Singularity
Just another Reality-based bubble in the foam of the multiverse.
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Being Good for Goodness' Sake, or Bad for the Hell of It
...Primatologists like Frans de Waal have long argued that the roots of human morality are evident in social animals like apes and monkeys. The animals’ feelings of empathy and expectations of reciprocity are essential behaviors for mammalian group living and can be regarded as a counterpart of human morality.
Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard biologist, has built on this idea to propose that people are born with a moral grammar wired into their neural circuits by evolution. In a new book, “Moral Minds” (HarperCollins 2006), he argues that the grammar generates instant moral judgments which, in part because of the quick decisions that must be made in life-or-death situations, are inaccessible to the conscious mind.
People are generally unaware of this process because the mind is adept at coming up with plausible rationalizations for why it arrived at a decision generated subconsciously.
Dr. Hauser presents his argument as a hypothesis to be proved, not as an established fact. But it is an idea that he roots in solid ground, including his own and others’ work with primates and in empirical results derived by moral philosophers.
The proposal, if true, would have far-reaching consequences. It implies that parents and teachers are not teaching children the rules of correct behavior from scratch but are, at best, giving shape to an innate behavior. And it suggests that religions are not the source of moral codes but, rather, social enforcers of instinctive moral behavior.
Both atheists and people belonging to a wide range of faiths make the same moral judgments, Dr. Hauser writes, implying “that the system that unconsciously generates moral judgments is immune to religious doctrine.” Dr. Hauser argues that the moral grammar operates in much the same way as the universal grammar proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky as the innate neural machinery for language. The universal grammar is a system of rules for generating syntax and vocabulary but does not specify any particular language. That is supplied by the culture in which a child grows up.
The moral grammar too, in Dr. Hauser’s view, is a system for generating moral behavior and not a list of specific rules. It constrains human behavior so tightly that many rules are in fact the same or very similar in every society — do as you would be done by; care for children and the weak; don’t kill; avoid adultery and incest; don’t cheat, steal or lie.
But it also allows for variations, since cultures can assign different weights to the elements of the grammar’s calculations. Thus one society may ban abortion, another may see infanticide as a moral duty in certain circumstances. Or as Kipling observed, “The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Katmandu, and the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.”
Matters of right and wrong have long been the province of moral philosophers and ethicists. Dr. Hauser’s proposal is an attempt to claim the subject for science, in particular for evolutionary biology. The moral grammar evolved, he believes, because restraints on behavior are required for social living and have been favored by natural selection because of their survival value.
Much of the present evidence for the moral grammar is indirect. Some of it comes from psychological tests of children, showing that they have an innate sense of fairness that starts to unfold at age 4. Some comes from ingenious dilemmas devised to show a subconscious moral judgment generator at work. These are known by the moral philosophers who developed them as “trolley problems.”
Suppose you are standing by a railroad track. Ahead, in a deep cutting from which no escape is possible, five people are walking on the track. You hear a train approaching. Beside you is a lever with which you can switch the train to a sidetrack. One person is walking on the sidetrack. Is it O.K. to pull the lever and save the five people, though one will die?
Most people say it is.
Assume now you are on a bridge overlooking the track. Ahead, five people on the track are at risk. You can save them by throwing down a heavy object into the path of the approaching train. One is available beside you, in the form of a fat man. Is it O.K. to push him to save the five?
Most people say no, although lives saved and lost are the same as in the first problem. [Many other people will ask, though, "Is he really fat enough to stop the train?" And keep their mouths shut about what they'd really do.]
...Why does the moral grammar generate such different judgments in apparently similar situations? It makes a distinction, Dr. Hauser writes, between a foreseen harm (the train killing the person on the track) and an intended harm (throwing the person in front of the train), despite the fact that the consequences are the same in either case. It also rates killing an animal as more acceptable than killing a person.
Many people cannot articulate the foreseen/intended distinction, Dr. Hauser says, a sign that it is being made at inaccessible levels of the mind. This inability challenges the general belief that moral behavior is learned. For if people cannot articulate the foreseen/intended distinction, how can they teach it?
Kind of reminds me of the chemistry teacher who doesn't understand quantum theory...
Dr. Hauser began his research career in animal communication, working with vervet monkeys in Kenya and with birds. He is the author of a standard textbook on the subject, “The Evolution of Communication.” He began to take an interest in the human animal in 1992 after psychologists devised experiments that allowed one to infer what babies are thinking. He found he could repeat many of these experiments in cotton-top tamarins, allowing the cognitive capacities of infants to be set in an evolutionary framework.
His proposal of a moral grammar emerges from a collaboration with Dr. Chomsky, who had taken an interest in Dr. Hauser’s ideas about animal communication. In 2002 they wrote, with Dr. Tecumseh Fitch, an unusual article arguing that the faculty of language must have developed as an adaptation of some neural system possessed by animals, perhaps one used in navigation. From this interaction Dr. Hauser developed the idea that moral behavior, like language behavior, is acquired with the help of an innate set of rules that unfolds early in a child’s development.
Social animals, he believes, possess the rudiments of a moral system in that they can recognize cheating or deviations from expected behavior. But they generally lack the psychological mechanisms on which the pervasive reciprocity of human society is based, like the ability to remember bad behavior, quantify its costs, recall prior interactions with an individual and punish offenders. “Lions cooperate on the hunt, but there is no punishment for laggards,” Dr. Hauser said.
The moral grammar now universal among people presumably evolved to its final shape during the hunter-gatherer phase of the human past, before the dispersal from the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa some 50,000 years ago. This may be why events before our eyes carry far greater moral weight than happenings far away, Dr. Hauser believes, since in those days one never had to care about people remote from one’s environment.
You realize, of course, if it's biological and evolving their is no final shape. Only a current one that changes with selection pressure. If you can select for morality, then under some circumstances you can select against it
too.
Dr. Hauser believes that the moral grammar may have evolved through the evolutionary mechanism known as group selection. A group bound by altruism toward its members and rigorous discouragement of cheaters would be more likely to prevail over a less cohesive society, so genes for moral grammar would become more common.
Still, there are different successful survival strategies that a species can adopt. For example, take the violent, male-oriented chimpanzee family, and compare it to the maternal, affectionate bonobos. Altruism isn't the only group-oriented success strategery
among human subspecies, either.
Many evolutionary biologists frown on the idea of group selection, noting that genes cannot become more frequent unless they benefit the individual who carries them, and a person who contributes altruistically to people not related to him will reduce his own fitness and leave fewer offspring.
But though group selection has not been proved to occur in animals, Dr. Hauser believes that it may have operated in people because of their greater social conformity and willingness to punish or ostracize those who disobey moral codes.
“That permits strong group cohesion you don’t see in other animals, which may make for group selection,” he said.
His proposal for an innate moral grammar, if people pay attention to it, could ruffle many feathers. His fellow biologists may raise eyebrows at proposing such a big idea when much of the supporting evidence has yet to be acquired. Moral philosophers may not welcome a biologist’s bid to annex their turf, despite Dr. Hauser’s expressed desire to collaborate with them.
Nevertheless, researchers’ idea of a good hypothesis is one that generates interesting and testable predictions. By this criterion, the proposal of an innate moral grammar seems unlikely to disappoint. And once identified, the genes provide a whole new way to discriminate against people.
Although in some cases
, there may be good reason.
¶ 6:29 AM 0 comments
links to this post
Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard biologist, has built on this idea to propose that people are born with a moral grammar wired into their neural circuits by evolution. In a new book, “Moral Minds” (HarperCollins 2006), he argues that the grammar generates instant moral judgments which, in part because of the quick decisions that must be made in life-or-death situations, are inaccessible to the conscious mind.
People are generally unaware of this process because the mind is adept at coming up with plausible rationalizations for why it arrived at a decision generated subconsciously.
Dr. Hauser presents his argument as a hypothesis to be proved, not as an established fact. But it is an idea that he roots in solid ground, including his own and others’ work with primates and in empirical results derived by moral philosophers.
The proposal, if true, would have far-reaching consequences. It implies that parents and teachers are not teaching children the rules of correct behavior from scratch but are, at best, giving shape to an innate behavior. And it suggests that religions are not the source of moral codes but, rather, social enforcers of instinctive moral behavior.
Both atheists and people belonging to a wide range of faiths make the same moral judgments, Dr. Hauser writes, implying “that the system that unconsciously generates moral judgments is immune to religious doctrine.” Dr. Hauser argues that the moral grammar operates in much the same way as the universal grammar proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky as the innate neural machinery for language. The universal grammar is a system of rules for generating syntax and vocabulary but does not specify any particular language. That is supplied by the culture in which a child grows up.
The moral grammar too, in Dr. Hauser’s view, is a system for generating moral behavior and not a list of specific rules. It constrains human behavior so tightly that many rules are in fact the same or very similar in every society — do as you would be done by; care for children and the weak; don’t kill; avoid adultery and incest; don’t cheat, steal or lie.
But it also allows for variations, since cultures can assign different weights to the elements of the grammar’s calculations. Thus one society may ban abortion, another may see infanticide as a moral duty in certain circumstances. Or as Kipling observed, “The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Katmandu, and the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.”
Matters of right and wrong have long been the province of moral philosophers and ethicists. Dr. Hauser’s proposal is an attempt to claim the subject for science, in particular for evolutionary biology. The moral grammar evolved, he believes, because restraints on behavior are required for social living and have been favored by natural selection because of their survival value.
Much of the present evidence for the moral grammar is indirect. Some of it comes from psychological tests of children, showing that they have an innate sense of fairness that starts to unfold at age 4. Some comes from ingenious dilemmas devised to show a subconscious moral judgment generator at work. These are known by the moral philosophers who developed them as “trolley problems.”
Suppose you are standing by a railroad track. Ahead, in a deep cutting from which no escape is possible, five people are walking on the track. You hear a train approaching. Beside you is a lever with which you can switch the train to a sidetrack. One person is walking on the sidetrack. Is it O.K. to pull the lever and save the five people, though one will die?
Most people say it is.
Assume now you are on a bridge overlooking the track. Ahead, five people on the track are at risk. You can save them by throwing down a heavy object into the path of the approaching train. One is available beside you, in the form of a fat man. Is it O.K. to push him to save the five?
Most people say no, although lives saved and lost are the same as in the first problem. [Many other people will ask, though, "Is he really fat enough to stop the train?" And keep their mouths shut about what they'd really do.]
...Why does the moral grammar generate such different judgments in apparently similar situations? It makes a distinction, Dr. Hauser writes, between a foreseen harm (the train killing the person on the track) and an intended harm (throwing the person in front of the train), despite the fact that the consequences are the same in either case. It also rates killing an animal as more acceptable than killing a person.
Many people cannot articulate the foreseen/intended distinction, Dr. Hauser says, a sign that it is being made at inaccessible levels of the mind. This inability challenges the general belief that moral behavior is learned. For if people cannot articulate the foreseen/intended distinction, how can they teach it?
Kind of reminds me of the chemistry teacher who doesn't understand quantum theory...
Dr. Hauser began his research career in animal communication, working with vervet monkeys in Kenya and with birds. He is the author of a standard textbook on the subject, “The Evolution of Communication.” He began to take an interest in the human animal in 1992 after psychologists devised experiments that allowed one to infer what babies are thinking. He found he could repeat many of these experiments in cotton-top tamarins, allowing the cognitive capacities of infants to be set in an evolutionary framework.
His proposal of a moral grammar emerges from a collaboration with Dr. Chomsky, who had taken an interest in Dr. Hauser’s ideas about animal communication. In 2002 they wrote, with Dr. Tecumseh Fitch, an unusual article arguing that the faculty of language must have developed as an adaptation of some neural system possessed by animals, perhaps one used in navigation. From this interaction Dr. Hauser developed the idea that moral behavior, like language behavior, is acquired with the help of an innate set of rules that unfolds early in a child’s development.
Social animals, he believes, possess the rudiments of a moral system in that they can recognize cheating or deviations from expected behavior. But they generally lack the psychological mechanisms on which the pervasive reciprocity of human society is based, like the ability to remember bad behavior, quantify its costs, recall prior interactions with an individual and punish offenders. “Lions cooperate on the hunt, but there is no punishment for laggards,” Dr. Hauser said.
The moral grammar now universal among people presumably evolved to its final shape during the hunter-gatherer phase of the human past, before the dispersal from the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa some 50,000 years ago. This may be why events before our eyes carry far greater moral weight than happenings far away, Dr. Hauser believes, since in those days one never had to care about people remote from one’s environment.
You realize, of course, if it's biological and evolving their is no final shape. Only a current one that changes with selection pressure. If you can select for morality, then under some circumstances you can select against it
too. Dr. Hauser believes that the moral grammar may have evolved through the evolutionary mechanism known as group selection. A group bound by altruism toward its members and rigorous discouragement of cheaters would be more likely to prevail over a less cohesive society, so genes for moral grammar would become more common.
Still, there are different successful survival strategies that a species can adopt. For example, take the violent, male-oriented chimpanzee family, and compare it to the maternal, affectionate bonobos. Altruism isn't the only group-oriented success strategery
among human subspecies, either.Many evolutionary biologists frown on the idea of group selection, noting that genes cannot become more frequent unless they benefit the individual who carries them, and a person who contributes altruistically to people not related to him will reduce his own fitness and leave fewer offspring.
But though group selection has not been proved to occur in animals, Dr. Hauser believes that it may have operated in people because of their greater social conformity and willingness to punish or ostracize those who disobey moral codes.
“That permits strong group cohesion you don’t see in other animals, which may make for group selection,” he said.
His proposal for an innate moral grammar, if people pay attention to it, could ruffle many feathers. His fellow biologists may raise eyebrows at proposing such a big idea when much of the supporting evidence has yet to be acquired. Moral philosophers may not welcome a biologist’s bid to annex their turf, despite Dr. Hauser’s expressed desire to collaborate with them.
Nevertheless, researchers’ idea of a good hypothesis is one that generates interesting and testable predictions. By this criterion, the proposal of an innate moral grammar seems unlikely to disappoint. And once identified, the genes provide a whole new way to discriminate against people.
Although in some cases
, there may be good reason.
¶ 6:29 AM 0 comments
links to this post
Monday, October 30, 2006
Future Projection
Forget all about Diebold promising to "deliver Ohio" to Bu$h.
We're talking about a whole brand new way for Rove to make sure his moneymaker doesn't get impeached, Darth Rumsfeld to make sure his War on Terra continues winning hearts and minds and livers, and Dear Leader's Crusade continues.
If you've stolen two Presidential elections, but your base gets unreliably squishy in places where democracy's crept in on little cat's feet
, why, accuse them of being influenced by companies owned by scurrilous furriners!
The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chávez.
The inquiry is focusing on the Venezuelan owners of the software company, the Smartmatic Corporation, and is trying to determine whether the government in Caracas has any control or influence over the firm’s operations, government officials and others familiar with the investigation said.
The inquiry on the eve of the midterm elections is being conducted by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or Cfius, the same panel of 12 government agencies that reviewed the abortive attempt by a company in Dubai to take over operations at six American ports earlier this year.
The committee’s formal inquiry into Smartmatic and its subsidiary, Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, Calif., was first reported Saturday in The Miami Herald.
Officials of both Smartmatic and the Venezuelan government strongly denied yesterday that President Chávez’s administration, which has been bitterly at odds with Washington, has any role in Smartmatic.
“The government of Venezuela doesn’t have anything to do with the company aside from contracting it for our electoral process,” the Venezuelan ambassador in Washington, Bernardo Alvarez, said last night.
Smartmatic was a little-known firm with no experience in voting technology before it was chosen by the Venezuelan authorities to replace the country’s elections machinery ahead of a contentious referendum that confirmed Mr. Chávez as president in August 2004.
Seven months before that voting contract was awarded, a Venezuelan government financing agency invested more than $200,000 into a smaller technology company, owned by some of the same people as Smartmatic, that joined with Smartmatic as a minor partner in the bid.
In return, the government agency was given a 28 percent stake in the smaller company and a seat on its board, which was occupied by a senior government official who had previously advised Mr. Chávez on elections technology. But Venezuelan officials later insisted that the money was merely a small-business loan and that it was repaid before the referendum.
With a windfall of some $120 million from its first three contracts with Venezuela, Smartmatic then bought the much larger and more established Sequoia Voting Systems, which now has voting equipment installed in 17 states and the District of Columbia.
Since its takeover by Smartmatic in March 2005, Sequoia has worked aggressively to market its voting machines in Latin America and other developing countries. “The goal is to create the world’s leader in electronic voting solutions,” said Mitch Stoller, a company spokesman.
But the role of the young Venezuelan engineers who founded Smartmatic has become less visible in public documents as the company has been restructured into an elaborate web of offshore companies and foreign trusts...
Okay, that cuts it. If Pravda won't give details about the web, it leads back to the CIA, the Saudi Royals, or both.
In fact, Sequoia is an interesting corporation also owned in part by- guess who?
...Another example of the Carlyle Group's total disregard for ethics and morality is Sequoia Systems, Inc. Sequoia is a major manufacturer of the new touch-screen-voting-machines that have been stirring controversy in the United States. Opponents claim that the American election process has been sold off to private companies like Sequoia Systems, which is yet another subsidiary of the Carlyle Group.
How ethical is it to have the father of the President of the United States spearheading a company that owns another company that manufactures machines that count votes?
At least as ethical as it would be to have him set up a November surprise to invalidate a midterm election that would otherwise produce a predomiminantly Democratic Congress that would threaten his cash flow- and impeach his son.
But it seems the Carlyle Group has recently divested itself of Sequoia into the hands of the Venezuelan corporation mentioned in the Pravda article. Who better to know than Kennard? The timing of the deal certainly is handy and could be the work of the Fixer himself, scandalously profiteering by selling good 'Murikan Rethuglican elections to the highest bidder. ¶ 8:41 PM 0 comments links to this post
We're talking about a whole brand new way for Rove to make sure his moneymaker doesn't get impeached, Darth Rumsfeld to make sure his War on Terra continues winning hearts and minds and livers, and Dear Leader's Crusade continues.
If you've stolen two Presidential elections, but your base gets unreliably squishy in places where democracy's crept in on little cat's feet
, why, accuse them of being influenced by companies owned by scurrilous furriners!The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chávez.
The inquiry is focusing on the Venezuelan owners of the software company, the Smartmatic Corporation, and is trying to determine whether the government in Caracas has any control or influence over the firm’s operations, government officials and others familiar with the investigation said.
The inquiry on the eve of the midterm elections is being conducted by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or Cfius, the same panel of 12 government agencies that reviewed the abortive attempt by a company in Dubai to take over operations at six American ports earlier this year.
The committee’s formal inquiry into Smartmatic and its subsidiary, Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, Calif., was first reported Saturday in The Miami Herald.
Officials of both Smartmatic and the Venezuelan government strongly denied yesterday that President Chávez’s administration, which has been bitterly at odds with Washington, has any role in Smartmatic.
“The government of Venezuela doesn’t have anything to do with the company aside from contracting it for our electoral process,” the Venezuelan ambassador in Washington, Bernardo Alvarez, said last night.
Smartmatic was a little-known firm with no experience in voting technology before it was chosen by the Venezuelan authorities to replace the country’s elections machinery ahead of a contentious referendum that confirmed Mr. Chávez as president in August 2004.
Seven months before that voting contract was awarded, a Venezuelan government financing agency invested more than $200,000 into a smaller technology company, owned by some of the same people as Smartmatic, that joined with Smartmatic as a minor partner in the bid.
In return, the government agency was given a 28 percent stake in the smaller company and a seat on its board, which was occupied by a senior government official who had previously advised Mr. Chávez on elections technology. But Venezuelan officials later insisted that the money was merely a small-business loan and that it was repaid before the referendum.
With a windfall of some $120 million from its first three contracts with Venezuela, Smartmatic then bought the much larger and more established Sequoia Voting Systems, which now has voting equipment installed in 17 states and the District of Columbia.
Since its takeover by Smartmatic in March 2005, Sequoia has worked aggressively to market its voting machines in Latin America and other developing countries. “The goal is to create the world’s leader in electronic voting solutions,” said Mitch Stoller, a company spokesman.
But the role of the young Venezuelan engineers who founded Smartmatic has become less visible in public documents as the company has been restructured into an elaborate web of offshore companies and foreign trusts...
Okay, that cuts it. If Pravda won't give details about the web, it leads back to the CIA, the Saudi Royals, or both.
In fact, Sequoia is an interesting corporation also owned in part by- guess who?
...Another example of the Carlyle Group's total disregard for ethics and morality is Sequoia Systems, Inc. Sequoia is a major manufacturer of the new touch-screen-voting-machines that have been stirring controversy in the United States. Opponents claim that the American election process has been sold off to private companies like Sequoia Systems, which is yet another subsidiary of the Carlyle Group.
How ethical is it to have the father of the President of the United States spearheading a company that owns another company that manufactures machines that count votes?
At least as ethical as it would be to have him set up a November surprise to invalidate a midterm election that would otherwise produce a predomiminantly Democratic Congress that would threaten his cash flow- and impeach his son.
