there is now ample evidence to show that our view of drugs' effectiveness is being subtly distorted. And the motivation, say the researchers, is financial gain and personal ambition.
"Patients volunteer for trials, but finances and career motives decide what gets published," says Peter Gøtzsche, an expert in clinical trials and director of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen. "This is ethically indefensible. Change is not easy, but we must get there."
It is a dramatic conclusion to come from a field of study with no proper name, staffed by part-time volunteers. Most are journal editors, medical statisticians or public-health experts, united by fears for the integrity of clinical trials. For the devotees of 'journalology' or 'research into research', the literature on clinical trials is their raw data and patterns of bias are their results.
Some of these researchers are using their findings to change medical journals and make it harder for authors to misrepresent results. Others are working on what could become the biggest reform of clinical-trial reporting for decades: the creation of a comprehensive international registry of all clinical trials. It is a powerful idea, which could one day make all trial information public. It is also an idea that has pitched pharmaceutical companies against advocates for reform, in a tussle over whether transparency or commercial confidentiality best serves medical science.
One of the biggest problems with clinical-trial reporting, the suppression of negative results, shows the importance of such debates. Because clinical researchers are not obliged to publish their findings, ambiguous or negative results can languish in filing cabinets, resulting in what Christine Laine, an editor at the Annals of Internal Medicine in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, calls "phantom papers". If that happens, the journal record will give an over-optimistic impression of the treatments studied, with consequences for peer reviewers, government regulators and patients.
One alleged example hit the headlines in 2004. At that time, the antidepressant Paxil (paroxetine), made by London-based drug giant GlaxoSmithKline, was a popular treatment for adolescents in the United States. But doctors have now been warned off prescribing Paxil to youngsters, after evidence emerged that it increases the risk of suicidal behaviour. It was claimed in a court case brought in the United States that GlaxoSmithKline had suppressed data showing this since 1998. Rick Koenig, a spokesman for GlaxoSmithKline, says the company thought the charges unfounded, but agreed to pay $2.5 million to avoid the costs and time of litigation.
Phantom papers can be tracked down through trial protocols — the document describing how a trial will be run and what outcomes will be measured — which have to be registered with local ethics committees. By matching papers with protocols, several groups have shown that many trials are completed but not published. And that, notes Laine, makes it impossible for journals and health agencies to assess potential drugs. "You never quite know if other data are out there that would influence your conclusions," she says.
Last year, for example, a French team showed that only 40% of trials registered with its country's ethics committees in 1984 had been published by 2002, despite more than twice as many having been completed [Decullier, E. , Lhéritier, V. & Chapuis, F. Br. Med. J. 331, 19–22 (2005)]. Crucially, papers with inconclusive results not only took longer to publish (see graph), they were less likely to see the light of day at all. Researchers in any field can sit on negative or inconclusive results. But critics say that clinical researchers carry a greater ethical burden, as their findings inform decisions about the licensing of drugs.
Nor do the problems end when a trial hits an editor's desk. Results from a trial of the arthritis drug Celebrex (celecoxib) looked good when they were published in 2000, for example, but less so when physicians scrutinized the full data set. The original paper, which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), dismissed fears that Celebrex could cause ulcers. But that was based on data collected over six months. When other physicians analysed a full year's worth — which the authors already had at the time of their JAMA submission — they claimed that Celebrex seemed to cause ulcers just as often as other treatments [Hrachovec, J. B. & Mora, M. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 286, 2398 (2001)]. The original study's authors say that the later data were too unreliable to be included, but acknowledge that they could have "avoided confusion" by explaining to editors why they had omitted them.
But even with all the data, journal editors face another challenge: hype...
The hype shows up in a paper's conclusions. In 2003, epidemiologist Bodil Als-Nielsen and her colleagues at the University of Copenhagen looked at factors that might influence researchers' conclusions about a drug's efficacy or safety [Als-Nielsen, B. , Chen, W. , Gluud, C. & Kjaergard, L. L. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 290, 921–928 (2003)]. Their analysis of 370 trials showed that the strongest predictor of the authors' conclusions was not the nature of the data, but the type of sponsor.
Trials funded by for-profit organizations were significantly more likely to reach a favourable verdict than those sponsored by charities or governments. Critically, the association was not explained by the papers having more positive results. In a study under review, Gøtzsche and his colleagues show that industry-funded meta-analyses — studies that combine results from several clinical trials of a drug — are similarly prone to draw positive conclusions that are not supported by the data.
For many clinical-trials experts, these funding biases explain all the others. For each act, be it the suppression of results or the omission of outcomes, there is a financial motive for the company whose drug is being tested. In many cases, the company funding the study also employs one or more of the authors. Given the combination of motive and opportunity, many see drug-company influence as an inevitably distorting factor... ¶ 8:51 PM 1 comments links to this post
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
They Let It Happen
Via Laura Rozen:
The FBI agent who arrested Zacarias Moussaoui weeks before Sept. 11 told a federal jury Monday that his own superiors were guilty of "criminal negligence and obstruction" for blocking his attempts to learn whether the terrorist was part of a larger cell about to hijack planes in the United States.
During intense cross-examination, Special Agent Harry Samit — a witness for the prosecution — accused his bosses of acting only to protect their positions within the FBI...
Samit wanted to seek a criminal search warrant, and later one from a special intelligence court. But officials at the FBI headquarters refused to let him, because they did not believe he had enough evidence to prove Moussaoui was anything but a wealthy man who had come to this country to follow his dream of becoming a pilot.
He said that as Washington kept telling him there was "no urgency and no threat," his FBI superiors sent him on "wild goose chases."
For a while, Samit said, they did not even believe Moussaoui was the same person whom French intelligence sources had identified as a Muslim extremist. Samit said that FBI headquarters wanted him and his fellow agents to spend days poring through Paris phone books to make sure they had the right Moussaoui.
Samit said that when he asked permission to place an Arabic-speaking federal officer as a plant inside Moussaoui's cell to find out what Moussaoui was up to, Washington said no.
And he said that when he prepared a lengthy memo about Moussaoui for Federal Aviation Administration officials, Washington deleted key sections, including a part connecting Moussaoui with Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. [...]
Samit said his immediate boss in Minneapolis, FBI Special Agent Greg Jones, did urge Washington to be more receptive.
Samit said he once overheard Jones on the phone with headquarters, telling FBI superiors that Minneapolis was trying to keep Zacarias Moussaoui "from flying an airplane into the World Trade Center."
The Bush administration let it happen. ¶ 4:51 PM 1 comments links to this post
The FBI agent who arrested Zacarias Moussaoui weeks before Sept. 11 told a federal jury Monday that his own superiors were guilty of "criminal negligence and obstruction" for blocking his attempts to learn whether the terrorist was part of a larger cell about to hijack planes in the United States.
During intense cross-examination, Special Agent Harry Samit — a witness for the prosecution — accused his bosses of acting only to protect their positions within the FBI...
Samit wanted to seek a criminal search warrant, and later one from a special intelligence court. But officials at the FBI headquarters refused to let him, because they did not believe he had enough evidence to prove Moussaoui was anything but a wealthy man who had come to this country to follow his dream of becoming a pilot.
He said that as Washington kept telling him there was "no urgency and no threat," his FBI superiors sent him on "wild goose chases."
For a while, Samit said, they did not even believe Moussaoui was the same person whom French intelligence sources had identified as a Muslim extremist. Samit said that FBI headquarters wanted him and his fellow agents to spend days poring through Paris phone books to make sure they had the right Moussaoui.
Samit said that when he asked permission to place an Arabic-speaking federal officer as a plant inside Moussaoui's cell to find out what Moussaoui was up to, Washington said no.
And he said that when he prepared a lengthy memo about Moussaoui for Federal Aviation Administration officials, Washington deleted key sections, including a part connecting Moussaoui with Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. [...]
Samit said his immediate boss in Minneapolis, FBI Special Agent Greg Jones, did urge Washington to be more receptive.
Samit said he once overheard Jones on the phone with headquarters, telling FBI superiors that Minneapolis was trying to keep Zacarias Moussaoui "from flying an airplane into the World Trade Center."
The Bush administration let it happen. ¶ 4:51 PM 1 comments links to this post
Monday, March 20, 2006
Hacking Skynet for Fun and Profit and Global Domination
Defense Tech:
It's bad enough that the $10 billion a year missile shield -- especially its ground-based interceptors -- routinely flunk their test runs.
But what's potentially worse is that the anti-missile system may have been left wide open to hackers, with "such serious security flaws that the agency and its contractor, Boeing, may not be able to prevent misuse of the system, according to a Defense Department Inspector General’s report.
The report, released late last month, said MDA [the Missile Defense Agency] and Boeing allowed the use of group passwords on the unencrypted portion of MDA’s Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) communications network.
The report said that neither MDA nor Boeing officials saw the need to install a system to conduct automated log audits on unencrypted communications and monitoring systems. Even though current DOD policies require such automated network monitoring, such a requirement “was not in the contract."
The network, which was also developed to conform to more than 20-year-old DOD security policies rather than more recent guidelines, lacks a comprehensive user account management process, the report said. Neither MDA nor Boeing conducted required Information Assurance (IA) training for users before they were granted access to the network, the report stated.
You knew this was coming. The Pentagon has yanked the Inspector General's report off of its website. Luckily, Federal Computer Week saved itself a copy. ¶ 9:09 PM 1 comments links to this post
It's bad enough that the $10 billion a year missile shield -- especially its ground-based interceptors -- routinely flunk their test runs.
But what's potentially worse is that the anti-missile system may have been left wide open to hackers, with "such serious security flaws that the agency and its contractor, Boeing, may not be able to prevent misuse of the system, according to a Defense Department Inspector General’s report.
The report, released late last month, said MDA [the Missile Defense Agency] and Boeing allowed the use of group passwords on the unencrypted portion of MDA’s Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) communications network.
The report said that neither MDA nor Boeing officials saw the need to install a system to conduct automated log audits on unencrypted communications and monitoring systems. Even though current DOD policies require such automated network monitoring, such a requirement “was not in the contract."
The network, which was also developed to conform to more than 20-year-old DOD security policies rather than more recent guidelines, lacks a comprehensive user account management process, the report said. Neither MDA nor Boeing conducted required Information Assurance (IA) training for users before they were granted access to the network, the report stated.
You knew this was coming. The Pentagon has yanked the Inspector General's report off of its website. Luckily, Federal Computer Week saved itself a copy. ¶ 9:09 PM 1 comments links to this post
Category 5 hits Australia Today
Super Cyclone Hits Northeastern Australia
by Staff Writers
Brisbane, Australia (AFP) Mar 20, 2006
A super cyclone smashed into tropical northeastern Australia Monday, with winds of up to 290 kilometres an hour (180 mph) causing casualties and ripping homes apart, officials said.
Tropical Cyclone Larry hit land near Innisfail in the far north of Queensland state as a top category five, but had since been downgraded to a category four, the Queensland weather bureau said.
It is the strongest cyclone to strike Australia in more than 30 years and was seen as potentially more dangerous than Cyclone Tracy, which devastated the northern city of Darwin in 1974, killing 71 people and leaving 20,000 homeless.
Innisfail police said they had been inundated with calls from terrified residents whose "homes are literally crumbling around them".
"We have roofs flying off in Fly Fish Point, Silkwood and in the city centre," an Innisfail police spokeswoman said. "And we have trees across roads."
Police had been unable to leave the station despite hundreds of calls for help, she said.
"We've had reports of some casualties at Cairns hospital, some 20 or so," weather bureau forecaster Jonty Hall said. "There's also some reports of a few people missing as well."
Queensland state Premier Peter Beattie declared a state of emergency ahead of the storm's landfall late Sunday, opening the way for mandatory evacuations in several coastal areas, where tidal surges of up to two metres (6.6 feet) were expected.
Hundreds of people evacuated coastal towns in the area and major airlines cancelled all flights into Cairns and Townsville, the two biggest cities in the region.
The weather bureau describes a category five cyclone as "extremely dangerous with widespread destruction". It said Larry posed a very serious threat to life and property...
Apparently it was much stronger than Katrina.
March 21 (Bloomberg) -- Cyclone Larry, the strongest storm to hit Australia in 30 years, smashed into the Queensland coast today with about 40 percent more force than Hurricane Katrina at landfall.
The highest recorded winds for Cyclone Larry, a category 5 storm, were about 180 miles per hour (290 kilometers per hour), compared with 125 mile per hour winds for the Category 3 Katrina when it struck land, said James Vasilj, a spokesman with the National Weather Service in New Orleans.
``If a Category 5 hurricane like Larry hit any populated area of the United States, the damage would be absolutely catastrophic,'' said Frank Lepore, spokesman for the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
``You're talking major wall failure on high-rise buildings. A Category 5 hurricane could lift a 2000-pound car and deposit it on a 4-foot-high wall,'' Lepore said in an interview. ``A 150-160 pound person wouldn't stand a chance.''
More than half the buildings in Innisfail, Queensland, a town of 8,000 people, were damaged by Larry, and about 30 people suffered minor injuries, according to Queensland's Department of Emergency Services.
``It looks like an atomic bomb hit the place,'' Innisfail Mayor Neil Clarke said on Australian television, the Associated Press reported. ``This is more than a local disaster, this is a national disaster.'' ¶ 6:21 PM 0 comments links to this post
by Staff Writers
Brisbane, Australia (AFP) Mar 20, 2006
A super cyclone smashed into tropical northeastern Australia Monday, with winds of up to 290 kilometres an hour (180 mph) causing casualties and ripping homes apart, officials said.
Tropical Cyclone Larry hit land near Innisfail in the far north of Queensland state as a top category five, but had since been downgraded to a category four, the Queensland weather bureau said.
It is the strongest cyclone to strike Australia in more than 30 years and was seen as potentially more dangerous than Cyclone Tracy, which devastated the northern city of Darwin in 1974, killing 71 people and leaving 20,000 homeless.
Innisfail police said they had been inundated with calls from terrified residents whose "homes are literally crumbling around them".
"We have roofs flying off in Fly Fish Point, Silkwood and in the city centre," an Innisfail police spokeswoman said. "And we have trees across roads."
Police had been unable to leave the station despite hundreds of calls for help, she said.
"We've had reports of some casualties at Cairns hospital, some 20 or so," weather bureau forecaster Jonty Hall said. "There's also some reports of a few people missing as well."
Queensland state Premier Peter Beattie declared a state of emergency ahead of the storm's landfall late Sunday, opening the way for mandatory evacuations in several coastal areas, where tidal surges of up to two metres (6.6 feet) were expected.
Hundreds of people evacuated coastal towns in the area and major airlines cancelled all flights into Cairns and Townsville, the two biggest cities in the region.
The weather bureau describes a category five cyclone as "extremely dangerous with widespread destruction". It said Larry posed a very serious threat to life and property...
Apparently it was much stronger than Katrina.
March 21 (Bloomberg) -- Cyclone Larry, the strongest storm to hit Australia in 30 years, smashed into the Queensland coast today with about 40 percent more force than Hurricane Katrina at landfall.
The highest recorded winds for Cyclone Larry, a category 5 storm, were about 180 miles per hour (290 kilometers per hour), compared with 125 mile per hour winds for the Category 3 Katrina when it struck land, said James Vasilj, a spokesman with the National Weather Service in New Orleans.
``If a Category 5 hurricane like Larry hit any populated area of the United States, the damage would be absolutely catastrophic,'' said Frank Lepore, spokesman for the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
``You're talking major wall failure on high-rise buildings. A Category 5 hurricane could lift a 2000-pound car and deposit it on a 4-foot-high wall,'' Lepore said in an interview. ``A 150-160 pound person wouldn't stand a chance.''
More than half the buildings in Innisfail, Queensland, a town of 8,000 people, were damaged by Larry, and about 30 people suffered minor injuries, according to Queensland's Department of Emergency Services.
``It looks like an atomic bomb hit the place,'' Innisfail Mayor Neil Clarke said on Australian television, the Associated Press reported. ``This is more than a local disaster, this is a national disaster.'' ¶ 6:21 PM 0 comments links to this post
Morning in America with the Chop Shop Entrepreneurs
NEW YORK- A macabre scandal in which corpses were plundered for body parts could be even bigger than previously disclosed, with one company alone saying it has distributed thousands of pieces of human tissue that authorities fear could be tainted with disease.
In addition, three other companies have reported quarantining or destroying more than $5 million in tissue from Biomedical Tissue Services — the now-defunct New Jersey supply house at the center of the scandal...
BTS has been accused of collecting body parts without donor consent and selling them for use in transplants performed at hospitals and other medical facilities across the country. The owner of BTS and three others were charged in a scheme that earned them millions of dollars. All four have pleaded not guilty.
BTS supplied bone, skin and tendons to various processors, who in turn provided them to distributors. Those companies are not accused of any wrongdoing.
Minneapolis-based distributor Medtronic Inc. reported that at least 8,000 pieces that came from BTS were implanted, and others are being recalled, according to documents filed January in a federal lawsuit in Ohio.
The number was revealed in a question-and-answer form the company sent to surgeons around the country in November 2005 shortly after it was notified that the tissue had dubious origins...
The FDA will not say whether any patients have ailments that might be linked with suspect tissue. The FDA has also refused to reveal how many people received BTS tissue...
Free enterprise, you know.
Chop shops seem all the rage these days, and victims seem to come from all over and all lifestyles.
Although the dead seem the easiest victims, one has to wonder how many people and especially teenagers (healthy parts) who disappear meet this fate.
Not to mention the contribution of human traffic, which next to drugs is the most lucrative international criminal activity. Or it was in 1999 anyway.
Current statistics are harder to find.
It seems the Bush administration has removed this from the Department of Justice website priorities. ¶ 5:01 PM 0 comments links to this post
In addition, three other companies have reported quarantining or destroying more than $5 million in tissue from Biomedical Tissue Services — the now-defunct New Jersey supply house at the center of the scandal...
BTS has been accused of collecting body parts without donor consent and selling them for use in transplants performed at hospitals and other medical facilities across the country. The owner of BTS and three others were charged in a scheme that earned them millions of dollars. All four have pleaded not guilty.
BTS supplied bone, skin and tendons to various processors, who in turn provided them to distributors. Those companies are not accused of any wrongdoing.
Minneapolis-based distributor Medtronic Inc. reported that at least 8,000 pieces that came from BTS were implanted, and others are being recalled, according to documents filed January in a federal lawsuit in Ohio.
The number was revealed in a question-and-answer form the company sent to surgeons around the country in November 2005 shortly after it was notified that the tissue had dubious origins...
The FDA will not say whether any patients have ailments that might be linked with suspect tissue. The FDA has also refused to reveal how many people received BTS tissue...
Free enterprise, you know.
Chop shops seem all the rage these days, and victims seem to come from all over and all lifestyles.
Although the dead seem the easiest victims, one has to wonder how many people and especially teenagers (healthy parts) who disappear meet this fate.
Not to mention the contribution of human traffic, which next to drugs is the most lucrative international criminal activity. Or it was in 1999 anyway.
Current statistics are harder to find.
It seems the Bush administration has removed this from the Department of Justice website priorities. ¶ 5:01 PM 0 comments links to this post
Atrocity
This link says it all.
At 230 of 15/3/2006, according to the telegram (report) of the Ishaqi police directorate, American forces used helicopters to drop troops on the house of Faiz Harat Khalaf situated in the Abu Sifa village of the Ishaqi district. The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 people, including 5 children, 4 women and 2 men, then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals (map coordinates 098702).
They were:
Turkiya Muhammed Ali, 75 years
Faiza Harat Khalaf, 30 years
Faiz Harat Khalaf, 28 years
Um Ahmad, 23 years
Sumaya Abdulrazak, 22 years
Aziz Khalil Jarmoot, 22 years
Hawra Harat Khalaf, 5 years
Asma Yousef Maruf, 5 years
Osama Yousef Maruf, 3 years
Aisha Harat Khalaf, 3 years
Husam Harat Khalaf, 6 months
(Signed)
Staff Colonel
Fadhil Muhammed Khalaf
Assistant Chief of the Joint Coordination Center
The problem being, death squads don't get air support. Somebody forgot to read Negroponte's playbook. Dropping nuns from helicopters is what exposed them in the Honduras and El Salvador.
Eager beavers. Six foot tall rabid beavers with high tech murder in their hearts. You want endless war?
I suspect you've got it. ¶ 3:27 PM 0 comments links to this post
At 230 of 15/3/2006, according to the telegram (report) of the Ishaqi police directorate, American forces used helicopters to drop troops on the house of Faiz Harat Khalaf situated in the Abu Sifa village of the Ishaqi district. The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 people, including 5 children, 4 women and 2 men, then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals (map coordinates 098702).
They were:
Turkiya Muhammed Ali, 75 years
Faiza Harat Khalaf, 30 years
Faiz Harat Khalaf, 28 years
Um Ahmad, 23 years
Sumaya Abdulrazak, 22 years
Aziz Khalil Jarmoot, 22 years
Hawra Harat Khalaf, 5 years
Asma Yousef Maruf, 5 years
Osama Yousef Maruf, 3 years
Aisha Harat Khalaf, 3 years
Husam Harat Khalaf, 6 months
(Signed)
Staff Colonel
Fadhil Muhammed Khalaf
Assistant Chief of the Joint Coordination Center
The problem being, death squads don't get air support. Somebody forgot to read Negroponte's playbook. Dropping nuns from helicopters is what exposed them in the Honduras and El Salvador.
Eager beavers. Six foot tall rabid beavers with high tech murder in their hearts. You want endless war?
I suspect you've got it. ¶ 3:27 PM 0 comments links to this post
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Why Did WTC-7 Collapse?
I know, I know, old question.
But check it out again. It's one of the best loose threads about 9-11. It wasn't hit by a plane- and collapsed just like controlled demolition.
Emergent conspiracy theory indeed. ¶ 9:04 PM 0 comments links to this post
But check it out again. It's one of the best loose threads about 9-11. It wasn't hit by a plane- and collapsed just like controlled demolition.
Emergent conspiracy theory indeed. ¶ 9:04 PM 0 comments links to this post
Private Contractor Praetorians
Lest any undesirables like the bona fide Secret Service be in the position to step in if Dear Leader decides he's tired of waiting for the Second Coming and pushes the Button, it seems there is a Bubble Squad designed to help him maintain his clarity of vision.
This guard of private security seems to surround Dear Leader. Its presence preceeds him, and seems to inspect his environment carefully. Although the real Secret Service seems to allow them to run the Bubble of the boy-king, they won't own up to their illegal actions.
No wonder. I don't think the goons choose their Caesar, but their owners likely do. ¶ 5:06 PM 0 comments links to this post
This guard of private security seems to surround Dear Leader. Its presence preceeds him, and seems to inspect his environment carefully. Although the real Secret Service seems to allow them to run the Bubble of the boy-king, they won't own up to their illegal actions.
No wonder. I don't think the goons choose their Caesar, but their owners likely do. ¶ 5:06 PM 0 comments links to this post
American Theocracy
by Kevin Phillips, reviewed today by Alan Brinkley. Reproduced here for educational purposes only, of course.
...Phillips... long ago abandoned his enthusiasm for the Republican coalition he helped to build. His latest book (his 13th) looks broadly and historically at the political world the conservative coalition has painstakingly constructed over the last several decades. No longer does he see Republican government as a source of stability and order. Instead, he presents a nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed and dangerous shortsightedness.
Although Phillips is scathingly critical of what he considers the dangerous policies of the Bush administration, he does not spend much time examining the ideas and behavior of the president and his advisers. Instead, he identifies three broad and related trends — none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration's policies — that together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt — current and prospective — that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating. If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through the three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to look beyond their own and the country's immediate ambitions and desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future.
The American press in the first days of the Iraq war reported extensively on the Pentagon's failure to post American troops in front of the National Museum in Baghdad, which, as a result, was looted of many of its great archaeological treasures. Less widely reported, but to Phillips far more meaningful, was the immediate posting of troops around the Iraqi Oil Ministry, which held the maps and charts that were the key to effective oil production. Phillips fully supports an explanation of the Iraq war that the Bush administration dismisses as conspiracy theory — that its principal purpose was to secure vast oil reserves that would enable the United States to control production and to lower prices. ("Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath," an oil analyst said a couple of years ago. "You can't ask for better than that.") Terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, tyranny, democracy and other public rationales were, Phillips says, simply ruses to disguise the real motivation for the invasion.
...it is hard to dismiss Phillips's larger argument: that the pursuit of oil has for at least 30 years been one of the defining elements of American policy in the world; and that the Bush administration — unusually dominated by oilmen — has taken what the president deplored recently as the nation's addiction to oil to new and terrifying levels. The United States has embraced a kind of "petro-imperialism," Phillips writes, "the key aspect of which is the U.S. military's transformation into a global oil-protection force," and which "puts up a democratic facade, emphasizes freedom of the seas (or pipeline routes) and seeks to secure, protect, drill and ship oil, not administer everyday affairs."
Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great force that he sees shaping contemporary American life — radical Christianity and its growing intrusion into government and politics. The political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an enormous range of information from scholars and journalists and presents a remarkably comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and achievements of the religious right.
He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a scorned seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so large that it dominates not just Baptism itself but American Protestantism generally. The Southern Baptist Convention does not speak with one voice, but almost all of its voices, Phillips argues, are to one degree or another highly conservative. On the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of "Christian Reconstructionists" who believe in a "Taliban-like" reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a "myth" and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian doctrine. A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as many as a third of the population, claims to believe in the supposed biblical prophecies of an imminent "rapture" — the return of Jesus to the world and the elevation of believers to heaven.
Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of politics and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars have identified as predictors of the apocalypse — among them a war in Iraq, the Jewish settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the rise of terrorism. He convincingly demonstrates that the Bush administration has calculatedly reached out to such believers and encouraged them to see the president's policies as a response to premillennialist thought. He also suggests that the president and other members of his administration may actually believe these things themselves, that religious belief is the basis of policy, not just a tactic for selling it to the public. Phillips's evidence for this disturbing claim is significant, but not conclusive.
THE third great impending crisis that Phillips identifies is also, perhaps, the best known — the astonishing rise of debt as the precarious underpinning of the American economy. He is not, of course, the only observer who has noted the dangers of indebtedness. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example, frequently writes about the looming catastrophe. So do many more-conservative economists, who point especially to future debt — particularly the enormous obligation, which Phillips estimates at between $30 trillion and $40 trillion, that Social Security and health care demands will create in the coming decades. The most familiar debt is that of the United States government, fueled by soaring federal budget deficits that have continued (with a brief pause in the late 1990's) for more than two decades. But the national debt — currently over $8 trillion — is only the tip of the iceberg. There has also been an explosion of corporate debt, state and local bonded debt, international debt through huge trade imbalances, and consumer debt (mostly in the form of credit-card balances and aggressively marketed home-mortgage packages). Taken together, this present and future debt may exceed $70 trillion.