But it seems the Carlyle Group has recently divested itself of Sequoia into the hands of the Venezuelan corporation mentioned in the Pravda article. Who better to know than Kennard? The timing of the deal certainly is handy and could be the work of the Fixer himself, scandalously profiteering by selling good 'Murikan Rethuglican elections to the highest bidder. ¶ 8:41 PM 0 comments links to this post
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Just Clap Louder
...if you want Tinkerbell to live to eat cake!
Payson @ Think Progress:
54 percent of Americans think the economy is getting worse. And Friday, the Commerce Department reported that “U.S. economic growth slowed during the summer to its lowest growth rate in three years” — 1.6 percent — “amid a slump in the housing sector.”
The conservative response? Blame the media. On Fox News yesterday, Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO) said “a bigger story is that so much of the media - and I don’t put Fox News in this category - has constantly talked down this economy.” “Believe me, if we were in the mid-90s, Bill Clinton was president,” Blunt said, “I am convinced there would be a totally different national media coverage by most of the media of this economy...”
The economic data points to a slumping economy that is squeezing the poor and the middle class. Wages are stagnating, poverty rates are climbing, family debt is rising, and the housing market is slowing.
If we don't talk about the 500 lb gorilla in the room, surely he won't eat all the bananas.
It's worked for Iraq, right? ¶ 10:17 PM 0 comments links to this post
Payson @ Think Progress:
54 percent of Americans think the economy is getting worse. And Friday, the Commerce Department reported that “U.S. economic growth slowed during the summer to its lowest growth rate in three years” — 1.6 percent — “amid a slump in the housing sector.”
The conservative response? Blame the media. On Fox News yesterday, Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO) said “a bigger story is that so much of the media - and I don’t put Fox News in this category - has constantly talked down this economy.” “Believe me, if we were in the mid-90s, Bill Clinton was president,” Blunt said, “I am convinced there would be a totally different national media coverage by most of the media of this economy...”
The economic data points to a slumping economy that is squeezing the poor and the middle class. Wages are stagnating, poverty rates are climbing, family debt is rising, and the housing market is slowing.
If we don't talk about the 500 lb gorilla in the room, surely he won't eat all the bananas.
It's worked for Iraq, right? ¶ 10:17 PM 0 comments links to this post
When Ruled by a "C" Average Yale Cheerleader
It's hard to run an Empire for Royalty dumber than Paris Hilton...
Revolt of the fairly rich
Today's lower upper class is seething about the ultrawealthy.
FORTUNE Magazine
By Matt Miller, Fortune columnist
October 25 2006: 8:43 AM EDT
Not long ago an investment banker worth millions told me that he wasn't in his line of work for the money. "If I was doing this for the money," he said, with no trace of irony, "I'd be at a hedge fund." What to say? Only on a small plot of real estate in lower Manhattan at the dawn of the 21st century could such a statement be remotely fathomable. That it is suggests how debauched our ruling class has become.
The widening chasm between rich and poor may well threaten our democracy. Yet if that banker's lament staggers your brain as it did mine, you're on your way to seeing why America's income gap is arguably less likely to spark a retro fight between proletarians and capitalists than a war between what I call the "lower upper class" and the ultrarich.
Here's my outlandish theory: that economic resentment at the bottom of the top 1 percent of America's income distribution is the new wild card in public life. Ordinary workers won't rise up against ultras because they take it as given that "the rich get richer."
But the hopes and dreams of today's educated class are based on the idea that market capitalism is a meritocracy. The unreachable success of the superrich shreds those dreams.
"I've seen it in my research," says pollster Doug Schoen, who counsels Michael Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton, among others. "If you look at the lower part of the upper class or the upper part of the upper middle class, there's a great deal of frustration. These are people who assumed that their hard work and conventional 'success' would leave them with no worries. It's the type of rumbling that could lead to political volatility."
Lower uppers are doctors, accountants, engineers, lawyers. At companies they're mostly executives above the rank of VP but below the CEO. Their comrades include well-fed members of the media (and even Fortune columnists who earn their living as consultants).
Lower uppers are professionals who by dint of schooling, hard work and luck are living better than 99 percent of the humans who have ever walked the planet. They're also people who can't help but notice how many folks with credentials like theirs are living in Gatsby-esque splendor they'll never enjoy.
This stings. If people no smarter or better than you are making ten or 50 or 100 million dollars in a single year while you're working yourself ragged to earn a million or two - or, God forbid, $400,000 - then something must be wrong...
[thanks xenophon] ¶ 6:46 AM 2 comments links to this post
Revolt of the fairly rich
Today's lower upper class is seething about the ultrawealthy.
FORTUNE Magazine
By Matt Miller, Fortune columnist
October 25 2006: 8:43 AM EDT
Not long ago an investment banker worth millions told me that he wasn't in his line of work for the money. "If I was doing this for the money," he said, with no trace of irony, "I'd be at a hedge fund." What to say? Only on a small plot of real estate in lower Manhattan at the dawn of the 21st century could such a statement be remotely fathomable. That it is suggests how debauched our ruling class has become.
The widening chasm between rich and poor may well threaten our democracy. Yet if that banker's lament staggers your brain as it did mine, you're on your way to seeing why America's income gap is arguably less likely to spark a retro fight between proletarians and capitalists than a war between what I call the "lower upper class" and the ultrarich.
Here's my outlandish theory: that economic resentment at the bottom of the top 1 percent of America's income distribution is the new wild card in public life. Ordinary workers won't rise up against ultras because they take it as given that "the rich get richer."
But the hopes and dreams of today's educated class are based on the idea that market capitalism is a meritocracy. The unreachable success of the superrich shreds those dreams.
"I've seen it in my research," says pollster Doug Schoen, who counsels Michael Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton, among others. "If you look at the lower part of the upper class or the upper part of the upper middle class, there's a great deal of frustration. These are people who assumed that their hard work and conventional 'success' would leave them with no worries. It's the type of rumbling that could lead to political volatility."
Lower uppers are doctors, accountants, engineers, lawyers. At companies they're mostly executives above the rank of VP but below the CEO. Their comrades include well-fed members of the media (and even Fortune columnists who earn their living as consultants).
Lower uppers are professionals who by dint of schooling, hard work and luck are living better than 99 percent of the humans who have ever walked the planet. They're also people who can't help but notice how many folks with credentials like theirs are living in Gatsby-esque splendor they'll never enjoy.
This stings. If people no smarter or better than you are making ten or 50 or 100 million dollars in a single year while you're working yourself ragged to earn a million or two - or, God forbid, $400,000 - then something must be wrong...
[thanks xenophon] ¶ 6:46 AM 2 comments links to this post
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Domestic Terrorism
Avedon reminds us who the real homegrown terrorists in America are.
These guys send fake anthrax.
They have apologists and adherents in the highest echelons of Bu$hCo's military:
Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, the new deputy undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, is a much-decorated and twice-wounded veteran of covert military operations. From the bloody 1993 clash with Muslim warlords in Somalia chronicled in "Black Hawk Down" and the hunt for Colombian drug czar Pablo Escobar to the ill-fated attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980, Boykin was in the thick of things.
Yet the former commander and 13-year veteran of the Army's top-secret Delta Force is also an outspoken evangelical Christian who appeared in dress uniform and polished jump boots before a religious group in Oregon in June (2003) to declare that radical Islamists hated the United States "because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian ... and the enemy is a guy named Satan."
Discussing the battle against a Muslim warlord in Somalia, Boykin told another audience, "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."
"We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this," Boykin said...
On at least one occasion, in Sandy, Ore., in June, Boykin said of President Bush: "He's in the White House because God put him there..."
The majority of voters damned sure didn't.
General Boykin is an example of the religious attitude that's actively infiltrating and subverting the armed forces of the United States. They build megachurches near Air Force academies and bases seeking to influence the people that live and work there. They claim to be above politics but share an obsession with political power. They're the Dominionists.
And they work for the Republican Party. ¶ 1:27 PM 2 comments links to this post
These guys send fake anthrax.
They have apologists and adherents in the highest echelons of Bu$hCo's military:
Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, the new deputy undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, is a much-decorated and twice-wounded veteran of covert military operations. From the bloody 1993 clash with Muslim warlords in Somalia chronicled in "Black Hawk Down" and the hunt for Colombian drug czar Pablo Escobar to the ill-fated attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980, Boykin was in the thick of things.
Yet the former commander and 13-year veteran of the Army's top-secret Delta Force is also an outspoken evangelical Christian who appeared in dress uniform and polished jump boots before a religious group in Oregon in June (2003) to declare that radical Islamists hated the United States "because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian ... and the enemy is a guy named Satan."
Discussing the battle against a Muslim warlord in Somalia, Boykin told another audience, "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."
"We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this," Boykin said...
On at least one occasion, in Sandy, Ore., in June, Boykin said of President Bush: "He's in the White House because God put him there..."
The majority of voters damned sure didn't.
General Boykin is an example of the religious attitude that's actively infiltrating and subverting the armed forces of the United States. They build megachurches near Air Force academies and bases seeking to influence the people that live and work there. They claim to be above politics but share an obsession with political power. They're the Dominionists.
And they work for the Republican Party. ¶ 1:27 PM 2 comments links to this post
Trickle Down On You
How the Bush Family Makes a Killing from George's Presidency
by Heather Wokusch
Halliburton scored almost $1.2 billion in revenue from contracts related to Iraq in the third quarter of 2006, leading one analyst to comment: "Iraq was better than expected ... Overall, there is nothing really to question or be skeptical about. I think the results are very good."
Very good indeed. An estimated 655,000 dead Iraqis, over 3,000 dead coalition troops, billions stolen from Iraq's coffers, a country battered by civil war - but Halliburton turned a profit, so the results are very good.
Very good certainly for Vice President Dick Cheney, who resigned from Halliburton in 2000 with a $33.7 million retirement package (not bad for roughly four years of work). In a stunning conflict of interest, Cheney still holds more than 400,000 stock options in the company. Why pursue diplomacy when you can rake in a personal fortune from war?
Yet Cheney isn't the only one who has benefited from the Bush administration's destructive policies. The Bush family has done quite nicely too. Just a few examples:
Bush Sr.: Bush's dad has strong connections to the Carlyle Group, a massive private equity investment firm whose Chairman Emeritus is Frank Carlucci, a former college roommate of Donald Rumsfeld's and former Defense Secretary under Ronald Reagan. Imagine the pull Carlucci has with today's White House.
But Carlucci has another secret weapon - Bush Sr. Amid conflict-of-interest allegations, the elder Bush resigned from the Carlyle Group in 2003, but reportedly remains on retainer, opening doors to lucrative profits in the Middle East and elsewhere. Bush Sr.'s specialty is Saudi Arabia; in fact, he was at a Carlyle investment conference with Osama bin Laden's estranged brother, Shafiq bin Laden, when the 9/11 attacks took place.
Carlyle specializes in military and security investments, and with Bush Jr. in office, the company's profits have soared; it received $677 million in contracts in 2002, then a whopping $2.1 billion in 2003. Carlyle's investors currently enjoy an equity capital pool of over 44 billion dollars.
In January 2006, Bush Sr. wrote China's Foreign Affairs Ministry that it would be "beneficial to the comprehensive development of Sino-US relations" if Beijing approved the sale of a Chinese bank to a consortium which included Carlyle. Bluntly put, Bush Sr. asked China to grant Carlyle a lucrative business deal or risk his son's wrath. Foreign policy at its finest.
William H. T. "Bucky" Bush: George's "Uncle Bucky" joined the board of military contractor Engineered Support Systems Inc. (ESSI) in 2000 and perhaps not surprisingly, the value of the company's governmental contracts has strongly increased with Bush Jr. in office. Uncle Bucky earns monthly consulting fees as well as options to buy stock at favorable prices, and considering that ESSI's stock tripled two weeks after 9/11 then settled into comfy territory, it's safe to say that George's uncle is doing quite well. In fact, Bucky cashed out on 8,438 stock options in January 2005, earning himself a cool $450,000 in the process. As of 2005, he still owned options on 45,000 more shares of the company's stock and accrues more each year.
War is profitable for ESSI, or as an executive explained: "The increasing likelihood for a prolonged military involvement in Southwest Asia by U.S. forces well into 2006 has created a fertile environment for the type of support ... products and services that we offer."
But lest anyone conclude that Bucky has opened doors for the company, ESSI's vice-president of investor relations explained in 2005, "The fact his nephew is in the White House has absolutely nothing to do with Mr Bush being on our board or with our stock having gone up 1000 per cent in the past five years." Absolutely nothing at all.
Neil Mallon Bush: Neil rose to infamy in the 1980s as director of the Colorado-based Silverado Savings and Loan; after Silverado collapsed due to mismanagement and corruption, US taxpayers were stuck with the billion-dollar bailout, yet Neil managed to escape the crisis with a small fine and no jail time. It helps to have a dad as Vice President.
In 1993, Neil joined Bush Sr. in Kuwait to drum up business in the Middle East, and today, he makes a profit by helping companies cash in on the occupation of Iraq. For example, in late 2003, The Financial Times reported that Neil earned $60,000 per year through the Crest Investment Company, a private firm generating contracts in Iraq. Crest was headed by Jamal Daniel, a longtime Bush family contact, who was also on the advisory board of New Bridge Strategies, a company specifically set up "with the aim of assisting clients to evaluate and take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the U.S.-led war in Iraq."
In 2003, Neil's messy divorce proceedings revealed that he was to get $2 million in stock options from a Chinese semiconductor firm despite having limited education or business experience in that area; critics complained that the Chinese company was buying access to his brother, the president. Neil later testified that on repeated business trips to Asia, he'd had sex with women who showed up at his hotel rooms, presumably prostitutes hired by companies trying to curry favor with the White House.
Neil has also profited from George's disastrous No Child Left Behind educational policy. His company, Ignite! (partially owned by Bush Sr. and funded by Crest Investment) has been awarded with lucrative federal contracts to place its educational products in school districts across the country.
Marvin Pierce Bush: Marvin joined Bush Sr. and Neil on their Middle Eastern sales trip in 1993 and then made a mint in the investment banking business. He is a co-founder of Winston Partners, a private investment firm whose investments in military and security firms profit from Bush's "war on terror."
Having a sibling as president has helped Marvin in other ways, too. He is on the board of HCC Insurance Holdings, Inc., which had insured parts of the World Trade Center; HCC benefited from the 9/11 insurance bailout legislation pushed through by brother George.
Marvin was also on the board of Securacom, a company which provided electronic security for both Dulles International Airport and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Marvin stepped down in 2000, but how intriguing that Bush's brother was so well connected to the security of two critical locations on that fateful day.
In short, the "results are very good" for the Bush dynasty, perhaps even "better than expected," thanks to George's stint in the Oval Office. Dad's still setting up international deals. Uncle Bucky's cashing in his stock options. Brothers Neil and Marvin are laughing all the way to the bank.
It's just the American people who have paid the ultimate price. ¶ 7:27 AM 0 comments links to this post
by Heather Wokusch
Halliburton scored almost $1.2 billion in revenue from contracts related to Iraq in the third quarter of 2006, leading one analyst to comment: "Iraq was better than expected ... Overall, there is nothing really to question or be skeptical about. I think the results are very good."
Very good indeed. An estimated 655,000 dead Iraqis, over 3,000 dead coalition troops, billions stolen from Iraq's coffers, a country battered by civil war - but Halliburton turned a profit, so the results are very good.
Very good certainly for Vice President Dick Cheney, who resigned from Halliburton in 2000 with a $33.7 million retirement package (not bad for roughly four years of work). In a stunning conflict of interest, Cheney still holds more than 400,000 stock options in the company. Why pursue diplomacy when you can rake in a personal fortune from war?
Yet Cheney isn't the only one who has benefited from the Bush administration's destructive policies. The Bush family has done quite nicely too. Just a few examples:
Bush Sr.: Bush's dad has strong connections to the Carlyle Group, a massive private equity investment firm whose Chairman Emeritus is Frank Carlucci, a former college roommate of Donald Rumsfeld's and former Defense Secretary under Ronald Reagan. Imagine the pull Carlucci has with today's White House.
But Carlucci has another secret weapon - Bush Sr. Amid conflict-of-interest allegations, the elder Bush resigned from the Carlyle Group in 2003, but reportedly remains on retainer, opening doors to lucrative profits in the Middle East and elsewhere. Bush Sr.'s specialty is Saudi Arabia; in fact, he was at a Carlyle investment conference with Osama bin Laden's estranged brother, Shafiq bin Laden, when the 9/11 attacks took place.
Carlyle specializes in military and security investments, and with Bush Jr. in office, the company's profits have soared; it received $677 million in contracts in 2002, then a whopping $2.1 billion in 2003. Carlyle's investors currently enjoy an equity capital pool of over 44 billion dollars.
In January 2006, Bush Sr. wrote China's Foreign Affairs Ministry that it would be "beneficial to the comprehensive development of Sino-US relations" if Beijing approved the sale of a Chinese bank to a consortium which included Carlyle. Bluntly put, Bush Sr. asked China to grant Carlyle a lucrative business deal or risk his son's wrath. Foreign policy at its finest.
William H. T. "Bucky" Bush: George's "Uncle Bucky" joined the board of military contractor Engineered Support Systems Inc. (ESSI) in 2000 and perhaps not surprisingly, the value of the company's governmental contracts has strongly increased with Bush Jr. in office. Uncle Bucky earns monthly consulting fees as well as options to buy stock at favorable prices, and considering that ESSI's stock tripled two weeks after 9/11 then settled into comfy territory, it's safe to say that George's uncle is doing quite well. In fact, Bucky cashed out on 8,438 stock options in January 2005, earning himself a cool $450,000 in the process. As of 2005, he still owned options on 45,000 more shares of the company's stock and accrues more each year.
War is profitable for ESSI, or as an executive explained: "The increasing likelihood for a prolonged military involvement in Southwest Asia by U.S. forces well into 2006 has created a fertile environment for the type of support ... products and services that we offer."
But lest anyone conclude that Bucky has opened doors for the company, ESSI's vice-president of investor relations explained in 2005, "The fact his nephew is in the White House has absolutely nothing to do with Mr Bush being on our board or with our stock having gone up 1000 per cent in the past five years." Absolutely nothing at all.
Neil Mallon Bush: Neil rose to infamy in the 1980s as director of the Colorado-based Silverado Savings and Loan; after Silverado collapsed due to mismanagement and corruption, US taxpayers were stuck with the billion-dollar bailout, yet Neil managed to escape the crisis with a small fine and no jail time. It helps to have a dad as Vice President.
In 1993, Neil joined Bush Sr. in Kuwait to drum up business in the Middle East, and today, he makes a profit by helping companies cash in on the occupation of Iraq. For example, in late 2003, The Financial Times reported that Neil earned $60,000 per year through the Crest Investment Company, a private firm generating contracts in Iraq. Crest was headed by Jamal Daniel, a longtime Bush family contact, who was also on the advisory board of New Bridge Strategies, a company specifically set up "with the aim of assisting clients to evaluate and take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the U.S.-led war in Iraq."
In 2003, Neil's messy divorce proceedings revealed that he was to get $2 million in stock options from a Chinese semiconductor firm despite having limited education or business experience in that area; critics complained that the Chinese company was buying access to his brother, the president. Neil later testified that on repeated business trips to Asia, he'd had sex with women who showed up at his hotel rooms, presumably prostitutes hired by companies trying to curry favor with the White House.
Neil has also profited from George's disastrous No Child Left Behind educational policy. His company, Ignite! (partially owned by Bush Sr. and funded by Crest Investment) has been awarded with lucrative federal contracts to place its educational products in school districts across the country.
Marvin Pierce Bush: Marvin joined Bush Sr. and Neil on their Middle Eastern sales trip in 1993 and then made a mint in the investment banking business. He is a co-founder of Winston Partners, a private investment firm whose investments in military and security firms profit from Bush's "war on terror."
Having a sibling as president has helped Marvin in other ways, too. He is on the board of HCC Insurance Holdings, Inc., which had insured parts of the World Trade Center; HCC benefited from the 9/11 insurance bailout legislation pushed through by brother George.
Marvin was also on the board of Securacom, a company which provided electronic security for both Dulles International Airport and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Marvin stepped down in 2000, but how intriguing that Bush's brother was so well connected to the security of two critical locations on that fateful day.
In short, the "results are very good" for the Bush dynasty, perhaps even "better than expected," thanks to George's stint in the Oval Office. Dad's still setting up international deals. Uncle Bucky's cashing in his stock options. Brothers Neil and Marvin are laughing all the way to the bank.
It's just the American people who have paid the ultimate price. ¶ 7:27 AM 0 comments links to this post
Friday, October 27, 2006
What happened at Camp Falcon?
No American casualities- right. They wouldn't lie to us about the spike in fatalities this month, would they?
“US occupation forces are accusing Iraqi translators of leaking information on the location of arms and ammunition depots in the Falcon military base (Al-Rashid military base) to the resistance.
“We are sure that two Iraqi translators working with US forces leaked information and gave the base altitudes to the resistance. There are also doubts that a third interpreter had left the base one day before the bombing only and did not join again”.