The creation of a national-debt culture, Phillips argues, although exacerbated by the policies of the Bush administration, has been the work of many people over many decades — among them Alan Greenspan, who, he acidly notes, blithely and irresponsibly ignored the rising debt to avoid pricking the stock-market bubble it helped produce. It is most of all a product of the "financialization" of the American economy — the turn away from manufacturing and toward an economy based on moving and managing money, a trend encouraged, Phillips argues persuasively, by the preoccupation with oil and (somewhat less persuasively) with evangelical belief in the imminent rapture, which makes planning for the future unnecessary.
Phillips' American Dynasty clearly outlines the history of the Bush crime family.
This promises to be equally as good. ¶ 1:56 PM 0 comments links to this post
...Phillips... long ago abandoned his enthusiasm for the Republican coalition he helped to build. His latest book (his 13th) looks broadly and historically at the political world the conservative coalition has painstakingly constructed over the last several decades. No longer does he see Republican government as a source of stability and order. Instead, he presents a nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed and dangerous shortsightedness.
Although Phillips is scathingly critical of what he considers the dangerous policies of the Bush administration, he does not spend much time examining the ideas and behavior of the president and his advisers. Instead, he identifies three broad and related trends — none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration's policies — that together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt — current and prospective — that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating. If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through the three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to look beyond their own and the country's immediate ambitions and desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future.
The American press in the first days of the Iraq war reported extensively on the Pentagon's failure to post American troops in front of the National Museum in Baghdad, which, as a result, was looted of many of its great archaeological treasures. Less widely reported, but to Phillips far more meaningful, was the immediate posting of troops around the Iraqi Oil Ministry, which held the maps and charts that were the key to effective oil production. Phillips fully supports an explanation of the Iraq war that the Bush administration dismisses as conspiracy theory — that its principal purpose was to secure vast oil reserves that would enable the United States to control production and to lower prices. ("Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath," an oil analyst said a couple of years ago. "You can't ask for better than that.") Terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, tyranny, democracy and other public rationales were, Phillips says, simply ruses to disguise the real motivation for the invasion.
...it is hard to dismiss Phillips's larger argument: that the pursuit of oil has for at least 30 years been one of the defining elements of American policy in the world; and that the Bush administration — unusually dominated by oilmen — has taken what the president deplored recently as the nation's addiction to oil to new and terrifying levels. The United States has embraced a kind of "petro-imperialism," Phillips writes, "the key aspect of which is the U.S. military's transformation into a global oil-protection force," and which "puts up a democratic facade, emphasizes freedom of the seas (or pipeline routes) and seeks to secure, protect, drill and ship oil, not administer everyday affairs."
Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great force that he sees shaping contemporary American life — radical Christianity and its growing intrusion into government and politics. The political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an enormous range of information from scholars and journalists and presents a remarkably comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and achievements of the religious right.
He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a scorned seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so large that it dominates not just Baptism itself but American Protestantism generally. The Southern Baptist Convention does not speak with one voice, but almost all of its voices, Phillips argues, are to one degree or another highly conservative. On the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of "Christian Reconstructionists" who believe in a "Taliban-like" reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a "myth" and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian doctrine. A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as many as a third of the population, claims to believe in the supposed biblical prophecies of an imminent "rapture" — the return of Jesus to the world and the elevation of believers to heaven.
Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of politics and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars have identified as predictors of the apocalypse — among them a war in Iraq, the Jewish settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the rise of terrorism. He convincingly demonstrates that the Bush administration has calculatedly reached out to such believers and encouraged them to see the president's policies as a response to premillennialist thought. He also suggests that the president and other members of his administration may actually believe these things themselves, that religious belief is the basis of policy, not just a tactic for selling it to the public. Phillips's evidence for this disturbing claim is significant, but not conclusive.
THE third great impending crisis that Phillips identifies is also, perhaps, the best known — the astonishing rise of debt as the precarious underpinning of the American economy. He is not, of course, the only observer who has noted the dangers of indebtedness. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example, frequently writes about the looming catastrophe. So do many more-conservative economists, who point especially to future debt — particularly the enormous obligation, which Phillips estimates at between $30 trillion and $40 trillion, that Social Security and health care demands will create in the coming decades. The most familiar debt is that of the United States government, fueled by soaring federal budget deficits that have continued (with a brief pause in the late 1990's) for more than two decades. But the national debt — currently over $8 trillion — is only the tip of the iceberg. There has also been an explosion of corporate debt, state and local bonded debt, international debt through huge trade imbalances, and consumer debt (mostly in the form of credit-card balances and aggressively marketed home-mortgage packages). Taken together, this present and future debt may exceed $70 trillion.
The creation of a national-debt culture, Phillips argues, although exacerbated by the policies of the Bush administration, has been the work of many people over many decades — among them Alan Greenspan, who, he acidly notes, blithely and irresponsibly ignored the rising debt to avoid pricking the stock-market bubble it helped produce. It is most of all a product of the "financialization" of the American economy — the turn away from manufacturing and toward an economy based on moving and managing money, a trend encouraged, Phillips argues persuasively, by the preoccupation with oil and (somewhat less persuasively) with evangelical belief in the imminent rapture, which makes planning for the future unnecessary.
Phillips' American Dynasty clearly outlines the history of the Bush crime family.
This promises to be equally as good. ¶ 1:56 PM 0 comments links to this post
The Surgin' General Warns Against a Land War in Asia
Recent news says it's all good except for a few bad apples:
2003
Middle East Online, September 3, 2003: "Meanwhile, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac were to meet in Germany on Thursday to discuss ways for the West to respond to the recent surge in violence in Iraq and the Middle East."
UK Telegraph, October 31, 2003: "Ansar is believed to be channeling into Iraq the foreign fighters who are behind a recent surge in violence in the country, officials say."
KNI News, November 3, 2003: "Bush blamed loyalists to ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and foreign terrorists for the recent surge in violence in Iraq."
2004
Reuters, March 4, 2004: "A wave of bomb attacks in Baghdad and Karbala killing at least 171 people earlier this week has highlighted the difficulties in rebuilding the country and restoring peace. But Mr. Blair, speaking after a meeting in Rome with his Italian counterpart, Silvio Berlusconi, said the recent surge in violence in Iraq did not constitute civil war."
Radio Free Europe, April 14, 2004: "US President George W. Bush held a major news conference at the White House on 13 April in the middle of the deadliest month for Americans in Iraq since Baghdad fell a year ago. He spoke of the recent surge in violence there, but urged his countrymen not to lose faith. He also said he would adhere to the 30 June deadline for handing over sovereignty to Iraqis."
US State Department, April 15, 2004: "Pace said the recent surge in violence in Iraq is being driven by 'terrorists' who see the June 30 deadline for turnover of sovereignty approaching rapidly and are petrified by the promise of democracy."
CBS News, April 26, 2004: "Lt. Gen. David Barno, the top American commander in Afghanistan, said Monday that the military has seen a recent surge in violence, but that most attacks were directed against soft targets, such as civilians or isolated Afghan security outposts."
Pew Research Center, May 12, 2004: "Despite the prison abuse scandal and the recent surge in violence in Iraq, a majority of the public (53%) continues to support keeping troops in Iraq until a stable government is established."
China Daily, May 25, 2004: "In his speech to the Army War College here, Bush warned that 'there are difficult days ahead and the way forward may sometimes appear chaotic.' Yet he vowed the handover would take place on schedule and that the US-led coalition would not be defeated by insurgents blamed for the recent surge in violence."
The New Standard, June 24, 2004: "Compelled by the recent surge in violence, US Central Command (CentCom) has informally asked Army planners for as many as 25,000 more troops in Iraq, the Baltimore Sun reports."
The Washington Post, July 22, 2004: "Despite a recent surge in violence, including kidnappings, car bombings and assassinations, senior US and Iraqi officials gave a relatively optimistic assessment on Wednesday of the security situation in Iraq since the transfer of political authority from US to Iraqi authorities June 28."
Progress Magazine, July/August, 2004: "In the short term, ongoing help will be required with the maintenance of security within the country. The response to the recent surge in violence must emphasize political solutions and not be just a simple deployment of military power."
The Washington Post, September 9, 2004: "'The recent surge in violence has been especially surprising because in the weeks after the transfer of power there was a phase that, for Iraq, felt to some almost like a lull.'"
Al Jazeera, September 17, 2004: "The assessments, made before the recent surge in violence in Iraq and the US military death toll there topping 1000, appear to conflict with Bush's upbeat description of the US-led effort to stabilize and democratize Iraq."
The Washington Times, September 22, 2004: "The Iraqi leader also said that despite a recent surge in violence in Iraq, it is 'very important for the people of the world really to know that we are winning, we are making progress in Iraq, we are defeating terrorists.'"
Al Jazeera, December 18, 2004: "Mosul has experienced a recent surge in violence. On Friday, a car carrying Turkish security guards was attacked in the city, in Iraq's far north near the Turkish border, and four people were killed, one of them decapitated."
2005
Radio Free Europe, January 4, 2005: "The incident marks the most senior assassination since the death in May of Governing Council president Abd al-Zahra Uthman Muhammad and should be seen within the context of the recent surge in violence ahead of national and provincial elections slated for 30 January."
CBS Chicago, January 17, 2005: "The area around Kut has seen a recent surge in violence. In a separate attack, two Iraqi provincial government auditors were shot to death late Sunday after armed gunmen stopped their car in Suwaira, about 25 miles southeast of Baghdad, an official at a Kut hospital said."
ABC News, March 2, 2005: "Most of the victims were Shiites, the targets of a recent surge in violence, most notably a series of suicide bombings and other attacks that killed nearly 100 people during the Shiite religious commemoration known as Ashoura."
The BBC, April 27, 2005: "But he added it was too early to say if a recent surge in violence amounted to a concerted campaign, and insisted that US-backed forces were 'winning.'"
The International Herald-Tribune, May 16, 2005: "The insurgents' choice of adversary is unusual. But the recent surge in violence, at least, follows a time-tested pattern."
The Washington Post, May 19, 2005: "A senior US military official told reporters Wednesday that the recent surge in violence in Iraq followed a meeting in Syria last month of associates of the Jordanian insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi."
The Council on Foreign Relations, May 20, 2005: "It's unclear how much of the recent surge in violence stems from tribal leaders, but as Metz points out: 'Local elites recognize that in a secular, modernized Iraq, their power would be challenged.'"
Salon, May 23, 2005: "Even despite the recent surge in violence, in some areas - downtown Mosul, for example - Iraqi forces have begun limited independent operations."
Associated Press, June 17, 2005: "It is also believed to be the main hideout of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant whose al Qaeda-linked group has carried out many of the deadliest attacks in Iraq and who US forces believe is behind a recent surge in violence."
White House press conference, June 20, 2005: "Mr. President, we were told that you planned to sharpen your focus on Iraq. Why did this become necessary? And given the recent surge in violence, do you agree with Vice President Dick Cheney's assessment that the insurgency is in its last throes?"
Iran Focus Online, August 4, 2005: "His comments came as the 15-nation council unanimously adopted a US-drafted resolution condemning a recent surge in violence in Iraq that has killed hundreds ..."
Radio Free Europe, August 12, 2005: "But a recent surge in violence and reports of growing public hostility to the Japanese presence are prompting many to question the prospects for continued humanitarian assistance there."
Associated Press, September 17, 2005: "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, has reportedly said the recent surge in violence is in retaliation for a coalition offensive against the group's stronghold in the northern city of Tal Afar."
The Washington Times, October 31, 2005: "The fresh US effort to crack down on insurgents followed a recent surge in violence caused by the passing of the new Iraqi constitution in a referendum held earlier this month."
2006
Agence France Presse, January 7, 2006: "US officials have sought to downplay a recent surge in violence that on Thursday alone claimed the lives of more than 115 Iraqis and 11 US servicemen."
The Sidney Morning Herald, January 8, 2006: "The recent surge in violence is "an anomaly" and Iraq is not on the verge of civil war, the top US commander there said yesterday, after one of the country's bloodiest days since the fall of Saddam Hussein."
The American Chronicle, February 1, 2006: "Recently, five other members of Congress and I sat on a C-130 transport plane surrounded by soldiers going from Kuwait to Baghdad. The backdrop is a recent surge in violence."
The Associated Press, February 4, 2006: "Dozens of bodies have been discovered in various parts of Baghdad gagged, bound and shot repeatedly in the past week, amid recent surge in violence, which analysts have repeatedly described as initial stages of an open-ended civil war between Iraq's ethnic groups."
Associated Press, March 1, 2006: "AP reports that he was giving an unusually frank assessment of the stakes in the country's recent surge in violence."
The Baltimore Sun, March 4, 2006: "The top US commander in Iraq said yesterday that he hopes to make an assessment this spring about whether to reduce the number of American troops in Iraq. But Pentagon officials speaking anonymously said a recent surge in violence there has dampened hopes that force levels can be cut anytime soon."
Associated Press, March 6, 2006: "The training at the desert village is especially important for the Marines of the First Battalion, 14th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Division. The battalion, made up mostly of Marine reservists, is leaving soon for Iraq, where sectarian tensions have brought a recent surge in violence - and growing concerns about civil war."
Reuters, March 10, 2006: "Iraqi forces, not American troops, would deal with a civil war if one erupts in Iraq and US troop cuts remained possible despite a recent surge in violence, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Thursday."
Al Jazeera, March 11, 2006: "Moving to the recent surge in violence that has swept Iraq, Ritter said he wasn't surprised as the only thing holding the three infighting ethnic and religious groups (Kurds, Shia, and Sunnis) together since the end of the Ottoman Empire after World War I was Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist Party."
The New York Times, March 13, 2006: "Despite the recent surge in violence in Iraq, Mr. Reid said he believed that civil war was "neither imminent nor inevitable." He said Iraqi security forces now numbered around 235,000, with 5,000 more volunteering to join every month."
As long as things don't get out of hand, anyway. ¶ 7:13 AM 0 comments links to this post
2003
Middle East Online, September 3, 2003: "Meanwhile, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac were to meet in Germany on Thursday to discuss ways for the West to respond to the recent surge in violence in Iraq and the Middle East."
UK Telegraph, October 31, 2003: "Ansar is believed to be channeling into Iraq the foreign fighters who are behind a recent surge in violence in the country, officials say."
KNI News, November 3, 2003: "Bush blamed loyalists to ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and foreign terrorists for the recent surge in violence in Iraq."
2004
Reuters, March 4, 2004: "A wave of bomb attacks in Baghdad and Karbala killing at least 171 people earlier this week has highlighted the difficulties in rebuilding the country and restoring peace. But Mr. Blair, speaking after a meeting in Rome with his Italian counterpart, Silvio Berlusconi, said the recent surge in violence in Iraq did not constitute civil war."
Radio Free Europe, April 14, 2004: "US President George W. Bush held a major news conference at the White House on 13 April in the middle of the deadliest month for Americans in Iraq since Baghdad fell a year ago. He spoke of the recent surge in violence there, but urged his countrymen not to lose faith. He also said he would adhere to the 30 June deadline for handing over sovereignty to Iraqis."
US State Department, April 15, 2004: "Pace said the recent surge in violence in Iraq is being driven by 'terrorists' who see the June 30 deadline for turnover of sovereignty approaching rapidly and are petrified by the promise of democracy."
CBS News, April 26, 2004: "Lt. Gen. David Barno, the top American commander in Afghanistan, said Monday that the military has seen a recent surge in violence, but that most attacks were directed against soft targets, such as civilians or isolated Afghan security outposts."
Pew Research Center, May 12, 2004: "Despite the prison abuse scandal and the recent surge in violence in Iraq, a majority of the public (53%) continues to support keeping troops in Iraq until a stable government is established."
China Daily, May 25, 2004: "In his speech to the Army War College here, Bush warned that 'there are difficult days ahead and the way forward may sometimes appear chaotic.' Yet he vowed the handover would take place on schedule and that the US-led coalition would not be defeated by insurgents blamed for the recent surge in violence."
The New Standard, June 24, 2004: "Compelled by the recent surge in violence, US Central Command (CentCom) has informally asked Army planners for as many as 25,000 more troops in Iraq, the Baltimore Sun reports."
The Washington Post, July 22, 2004: "Despite a recent surge in violence, including kidnappings, car bombings and assassinations, senior US and Iraqi officials gave a relatively optimistic assessment on Wednesday of the security situation in Iraq since the transfer of political authority from US to Iraqi authorities June 28."
Progress Magazine, July/August, 2004: "In the short term, ongoing help will be required with the maintenance of security within the country. The response to the recent surge in violence must emphasize political solutions and not be just a simple deployment of military power."
The Washington Post, September 9, 2004: "'The recent surge in violence has been especially surprising because in the weeks after the transfer of power there was a phase that, for Iraq, felt to some almost like a lull.'"
Al Jazeera, September 17, 2004: "The assessments, made before the recent surge in violence in Iraq and the US military death toll there topping 1000, appear to conflict with Bush's upbeat description of the US-led effort to stabilize and democratize Iraq."
The Washington Times, September 22, 2004: "The Iraqi leader also said that despite a recent surge in violence in Iraq, it is 'very important for the people of the world really to know that we are winning, we are making progress in Iraq, we are defeating terrorists.'"
Al Jazeera, December 18, 2004: "Mosul has experienced a recent surge in violence. On Friday, a car carrying Turkish security guards was attacked in the city, in Iraq's far north near the Turkish border, and four people were killed, one of them decapitated."
2005
Radio Free Europe, January 4, 2005: "The incident marks the most senior assassination since the death in May of Governing Council president Abd al-Zahra Uthman Muhammad and should be seen within the context of the recent surge in violence ahead of national and provincial elections slated for 30 January."
CBS Chicago, January 17, 2005: "The area around Kut has seen a recent surge in violence. In a separate attack, two Iraqi provincial government auditors were shot to death late Sunday after armed gunmen stopped their car in Suwaira, about 25 miles southeast of Baghdad, an official at a Kut hospital said."
ABC News, March 2, 2005: "Most of the victims were Shiites, the targets of a recent surge in violence, most notably a series of suicide bombings and other attacks that killed nearly 100 people during the Shiite religious commemoration known as Ashoura."
The BBC, April 27, 2005: "But he added it was too early to say if a recent surge in violence amounted to a concerted campaign, and insisted that US-backed forces were 'winning.'"
The International Herald-Tribune, May 16, 2005: "The insurgents' choice of adversary is unusual. But the recent surge in violence, at least, follows a time-tested pattern."
The Washington Post, May 19, 2005: "A senior US military official told reporters Wednesday that the recent surge in violence in Iraq followed a meeting in Syria last month of associates of the Jordanian insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi."
The Council on Foreign Relations, May 20, 2005: "It's unclear how much of the recent surge in violence stems from tribal leaders, but as Metz points out: 'Local elites recognize that in a secular, modernized Iraq, their power would be challenged.'"
Salon, May 23, 2005: "Even despite the recent surge in violence, in some areas - downtown Mosul, for example - Iraqi forces have begun limited independent operations."
Associated Press, June 17, 2005: "It is also believed to be the main hideout of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant whose al Qaeda-linked group has carried out many of the deadliest attacks in Iraq and who US forces believe is behind a recent surge in violence."
White House press conference, June 20, 2005: "Mr. President, we were told that you planned to sharpen your focus on Iraq. Why did this become necessary? And given the recent surge in violence, do you agree with Vice President Dick Cheney's assessment that the insurgency is in its last throes?"
Iran Focus Online, August 4, 2005: "His comments came as the 15-nation council unanimously adopted a US-drafted resolution condemning a recent surge in violence in Iraq that has killed hundreds ..."
Radio Free Europe, August 12, 2005: "But a recent surge in violence and reports of growing public hostility to the Japanese presence are prompting many to question the prospects for continued humanitarian assistance there."
Associated Press, September 17, 2005: "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, has reportedly said the recent surge in violence is in retaliation for a coalition offensive against the group's stronghold in the northern city of Tal Afar."
The Washington Times, October 31, 2005: "The fresh US effort to crack down on insurgents followed a recent surge in violence caused by the passing of the new Iraqi constitution in a referendum held earlier this month."
2006
Agence France Presse, January 7, 2006: "US officials have sought to downplay a recent surge in violence that on Thursday alone claimed the lives of more than 115 Iraqis and 11 US servicemen."
The Sidney Morning Herald, January 8, 2006: "The recent surge in violence is "an anomaly" and Iraq is not on the verge of civil war, the top US commander there said yesterday, after one of the country's bloodiest days since the fall of Saddam Hussein."
The American Chronicle, February 1, 2006: "Recently, five other members of Congress and I sat on a C-130 transport plane surrounded by soldiers going from Kuwait to Baghdad. The backdrop is a recent surge in violence."
The Associated Press, February 4, 2006: "Dozens of bodies have been discovered in various parts of Baghdad gagged, bound and shot repeatedly in the past week, amid recent surge in violence, which analysts have repeatedly described as initial stages of an open-ended civil war between Iraq's ethnic groups."
Associated Press, March 1, 2006: "AP reports that he was giving an unusually frank assessment of the stakes in the country's recent surge in violence."
The Baltimore Sun, March 4, 2006: "The top US commander in Iraq said yesterday that he hopes to make an assessment this spring about whether to reduce the number of American troops in Iraq. But Pentagon officials speaking anonymously said a recent surge in violence there has dampened hopes that force levels can be cut anytime soon."
Associated Press, March 6, 2006: "The training at the desert village is especially important for the Marines of the First Battalion, 14th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Division. The battalion, made up mostly of Marine reservists, is leaving soon for Iraq, where sectarian tensions have brought a recent surge in violence - and growing concerns about civil war."
Reuters, March 10, 2006: "Iraqi forces, not American troops, would deal with a civil war if one erupts in Iraq and US troop cuts remained possible despite a recent surge in violence, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Thursday."
Al Jazeera, March 11, 2006: "Moving to the recent surge in violence that has swept Iraq, Ritter said he wasn't surprised as the only thing holding the three infighting ethnic and religious groups (Kurds, Shia, and Sunnis) together since the end of the Ottoman Empire after World War I was Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist Party."
The New York Times, March 13, 2006: "Despite the recent surge in violence in Iraq, Mr. Reid said he believed that civil war was "neither imminent nor inevitable." He said Iraqi security forces now numbered around 235,000, with 5,000 more volunteering to join every month."
As long as things don't get out of hand, anyway. ¶ 7:13 AM 0 comments links to this post
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Who Watches the Watchers? They Make You an Offer You Cannot Refuse
The Mob controls everything.
Of course, the people Darth Rumsfeld has hired to go through your garbage and your hard drive for National Security have the highest credentials and integrity.
WASHINGTON - A Pentagon intelligence agency that kept files on American anti-war activists hired one of the contractors who bribed former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., to help it collect data on houses of worship, schools, power plants and other locations in the United States.
MZM Inc., headed by Mitchell Wade, also received three contracts totaling more than $250,000 to provide unspecified "intelligence services" to the White House, according to documents obtained by Knight Ridder. The White House didn't respond to an inquiry about what those intelligence services entailed.
MZM's Pentagon and White House deals were part of tens of millions of dollars in federal government business that Wade's company attracted beginning in 2002.
MZM and Wade, who pleaded guilty last month to bribing Cunningham and unnamed Defense Department officials to steer work to his firm, are the focus of ongoing probes by Pentagon and Department of Justice investigators.
In February 2003, MZM won a two-month contract worth $503,144.70 to provide technical support to the Pentagon's Joint Counter-Intelligence Field Activity, or CIFA. The top-secret agency was created five months earlier primarily to protect U.S. defense personnel and facilities from foreign terrorists...
According to a "statement of work," the data that CIFA was interested in obtaining included "maps, street addresses, lines of communication, critical infrastructure elements, demographic and other pertinent sources that would support geocoding and multi-level analysis."
Geocoding involves assigning latitudes and longitudes to locations, such as street addresses, so they can be displayed as points on maps. Such tools increasingly are being used by U.S. corporations and law enforcement agencies.
MZM was to "assist the government in identifying and procuring data" on maps, as well as "airports, ports, dams, churches/mosques/synagogues, schools (and) power plants," said the statement of work.
"In many cases, the government already owns such data, and for reasons of economy, government-owned data is preferred," said the statement. It isn't clear why U.S. intelligence agencies couldn't do the work themselves...
The disclosure that CIFA was storing information on anti-war activities added to concerns that the Bush administration may have used its war on terrorism to give government agencies expanded power to monitor Americans' finances, associations, travel and other activities.
The administration's domestic eavesdropping program and FBI monitoring of environmental, animal rights and anti-war groups have also fueled such fears. The administration contends that its programs are legal and insists that they're designed to ensure civil liberties while protecting national security.
A Washington Post story last year contained a brief reference to the White House contracts in a report on the company's dealings with the Pentagon.
Wade, who faces up to 20 years in prison, was one of four men charged in the Cunningham case. Cunningham, who resigned from Congress in November after serving for 15 years, was sentenced to eight years and four months in prison earlier this month.
Thanks to Jane Hamsher for the link. ¶ 6:25 AM 0 comments links to this post
Of course, the people Darth Rumsfeld has hired to go through your garbage and your hard drive for National Security have the highest credentials and integrity.
WASHINGTON - A Pentagon intelligence agency that kept files on American anti-war activists hired one of the contractors who bribed former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., to help it collect data on houses of worship, schools, power plants and other locations in the United States.
MZM Inc., headed by Mitchell Wade, also received three contracts totaling more than $250,000 to provide unspecified "intelligence services" to the White House, according to documents obtained by Knight Ridder. The White House didn't respond to an inquiry about what those intelligence services entailed.
MZM's Pentagon and White House deals were part of tens of millions of dollars in federal government business that Wade's company attracted beginning in 2002.
MZM and Wade, who pleaded guilty last month to bribing Cunningham and unnamed Defense Department officials to steer work to his firm, are the focus of ongoing probes by Pentagon and Department of Justice investigators.
In February 2003, MZM won a two-month contract worth $503,144.70 to provide technical support to the Pentagon's Joint Counter-Intelligence Field Activity, or CIFA. The top-secret agency was created five months earlier primarily to protect U.S. defense personnel and facilities from foreign terrorists...
According to a "statement of work," the data that CIFA was interested in obtaining included "maps, street addresses, lines of communication, critical infrastructure elements, demographic and other pertinent sources that would support geocoding and multi-level analysis."
Geocoding involves assigning latitudes and longitudes to locations, such as street addresses, so they can be displayed as points on maps. Such tools increasingly are being used by U.S. corporations and law enforcement agencies.
MZM was to "assist the government in identifying and procuring data" on maps, as well as "airports, ports, dams, churches/mosques/synagogues, schools (and) power plants," said the statement of work.
"In many cases, the government already owns such data, and for reasons of economy, government-owned data is preferred," said the statement. It isn't clear why U.S. intelligence agencies couldn't do the work themselves...