The Iraqi source, who refused to reveal his identity, said that dozens of American soldiers were killed in those explosions. The source pointed out that six Iraqi translators were killed in those explosions. American forces refused to hand over the bodies of the dead Iraqis to their families without giving reasons...”
Who needs translators when there are Google Maps?
There are emailed reports, yet to be confirmed, that the number of dead American soldiers at Al-Rashid military base (camp Falcon) has reached 300. See below pictures on the extent of some of the devastation there as a result of just a few Grad and Katyusha rockets (cost: no more than $300 - Effect: estimated at $billions of munitions, structures and American lives wasted).
Wonder why there is a ’spike’ in American casualties this month?
Wonder why Bush is huddled with his military?
The Video shows the US “Falcon” base in Baghdad, Iraq set on fire by mujahedeen fighters with motors. At 3.56 mins you see a major explosion, a white flash, followed by a mushroom cloud.
Mushroom clouds happen whenever there is a sudden, intense plasma caused by enough of an explosive agent. I saw some of these explosions live on CNN- they went on for hours. While not thermonuclear, you can bet a lot of depleted uranium munitions went off all at once.
Those soldiers, and anyone downwind breathed a lot of uranium oxide dust that will doubtless stay with them the rest of their lives.
Their lives will also be shortened by decades if they inhaled substantial amounts of it.
While Bu$h may have cringed, Darth Rumsfled has not. After all, if billions in munitions did go up in uranium oxide, that means the Company sells billions more again to the United States government. Business is booming... ¶ 10:21 PM 0 comments links to this post
No American casualities- right. They wouldn't lie to us about the spike in fatalities this month, would they?
“US occupation forces are accusing Iraqi translators of leaking information on the location of arms and ammunition depots in the Falcon military base (Al-Rashid military base) to the resistance.
“We are sure that two Iraqi translators working with US forces leaked information and gave the base altitudes to the resistance. There are also doubts that a third interpreter had left the base one day before the bombing only and did not join again”.
The Iraqi source, who refused to reveal his identity, said that dozens of American soldiers were killed in those explosions. The source pointed out that six Iraqi translators were killed in those explosions. American forces refused to hand over the bodies of the dead Iraqis to their families without giving reasons...”
Who needs translators when there are Google Maps?
There are emailed reports, yet to be confirmed, that the number of dead American soldiers at Al-Rashid military base (camp Falcon) has reached 300. See below pictures on the extent of some of the devastation there as a result of just a few Grad and Katyusha rockets (cost: no more than $300 - Effect: estimated at $billions of munitions, structures and American lives wasted).
Wonder why there is a ’spike’ in American casualties this month?
Wonder why Bush is huddled with his military?
The Video shows the US “Falcon” base in Baghdad, Iraq set on fire by mujahedeen fighters with motors. At 3.56 mins you see a major explosion, a white flash, followed by a mushroom cloud.
Mushroom clouds happen whenever there is a sudden, intense plasma caused by enough of an explosive agent. I saw some of these explosions live on CNN- they went on for hours. While not thermonuclear, you can bet a lot of depleted uranium munitions went off all at once.
Those soldiers, and anyone downwind breathed a lot of uranium oxide dust that will doubtless stay with them the rest of their lives.
Their lives will also be shortened by decades if they inhaled substantial amounts of it.
While Bu$h may have cringed, Darth Rumsfled has not. After all, if billions in munitions did go up in uranium oxide, that means the Company sells billions more again to the United States government. Business is booming... ¶ 10:21 PM 0 comments links to this post
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Free Enterprise
WASHINGTON, Oct. 25 (AP) — The authorities in northern New Mexico have stumbled onto what appears to be classified information from Los Alamos National Laboratory while arresting a man suspected of domestic violence and dealing methamphetamine from his mobile home.
Sgt. Chuck Ney of the Los Alamos Police Department said the information was found last Friday during a search of the man’s records for evidence of a drug business.
The police alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the secret documents, which agents traced back to a woman linked to the man suspected of drug dealing, officials said. The woman is a contract employee at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said an F.B.I. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The official would say only that the documents appeared to contain classified material and were stored on a computer file...
Los Alamos, where they design build your new nukes- or Dear Leader's at any rate- has recently been taken over by Bechtel.
Aside from being the Carlyle Group's and the bin Laden family's multinational energy firm of choice, or maybe because of it, Bechtel's had more than its share of scandals.
Whatever private contractor was involved, this was serious.
...According to unconfirmed sources, the information was classified as Secret Restricted Data which means it would involve nuclear weapons data and may have concerned detection of underground nuclear weapons testing. Also unconfirmed, the person in possession of the information worked either in Technical Area 55 where all of the Lab’s plutonium is stored or in the X Division which handles nuclear weapons design data for a maintenance subcontractor of the Lab...
Why worry about Iran getting nuclear weapons from North Korea? Bechtel, who after all handles a lot of Iraq action anyway, probably can supply them with the best plutonium money can buy, and the plans to use it, too. ¶ 5:12 PM 0 comments links to this post
Sgt. Chuck Ney of the Los Alamos Police Department said the information was found last Friday during a search of the man’s records for evidence of a drug business.
The police alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the secret documents, which agents traced back to a woman linked to the man suspected of drug dealing, officials said. The woman is a contract employee at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said an F.B.I. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The official would say only that the documents appeared to contain classified material and were stored on a computer file...
Los Alamos, where they design build your new nukes- or Dear Leader's at any rate- has recently been taken over by Bechtel.
Aside from being the Carlyle Group's and the bin Laden family's multinational energy firm of choice, or maybe because of it, Bechtel's had more than its share of scandals.
Whatever private contractor was involved, this was serious.
...According to unconfirmed sources, the information was classified as Secret Restricted Data which means it would involve nuclear weapons data and may have concerned detection of underground nuclear weapons testing. Also unconfirmed, the person in possession of the information worked either in Technical Area 55 where all of the Lab’s plutonium is stored or in the X Division which handles nuclear weapons design data for a maintenance subcontractor of the Lab...
Why worry about Iran getting nuclear weapons from North Korea? Bechtel, who after all handles a lot of Iraq action anyway, probably can supply them with the best plutonium money can buy, and the plans to use it, too. ¶ 5:12 PM 0 comments links to this post
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Please Prove Us Wrong
GOP will win in November
by Stuart Kiehl
In spite of the La Cage aux Foley Pedophile Scandal, the GOP cover up, and a sense of hope on the side of the Democrats, the Republicans will retain the House and Senate this November. Why? The GOP and their corporate allies have control and the security of the voting machines we have been forced to use without our consent.
The most fundamental and primary consideration for this country, and the world, is voter disenfranchisement and fraud in the vote count. This crime occurred in 2000 and 2004 and nothing has changed for this election or 2008. Ohio and Florida are being stolen again, and other states are vulnerable.
On a near daily basis, the fraud and corruption of the voting machines is now being exposed for what it really is: a GOP power play to monopolize all aspects of voting.
The system now in place was created by a corporate/government program called Help America Vote Act, which is essentially a federally mandated program of vote counting, without any independent security oversight, done by machines made and controlled by GOP supporters, including Diebold, whose CEO publicly guaranteed Ohio to Bush in 2004. That was the presidency and they knew it. But, none of the $3.9 billion HAVA funding may be used to purchase new punch card machines or to update an existing
punch card system. In simple terms, there is no verifiable vote counting process in these machines or in this GOP controlled process, nor are other systems permitted!
A Princeton computer professor took 10 seconds to hack into a Diebold voting machine. Burger King can count the number of french fries sold daily, and all other major industrial countries have accurate and fair voting systems, but we do not. This is intentional.
The question, then, should be asked, what is the purpose of government and who controls it? The corporations or the people? Lincoln wrote, "Government of the people, by the people and for the people...shall not perish."
Well, folks, this administration is not for the people and we are perishing. Not one single piece of legislation has been passed willingly by the GOP where the people benefit over profit. The charade of helping America vote is in fact a velvet coup d'etat, ignoring what this country was founded on: no taxation without representation. The Declaration of Independence reminds us, "Governments....deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"
We have no representation if we can't vote, and the consent of the governed has been hijacked by GOP/corporate/government manipulation under the guise of fair voting.
The freedom our forefathers fought for has been prostituted by no bid private profiteering, our values and ideals perverted, our resources plundered, our treasury emptied and our hopes dashed by corporate greed lubricated with this administrations's planning and collaboration.
Solution? Today, and tomorrow, and the day after, ask every official representing you, from the local city council to federal senators, for emergency legislation for this coming election requiring that all voting equipment produce a paper record that lets voters verify how they voted, regardless of the cost or inconvenience, and to decertify the voting machines in their current configuration, as they are attempting to do in Colorado.
Do not relent. Create a groundswell. If enough towns, cities, counties and states refuse to accept this stranglehold, we will make a difference. Ultimately, this outcry will go up the political foodchain, forcing a fair federal system of vote counting.
It is time to take this country back, demanding NOW that the charade for this November's election cannot continue under the current stacked deck. Anything less is acceptance of what Mussolini called Fascism, "... the merger of State and Corporate Power."
Please make me wrong, please make this column incorrect. ¶ 11:16 PM 0 comments links to this post
by Stuart Kiehl
In spite of the La Cage aux Foley Pedophile Scandal, the GOP cover up, and a sense of hope on the side of the Democrats, the Republicans will retain the House and Senate this November. Why? The GOP and their corporate allies have control and the security of the voting machines we have been forced to use without our consent.
The most fundamental and primary consideration for this country, and the world, is voter disenfranchisement and fraud in the vote count. This crime occurred in 2000 and 2004 and nothing has changed for this election or 2008. Ohio and Florida are being stolen again, and other states are vulnerable.
On a near daily basis, the fraud and corruption of the voting machines is now being exposed for what it really is: a GOP power play to monopolize all aspects of voting.
The system now in place was created by a corporate/government program called Help America Vote Act, which is essentially a federally mandated program of vote counting, without any independent security oversight, done by machines made and controlled by GOP supporters, including Diebold, whose CEO publicly guaranteed Ohio to Bush in 2004. That was the presidency and they knew it. But, none of the $3.9 billion HAVA funding may be used to purchase new punch card machines or to update an existing
punch card system. In simple terms, there is no verifiable vote counting process in these machines or in this GOP controlled process, nor are other systems permitted!
A Princeton computer professor took 10 seconds to hack into a Diebold voting machine. Burger King can count the number of french fries sold daily, and all other major industrial countries have accurate and fair voting systems, but we do not. This is intentional.
The question, then, should be asked, what is the purpose of government and who controls it? The corporations or the people? Lincoln wrote, "Government of the people, by the people and for the people...shall not perish."
Well, folks, this administration is not for the people and we are perishing. Not one single piece of legislation has been passed willingly by the GOP where the people benefit over profit. The charade of helping America vote is in fact a velvet coup d'etat, ignoring what this country was founded on: no taxation without representation. The Declaration of Independence reminds us, "Governments....deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"
We have no representation if we can't vote, and the consent of the governed has been hijacked by GOP/corporate/government manipulation under the guise of fair voting.
The freedom our forefathers fought for has been prostituted by no bid private profiteering, our values and ideals perverted, our resources plundered, our treasury emptied and our hopes dashed by corporate greed lubricated with this administrations's planning and collaboration.
Solution? Today, and tomorrow, and the day after, ask every official representing you, from the local city council to federal senators, for emergency legislation for this coming election requiring that all voting equipment produce a paper record that lets voters verify how they voted, regardless of the cost or inconvenience, and to decertify the voting machines in their current configuration, as they are attempting to do in Colorado.
Do not relent. Create a groundswell. If enough towns, cities, counties and states refuse to accept this stranglehold, we will make a difference. Ultimately, this outcry will go up the political foodchain, forcing a fair federal system of vote counting.
It is time to take this country back, demanding NOW that the charade for this November's election cannot continue under the current stacked deck. Anything less is acceptance of what Mussolini called Fascism, "... the merger of State and Corporate Power."
Please make me wrong, please make this column incorrect. ¶ 11:16 PM 0 comments links to this post
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
It's Still the Economy, Chimpy
Pravda seeks to obfuscate the issues for Dear Leader, with an air of perplexity:
...President Bush, in hopes of winning credit for his party’s stewardship of the economy, is spending two days this week campaigning on the theme that the economy is purring. “No question that a strong economy is going to help our candidates,”
Mr. Bush said in a CNBC interview yesterday, “primarily because they have got something to run on, they can say our economy’s good because I voted for tax relief.” Well, for the top 5% of incomes, anyway.
Back to Pravda:
...But Republican candidates do not seem to be getting any traction from the glowing economic statistics with midterm elections just two weeks away.
The economy is virtually nowhere to be found among the campaign ads of embattled Republican incumbents fighting to hold onto their House or Senate seats. Nor is it showing up as a strong weapon in the arsenal of Republican governors defending their jobs from Democrats.
“I don’t know of another election cycle in which the economy was so good, yet the election prospects for the incumbent party looked so bad,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist
. “If something goes wrong, Republicans are to blame. If something goes right, Republicans don’t get credit...” None is so blind, as those who can not see beyond their own stock portfolio.
It's because it's only the top 5% of incomes that benefit from the "good" Bush economy. Bush's plans are good for his campaign supporter base, including the owners of the main$tream media, and bad for everyone else.
As you might expect, some Democrats are all over this issue. John Sweeny of the AFL-CIO:
...For workers, a "perfect storm" is already happening. Ordinary workers aren't making ends meet -- and it's not their imagination, either. As President Bush transverses the country touting a "growing" and "healthy" economy, working people are painfully aware that Bush's economic reality is not the same reality they face in their communities every day.
While corporate profits and productivity have soared, wages are a different story -- wages and salaries now make up the lowest proportion of the economy since the government began keeping records in 1947.
Working people have lost serious economic ground under Bush. The typical family's real income today is still almost $1,300 lower than in 2000, while household debt is out of sight.
The good manufacturing jobs that provide working families with a decent standard of living continue to vanish before our eyes. Since Bush took office, our country has seen nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs disappear -- including another 19,000 jobs last month alone.
Five million more people are in poverty today than in 2000, including 1 million more children. The poverty rate for black children hit a disgraceful 34.5% in 2005.
Health care coverage continues to fall: 46.6 million people were not covered by health insurance in 2005 -- that is more than 5 million people who have lost coverage since 2001. Health care costs rose three times faster than wages last year.
While Bush and his political team have mastered the art of diverting working people's attention from key economic issues in elections past, polling by Peter Hart Research suggests that America's workers won't allow that to happen this November.
Fifty-five percent of voters and 66% of union members report being dissatisfied with the current economic situation in this country. And 55% of voters and 60% of swing voters say their incomes are falling behind the cost of living...
Molly Ivins really caught this nicely today, too.
Oh, goody. According to the White House press office, President Bush will spend much of the next two weeks discussing what a swell economy we have. Did you know that the Dow Jones industrial average is at its highest point EVER? And the NASDAQ, ditto. Wow, breathtaking, huh? But the Dow is not a good indicator of how thing are really going for the majority of Americans.
I just love listening to the Bushies play with numbers. When Bush took over in 2001, he predicted a surplus of $516 billion for fiscal year 2006. Last week, the administration announced a 2006 deficit of $248 billion, missing its projection for this year by $764 billion. Bush said the numbers are “proof that pro-growth economic policies work” and are “an example of sound fiscal policies here in Washington.”
This is highly reminiscent of Dick Cheney’s recent observation about the Iraqi government, “If you look at the general, overall situation, they’re doing remarkably well.”
Bush’s main talking point on the budget is that he “cut the deficit in half”—that would be from 2004, the year the White House inflated the projected deficit for political reasons. Even conservatives disagree. Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation said, “The White House has a track record of projecting budget numbers to be a lot worse than they end up, which therefore helps them defeat the gloomy expectations and declare victory.” If Bush does manage to make the tax cuts permanent, he will add more than $3 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years. The federal budget would be virtually in balance if there had been no tax cuts.
Bush’s version of “doing remarkably well” includes a trade gap—now a record $69.9 billion—up 2.7 percent since July. “Short of a big correction in consumer spending, the best we can hope for is that the trade deficit stabilizes,” Stephen Stanley, chief economist at RBS Greenwich Capital, told Bloomberg.com.
Meanwhile, what we see in the economy as a whole is an immense shift of wealth from the poor and middle class to the very rich.
It seems a little painful to have to point this out yet again after six solid years of it, but these are lies, damn lies and statistics.
Just to give you an idea of how dependable the Bush numbers are, the Department of Health and Human Services put out a press release a few weeks ago telling senior citizens they will have “new options with low costs” and that monthly premiums in ’07 will be the same as in ’06.
“The Medicare prescription drug benefit ... just keeps getting better,” burbled HHS. They seem to have been taking too much in the way of prescription drugs. Rep. Henry Waxman, one of the most singularly useful members of Congress, found that average premiums will actually increase by over 10 percent next year. And for the lowest-priced plans, average premiums will be up over 44 percent. “It is not merely confusing arithmetic, it is deceptive advertising,” said Waxman.
While lightening the tax burden for the rich, other parts of the Bush economic program continue to undermine the middle class in this country. As you may recall, in 2005 the credit industry successfully rammed a disgraceful bankruptcy reform bill through Congress. It’s working out just the way we expected it to: Middle-class families are borrowing more than ever to make ends meet. Most families go under if: (a) they lose a job or (b) they have a health emergency crisis.
One attorney sums up the legislation’s impact: “It’s designed to make life miserable for anybody who owes money. It’s a help-the-banks, squish-the-little-guy law.”
Bush’s remarkably good economy is good only for the richest; for the rest of us, incomes are stagnant and education and healthcare costs are skyrocketing. The Republican Congress blindly rubber-stamps policies designed to help only a few. Are you better off than you were six years ago? ¶ 8:56 PM 0 comments links to this post
...President Bush, in hopes of winning credit for his party’s stewardship of the economy, is spending two days this week campaigning on the theme that the economy is purring. “No question that a strong economy is going to help our candidates,”
Mr. Bush said in a CNBC interview yesterday, “primarily because they have got something to run on, they can say our economy’s good because I voted for tax relief.” Well, for the top 5% of incomes, anyway.Back to Pravda:
...But Republican candidates do not seem to be getting any traction from the glowing economic statistics with midterm elections just two weeks away.
The economy is virtually nowhere to be found among the campaign ads of embattled Republican incumbents fighting to hold onto their House or Senate seats. Nor is it showing up as a strong weapon in the arsenal of Republican governors defending their jobs from Democrats.
“I don’t know of another election cycle in which the economy was so good, yet the election prospects for the incumbent party looked so bad,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist
. “If something goes wrong, Republicans are to blame. If something goes right, Republicans don’t get credit...” None is so blind, as those who can not see beyond their own stock portfolio.It's because it's only the top 5% of incomes that benefit from the "good" Bush economy. Bush's plans are good for his campaign supporter base, including the owners of the main$tream media, and bad for everyone else.
As you might expect, some Democrats are all over this issue. John Sweeny of the AFL-CIO:
...For workers, a "perfect storm" is already happening. Ordinary workers aren't making ends meet -- and it's not their imagination, either. As President Bush transverses the country touting a "growing" and "healthy" economy, working people are painfully aware that Bush's economic reality is not the same reality they face in their communities every day.
While corporate profits and productivity have soared, wages are a different story -- wages and salaries now make up the lowest proportion of the economy since the government began keeping records in 1947.
Working people have lost serious economic ground under Bush. The typical family's real income today is still almost $1,300 lower than in 2000, while household debt is out of sight.
The good manufacturing jobs that provide working families with a decent standard of living continue to vanish before our eyes. Since Bush took office, our country has seen nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs disappear -- including another 19,000 jobs last month alone.
Five million more people are in poverty today than in 2000, including 1 million more children. The poverty rate for black children hit a disgraceful 34.5% in 2005.
Health care coverage continues to fall: 46.6 million people were not covered by health insurance in 2005 -- that is more than 5 million people who have lost coverage since 2001. Health care costs rose three times faster than wages last year.
While Bush and his political team have mastered the art of diverting working people's attention from key economic issues in elections past, polling by Peter Hart Research suggests that America's workers won't allow that to happen this November.
Fifty-five percent of voters and 66% of union members report being dissatisfied with the current economic situation in this country. And 55% of voters and 60% of swing voters say their incomes are falling behind the cost of living...
Molly Ivins really caught this nicely today, too.
Oh, goody. According to the White House press office, President Bush will spend much of the next two weeks discussing what a swell economy we have. Did you know that the Dow Jones industrial average is at its highest point EVER? And the NASDAQ, ditto. Wow, breathtaking, huh? But the Dow is not a good indicator of how thing are really going for the majority of Americans.
I just love listening to the Bushies play with numbers. When Bush took over in 2001, he predicted a surplus of $516 billion for fiscal year 2006. Last week, the administration announced a 2006 deficit of $248 billion, missing its projection for this year by $764 billion. Bush said the numbers are “proof that pro-growth economic policies work” and are “an example of sound fiscal policies here in Washington.”
This is highly reminiscent of Dick Cheney’s recent observation about the Iraqi government, “If you look at the general, overall situation, they’re doing remarkably well.”