The disclosure that CIFA was storing information on anti-war activities added to concerns that the Bush administration may have used its war on terrorism to give government agencies expanded power to monitor Americans' finances, associations, travel and other activities.
The administration's domestic eavesdropping program and FBI monitoring of environmental, animal rights and anti-war groups have also fueled such fears. The administration contends that its programs are legal and insists that they're designed to ensure civil liberties while protecting national security.
A Washington Post story last year contained a brief reference to the White House contracts in a report on the company's dealings with the Pentagon.
Wade, who faces up to 20 years in prison, was one of four men charged in the Cunningham case. Cunningham, who resigned from Congress in November after serving for 15 years, was sentenced to eight years and four months in prison earlier this month.
Thanks to Jane Hamsher for the link. ¶ 6:25 AM 0 comments links to this post
Friday, March 17, 2006
S is for Stupid
On the March 15 edition (7:00 p.m. ET hour) of MSNBC's Hardball, host Chris Matthews, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, and MSNBC political analyst Pat Buchanan discussed what they agreed were the likely political benefits to President Bush and congressional Republicans in November 2006 if Bush were to launch a pre-emptive war against Iran. Buchanan posited: "I don't think he's going to do it for political reasons, but if he did do it for political reasons, you'd do it in October," because "you'd get right up the polls ... you'd win the election." Matthews, who confessed to being "staggered by the possible truth" in Buchanan's comments, invited Milbank to comment. Milbank noted that "[t]here is undoubtedly a rallying effect," but, according to Milbank, the question regarding a possible war against Iran launched partially -- or purely -- for political gain is: "Exactly when do you do the action, and exactly how long do you stay up at the top of the heap here?"
As of this posting, the transcript of this exchange was not available on the MSNBC website, nor was it available in the Nexis or Factiva databases...
Media Matters made a copy of the video and the doctored transcript. Check it out. Thank Atrios for the link.
The question is, are these people this stupid?
N-dimensional idiocy. Where to begin?
Stage a terrorist attack on the United States, or allow one to happen. It doesn't matter which. Use it to get absolute control.
Frame it to start a war. Use the war to consolidate your power at home and rape the United States Treasury.
The problem is, the Company has a job that exceeds its capacity. It's not simply riding a tiger in the Middle East. It's trying to control the minds of a nation that has become a melting pot of every culture in the world.
There's historical precedence for what Dear Leader's attempting here. There's enough of us that can see it happening. And his own lackeys have a difficult time keeping a straight face- much less their story straight. ¶ 9:20 PM 0 comments links to this post
As of this posting, the transcript of this exchange was not available on the MSNBC website, nor was it available in the Nexis or Factiva databases...
Media Matters made a copy of the video and the doctored transcript. Check it out. Thank Atrios for the link.
The question is, are these people this stupid?
N-dimensional idiocy. Where to begin?
Stage a terrorist attack on the United States, or allow one to happen. It doesn't matter which. Use it to get absolute control.
Frame it to start a war. Use the war to consolidate your power at home and rape the United States Treasury.
The problem is, the Company has a job that exceeds its capacity. It's not simply riding a tiger in the Middle East. It's trying to control the minds of a nation that has become a melting pot of every culture in the world.
There's historical precedence for what Dear Leader's attempting here. There's enough of us that can see it happening. And his own lackeys have a difficult time keeping a straight face- much less their story straight. ¶ 9:20 PM 0 comments links to this post
When it's criminal to report a government crime
...the only story you get will be from criminals.
Via chicago dyke and others:
WASHINGTON Reporters who write about government surveillance could be prosecuted under proposed legislation that would solidify the administration's eavesdropping authority, according to some legal analysts who are concerned about dramatic changes in U.S. law...
The Associated Press obtained a copy of the draft of the legislation, which could be introduced as soon as next week.
The draft would add to the criminal penalties for anyone who "intentionally discloses information identifying or describing" the Bush administration's terrorist surveillance program or any other eavesdropping program conducted under a 1978 surveillance law.
Under the boosted penalties, those found guilty could face fines of up to $1 million, 15 years in jail or both.
Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the measure is broader than any existing laws. She said, for example, the language does not specify that the information has to be harmful to national security or classified.
"The bill would make it a crime to tell the American people that the president is breaking the law, and the bill could make it a crime for the newspapers to publish that fact," said Martin, a civil liberties advocate.
DeWine is co-sponsoring the bill with Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska...
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the language would allow anyone — "if you read a story in the paper and pass it along to your brother-in-law" — to be prosecuted.
"As a practical matter, would they use this to try to punish any newspaper or any broadcast? It essentially makes coverage of any of these surveillance programs illegal," she said. "I'm sorry, that's just not constitutional."
We'd like to think so, anyway. But the Constitution is so, you know, 18th century. ¶ 2:33 PM 0 comments links to this post
Via chicago dyke and others:
WASHINGTON Reporters who write about government surveillance could be prosecuted under proposed legislation that would solidify the administration's eavesdropping authority, according to some legal analysts who are concerned about dramatic changes in U.S. law...
The Associated Press obtained a copy of the draft of the legislation, which could be introduced as soon as next week.
The draft would add to the criminal penalties for anyone who "intentionally discloses information identifying or describing" the Bush administration's terrorist surveillance program or any other eavesdropping program conducted under a 1978 surveillance law.
Under the boosted penalties, those found guilty could face fines of up to $1 million, 15 years in jail or both.
Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the measure is broader than any existing laws. She said, for example, the language does not specify that the information has to be harmful to national security or classified.
"The bill would make it a crime to tell the American people that the president is breaking the law, and the bill could make it a crime for the newspapers to publish that fact," said Martin, a civil liberties advocate.
DeWine is co-sponsoring the bill with Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska...
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the language would allow anyone — "if you read a story in the paper and pass it along to your brother-in-law" — to be prosecuted.
"As a practical matter, would they use this to try to punish any newspaper or any broadcast? It essentially makes coverage of any of these surveillance programs illegal," she said. "I'm sorry, that's just not constitutional."
We'd like to think so, anyway. But the Constitution is so, you know, 18th century. ¶ 2:33 PM 0 comments links to this post
Got Prions?
Mad Cow & a brief timetable of corruption
Ever wonder what more than $3 million in campaign contributions since 2000 can buy from the Republican Party? Well, now you don't have to wonder - you can see it on display right here, as the meat processing industry has once again convinced the Bush administration to reduce testing for beef inspections after another Mad Cow case was discovered last week.
You may recall, that back in 2003, Knight Ridder published an expose showing how "from key policymakers to midlevel administrators, the Department of Agriculture is staffed with former executives of the meat and poultry industry, now in charge of regulating their former employers." Combine that with the campaign contributions and you get this brief - yet totally frightening - timetable of corruption that begs the question: how many cases of Mad Cow are going undetected?
12/24/03:
"The first apparent case of mad cow disease in the United States has been discovered, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Tuesday." - CNN
12/31/03:
"The Bush administration must take more steps to protect Americans from mad cow disease, Democratic lawmakers and consumer groups said on Wednesday... The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the meat industry have rejected adopting a program to test all U.S. cattle, modeled after Japan's approach." - Reuters
3/14/06:
"A cow in Alabama has tested positive for mad cow disease, the Agriculture Department confirmed Monday, the third case in the U.S." - Associated Press
3/16/06:
"Agriculture Department officials today defended their plans to reduce the number of cattle tested for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, even after a third case was confirmed in Alabama last week." - CongressDaily
¶ 10:14 AM 0 comments links to this post
Ever wonder what more than $3 million in campaign contributions since 2000 can buy from the Republican Party? Well, now you don't have to wonder - you can see it on display right here, as the meat processing industry has once again convinced the Bush administration to reduce testing for beef inspections after another Mad Cow case was discovered last week.
You may recall, that back in 2003, Knight Ridder published an expose showing how "from key policymakers to midlevel administrators, the Department of Agriculture is staffed with former executives of the meat and poultry industry, now in charge of regulating their former employers." Combine that with the campaign contributions and you get this brief - yet totally frightening - timetable of corruption that begs the question: how many cases of Mad Cow are going undetected?
12/24/03:
"The first apparent case of mad cow disease in the United States has been discovered, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Tuesday." - CNN
12/31/03:
"The Bush administration must take more steps to protect Americans from mad cow disease, Democratic lawmakers and consumer groups said on Wednesday... The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the meat industry have rejected adopting a program to test all U.S. cattle, modeled after Japan's approach." - Reuters
3/14/06:
"A cow in Alabama has tested positive for mad cow disease, the Agriculture Department confirmed Monday, the third case in the U.S." - Associated Press
3/16/06:
"Agriculture Department officials today defended their plans to reduce the number of cattle tested for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, even after a third case was confirmed in Alabama last week." - CongressDaily
¶ 10:14 AM 0 comments links to this post
Acceptable Losses
Does anyone remember Nike missiles?
You can read a history of their development during the cold war. Built when Dick Nixon had Dick Cheney's current job in the '50s. When Dear Leader Dick Nixon got his pink slip, the Nike program went bye-bye too in 1974.
Yes, Virginia, they had thermonuclear warheads.
Yes, Virginia, they were hidden in and around major urban and industrial areas all around the country. Everywhere. Like Detroit, for example. But every big city in America, from Seattle to Chicago.
And so, yes, Virginia, can you really doubt Darth Rumsfeld has something similar hidden around every American city today? Especially the Blue ones.
And can you really think that if some one felt the need to pre-empt the first strike, these sites would be untouched? ¶ 8:29 AM 0 comments links to this post
You can read a history of their development during the cold war. Built when Dick Nixon had Dick Cheney's current job in the '50s. When Dear Leader Dick Nixon got his pink slip, the Nike program went bye-bye too in 1974.
Yes, Virginia, they had thermonuclear warheads.
Yes, Virginia, they were hidden in and around major urban and industrial areas all around the country. Everywhere. Like Detroit, for example. But every big city in America, from Seattle to Chicago.
And so, yes, Virginia, can you really doubt Darth Rumsfeld has something similar hidden around every American city today? Especially the Blue ones.
And can you really think that if some one felt the need to pre-empt the first strike, these sites would be untouched? ¶ 8:29 AM 0 comments links to this post
What Tom Harkin Says
It looks like there are at least two Senators that remembered they are vertebrates.
At the Senator from Iowa's website:
We have a President who likes to break things. He has broken the federal budget, running up $3 trillion in new debt. He has broken the Geneva Conventions, giving the green light to torture. He has repeatedly broken promises – and broken faith – with the American people. And now, worst of all, he has broken the law.
In brazen violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), he ordered the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless wiretaps of American citizens. And, despite getting caught red-handed, he refuses to stop.
Let's be clear: No American – and that must include the President – is above the law. And if we fail to hold Bush to account, then he will be confirmed in his conviction that he can pick and choose among the laws he wants to obey. This is profoundly dangerous to our democracy.
So it is time for Congress to stand up and say enough! That's why, this week, Senator Russ Feingold proposed a resolution to censure George W. Bush for breaking the FISA law. And that's why I fully support this resolution of censure.
Nothing is more important to me than the security of our country. Of course, we need to be listening to the terrorists' conversations. And sometimes there is not time to get a warrant. That's why the FISA law allows the President, when necessary, to wiretap first, and obtain a warrant afterward. But that's not acceptable to this above-the-law President. He rejects the idea that he should have to obtain a warrant before or after wiretapping.
We have an out-of-control President whose arrogant and, now, illegal behavior is running our country into the ditch. It's time to rein him in. And a fine place to start is by passing this resolution of censure. I hope that Senator Feingold's measure will be brought to the floor. And when it is, I will proudly vote yes.
We are with you, sir. ¶ 8:25 AM 0 comments links to this post
At the Senator from Iowa's website:
We have a President who likes to break things. He has broken the federal budget, running up $3 trillion in new debt. He has broken the Geneva Conventions, giving the green light to torture. He has repeatedly broken promises – and broken faith – with the American people. And now, worst of all, he has broken the law.
In brazen violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), he ordered the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless wiretaps of American citizens. And, despite getting caught red-handed, he refuses to stop.
Let's be clear: No American – and that must include the President – is above the law. And if we fail to hold Bush to account, then he will be confirmed in his conviction that he can pick and choose among the laws he wants to obey. This is profoundly dangerous to our democracy.
So it is time for Congress to stand up and say enough! That's why, this week, Senator Russ Feingold proposed a resolution to censure George W. Bush for breaking the FISA law. And that's why I fully support this resolution of censure.
Nothing is more important to me than the security of our country. Of course, we need to be listening to the terrorists' conversations. And sometimes there is not time to get a warrant. That's why the FISA law allows the President, when necessary, to wiretap first, and obtain a warrant afterward. But that's not acceptable to this above-the-law President. He rejects the idea that he should have to obtain a warrant before or after wiretapping.
We have an out-of-control President whose arrogant and, now, illegal behavior is running our country into the ditch. It's time to rein him in. And a fine place to start is by passing this resolution of censure. I hope that Senator Feingold's measure will be brought to the floor. And when it is, I will proudly vote yes.
We are with you, sir. ¶ 8:25 AM 0 comments links to this post
What it takes to be a U.S. Senator
As reported here, Paul Hackett can tell you.
¶ 8:23 AM 0 comments
links to this post
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Bringing Law n' Order to the "Might Be Difficult to Handle"
ST. BERNARD PARISH, La. - Maj. Pete Tufaro scanned the fenced lot packed with hundreds of stark white trailers soon to be inhabited by Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Shaking his head, he predicted the cramped quarters would ignite fights, hide criminals and become an incubator for crime, posing another test for his cash-strapped sheriff's department, which furloughed 206 of its 390 officers after the storm.
Tufaro thinks the parish has the solution: DynCorp International LLC, the Texas company that provided personal security to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and is one of the largest security contractors in Iraq. If the Federal Emergency Management Agency approves the sheriff's department's proposal, which would cost $70 million over three years, up to 100 DynCorp employees would be deputized to be make arrests, carry weapons, and dress in the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Department khaki and black uniforms...
But while the plan is for the DynCorp employees to eat and live with the other deputies in the same trailer camp, the hired guns would earn "significantly more" than the $18,000 annual salary of an entry-level deputy and the $30,000-a-year salary of a seasoned officer.
For DynCorp and other private security companies, the post-Katrina Gulf Coast, like Iraq, is a land of opportunity. Hired shortly after the storm to protect several New Orleans hospitals, its first domestic security job, the Texas firm has earned about $14 million from work in the Gulf Coast since Katrina, not all of which has involved security.
Blackwater USA, which protected the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and lost four employees in a brutal ambush in Fallujah in 2004, earned about $42 million through the end of December on a contract with Federal Protective Service, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, to provide security to FEMA sites. Most of the 330 contract guards now working in Louisiana are employed by the company...
...The FBI has warned that gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, could come attached to construction crews and establish operations, prompting the department to establish a strike team that has already arrested eight alleged members, police officials said.
Before the storm, the department tangled with "local toughs, slinging dope," not sophisticated international gangs, Stephens said. Added James Bernazzani, the FBI's special agent in charge in the region: "We would be naive to think that this being perhaps the largest construction boom for a region for a long, long time, we're talking eight to 10 years, that they might not try to take advantage of the situation..."
...Under the plan, DynCorp employees working for the sheriff's department would take over security at several FEMA trailer sites and establish three highway checkpoints. The DynCorp guards would report directly to a sheriff's deputy, who would be on site to supervise them, said Tufaro.
The department did not hold a competition before recommending DynCorp for the work but would consider other contactors if FEMA recommended it, said Tufaro. The department thinks DynCorp is the cheapest alternative, noting that it would charge less than $700 per day, compared with the $950 a day charged by Blackwater, he said.
But DynCorp also had an early advantage. The company designed the sheriff's department's trailer camp, a few miles from its former headquarters, under a sole-source contract. The camp houses offices and the deputies, many of whom expect to live there for years.
The DynCorp employees would be phased out as the parish returned to normal and the department's tax base was restored by the return of businesses and residents, law enforcement officials said...
[thanks to Vast Left Wing Conspiracy & Avedon Carol]
So FEMA can pay hiredguns security companies for $700/ day/ person X 30 enforcers for the next few years until its cash flow gets normal but can't float the county a grant to hire 30 locals people until its cash flow gets normal?
It's like they say over at VLWC: Could somebody please explain the benefits of replacing $18-30K/yr police with $700-900/day rent-a-cops? Over the course of a year that's $255-328K per hired gun.
It's even better when you do the math: they laid off 300 deputies to hire 30mercsprivate security contractors at 10 times as much each as the deputies giving a total savings of... ?
Somebody also better tell the Maj. to lock up his daughters if he has any.
...Ben Johnston, a DynCorp aircraft mechanic for Apache and Blackhawk helicopters in Kosovo, filed a lawsuit against his employer. The suit alleged that that in the latter part of 1999 Johnson "learned that employees and supervisors from DynCorp were engaging in perverse, illegal and inhumane behavior [and] were purchasing illegal weapons, women, forged passports and [participating in] other immoral acts."
The suit charges that "Johnston witnessed coworkers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased..."
More on DynCorp and trafficking here.
More on the scope of the problem in America here.
DynCorp also has a bit of a drug problem- they run the drugs, and the trailer park-bound locals will have the problem.
The Maj. doesn't realize it, but he has bought himself a whole world of trouble.
That's assuming he doesn't own a piece of the action.
Nothin' like a Secure Homeland. ¶ 9:19 PM 0 comments links to this post
Tufaro thinks the parish has the solution: DynCorp International LLC, the Texas company that provided personal security to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and is one of the largest security contractors in Iraq. If the Federal Emergency Management Agency approves the sheriff's department's proposal, which would cost $70 million over three years, up to 100 DynCorp employees would be deputized to be make arrests, carry weapons, and dress in the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Department khaki and black uniforms...
But while the plan is for the DynCorp employees to eat and live with the other deputies in the same trailer camp, the hired guns would earn "significantly more" than the $18,000 annual salary of an entry-level deputy and the $30,000-a-year salary of a seasoned officer.
For DynCorp and other private security companies, the post-Katrina Gulf Coast, like Iraq, is a land of opportunity. Hired shortly after the storm to protect several New Orleans hospitals, its first domestic security job, the Texas firm has earned about $14 million from work in the Gulf Coast since Katrina, not all of which has involved security.
Blackwater USA, which protected the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and lost four employees in a brutal ambush in Fallujah in 2004, earned about $42 million through the end of December on a contract with Federal Protective Service, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, to provide security to FEMA sites. Most of the 330 contract guards now working in Louisiana are employed by the company...
...The FBI has warned that gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, could come attached to construction crews and establish operations, prompting the department to establish a strike team that has already arrested eight alleged members, police officials said.
Before the storm, the department tangled with "local toughs, slinging dope," not sophisticated international gangs, Stephens said. Added James Bernazzani, the FBI's special agent in charge in the region: "We would be naive to think that this being perhaps the largest construction boom for a region for a long, long time, we're talking eight to 10 years, that they might not try to take advantage of the situation..."
...Under the plan, DynCorp employees working for the sheriff's department would take over security at several FEMA trailer sites and establish three highway checkpoints. The DynCorp guards would report directly to a sheriff's deputy, who would be on site to supervise them, said Tufaro.
The department did not hold a competition before recommending DynCorp for the work but would consider other contactors if FEMA recommended it, said Tufaro. The department thinks DynCorp is the cheapest alternative, noting that it would charge less than $700 per day, compared with the $950 a day charged by Blackwater, he said.
But DynCorp also had an early advantage. The company designed the sheriff's department's trailer camp, a few miles from its former headquarters, under a sole-source contract. The camp houses offices and the deputies, many of whom expect to live there for years.
The DynCorp employees would be phased out as the parish returned to normal and the department's tax base was restored by the return of businesses and residents, law enforcement officials said...
[thanks to Vast Left Wing Conspiracy & Avedon Carol]
So FEMA can pay hired
It's like they say over at VLWC: Could somebody please explain the benefits of replacing $18-30K/yr police with $700-900/day rent-a-cops? Over the course of a year that's $255-328K per hired gun.
It's even better when you do the math: they laid off 300 deputies to hire 30
Somebody also better tell the Maj. to lock up his daughters if he has any.
...Ben Johnston, a DynCorp aircraft mechanic for Apache and Blackhawk helicopters in Kosovo, filed a lawsuit against his employer. The suit alleged that that in the latter part of 1999 Johnson "learned that employees and supervisors from DynCorp were engaging in perverse, illegal and inhumane behavior [and] were purchasing illegal weapons, women, forged passports and [participating in] other immoral acts."
The suit charges that "Johnston witnessed coworkers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased..."
More on DynCorp and trafficking here.
More on the scope of the problem in America here.
DynCorp also has a bit of a drug problem- they run the drugs, and the trailer park-bound locals will have the problem.
The Maj. doesn't realize it, but he has bought himself a whole world of trouble.
That's assuming he doesn't own a piece of the action.
Nothin' like a Secure Homeland. ¶ 9:19 PM 0 comments links to this post
Some people deserve what they're going to get
...if they don't contact their Senators and Representatives to tell them to support Russ Feingold's censure of Dear Leader for conducting illegal wiretaps.
Clear enough?
Also: apparently the FEC is going to try to shut down political websites. Which is just nasty mean of them. Go check out the kos site, and if that bugs you, go tell your Representative what you think, too. ¶ 2:55 PM 0 comments links to this post
Clear enough?
Also: apparently the FEC is going to try to shut down political websites. Which is just nasty mean of them. Go check out the kos site, and if that bugs you, go tell your Representative what you think, too. ¶ 2:55 PM 0 comments links to this post
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Thermonuclear Price Supports
A recent statement by Linton Brooks, who speaks for the National Nuclear Security Administration on nuclear weapons issues... On March 4, Brooks told the East Tennessee Economic Council in the city of Oak Ridge (home to a major nuclear weapons complex),"The United States will, for the foreseeable future, need to retain both nuclear forces and the capabilities to sustain and modernize those forces,,, The end of the Cold War did not end the importance of nuclear weapons...I do not see any chance of the political conditions for abolition arising in my lifetime, nor do I think abolition could be verified if it were negotiated..."
[The locals were just as pleased as punch, knowing their property values would stay high- until everything else was turned to cinders anyway]
... These remarks were the first by a top government official publicly acknowledging US abandonment of a goal that could make the difference in whether life on this troubled planet will continue. The remarks revealed a serious departure from commitments by previous US administrations to their negotiating partners and the international community at large.
...These weapons are capable of what George Kennan has called "levels of such grotesque dimensions as to defy rational understanding." The US activities of updating nuclear weapons, threatening their use, and spreading nuclear technologies greatly increase the likelihood that such weapons will be used.
This militant posture is part of the administration’s response to the tragedy of 9/11. Had that been an attack with one 20 megaton bomb exploding on the surface of Columbus Circle in New York, it would have produced a hole where twenty city blocks had been, a hole deep enough to hide a 20 story building.
All brick and wood frame houses within 7.7 miles would be completely destroyed. The blast waves would carry through the entire underground subway system. Up to fifteen miles from ground zero flying debris, propelled by displacement effects would cause more casualties. 200,000 separate fires would be ignited producing a firestorm with temperatures up to 1,500 degrees F. and wind velocities to 150 MPH.
The fabric of water supplies, food and fuel for transportation, medical services, and electric power would be destroyed. And radiation damages that destroy and deform living things would continue for 240,000 years. Such bombs, and others still larger and more destructive, are contained in the warheads of missiles, many of them capable of delivering multiple warheads from a single launch.
...Anyone who doubts that this current administration is capable of accident or miscalculation, must clearly not have been have not been paying attention. And to play these games unaware of the risks they are creating, can only be described as a form of madness.
Whom the gods would destroy, they first allow to see "Star Wars".
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon is asking Congress for hundreds of millions of dollars to test weapons in space, marking the biggest step toward creating a space battlefield since President Reagan's long-defunct ''star wars" project during the Cold War, according to federal budget documents.
The Defense Department's budget proposal for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 includes money for a variety of tests on offensive and defensive weapons, including a missile launched at a small satellite in orbit, testing a small space vehicle that could disperse weapons while traveling at 20 times the speed of sound, and determining whether high-powered ground-based lasers can effectively destroy enemy satellites.
The military says that its aerospace technology, which has advanced exponentially during the last two decades, is worth the nine-figure investment because it will have civilian applications as well... Exactly which civilians are we talking about?
...The descriptions included in the budget request mark only what is publicly known about the military's space warfare plans. Specialists believe the classified portion of the $439 billion budget, blacked out for national security reasons, almost certainly includes other space-related programs.
Rick Lehner, an agency spokesman, said there are no plans to base weapons in space, noting that out of $48 billion planned for missile defense over the next five years, just $570 million will fund space-related activities. Most of the money will doubtless be directly deposited in Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grummon, and General Dynamics accounts with no need for messy hardware.
...Under President Bush, the White House has emphasized what's known as ''space dominance" -- the notion that the United States must command space to defend the nation, a strategy that gained traction under Reagan. The military already has reconnaissance and communications satellites, but the Pentagon says weapons systems in space can protect commercial satellites as well.
Anti-corporate terra'ist groups like Greenpeace are known for their hunter-killer antisatellite weapons. Still, it must strike some as odd how our satellite protection involves weapons to knock down satellites.
...In 2004, the Air Force published a paper outlining a long-term vision for space weapons, including an air-launched antisatellite missile, a ground-based laser aimed at low-earth orbit satellites, and a ''hypervelocity" weapon that could strike targets from space...
In another program, called Advanced Weapons Technology, the Air Force wants to spend $51 million for a series of space-oriented experiments, according to budget documents. A project description says the Air Force would test a variety of powerful laser beams ''for applications including antisatellite weapons."
A Missile Defense Agency project set to begin in 2008, the Space-Based Interceptor Test Bed, would launch up to five satellites capable of shooting down missiles, according to budget documents.
''A space layer helps protect the United States and our allies against asymmetric threats designed to exploit coverage and engagement gaps in our terrestrial defenses," the agency says in its budget proposal, referring to the interceptor test. ''We believe that a mix of terrestrial and space-basing offers the most effective global defense against ballistic missiles..."
Skynet agrees. ¶ 8:44 PM 0 comments links to this post
[The locals were just as pleased as punch, knowing their property values would stay high- until everything else was turned to cinders anyway]
... These remarks were the first by a top government official publicly acknowledging US abandonment of a goal that could make the difference in whether life on this troubled planet will continue. The remarks revealed a serious departure from commitments by previous US administrations to their negotiating partners and the international community at large.
...These weapons are capable of what George Kennan has called "levels of such grotesque dimensions as to defy rational understanding." The US activities of updating nuclear weapons, threatening their use, and spreading nuclear technologies greatly increase the likelihood that such weapons will be used.
This militant posture is part of the administration’s response to the tragedy of 9/11. Had that been an attack with one 20 megaton bomb exploding on the surface of Columbus Circle in New York, it would have produced a hole where twenty city blocks had been, a hole deep enough to hide a 20 story building.
All brick and wood frame houses within 7.7 miles would be completely destroyed. The blast waves would carry through the entire underground subway system. Up to fifteen miles from ground zero flying debris, propelled by displacement effects would cause more casualties. 200,000 separate fires would be ignited producing a firestorm with temperatures up to 1,500 degrees F. and wind velocities to 150 MPH.
The fabric of water supplies, food and fuel for transportation, medical services, and electric power would be destroyed. And radiation damages that destroy and deform living things would continue for 240,000 years. Such bombs, and others still larger and more destructive, are contained in the warheads of missiles, many of them capable of delivering multiple warheads from a single launch.
...Anyone who doubts that this current administration is capable of accident or miscalculation, must clearly not have been have not been paying attention. And to play these games unaware of the risks they are creating, can only be described as a form of madness.
Whom the gods would destroy, they first allow to see "Star Wars".
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon is asking Congress for hundreds of millions of dollars to test weapons in space, marking the biggest step toward creating a space battlefield since President Reagan's long-defunct ''star wars" project during the Cold War, according to federal budget documents.
The Defense Department's budget proposal for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 includes money for a variety of tests on offensive and defensive weapons, including a missile launched at a small satellite in orbit, testing a small space vehicle that could disperse weapons while traveling at 20 times the speed of sound, and determining whether high-powered ground-based lasers can effectively destroy enemy satellites.
The military says that its aerospace technology, which has advanced exponentially during the last two decades, is worth the nine-figure investment because it will have civilian applications as well... Exactly which civilians are we talking about?
...The descriptions included in the budget request mark only what is publicly known about the military's space warfare plans. Specialists believe the classified portion of the $439 billion budget, blacked out for national security reasons, almost certainly includes other space-related programs.
Rick Lehner, an agency spokesman, said there are no plans to base weapons in space, noting that out of $48 billion planned for missile defense over the next five years, just $570 million will fund space-related activities. Most of the money will doubtless be directly deposited in Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grummon, and General Dynamics accounts with no need for messy hardware.
...Under President Bush, the White House has emphasized what's known as ''space dominance" -- the notion that the United States must command space to defend the nation, a strategy that gained traction under Reagan. The military already has reconnaissance and communications satellites, but the Pentagon says weapons systems in space can protect commercial satellites as well.
Anti-corporate terra'ist groups like Greenpeace are known for their hunter-killer antisatellite weapons. Still, it must strike some as odd how our satellite protection involves weapons to knock down satellites.
...In 2004, the Air Force published a paper outlining a long-term vision for space weapons, including an air-launched antisatellite missile, a ground-based laser aimed at low-earth orbit satellites, and a ''hypervelocity" weapon that could strike targets from space...
In another program, called Advanced Weapons Technology, the Air Force wants to spend $51 million for a series of space-oriented experiments, according to budget documents. A project description says the Air Force would test a variety of powerful laser beams ''for applications including antisatellite weapons."
A Missile Defense Agency project set to begin in 2008, the Space-Based Interceptor Test Bed, would launch up to five satellites capable of shooting down missiles, according to budget documents.
''A space layer helps protect the United States and our allies against asymmetric threats designed to exploit coverage and engagement gaps in our terrestrial defenses," the agency says in its budget proposal, referring to the interceptor test. ''We believe that a mix of terrestrial and space-basing offers the most effective global defense against ballistic missiles..."
Skynet agrees. ¶ 8:44 PM 0 comments links to this post
Bring It On
Arab central banks move assets out of dollar
By Philip Thornton, Economics Correspondent
Published: 14 March 2006
Middle Eastern anger over the decision by the US to block a Dubai company from buying five of its ports hit the dollar yesterday as a number of central banks said they were considering switching reserves into euros.
The United Arab Emirates, which includes Dubai, said it was looking to move one-tenth of its dollar reserves into euros, while the governor of the Saudi Arabian central bank condemned the US move as "discrimination".
Separately, Syria responded to US sanctions against two of its banks by confirming plans to use euros instead of dollars for its external transactions.
The remarks combined to knock the dollar, which fell against the euro, pound and yen yesterday as analysts warned other central banks might follow suit.
Last week the US caused dismay after political opposition to the takeover of P&O by Dubai Ports World forced DPW to agree to transfer P&O's US port management business to a "US entity" .
The governor of the UAE central bank, Sultan Nasser al-Suweidi, said the bank was looking to convert 10 per cent of its reserves, which stand at $23bn (£13.5bn), from dollars to euros. "They are contravening their own principles," he said. "Investors are going to take this into consideration [and] will look at investment opportunities through new binoculars."
Hamad Saud al-Sayyari, the governor of the Saudi Arabian monetary authority, said: "Is it protection or discrimination? Is it okay for US companies to buy everywhere but it is not okay for other companies to buy the US?"
Syria has switched the state's foreign currency transactions to euros from dollars, the head of the state-owned Commercial Bank of Syria, Duraid Durgham, said.
Last week the White House told US financial institutions to terminate all correspondent accounts involving the Commercial Bank of Syria because of money-laundering concerns. Mohammad al-Hussein, Syria's finance minister, said: "Syria affirms that this decision and its timing are fundamentally political."
The euro rose a quarter of one percentage point against the dollar to a one-week high of $1.1945, although it retreated in later trading.
Monica Fan, at RBC Capital Markets, said: "The issue is whether we will see similar attitudes taken by other Middle Eastern banks. It is a question of momentum."
Middle Eastern anger over the decision by the US to block a Dubai company from buying five of its ports hit the dollar yesterday as a number of central banks said they were considering switching reserves into euros.
The United Arab Emirates, which includes Dubai, said it was looking to move one-tenth of its dollar reserves into euros, while the governor of the Saudi Arabian central bank condemned the US move as "discrimination"...
If it ever really happens, I think it's the discrimination of deciding not to go out on a hot date with a serial killer.
That's why we invaded Iraq in the first place, right? Saddam wanted to drop the dollar standard and use euros instead.
So who is Dear Leader going to attack now? ¶ 5:31 PM 0 comments links to this post
By Philip Thornton, Economics Correspondent
Published: 14 March 2006
Middle Eastern anger over the decision by the US to block a Dubai company from buying five of its ports hit the dollar yesterday as a number of central banks said they were considering switching reserves into euros.
The United Arab Emirates, which includes Dubai, said it was looking to move one-tenth of its dollar reserves into euros, while the governor of the Saudi Arabian central bank condemned the US move as "discrimination".
Separately, Syria responded to US sanctions against two of its banks by confirming plans to use euros instead of dollars for its external transactions.
The remarks combined to knock the dollar, which fell against the euro, pound and yen yesterday as analysts warned other central banks might follow suit.
Last week the US caused dismay after political opposition to the takeover of P&O by Dubai Ports World forced DPW to agree to transfer P&O's US port management business to a "US entity" .
The governor of the UAE central bank, Sultan Nasser al-Suweidi, said the bank was looking to convert 10 per cent of its reserves, which stand at $23bn (£13.5bn), from dollars to euros. "They are contravening their own principles," he said. "Investors are going to take this into consideration [and] will look at investment opportunities through new binoculars."
Hamad Saud al-Sayyari, the governor of the Saudi Arabian monetary authority, said: "Is it protection or discrimination? Is it okay for US companies to buy everywhere but it is not okay for other companies to buy the US?"
Syria has switched the state's foreign currency transactions to euros from dollars, the head of the state-owned Commercial Bank of Syria, Duraid Durgham, said.
Last week the White House told US financial institutions to terminate all correspondent accounts involving the Commercial Bank of Syria because of money-laundering concerns. Mohammad al-Hussein, Syria's finance minister, said: "Syria affirms that this decision and its timing are fundamentally political."
The euro rose a quarter of one percentage point against the dollar to a one-week high of $1.1945, although it retreated in later trading.
Monica Fan, at RBC Capital Markets, said: "The issue is whether we will see similar attitudes taken by other Middle Eastern banks. It is a question of momentum."
Middle Eastern anger over the decision by the US to block a Dubai company from buying five of its ports hit the dollar yesterday as a number of central banks said they were considering switching reserves into euros.
The United Arab Emirates, which includes Dubai, said it was looking to move one-tenth of its dollar reserves into euros, while the governor of the Saudi Arabian central bank condemned the US move as "discrimination"...
If it ever really happens, I think it's the discrimination of deciding not to go out on a hot date with a serial killer.
That's why we invaded Iraq in the first place, right? Saddam wanted to drop the dollar standard and use euros instead.
So who is Dear Leader going to attack now? ¶ 5:31 PM 0 comments links to this post
You don't play shell games with a swindler.
Dubai firm accused of breaking pledge to divest itself of U.S. port operations
By Doreen Hemlock
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Posted March 14 2006
The weeks-long saga of Dubai Ports World's purchase of operations in Miami and five other U.S. seaports took another turn Monday, when the company's Fort Lauderdale nemesis publicized a private e-mail and charged the note shows the Arab company has no intention of selling its U.S. assets.
Eller & Co., now a partner with DP World in a Miami operation after DP bought out a British firm last week, shared an e-mail that said the Arab company's sale of U.S. assets "would probably take a while."
The e-mail from Robert Scavone, a vice president for the port company now owned by DP World, also told managers in Miami to assume for now "ownership … is not going to change."
Eller's lawyer Michael N. Kreitzer said Monday the e-mail proves the Arab company has no plans to meet Thursday's pledge to transfer U.S. assets to a U.S. entity. The move aims to quell political furor -- much of it stirred up by Eller on Capitol Hill.
"We're making this public because we think Congress should do what it planned last week -- to pass a bill to specifically disavow the Dubai company from owning a U.S. port operation," Kreitzer said by phone...
Thanks to Buzzflash for verifying what we knew.
Now the question is: will Congress do anything about it? ¶ 12:09 PM 0 comments links to this post
By Doreen Hemlock
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Posted March 14 2006
The weeks-long saga of Dubai Ports World's purchase of operations in Miami and five other U.S. seaports took another turn Monday, when the company's Fort Lauderdale nemesis publicized a private e-mail and charged the note shows the Arab company has no intention of selling its U.S. assets.
Eller & Co., now a partner with DP World in a Miami operation after DP bought out a British firm last week, shared an e-mail that said the Arab company's sale of U.S. assets "would probably take a while."
The e-mail from Robert Scavone, a vice president for the port company now owned by DP World, also told managers in Miami to assume for now "ownership … is not going to change."
Eller's lawyer Michael N. Kreitzer said Monday the e-mail proves the Arab company has no plans to meet Thursday's pledge to transfer U.S. assets to a U.S. entity. The move aims to quell political furor -- much of it stirred up by Eller on Capitol Hill.
"We're making this public because we think Congress should do what it planned last week -- to pass a bill to specifically disavow the Dubai company from owning a U.S. port operation," Kreitzer said by phone...
Thanks to Buzzflash for verifying what we knew.
Now the question is: will Congress do anything about it? ¶ 12:09 PM 0 comments links to this post
Monday, March 13, 2006
Thinking Outside the Box
Mike Miller notes a warning from a "private researcher" used by Richard Clarke pre-9/11 when he couldn't get the straight story from the FBI:
Where is the man who singlehandedly created from scratch a formidable guerrilla army in occupied Iraq and whom Osama bin Laden called the Emir of Al Qaeda in Iraq? . . . The answers may be found in a letter from Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s second in command, to Zarqawi, from July 2005...
‘’The jihad in Iraq requires several incremental goals. The first stage: Expel the Americans from Iraq. The second stage: Establish an Islamic authority or emirate . . . a caliphate — over as much territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq, i.e., in Sunni areas. The third: Extend the jihad wave. . .”
In disinterestedpropaganda analyses found in a Chinese government-censored news site, you can read:
...Like or not, the US will get chaos, and cannot do anything to forestall it...
A tragedy is unfolding whose final curtain never comes down. Washington must prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, because the Ahmadinejad regime wants an oil empire stretching from the southeast shore of the Caspian Sea to the southwest shore of the Persian Gulf... President Mahmud Ahmadinejad cannot abandon Iran's nuclear ambitions any more than Adolf Hitler could have kept the peace with Poland in 1939 and remain in power.
Aerial attacks on Iran's nuclear capabilities - Washington's only effective option - will set into play Iranian assets in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere, precipitating a regional war...
This is not a news source friendly either to Bush [i'm not either] or America [which i'm not only friendly to, i care very much about]. Neither is Ms. Katz, despite her utility to Richard Clarke. Something about the woman and the organization she represents reeks Mossad. They both encourage the paranoid fantasies the NeoCons fear and the Rumsfeld Imperials use to justify their actions.
But they may be right.
Particularly if we follow their advice.
When people who profit from war advise you to war, their predictions are likely self-fulfilling prophecy.
You want to end the struggle in the Middle East? You want to end the new Great Game the Powers are playing on the surface of the world? Then really, the path of action is quite simple: do what Dear Leader seems to fear the most.
Disengage.
Develop energy alternatives that don't depend on fossil fuels.
Quit treating Corporations like citizens. They aren't. Right now it's like Animal Farm, and they're the pigs more equal than others.
Don't listen to politicos, even "our" politicos. Listen to what wise people say:
Iraq is making terrorism worse; it’s a breeding ground. We need to extricate ourselves as soon as possible. We are not helping the Iraqis by staying. ¶ 9:42 PM 1 comments links to this post
Where is the man who singlehandedly created from scratch a formidable guerrilla army in occupied Iraq and whom Osama bin Laden called the Emir of Al Qaeda in Iraq? . . . The answers may be found in a letter from Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s second in command, to Zarqawi, from July 2005...
‘’The jihad in Iraq requires several incremental goals. The first stage: Expel the Americans from Iraq. The second stage: Establish an Islamic authority or emirate . . . a caliphate — over as much territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq, i.e., in Sunni areas. The third: Extend the jihad wave. . .”
In disinterested
...Like or not, the US will get chaos, and cannot do anything to forestall it...
A tragedy is unfolding whose final curtain never comes down. Washington must prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, because the Ahmadinejad regime wants an oil empire stretching from the southeast shore of the Caspian Sea to the southwest shore of the Persian Gulf... President Mahmud Ahmadinejad cannot abandon Iran's nuclear ambitions any more than Adolf Hitler could have kept the peace with Poland in 1939 and remain in power.
Aerial attacks on Iran's nuclear capabilities - Washington's only effective option - will set into play Iranian assets in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere, precipitating a regional war...
This is not a news source friendly either to Bush [i'm not either] or America [which i'm not only friendly to, i care very much about]. Neither is Ms. Katz, despite her utility to Richard Clarke. Something about the woman and the organization she represents reeks Mossad. They both encourage the paranoid fantasies the NeoCons fear and the Rumsfeld Imperials use to justify their actions.
But they may be right.
Particularly if we follow their advice.
When people who profit from war advise you to war, their predictions are likely self-fulfilling prophecy.
You want to end the struggle in the Middle East? You want to end the new Great Game the Powers are playing on the surface of the world? Then really, the path of action is quite simple: do what Dear Leader seems to fear the most.
Disengage.
Develop energy alternatives that don't depend on fossil fuels.
Quit treating Corporations like citizens. They aren't. Right now it's like Animal Farm, and they're the pigs more equal than others.
Don't listen to politicos, even "our" politicos. Listen to what wise people say:
Iraq is making terrorism worse; it’s a breeding ground. We need to extricate ourselves as soon as possible. We are not helping the Iraqis by staying. ¶ 9:42 PM 1 comments links to this post
Arctic Open Water in the Winter Again
Climate change 'irreversible' as Arctic sea ice fails to re-form
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 14 March 2006
Sea ice in the Arctic has failed to re-form for the second consecutive winter, raising fears that global warming may have tipped the polar regions in to irreversible climate change far sooner than predicted.
Satellite measurements of the area of the Arctic covered by sea ice show that for every month this winter, the ice failed to return even to its long-term average rate of decline. It is the second consecutive winter that the sea ice has not managed to re-form enough to compensate for the unprecedented melting seen during the past few summers.
Scientists are now convinced that Arctic sea ice is showing signs of both a winter and a summer decline that could indicate a major acceleration in its long-term rate of disappearance. The greatest fear is that an environmental "positive feedback" has kicked in, where global warming melts ice which in itself causes the seas to warm still further as more sunlight is absorbed by a dark ocean rather than being reflected by white ice.
Mark Serreze, a sea ice specialist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, said: "In September 2005, the Arctic sea ice cover was at its lowest extent since satellite monitoring began in 1979, and probably the lowest in the past 100 years. While we can't be certain, it looks like 2006 will be more of the same," Dr Serreze said.
"Unless conditions turn colder, we may be headed for another year of big sea ice losses, rivalling or perhaps even exceeding what we saw in September 2005. We are of course monitoring the situation closely ... Coupled with recent findings from Nasa that the Greenland ice sheet may be near a tipping point, it's pretty clear that the Arctic is starting to respond to global warming," he added.
Although sea levels are not affected by melting sea ice - which floats on the ocean - the Arctic ice cover is thought to be a key moderator of the northern hemisphere's climate. It helps to stabilise the massive land glaciers and ice sheets of Greenland which have the capacity to raise sea levels dramatically.
Dr Serreze said that some parts of the northern hemisphere experienced very low temperatures this winter, but the Arctic was much warmer than normal. "Even in January, when there were actually record low temperatures in Alaska and parts of Russia, it was still very warm over the Arctic Ocean," he said.
"The sea ice cover waxes and wanes with the seasons. It partly melts in spring and summer, then grows back in autumn and winter. It has not recovered well this past winter - ice extent for every month since September 2005 has been far below average. And it's been so warm in the Arctic that the ice that has grown this winter is probably rather thin," he explained.
Professor Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, who was the first Briton to monitor Arctic sea ice from nuclear submarines, said: "One of the big changes this winter is that a large area of the Barents Sea has remained ice-free for the first time. This is part of Europe's 'back yard'. Climate models did predict a retreat of sea ice in the Barents Sea but not for a few decades yet, so it is a sign that the changes that were predicted are indeed happening, but much faster than predicted."
Sea ice in the Arctic has failed to re-form for the second consecutive winter, raising fears that global warming may have tipped the polar regions in to irreversible climate change far sooner than predicted.
Satellite measurements of the area of the Arctic covered by sea ice show that for every month this winter, the ice failed to return even to its long-term average rate of decline. It is the second consecutive winter that the sea ice has not managed to re-form enough to compensate for the unprecedented melting seen during the past few summers.
Scientists are now convinced that Arctic sea ice is showing signs of both a winter and a summer decline that could indicate a major acceleration in its long-term rate of disappearance. The greatest fear is that an environmental "positive feedback" has kicked in, where global warming melts ice which in itself causes the seas to warm still further as more sunlight is absorbed by a dark ocean rather than being reflected by white ice.Mark Serreze, a sea ice specialist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, said: "In September 2005, the Arctic sea ice cover was at its lowest extent since satellite monitoring began in 1979, and probably the lowest in the past 100 years. While we can't be certain, it looks like 2006 will be more of the same," Dr Serreze said...
Dr Serreze said that some parts of the northern hemisphere experienced very low temperatures this winter, but the Arctic was much warmer than normal. "Even in January, when there were actually record low temperatures in Alaska and parts of Russia, it was still very warm over the Arctic Ocean," he said.
"The sea ice cover waxes and wanes with the seasons. It partly melts in spring and summer, then grows back in autumn and winter. It has not recovered well this past winter - ice extent for every month since September 2005 has been far below average. And it's been so warm in the Arctic that the ice that has grown this winter is probably rather thin," he explained.
Professor Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, who was the first Briton to monitor Arctic sea ice from nuclear submarines, said: "One of the big changes this winter is that a large area of the Barents Sea has remained ice-free for the first time. This is part of Europe's 'back yard'. Climate models did predict a retreat of sea ice in the Barents Sea but not for a few decades yet, so it is a sign that the changes that were predicted are indeed happening, but much faster than predicted."
The model described in this post and figure may explain some of what's going on.
As the deep ocean conveyor current dissipates due to decreased salinization, warm water pools in the North Atlantic, and recirculation occurs at the surface.
This causes increasing storms, and perhaps causes weather like Michigan's had this year. We've had rapid phasing of abnormally record warm and record cold fronts all winter. While December had days far below average, January was far above it. ¶ 8:50 PM 0 comments links to this post
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 14 March 2006
Sea ice in the Arctic has failed to re-form for the second consecutive winter, raising fears that global warming may have tipped the polar regions in to irreversible climate change far sooner than predicted.
Satellite measurements of the area of the Arctic covered by sea ice show that for every month this winter, the ice failed to return even to its long-term average rate of decline. It is the second consecutive winter that the sea ice has not managed to re-form enough to compensate for the unprecedented melting seen during the past few summers.
Scientists are now convinced that Arctic sea ice is showing signs of both a winter and a summer decline that could indicate a major acceleration in its long-term rate of disappearance. The greatest fear is that an environmental "positive feedback" has kicked in, where global warming melts ice which in itself causes the seas to warm still further as more sunlight is absorbed by a dark ocean rather than being reflected by white ice.
Mark Serreze, a sea ice specialist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, said: "In September 2005, the Arctic sea ice cover was at its lowest extent since satellite monitoring began in 1979, and probably the lowest in the past 100 years. While we can't be certain, it looks like 2006 will be more of the same," Dr Serreze said.
"Unless conditions turn colder, we may be headed for another year of big sea ice losses, rivalling or perhaps even exceeding what we saw in September 2005. We are of course monitoring the situation closely ... Coupled with recent findings from Nasa that the Greenland ice sheet may be near a tipping point, it's pretty clear that the Arctic is starting to respond to global warming," he added.
Although sea levels are not affected by melting sea ice - which floats on the ocean - the Arctic ice cover is thought to be a key moderator of the northern hemisphere's climate. It helps to stabilise the massive land glaciers and ice sheets of Greenland which have the capacity to raise sea levels dramatically.
Dr Serreze said that some parts of the northern hemisphere experienced very low temperatures this winter, but the Arctic was much warmer than normal. "Even in January, when there were actually record low temperatures in Alaska and parts of Russia, it was still very warm over the Arctic Ocean," he said.
"The sea ice cover waxes and wanes with the seasons. It partly melts in spring and summer, then grows back in autumn and winter. It has not recovered well this past winter - ice extent for every month since September 2005 has been far below average. And it's been so warm in the Arctic that the ice that has grown this winter is probably rather thin," he explained.
Professor Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, who was the first Briton to monitor Arctic sea ice from nuclear submarines, said: "One of the big changes this winter is that a large area of the Barents Sea has remained ice-free for the first time. This is part of Europe's 'back yard'. Climate models did predict a retreat of sea ice in the Barents Sea but not for a few decades yet, so it is a sign that the changes that were predicted are indeed happening, but much faster than predicted."
Sea ice in the Arctic has failed to re-form for the second consecutive winter, raising fears that global warming may have tipped the polar regions in to irreversible climate change far sooner than predicted.
Satellite measurements of the area of the Arctic covered by sea ice show that for every month this winter, the ice failed to return even to its long-term average rate of decline. It is the second consecutive winter that the sea ice has not managed to re-form enough to compensate for the unprecedented melting seen during the past few summers.
Scientists are now convinced that Arctic sea ice is showing signs of both a winter and a summer decline that could indicate a major acceleration in its long-term rate of disappearance. The greatest fear is that an environmental "positive feedback" has kicked in, where global warming melts ice which in itself causes the seas to warm still further as more sunlight is absorbed by a dark ocean rather than being reflected by white ice.Mark Serreze, a sea ice specialist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, said: "In September 2005, the Arctic sea ice cover was at its lowest extent since satellite monitoring began in 1979, and probably the lowest in the past 100 years. While we can't be certain, it looks like 2006 will be more of the same," Dr Serreze said...
Dr Serreze said that some parts of the northern hemisphere experienced very low temperatures this winter, but the Arctic was much warmer than normal. "Even in January, when there were actually record low temperatures in Alaska and parts of Russia, it was still very warm over the Arctic Ocean," he said.
"The sea ice cover waxes and wanes with the seasons. It partly melts in spring and summer, then grows back in autumn and winter. It has not recovered well this past winter - ice extent for every month since September 2005 has been far below average. And it's been so warm in the Arctic that the ice that has grown this winter is probably rather thin," he explained.
Professor Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, who was the first Briton to monitor Arctic sea ice from nuclear submarines, said: "One of the big changes this winter is that a large area of the Barents Sea has remained ice-free for the first time. This is part of Europe's 'back yard'. Climate models did predict a retreat of sea ice in the Barents Sea but not for a few decades yet, so it is a sign that the changes that were predicted are indeed happening, but much faster than predicted."
The model described in this post and figure may explain some of what's going on.
As the deep ocean conveyor current dissipates due to decreased salinization, warm water pools in the North Atlantic, and recirculation occurs at the surface.
This causes increasing storms, and perhaps causes weather like Michigan's had this year. We've had rapid phasing of abnormally record warm and record cold fronts all winter. While December had days far below average, January was far above it. ¶ 8:50 PM 0 comments links to this post
To Serve Man
Death squads operated from inside Iraqi government, officials say
By Matthew Schofield
Knight Ridder Newspapers
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Senior Iraqi officials Sunday confirmed for the first time that death squads composed of government employees had operated illegally from inside two government ministries.
"The deaths squads that we have captured are in the defense and interior ministries," Minister of Interior Bayan Jabr said during a joint news conference with the Minister of Defense. "There are people who have infiltrated the army and the interior..."
I wonder where anyone in the Iraqi government would have gotten the idea to do anything like that? ¶ 2:49 PM 1 comments links to this post
By Matthew Schofield
Knight Ridder Newspapers
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Senior Iraqi officials Sunday confirmed for the first time that death squads composed of government employees had operated illegally from inside two government ministries.
"The deaths squads that we have captured are in the defense and interior ministries," Minister of Interior Bayan Jabr said during a joint news conference with the Minister of Defense. "There are people who have infiltrated the army and the interior..."
I wonder where anyone in the Iraqi government would have gotten the idea to do anything like that? ¶ 2:49 PM 1 comments links to this post
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Outsourcing Logistics
Pudnetilla at skippy notices that Bu$hCo's outsourcing the Merchant Marine:
"...three-fourths of the cargo ships in a special fleet carrying vital supplies to us military forces are owned by foreign companies, raising concerns about the lack of american-owned vessels to help the pentagon in a global crisis, according to government records reviewed by the globe..."