Bush’s main talking point on the budget is that he “cut the deficit in half”—that would be from 2004, the year the White House inflated the projected deficit for political reasons. Even conservatives disagree. Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation said, “The White House has a track record of projecting budget numbers to be a lot worse than they end up, which therefore helps them defeat the gloomy expectations and declare victory.” If Bush does manage to make the tax cuts permanent, he will add more than $3 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years. The federal budget would be virtually in balance if there had been no tax cuts.
Bush’s version of “doing remarkably well” includes a trade gap—now a record $69.9 billion—up 2.7 percent since July. “Short of a big correction in consumer spending, the best we can hope for is that the trade deficit stabilizes,” Stephen Stanley, chief economist at RBS Greenwich Capital, told Bloomberg.com.
Meanwhile, what we see in the economy as a whole is an immense shift of wealth from the poor and middle class to the very rich.
It seems a little painful to have to point this out yet again after six solid years of it, but these are lies, damn lies and statistics.Just to give you an idea of how dependable the Bush numbers are, the Department of Health and Human Services put out a press release a few weeks ago telling senior citizens they will have “new options with low costs” and that monthly premiums in ’07 will be the same as in ’06.
“The Medicare prescription drug benefit ... just keeps getting better,” burbled HHS. They seem to have been taking too much in the way of prescription drugs. Rep. Henry Waxman, one of the most singularly useful members of Congress, found that average premiums will actually increase by over 10 percent next year. And for the lowest-priced plans, average premiums will be up over 44 percent. “It is not merely confusing arithmetic, it is deceptive advertising,” said Waxman.
While lightening the tax burden for the rich, other parts of the Bush economic program continue to undermine the middle class in this country. As you may recall, in 2005 the credit industry successfully rammed a disgraceful bankruptcy reform bill through Congress. It’s working out just the way we expected it to: Middle-class families are borrowing more than ever to make ends meet. Most families go under if: (a) they lose a job or (b) they have a health emergency crisis.
One attorney sums up the legislation’s impact: “It’s designed to make life miserable for anybody who owes money. It’s a help-the-banks, squish-the-little-guy law.”
Bush’s remarkably good economy is good only for the richest; for the rest of us, incomes are stagnant and education and healthcare costs are skyrocketing. The Republican Congress blindly rubber-stamps policies designed to help only a few. Are you better off than you were six years ago? ¶ 8:56 PM 0 comments links to this post
Monday, October 23, 2006
Mixed Motivations
More good stuff from Tom Paine:
War Climates
Jeffrey Sachs
October 23, 2006
Our political systems and global politics are largely unequipped for the real challenges of today’s world. Global economic growth and rising populations are putting unprecedented stresses on the physical environment, and these stresses in turn are causing unprecedented challenges for our societies. Yet politicians are largely ignorant of these trends. Governments are not organized to meet them. And crises that are fundamentally ecological in nature are managed by outdated strategies of war and diplomacy.
Consider
, for example 
, the situation in Darfur, Sudan 
. This horrible conflict is being addressed through threats of military force, sanctions and generally the language of war and peacekeeping. Yet the undoubted origin of the conflict is the region’s extreme poverty, which was made disastrously worse in the 1980s by a drought that has essentially lasted until today. It appears that long-term climate change is leading to lower rainfall not only in Sudan, but also in much of Africa just south of the Sahara Desert—an area where life depends on the rains, and where drought means death.
Darfur has been caught in a drought-induced death trap, but nobody has seen fit to approach the Darfur crisis from the perspective of long-term development rather than the perspective of war. Darfur needs a water strategy more than a military strategy. Its 7 million people cannot survive without a new approach that gives them a chance to grow crops and water their animals. Yet all of the talk at the United Nations is about sanctions and armies, with no path to peace in sight.
Water stress is becoming a major obstacle to economic development in many parts of the world. The water crisis in Gaza is a cause of disease and suffering among Palestinians, and is a major source of underlying tensions between Palestine and Israel. Yet again, billions of dollars are spent on bombing and destruction in the region, while virtually nothing is done about the growing water crisis.
China
and India, too, will face growing water crises in the coming years, with potentially horrendous consequences. The economic takeoff of these two giants started 40 years ago with the introduction of higher agricultural output and an end to famines. Yet part of that increased agricultural output resulted from millions of wells that were sunk to tap underground water supplies for irrigation. Now the water table is falling at a dangerous pace, as the underground water is being pumped much faster than the rains are recharging it.
Moreover, aside from rainfall patterns, climate change is upsetting the flow of rivers, as glaciers, which provide a huge amount of water for irrigation and household use, are rapidly receding due to global warming. Snow pack in the mountains is melting earlier in the season, so that river water is less available during summer growing seasons. For all of these reasons, India and China are experiencing serious water crises that are likely to intensify in the future.
The United States faces risks as well. Midwestern and southwestern states have been in a prolonged drought that might well be the result of long-term warming, and the farm states rely heavily on water from a huge underground reservoir that is being depleted by over-pumping.
Just as pressures on oil and gas supplies have driven up energy prices, environmental stresses may now push up food and water prices in many parts of the world. Given the heat waves, droughts, and other climate stresses across the U.S., Europe, Australia and elsewhere this year, wheat prices are now shooting up to their highest levels in decades. Thus, environmental pressures are now hitting the bottom line—affecting incomes and livelihoods around the world.
With rising populations, economic growth and climate change, we will face intensifying droughts, hurricanes and typhoons, powerful El Nino’s, water stress, heat waves, species extinctions and more. The “soft” issues of environment and climate will become the hard and strategic issues of the 21st century. Yet there is almost no recognition of this basic truth in our governments or our global politics. People who speak about hunger and environmental crises are viewed as muddle-headed “moralists,” as opposed to the hard-headed “realists” who deal with war and peace. This is nonsense. The so-called realists just don’t understand the sources of tensions and stresses that are leading to a growing number of crises around the world.
Our governments should all establish Ministries of Sustainable Development, devoted full-time to managing the linkages between environmental change and human well-being. Agriculture ministers by themselves will not be able to cope with water shortages that farmers will face. Health ministers will not be able to cope with an increase in infectious diseases due to global warming. Environment ministers will not be able to cope with the pressures on oceans and forests, or the consequences of increasing extreme weather events like last year’s Hurricane Katrina or this year’s Typhoon Saomai—China’s worst in many decades. A new powerful ministry should be charged with coordinating the responses to climate change, water stress and other ecosystem crises.
At the global level, the world’s governments should finally understand that the treaties that they have all signed in recent years on climate, environment and biodiversity are at least as important to global security as all of the war zones and crisis hotspots that grab the headlines, budgets and attention. By focusing on the underlying challenges of sustainable development, our governments could more easily end the current crises (as in Darfur) and head off many more crises in the future.
Dr. Sachs, professor of Economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is absolutely right about what should be done.
Water as an issue
that precipitates war? You might as well try to get them to think 
about the air they breathe 
, or change the way they build their cities 
.
But how would treating these complex issues as environmental rather than religious/ ethnic/ security problems appeal to the higher emotions that cause people to think of Great Causes and march off to war?
How would treating these complex issues as environmental rather than religious/ ethnic/ security problems profit those selling a lot of guns (among other things) to all of these desperate people? ¶ 8:25 PM 0 comments links to this post
War Climates
Jeffrey Sachs
October 23, 2006
Our political systems and global politics are largely unequipped for the real challenges of today’s world. Global economic growth and rising populations are putting unprecedented stresses on the physical environment, and these stresses in turn are causing unprecedented challenges for our societies. Yet politicians are largely ignorant of these trends. Governments are not organized to meet them. And crises that are fundamentally ecological in nature are managed by outdated strategies of war and diplomacy.
Consider
, for example , the situation in Darfur, Sudan . This horrible conflict is being addressed through threats of military force, sanctions and generally the language of war and peacekeeping. Yet the undoubted origin of the conflict is the region’s extreme poverty, which was made disastrously worse in the 1980s by a drought that has essentially lasted until today. It appears that long-term climate change is leading to lower rainfall not only in Sudan, but also in much of Africa just south of the Sahara Desert—an area where life depends on the rains, and where drought means death.Darfur has been caught in a drought-induced death trap, but nobody has seen fit to approach the Darfur crisis from the perspective of long-term development rather than the perspective of war. Darfur needs a water strategy more than a military strategy. Its 7 million people cannot survive without a new approach that gives them a chance to grow crops and water their animals. Yet all of the talk at the United Nations is about sanctions and armies, with no path to peace in sight.
Water stress is becoming a major obstacle to economic development in many parts of the world. The water crisis in Gaza is a cause of disease and suffering among Palestinians, and is a major source of underlying tensions between Palestine and Israel. Yet again, billions of dollars are spent on bombing and destruction in the region, while virtually nothing is done about the growing water crisis.
China
and India, too, will face growing water crises in the coming years, with potentially horrendous consequences. The economic takeoff of these two giants started 40 years ago with the introduction of higher agricultural output and an end to famines. Yet part of that increased agricultural output resulted from millions of wells that were sunk to tap underground water supplies for irrigation. Now the water table is falling at a dangerous pace, as the underground water is being pumped much faster than the rains are recharging it.Moreover, aside from rainfall patterns, climate change is upsetting the flow of rivers, as glaciers, which provide a huge amount of water for irrigation and household use, are rapidly receding due to global warming. Snow pack in the mountains is melting earlier in the season, so that river water is less available during summer growing seasons. For all of these reasons, India and China are experiencing serious water crises that are likely to intensify in the future.
The United States faces risks as well. Midwestern and southwestern states have been in a prolonged drought that might well be the result of long-term warming, and the farm states rely heavily on water from a huge underground reservoir that is being depleted by over-pumping.
Just as pressures on oil and gas supplies have driven up energy prices, environmental stresses may now push up food and water prices in many parts of the world. Given the heat waves, droughts, and other climate stresses across the U.S., Europe, Australia and elsewhere this year, wheat prices are now shooting up to their highest levels in decades. Thus, environmental pressures are now hitting the bottom line—affecting incomes and livelihoods around the world.
With rising populations, economic growth and climate change, we will face intensifying droughts, hurricanes and typhoons, powerful El Nino’s, water stress, heat waves, species extinctions and more. The “soft” issues of environment and climate will become the hard and strategic issues of the 21st century. Yet there is almost no recognition of this basic truth in our governments or our global politics. People who speak about hunger and environmental crises are viewed as muddle-headed “moralists,” as opposed to the hard-headed “realists” who deal with war and peace. This is nonsense. The so-called realists just don’t understand the sources of tensions and stresses that are leading to a growing number of crises around the world.
Our governments should all establish Ministries of Sustainable Development, devoted full-time to managing the linkages between environmental change and human well-being. Agriculture ministers by themselves will not be able to cope with water shortages that farmers will face. Health ministers will not be able to cope with an increase in infectious diseases due to global warming. Environment ministers will not be able to cope with the pressures on oceans and forests, or the consequences of increasing extreme weather events like last year’s Hurricane Katrina or this year’s Typhoon Saomai—China’s worst in many decades. A new powerful ministry should be charged with coordinating the responses to climate change, water stress and other ecosystem crises.
At the global level, the world’s governments should finally understand that the treaties that they have all signed in recent years on climate, environment and biodiversity are at least as important to global security as all of the war zones and crisis hotspots that grab the headlines, budgets and attention. By focusing on the underlying challenges of sustainable development, our governments could more easily end the current crises (as in Darfur) and head off many more crises in the future.
Dr. Sachs, professor of Economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is absolutely right about what should be done.
Water as an issue
that precipitates war? You might as well try to get them to think about the air they breathe , or change the way they build their cities .But how would treating these complex issues as environmental rather than religious/ ethnic/ security problems appeal to the higher emotions that cause people to think of Great Causes and march off to war?
How would treating these complex issues as environmental rather than religious/ ethnic/ security problems profit those selling a lot of guns (among other things) to all of these desperate people? ¶ 8:25 PM 0 comments links to this post
Let's Hire Someone to Figure This Out
Army punts on Iraq contractor census
By Jenny Mandel
An Army effort to count the number of contractors working or living in Iraq has foundered, and a spokesman acknowledged that the census, when complete, will not meet the standards set out when it was requested.
The Office of Management and Budget in May forwarded agencies a call for data from the Army Central Command and the international forces in Iraq. It asked that they collect survey information on contractor personnel based in Iraq, including data on the camp or base at which contractors are located; the company and agreement under which work is performed; services such as mail, emergency medical care or meals obtained from the military; and whether the contractors carry weapons.
The initial data request gave a June 1 deadline. But since then, the Pentagon has repeatedly said the data was not yet available, and on Friday, an Army spokesman acknowledged that the information is not likely to be reported as originally requested. No timeline is available for when any data might be available, he said.
...Arasin said CENTCOM has had trouble getting information from the various services' contracting offices, and collecting and analyzing data from operating locations. "The issue is still being looked at," he said. "The folks who work in contracting are all forward right now."
Similar efforts to measure the size of the contractor workforce have failed in the past, including an initiative to tally Army contractors in 2000 that got bogged down by procedural hurdles.
Paul Light, a professor at the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at New York University who specializes in federal workforce issues, said industry typically has resisted head counts because they reveal how many more people work for government than are reported in federal employee figures.
"It raises questions about why there are so many contractor personnel and is easily understood by the American public," Light said. "The public may not be able to grasp the money issue -- how much is being spent -- because it is always so large, but they can get the number of employees, and that's dynamite."
In a recent report, Light analyzed what he calls "the true size of government," which he said includes civil servants, postal workers, military personnel, contractors and grantees, including state and local government officials working on federal mandates. He said his research methods produced an estimate for the contractor contribution to federal work worldwide, but did not lend themselves to the type of detailed country-by-country assessment that would be necessary to isolate the type of information CENTCOM is seeking on Iraq contractors...
Doubtless a matter of National Security, and Classified. In fact, the fact it's Classified is Classified, so all unauthorized personel reading this post should immediately report to the nearest private contractor for work camp assignment.
Back to the story:
...data for 2005 -- the most recent year available -- suggest that roughly 14.6 million people worked, directly or indirectly, for the federal government. That would represent about five and a half contractors and grantees for every federal civil servant...
Exactly who is Grover gonna strangle where
?
[with thanks] ¶ 8:00 PM 1 comments links to this post
By Jenny Mandel
An Army effort to count the number of contractors working or living in Iraq has foundered, and a spokesman acknowledged that the census, when complete, will not meet the standards set out when it was requested.
The Office of Management and Budget in May forwarded agencies a call for data from the Army Central Command and the international forces in Iraq. It asked that they collect survey information on contractor personnel based in Iraq, including data on the camp or base at which contractors are located; the company and agreement under which work is performed; services such as mail, emergency medical care or meals obtained from the military; and whether the contractors carry weapons.
The initial data request gave a June 1 deadline. But since then, the Pentagon has repeatedly said the data was not yet available, and on Friday, an Army spokesman acknowledged that the information is not likely to be reported as originally requested. No timeline is available for when any data might be available, he said.
...Arasin said CENTCOM has had trouble getting information from the various services' contracting offices, and collecting and analyzing data from operating locations. "The issue is still being looked at," he said. "The folks who work in contracting are all forward right now."
Similar efforts to measure the size of the contractor workforce have failed in the past, including an initiative to tally Army contractors in 2000 that got bogged down by procedural hurdles.
Paul Light, a professor at the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at New York University who specializes in federal workforce issues, said industry typically has resisted head counts because they reveal how many more people work for government than are reported in federal employee figures.
"It raises questions about why there are so many contractor personnel and is easily understood by the American public," Light said. "The public may not be able to grasp the money issue -- how much is being spent -- because it is always so large, but they can get the number of employees, and that's dynamite."
In a recent report, Light analyzed what he calls "the true size of government," which he said includes civil servants, postal workers, military personnel, contractors and grantees, including state and local government officials working on federal mandates. He said his research methods produced an estimate for the contractor contribution to federal work worldwide, but did not lend themselves to the type of detailed country-by-country assessment that would be necessary to isolate the type of information CENTCOM is seeking on Iraq contractors...
Doubtless a matter of National Security, and Classified. In fact, the fact it's Classified is Classified, so all unauthorized personel reading this post should immediately report to the nearest private contractor for work camp assignment.
Back to the story:
...data for 2005 -- the most recent year available -- suggest that roughly 14.6 million people worked, directly or indirectly, for the federal government. That would represent about five and a half contractors and grantees for every federal civil servant...
Exactly who is Grover gonna strangle where
?[with thanks] ¶ 8:00 PM 1 comments links to this post
Say hi to the KGB
It turns out the NSA isn't the only thing to think about out here in the high plains of cyberspace.
Veronica Khokholva via Xeni Jardin:
The Russian-language blogosphere (commonly known as ZheZhe) is on fire: some users are shutting down their blogs, others are emigrating to the virtual Trinidad & Tobago - all because LiveJournal.com's owner Six Apart has decided to team up with the Russian internet company Sup, founded this year by Aleksandr Mamut, a Russian "oligarch," and Andrew Paulson, an American entrepreneur.
...
Assurances from managers of Six Apart and Sup have left many unconvinced and still concerned over whether the Russian security services would gain access to their personal information and whether the new Abuse Team would carry out ruthless purges...
Somehow I think the purges they're talking about aren't just kicking people off the blogroll.
But it's inevitable. The KGB, long a tool of organized crime in Russia (and vice-versa), meets DynCorp/ CIA/ NSA. It's impossible to tell who's adopted whose tacics, because these boys have been playing the same game all along. ¶ 8:03 AM 1 comments links to this post
Veronica Khokholva via Xeni Jardin:
The Russian-language blogosphere (commonly known as ZheZhe) is on fire: some users are shutting down their blogs, others are emigrating to the virtual Trinidad & Tobago - all because LiveJournal.com's owner Six Apart has decided to team up with the Russian internet company Sup, founded this year by Aleksandr Mamut, a Russian "oligarch," and Andrew Paulson, an American entrepreneur.
...
Assurances from managers of Six Apart and Sup have left many unconvinced and still concerned over whether the Russian security services would gain access to their personal information and whether the new Abuse Team would carry out ruthless purges...
Somehow I think the purges they're talking about aren't just kicking people off the blogroll.
But it's inevitable. The KGB, long a tool of organized crime in Russia (and vice-versa), meets DynCorp/ CIA/ NSA. It's impossible to tell who's adopted whose tacics, because these boys have been playing the same game all along. ¶ 8:03 AM 1 comments links to this post
Sunday, October 22, 2006
The Language of the Serpent
If you could stand on Mars -- what might you see? Like the robotic Opportunity rover rolling across the red planet, you might well see vast plains of red sand, an orange tinted sky, and wispy light clouds. The Opportunity rover captured just such a vista after arriving at Victoria Crater
earlier this month, albeit in a completely different direction from the large crater. Unlike other Martian vistas, few rocks are visible in this exaggerated color image mosaic. The distant red horizon is so flat and featureless that it appears similar to the horizon toward a calm blue ocean on Earth. Clouds on Mars can be composed of either carbon dioxide ice or water ice, and can move quickly, like clouds move on Earth. The red dust in the Martian air can change the sky color above Mars from the blue that occurs above Earth toward the red, with the exact color depending on the density and particle size of the floating dust particles.
From the sublime to the ridiculous. All helment and no starship. Theresa Hitchens and Haninah Levine:
After four years and some 35 drafts, the Bush White House has finally released its long-awaited rewrite of the U.S. National Space Policy. Obviously, the administration was keen to get the word out – they quietly posted a 10-page unclassified summary [.pdf] on the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s website at 5 pm on Oct. 6 – the Friday before the Columbus Day long weekend...
While the Clinton version focuses on civil and commercial space, the Bush NSP gives primacy to national security and military space. Example: of Clinton’s five goals for U.S. space programs, two mention national security; of Bush’s six goals, four are related to national security and defense.
While the Clinton policy aimed to highlight international cooperation and collective security in space, the Bush NSP takes a go–it-alone stance, using strong language that asserts U.S. unilateral rights in space while possibly also being intended to "negate" the rights of other space-faring nations. In ominous tones, the document threatens in one section to "dissuade or deter others from either impeding [U.S.] rights or developing capabilities intended to do so" – raising the specter of preemptive action against other nations’ dual-use space technology.
Indeed, even as the Bush policy emphasizes the importance of space security, it goes out of its way to make clear that this security may not, under any circumstances, come from (shudder) international law: "The United States will oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space. Proposed arms control agreements or restrictions must not impair the rights of the United States to conduce research, development, testing and operations or other activities in space for U.S. national interests" [emphasis added].
While the new NSP doesn't go as far as some space hawks wanted it to in openly endorsing the strategy of fighting "in, from and through" space, neither has it served to put a blanket – even a thin one – on those ambitions. And in taking a decidedly "us against them" tone, it is likely to further cement the view from abroad that the United States has taken on the role of a "Lone Space Cowboy." And as much as people love John Wayne movies overseas, that will not be a good thing.