...we guess to have an american merchant marine, the reds in congress would have to be willing to support and industry in the u.s. that provided good-paying, unionized jobs to u.s. citizens. now why on god's green earth would they do that? at some point folks are just going to have to accept that aWol is not an american in the sense that we have traditionally understood the term. he is, in fact, the international financial aristocracy's man in america. their interests are not served by a vibrant manufacturing sector in the u.s. which provides stable jobs with good wages and benefits to working folks. [Emphasis mine]
Indeed not. A self-sufficient, prosperous America with a high standard of living wouldn't be globalized. Because it's not just America: if every nation on earth decided to go it alone without multinational corporate control, the whole international network of financial interests would be upset! ¶ 6:50 PM 0 comments links to this post
"...three-fourths of the cargo ships in a special fleet carrying vital supplies to us military forces are owned by foreign companies, raising concerns about the lack of american-owned vessels to help the pentagon in a global crisis, according to government records reviewed by the globe..."
...we guess to have an american merchant marine, the reds in congress would have to be willing to support and industry in the u.s. that provided good-paying, unionized jobs to u.s. citizens. now why on god's green earth would they do that? at some point folks are just going to have to accept that aWol is not an american in the sense that we have traditionally understood the term. he is, in fact, the international financial aristocracy's man in america. their interests are not served by a vibrant manufacturing sector in the u.s. which provides stable jobs with good wages and benefits to working folks. [Emphasis mine]
Indeed not. A self-sufficient, prosperous America with a high standard of living wouldn't be globalized. Because it's not just America: if every nation on earth decided to go it alone without multinational corporate control, the whole international network of financial interests would be upset! ¶ 6:50 PM 0 comments links to this post
They Are The Monkey On Your Back
Corporations working in the Public Interest!
On Feb. 3, Joyce Elkins filled a prescription for a two-week supply of nitrogen mustard, a decades-old cancer drug used to treat a rare form of lymphoma. The cost was $77.50.
On Feb. 17, Ms. Elkins, a 64-year-old retiree who lives in Georgetown, Tex., returned to her pharmacy for a refill. This time, following a huge increase in the wholesale price of the drug, the cost was $548.01.
Ms. Elkins's insurance does not cover nitrogen mustard, which she must take for at least the next six months at a cost that will now total nearly $7,000. She and her husband, who works for the Texas Department of Transportation, are paying for the medicine by spending less on utilities and food, she said.
The medicine, also known as Mustargen, was developed more than 60 years ago and is among the oldest chemotherapy drugs. For decades, it has been blended into an ointment by pharmacists and used as a topical treatment for a cancer called cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, a form of cancer that mainly affects the skin.
Last August, Merck, which makes Mustargen, sold the rights to manufacture and market it and Cosmegen, another cancer drug, to Ovation Pharmaceuticals, a six-year-old company in Deerfield, Ill., that buys slow-selling medicines from big pharmaceutical companies.
The two drugs are used by fewer than 5,000 patients a year and had combined sales of about $1 million in 2004.
Now Ovation has raised the wholesale price of Mustargen roughly tenfold and that of Cosmegen even more, according to several pharmacists and patients...
"Nitrogen mustard has been around forever," said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, the deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. "There's nothing that I am aware of in the treatment environment that would explain an increase in the cost of the drug."
Dr. David H. Johnson, a Vanderbilt University oncologist who is a former president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, said he had contacted Ovation to ask its reasons for raising Mustargen's price.
"I'd like to have some evidence from them that it actually costs them X amount, so that the pricing makes sense," Dr. Johnson said...
Obviously these people are insensitive to the profit margins needed to give these corporations their just desserts.
What they need is this brand new drug:
NEW YORK—The Food and Drug Administration today approved the sale of the drug PharmAmorin, a prescription tablet developed by Pfizer to treat chronic distrust of large prescription-drug manufacturers.
Pfizer executives characterized the FDA's approval as a "godsend" for sufferers of independent-thinking-related mental-health disorders.
"Many individuals today lack the deep, abiding affection for drug makers that is found in healthy people, such as myself," Pfizer CEO Hank McKinnell said. "These tragic disorders are reaching epidemic levels, and as a company dedicated to promoting the health, well-being, and long life of our company's public image, it was imperative that we did something to combat them."
Although many psychotropic drugs impart a generalized feeling of well-being, PharmAmorin is the first to induce and focus intense feelings of affection externally, toward for-profit drug makers. Pfizer representatives say that, if taken regularly, PharmAmorin can increase affection for and trust in its developers by as much as 96.5 percent.
"Out of a test group of 180, 172 study participants reported a dramatic rise in their passion for pharmaceutical companies," said Pfizer director of clinical research Suzanne Frost. "And 167 asked their doctors about a variety of prescription medications they had seen on TV."
Frost said a small percentage of test subjects showed an interest in becoming lobbyists for one of the top five pharmaceutical companies, and several browsed eBay for drug-company apparel.
PharmAmorin, available in 100-, 200-, and 400-mg tablets, is classified as a critical-thinking inhibitor, a family of drugs that holds great promise for the estimated 20 million Americans who suffer from Free-Thinking Disorder.
Pfizer will also promote PharmAmorin in an aggressive, $34.6 million print and televised ad campaign...
Read it all. America's drug companies personify what the Spirit of Free Enterprise is all about. ¶ 4:31 PM 1 comments links to this post
On Feb. 3, Joyce Elkins filled a prescription for a two-week supply of nitrogen mustard, a decades-old cancer drug used to treat a rare form of lymphoma. The cost was $77.50.
On Feb. 17, Ms. Elkins, a 64-year-old retiree who lives in Georgetown, Tex., returned to her pharmacy for a refill. This time, following a huge increase in the wholesale price of the drug, the cost was $548.01.
Ms. Elkins's insurance does not cover nitrogen mustard, which she must take for at least the next six months at a cost that will now total nearly $7,000. She and her husband, who works for the Texas Department of Transportation, are paying for the medicine by spending less on utilities and food, she said.
The medicine, also known as Mustargen, was developed more than 60 years ago and is among the oldest chemotherapy drugs. For decades, it has been blended into an ointment by pharmacists and used as a topical treatment for a cancer called cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, a form of cancer that mainly affects the skin.
Last August, Merck, which makes Mustargen, sold the rights to manufacture and market it and Cosmegen, another cancer drug, to Ovation Pharmaceuticals, a six-year-old company in Deerfield, Ill., that buys slow-selling medicines from big pharmaceutical companies.
The two drugs are used by fewer than 5,000 patients a year and had combined sales of about $1 million in 2004.
Now Ovation has raised the wholesale price of Mustargen roughly tenfold and that of Cosmegen even more, according to several pharmacists and patients...
"Nitrogen mustard has been around forever," said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, the deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. "There's nothing that I am aware of in the treatment environment that would explain an increase in the cost of the drug."
Dr. David H. Johnson, a Vanderbilt University oncologist who is a former president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, said he had contacted Ovation to ask its reasons for raising Mustargen's price.
"I'd like to have some evidence from them that it actually costs them X amount, so that the pricing makes sense," Dr. Johnson said...
Obviously these people are insensitive to the profit margins needed to give these corporations their just desserts.
What they need is this brand new drug:
NEW YORK—The Food and Drug Administration today approved the sale of the drug PharmAmorin, a prescription tablet developed by Pfizer to treat chronic distrust of large prescription-drug manufacturers.
Pfizer executives characterized the FDA's approval as a "godsend" for sufferers of independent-thinking-related mental-health disorders.
"Many individuals today lack the deep, abiding affection for drug makers that is found in healthy people, such as myself," Pfizer CEO Hank McKinnell said. "These tragic disorders are reaching epidemic levels, and as a company dedicated to promoting the health, well-being, and long life of our company's public image, it was imperative that we did something to combat them."
Although many psychotropic drugs impart a generalized feeling of well-being, PharmAmorin is the first to induce and focus intense feelings of affection externally, toward for-profit drug makers. Pfizer representatives say that, if taken regularly, PharmAmorin can increase affection for and trust in its developers by as much as 96.5 percent.
"Out of a test group of 180, 172 study participants reported a dramatic rise in their passion for pharmaceutical companies," said Pfizer director of clinical research Suzanne Frost. "And 167 asked their doctors about a variety of prescription medications they had seen on TV."
Frost said a small percentage of test subjects showed an interest in becoming lobbyists for one of the top five pharmaceutical companies, and several browsed eBay for drug-company apparel.
PharmAmorin, available in 100-, 200-, and 400-mg tablets, is classified as a critical-thinking inhibitor, a family of drugs that holds great promise for the estimated 20 million Americans who suffer from Free-Thinking Disorder.
Pfizer will also promote PharmAmorin in an aggressive, $34.6 million print and televised ad campaign...
Read it all. America's drug companies personify what the Spirit of Free Enterprise is all about. ¶ 4:31 PM 1 comments links to this post
Double Talk, Doublethink, and the Owner of Rights to Animal Farm
Last week the call went out: the horror that is Abu Ghraib would be closed:
Abu Ghraib, symbol of America's shame, to close within three months
· 4,500 inmates to be moved to other jails
· Buildings will be handed over to Iraqi government
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Friday March 10, 2006
The Guardian
Abu Ghraib, the prison which will be forever linked with images of Iraqi detainees stripped naked and humiliated by their American jailors, is to be closed, US military officials said yesterday. The sprawling, low-slung prison in the western suburbs of Baghdad, a torture chamber under Saddam Hussein that gained even more notoriety with the photographs of abuse committed by US troops, is likely to close within three months...
Let's see, the release intitially to British news sources, which penetrated the American main$tream via those sources, was on the 9th- the day before the 10th.
On the 9th, the D.o'D. quietly released this at home:
U.S. Has No Immediate Plans to Close Abu Ghraib Prison
By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, March 9, 2006 – The United States always has planned to transfer authority for all detention facilities in Iraq to the Iraqis, but announcements regarding the imminent closure at the Abu Ghraib prison are premature, defense officials said today.
News reports that the U.S. military intends to close Abu Ghraib within the next few months and to transfer its prisoners to other jails are inaccurate, officials said.
There's no specific timetable for that transfer or for closure of the Baghdad prison, they said. Decisions regarding Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities in Iraq will be based largely on two factors: the readiness of Iraq's security forces to assume control of them and infrastructure improvements at the facilities.
The Abu Ghraib facility, which houses about 4,500 prisoners, became notorious in 2004 after isolated reports of prisoner abuse were made public. Defense officials condemned the actions sharply, insisting that detainee abuse is not tolerated. All allegations of detainee abuse are aggressively investigated, and anyone convicted of or involved in abuse is held accountable, they said. Six soldiers at the Abu Ghraib facility were tried on abuse charges.
All detainees are treated humanely in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and receive military medical care similar to what deployed U.S. servicemembers receive, officials said.
Of course they're all treated in accordance to the Geneva Conventions.
"We're gonna close it, except, you know, we really aren't."
This must be an example of catapulting propaganda to foreign news sources to confuse the terra'ists.
Your tax dollars at work supporting the Ministry of Truthiness in action.
In other news this morning, Darth Rumsfeld made a "killing" on Tamiflu even though the H5N1 bug never took off here at home this winter. He's sold his stock options now, so likely that means there are too many vaccines that are likely to be released for it this fall. Still, a tidy sum for the Dark Lord of the Sith.
Speaking of the Dark Lords of the Sith and the Ministry of Truthiness, you will be relieved to hear the CIA now holds the syndication and distribution rights to the film of Animal Farm (via Defense Tech).
Now that's a book that ought to be Classified.
The Memory Hole has put together a list of other interesting films the CIA now owns. Here are some other interesting titles whose release the CIA controls:
CBS Reports: UFO: Friend, Foe or Fancy?
Extraordinary Occurrence, II
Jim Garrison's Responses/Discusses JFK Assassination
Mickey Mouse Cartoon-Squatter's Rights
Moscow Antarctica -- Polar Outpost
Our Election Day Illusion/The Best Majority
Restoration of Sanity, Mental Illness Diagnostic
Study of Sun's Corona
Unidentified Flying Objects
Curious choice the Company has, no? This list is part of a longer list of films you might see the Agency wanting to control. For example, there might be a point in worrying about How to Fight A Guerrilla War -- 20th Century. But you just have wonder what Mickey Mouse, UFOs, and the study of the Sun all have that the CIA is afraid of. ¶ 7:10 AM 0 comments links to this post
Abu Ghraib, symbol of America's shame, to close within three months
· 4,500 inmates to be moved to other jails
· Buildings will be handed over to Iraqi government
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Friday March 10, 2006
The Guardian
Abu Ghraib, the prison which will be forever linked with images of Iraqi detainees stripped naked and humiliated by their American jailors, is to be closed, US military officials said yesterday. The sprawling, low-slung prison in the western suburbs of Baghdad, a torture chamber under Saddam Hussein that gained even more notoriety with the photographs of abuse committed by US troops, is likely to close within three months...
Let's see, the release intitially to British news sources, which penetrated the American main$tream via those sources, was on the 9th- the day before the 10th.
On the 9th, the D.o'D. quietly released this at home:
U.S. Has No Immediate Plans to Close Abu Ghraib Prison
By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, March 9, 2006 – The United States always has planned to transfer authority for all detention facilities in Iraq to the Iraqis, but announcements regarding the imminent closure at the Abu Ghraib prison are premature, defense officials said today.
News reports that the U.S. military intends to close Abu Ghraib within the next few months and to transfer its prisoners to other jails are inaccurate, officials said.
There's no specific timetable for that transfer or for closure of the Baghdad prison, they said. Decisions regarding Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities in Iraq will be based largely on two factors: the readiness of Iraq's security forces to assume control of them and infrastructure improvements at the facilities.
The Abu Ghraib facility, which houses about 4,500 prisoners, became notorious in 2004 after isolated reports of prisoner abuse were made public. Defense officials condemned the actions sharply, insisting that detainee abuse is not tolerated. All allegations of detainee abuse are aggressively investigated, and anyone convicted of or involved in abuse is held accountable, they said. Six soldiers at the Abu Ghraib facility were tried on abuse charges.
All detainees are treated humanely in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and receive military medical care similar to what deployed U.S. servicemembers receive, officials said.
Of course they're all treated in accordance to the Geneva Conventions.
"We're gonna close it, except, you know, we really aren't."
This must be an example of catapulting propaganda to foreign news sources to confuse the terra'ists.
Your tax dollars at work supporting the Ministry of Truthiness in action.
In other news this morning, Darth Rumsfeld made a "killing" on Tamiflu even though the H5N1 bug never took off here at home this winter. He's sold his stock options now, so likely that means there are too many vaccines that are likely to be released for it this fall. Still, a tidy sum for the Dark Lord of the Sith.
Speaking of the Dark Lords of the Sith and the Ministry of Truthiness, you will be relieved to hear the CIA now holds the syndication and distribution rights to the film of Animal Farm (via Defense Tech).
Now that's a book that ought to be Classified.
The Memory Hole has put together a list of other interesting films the CIA now owns. Here are some other interesting titles whose release the CIA controls:
CBS Reports: UFO: Friend, Foe or Fancy?
Extraordinary Occurrence, II
Jim Garrison's Responses/Discusses JFK Assassination
Mickey Mouse Cartoon-Squatter's Rights
Moscow Antarctica -- Polar Outpost
Our Election Day Illusion/The Best Majority
Restoration of Sanity, Mental Illness Diagnostic
Study of Sun's Corona
Unidentified Flying Objects
Curious choice the Company has, no? This list is part of a longer list of films you might see the Agency wanting to control. For example, there might be a point in worrying about How to Fight A Guerrilla War -- 20th Century. But you just have wonder what Mickey Mouse, UFOs, and the study of the Sun all have that the CIA is afraid of. ¶ 7:10 AM 0 comments links to this post
Saturday, March 11, 2006
Priorities
Budgets Imperil Environmental Satellites
Tight Budgets Imperil the Nation's Environmental Satellites - Vital Forecasting Tools
By MATT CRENSON
The Associated Press
- Budget cuts and poor management may be jeopardizing the future of our eyes in orbit America's fleet of environmental satellites, vital tools for forecasting hurricanes, protecting water supplies and predicting global warming...
...NASA has chosen to cancel or mothball at least three planned satellites in an effort to save money. Cost overruns have delayed a new generation of weather satellites until at least 2010 and probably 2012, leading a Government Accountability Office official to label the enterprise "a program in crisis."
Scientists warn that the consequences of neglecting Earth-observing satellites could have more than academic consequences. It is possible that when a big volcano starts rumbling in the Pacific Northwest, a swarm of tornadoes sweeps through Oklahoma or a massive hurricane bears down on New Orleans, the people in harm's way and those responsible for their safety will have a lot less information than they'd like about the impending threat.
NASA officials say that tight budgets tie their hands, forcing them to cut all but the most vital programs. The agency's proposed 2007 budget request contains $2.2 billion for satellites that observe the Earth and sun, compared to $6.2 billion for operating the space shuttle and International Space Station and $4 billion for developing future missions to the moon and Mars.
"We simply cannot afford all of the missions that our scientific constituencies would like us to sponsor," NASA administrator Michael Griffin told members of Congress when he testified before the House Science Committee Feb. 16...
Unless, of course, the Constituency is Darth Rumsfeld.
...NASA's Earth Observing System was conceived in the 1980s as a 15-year program that would collect comprehensive data about the planet's oceans, atmosphere and land surface. It was originally intended to send three generations of spacecraft into orbit at five-year intervals, but budget shortfalls limited the project to only one round of launches.
Landsat, a series of satellites that have provided detailed images of the ground surface for more than 30 years, is in danger of experiencing a gap in service. Landsat 7, launched in April 1999, is scheduled to be replaced by a next-generation satellite in 2011. But if the existing satellite fails before that date and NASA has not developed a contingency plan, scientists, land managers and others who depend on Landsat images could be out of luck.
The launch of a satellite designed to measure rainfall over the entire Earth, the Global Precipitation Measurement mission, has been pushed back to 2012. But the satellite it is designed to replace, the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, can't possibly last that long. That means there will be a period of several years when scientists have no access to the accurate global precipitation measurements that help them improve hurricane forecasts and predict the severity of droughts and flooding.
In December, scientists working on the Hydros mission received a letter canceling their program. They were developing a satellite that would measure soil moisture and differentiate between frozen and unfrozen ground, an increasingly important distinction since melting of the Arctic permafrost has accelerated over the past several decades. The satellite also would have improved drought and flood forecasting.
Last month Scripps' Valero was notified that the Deep Space Climate Observatory, a project he has led for more than seven years, would be canceled. The spacecraft has already been built, but NASA is reluctant to spend the $60 million to $100 million it would cost to launch and operate it...
The observatory would have provided valuable information about how clouds, snow cover, airborne dust and other phenomena affect the balance between the amount of sunlight Earth absorbs and the amount of heat energy it emits. And because it would have hovered between Earth and the sun at a distance of roughly a million miles, it would have been able to observe the entire sunlit surface of the planet constantly. Such observations could greatly enhance scientists' understanding how much the planet has warmed in recent years and help them predict how much warmer it will get in the future.
A new generation of weather satellites being developed jointly by NASA, the Department of Defense and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has gone so far over budget that federal law requires a review of whether it is worth continuing. Even if the program does survive, the first spacecraft in the National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System can't be launched until at least 2010, and probably 2012.
The current generation of polar-orbiting weather satellites is critical to weather forecasting because it offers a complete picture of the planet every six-hours. That detailed coverage is especially important for developing four- to seven-day forecasts, because it gives meteorologists the ability to track weather systems as they evolve in both time and space.
Weather forecasts could be compromised if the launch of the final satellite from the previous generation of polar orbiters, scheduled for late 2007, fails. The chances of a satellite failing on launch are typically about 10 percent.
Billions upon billions for Star Wars. Nothing for predicting the weather. Except for the Air Force, who will doubtless Classify the data. ¶ 6:55 AM 3 comments links to this post
Tight Budgets Imperil the Nation's Environmental Satellites - Vital Forecasting Tools
By MATT CRENSON
The Associated Press
- Budget cuts and poor management may be jeopardizing the future of our eyes in orbit America's fleet of environmental satellites, vital tools for forecasting hurricanes, protecting water supplies and predicting global warming...
...NASA has chosen to cancel or mothball at least three planned satellites in an effort to save money. Cost overruns have delayed a new generation of weather satellites until at least 2010 and probably 2012, leading a Government Accountability Office official to label the enterprise "a program in crisis."
Scientists warn that the consequences of neglecting Earth-observing satellites could have more than academic consequences. It is possible that when a big volcano starts rumbling in the Pacific Northwest, a swarm of tornadoes sweeps through Oklahoma or a massive hurricane bears down on New Orleans, the people in harm's way and those responsible for their safety will have a lot less information than they'd like about the impending threat.
NASA officials say that tight budgets tie their hands, forcing them to cut all but the most vital programs. The agency's proposed 2007 budget request contains $2.2 billion for satellites that observe the Earth and sun, compared to $6.2 billion for operating the space shuttle and International Space Station and $4 billion for developing future missions to the moon and Mars.
"We simply cannot afford all of the missions that our scientific constituencies would like us to sponsor," NASA administrator Michael Griffin told members of Congress when he testified before the House Science Committee Feb. 16...
Unless, of course, the Constituency is Darth Rumsfeld.
...NASA's Earth Observing System was conceived in the 1980s as a 15-year program that would collect comprehensive data about the planet's oceans, atmosphere and land surface. It was originally intended to send three generations of spacecraft into orbit at five-year intervals, but budget shortfalls limited the project to only one round of launches.
Landsat, a series of satellites that have provided detailed images of the ground surface for more than 30 years, is in danger of experiencing a gap in service. Landsat 7, launched in April 1999, is scheduled to be replaced by a next-generation satellite in 2011. But if the existing satellite fails before that date and NASA has not developed a contingency plan, scientists, land managers and others who depend on Landsat images could be out of luck.
The launch of a satellite designed to measure rainfall over the entire Earth, the Global Precipitation Measurement mission, has been pushed back to 2012. But the satellite it is designed to replace, the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, can't possibly last that long. That means there will be a period of several years when scientists have no access to the accurate global precipitation measurements that help them improve hurricane forecasts and predict the severity of droughts and flooding.
In December, scientists working on the Hydros mission received a letter canceling their program. They were developing a satellite that would measure soil moisture and differentiate between frozen and unfrozen ground, an increasingly important distinction since melting of the Arctic permafrost has accelerated over the past several decades. The satellite also would have improved drought and flood forecasting.
Last month Scripps' Valero was notified that the Deep Space Climate Observatory, a project he has led for more than seven years, would be canceled. The spacecraft has already been built, but NASA is reluctant to spend the $60 million to $100 million it would cost to launch and operate it...
The observatory would have provided valuable information about how clouds, snow cover, airborne dust and other phenomena affect the balance between the amount of sunlight Earth absorbs and the amount of heat energy it emits. And because it would have hovered between Earth and the sun at a distance of roughly a million miles, it would have been able to observe the entire sunlit surface of the planet constantly. Such observations could greatly enhance scientists' understanding how much the planet has warmed in recent years and help them predict how much warmer it will get in the future.
A new generation of weather satellites being developed jointly by NASA, the Department of Defense and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has gone so far over budget that federal law requires a review of whether it is worth continuing. Even if the program does survive, the first spacecraft in the National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System can't be launched until at least 2010, and probably 2012.
The current generation of polar-orbiting weather satellites is critical to weather forecasting because it offers a complete picture of the planet every six-hours. That detailed coverage is especially important for developing four- to seven-day forecasts, because it gives meteorologists the ability to track weather systems as they evolve in both time and space.
Weather forecasts could be compromised if the launch of the final satellite from the previous generation of polar orbiters, scheduled for late 2007, fails. The chances of a satellite failing on launch are typically about 10 percent.
Billions upon billions for Star Wars. Nothing for predicting the weather. Except for the Air Force, who will doubtless Classify the data. ¶ 6:55 AM 3 comments links to this post
Friday, March 10, 2006
The Man Without a Country Speaks
Vonnegut takes an easy chair across from Prof. Manuel Luis Martinez, a poet and teacher of writing. He grabs Martinez and semi-whispers into his ear (and the mike) “What can I say here?”
Martinez urges candor.
“Well,” says Vonnegut, “I just want to say that George W. Bush is the syphilis president.”
The students seem to agree.
“The only difference between Bush and Hitler,” Vonnegut adds, “is that Hitler was elected.”
“You all know, of course, that the election was stolen. Right here.”
Off to a flying start, Vonnegut explains that this will be his “last speech for money.” He can’t remember the first one, but it was on a campus long, long ago, and this will be the end.
The students are hushed with the prospect of the final appearance of America’s greatest living novelist. Alongside Mark Twain and Ben Franklin, Will Rogers and Joseph Heller and a very short list of immortal satirists and storytellers, there stands Kurt Vonnegut, author of SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE and SIRENS OF TITAN, CAT’S CRADLE and GOD BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER, books these students are studying now, as did their parents, as will their children and grandchildren, with a deeply felt mixture of gratitude and awe.
Nobody tonight seems to think they were in for a detached, scholarly presentation from a disengaged academic genius coasting on his incomparable laurels
“I’m lucky enough to have known a great president, one who really cared about ALL the people, rich and poor. That was Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was rich himself, and his class considered him a traitor.
“We have people in this country who are richer than whole countries,” he says. “They run everything.
“We have no Democratic Party. It’s financed by the same millionaires and billionaires as the Republicans.
“So we have no representatives in Washington. Working people have no leverage whatsoever.
“I’m trying to write a novel about the end of the world. But the world is really ending! It’s becoming more and more uninhabitable because of our addiction to oil.
“Bush used that line recently,” Vonnegut adds. “I should sue him for plagiarism.”
Things have gotten so bad, he says, “people are in revolt again life itself.”
Our economy has been making money, but “all the money that should have gone into research and development has gone into executive compensation. If people insist on living as if there’s no tomorrow, there really won’t be one.
“As the world is ending, I’m always glad to be entertained for a few moments. The best way to do that is with music. You should practice once a night.
“If you want really want to hurt your parents and don’t want to be gay, go into the arts,” he says. ¶ 7:42 PM 2 comments links to this post
Martinez urges candor.
“Well,” says Vonnegut, “I just want to say that George W. Bush is the syphilis president.”
The students seem to agree.
“The only difference between Bush and Hitler,” Vonnegut adds, “is that Hitler was elected.”
“You all know, of course, that the election was stolen. Right here.”
Off to a flying start, Vonnegut explains that this will be his “last speech for money.” He can’t remember the first one, but it was on a campus long, long ago, and this will be the end.
The students are hushed with the prospect of the final appearance of America’s greatest living novelist. Alongside Mark Twain and Ben Franklin, Will Rogers and Joseph Heller and a very short list of immortal satirists and storytellers, there stands Kurt Vonnegut, author of SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE and SIRENS OF TITAN, CAT’S CRADLE and GOD BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER, books these students are studying now, as did their parents, as will their children and grandchildren, with a deeply felt mixture of gratitude and awe.
Nobody tonight seems to think they were in for a detached, scholarly presentation from a disengaged academic genius coasting on his incomparable laurels
“I’m lucky enough to have known a great president, one who really cared about ALL the people, rich and poor. That was Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was rich himself, and his class considered him a traitor.
“We have people in this country who are richer than whole countries,” he says. “They run everything.
“We have no Democratic Party. It’s financed by the same millionaires and billionaires as the Republicans.
“So we have no representatives in Washington. Working people have no leverage whatsoever.
“I’m trying to write a novel about the end of the world. But the world is really ending! It’s becoming more and more uninhabitable because of our addiction to oil.
“Bush used that line recently,” Vonnegut adds. “I should sue him for plagiarism.”
Things have gotten so bad, he says, “people are in revolt again life itself.”
Our economy has been making money, but “all the money that should have gone into research and development has gone into executive compensation. If people insist on living as if there’s no tomorrow, there really won’t be one.
“As the world is ending, I’m always glad to be entertained for a few moments. The best way to do that is with music. You should practice once a night.
“If you want really want to hurt your parents and don’t want to be gay, go into the arts,” he says. ¶ 7:42 PM 2 comments links to this post
Dubai Deal Scam: Bait & Switch Shell Game
Today the Intrepid Rethuglican Opposition along with the DINOcratic Leadership announced a defeat of Dear Leader and the Emirs over the port security issue, according to The New York Pravda:
WASHINGTON, March 9 — The state-owned Dubai company seeking to manage some terminal operations at six American ports dropped out of the deal on Thursday, bowing to an unrelenting bipartisan attack in Congress that swept aside President Bush's efforts.
The company, DP World, said that at the direction of Dubai's ruler it would "transfer" to a still-unnamed American company the leases to manage some of the busiest terminals in the United States, including some in New York, Newark, Baltimore and Miami.
Under questioning, the company declined to say whether it planned to sell the American operations or had some other transaction in mind...
Now, keep your eyes on the shell with the ball- "other" would be the operative word.
You see, the Emirs actually closed the deal today.
LONDON (MarketWatch) -- Dubai Ports World on Thursday closed its $6.8 billion takeover of Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co., turning it into one of the world's three largest ports operators and giving it control over some key U.S. ports.
Dubai Ports reiterated that it would hold its U.S. ports business separate from the rest of the company pending a review in the U.S.
"A review of our operations in the United States continues and we look forward to a timely resolution of any issues. We will continue to hold our U.S. operations separate while this process continues," said CEO Mohammad Sharaf.
The deal closing comes after a key House panel voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to block its plan to acquire the right to manage terminals at several major U.S. seaports, setting President Bush and defiant House Republicans on course for a major legislative collision.
The House Appropriations Committee voted 62 to 2 to amend an emergency-spending measure with language that would effectively bar Dubai Ports World from taking over terminal operations from P&O.
The vote marks an uprising among House Republicans, who have joined Democrats in rejecting Bush's pleas to let the deal proceed. The amendment was sponsored by Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., and was endorsed by House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill.
The full House could vote as early as next week on the urgently sought legislation, which would provide ongoing funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as further hurricane relief.
But Bush's threat to veto any legislation designed to block the deal still stands, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters.
Bush and top officials insist that the deal was thoroughly vetted for security concerns, while Democratic and Republican lawmakers have charged that the interagency task force, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, that approved the deal failed to adequately consider national-security risks.
Backers of the deal argue that the United Arab Emirates has been a valuable Middle Eastern ally in the war on terror, and warn that blocking the deal would set a double standard that discriminates against Arab-owned firms, while allowing other foreign-owned firms to operate port terminals.
Critics charge that UAE has a mixed record on terrorism, and also contend that state-owned firms should be held to a higher standard than other companies.
The administration agreed to take another look at the deal via a 45-day review by CFIUS, but Bush has made clear that he believes the transaction should eventually proceed.
So in a fine bit of Truthiness, Congress declared victory so they would be spared the struggle with Dear Leader, who's planning on vetoing aid to Katrina victims if he can't give his buddies the Emirs some of the action. Congressional Victory- with Dear Leader winning as usual.
Thanks to Buzzflash for the heads up. ¶ 1:24 PM 1 comments links to this post
WASHINGTON, March 9 — The state-owned Dubai company seeking to manage some terminal operations at six American ports dropped out of the deal on Thursday, bowing to an unrelenting bipartisan attack in Congress that swept aside President Bush's efforts.
The company, DP World, said that at the direction of Dubai's ruler it would "transfer" to a still-unnamed American company the leases to manage some of the busiest terminals in the United States, including some in New York, Newark, Baltimore and Miami.
Under questioning, the company declined to say whether it planned to sell the American operations or had some other transaction in mind...
Now, keep your eyes on the shell with the ball- "other" would be the operative word.
You see, the Emirs actually closed the deal today.
LONDON (MarketWatch) -- Dubai Ports World on Thursday closed its $6.8 billion takeover of Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co., turning it into one of the world's three largest ports operators and giving it control over some key U.S. ports.
Dubai Ports reiterated that it would hold its U.S. ports business separate from the rest of the company pending a review in the U.S.
"A review of our operations in the United States continues and we look forward to a timely resolution of any issues. We will continue to hold our U.S. operations separate while this process continues," said CEO Mohammad Sharaf.
The deal closing comes after a key House panel voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to block its plan to acquire the right to manage terminals at several major U.S. seaports, setting President Bush and defiant House Republicans on course for a major legislative collision.
The House Appropriations Committee voted 62 to 2 to amend an emergency-spending measure with language that would effectively bar Dubai Ports World from taking over terminal operations from P&O.
The vote marks an uprising among House Republicans, who have joined Democrats in rejecting Bush's pleas to let the deal proceed. The amendment was sponsored by Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., and was endorsed by House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill.
The full House could vote as early as next week on the urgently sought legislation, which would provide ongoing funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as further hurricane relief.
But Bush's threat to veto any legislation designed to block the deal still stands, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters.
Bush and top officials insist that the deal was thoroughly vetted for security concerns, while Democratic and Republican lawmakers have charged that the interagency task force, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, that approved the deal failed to adequately consider national-security risks.
Backers of the deal argue that the United Arab Emirates has been a valuable Middle Eastern ally in the war on terror, and warn that blocking the deal would set a double standard that discriminates against Arab-owned firms, while allowing other foreign-owned firms to operate port terminals.
Critics charge that UAE has a mixed record on terrorism, and also contend that state-owned firms should be held to a higher standard than other companies.
The administration agreed to take another look at the deal via a 45-day review by CFIUS, but Bush has made clear that he believes the transaction should eventually proceed.
So in a fine bit of Truthiness, Congress declared victory so they would be spared the struggle with Dear Leader, who's planning on vetoing aid to Katrina victims if he can't give his buddies the Emirs some of the action. Congressional Victory- with Dear Leader winning as usual.
Thanks to Buzzflash for the heads up. ¶ 1:24 PM 1 comments links to this post
Thursday, March 09, 2006
As Fast as DARPA Dreams Them Up,
...the Defense Industry promotes new weapons internationally to extend their client base.
The electromagnetic pulse bomb you'll need for your hovercraft once the machines take over.
Skynet creates a whole new role for NASA. Good bye Star Trek, hello Star Wars. More on the FY07 D.'o D.-Darth Rumsfeld space budget soon as I finish reading it! ¶ 10:03 PM 0 comments links to this post
The electromagnetic pulse bomb you'll need for your hovercraft once the machines take over.
Skynet creates a whole new role for NASA. Good bye Star Trek, hello Star Wars. More on the FY07 D.'o D.-Darth Rumsfeld space budget soon as I finish reading it! ¶ 10:03 PM 0 comments links to this post
The main$tream DINOcrats lose another one
Michael Miller points to Molly Ivin's Declaration of Independence from the whiles of the DLC:
...now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of the party. I don’t know about you, but I have had it with the D.C. Democrats, had it with the DLC Democrats, had it with every calculating, equivocating, triangulating, straddling, hair-splitting son of a bitch up there, and that includes Hillary Rodham Clinton.
I will not be supporting Senator Clinton because: a) she has no clear stand on the war and b) Terri Schiavo and flag-burning are not issues where you reach out to the other side and try to split the difference. You want to talk about lowering abortion rates through cooperation on sex education and contraception, fine, but don’t jack with stuff that is pure rightwing firewater.
I can’t see a damn soul in D.C. except Russ Feingold who is even worth considering for President. The rest of them seem to me so poisonously in hock to this system of legalized bribery they can’t even see straight.
Look at their reaction to this Abramoff scandal. They’re talking about “a lobby reform package.” We don’t need a lobby reform package, you dimwits, we need full public financing of campaigns, and every single one of you who spends half your time whoring after special interest contributions knows it. The Abramoff scandal is a once in a lifetime gift—a perfect lesson on what’s wrong with the system being laid out for people to see. Run with it, don’t mess around with little patches, and fix the system.
As usual, the Democrats have forty good issues on their side and want to run on thirty-nine of them. Here are three they should stick to:
1) Iraq is making terrorism worse; it’s a breeding ground. We need to extricate ourselves as soon as possible. We are not helping the Iraqis by staying.
2) Full public financing of campaigns so as to drive the moneylenders from the halls of Washington.
3) Single-payer health insurance.
Every Democrat I talk to is appalled at the sheer gutlessness and spinelessness of the Democratic performance. The party is still cringing at the thought of being called, ooh-ooh, “unpatriotic” by a bunch of rightwingers.
Take “unpatriotic” and shove it. How dare they do this to our country? “Unpatriotic”? These people have ruined the American military! Not to mention the economy, the middle class, and our reputation in the world. Everything they touch turns to dirt, including Medicare prescription drugs and hurricane relief.
This is not a time for a candidate who will offend no one; it is time for a candidate who takes clear stands and kicks ass...
Indeed. But that's hard to do while the Senator from the MGM Mirage runs the Democrats in the Senate. The Senator who was second in 2004 in Washington only to George W. Bush in the amount of legally donated cash he's obtained from the casino industry.
Makes you wonder exactly what they have in common but not for very long given the Senator's behavior.
So the DINOcrat's thunder has yet again been stolen: The New York Pravda insists it was the intrepid Republicans that beat Dear Leader's Dubai Deal. They're running for the 2006 $election as the Party most likely to show the Party in Power who's boss doubtless. ¶ 6:36 AM 1 comments links to this post
...now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of the party. I don’t know about you, but I have had it with the D.C. Democrats, had it with the DLC Democrats, had it with every calculating, equivocating, triangulating, straddling, hair-splitting son of a bitch up there, and that includes Hillary Rodham Clinton.
I will not be supporting Senator Clinton because: a) she has no clear stand on the war and b) Terri Schiavo and flag-burning are not issues where you reach out to the other side and try to split the difference. You want to talk about lowering abortion rates through cooperation on sex education and contraception, fine, but don’t jack with stuff that is pure rightwing firewater.
I can’t see a damn soul in D.C. except Russ Feingold who is even worth considering for President. The rest of them seem to me so poisonously in hock to this system of legalized bribery they can’t even see straight.
Look at their reaction to this Abramoff scandal. They’re talking about “a lobby reform package.” We don’t need a lobby reform package, you dimwits, we need full public financing of campaigns, and every single one of you who spends half your time whoring after special interest contributions knows it. The Abramoff scandal is a once in a lifetime gift—a perfect lesson on what’s wrong with the system being laid out for people to see. Run with it, don’t mess around with little patches, and fix the system.
As usual, the Democrats have forty good issues on their side and want to run on thirty-nine of them. Here are three they should stick to:
1) Iraq is making terrorism worse; it’s a breeding ground. We need to extricate ourselves as soon as possible. We are not helping the Iraqis by staying.
2) Full public financing of campaigns so as to drive the moneylenders from the halls of Washington.
3) Single-payer health insurance.
Every Democrat I talk to is appalled at the sheer gutlessness and spinelessness of the Democratic performance. The party is still cringing at the thought of being called, ooh-ooh, “unpatriotic” by a bunch of rightwingers.
Take “unpatriotic” and shove it. How dare they do this to our country? “Unpatriotic”? These people have ruined the American military! Not to mention the economy, the middle class, and our reputation in the world. Everything they touch turns to dirt, including Medicare prescription drugs and hurricane relief.
This is not a time for a candidate who will offend no one; it is time for a candidate who takes clear stands and kicks ass...
Indeed. But that's hard to do while the Senator from the MGM Mirage runs the Democrats in the Senate. The Senator who was second in 2004 in Washington only to George W. Bush in the amount of legally donated cash he's obtained from the casino industry.
Makes you wonder exactly what they have in common but not for very long given the Senator's behavior.
So the DINOcrat's thunder has yet again been stolen: The New York Pravda insists it was the intrepid Republicans that beat Dear Leader's Dubai Deal. They're running for the 2006 $election as the Party most likely to show the Party in Power who's boss doubtless. ¶ 6:36 AM 1 comments links to this post
This was planned
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 8 — In one of the most audacious kidnappings since the American invasion, a group of about 50 people was abducted in a Baghdad raid on Wednesday by gunmen wearing the uniforms of a police paramilitary unit, Iraqi officials and witnesses said.
The raid took place hours after the discovery in Baghdad of at least 24 bodies, all victims of execution-style slayings, Iraqi and American officials said.
The events threatened to aggravate Iraq's sectarian tensions, which have been at a high pitch since the bombing last month of a major Shiite shrine set off an eruption of violence that left hundreds dead before ebbing within a couple days. Since then, the country has feared a slide toward full-blown civil war.
In the abduction, the gunmen stormed a private Sunni Arab-owned security company during the afternoon in a busy middle-class area of eastern Baghdad and carted away the employees in white pickup trucks, the kind used by Shiite-led Interior Ministry police commandos, according to three neighbors who witnessed the raid.
Remember? ¶ 6:25 AM 1 comments links to this post
The raid took place hours after the discovery in Baghdad of at least 24 bodies, all victims of execution-style slayings, Iraqi and American officials said.
The events threatened to aggravate Iraq's sectarian tensions, which have been at a high pitch since the bombing last month of a major Shiite shrine set off an eruption of violence that left hundreds dead before ebbing within a couple days. Since then, the country has feared a slide toward full-blown civil war.
In the abduction, the gunmen stormed a private Sunni Arab-owned security company during the afternoon in a busy middle-class area of eastern Baghdad and carted away the employees in white pickup trucks, the kind used by Shiite-led Interior Ministry police commandos, according to three neighbors who witnessed the raid.
Remember? ¶ 6:25 AM 1 comments links to this post
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Remember When They Talked About It Publicly?
‘The Salvador Option’
The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq
By Michael Hirsh and John Barry
Newsweek
Updated: 8:59 p.m. ET Jan. 14, 2005
Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.
Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras. There is no evidence, however, that Negroponte knew anything about the Salvadoran death squads or the Iran-Contra scandal at the time. The Iraq ambassador, in a phone call to NEWSWEEK on Jan. 10, said he was not involved in military strategy in Iraq. He called the insertion of his name into this report "utterly gratuitous.")
Black Spot has always loved him some Sargent Schultz. But his reputation has always preceeded him. He was definitely the Right man in the Right place and time.
Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.
Also being debated is which agency within the U.S. government—the Defense department or CIA—would take responsibility for such an operation. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has aggressively sought to build up its own intelligence-gathering and clandestine capability with an operation run by Defense Undersecretary Stephen Cambone. But since the Abu Ghraib interrogations scandal, some military officials are ultra-wary of any operations that could run afoul of the ethics codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That, they argue, is the reason why such covert operations have always been run by the CIA and authorized by a special presidential finding...
And then there's this:
US considers 'Salvador option' in Iraq
Plan modeled on Reagan-era support for Central American 'death-squads.'
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
...the squads would be composed of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen that would "target" Sunni insurgent leaders and their sympatizers. The move comes at a time when the BBC reports that the insurgency has developed into "near open warfare." Military experts believe that instead of containing the insurgents in Fallujah, the recent battle there spread them out across Iraq.
The Pentagon refused to comment on the Newsweek report, but according to The Times of London, one military insider said, "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are. We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing."
The Times also points out that John Negroponte, current US Ambassador to Iraq, was also Ambassador to Honduras from 1981-85. The US used Honduras in the 80s as a base to train Nicaraguan contras to fight against the then-Sandinista-led Nicaraguan government.
The Daily Telegraph reports that this plan, known as the 'Salvador option,' would aim not only to kill insurgents leaders, but to show their sympathizers that there is a price to be paid for their support.
One military source said: "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists. From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation..."
The most amazing thing is that these people talked about the Option- they threatened their Solution- before they did it. People did notice
Dear Leader never could do the math. In the past, his frat brothers have always bailed him out. Before it's all over this time, Poppy and his buddies the Emirs and the Royal House are going to have one devilish interest to pay. ¶ 8:57 PM 0 comments links to this post
The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq
By Michael Hirsh and John Barry
Newsweek
Updated: 8:59 p.m. ET Jan. 14, 2005
Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.
Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras. There is no evidence, however, that Negroponte knew anything about the Salvadoran death squads or the Iran-Contra scandal at the time. The Iraq ambassador, in a phone call to NEWSWEEK on Jan. 10, said he was not involved in military strategy in Iraq. He called the insertion of his name into this report "utterly gratuitous.")
Black Spot has always loved him some Sargent Schultz. But his reputation has always preceeded him. He was definitely the Right man in the Right place and time.
Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.
Also being debated is which agency within the U.S. government—the Defense department or CIA—would take responsibility for such an operation. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has aggressively sought to build up its own intelligence-gathering and clandestine capability with an operation run by Defense Undersecretary Stephen Cambone. But since the Abu Ghraib interrogations scandal, some military officials are ultra-wary of any operations that could run afoul of the ethics codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That, they argue, is the reason why such covert operations have always been run by the CIA and authorized by a special presidential finding...
And then there's this:
US considers 'Salvador option' in Iraq
Plan modeled on Reagan-era support for Central American 'death-squads.'
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
...the squads would be composed of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen that would "target" Sunni insurgent leaders and their sympatizers. The move comes at a time when the BBC reports that the insurgency has developed into "near open warfare." Military experts believe that instead of containing the insurgents in Fallujah, the recent battle there spread them out across Iraq.
The Pentagon refused to comment on the Newsweek report, but according to The Times of London, one military insider said, "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are. We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing."
The Times also points out that John Negroponte, current US Ambassador to Iraq, was also Ambassador to Honduras from 1981-85. The US used Honduras in the 80s as a base to train Nicaraguan contras to fight against the then-Sandinista-led Nicaraguan government.
The Daily Telegraph reports that this plan, known as the 'Salvador option,' would aim not only to kill insurgents leaders, but to show their sympathizers that there is a price to be paid for their support.
One military source said: "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists. From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation..."
The most amazing thing is that these people talked about the Option- they threatened their Solution- before they did it. People did notice
Dear Leader never could do the math. In the past, his frat brothers have always bailed him out. Before it's all over this time, Poppy and his buddies the Emirs and the Royal House are going to have one devilish interest to pay. ¶ 8:57 PM 0 comments links to this post
Nice shiny new nukes ready to go!
...The first step in the long-range plan is focused around the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program that was approved last year. That program contemplates designing new components for previously tested nuclear packages that would make the resulting bombs and warheads safer and more reliable over the long term than older stockpiled weapons that are being refurbished.
The RRW warheads would create, Brooks said, a "reduced chance we will ever need to resort to nuclear testing." In addition, he said, "Once we demonstrate we can produce warheads on a time scale in which geopolitical threats could emerge, we would no longer need to retain extra warheads to hedge against unexpected geopolitical changes."
Under current plans, the number of deployed U.S. warheads on submarines, missiles and bombers would be reduced to between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2012. There would be an additional number, said to exceed 2,000, that would remain in a strategic reserve, and it would be the latter that could be further reduced under the RRW program.
True enough, if we crank through 4200 thermonuclear warheads, we want to be able to replace them quickly, in case there are still any communist islamofascist bacteria left alive on the surface of the planet. ¶ 8:38 AM 0 comments links to this post
The RRW warheads would create, Brooks said, a "reduced chance we will ever need to resort to nuclear testing." In addition, he said, "Once we demonstrate we can produce warheads on a time scale in which geopolitical threats could emerge, we would no longer need to retain extra warheads to hedge against unexpected geopolitical changes."
Under current plans, the number of deployed U.S. warheads on submarines, missiles and bombers would be reduced to between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2012. There would be an additional number, said to exceed 2,000, that would remain in a strategic reserve, and it would be the latter that could be further reduced under the RRW program.
True enough, if we crank through 4200 thermonuclear warheads, we want to be able to replace them quickly, in case there are still any communist islamofascist bacteria left alive on the surface of the planet. ¶ 8:38 AM 0 comments links to this post
Monday, March 06, 2006
Following the Advantages
When he's not chasing flying saucers, he comes up with some pithy material indeed.
Noted by the Cautious Pessimist:
...In a March 2 interview with Australian Television, Robert Fisk asked a similar, rhetorical question:
"The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it's Al Qaeda, it's the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays the militia men who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation authorities. I'd like to know what the Americans are doing to get at the people who are trying to provoke the civil war. It seems to me not very much. We don't hear of any suicide bombers being stopped before they blow themselves up. We don't hear of anybody stopping a mosque getting blown up. We're not hearing of death squads all being arrested. Something is going very, very wrong in Baghdad. Something is going wrong with the Administration."
In the same broadcast, professional coincidentalist Daniel Pipes was as forthcoming as modesty permitted: "should there be a civil war, it is not necessarily all that bad for our interests. By no means am I endorsing it, by no means do I want one. I'm looking at it in a cool way and saying there are advantages to it..."
...from an aid worker's email:
"Since the bombing of the Al-Askari Shrine in Samarra on 22 February 2006, local media and friends have deluged the Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) in Iraq with information. Iraqi Islamic television reported that the U.S. military and Iraqi police were seen at the shrine the night before it was bombed. The next morning, two shrine guards were found alive but handcuffed inside. Baghdadiya television aired the same report. The Minister of Housing and Reconstruction said the job would have taken ten men about twelve hours to set up enough explosives to do this kind of damage. We have not heard this information reported outside Iraq. The U.S. made offers to rebuild the shrine, but the Iraqi Islamic Party asked that repair be delayed until an independent investigation was completed. Samarra citizens have locked down the shrine to preserve evidence...
"While the New York Times and other media focus on ethnic hatred, sectarian violence, and civil war, we receive other reports that most of the western media ignore. A team friend calls us daily with stories of Sunni/Shi'a unity, cries for peace, and the deep passion of all Iraqis to live as one family. In neighborhoods that have been hotbeds of violence, we hear of Sunni and Shi'a working together to repair and rebuild damaged mosques. Shi'a Iraqis have protected Sunni mosques in their neighborhoods. In a Basrah shrine, Sunni and Shi'a have gathered to pray together.
Now I ask you, if a certain Company has its operatives and private contractors respond like this in Iraq when their toads don't win elections, how are they going to respond here if by some miracle free elections are ever held in America again, and we make them all come home? ¶ 10:21 PM 0 comments links to this post
Noted by the Cautious Pessimist:
...In a March 2 interview with Australian Television, Robert Fisk asked a similar, rhetorical question:
"The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it's Al Qaeda, it's the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays the militia men who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation authorities. I'd like to know what the Americans are doing to get at the people who are trying to provoke the civil war. It seems to me not very much. We don't hear of any suicide bombers being stopped before they blow themselves up. We don't hear of anybody stopping a mosque getting blown up. We're not hearing of death squads all being arrested. Something is going very, very wrong in Baghdad. Something is going wrong with the Administration."
In the same broadcast, professional coincidentalist Daniel Pipes was as forthcoming as modesty permitted: "should there be a civil war, it is not necessarily all that bad for our interests. By no means am I endorsing it, by no means do I want one. I'm looking at it in a cool way and saying there are advantages to it..."
...from an aid worker's email:
"Since the bombing of the Al-Askari Shrine in Samarra on 22 February 2006, local media and friends have deluged the Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) in Iraq with information. Iraqi Islamic television reported that the U.S. military and Iraqi police were seen at the shrine the night before it was bombed. The next morning, two shrine guards were found alive but handcuffed inside. Baghdadiya television aired the same report. The Minister of Housing and Reconstruction said the job would have taken ten men about twelve hours to set up enough explosives to do this kind of damage. We have not heard this information reported outside Iraq. The U.S. made offers to rebuild the shrine, but the Iraqi Islamic Party asked that repair be delayed until an independent investigation was completed. Samarra citizens have locked down the shrine to preserve evidence...
"While the New York Times and other media focus on ethnic hatred, sectarian violence, and civil war, we receive other reports that most of the western media ignore. A team friend calls us daily with stories of Sunni/Shi'a unity, cries for peace, and the deep passion of all Iraqis to live as one family. In neighborhoods that have been hotbeds of violence, we hear of Sunni and Shi'a working together to repair and rebuild damaged mosques. Shi'a Iraqis have protected Sunni mosques in their neighborhoods. In a Basrah shrine, Sunni and Shi'a have gathered to pray together.
Now I ask you, if a certain Company has its operatives and private contractors respond like this in Iraq when their toads don't win elections, how are they going to respond here if by some miracle free elections are ever held in America again, and we make them all come home? ¶ 10:21 PM 0 comments links to this post
Sunday, March 05, 2006
Some People Just Like Their Jobs
Like this man.
Via the Guardian via Truthout:
Faik Bakir, the director of the Baghdad morgue, has fled Iraq in fear of his life after reporting that more than 7,000 people have been killed by death squads in recent months, the outgoing head of the UN human rights office in Iraq has disclosed.
"The vast majority of bodies showed signs of summary execution - many with their hands tied behind their back. Some showed evidence of torture, with arms and leg joints broken by electric drills," said John Pace, the Maltese UN official. The killings had been happening long before the bloodshed after last week's bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra.
Mr. Pace, whose contract in Iraq ended last month, said many killings were carried out by Shia militias linked to the industry ministry run by Bayan Jabr, a leading figure in the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri).
Mr. Pace said records, supported by photographs, came from Baghdad's forensic institute, which passed them to the UN. The Baghdad morgue has been receiving 700 or more bodies a month. The figures peaked at 1,100 last July - many showing signs of torture.
Reports of government-sponsored death squads have sparked fear among many prominent Iraqis, prompting a rise in the number leaving the country. Mr. Pace said the morgue's director had received death threats after he reported the murders. "He's out of the country now," said Mr. Pace, adding that the attribution of the killings to government-linked militias did not come from Dr. Bakir.
"There are other sources for that. Some militias are integrated with the police and wear police uniforms," he said. "The BaDr. brigade [Sciri's armed wing] are in the police and are mainly the ones doing the killing. They're the most notorious..."
He knew nothing, absolutely nothing about this in the Honduras. Or Iraq, either. Just ask him, he'll tell you. And you'd better listen, because he knows where you live.