Indeed. And some people even with in the Company aren't impressed. The editor at Pravda, for one:
The Bush administration has adopted a jingoistic and downright belligerent tone toward space operations. In a new “national space policy” posted without fanfare on an obscure government Web site, and in recent speeches, it has signaled its determination to be pre-eminent in space — as it is in air power and sea power — while opposing any treaties that might curtail any American action there.
This chest-thumping is being portrayed as a modest extension of the Clinton administration’s space policy issued a decade ago. And so far there is no mention of putting American weapons in space. But the more aggressive tone of the Bush policy may undercut international cooperation on civilian space projects — a goal to which the new policy subscribes — or set off an eventual arms race in space.
The new policy reflects the worst tendencies of the Bush administration — a unilateral drive for supremacy and a rejection of treaties. And it comes just as the White House is desperately seeking help to rein in the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran. That effort depends heavily on cooperation from China and Russia, two countries with their own active space programs.
The administration regards the policy as a necessary update to reflect how important space is becoming for the American economy and defense. But outside experts who have parsed the language are struck by how forceful and nationalistic it sounds.
Whereas the 1996 policy opened with assurances that the United States would pursue greater levels of partnership and cooperation in space, the new policy states: “In this new century, those who effectively utilize space will enjoy added prosperity and security and will hold a substantial advantage over those who do not. Freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power.”
The only solace is that the new policy does not endorse placing weapons in space or fighting in, through or from space, as the Air Force has been urging. But neither does it rule out these activities.
In keeping with the more muscular stance, the administration is also opposing any negotiations on a treaty to prevent an arms race in outer space — arguing that it may impede America’s ability to defend its satellites from ground-based weapons. That seems shortsighted. An international treaty to keep space free of weapons might well provide greater security than a unilateral declaration that we will do whatever we have to do to preserve our own space assets.
Michael Griffin, the NASA administrator, insisted he did not intend to sound jingoistic when he addressed a conference in Spain this month — but he sure came across that way. He wondered aloud what language future settlers of the Moon and Mars would speak. “Will my language be passed down over the generations to future lunar colonies?” he asked. “Or will another, bolder or more persistent culture surpass our efforts and put their own stamp on the predominant lunar society of the far future?”
We fear the old notion that space might provide the perfect arena for international cooperation may be yielding to a new era of competition — one not seen since the cold war race to the moon.
Don't worry, Mikey. That "bolder and more persistent culture"
is probably quite at home with DynCorp tactics.
¶ 10:32 PM 0 comments
links to this post
If you could stand on Mars -- what might you see? Like the robotic Opportunity rover rolling across the red planet, you might well see vast plains of red sand, an orange tinted sky, and wispy light clouds. The Opportunity rover captured just such a vista after arriving at Victoria Crater
earlier this month, albeit in a completely different direction from the large crater. Unlike other Martian vistas, few rocks are visible in this exaggerated color image mosaic. The distant red horizon is so flat and featureless that it appears similar to the horizon toward a calm blue ocean on Earth. Clouds on Mars can be composed of either carbon dioxide ice or water ice, and can move quickly, like clouds move on Earth. The red dust in the Martian air can change the sky color above Mars from the blue that occurs above Earth toward the red, with the exact color depending on the density and particle size of the floating dust particles.From the sublime to the ridiculous. All helment and no starship. Theresa Hitchens and Haninah Levine:
After four years and some 35 drafts, the Bush White House has finally released its long-awaited rewrite of the U.S. National Space Policy. Obviously, the administration was keen to get the word out – they quietly posted a 10-page unclassified summary [.pdf] on the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s website at 5 pm on Oct. 6 – the Friday before the Columbus Day long weekend...
While the Clinton version focuses on civil and commercial space, the Bush NSP gives primacy to national security and military space. Example: of Clinton’s five goals for U.S. space programs, two mention national security; of Bush’s six goals, four are related to national security and defense.
While the Clinton policy aimed to highlight international cooperation and collective security in space, the Bush NSP takes a go–it-alone stance, using strong language that asserts U.S. unilateral rights in space while possibly also being intended to "negate" the rights of other space-faring nations. In ominous tones, the document threatens in one section to "dissuade or deter others from either impeding [U.S.] rights or developing capabilities intended to do so" – raising the specter of preemptive action against other nations’ dual-use space technology.
Indeed, even as the Bush policy emphasizes the importance of space security, it goes out of its way to make clear that this security may not, under any circumstances, come from (shudder) international law: "The United States will oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space. Proposed arms control agreements or restrictions must not impair the rights of the United States to conduce research, development, testing and operations or other activities in space for U.S. national interests" [emphasis added].
While the new NSP doesn't go as far as some space hawks wanted it to in openly endorsing the strategy of fighting "in, from and through" space, neither has it served to put a blanket – even a thin one – on those ambitions. And in taking a decidedly "us against them" tone, it is likely to further cement the view from abroad that the United States has taken on the role of a "Lone Space Cowboy." And as much as people love John Wayne movies overseas, that will not be a good thing.
Indeed. And some people even with in the Company aren't impressed. The editor at Pravda, for one:
The Bush administration has adopted a jingoistic and downright belligerent tone toward space operations. In a new “national space policy” posted without fanfare on an obscure government Web site, and in recent speeches, it has signaled its determination to be pre-eminent in space — as it is in air power and sea power — while opposing any treaties that might curtail any American action there.
This chest-thumping is being portrayed as a modest extension of the Clinton administration’s space policy issued a decade ago. And so far there is no mention of putting American weapons in space. But the more aggressive tone of the Bush policy may undercut international cooperation on civilian space projects — a goal to which the new policy subscribes — or set off an eventual arms race in space.
The new policy reflects the worst tendencies of the Bush administration — a unilateral drive for supremacy and a rejection of treaties. And it comes just as the White House is desperately seeking help to rein in the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran. That effort depends heavily on cooperation from China and Russia, two countries with their own active space programs.
The administration regards the policy as a necessary update to reflect how important space is becoming for the American economy and defense. But outside experts who have parsed the language are struck by how forceful and nationalistic it sounds.
Whereas the 1996 policy opened with assurances that the United States would pursue greater levels of partnership and cooperation in space, the new policy states: “In this new century, those who effectively utilize space will enjoy added prosperity and security and will hold a substantial advantage over those who do not. Freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power.”
The only solace is that the new policy does not endorse placing weapons in space or fighting in, through or from space, as the Air Force has been urging. But neither does it rule out these activities.
In keeping with the more muscular stance, the administration is also opposing any negotiations on a treaty to prevent an arms race in outer space — arguing that it may impede America’s ability to defend its satellites from ground-based weapons. That seems shortsighted. An international treaty to keep space free of weapons might well provide greater security than a unilateral declaration that we will do whatever we have to do to preserve our own space assets.
Michael Griffin, the NASA administrator, insisted he did not intend to sound jingoistic when he addressed a conference in Spain this month — but he sure came across that way. He wondered aloud what language future settlers of the Moon and Mars would speak. “Will my language be passed down over the generations to future lunar colonies?” he asked. “Or will another, bolder or more persistent culture surpass our efforts and put their own stamp on the predominant lunar society of the far future?”
We fear the old notion that space might provide the perfect arena for international cooperation may be yielding to a new era of competition — one not seen since the cold war race to the moon.
Don't worry, Mikey. That "bolder and more persistent culture"
is probably quite at home with DynCorp tactics.
¶ 10:32 PM 0 comments
links to this post
A Little More than Sunspots
Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann at Real Climate do a takedown of the oil industry-funded experts who assert the increased global temperatures are purely solar driven.
To do so, they do an analysis of this recent review in Nature (by P. Foukal1, C. Fröhlich, H. Spruit and T. M. L. Wigley, Nature 443, 161-166(14 September 2006) | doi:10.1038/nature05072) concerning just this effect. Given in abstract but graphically supplemented:
Variations in solar luminosity and their effect on the Earth's climate
Variations in the Sun's total energy output (luminosity) are caused by changing dark (sunspot) and bright structures on the solar disk during the 11-year sunspot cycle.
The variations measured from spacecraft since 1978 are too small to have contributed appreciably to accelerated global warming over the past 30 years. In this Review, we show that detailed analysis of these small output variations has greatly advanced our understanding of solar luminosity change, and this new understanding indicates that brightening of the Sun is unlikely to have had a significant influence on global warming since the seventeenth century. 
Additional climate forcing by changes in the Sun's output of ultraviolet light, and of magnetized plasmas, cannot be ruled out. The suggested mechanisms are, however, too complex to evaluate meaningfully at present.
Which is the nice careful, way scientists say: it sure as Hell doesn't look like brightness is driving the temperature increase, but yeah, it might be something we can't measure.
Now that's a reality-based statement. ¶ 8:50 AM 0 comments links to this post
To do so, they do an analysis of this recent review in Nature (by P. Foukal1, C. Fröhlich, H. Spruit and T. M. L. Wigley, Nature 443, 161-166(14 September 2006) | doi:10.1038/nature05072) concerning just this effect. Given in abstract but graphically supplemented:
Variations in solar luminosity and their effect on the Earth's climate
Variations in the Sun's total energy output (luminosity) are caused by changing dark (sunspot) and bright structures on the solar disk during the 11-year sunspot cycle.
The variations measured from spacecraft since 1978 are too small to have contributed appreciably to accelerated global warming over the past 30 years. In this Review, we show that detailed analysis of these small output variations has greatly advanced our understanding of solar luminosity change, and this new understanding indicates that brightening of the Sun is unlikely to have had a significant influence on global warming since the seventeenth century. Additional climate forcing by changes in the Sun's output of ultraviolet light, and of magnetized plasmas, cannot be ruled out. The suggested mechanisms are, however, too complex to evaluate meaningfully at present.Which is the nice careful, way scientists say: it sure as Hell doesn't look like brightness is driving the temperature increase, but yeah, it might be something we can't measure.
Now that's a reality-based statement. ¶ 8:50 AM 0 comments links to this post
Saturday, October 21, 2006
L'état vous veut
Moving quickly to implement the bill signed by President Bush this week that authorizes military trials of enemy combatants, the administration has formally notified the U.S. District Court here that it no longer has jurisdiction to consider hundreds of habeas corpus petitions filed by inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.
In a notice dated Wednesday, the Justice Department listed 196 pending habeas cases, some of which cover groups of detainees. The new Military Commissions Act (MCA), it said, provides that "no court, justice, or judge" can consider those petitions or other actions related to treatment or imprisonment filed by anyone designated as an enemy combatant, now or in the future.
Beyond those already imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere, the law applies to all non-U.S. citizens, including permanent U.S. residents.
The new law already has been challenged as unconstitutional by lawyers representing the petitioners. The issue of detainee rights is likely to reach the Supreme Court for a third time...
The third strike for Habeas Corpus.
And it's not just for people who aren't American citizens, campers. As pointed out by Peter Van Erp to the esteemed Dr. Juan Cole's virtual classroom, although the original Senate version specified the law applied to non citizens, that wording was removed by the House and wasn't present in the version our Dear Leader signed. Instead, it was:
" '...a person who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense.'
"When the Senate version originally passed, the version published in Thomas as “Engrossed as Agreed to or Passed by Senate” ( http://thomas.loc.gov/) included that language. That has lead to most of the media stating, as you did, that the Military Commissions Act does not apply to American citizens.
"In the past two weeks since the Senate passed S 3930, the published version has been changed to align with the House.
"I can only speculate that the language in the published version of S 3930 was not changed immediately after passage in order to mislead the media. The other possibility is that the Senate passed the bill as originally written, and persons unknown changed the published version in order to avoid the need for a reconciliation vote where the import of the bill could be revisited. In any case, the various efforts of the ACLU and others to correct the public perception are lost in the general furor, and the media keep repeating that the bill only applies to them. We have met the enemy and he is us..."
If the Blackwater/ DynCorp mercs working your neighborhood for the usual terra'ist suspects (hypothetically) under the Authority of Darth Rumsfeld say you're an Enemy Combatant because you couldn't pay 'em off, to the work camp you go. The Company needs a certain number of warm bodies occupying their facility to justify their budget. Nothing personal.
More interesting Constitutional points at Informed Comment here, and all over the good doctor's site. ¶ 6:06 PM 0 comments links to this post
In a notice dated Wednesday, the Justice Department listed 196 pending habeas cases, some of which cover groups of detainees. The new Military Commissions Act (MCA), it said, provides that "no court, justice, or judge" can consider those petitions or other actions related to treatment or imprisonment filed by anyone designated as an enemy combatant, now or in the future.
Beyond those already imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere, the law applies to all non-U.S. citizens, including permanent U.S. residents.
The new law already has been challenged as unconstitutional by lawyers representing the petitioners. The issue of detainee rights is likely to reach the Supreme Court for a third time...
The third strike for Habeas Corpus.
And it's not just for people who aren't American citizens, campers. As pointed out by Peter Van Erp to the esteemed Dr. Juan Cole's virtual classroom, although the original Senate version specified the law applied to non citizens, that wording was removed by the House and wasn't present in the version our Dear Leader signed. Instead, it was:
" '...a person who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense.'
"When the Senate version originally passed, the version published in Thomas as “Engrossed as Agreed to or Passed by Senate” ( http://thomas.loc.gov/) included that language. That has lead to most of the media stating, as you did, that the Military Commissions Act does not apply to American citizens.
"In the past two weeks since the Senate passed S 3930, the published version has been changed to align with the House.
"I can only speculate that the language in the published version of S 3930 was not changed immediately after passage in order to mislead the media. The other possibility is that the Senate passed the bill as originally written, and persons unknown changed the published version in order to avoid the need for a reconciliation vote where the import of the bill could be revisited. In any case, the various efforts of the ACLU and others to correct the public perception are lost in the general furor, and the media keep repeating that the bill only applies to them. We have met the enemy and he is us..."
If the Blackwater/ DynCorp mercs working your neighborhood for the usual terra'ist suspects (hypothetically) under the Authority of Darth Rumsfeld say you're an Enemy Combatant because you couldn't pay 'em off, to the work camp you go. The Company needs a certain number of warm bodies occupying their facility to justify their budget. Nothing personal.
More interesting Constitutional points at Informed Comment here, and all over the good doctor's site. ¶ 6:06 PM 0 comments links to this post
Company Soapbox
It's always good to hear from William E. Kennard, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 1997 to 2001, on the board of The New York Times.
And it's even more amusing to read his words.
It seems those of us in Blogistan, Left Behind or Righteous, just don't have our priorities right.
Any serious discussion of the future of the Internet should start with a basic fact: broadband is transforming every facet of communications, from entertainment and telephone services to delivery of vital services like health care. But this also means that the digital divide, once defined as the chasm separating those who had access to narrowband dial-up Internet and those who didn’t, has become a broadband digital divide.
The nation should have a full-scale policy debate about the direction of the broadband Internet, especially about how to make sure that all Americans get access to broadband connections.
Unfortunately, the current debate in Washington is over “net neutrality” — that is, should network providers be able to charge some companies special fees for faster bandwidth. This is essentially a battle between the extremely wealthy (Google, Amazon and other high-tech giants, which oppose such a move) and the merely rich (the telephone and cable industries). In the past year, collectively they have spent $50 million on lobbying and advertising, effectively preventing Congress and the public from dealing with more pressing issues...
Yes, pity the poor telecoms, mired up with all those net neutrality nattering natterbobs of negatism. You know those limousine liberals at Google and Amazon hate the hard working blue collar types that own AT&T...
...First, to ensure that broadband reaches into rural, low income and other underserved communities, Congress should reform the Universal Service Fund, the federal subsidy paid to companies that provide telephone service to rural areas. For decades, the fund has been financed by a federal fee or surcharge that consumers pay on interstate phone calls. But the fund in its current form is not an effective way to support expanded broadband access. It is not fair to expect telephone consumers to bear the sole burden of the subsidy, and the decline in revenue from traditional long-distance calling is shrinking the base for contributions to the fund.
We must find a new source of revenue for the fund that does not exclusively tax users of the phone network. And we should adopt a much more efficient way to distribute precious fund dollars. All communications companies — telephone, cable TV or wireless network operators — that want government financing to provide broadband services to specific underserved communities should submit competitive bids to the fund. The F.C.C.’s chairman, Kevin Martin, has opened the debate on this proposal, called a reverse auction, which would ensure that only the most efficient companies would be granted subsidies to provide service to rural areas. This is a step in the right direction...
Reverse auction? Ya gotta wonder what kind of scam that is. The Feds hold an auction to figure out how much cash they give telcoms?
...Second, Congress should put all broadband providers on a level playing field. Both the cable and telephone industries are racing to provide a bundle of services to consumers. Each wants to be the consumer’s one-stop shop for video, voice and data services. Unfortunately, the legacy of historic regulation puts the telephone companies at a serious regulatory disadvantage in quickly deploying video services...
Yup, it's those pesky gummint regulations. Look how well deregulation worked for, example, Enron. Now there's a model the Company loves!
...Both industries could benefit from national franchising legislation that would streamline the franchising process and promote innovation and competition. (Disclosure: Some companies in which I invest at The Carlyle Group could also benefit from the wave of investment that would result from such legislation...)
Really? Who woulda knowed? So now it's okay, right, you've assured us how nonpartisan and disinterested you are.
Good ol' Slick Willie Kennard, the shyster responsible for turning the Gray Lady into a courtesan for the Powers. It's always nice to know what you think, Willie. I always appreciate an obvious crook. ¶ 5:36 PM 2 comments links to this post
And it's even more amusing to read his words.
It seems those of us in Blogistan, Left Behind or Righteous, just don't have our priorities right.
Any serious discussion of the future of the Internet should start with a basic fact: broadband is transforming every facet of communications, from entertainment and telephone services to delivery of vital services like health care. But this also means that the digital divide, once defined as the chasm separating those who had access to narrowband dial-up Internet and those who didn’t, has become a broadband digital divide.
The nation should have a full-scale policy debate about the direction of the broadband Internet, especially about how to make sure that all Americans get access to broadband connections.
Unfortunately, the current debate in Washington is over “net neutrality” — that is, should network providers be able to charge some companies special fees for faster bandwidth. This is essentially a battle between the extremely wealthy (Google, Amazon and other high-tech giants, which oppose such a move) and the merely rich (the telephone and cable industries). In the past year, collectively they have spent $50 million on lobbying and advertising, effectively preventing Congress and the public from dealing with more pressing issues...
Yes, pity the poor telecoms, mired up with all those net neutrality nattering natterbobs of negatism. You know those limousine liberals at Google and Amazon hate the hard working blue collar types that own AT&T...
...First, to ensure that broadband reaches into rural, low income and other underserved communities, Congress should reform the Universal Service Fund, the federal subsidy paid to companies that provide telephone service to rural areas. For decades, the fund has been financed by a federal fee or surcharge that consumers pay on interstate phone calls. But the fund in its current form is not an effective way to support expanded broadband access. It is not fair to expect telephone consumers to bear the sole burden of the subsidy, and the decline in revenue from traditional long-distance calling is shrinking the base for contributions to the fund.
We must find a new source of revenue for the fund that does not exclusively tax users of the phone network. And we should adopt a much more efficient way to distribute precious fund dollars. All communications companies — telephone, cable TV or wireless network operators — that want government financing to provide broadband services to specific underserved communities should submit competitive bids to the fund. The F.C.C.’s chairman, Kevin Martin, has opened the debate on this proposal, called a reverse auction, which would ensure that only the most efficient companies would be granted subsidies to provide service to rural areas. This is a step in the right direction...
Reverse auction? Ya gotta wonder what kind of scam that is. The Feds hold an auction to figure out how much cash they give telcoms?
...Second, Congress should put all broadband providers on a level playing field. Both the cable and telephone industries are racing to provide a bundle of services to consumers. Each wants to be the consumer’s one-stop shop for video, voice and data services. Unfortunately, the legacy of historic regulation puts the telephone companies at a serious regulatory disadvantage in quickly deploying video services...
Yup, it's those pesky gummint regulations. Look how well deregulation worked for, example, Enron. Now there's a model the Company loves!
...Both industries could benefit from national franchising legislation that would streamline the franchising process and promote innovation and competition. (Disclosure: Some companies in which I invest at The Carlyle Group could also benefit from the wave of investment that would result from such legislation...)
Really? Who woulda knowed? So now it's okay, right, you've assured us how nonpartisan and disinterested you are.
Good ol' Slick Willie Kennard, the shyster responsible for turning the Gray Lady into a courtesan for the Powers. It's always nice to know what you think, Willie. I always appreciate an obvious crook. ¶ 5:36 PM 2 comments links to this post
New and Improved TIA Beta
The Eye of Sauron cops a new feel.
Ready for your test drive?
Shane Harris at Defense Tech:
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is building a new terrorist profiling system, called Tangram. What's wrong with the old profiling systems, you might ask? Well, according to an unclassified document describing Tangram, they're not all that good at catching terrorists.
The document, which is a description of the Tangram program for potential contractors, describes other, existing profiling and detection systems that haven't moved beyond so-called "guilt-by-association models," which link suspected terrorists to potential associates, but apparently don't tell analysts much about why those links are significant. Tangram wants to improve upon these methods, as well as investigate the effectiveness of other detection links such as "collective inferencing," which attempt to create suspicion scores of entire networks of people simultaneously.