In an unfair and unbalanced and contested Wikipedia link- some resources here [while you can get them]:
# SourceWatch profile of John Negroponte
# RightWeb profile of John Negroponte
# Profile: John Negroponte, Center for Cooperative Research...
# Negroponte's connections, Political Friendster. ¶ 8:33 AM 0 comments links to this post
Via the Guardian via Truthout:
Faik Bakir, the director of the Baghdad morgue, has fled Iraq in fear of his life after reporting that more than 7,000 people have been killed by death squads in recent months, the outgoing head of the UN human rights office in Iraq has disclosed.
"The vast majority of bodies showed signs of summary execution - many with their hands tied behind their back. Some showed evidence of torture, with arms and leg joints broken by electric drills," said John Pace, the Maltese UN official. The killings had been happening long before the bloodshed after last week's bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra.
Mr. Pace, whose contract in Iraq ended last month, said many killings were carried out by Shia militias linked to the industry ministry run by Bayan Jabr, a leading figure in the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri).
Mr. Pace said records, supported by photographs, came from Baghdad's forensic institute, which passed them to the UN. The Baghdad morgue has been receiving 700 or more bodies a month. The figures peaked at 1,100 last July - many showing signs of torture.
Reports of government-sponsored death squads have sparked fear among many prominent Iraqis, prompting a rise in the number leaving the country. Mr. Pace said the morgue's director had received death threats after he reported the murders. "He's out of the country now," said Mr. Pace, adding that the attribution of the killings to government-linked militias did not come from Dr. Bakir.
"There are other sources for that. Some militias are integrated with the police and wear police uniforms," he said. "The BaDr. brigade [Sciri's armed wing] are in the police and are mainly the ones doing the killing. They're the most notorious..."
He knew nothing, absolutely nothing about this in the Honduras. Or Iraq, either. Just ask him, he'll tell you. And you'd better listen, because he knows where you live.
In an unfair and unbalanced and contested Wikipedia link- some resources here [while you can get them]:
# SourceWatch profile of John Negroponte
# RightWeb profile of John Negroponte
# Profile: John Negroponte, Center for Cooperative Research...
# Negroponte's connections, Political Friendster. ¶ 8:33 AM 0 comments links to this post
Fast Track for Quick Bucks: Touching the Untouchables
New Drugs Hit the Market, but Promised Trials Go Undone
By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: March 4, 2006
The agency often compromises by approving a drug quickly and then insisting that its maker prove after approval that the drug actually works. This strategy, as the numbers released Friday show, has been only marginally successful.
As of Sept. 30, of the 1,231 promised drug trials, 797, or 65 percent, had not begun or were "pending," according to the F.D.A. Another 231 were considered "ongoing" and 28 were "delayed." In the 2005 fiscal year, drug makers completed and submitted the results of 172 trials, the agency reported.
[What they don't tell us is the total number of new drugs that were approved that year.]
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the deputy F.D.A. commissioner for medical and scientific affairs, said last month that the agency would ask an outside group to evaluate the problem, a process that could take a year.
Dr. Steven E. Nissen, chairman of the cardiology department at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, said, "I think it's very disappointing that we're not seeing the studies that are promised being done."
Companies complete trials rapidly when the F.D.A. demands the results as a condition for approval, Dr. Nissen said...
Although the controversy about these numbers has raged for years, the ratio of uncompleted trials has remained largely unchanged. In 2002, the first year that the F.D.A. began closely monitoring the issue, 820 of 1,339 promised trials, or 61 percent, were "pending."
How does the Company's Pharmaceutical division propose to get around this? After all, Big Time and Poppy want to live forever, and even Dear Leader wants to know how all that Cialis he takes to keep up with his hotmilitarystuds4hire is gonna effect his "love" life.
How to get the data in a corporate-friendly manner? Outsource it!
The consulting firm McKinsey calculates that the market in India for outsourced trials will hit $1.5 billion by 2010. ...
Like high-tech call centers and software farms, which were meant to transform India's computer industry by creating skilled workers and a stockpile of modern equipment, drug trial outsourcing is seen as the fast route to economic and scientific growth.... With this in mind, the government is working to advertise India's most pharmacologically appealing qualities, notably its doctors (English-speaking and educated abroad) and its vast number of ailing patients — 32 million diabetics alone....
Last year, the government took a more controversial step, amending a long-standing law that limited the kind of trials that foreign pharmaceutical companies could conduct. In January, the government threw out that constraint. India, the brilliant hub of outsourced labor, was positioning itself in a newly lucrative role: guinea pig to the world.
More here, from Jennifer Kahn's orignal post:
...the number of patients willing to sign up for clinical trials is abysmally low. Just 3 percent of cancer patients opt to join trials, and the number of US patients who sign up for cardiac trials has plunged by half over the past five years.
Such reticence has created a problem for the pharmaceutical industry. Modern drug design may be a sophisticated enterprise, harnessing technology that didn't even exist a decade ago, but one part of the process remains the same: The only way to tell how well a medication really works is to feed it to a sick person. This process, the human clinical trial, is the largest and creakiest part of the drugmaking machine - a mammoth lab experiment that succeeds by brute statistical force. To make it run, companies have to round up a large number of ailing people and then convince them to swallow an unproven remedy with uncertain side effects.
The experiment unfolds in three stages: Phase I, when a compound is safety-tested on a few dozen healthy people; Phase II, conducted on a slightly larger group of mildly ill subjects; and Phase III, which is the most extensive. Involving thousands of subjects and taking up to seven years to complete, Phase III trials are the make-or-break point for new medicines and, because of their size, the hardest to fill with patients. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that discoveries of rare side effects (including lethal ones, like strokes and heart attacks caused by the arthritis drug Vioxx) have pushed companies to conduct ever larger studies. In the 1980s, a new drug typically was tested on 1,300 volunteers in a total of 30 trials. By the mid-1990s, those numbers had swelled to 4,200 patients and 68 trials.
"Twenty years ago, drugs were dropping the cardiac mortality rate from 20 percent to 15 percent," says Dhiraj Narula, medical director of Quintiles ECG, a contract-research firm that organizes trials for major multinationals. "Today we're looking at drugs that will take you from 6 percent mortality to 5 percent. To prove an effect that subtle, in a way that's statistically robust, you need a lot of patients in your sample." One cardiac drug study was conducted on a whopping 41,000 subjects.
The result is a bottleneck that Narula argues is impeding the arrival of important cures. Herceptin - an exceptionally effective breast cancer drug - languished in trials for years because its maker, Genentech, reportedly couldn't recruit enough patients to test it.
Like many in the pharmaceutical industry, Narula believes that the solution to the slow pace of drug trials lies in outsourcing. As many as half of all clinical trials are already conducted in locations far from the pharmaceutical companies' home base, in countries like India, China, and Brazil. And many industry analysts expect the market to skyrocket, particularly as expanding libraries of genetic information increase the number of drugs coming out of the lab. The consulting firm McKinsey calculates that the market in India for outsourced trials will hit $1.5 billion by 2010.
Enticed by numbers like these, developing countries have been scrambling to catch Big Pharma's eye - India most aggressively of all. Like high tech call centers and software farms, which were meant to transform India's computer industry by creating skilled workers and a stockpile of modern equipment, drug trial outsourcing is seen as the fast route to economic and scientific growth - a money train that the country can't afford to miss. With this in mind, the government is working to advertise India's most pharmacologically appealing qualities, notably its doctors (English-speaking and educated abroad) and its vast number of ailing patients - 32 million diabetics alone. Many of these patients are also, in the delicate parlance of the drug world, "treatment naive," meaning they've never taken any medication for their illnesses. This is a perk for trial managers, because it lowers the risk of unforeseen drug interactions and avoids the troublesome process of weaning patients off one medication and onto another...
...Kalantri is uneasy about his clinical success. "Patients here are very passive," he reflects. "They will almost never question their doctor." Indeed, one woman who joined the trial six months ago sits patiently for more than an hour while Kalantri translates my questions, before revealing that she is suffering from aches and fever that are likely malaria. Such deference is hard to imagine in US patients - a querulous lot - and it makes Kalantri's position tricky. "Nine out of 10 times," he says, "the patient will just ask me to make the decision about the trial for him. So what role do I play? Am I a physician, concentrating on what's best for the patient? Or am I a researcher interested in recruiting patients? I try to balance the two sides, but ..." He shrugs. "It's a dichotomy."
Kalantri began worrying about such matters not long after he started recruiting patients for Boehringer Ingelheim. The previous year, he had overseen a trial for Reviparin, an anticlotting drug that improves the health of one out of 65 cardiac patients within 30 days of a heart attack. The trial was enormous: Nearly 16,000 patients participated, half of them from India. When the trial ended, however, Kalantri wondered whether he had served his patients well by enrolling them. At 800 rupees a day, the drug they had taken was too expensive for any of them to afford. Plus, even when it worked, it showed results for just a month. Such a minute and costly improvement might make sense in the US, Kalantri felt, but was it really the kind of medication that poor Indians should be testing? "The biggest problems around here are snakebite and insecticide poisoning," he points out. "We could really use a trial for one of those."
Good luck with that.
The nice thing about the Company's model for free-range slavery is that the property has to fend for itself. ¶ 7:28 AM 0 comments links to this post
By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: March 4, 2006
The agency often compromises by approving a drug quickly and then insisting that its maker prove after approval that the drug actually works. This strategy, as the numbers released Friday show, has been only marginally successful.
As of Sept. 30, of the 1,231 promised drug trials, 797, or 65 percent, had not begun or were "pending," according to the F.D.A. Another 231 were considered "ongoing" and 28 were "delayed." In the 2005 fiscal year, drug makers completed and submitted the results of 172 trials, the agency reported.
[What they don't tell us is the total number of new drugs that were approved that year.]
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the deputy F.D.A. commissioner for medical and scientific affairs, said last month that the agency would ask an outside group to evaluate the problem, a process that could take a year.
Dr. Steven E. Nissen, chairman of the cardiology department at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, said, "I think it's very disappointing that we're not seeing the studies that are promised being done."
Companies complete trials rapidly when the F.D.A. demands the results as a condition for approval, Dr. Nissen said...
Although the controversy about these numbers has raged for years, the ratio of uncompleted trials has remained largely unchanged. In 2002, the first year that the F.D.A. began closely monitoring the issue, 820 of 1,339 promised trials, or 61 percent, were "pending."
How does the Company's Pharmaceutical division propose to get around this? After all, Big Time and Poppy want to live forever, and even Dear Leader wants to know how all that Cialis he takes to keep up with his hotmilitarystuds4hire is gonna effect his "love" life.
How to get the data in a corporate-friendly manner? Outsource it!
The consulting firm McKinsey calculates that the market in India for outsourced trials will hit $1.5 billion by 2010. ...
Like high-tech call centers and software farms, which were meant to transform India's computer industry by creating skilled workers and a stockpile of modern equipment, drug trial outsourcing is seen as the fast route to economic and scientific growth.... With this in mind, the government is working to advertise India's most pharmacologically appealing qualities, notably its doctors (English-speaking and educated abroad) and its vast number of ailing patients — 32 million diabetics alone....
Last year, the government took a more controversial step, amending a long-standing law that limited the kind of trials that foreign pharmaceutical companies could conduct. In January, the government threw out that constraint. India, the brilliant hub of outsourced labor, was positioning itself in a newly lucrative role: guinea pig to the world.
More here, from Jennifer Kahn's orignal post:
...the number of patients willing to sign up for clinical trials is abysmally low. Just 3 percent of cancer patients opt to join trials, and the number of US patients who sign up for cardiac trials has plunged by half over the past five years.
Such reticence has created a problem for the pharmaceutical industry. Modern drug design may be a sophisticated enterprise, harnessing technology that didn't even exist a decade ago, but one part of the process remains the same: The only way to tell how well a medication really works is to feed it to a sick person. This process, the human clinical trial, is the largest and creakiest part of the drugmaking machine - a mammoth lab experiment that succeeds by brute statistical force. To make it run, companies have to round up a large number of ailing people and then convince them to swallow an unproven remedy with uncertain side effects.
The experiment unfolds in three stages: Phase I, when a compound is safety-tested on a few dozen healthy people; Phase II, conducted on a slightly larger group of mildly ill subjects; and Phase III, which is the most extensive. Involving thousands of subjects and taking up to seven years to complete, Phase III trials are the make-or-break point for new medicines and, because of their size, the hardest to fill with patients. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that discoveries of rare side effects (including lethal ones, like strokes and heart attacks caused by the arthritis drug Vioxx) have pushed companies to conduct ever larger studies. In the 1980s, a new drug typically was tested on 1,300 volunteers in a total of 30 trials. By the mid-1990s, those numbers had swelled to 4,200 patients and 68 trials.
"Twenty years ago, drugs were dropping the cardiac mortality rate from 20 percent to 15 percent," says Dhiraj Narula, medical director of Quintiles ECG, a contract-research firm that organizes trials for major multinationals. "Today we're looking at drugs that will take you from 6 percent mortality to 5 percent. To prove an effect that subtle, in a way that's statistically robust, you need a lot of patients in your sample." One cardiac drug study was conducted on a whopping 41,000 subjects.
The result is a bottleneck that Narula argues is impeding the arrival of important cures. Herceptin - an exceptionally effective breast cancer drug - languished in trials for years because its maker, Genentech, reportedly couldn't recruit enough patients to test it.
Like many in the pharmaceutical industry, Narula believes that the solution to the slow pace of drug trials lies in outsourcing. As many as half of all clinical trials are already conducted in locations far from the pharmaceutical companies' home base, in countries like India, China, and Brazil. And many industry analysts expect the market to skyrocket, particularly as expanding libraries of genetic information increase the number of drugs coming out of the lab. The consulting firm McKinsey calculates that the market in India for outsourced trials will hit $1.5 billion by 2010.
Enticed by numbers like these, developing countries have been scrambling to catch Big Pharma's eye - India most aggressively of all. Like high tech call centers and software farms, which were meant to transform India's computer industry by creating skilled workers and a stockpile of modern equipment, drug trial outsourcing is seen as the fast route to economic and scientific growth - a money train that the country can't afford to miss. With this in mind, the government is working to advertise India's most pharmacologically appealing qualities, notably its doctors (English-speaking and educated abroad) and its vast number of ailing patients - 32 million diabetics alone. Many of these patients are also, in the delicate parlance of the drug world, "treatment naive," meaning they've never taken any medication for their illnesses. This is a perk for trial managers, because it lowers the risk of unforeseen drug interactions and avoids the troublesome process of weaning patients off one medication and onto another...
...Kalantri is uneasy about his clinical success. "Patients here are very passive," he reflects. "They will almost never question their doctor." Indeed, one woman who joined the trial six months ago sits patiently for more than an hour while Kalantri translates my questions, before revealing that she is suffering from aches and fever that are likely malaria. Such deference is hard to imagine in US patients - a querulous lot - and it makes Kalantri's position tricky. "Nine out of 10 times," he says, "the patient will just ask me to make the decision about the trial for him. So what role do I play? Am I a physician, concentrating on what's best for the patient? Or am I a researcher interested in recruiting patients? I try to balance the two sides, but ..." He shrugs. "It's a dichotomy."
Kalantri began worrying about such matters not long after he started recruiting patients for Boehringer Ingelheim. The previous year, he had overseen a trial for Reviparin, an anticlotting drug that improves the health of one out of 65 cardiac patients within 30 days of a heart attack. The trial was enormous: Nearly 16,000 patients participated, half of them from India. When the trial ended, however, Kalantri wondered whether he had served his patients well by enrolling them. At 800 rupees a day, the drug they had taken was too expensive for any of them to afford. Plus, even when it worked, it showed results for just a month. Such a minute and costly improvement might make sense in the US, Kalantri felt, but was it really the kind of medication that poor Indians should be testing? "The biggest problems around here are snakebite and insecticide poisoning," he points out. "We could really use a trial for one of those."
Good luck with that.
The nice thing about the Company's model for free-range slavery is that the property has to fend for itself. ¶ 7:28 AM 0 comments links to this post
Saturday, March 04, 2006
Will They Draft Their Paid Trolls?
Caught via the farmer from a Kos diary by georgia10:
Your tax dollars at work [Note: .mil site. Visit only with Firefox and purge your computers of the spyware cookies afterwards]:
[Army Reserve Maj. Richard J. McNorton, CENTCOM's chief of engagement operations] said the team contacts bloggers to inform the writers about any given topic that may have been posted on their site. This outreach effort enables the team to offer complete information to bloggers by inviting them to visit CENTCOM's Web site for news releases, data or imagery.
The team engages bloggers who are posting inaccurate or untrue information, as well as bloggers who are posting incomplete information. They extend a friendly invitation to all bloggers to visit the command's Web site.
The team also has as its mission to spread "good stories":
"Now (online readers) have the opportunity to read positive stories. At least the public can go there and see the whole story. The public wants to hear these good stories," he said, adding that the news stories the military generates are "very factual." [...]
The team's motto is "Engage," and Flowers and others work with more than 250 bloggers to try to disseminate news about the good work being done by U.S. forces in the global war on terror. The effort, officials here said, has reached more than 17 million online readers.
The contacted bloggers, the press release states, are surprised that the info CENTCOM feeds them isn't presented in the "mainstream media" (CENTCOM's term, not mine). This newest effort, I think, should be viewed in the context of the military's PR blitz. Almost two months ago, the Army hired a PR firm to funnel "exclusive editorial content" to selected bloggers (diaried here).
Very factualoid truthiness and Good News from the Department of Defense.
This has been going on awhile throughout the blogsphere.
That they're publically reaching out like this is only part of their new push for more informants. ¶ 7:14 AM 1 comments links to this post
Your tax dollars at work [Note: .mil site. Visit only with Firefox and purge your computers of the spyware cookies afterwards]:
[Army Reserve Maj. Richard J. McNorton, CENTCOM's chief of engagement operations] said the team contacts bloggers to inform the writers about any given topic that may have been posted on their site. This outreach effort enables the team to offer complete information to bloggers by inviting them to visit CENTCOM's Web site for news releases, data or imagery.
The team engages bloggers who are posting inaccurate or untrue information, as well as bloggers who are posting incomplete information. They extend a friendly invitation to all bloggers to visit the command's Web site.
The team also has as its mission to spread "good stories":
"Now (online readers) have the opportunity to read positive stories. At least the public can go there and see the whole story. The public wants to hear these good stories," he said, adding that the news stories the military generates are "very factual." [...]
The team's motto is "Engage," and Flowers and others work with more than 250 bloggers to try to disseminate news about the good work being done by U.S. forces in the global war on terror. The effort, officials here said, has reached more than 17 million online readers.
The contacted bloggers, the press release states, are surprised that the info CENTCOM feeds them isn't presented in the "mainstream media" (CENTCOM's term, not mine). This newest effort, I think, should be viewed in the context of the military's PR blitz. Almost two months ago, the Army hired a PR firm to funnel "exclusive editorial content" to selected bloggers (diaried here).
Very factualoid truthiness and Good News from the Department of Defense.
This has been going on awhile throughout the blogsphere.
That they're publically reaching out like this is only part of their new push for more informants. ¶ 7:14 AM 1 comments links to this post
Incurious George's Ingenuous Plan
Some months ago India was crying in alarm at the sale of dozens of F-16 fighter to Pakistan.
Now, we hear a deal that throws all international nuclear agreements to the winds with India. And oh, by the way, we're selling them lots of newer jets- F-18s and other unspecified advanced technology- too. It is whispered quietly China is the fear. So we "let" them build as many fissile nukes as they want at 22 uninspected sites. And damn that UN and the IAEA anyway, 'cause they wouldn't play with the Company over Iraq and won't over Iran either.
We're playing poker at a chess game again. When they speak of fear, the motivation is greed. Ask Lockheed-Martin or any of the other Carlyle Group members who'll directly profit from this deal and the tension between India and Pakistan.
But whisper.
Nothing brings in the blank check like endless war. ¶ 6:49 AM 2 comments links to this post
Now, we hear a deal that throws all international nuclear agreements to the winds with India. And oh, by the way, we're selling them lots of newer jets- F-18s and other unspecified advanced technology- too. It is whispered quietly China is the fear. So we "let" them build as many fissile nukes as they want at 22 uninspected sites. And damn that UN and the IAEA anyway, 'cause they wouldn't play with the Company over Iraq and won't over Iran either.
We're playing poker at a chess game again. When they speak of fear, the motivation is greed. Ask Lockheed-Martin or any of the other Carlyle Group members who'll directly profit from this deal and the tension between India and Pakistan.
But whisper.
Nothing brings in the blank check like endless war. ¶ 6:49 AM 2 comments links to this post
Friday, March 03, 2006
A Good Return on Their Investment
Terror Futures, that is.
Like Total Information Awareness, that other obscenity dreamed up by John Poindexter that's failed to die with its "official" termination, the idea of profit off of speculation on chaos repulses sane people.
Sanity seems to have left the building.
Dhar Jamail has noticed what saner heads might view as unthinkable, and thought of just the right person to think it up:
What we're witnessing in Iraq now with these death squads and escalating sectarian violence is the product of policies implemented by Negroponte when he was the US Ambassador in Iraq.
But let us remove the covert operations factor for a moment.
For over a year now, Shia death squads have been killing Sunni en masse.
Thus, at first glance, the bombing of the Golden Mosque last week as Sunni retaliation makes sense.
However, what doesn't make sense is the immediate showing of solidarity between Shia and Sunni clerics following the bombing.
Let us now reinsert the covert operations factor into this equation.
Along with the showing of religious solidarity, there is widespread belief by Shiite religious clerics both in and outside Iraq, as well as belief in the Arab media, that US covert operations were behind the bombing:
* Shiite Cleric Muqtada Al Sadr blamed the United States occupation for the current violence. He recently stated, "My message to the Iraqi people is to stand united and bonded, and not to fall into the Western trap. The West is trying to divide the Iraqi people. As God is my witness, I hereby demand an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the occupation forces from Iraq."
* In another interview, Sadr stated, "We say that the occupiers are responsible for such crisis [Golden Mosque bombing] ... there is only one enemy. The occupier."
* Adel Abdul Mehdi, the Iraqi Vice President, held the American Ambassador [Zalmay Khalilzad] responsible for the bombing of the Golden Mosque, "especially since occupation forces did not comply with curfew orders imposed by the Iraqi government."
He added, "Evidence indicates that the occupation may be trying to undermine and weaken the Iraqi government."
* At a major demonstration in Beirut, prominent Lebanese Shiite cleric and Secretary General of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, said America and Israel are to blame for the sectarian divisions in Iraq, claiming that the violence will offer further justifications for maintaining the occupation of Iraq.
* According to the Saudi-based Arab News editorial, a civil-war scenario may serve the interests of the Bush administration: "This may in the end be what Washington wants, because if Iraq plunges into chaos, it could be the Bush ticket out of the Iraq debacle, albeit paid for in rivers of Iraqi blood as well the utter humiliation of the president's administration and its neo-con agenda."
* Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, urged Iraqi Shia not to seek revenge against Sunni Muslims, saying there were definite plots "to force the Shia to attack the mosques and other properties respected by the Sunni," and blamed the intelligence services of the US and Israel for being responsible for the bombing of the Golden Mosque.
* Hoseyn Shari'atmadarit wrote in the Keyhan newspaper of Iran on February 25 of several instances of documented covert operations carried out by occupation forces in Iraq, including: "In Shahrivar two British intelligence officers were arrested [in September 2005] at an inspection post while carrying a considerable amount of explosives, detonators and other equipment necessary to build a bomb. This event certainly shows the direct involvement of the English intelligence service in the bombings in Iraq ... The commander of the English military deployed in Basra [then] issued an order to attack the police centre and release two English saboteurs."
In the recent committee meeting, Negroponte told US senators he was seeing progress in Iraq. He said, "And if we continue to make that kind of progress, yes, we can win in Iraq."
Evidently the kind of progress John Negroponte sees in Iraq is not the kind that benefits the Iraqi people. Because the only progress in Iraq, apart from building prisons, is for the situation to continue growing progressively worse by deepening sectarian divides, despite the best efforts of religious leaders to create peace and unity.
Would civil war in Iraq be a "serious setback" for John Negroponte? Because the sectarian violence happening in Iraq right now is already a "serious setback" for the Iraqi people.
Thus, does Negroponte really care if there is civil war? Does he really concern himself with the wellbeing of the Iraqi people? Or is his main concern creating the catastrophe which keeps them divided? ¶ 11:06 PM 0 comments links to this post
Like Total Information Awareness, that other obscenity dreamed up by John Poindexter that's failed to die with its "official" termination, the idea of profit off of speculation on chaos repulses sane people.
Sanity seems to have left the building.
Dhar Jamail has noticed what saner heads might view as unthinkable, and thought of just the right person to think it up:
What we're witnessing in Iraq now with these death squads and escalating sectarian violence is the product of policies implemented by Negroponte when he was the US Ambassador in Iraq.
But let us remove the covert operations factor for a moment.
For over a year now, Shia death squads have been killing Sunni en masse.
Thus, at first glance, the bombing of the Golden Mosque last week as Sunni retaliation makes sense.
However, what doesn't make sense is the immediate showing of solidarity between Shia and Sunni clerics following the bombing.
Let us now reinsert the covert operations factor into this equation.
Along with the showing of religious solidarity, there is widespread belief by Shiite religious clerics both in and outside Iraq, as well as belief in the Arab media, that US covert operations were behind the bombing:
* Shiite Cleric Muqtada Al Sadr blamed the United States occupation for the current violence. He recently stated, "My message to the Iraqi people is to stand united and bonded, and not to fall into the Western trap. The West is trying to divide the Iraqi people. As God is my witness, I hereby demand an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the occupation forces from Iraq."
* In another interview, Sadr stated, "We say that the occupiers are responsible for such crisis [Golden Mosque bombing] ... there is only one enemy. The occupier."
* Adel Abdul Mehdi, the Iraqi Vice President, held the American Ambassador [Zalmay Khalilzad] responsible for the bombing of the Golden Mosque, "especially since occupation forces did not comply with curfew orders imposed by the Iraqi government."
He added, "Evidence indicates that the occupation may be trying to undermine and weaken the Iraqi government."
* At a major demonstration in Beirut, prominent Lebanese Shiite cleric and Secretary General of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, said America and Israel are to blame for the sectarian divisions in Iraq, claiming that the violence will offer further justifications for maintaining the occupation of Iraq.
* According to the Saudi-based Arab News editorial, a civil-war scenario may serve the interests of the Bush administration: "This may in the end be what Washington wants, because if Iraq plunges into chaos, it could be the Bush ticket out of the Iraq debacle, albeit paid for in rivers of Iraqi blood as well the utter humiliation of the president's administration and its neo-con agenda."
* Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, urged Iraqi Shia not to seek revenge against Sunni Muslims, saying there were definite plots "to force the Shia to attack the mosques and other properties respected by the Sunni," and blamed the intelligence services of the US and Israel for being responsible for the bombing of the Golden Mosque.
* Hoseyn Shari'atmadarit wrote in the Keyhan newspaper of Iran on February 25 of several instances of documented covert operations carried out by occupation forces in Iraq, including: "In Shahrivar two British intelligence officers were arrested [in September 2005] at an inspection post while carrying a considerable amount of explosives, detonators and other equipment necessary to build a bomb. This event certainly shows the direct involvement of the English intelligence service in the bombings in Iraq ... The commander of the English military deployed in Basra [then] issued an order to attack the police centre and release two English saboteurs."
In the recent committee meeting, Negroponte told US senators he was seeing progress in Iraq. He said, "And if we continue to make that kind of progress, yes, we can win in Iraq."
Evidently the kind of progress John Negroponte sees in Iraq is not the kind that benefits the Iraqi people. Because the only progress in Iraq, apart from building prisons, is for the situation to continue growing progressively worse by deepening sectarian divides, despite the best efforts of religious leaders to create peace and unity.
Would civil war in Iraq be a "serious setback" for John Negroponte? Because the sectarian violence happening in Iraq right now is already a "serious setback" for the Iraqi people.
Thus, does Negroponte really care if there is civil war? Does he really concern himself with the wellbeing of the Iraqi people? Or is his main concern creating the catastrophe which keeps them divided? ¶ 11:06 PM 0 comments links to this post
More Economic Truthiness: If They Told You, They'd Have to Kill You
Via Atrios, we have MaxSpeak noting the Good News:
The Bush administration's plan to reduce the flow of bad economic news, by eliminating the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), is running into opposition. More than 400 researchers, including 2 Nobel Laureates signed a letter opposing the elimination of the SIPP. The SIPP is the only major longitudinal survey that tracks the same families over time. While it has a representative sample that allows it to be used to examine issues affecting the whole population, it over samples low income households, which makes it especially useful for examining the impact of TANF, Medicaid, and other anti-poverty programs. Ostensibly, the reason for eliminating the SIPP is to save the $40 million annual cost of fielding the survey (@ 6hours of the Iraq war).
Usually, plans to alter or eliminate major surveys are floated well in advance in order to get input from the community of researchers, policy makers, and advocates that rely on the survey. This plan was crafted in the dark of night and kept secret until the 2007 budget was released. Perhaps the secrecy was needed to keep us safe from the terrorists, but this does not seem like best path for producing reliable data.
More here.
Nice to know Dear Leader is evenhanded in his desire to shut down the physical, biological and social sciences to move us back beyond the 20th century into the 19th.
If he keeps it up, he may recreate the 1860s at least. ¶ 8:23 AM 2 comments links to this post
The Bush administration's plan to reduce the flow of bad economic news, by eliminating the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), is running into opposition. More than 400 researchers, including 2 Nobel Laureates signed a letter opposing the elimination of the SIPP. The SIPP is the only major longitudinal survey that tracks the same families over time. While it has a representative sample that allows it to be used to examine issues affecting the whole population, it over samples low income households, which makes it especially useful for examining the impact of TANF, Medicaid, and other anti-poverty programs. Ostensibly, the reason for eliminating the SIPP is to save the $40 million annual cost of fielding the survey (@ 6hours of the Iraq war).
Usually, plans to alter or eliminate major surveys are floated well in advance in order to get input from the community of researchers, policy makers, and advocates that rely on the survey. This plan was crafted in the dark of night and kept secret until the 2007 budget was released. Perhaps the secrecy was needed to keep us safe from the terrorists, but this does not seem like best path for producing reliable data.
More here.
Nice to know Dear Leader is evenhanded in his desire to shut down the physical, biological and social sciences to move us back beyond the 20th century into the 19th.
If he keeps it up, he may recreate the 1860s at least. ¶ 8:23 AM 2 comments links to this post
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Following the Money
When Americans No Longer Own America
by Thom Hartmann
The Dubai Ports World deal is waking Americans up to a painful reality: So-called "conservatives" and "flat world" globalists have bankrupted our nation for their own bag of silver, and in the process are selling off America.
Through a combination of the "Fast Track" authority pushed for by Reagan and GHW Bush, sweetheart trade deals involving "most favored nation status" for dictatorships like China, and Clinton pushing us into NAFTA and the WTO (via GATT), we've abandoned the principles of tariff-based trade that built American industry and kept us strong for over 200 years...
Then came the flat-worlders, led by misguided true believers and promoted by multinational corporations. Do away with those tariffs, they said, because they "restrain trade." Let everything in, and tax nothing. The result has been an explosion of cheap goods coming into our nation, and the loss of millions of good manufacturing jobs and thousands of manufacturing companies. Entire industry sectors have been wiped out.
These policies have kneecapped the American middle class...
...Because our so-called "free trade" policies have left us with an over $700 billion annual trade deficit, other countries are sitting on huge piles of the dollars we gave them to buy their stuff (via Wal-Mart and other "low cost" retailers). But we no longer manufacture anything they want to buy with those dollars.
So instead of buying our manufactured goods, they are doing what we used to do with Third World nations - they are buying us, the USA, chunk by chunk. In particular, they want to buy things in America that will continue to produce profits, and then to take those profits overseas where they're invested to make other nations strong. The "things" they're buying are, by and large, corporations, utilities, and natural resources...
Foreign companies are buying up our water systems, our power generating systems, our mines, and our few remaining factories. All because "flat world" so-called "free trade" policies have turned us from a nation of wealthy producers into a nation of indebted consumers, leaving the world awash in dollars that are most easily used to buy off big chunks of America...
Thus it shouldn't surprise us that the cons have sold off our ports as well, and will defend it to the bitter end. They truly believe that a "New World Order" with multinational corporations in charge instead of sovereign governments will be the answer to the problem of world instability. And therefore they must do away with quaint things like unions, a healthy middle class, and, ultimately, democracy...
Everything today is driven by profits for multinationals, supported by the lawmaking power of the WTO. Thus, parts for our missiles are now made in China, a country that last year threatened us with nuclear weapons. Our oil comes from a country that birthed a Wahabist movement that ultimately led to 14 Saudi citizens flying jetliners into the World Trade buildings and the Pentagon. Germans now own the Chrysler auto assembly lines that turned out tanks to use against Germany in WWII. And the price of labor in America is being held down by over ten million illegal workers, a situation that was impossible twenty-five years ago when unions were the first bulwark against dilution of the American labor force.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote of King George III in the Declaration of Independence, "He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation…" he just as easily could have been writing of the World Trade Organization, which now has the legal authority to force the United States to overturn laws passed at both local, state, and federal levels with dictates devised by tribunals made up of representatives of multinational corporations. If Dubai loses in the American Congress, their next stop will almost certainly be the WTO...
Ultimately, it's not about security -- it's about money. In the multinational corporatocracy's "flat world," money trumps the national good, community concerns, labor interests, and the environment. NAFTA, CAFTA, and WTO tribunals can - and regularly do - strike down local and national laws. Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man" are replaced by Antonin Scalia's "Rights of Corporate Persons."
Profits even trump the desire for good enough port security to avoid disasters that may lead to war. After all, as Judith Miller wrote in The New York Times on January 30, 1991, quoting a local in Saudi Arabia: "War is good for business."
The truth is, this is a neocon venture. The paleocons hate it, too, just as most paleocons despised agreements like NAFTA. There is doubtless an element of racism in their dislike of foreigners, but let's not lose track of their recognition that the Corporatist takeover of America is good for nobody.
It's our job to educate them that the root of the problem isn't the people of other countries or other races. It's the corporate entities that manipulate other nations, as much as they manipulate us. If we're all working in sweatshops for the oligarchs of the Company, it won't really matter if we're in Mexico, China, or Michigan. ¶ 9:50 PM 0 comments links to this post
by Thom Hartmann
The Dubai Ports World deal is waking Americans up to a painful reality: So-called "conservatives" and "flat world" globalists have bankrupted our nation for their own bag of silver, and in the process are selling off America.
Through a combination of the "Fast Track" authority pushed for by Reagan and GHW Bush, sweetheart trade deals involving "most favored nation status" for dictatorships like China, and Clinton pushing us into NAFTA and the WTO (via GATT), we've abandoned the principles of tariff-based trade that built American industry and kept us strong for over 200 years...
Then came the flat-worlders, led by misguided true believers and promoted by multinational corporations. Do away with those tariffs, they said, because they "restrain trade." Let everything in, and tax nothing. The result has been an explosion of cheap goods coming into our nation, and the loss of millions of good manufacturing jobs and thousands of manufacturing companies. Entire industry sectors have been wiped out.
These policies have kneecapped the American middle class...
...Because our so-called "free trade" policies have left us with an over $700 billion annual trade deficit, other countries are sitting on huge piles of the dollars we gave them to buy their stuff (via Wal-Mart and other "low cost" retailers). But we no longer manufacture anything they want to buy with those dollars.
So instead of buying our manufactured goods, they are doing what we used to do with Third World nations - they are buying us, the USA, chunk by chunk. In particular, they want to buy things in America that will continue to produce profits, and then to take those profits overseas where they're invested to make other nations strong. The "things" they're buying are, by and large, corporations, utilities, and natural resources...
Foreign companies are buying up our water systems, our power generating systems, our mines, and our few remaining factories. All because "flat world" so-called "free trade" policies have turned us from a nation of wealthy producers into a nation of indebted consumers, leaving the world awash in dollars that are most easily used to buy off big chunks of America...
Thus it shouldn't surprise us that the cons have sold off our ports as well, and will defend it to the bitter end. They truly believe that a "New World Order" with multinational corporations in charge instead of sovereign governments will be the answer to the problem of world instability. And therefore they must do away with quaint things like unions, a healthy middle class, and, ultimately, democracy...
Everything today is driven by profits for multinationals, supported by the lawmaking power of the WTO. Thus, parts for our missiles are now made in China, a country that last year threatened us with nuclear weapons. Our oil comes from a country that birthed a Wahabist movement that ultimately led to 14 Saudi citizens flying jetliners into the World Trade buildings and the Pentagon. Germans now own the Chrysler auto assembly lines that turned out tanks to use against Germany in WWII. And the price of labor in America is being held down by over ten million illegal workers, a situation that was impossible twenty-five years ago when unions were the first bulwark against dilution of the American labor force.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote of King George III in the Declaration of Independence, "He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation…" he just as easily could have been writing of the World Trade Organization, which now has the legal authority to force the United States to overturn laws passed at both local, state, and federal levels with dictates devised by tribunals made up of representatives of multinational corporations. If Dubai loses in the American Congress, their next stop will almost certainly be the WTO...
Ultimately, it's not about security -- it's about money. In the multinational corporatocracy's "flat world," money trumps the national good, community concerns, labor interests, and the environment. NAFTA, CAFTA, and WTO tribunals can - and regularly do - strike down local and national laws. Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man" are replaced by Antonin Scalia's "Rights of Corporate Persons."
Profits even trump the desire for good enough port security to avoid disasters that may lead to war. After all, as Judith Miller wrote in The New York Times on January 30, 1991, quoting a local in Saudi Arabia: "War is good for business."
The truth is, this is a neocon venture. The paleocons hate it, too, just as most paleocons despised agreements like NAFTA. There is doubtless an element of racism in their dislike of foreigners, but let's not lose track of their recognition that the Corporatist takeover of America is good for nobody.
It's our job to educate them that the root of the problem isn't the people of other countries or other races. It's the corporate entities that manipulate other nations, as much as they manipulate us. If we're all working in sweatshops for the oligarchs of the Company, it won't really matter if we're in Mexico, China, or Michigan. ¶ 9:50 PM 0 comments links to this post
"Not One Thin Dime"- Just Three Billion Dollars Cut
More on the gutting of space science by Darth Rumsfeld's Star Wars minion of NASA, Michael Griffin, from Pravda:
Some of the most highly promoted missions on NASA's scientific agenda would be postponed indefinitely or perhaps even canceled under the agency's new budget, despite its administrator's vow to Congress six months ago that not "one thin dime" would be taken from space science to pay for President Bush's plan to send astronauts to the Moon and Mars.
The cuts come to $3 billion over the next five years, even as NASA's overall spending grows by 3.2 percent this year, to $16.8 billion.
Among the casualties in the budget, released last month, are efforts to look for habitable planets and perhaps life elsewhere in the galaxy, an investigation of the dark energy that seems to be ripping the universe apart, bringing a sample of Mars back to Earth and exploring for life under the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa — as well as numerous smaller programs and individual research projects that astronomers say are the wellsprings of new science and new scientists...
The cuts have alarmed and outraged many scientists, who have long feared that NASA will have to cannibalize its science program to carry out the president's vision of human spaceflight.
The new cuts, they say, will drive young people from the field, ending American domination of space science and perhaps ceding future discoveries to Europe.
"The bottom line: science at NASA is disappearing — fast," said Donald Lamb, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago and chairman of a committee on space science for the Association of American Universities.
Representative Sherwood Boehlert, the New York Republican who is chairman of the Science Committee, called the new budget "bad for space science, worse for earth science," adding, "It basically cuts or de-emphasizes every forward-looking, truly futuristic program of the agency to fund operational and development programs to enable us to do what we are already doing or have done before..."
Astronomers and planetary researchers say space science has provided NASA's brightest and most inspirational moments in recent years: the landing on Saturn's moon Titan, the exploits of the Mars rovers and the stream of cosmic postcards from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Despite Dr. Griffin's assurances, they say that delaying space missions can be a death sentence if there is not money to continue developing technology and to keep teams together until the mission is ready to fly again.
That is the case, said Charles Beichman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with the Terrestrial Planet Finder missions, which are intended to produce images of Earth-like planets around other stars. They are the culmination of a line of missions devoted to hunting for planets around other stars and investigating if they are habitable or already harbor life, a goal, planetary scientists point out, that is explicitly endorsed in Mr. Bush's space vision.
"We're getting ready to fire all the people we've built up," said Dr. Beichman, who is the project scientist for the second of the two spacecraft missions, once scheduled for about 2020. Once those scientists have found other jobs, he said, they are not likely to come back.
"What I feel bad about is turning away a generation," Dr. Beichman said, explaining that planet-finding has been one of the hottest fields in science lately, attracting, in particular, young scientists into astronomy.
...Much of the concern among scientists is for the fate of smaller projects like the low-budget spacecraft called Explorers. Designed to provide relatively cheap and fast access to space, they are usually developed and managed by university groups. Dr. Lamb referred to them as "the crown jewels in NASA's science program."
In recent years, one such mission, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, produced exquisite baby pictures of the Big Bang, while another, the Swift satellite, has helped solve a 30-year-old mystery, linking distant explosions called gamma-ray bursts to the formation of black holes.
Explorers, Dr. Lamb said, are where graduate students and young professors get their first taste of space science. Until recently, about one mission was launched a year, but under the new plan, there will be none from 2009 to 2012. In a letter to Dr. Cleave last fall, 16 present and former Explorer scientists said, "Such a lengthy suspension would be a devastating blow to the program and the science community."
Many scientists said the roots of their plight lay in the Bush administration's refusal to ask Congress for enough money to carry out the Moon-Mars program, announced with fanfare two years ago...
Announced with fanfare: a return to 1969.
The astronauts don't like it either, but then again, they're the ones risking their lives on an unsafe shuttle schedule to keep Dear Leader's life exciting. ¶ 8:36 PM 0 comments links to this post
Some of the most highly promoted missions on NASA's scientific agenda would be postponed indefinitely or perhaps even canceled under the agency's new budget, despite its administrator's vow to Congress six months ago that not "one thin dime" would be taken from space science to pay for President Bush's plan to send astronauts to the Moon and Mars.
The cuts come to $3 billion over the next five years, even as NASA's overall spending grows by 3.2 percent this year, to $16.8 billion.
Among the casualties in the budget, released last month, are efforts to look for habitable planets and perhaps life elsewhere in the galaxy, an investigation of the dark energy that seems to be ripping the universe apart, bringing a sample of Mars back to Earth and exploring for life under the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa — as well as numerous smaller programs and individual research projects that astronomers say are the wellsprings of new science and new scientists...
The cuts have alarmed and outraged many scientists, who have long feared that NASA will have to cannibalize its science program to carry out the president's vision of human spaceflight.
The new cuts, they say, will drive young people from the field, ending American domination of space science and perhaps ceding future discoveries to Europe.
"The bottom line: science at NASA is disappearing — fast," said Donald Lamb, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago and chairman of a committee on space science for the Association of American Universities.
Representative Sherwood Boehlert, the New York Republican who is chairman of the Science Committee, called the new budget "bad for space science, worse for earth science," adding, "It basically cuts or de-emphasizes every forward-looking, truly futuristic program of the agency to fund operational and development programs to enable us to do what we are already doing or have done before..."
Astronomers and planetary researchers say space science has provided NASA's brightest and most inspirational moments in recent years: the landing on Saturn's moon Titan, the exploits of the Mars rovers and the stream of cosmic postcards from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Despite Dr. Griffin's assurances, they say that delaying space missions can be a death sentence if there is not money to continue developing technology and to keep teams together until the mission is ready to fly again.
That is the case, said Charles Beichman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with the Terrestrial Planet Finder missions, which are intended to produce images of Earth-like planets around other stars. They are the culmination of a line of missions devoted to hunting for planets around other stars and investigating if they are habitable or already harbor life, a goal, planetary scientists point out, that is explicitly endorsed in Mr. Bush's space vision.
"We're getting ready to fire all the people we've built up," said Dr. Beichman, who is the project scientist for the second of the two spacecraft missions, once scheduled for about 2020. Once those scientists have found other jobs, he said, they are not likely to come back.
"What I feel bad about is turning away a generation," Dr. Beichman said, explaining that planet-finding has been one of the hottest fields in science lately, attracting, in particular, young scientists into astronomy.
...Much of the concern among scientists is for the fate of smaller projects like the low-budget spacecraft called Explorers. Designed to provide relatively cheap and fast access to space, they are usually developed and managed by university groups. Dr. Lamb referred to them as "the crown jewels in NASA's science program."
In recent years, one such mission, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, produced exquisite baby pictures of the Big Bang, while another, the Swift satellite, has helped solve a 30-year-old mystery, linking distant explosions called gamma-ray bursts to the formation of black holes.
Explorers, Dr. Lamb said, are where graduate students and young professors get their first taste of space science. Until recently, about one mission was launched a year, but under the new plan, there will be none from 2009 to 2012. In a letter to Dr. Cleave last fall, 16 present and former Explorer scientists said, "Such a lengthy suspension would be a devastating blow to the program and the science community."
Many scientists said the roots of their plight lay in the Bush administration's refusal to ask Congress for enough money to carry out the Moon-Mars program, announced with fanfare two years ago...
Announced with fanfare: a return to 1969.
The astronauts don't like it either, but then again, they're the ones risking their lives on an unsafe shuttle schedule to keep Dear Leader's life exciting. ¶ 8:36 PM 0 comments links to this post
Bush Knew Katrina Was Category 5
...well before it hit.
The blogsphere exploded with this last night. I like Greg Saunders' take on this. It includes the complete AP video that shows Bushie getting the lowdown on Brownie 24 h before it hit. And Bushie promising to do his bestest to help.
As usual, although much of the progressive blogsphere is up in arms about this, if you look at the mainstream media, it's mostly republican voices you hear damning the Liar-in-Chief.
The conventional take is Bush the incompetent.
Malign neglect is a possibility no one suggests. In the main$tream, that is.
The truth is, from Lou Dobbs on down, the PaleoCon wing of the Republican party is getting a little scared of the Wrethuglican wing. But they're equally scared of losing votes this fall. So now we're treated to the spectacle of Paleocons vs. NeoCons, and Reptilicans vs. Wrethuglicans.
It's hard, though, for the Reptilicans to steal elections. They don't have the feel for the Dark Side of the Force the Rovian Wrethuglicans do. And always, now, Negroponte's ball is in play in the dark.
When it really hits the fan this summer, it's going to get messy. ¶ 10:08 AM 0 comments links to this post
The blogsphere exploded with this last night. I like Greg Saunders' take on this. It includes the complete AP video that shows Bushie getting the lowdown on Brownie 24 h before it hit. And Bushie promising to do his bestest to help.
As usual, although much of the progressive blogsphere is up in arms about this, if you look at the mainstream media, it's mostly republican voices you hear damning the Liar-in-Chief.
The conventional take is Bush the incompetent.
Malign neglect is a possibility no one suggests. In the main$tream, that is.
The truth is, from Lou Dobbs on down, the PaleoCon wing of the Republican party is getting a little scared of the Wrethuglican wing. But they're equally scared of losing votes this fall. So now we're treated to the spectacle of Paleocons vs. NeoCons, and Reptilicans vs. Wrethuglicans.
It's hard, though, for the Reptilicans to steal elections. They don't have the feel for the Dark Side of the Force the Rovian Wrethuglicans do. And always, now, Negroponte's ball is in play in the dark.
When it really hits the fan this summer, it's going to get messy. ¶ 10:08 AM 0 comments links to this post
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
The Empire Strikes Back
In early February there were reports of a real win for space science at NASA: a Heritage Foundation mole/ Hitler youth bureaucrat was axed.
The jubilation was, alas, short lived.
Nature 439, 768-769 (16 February 2006) | doi:10.1038/439768a
US space scientists rage over axed projects
Critics say proposed cuts will devastate the field.
Tony Reichhardt
Proposed cuts to NASA's science budget have unleashed a storm of anger from US astronomers and planetary researchers, who say the reductions would cause irreparable harm and drive young people from the field.
Under a NASA budget unveiled on 6 February (see Nature 439, 644; 2006), growth in science spending between 2007 and 2010 would be slashed by 17%. The budget proposed by President George W. Bush has yet to be approved by Congress, but many planned projects — from planet searches to a Mars sample return, as well as scores of individual research grants — are likely to be scrapped...
Scientists appreciate that NASA's administrator, Mike Griffin, [my link, incidently, to information about Darth Griffin] is struggling to balance his books. Griffin explained during the budget press conference that the science cuts were necessary to pay for shuttle flights required to complete the International Space Station. "It's what we needed to do," he said regretfully. How nicely the crocodile cries.
But Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, Tucson, sums up the view of many when he says he finds it "puzzling and frustrating" that NASA would divert money from science, widely considered its most productive enterprise, to keep the aged space shuttles flying. "It seems that NASA is trying to capitalize on its failures rather than its successes," says Lunine...
Alas, when the erudite space scientists sleep with a Reptilican, it is not unexpected to wake up without a few fingers, or other appendages.
Unfortunately, many are about to lose their heads because of this.
...Particularly hard hit is the search for new planets, a field that appeals to young scientists, says Charles Beichman of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. NASA could keep developing technologies for the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) mission given just $10 million next year, he says. Instead, the TPF's budget will be wiped out. NASA claims the mission is "deferred indefinitely", says Beichman. "The fact is, they are cancelling the TPF. They are breaking up the technology team."
There is fury not just at the size of the cuts, but at how they were decided and announced to the science community. Heidi Hammel, a planetary researcher with the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, says that NASA's advisory council was not operating during much of last year and so "there was absolutely no way to know how these decisions had been made. It's sort of like a black hole over there."
I'd describe the advisory council as more like R'lyeh than a black hole, which is after all a reality-based phenomenon.
But I digress, let us continue:
Harrison estimates that about 200 scientists are planning to send petitions or protest letters to NASA. Craig Wheeler, president-elect of the American Astronomical Society, says the society will argue that NASA's science projects should share in the generous increases granted to other research agencies for 2007.
Yes, but how can the Carlyle Group make a buck off of planetary science? Figure out how to put a gas rig on Titan and you'll doubtless get funded. Particularly if Halliburton has a piece of any profits.
...many space scientists are still just trying to figure out what it all means — and they believe the draconian cuts won't even fix NASA's larger budget problems. Gregory Junemann is president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, NASA's largest union. "Devouring everything else at the agency, while holding out for some future financial miracle, is irresponsible," he says.
So how does that differ from anything else Dear Leader is in control of? ¶ 9:22 PM 0 comments links to this post
The jubilation was, alas, short lived.
Nature 439, 768-769 (16 February 2006) | doi:10.1038/439768a
US space scientists rage over axed projects
Critics say proposed cuts will devastate the field.
Tony Reichhardt
Proposed cuts to NASA's science budget have unleashed a storm of anger from US astronomers and planetary researchers, who say the reductions would cause irreparable harm and drive young people from the field.
Under a NASA budget unveiled on 6 February (see Nature 439, 644; 2006), growth in science spending between 2007 and 2010 would be slashed by 17%. The budget proposed by President George W. Bush has yet to be approved by Congress, but many planned projects — from planet searches to a Mars sample return, as well as scores of individual research grants — are likely to be scrapped...
Scientists appreciate that NASA's administrator, Mike Griffin, [my link, incidently, to information about Darth Griffin] is struggling to balance his books. Griffin explained during the budget press conference that the science cuts were necessary to pay for shuttle flights required to complete the International Space Station. "It's what we needed to do," he said regretfully. How nicely the crocodile cries.
But Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, Tucson, sums up the view of many when he says he finds it "puzzling and frustrating" that NASA would divert money from science, widely considered its most productive enterprise, to keep the aged space shuttles flying. "It seems that NASA is trying to capitalize on its failures rather than its successes," says Lunine...
Alas, when the erudite space scientists sleep with a Reptilican, it is not unexpected to wake up without a few fingers, or other appendages.
Unfortunately, many are about to lose their heads because of this.
...Particularly hard hit is the search for new planets, a field that appeals to young scientists, says Charles Beichman of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. NASA could keep developing technologies for the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) mission given just $10 million next year, he says. Instead, the TPF's budget will be wiped out. NASA claims the mission is "deferred indefinitely", says Beichman. "The fact is, they are cancelling the TPF. They are breaking up the technology team."
There is fury not just at the size of the cuts, but at how they were decided and announced to the science community. Heidi Hammel, a planetary researcher with the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, says that NASA's advisory council was not operating during much of last year and so "there was absolutely no way to know how these decisions had been made. It's sort of like a black hole over there."
I'd describe the advisory council as more like R'lyeh than a black hole, which is after all a reality-based phenomenon.
But I digress, let us continue:
Harrison estimates that about 200 scientists are planning to send petitions or protest letters to NASA. Craig Wheeler, president-elect of the American Astronomical Society, says the society will argue that NASA's science projects should share in the generous increases granted to other research agencies for 2007.
Yes, but how can the Carlyle Group make a buck off of planetary science? Figure out how to put a gas rig on Titan and you'll doubtless get funded. Particularly if Halliburton has a piece of any profits.
...many space scientists are still just trying to figure out what it all means — and they believe the draconian cuts won't even fix NASA's larger budget problems. Gregory Junemann is president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, NASA's largest union. "Devouring everything else at the agency, while holding out for some future financial miracle, is irresponsible," he says.
So how does that differ from anything else Dear Leader is in control of? ¶ 9:22 PM 0 comments links to this post