Tangram's pedigree also is familiar. It is apparently the next generation of DARPA's Total Information Awareness system, which has been conducted in secret since Congress pulled public funding on the project in 2003. TIA programs form the foundation for Tangram, the document describing the system shows. (With one big difference: no privacy protections.)
Obviously, people without terra'ist links have no need to worry.
...Read the full story on Tangram in National Journal here.
Collective inferencing. I like that. How many degrees of separation do you require for your work camp/ waterboarding invitation? ¶ 7:21 AM 0 comments links to this post
Ready for your test drive?
Shane Harris at Defense Tech:
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is building a new terrorist profiling system, called Tangram. What's wrong with the old profiling systems, you might ask? Well, according to an unclassified document describing Tangram, they're not all that good at catching terrorists.
The document, which is a description of the Tangram program for potential contractors, describes other, existing profiling and detection systems that haven't moved beyond so-called "guilt-by-association models," which link suspected terrorists to potential associates, but apparently don't tell analysts much about why those links are significant. Tangram wants to improve upon these methods, as well as investigate the effectiveness of other detection links such as "collective inferencing," which attempt to create suspicion scores of entire networks of people simultaneously.
Tangram's pedigree also is familiar. It is apparently the next generation of DARPA's Total Information Awareness system, which has been conducted in secret since Congress pulled public funding on the project in 2003. TIA programs form the foundation for Tangram, the document describing the system shows. (With one big difference: no privacy protections.)
Obviously, people without terra'ist links have no need to worry. ...Read the full story on Tangram in National Journal here.
Collective inferencing. I like that. How many degrees of separation do you require for your work camp/ waterboarding invitation? ¶ 7:21 AM 0 comments links to this post
Friday, October 20, 2006
MsTriangulation
Rosa Brooks at the Los Angeles Times via Common Dreams:
Has Hillary Clinton been watching too many episodes of "24," or is she just determined to prove that she really is entirely without principles?
Whichever it is, Clinton hit a new low last week, telling the New York Daily News that the president should have "some lawful authority" to use torture or other "severe" interrogation methods in a so-called ticking-bomb scenario.
These comments appear to directly contradict her previous statements on the Military Commissions Act, which President Bush signed into law Tuesday. In late September, Clinton objected that the bill "undermines the Geneva Conventions by allowing the president to issue executive orders to redefine what are permissible interrogation techniques. Have we fallen so low as to debate how much torture we are willing to stomach?"
It sure looks that way.
The ticking-bomb scenario has routinely been used to justify the legalization of torture in exceptional circumstances. This is how the argument goes: You capture the terrorist who has just placed a nuclear bomb somewhere in a major American city. If you can't locate and disarm the bomb, millions of people will die. If the terrorist won't talk, should you torture him until he tells you what you want to know?
When you put it that way, of course, few of us would decline to torture the terrorist...
As one of the few, let me point out, what you want to know would in all likelihood not be what you need to know in such a circumstance.
That's because suicidal mass murderers don't care, and torture only confirms their hatred.
That's an incredibly stupid straw man of a scenario, and every time we accept it as an argument, we argue about a fallacy.
But back to our post:
...Clinton ought to know better. Plenty of immoral things might conceivably be justified in far-fetched hypothetical situations, but that doesn't mean the law should bless those exceptions in advance.
Take treason. Is it possible to construct far-fetched hypothetical situations in which treason might be justified? Sure. If one were faced with a choice between betraying one's country and allowing the Earth to be destroyed, treason might well be morally justified. But that doesn't mean we should pass laws laying out the conditions under which treason would be permissible.
Or how about rape? If torture can be justified by utilitarian principles, then in some "very, very limited circumstances," rape can presumably be justified as well. Would Clinton — would any American — truly want to see legislation laying out the unique circumstances in which rape should be permitted?
No. We really, really don't want to go there.
Agreed.
Jim Henley has a good take on this point [thanks, Avedon]:
Let’s say you’ve caught a suspect and you’re sure that he’s a terrorist, and you’re sure there’s a nuclear bomb planted somewhere in Manhattan, and you’re sure that he knows where the nuclear device has been planted in Manhattan, and you’re sure that this particular terrorist has been trained to resist torture just long enough that you could never get the true location of the bomb out of him in time. But you’re also sure that this particular terrorist is a pervert! And he tells you that if you’ll let him watch you rape your own child in front of him, he’ll tell you exactly where the bomb is and how to disarm it. And you’re sure that he will, because your intelligence is that good in exactly that way.
Wow! What a fascinating hypothetical, huh? And really, no less unlikely than the ticking bomb scenario you’re more familiar with, when you consider just how precisely the foundation of that dilemma has to be laid. So how come we hear so much about the other one and nothing about mine?
The answer is simple: State agents don’t have any ambition to rape their own children...
Good Occam's Razor, Jim.
Back to Rosa Brooks:
...Clinton was right about one thing: When you start to contemplate writing those "very, very narrow" exceptions into law, you've fallen as low as it's possible to go.
Once again, we Democrats misjudge the depths to which people can fall.
Rosa Brooks has no idea how low it can get. ¶ 10:14 PM 0 comments links to this post
Rosa Brooks at the Los Angeles Times via Common Dreams:
Has Hillary Clinton been watching too many episodes of "24," or is she just determined to prove that she really is entirely without principles?
Whichever it is, Clinton hit a new low last week, telling the New York Daily News that the president should have "some lawful authority" to use torture or other "severe" interrogation methods in a so-called ticking-bomb scenario.
These comments appear to directly contradict her previous statements on the Military Commissions Act, which President Bush signed into law Tuesday. In late September, Clinton objected that the bill "undermines the Geneva Conventions by allowing the president to issue executive orders to redefine what are permissible interrogation techniques. Have we fallen so low as to debate how much torture we are willing to stomach?"
It sure looks that way.
The ticking-bomb scenario has routinely been used to justify the legalization of torture in exceptional circumstances. This is how the argument goes: You capture the terrorist who has just placed a nuclear bomb somewhere in a major American city. If you can't locate and disarm the bomb, millions of people will die. If the terrorist won't talk, should you torture him until he tells you what you want to know?
When you put it that way, of course, few of us would decline to torture the terrorist...
As one of the few, let me point out, what you want to know would in all likelihood not be what you need to know in such a circumstance.
That's because suicidal mass murderers don't care, and torture only confirms their hatred.
That's an incredibly stupid straw man of a scenario, and every time we accept it as an argument, we argue about a fallacy.
But back to our post:
...Clinton ought to know better. Plenty of immoral things might conceivably be justified in far-fetched hypothetical situations, but that doesn't mean the law should bless those exceptions in advance.
Take treason. Is it possible to construct far-fetched hypothetical situations in which treason might be justified? Sure. If one were faced with a choice between betraying one's country and allowing the Earth to be destroyed, treason might well be morally justified. But that doesn't mean we should pass laws laying out the conditions under which treason would be permissible.
Or how about rape? If torture can be justified by utilitarian principles, then in some "very, very limited circumstances," rape can presumably be justified as well. Would Clinton — would any American — truly want to see legislation laying out the unique circumstances in which rape should be permitted?
No. We really, really don't want to go there.
Agreed.
Jim Henley has a good take on this point [thanks, Avedon]:
Let’s say you’ve caught a suspect and you’re sure that he’s a terrorist, and you’re sure there’s a nuclear bomb planted somewhere in Manhattan, and you’re sure that he knows where the nuclear device has been planted in Manhattan, and you’re sure that this particular terrorist has been trained to resist torture just long enough that you could never get the true location of the bomb out of him in time. But you’re also sure that this particular terrorist is a pervert! And he tells you that if you’ll let him watch you rape your own child in front of him, he’ll tell you exactly where the bomb is and how to disarm it. And you’re sure that he will, because your intelligence is that good in exactly that way.
Wow! What a fascinating hypothetical, huh? And really, no less unlikely than the ticking bomb scenario you’re more familiar with, when you consider just how precisely the foundation of that dilemma has to be laid. So how come we hear so much about the other one and nothing about mine?
The answer is simple: State agents don’t have any ambition to rape their own children...
Good Occam's Razor, Jim.
Back to Rosa Brooks:
...Clinton was right about one thing: When you start to contemplate writing those "very, very narrow" exceptions into law, you've fallen as low as it's possible to go.
Once again, we Democrats misjudge the depths to which people can fall.
Rosa Brooks has no idea how low it can get. ¶ 10:14 PM 0 comments links to this post
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Drinking Their Own Kool Aid
...A classified Defense Department inspector general's report said regulations were followed when the military paid to have favorable stories about coalition forces planted in Iraqi newspapers, according to the unclassified executive summary obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.
"Psychological operations are a central part of information operations and contribute to achieving the ... commander's objectives," the summary said. They are aimed at conveying "selected, truthful information to foreign audiences to influence their emotions ... reasoning, and ultimately, the behavior of governments" and other entities, it said...
And when the government you disinform happens to be your own?
FORMER US secretary of state James Baker was visibly shocked when he last visited Iraq, and said the country was in a "helluva mess", the BBC reported today.
Mr Baker is leading a review of the situation in Iraq by a bipartisan US committee of experts, and is expected to recommend a change in US strategy for rebuilding Iraq.
Citing a unnamed close friend and ally of Mr Baker's, himself a top politician, the BBC reported that Mr Baker said "there simply weren't any easy solutions"...
A day after George Bush conceded for the first time that America may have reached the equivalent of a Tet offensive in Iraq, the Pentagon yesterday admitted defeat in its strategy of securing Baghdad.
The admission from President Bush that the US may have arrived at a turning point in this war - the Tet offensive led to a massive loss of confidence in the American presence in Vietnam - comes during one of the deadliest months for US forces since the invasion...
The Sergeant Schultz defense
won't work for Bu$hCo.
Unless, of course, you're one
of the Faithful 
.
¶ 9:37 PM 0 comments
links to this post
"Psychological operations are a central part of information operations and contribute to achieving the ... commander's objectives," the summary said. They are aimed at conveying "selected, truthful information to foreign audiences to influence their emotions ... reasoning, and ultimately, the behavior of governments" and other entities, it said...
And when the government you disinform happens to be your own?
FORMER US secretary of state James Baker was visibly shocked when he last visited Iraq, and said the country was in a "helluva mess", the BBC reported today.
Mr Baker is leading a review of the situation in Iraq by a bipartisan US committee of experts, and is expected to recommend a change in US strategy for rebuilding Iraq.
Citing a unnamed close friend and ally of Mr Baker's, himself a top politician, the BBC reported that Mr Baker said "there simply weren't any easy solutions"...
A day after George Bush conceded for the first time that America may have reached the equivalent of a Tet offensive in Iraq, the Pentagon yesterday admitted defeat in its strategy of securing Baghdad.
The admission from President Bush that the US may have arrived at a turning point in this war - the Tet offensive led to a massive loss of confidence in the American presence in Vietnam - comes during one of the deadliest months for US forces since the invasion...
The Sergeant Schultz defense
won't work for Bu$hCo.Unless, of course, you're one
of the Faithful .
¶ 9:37 PM 0 comments
links to this post
Clean Books
The cleanest books being no books at all.
Lambert makes a nice analysis of the eminent trainwreck of the 2006 Congressional $elections.
You can't recount something without a paper trail.
Follow his links for a first class education. ¶ 12:37 PM 0 comments links to this post
Lambert makes a nice analysis of the eminent trainwreck of the 2006 Congressional $elections.
You can't recount something without a paper trail.
Follow his links for a first class education. ¶ 12:37 PM 0 comments links to this post
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Top Secret, Except for Our Old Buddy Bandar
Project Orion, the "abandoned" NASA-D.o'D. project to fly to different planets using the propulsive power of mini-nuclear explosions, was always kept Top Secret.
Although abandoned, you couldn't get the uncensored
plans for it.
Unless, as Xeni Jardin's uncovered over at Boing Boing, you speak
Arabic.
What are friends
for?
[Thanks to Defense Tech for the tip. And if you're an offended Saudi Prince, well, that's life. I guess there are some things money can't buy.] ¶ 8:56 PM 0 comments links to this post
Although abandoned, you couldn't get the uncensored
plans for it.Unless, as Xeni Jardin's uncovered over at Boing Boing, you speak
Arabic.What are friends
for?[Thanks to Defense Tech for the tip. And if you're an offended Saudi Prince, well, that's life. I guess there are some things money can't buy.] ¶ 8:56 PM 0 comments links to this post
The Ghost in the Machine
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman at Common Dreams are calling it the way I do:
...We coined the phrase "loaves and fishes vote count" to describe the tally in Gahanna, Ohio, 2004. This infamous precinct in suburban Columbus registered 4258 votes for George W. Bush where just 638 people voted. The blessed event occurred at a fundamentalist church run by a close ally of the Reverend Jerry Falwell.
These numbers were later "corrected." But they reflect a much larger reality: the 2004 election was stolen with scores of dirty tricks for whose second coming the Democrats have yet to fully prepare.
In the two years since the fraudulent defeat of John Kerry, we've unearthed an unholy arsenal by which that election was stolen. They include: outright intimidation, wrongful elimination of registered voters, theft, selective deployment of (often faulty) voting machines, absentee ballots without Kerry's name on them, absentee ballots pre-punched for Bush, absentee ballots never mailed, touch screens that lit up for Bush when Kerry was chosen, lines for black voters five hours long while white voters a mile away voted in fifteen minutes, tens of thousands of provisional ballots pitched summarily in the trash, alleged ex-felons illegally told they could not vote, Hispanic precincts with no Spanish-speaking poll workers, deliberate misinformation on official web sites…and that's not even the tip of an iceberg whose bottom we may never see.
Thanks to a federal lawsuit, we have finally been able to look at some of the actual ballots from Ohio 2004. Just for starters, researchers Stuart Wright and Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips have found a precinct in Delaware County where 359 consecutive voters allegedly cast ballots for Bush. Dr. Ron Baiman found another precinct in Clermont County where a random inspection found 36 straight replacement ballots, a phenomenon that can be accomplished only by divine intervention or outright fraud.
These initial snippets have been unearthed with no cooperation or participation from the Democratic Party. The official Democratic spin is that they have "looked into the matter." But public records indicate that they have yet to visit the actual ballot storage facilities to examine the public records from the 2004 election.
In sum, we see no indication that the Democrats are prepared for the inevitable… that Karl Rove will steal again, and more, in 2006...
I dunno- this guy looks ready to guard your freedom and count every vote...
Back to the real deal:
...In Ohio alone, four election boards have already eliminated some 500,000 voters since the 2000 election---ten percent of the state's electorate---from the registration rolls in four Democratic counties. No similar purges have occurred in rural Republican counties. The Democrats have said or done very little about it.
To date there is no logical explanation from John Kerry as to why he conceded with 250,000 votes still uncounted while Bush's alleged margin was just half that. Nor have we heard about Democrat plans to monitor the ever-larger numbers of electronic voting machines deployed throughout the United States with no paper trail and no transparency for programming codes and memory cards that are privately owned, with no public inspection allowed.
Which is brings us to the Holy Ghost turnout. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has reported in Rolling Stone Magazine, in Georgia 2002, U.S. Senate incumbent Max Cleland went into Election Day with a very substantial lead in the polls. He proceeded to allegedly lose by a substantial margin. Church-state operatives like Ralph Reed attributed this astonishing turn-around to an alleged last-minute mass turnout of evangelical voters.
Similar things were said about Florida and Ohio 2004.
But it never happened. There are no visual reports or other reliable indicators of extraordinary lines or massive late-in-the-day crowds at the polls. Throughout all those election days, it was every bit as quick and easy to vote in rural precincts that gave Bush his miraculous victory as it was impossible to do so in your average black neighborhood. But there was no extraordinary turnout of last-minute Bush voters.
What happened instead hearkens to the Holy Ghost, made manifest in electronic voting machines that cannot and will not be monitored. The miraculous pro-Bush margins give new meaning to the phrase "ghost in the machine." While the Democratic vote count was slashed and trashed in urban precincts, the rural voting stations, through the miracle of untrackable electronics, materialized just the right number of GOP votes to keep the Men of God in the White House (where it's recently reported they dare to mock those earthly evangelicals who allegedly gave them their margin of victory).
There's absolutely nothing to prevent this from happening again in 2006. Major studies from the Conyers Committee, the Government Accountability Office, Princeton University, the Brennan Center, the Carter-Baker Commission, and esteemed others, have all come to the same conclusion: it takes just one individual with inside access---or even just a wi-fi machine---to change the outcome of any election anywhere...
People even at progressive web sites get all snitty when warned about this. I hope, come next month, a solid Democratic Congress emerges like all the polls suggest. But if it doesn't, it will not surprise me in the least. ¶ 8:26 PM 0 comments links to this post
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman at Common Dreams are calling it the way I do:
...We coined the phrase "loaves and fishes vote count" to describe the tally in Gahanna, Ohio, 2004. This infamous precinct in suburban Columbus registered 4258 votes for George W. Bush where just 638 people voted. The blessed event occurred at a fundamentalist church run by a close ally of the Reverend Jerry Falwell.
These numbers were later "corrected." But they reflect a much larger reality: the 2004 election was stolen with scores of dirty tricks for whose second coming the Democrats have yet to fully prepare.
In the two years since the fraudulent defeat of John Kerry, we've unearthed an unholy arsenal by which that election was stolen. They include: outright intimidation, wrongful elimination of registered voters, theft, selective deployment of (often faulty) voting machines, absentee ballots without Kerry's name on them, absentee ballots pre-punched for Bush, absentee ballots never mailed, touch screens that lit up for Bush when Kerry was chosen, lines for black voters five hours long while white voters a mile away voted in fifteen minutes, tens of thousands of provisional ballots pitched summarily in the trash, alleged ex-felons illegally told they could not vote, Hispanic precincts with no Spanish-speaking poll workers, deliberate misinformation on official web sites…and that's not even the tip of an iceberg whose bottom we may never see.
Thanks to a federal lawsuit, we have finally been able to look at some of the actual ballots from Ohio 2004. Just for starters, researchers Stuart Wright and Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips have found a precinct in Delaware County where 359 consecutive voters allegedly cast ballots for Bush. Dr. Ron Baiman found another precinct in Clermont County where a random inspection found 36 straight replacement ballots, a phenomenon that can be accomplished only by divine intervention or outright fraud.
These initial snippets have been unearthed with no cooperation or participation from the Democratic Party. The official Democratic spin is that they have "looked into the matter." But public records indicate that they have yet to visit the actual ballot storage facilities to examine the public records from the 2004 election.
In sum, we see no indication that the Democrats are prepared for the inevitable… that Karl Rove will steal again, and more, in 2006...
I dunno- this guy looks ready to guard your freedom and count every vote...
Back to the real deal:
...In Ohio alone, four election boards have already eliminated some 500,000 voters since the 2000 election---ten percent of the state's electorate---from the registration rolls in four Democratic counties. No similar purges have occurred in rural Republican counties. The Democrats have said or done very little about it.
To date there is no logical explanation from John Kerry as to why he conceded with 250,000 votes still uncounted while Bush's alleged margin was just half that. Nor have we heard about Democrat plans to monitor the ever-larger numbers of electronic voting machines deployed throughout the United States with no paper trail and no transparency for programming codes and memory cards that are privately owned, with no public inspection allowed.
Which is brings us to the Holy Ghost turnout. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has reported in Rolling Stone Magazine, in Georgia 2002, U.S. Senate incumbent Max Cleland went into Election Day with a very substantial lead in the polls. He proceeded to allegedly lose by a substantial margin. Church-state operatives like Ralph Reed attributed this astonishing turn-around to an alleged last-minute mass turnout of evangelical voters.
Similar things were said about Florida and Ohio 2004.
But it never happened. There are no visual reports or other reliable indicators of extraordinary lines or massive late-in-the-day crowds at the polls. Throughout all those election days, it was every bit as quick and easy to vote in rural precincts that gave Bush his miraculous victory as it was impossible to do so in your average black neighborhood. But there was no extraordinary turnout of last-minute Bush voters.
What happened instead hearkens to the Holy Ghost, made manifest in electronic voting machines that cannot and will not be monitored. The miraculous pro-Bush margins give new meaning to the phrase "ghost in the machine." While the Democratic vote count was slashed and trashed in urban precincts, the rural voting stations, through the miracle of untrackable electronics, materialized just the right number of GOP votes to keep the Men of God in the White House (where it's recently reported they dare to mock those earthly evangelicals who allegedly gave them their margin of victory).
There's absolutely nothing to prevent this from happening again in 2006. Major studies from the Conyers Committee, the Government Accountability Office, Princeton University, the Brennan Center, the Carter-Baker Commission, and esteemed others, have all come to the same conclusion: it takes just one individual with inside access---or even just a wi-fi machine---to change the outcome of any election anywhere...
People even at progressive web sites get all snitty when warned about this. I hope, come next month, a solid Democratic Congress emerges like all the polls suggest. But if it doesn't, it will not surprise me in the least. ¶ 8:26 PM 0 comments links to this post
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
The Four Republicans of the Apocalypse
Via Attaturk at Eschaton:
"Famine, War, Pestilence and Cheney"
Torture is now the law of the land, and your rights of habeas corpus only exist as long as you don't annoy someone important.
But the two Big Dogs are triangulating themselves, all the way on to the waterboard. ¶ 9:21 PM 0 comments links to this post
"Famine, War, Pestilence and Cheney"
Torture is now the law of the land, and your rights of habeas corpus only exist as long as you don't annoy someone important.
But the two Big Dogs are triangulating themselves, all the way on to the waterboard. ¶ 9:21 PM 0 comments links to this post
Monday, October 16, 2006
Apocalypse Planned
Chris Hedges at Truthdig:
The aircraft carrier Eisenhower, accompanied by the guided-missile cruiser USS Anzio, guided-missile destroyer USS Ramage, guided-missile destroyer USS Mason and the fast-attack submarine USS Newport News, is, as I write, making its way to the Straits of Hormuz off Iran. The ships will be in place to strike Iran by the end of the month. It may be a bluff. It may be a feint. It may be a simple show of American power. But I doubt it.
War with Iran—a war that would unleash an apocalyptic scenario in the Middle East—is probable by the end of the Bush administration. It could begin in as little as three weeks. This administration, claiming to be anointed by a Christian God to reshape the world, and especially the Middle East, defined three states at the start of its reign as “the Axis of Evil.” They were Iraq, now occupied; North Korea, which, because it has nuclear weapons, is untouchable; and Iran. Those who do not take this apocalyptic rhetoric seriously have ignored the twisted pathology of men like Elliott Abrams, who helped orchestrate the disastrous and illegal contra war in Nicaragua, and who now handles the Middle East for the National Security Council. He knew nothing about Central America. He knows nothing about the Middle East. He sees the world through the childish, binary lens of good and evil, us and them, the forces of darkness and the forces of light. And it is this strange, twilight mentality that now grips most of the civilian planners who are barreling us towards a crisis of epic proportions.
These men advocate a doctrine of permanent war, a doctrine which, as William R. Polk points out, is a slight corruption of Leon Trotsky’s doctrine of permanent revolution. These two revolutionary doctrines serve the same function, to intimidate and destroy all those classified as foreign opponents, to create permanent instability and fear and to silence domestic critics who challenge leaders in a time of national crisis. It works. The citizens of the United States, slowly being stripped of their civil liberties, are being herded sheep-like, once again, over a cliff.
But this war will be different. It will be catastrophic. It will usher in the apocalyptic nightmares spun out in the dark, fantastic visions of the Christian right. And there are those around the president who see this vision as preordained by God; indeed, the president himself may hold such a vision... [Only when Franklin Graham is in the room.]
Given that we are actively engaged in an effort to destabilize the Iranian regime by recruiting tribal groups and ethnic minorities inside Iran to rebel, given that we use apocalyptic rhetoric to describe what must be done to the Iranian regime, given that other countries in the Middle East such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia are making noises about developing a nuclear capacity, and given that, with the touch of a button Israel could obliterate Iran, what do we expect from the Iranians? On top of this, the Iranian regime grasps that the doctrine of permanent war entails making “preemptive” and unprovoked strikes.
Those in Washington who advocate this war
, knowing as little about the limitations and chaos of war as they do about the Middle East, believe they can hit about 1,000 sites inside Iran to wipe out nuclear production and cripple the 850,000-man Iranian army. The disaster in southern Lebanon, where the Israeli air campaign not only failed to break Hezbollah but united most Lebanese behind the militant group, is dismissed. These ideologues, after all, do not live in a reality-based universe. The massive Israeli bombing of Lebanon failed to pacify 4 million Lebanese. What will happen when we begin to pound a country of 70 million people? As retired General Wesley K. Clark and others have pointed out, once you begin an air campaign it is only a matter of time before you have to put troops on the ground or accept defeat, as the Israelis had to do in Lebanon. And if we begin dropping bunker busters, cruise missiles and iron fragmentation bombs on Iran this is the choice that must be faced—either sending American forces into Iran to fight a protracted and futile guerrilla war or walking away in humiliation...
Oh, it'll be troops on the ground in 2007. Count on it. They'll Diebold things here this year. Then the Company'll be thinking that if they institute the draft in '07, and let John Negroponte act on dissenters at home the same way he set up in the Honduras and Iraq, there will be no opposition at all when they Diebold the '08.
They will be wrong in the reality-based world, of course, but maybe that's part of the plan, too.
...An attack on Iran will ignite the Middle East. The loss of Iranian oil, coupled with Silkworm missile attacks by Iran on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, could send oil soaring to well over $110 a barrel. The effect on the domestic and world economy will be devastating, very possibly triggering a huge, global depression. The 2 million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey will turn in rage on us and our dwindling allies. We will see a combination of increased terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and the widespread sabotage of oil production in the Gulf. Iraq, as bad as it looks now, will become a death pit for American troops as Shiites and Sunnis, for the first time, unite against their foreign occupiers.
The country, however, that will pay the biggest price will be Israel. And the sad irony is that those planning this war think of themselves as allies of the Jewish state. A conflagration of this magnitude could see Israel drawn back in Lebanon and sucked into a regional war, one that would over time spell the final chapter in the Zionist experiment in the Middle East. The Israelis aptly call their nuclear program “the Samson option.” The Biblical Samson ripped down the pillars of the temple and killed everyone around him, along with himself.
If you are sure you will be raptured into heaven, your clothes left behind with the nonbelievers, then this news should cheer you up. If you are rational, however, these may be some of the last few weeks or months in which to enjoy what is left of our beleaguered, dying republic and way of life.
There will be no rapture, even as there will be no global nuclear war. Not all at once like we used to fear, anyway. It will be more like a city here, a city there, over the space of years, with an occasional flurry of destruction interspaced with distraction from the long slow poisonous decay of Civilization.
After all, nuclear winter is the Company solution to global warming.
Global Depression is part of the Company plan, as is misery in the Middle East- and Middle West- that hasn't been seen since the Trail of Tears
while TheoConfederate feudalism strengthens its grip.
But all this silliness about Dear Leader believing in the Second Coming? Too many Democrats haven't read The Prince. Dear Leader has or at least has heard the audio book. ¶ 4:24 PM 3 comments links to this post
The aircraft carrier Eisenhower, accompanied by the guided-missile cruiser USS Anzio, guided-missile destroyer USS Ramage, guided-missile destroyer USS Mason and the fast-attack submarine USS Newport News, is, as I write, making its way to the Straits of Hormuz off Iran. The ships will be in place to strike Iran by the end of the month. It may be a bluff. It may be a feint. It may be a simple show of American power. But I doubt it.
War with Iran—a war that would unleash an apocalyptic scenario in the Middle East—is probable by the end of the Bush administration. It could begin in as little as three weeks. This administration, claiming to be anointed by a Christian God to reshape the world, and especially the Middle East, defined three states at the start of its reign as “the Axis of Evil.” They were Iraq, now occupied; North Korea, which, because it has nuclear weapons, is untouchable; and Iran. Those who do not take this apocalyptic rhetoric seriously have ignored the twisted pathology of men like Elliott Abrams, who helped orchestrate the disastrous and illegal contra war in Nicaragua, and who now handles the Middle East for the National Security Council. He knew nothing about Central America. He knows nothing about the Middle East. He sees the world through the childish, binary lens of good and evil, us and them, the forces of darkness and the forces of light. And it is this strange, twilight mentality that now grips most of the civilian planners who are barreling us towards a crisis of epic proportions.
These men advocate a doctrine of permanent war, a doctrine which, as William R. Polk points out, is a slight corruption of Leon Trotsky’s doctrine of permanent revolution. These two revolutionary doctrines serve the same function, to intimidate and destroy all those classified as foreign opponents, to create permanent instability and fear and to silence domestic critics who challenge leaders in a time of national crisis. It works. The citizens of the United States, slowly being stripped of their civil liberties, are being herded sheep-like, once again, over a cliff.
But this war will be different. It will be catastrophic. It will usher in the apocalyptic nightmares spun out in the dark, fantastic visions of the Christian right. And there are those around the president who see this vision as preordained by God; indeed, the president himself may hold such a vision... [Only when Franklin Graham is in the room.]
Given that we are actively engaged in an effort to destabilize the Iranian regime by recruiting tribal groups and ethnic minorities inside Iran to rebel, given that we use apocalyptic rhetoric to describe what must be done to the Iranian regime, given that other countries in the Middle East such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia are making noises about developing a nuclear capacity, and given that, with the touch of a button Israel could obliterate Iran, what do we expect from the Iranians? On top of this, the Iranian regime grasps that the doctrine of permanent war entails making “preemptive” and unprovoked strikes.
Those in Washington who advocate this war
, knowing as little about the limitations and chaos of war as they do about the Middle East, believe they can hit about 1,000 sites inside Iran to wipe out nuclear production and cripple the 850,000-man Iranian army. The disaster in southern Lebanon, where the Israeli air campaign not only failed to break Hezbollah but united most Lebanese behind the militant group, is dismissed. These ideologues, after all, do not live in a reality-based universe. The massive Israeli bombing of Lebanon failed to pacify 4 million Lebanese. What will happen when we begin to pound a country of 70 million people? As retired General Wesley K. Clark and others have pointed out, once you begin an air campaign it is only a matter of time before you have to put troops on the ground or accept defeat, as the Israelis had to do in Lebanon. And if we begin dropping bunker busters, cruise missiles and iron fragmentation bombs on Iran this is the choice that must be faced—either sending American forces into Iran to fight a protracted and futile guerrilla war or walking away in humiliation...Oh, it'll be troops on the ground in 2007. Count on it. They'll Diebold things here this year. Then the Company'll be thinking that if they institute the draft in '07, and let John Negroponte act on dissenters at home the same way he set up in the Honduras and Iraq, there will be no opposition at all when they Diebold the '08.
They will be wrong in the reality-based world, of course, but maybe that's part of the plan, too.
...An attack on Iran will ignite the Middle East. The loss of Iranian oil, coupled with Silkworm missile attacks by Iran on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, could send oil soaring to well over $110 a barrel. The effect on the domestic and world economy will be devastating, very possibly triggering a huge, global depression. The 2 million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey will turn in rage on us and our dwindling allies. We will see a combination of increased terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and the widespread sabotage of oil production in the Gulf. Iraq, as bad as it looks now, will become a death pit for American troops as Shiites and Sunnis, for the first time, unite against their foreign occupiers.
The country, however, that will pay the biggest price will be Israel. And the sad irony is that those planning this war think of themselves as allies of the Jewish state. A conflagration of this magnitude could see Israel drawn back in Lebanon and sucked into a regional war, one that would over time spell the final chapter in the Zionist experiment in the Middle East. The Israelis aptly call their nuclear program “the Samson option.” The Biblical Samson ripped down the pillars of the temple and killed everyone around him, along with himself.
If you are sure you will be raptured into heaven, your clothes left behind with the nonbelievers, then this news should cheer you up. If you are rational, however, these may be some of the last few weeks or months in which to enjoy what is left of our beleaguered, dying republic and way of life.
There will be no rapture, even as there will be no global nuclear war. Not all at once like we used to fear, anyway. It will be more like a city here, a city there, over the space of years, with an occasional flurry of destruction interspaced with distraction from the long slow poisonous decay of Civilization.
After all, nuclear winter is the Company solution to global warming.
Global Depression is part of the Company plan, as is misery in the Middle East- and Middle West- that hasn't been seen since the Trail of Tears
while TheoConfederate feudalism strengthens its grip.But all this silliness about Dear Leader believing in the Second Coming? Too many Democrats haven't read The Prince. Dear Leader has or at least has heard the audio book. ¶ 4:24 PM 3 comments links to this post
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Realpolitik
To understand the crucible of the elitist, tyrannical and barbaric worldview of the Bush Administration, BuzzFlash has recently published two editorials that go back to explore the Kissinger doctrine of supporting the torture and murder of tens of thousands of people in South America, Central America, Vietnam, East Timor and elsewhere in the world.
These BuzzFlash pieces -- "Torture, Murder, Bush, Kissinger and The Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina: America on the Brink of Horror" and "More on "Operation Condor, What Horrors May Await America, Kissinger, and the Disappeared" – are reminders of the basic egomaniacal self-perspective and indifference to loss of life and liberties among the executive branch in power.
The commentaries are important because Cheney and Rumsfeld -- the key architect and the key implementer of what will be known as the "Bush Doctrine" -- came of age with Kissinger. All three believe that they are smarter than the average American citizens who vote – and that democracy is a hindrance to exercising power based on their [Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Kissinger’s] self-assumed "superior knowledge" of the "realpolitik" of the world.
At its most basic, this means an utter contempt for democracy.
It also means that people often need to be "eliminated" in order to guarantee American supremacy. If "innocents" are accidentally tortured and killed, that is the price to pay for being the policeman of the world. To Kissinger – who advises both Cheney and Bush – and Rumsfeld, persons murdered to guarantee oligarchies, military governments, and sham democracies (in appearance only) are just so much collateral damage to the preservation of America’s role as a superpower that pulls the strings of the nations of the world.
That is why we thought it important, as we approach the 2006 elections to recall what Kissinger had to say about the right of the Chilean people to elect a government of their choosing back in the early ‘70s. Kissinger said "the issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."
True to his word, Kissinger backed the Pinochet coup of the duly-elected government of Salvador Allende, a coup that unleashed a bloodbath of death squad murders of Chilean citizens – and even a car bombing that killed two people on a Washington, D.C. street. It was part of the larger Operation Condor that resulted in the Kissinger-sanctioned killings of some 50,000 "enemies of the state" in five South American nations – as well as 30,000 persons who remain unaccounted for, but presumed dead. And that was just one "theater" of Kissinger’s nefarious contempt for life and freedom when it conflicted with his assertion of empire.
Read Kissinger’s words again: "the issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."
Just change one word and you have the Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld doctrine: "the issues are much too important for the American voters to be left to decide for themselves."
Many political analysts have called this outlook a legacy of a University of Chicago Professor, Leo Strauss. Shadia Drury, a critic of Strauss, observes that he believed that the "perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what's good for them."
Kissinger, Rumsfeld and Cheney are firm believers in this perspective. To them, government and world leadership cannot be left to the whims of democracy. Voters cannot be trusted with making ruthless decisions about international policy – or even with the election of a national government in the U.S.
Instead, it must be left to "masters of the universe" like them to seize, run and define the powers of the state, through their puppet George W. Bush... ¶ 8:11 AM 0 comments links to this post
These BuzzFlash pieces -- "Torture, Murder, Bush, Kissinger and The Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina: America on the Brink of Horror" and "More on "Operation Condor, What Horrors May Await America, Kissinger, and the Disappeared" – are reminders of the basic egomaniacal self-perspective and indifference to loss of life and liberties among the executive branch in power.
The commentaries are important because Cheney and Rumsfeld -- the key architect and the key implementer of what will be known as the "Bush Doctrine" -- came of age with Kissinger. All three believe that they are smarter than the average American citizens who vote – and that democracy is a hindrance to exercising power based on their [Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Kissinger’s] self-assumed "superior knowledge" of the "realpolitik" of the world.
At its most basic, this means an utter contempt for democracy.
It also means that people often need to be "eliminated" in order to guarantee American supremacy. If "innocents" are accidentally tortured and killed, that is the price to pay for being the policeman of the world. To Kissinger – who advises both Cheney and Bush – and Rumsfeld, persons murdered to guarantee oligarchies, military governments, and sham democracies (in appearance only) are just so much collateral damage to the preservation of America’s role as a superpower that pulls the strings of the nations of the world.
That is why we thought it important, as we approach the 2006 elections to recall what Kissinger had to say about the right of the Chilean people to elect a government of their choosing back in the early ‘70s. Kissinger said "the issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."
True to his word, Kissinger backed the Pinochet coup of the duly-elected government of Salvador Allende, a coup that unleashed a bloodbath of death squad murders of Chilean citizens – and even a car bombing that killed two people on a Washington, D.C. street. It was part of the larger Operation Condor that resulted in the Kissinger-sanctioned killings of some 50,000 "enemies of the state" in five South American nations – as well as 30,000 persons who remain unaccounted for, but presumed dead. And that was just one "theater" of Kissinger’s nefarious contempt for life and freedom when it conflicted with his assertion of empire.
Read Kissinger’s words again: "the issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."
Just change one word and you have the Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld doctrine: "the issues are much too important for the American voters to be left to decide for themselves."
Many political analysts have called this outlook a legacy of a University of Chicago Professor, Leo Strauss. Shadia Drury, a critic of Strauss, observes that he believed that the "perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what's good for them."
Kissinger, Rumsfeld and Cheney are firm believers in this perspective. To them, government and world leadership cannot be left to the whims of democracy. Voters cannot be trusted with making ruthless decisions about international policy – or even with the election of a national government in the U.S.
Instead, it must be left to "masters of the universe" like them to seize, run and define the powers of the state, through their puppet George W. Bush... ¶ 8:11 AM 0 comments links to this post
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Bad Breath
Science Ignored, Again
The Bush administration loves to talk about the virtues of “sound science,” by which it usually means science that buttresses its own political agenda. But when some truly independent science comes along to threaten that agenda, the administration often ignores or minimizes it. The latest example involves the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to reject the recommendations of experts inside and outside the government who had urged a significant tightening of federal standards regulating the amount of soot in the air.
At issue were so-called fine particles
, tiny specks of soot that are less than one-thirtieth the diameter of a human hair. They penetrate deep into the lungs and circulatory system and have been implicated in tens of thousands of deaths annually from both respiratory and coronary disease. The E.P.A., obliged under the Clean Air Act to set new exposure levels every five years, tightened the daily standard. But it left unchanged the annual standard, which affects chronic exposure and which the medical community regards as more important.
In so doing, the agency rejected the recommendation of its own staff scientists and even that of its Clean Air Scientific Advisory Council, a 22-member group of outside experts that had recommended a significant tightening of the standards. Stephen Johnson, the agency administrator, claimed there was “insufficient evidence” linking health problems to long-term exposure. He added that “wherever the science gave us a clear picture, we took clear action,” noting also that “there was not complete agreement on the standard.”
One wonders how much evidence Mr. Johnson requires, and how “complete” an “agreement” must be before he takes action. A 20-2 vote in favor of stronger standards seems fairly convincing to us; likewise the unanimous plea for stronger standards from mainstream groups like the American Medical Association.
The environmental and medical communities suspect that the administration’s main motive was to save the power companies and other industrial sources of pollution about $1.9 billion in new investment that the more protective annual standard would have required. But here, too, the administration appears to have ignored expert advice. Last Friday, the agency released an economic analysis showing that in exchange for $1.9 billion in new costs, the stronger annual standards could save as many as 24,000 thousand lives and as much as $50 billion annually in health care and other costs to society. Studies like these always offer a range of possible outcomes, but even at the lower end — 2,200 lives and $4.3 billion in money saved — the cost-benefit ratios are very favorable.
In the next year or so, the administration must decide whether to tighten the standards for another pollutant, ground-level ozone, which causes smog and is also associated with respiratory diseases. The scientific advisory committee has tentatively recommended that the ozone standard be tightened, citing new evidence of smog’s adverse effects. This time Mr. Johnson should pay more attention to the scientists and less to the political strategists in the White House. ¶ 11:04 PM 0 comments links to this post
The Bush administration loves to talk about the virtues of “sound science,” by which it usually means science that buttresses its own political agenda. But when some truly independent science comes along to threaten that agenda, the administration often ignores or minimizes it. The latest example involves the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to reject the recommendations of experts inside and outside the government who had urged a significant tightening of federal standards regulating the amount of soot in the air.
At issue were so-called fine particles
, tiny specks of soot that are less than one-thirtieth the diameter of a human hair. They penetrate deep into the lungs and circulatory system and have been implicated in tens of thousands of deaths annually from both respiratory and coronary disease. The E.P.A., obliged under the Clean Air Act to set new exposure levels every five years, tightened the daily standard. But it left unchanged the annual standard, which affects chronic exposure and which the medical community regards as more important.In so doing, the agency rejected the recommendation of its own staff scientists and even that of its Clean Air Scientific Advisory Council, a 22-member group of outside experts that had recommended a significant tightening of the standards. Stephen Johnson, the agency administrator, claimed there was “insufficient evidence” linking health problems to long-term exposure. He added that “wherever the science gave us a clear picture, we took clear action,” noting also that “there was not complete agreement on the standard.”
One wonders how much evidence Mr. Johnson requires, and how “complete” an “agreement” must be before he takes action. A 20-2 vote in favor of stronger standards seems fairly convincing to us; likewise the unanimous plea for stronger standards from mainstream groups like the American Medical Association.
The environmental and medical communities suspect that the administration’s main motive was to save the power companies and other industrial sources of pollution about $1.9 billion in new investment that the more protective annual standard would have required. But here, too, the administration appears to have ignored expert advice. Last Friday, the agency released an economic analysis showing that in exchange for $1.9 billion in new costs, the stronger annual standards could save as many as 24,000 thousand lives and as much as $50 billion annually in health care and other costs to society. Studies like these always offer a range of possible outcomes, but even at the lower end — 2,200 lives and $4.3 billion in money saved — the cost-benefit ratios are very favorable.
In the next year or so, the administration must decide whether to tighten the standards for another pollutant, ground-level ozone, which causes smog and is also associated with respiratory diseases. The scientific advisory committee has tentatively recommended that the ozone standard be tightened, citing new evidence of smog’s adverse effects. This time Mr. Johnson should pay more attention to the scientists and less to the political strategists in the White House. ¶ 11:04 PM 0 comments links to this post
It's Good to be King
Chris Floyd:
Nothing encapsulates the obscene and depraved mindset that drives the corporate elite – and their avid partners in government – than the first two paragraphs of this straightforward New York Times business story:
"China is planning to adopt a new law that seeks to crack down on sweatshops and protect workers’ rights by giving labor unions real power for the first time since it introduced market forces in the 1980s.
"The move, which underscores the government’s growing concern about the widening income gap and threats of social unrest, is setting off a battle with American and other foreign corporations that have lobbied against it by hinting that they may build fewer factories here..."
Read that again. Let it soak in. The corporate elite are threatening to lash out because China is considering a few very belated and, as the story makes clear, most likely ineffective steps to provide a modicum of protection for its working people, many of whom labor in conditions of near-slavery in order to stuff the bellies and the wallets of foreign fat-cats. The elite are saying – openly, brazenly – that they might choke off economic growth in China if they can't keep paying peon wages to defenseless people in hell-hole conditions...
Chris is correct. More on the article from the Pravda's business section:
Some of the world’s big companies have expressed concern that the new rules would revive some aspects of socialism and borrow too heavily from labor laws in union-friendly countries like France and Germany.
The Chinese government proposal, for example, would make it more difficult to lay off workers, a condition that some companies contend would be so onerous that they might slow their investments in China.
“This is really two steps backward after three steps forward,” said Kenneth Tung, Asia-Pacific director of legal affairs at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Hong Kong and a legal adviser to the American Chamber of Commerce here.
The proposed law is being debated after Wal-Mart Stores, the world’s biggest retailer, was forced to accept unions in its Chinese outlets.
State-controlled unions here have not wielded much power in the past, but after years of reports of worker abuse, the government seems determined to give its union new powers to negotiate worker contracts, safety protection and workplace ground rules.
Hoping to head off some of the rules, representatives of some American companies are waging an intense lobbying campaign to persuade the Chinese government to revise or abandon the proposed law.
The skirmish has pitted the American Chamber of Commerce — which represents corporations including Dell, Ford, General Electric, Microsoft and Nike — against labor activists and the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the Communist Party’s official union organization.
The workers’ advocates say that the proposed labor rules — and more important, enforcement powers — are long overdue, and they accuse the American businesses of favoring a system that has led to widespread labor abuse.
On Friday, Global Labor Strategies, a group that supports labor rights policies, is expected to release a report in New York and Boston denouncing American corporations for opposing legislation that would give Chinese workers stronger rights.
“You have big corporations opposing basically modest reforms,” said Tim Costello, an official of the group and a longtime labor union advocate. “This flies in the face of the idea that globalization and corporations will raise standards around the world...”
Perhaps that's not entirely accurate; it would raise standards for Bu$h's base around the world.
...Migrant workers in virtually every city complain about abuses like having their pay withheld or being forced to work without a contract.
“I don’t know about the labor law,” said Zhang Yin, an 18-year-old migrant who washes dishes in Shanghai. “During the three months I’ve been here, my boss has delayed the salary payment twice. I want to quit...”
Sounds like the Chinese businessmen have been getting advice from Halliburton consultants.
The misuse of labor in the most populous nation in the world has profound negative effects on American workers. It's no secret Dear Leader's economic "powerhouse" has benefited only a fraction of Americans. But it certainly has been good for the guys on top. ¶ 8:32 PM 1 comments links to this post
Nothing encapsulates the obscene and depraved mindset that drives the corporate elite – and their avid partners in government – than the first two paragraphs of this straightforward New York Times business story:
"China is planning to adopt a new law that seeks to crack down on sweatshops and protect workers’ rights by giving labor unions real power for the first time since it introduced market forces in the 1980s.
"The move, which underscores the government’s growing concern about the widening income gap and threats of social unrest, is setting off a battle with American and other foreign corporations that have lobbied against it by hinting that they may build fewer factories here..."
Read that again. Let it soak in. The corporate elite are threatening to lash out because China is considering a few very belated and, as the story makes clear, most likely ineffective steps to provide a modicum of protection for its working people, many of whom labor in conditions of near-slavery in order to stuff the bellies and the wallets of foreign fat-cats. The elite are saying – openly, brazenly – that they might choke off economic growth in China if they can't keep paying peon wages to defenseless people in hell-hole conditions...
Chris is correct. More on the article from the Pravda's business section:
Some of the world’s big companies have expressed concern that the new rules would revive some aspects of socialism and borrow too heavily from labor laws in union-friendly countries like France and Germany.
The Chinese government proposal, for example, would make it more difficult to lay off workers, a condition that some companies contend would be so onerous that they might slow their investments in China.
“This is really two steps backward after three steps forward,” said Kenneth Tung, Asia-Pacific director of legal affairs at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Hong Kong and a legal adviser to the American Chamber of Commerce here.
The proposed law is being debated after Wal-Mart Stores, the world’s biggest retailer, was forced to accept unions in its Chinese outlets.
State-controlled unions here have not wielded much power in the past, but after years of reports of worker abuse, the government seems determined to give its union new powers to negotiate worker contracts, safety protection and workplace ground rules.
Hoping to head off some of the rules, representatives of some American companies are waging an intense lobbying campaign to persuade the Chinese government to revise or abandon the proposed law.
The skirmish has pitted the American Chamber of Commerce — which represents corporations including Dell, Ford, General Electric, Microsoft and Nike — against labor activists and the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the Communist Party’s official union organization.
The workers’ advocates say that the proposed labor rules — and more important, enforcement powers — are long overdue, and they accuse the American businesses of favoring a system that has led to widespread labor abuse.
On Friday, Global Labor Strategies, a group that supports labor rights policies, is expected to release a report in New York and Boston denouncing American corporations for opposing legislation that would give Chinese workers stronger rights.
“You have big corporations opposing basically modest reforms,” said Tim Costello, an official of the group and a longtime labor union advocate. “This flies in the face of the idea that globalization and corporations will raise standards around the world...”
Perhaps that's not entirely accurate; it would raise standards for Bu$h's base around the world.
...Migrant workers in virtually every city complain about abuses like having their pay withheld or being forced to work without a contract.
“I don’t know about the labor law,” said Zhang Yin, an 18-year-old migrant who washes dishes in Shanghai. “During the three months I’ve been here, my boss has delayed the salary payment twice. I want to quit...”
Sounds like the Chinese businessmen have been getting advice from Halliburton consultants.
The misuse of labor in the most populous nation in the world has profound negative effects on American workers. It's no secret Dear Leader's economic "powerhouse" has benefited only a fraction of Americans. But it certainly has been good for the guys on top. ¶ 8:32 PM 1 comments links to this post
The Easy Way Out
ST. LOUIS, Oct. 13, 2006 -- The Boeing Company [NYSE: BA] has begun flight testing for the Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD) program and has generated "first light" of ATL's high-energy chemical laser in ground tests, achieving two key milestones in the laser gunship development effort.
During the "low-power" flight tests, which began Oct. 10 and conclude this fall, the ATL ACTD system will find and track ground targets at White Sands Missile Range, N.M. A low-power, solid-state laser will serve as a surrogate for ATL's high-power chemical laser.
To prepare for the tests, the ATL aircraft, a C-130H from the U.S. Air Force 46th Test Wing, was outfitted with flight demonstration hardware at Crestview Aerospace Corp. in Crestview, Fla. The hardware includes the beam director and optical control bench, which will direct the laser beam to its target; weapon system consoles, which will display high-resolution imagery and enable the tracking of targets; and sensors.
Boeing fired the high-energy chemical laser for the first time in ground tests on Sept. 21 in Albuquerque, N.M. -- an achievement known as "first light." Ground tests of the laser will conclude this fall. By 2007, Boeing will install the device on the aircraft and fire it in-flight at mission-representative ground targets to demonstrate the military utility of high energy-lasers. The test team will fire the laser through a rotating turret that extends through an existing 50-inch-diameter hole in the aircraft's belly.
"ATL will transform the battlefield by giving the warfighter a speed-of-light, precision engagement capability that will reduce collateral damage dramatically," said Pat Shanahan, vice president and general manager of Boeing Missile Defense Systems. "The start of flight and laser testing shows that Boeing is making solid progress toward making this revolutionary capability a reality."
Boeing is developing ATL for the U.S. Department of Defense through an ACTD program.
ATL will destroy, damage or disable targets with little to no collateral damage, supporting missions on the battlefield and in urban operations. ATL will produce scaleable effects, meaning the weapon operator will be able to select the degree and nature of the damage done to a target by choosing a specific aimpoint and laser shot duration. For example, targeting the fuel tank of a vehicle could result in total destruction of the vehicle, while targeting a tire might result in the vehicle stopping without injury to the driver.
Boeing's Advanced Tactical Laser industry team includes L-3 Communications/Brashear, which made the laser turret, and HYTEC, Inc., which made various structural elements of the weapon system. [with thanks]
¶ 9:25 AM 0 comments
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During the "low-power" flight tests, which began Oct. 10 and conclude this fall, the ATL ACTD system will find and track ground targets at White Sands Missile Range, N.M. A low-power, solid-state laser will serve as a surrogate for ATL's high-power chemical laser.
To prepare for the tests, the ATL aircraft, a C-130H from the U.S. Air Force 46th Test Wing, was outfitted with flight demonstration hardware at Crestview Aerospace Corp. in Crestview, Fla. The hardware includes the beam director and optical control bench, which will direct the laser beam to its target; weapon system consoles, which will display high-resolution imagery and enable the tracking of targets; and sensors.
Boeing fired the high-energy chemical laser for the first time in ground tests on Sept. 21 in Albuquerque, N.M. -- an achievement known as "first light." Ground tests of the laser will conclude this fall. By 2007, Boeing will install the device on the aircraft and fire it in-flight at mission-representative ground targets to demonstrate the military utility of high energy-lasers. The test team will fire the laser through a rotating turret that extends through an existing 50-inch-diameter hole in the aircraft's belly.
"ATL will transform the battlefield by giving the warfighter a speed-of-light, precision engagement capability that will reduce collateral damage dramatically," said Pat Shanahan, vice president and general manager of Boeing Missile Defense Systems. "The start of flight and laser testing shows that Boeing is making solid progress toward making this revolutionary capability a reality."
Boeing is developing ATL for the U.S. Department of Defense through an ACTD program.
ATL will destroy, damage or disable targets with little to no collateral damage, supporting missions on the battlefield and in urban operations. ATL will produce scaleable effects, meaning the weapon operator will be able to select the degree and nature of the damage done to a target by choosing a specific aimpoint and laser shot duration. For example, targeting the fuel tank of a vehicle could result in total destruction of the vehicle, while targeting a tire might result in the vehicle stopping without injury to the driver.
Boeing's Advanced Tactical Laser industry team includes L-3 Communications/Brashear, which made the laser turret, and HYTEC, Inc., which made various structural elements of the weapon system. [with thanks]
¶ 9:25 AM 0 comments
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Friday, October 13, 2006
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Interrogation
From Justin Road over at the Muckraker:
...In a new court filing on behalf of alleged dirty bomber Jose Padilla, his lawyers allege that government interrogators forced him to take LSD, Gerstein reported.
"Additionally, Padilla was given drugs against his will, believed to be some form of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or phencyclidine (PCP), to act as a sort of truth serum during his interrogations," he quotes the filing.
Now, There are some important details that aren't explained: Padilla's lawyers don't say what effects the prisoner reported to make them conclude it was LSD or PCP, nor do they report how many times such a drug or drugs were administered. And as any self-respecting child of the D.A.R.E era knows, LSD and PCP typically produce wildly different behavior (neither of which is particularly helpful if you're trying to get information out of someone)...
That's because it probably wasn't either LSD or PCP, but more likely a tropane alkaloid known as QNB or Agent Buzz in the Army rumored to be experimented with by the Company in Iraq.
You got it. The Company is using torture and chemical weapons on American citizens. Saddam, meet Darth Rumsfeld, your real soul mate, and maybe (in our dreams) your future cellmate. ¶ 6:41 AM 0 comments links to this post
...In a new court filing on behalf of alleged dirty bomber Jose Padilla, his lawyers allege that government interrogators forced him to take LSD, Gerstein reported.
"Additionally, Padilla was given drugs against his will, believed to be some form of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or phencyclidine (PCP), to act as a sort of truth serum during his interrogations," he quotes the filing.
Now, There are some important details that aren't explained: Padilla's lawyers don't say what effects the prisoner reported to make them conclude it was LSD or PCP, nor do they report how many times such a drug or drugs were administered. And as any self-respecting child of the D.A.R.E era knows, LSD and PCP typically produce wildly different behavior (neither of which is particularly helpful if you're trying to get information out of someone)...
That's because it probably wasn't either LSD or PCP, but more likely a tropane alkaloid known as QNB or Agent Buzz in the Army rumored to be experimented with by the Company in Iraq.
You got it. The Company is using torture and chemical weapons on American citizens. Saddam, meet Darth Rumsfeld, your real soul mate, and maybe (in our dreams) your future cellmate. ¶ 6:41 AM 0 comments links to this post
Thursday, October 12, 2006
"But don't they appreciate their new freedom?"
Majikthise [with thanks]:
The right wing noise machine is clanking and shuddering. They're outraged about this study, published in the Lancet (.pdf). The study estimated that 665,000 more Iraqis have died after the US invasion than would have been expected based on pre-invasion death rates. (I discuss the study in more detail here)
Here are today's popular bleats:
1. 655,000 is an awfully big number. That would mean that this war killed a whole lot of people. (Jane Galt)
2. If 770 extra people were dying in Iraq every day, why don't we hear about them on the news? (Gateway Pundit)
3. The study was published before the election. (Instapundit) (Political Pitbull)
4. The peer-reviewed paper must be bogus because the editor of the Lancet goes to anti-war rallies. (Anti-Idiotarian Rotweiler)
5. The pre-invasion death rates are too low. Surely, Saddam was filling mass graves two months before the invasion. (Chuck Simmins)
6. Those peacenik scientists wish there were more dead Iraqis. ("When the statistics announced by hospitals and military here, or even by the UN, did not satisfy their lust for more deaths, they resorted to mathematics to get a fake number that satisfies their sadistic urges," Omar Fadil.)
7. I just know the study's wrong, but I can't figure out how. Math people? (Michelle Malkin)
8. Sure the study's methodology is standard for public health resesarch. But don't forget that the public health is a leftwing plot. (Medpundit)
9. These statisticians say that you can take a small sample from a large population and learn a lot about the population. As if. I'll believe those 665,000 Iraqis are dead when they tell me so. (Tim Blair)
Cowards, all of them. They own this war, but they won't face up to the fact that their little adventure helped kill over half a million people.
Say it slowly, carefully, and with deliberation: the White House Iraq Group, and centrally George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, are guilty of war crimes and mass murder. ¶ 4:23 PM 0 comments links to this post
The right wing noise machine is clanking and shuddering. They're outraged about this study, published in the Lancet (.pdf). The study estimated that 665,000 more Iraqis have died after the US invasion than would have been expected based on pre-invasion death rates. (I discuss the study in more detail here)
Here are today's popular bleats:
1. 655,000 is an awfully big number. That would mean that this war killed a whole lot of people. (Jane Galt)
2. If 770 extra people were dying in Iraq every day, why don't we hear about them on the news? (Gateway Pundit)
3. The study was published before the election. (Instapundit) (Political Pitbull)
4. The peer-reviewed paper must be bogus because the editor of the Lancet goes to anti-war rallies. (Anti-Idiotarian Rotweiler)
5. The pre-invasion death rates are too low. Surely, Saddam was filling mass graves two months before the invasion. (Chuck Simmins)
6. Those peacenik scientists wish there were more dead Iraqis. ("When the statistics announced by hospitals and military here, or even by the UN, did not satisfy their lust for more deaths, they resorted to mathematics to get a fake number that satisfies their sadistic urges," Omar Fadil.)
7. I just know the study's wrong, but I can't figure out how. Math people? (Michelle Malkin)
8. Sure the study's methodology is standard for public health resesarch. But don't forget that the public health is a leftwing plot. (Medpundit)
9. These statisticians say that you can take a small sample from a large population and learn a lot about the population. As if. I'll believe those 665,000 Iraqis are dead when they tell me so. (Tim Blair)
Cowards, all of them. They own this war, but they won't face up to the fact that their little adventure helped kill over half a million people.
Say it slowly, carefully, and with deliberation: the White House Iraq Group, and centrally George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, are guilty of war crimes and mass murder. ¶ 4:23 PM 0 comments links to this post
Here's Lookin' at You, Kid
Joyce Marcel:
...It's no secret that President George W. Bush believes, in his blind arrogance, that God is directing his hand.
It's no secret that he's a born-again Christian with a taste for Armageddon. It's no secret he believes he makes no mistakes. It's no secret he loves the idea 
of himself as a warrior-president.
It's no secret he thinks Iran - an entire country! - is "evil." It's no secret he wants "regime change" without giving a thought to the damage he's already caused in Iraq.
It's no secret he ordered the Eisenhower's fleet to sail.
It's no secret he badly wants to attack Iran.
It's no secret he cannot learn. Therefore, he cannot gain by understanding Israel's disastrous recent experience in Lebanon.
It's no secret that he and Vice President Dick Cheney believe that the nuclear option is not only a viable one, but a desirable one.
It's no secret that the U.S. military is stretched beyond its limits in Iraq. Recruitment standards are being continually lowered to get more warm bodies into uniforms. Even if attacking Iran was rational, it would be impossible to put men and women on the ground without bringing back the draft.
Taking all these things together, it's not hard to visualize a nuclear attack on the good people of Iran.
Could we, as Americans, in good conscience, allow our country to use nuclear weapons?
Former U.N. arms inspector Scott Ritter said in Chester, Vt. this weekend that, "Congress has pretty much capitulated. The public debate is over on Iran. Seventy percent of Americans says Iran is trying to get nuclear weapons, so the Bush administration doesn't have to sell this war. We're in a very dangerous climate right now."
Think about the possible results of dropping a few "tactical" nuclear bombs on Iran. Besides the cruelty of such an act, the horrific destruction to cities and towns, the burning, anguish and death we would bring to thousands - possibly millions - of people, the poisonous clouds of nuclear dust that would be released into the atmosphere to circle the earth, what else might happen?
Pakistan, India and Israel have nuclear weapons. Once the concept of MAD - mutual assured destruction, an idea which has kept the world from a nuclear holocaust for over 60 years - is demolished, what will keep other countries from using their nukes? India and Pakistan over Kashmir? North Korea, which has developed and is testing nuclear weapons while we've been busy destroying Iraq, on South Korea and Japan?
Europe would be horrified, traumatized. Asia would be repelled. The Arab world, which already loathes the United States, would rise up in howling violence. Terrorism would increase. Israel would be at risk. Chaos would rule the Middle East.
Why aren't we, as citizens of this country and this world, screaming for this to stop right now?
Maybe it's because we know we can't do anything to stop this attack. Millions of us - around the world - poured into the streets to stop Bush from attacking Iraq. He did it anyway.
Here in America, we are living our day-to-day lives as if nothing will ever change. What movie will we see? Which car will we buy? Who will win the World Series?
Yet I'm reminded of the last scene in "Casablanca," when Rick says
, "Ilsa, I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."
Someday, America, you'll understand that.
But probably not until Middle America winds up on a list
of the usual suspects.
¶ 7:54 AM 3 comments
links to this post
...It's no secret that President George W. Bush believes, in his blind arrogance, that God is directing his hand.
It's no secret that he's a born-again Christian with a taste for Armageddon. It's no secret he believes he makes no mistakes. It's no secret he loves the idea of himself as a warrior-president.It's no secret he thinks Iran - an entire country! - is "evil." It's no secret he wants "regime change" without giving a thought to the damage he's already caused in Iraq.
It's no secret he ordered the Eisenhower's fleet to sail.
It's no secret he badly wants to attack Iran.
It's no secret he cannot learn. Therefore, he cannot gain by understanding Israel's disastrous recent experience in Lebanon.
It's no secret that he and Vice President Dick Cheney believe that the nuclear option is not only a viable one, but a desirable one.
It's no secret that the U.S. military is stretched beyond its limits in Iraq. Recruitment standards are being continually lowered to get more warm bodies into uniforms. Even if attacking Iran was rational, it would be impossible to put men and women on the ground without bringing back the draft.
Taking all these things together, it's not hard to visualize a nuclear attack on the good people of Iran.
Could we, as Americans, in good conscience, allow our country to use nuclear weapons?
Former U.N. arms inspector Scott Ritter said in Chester, Vt. this weekend that, "Congress has pretty much capitulated. The public debate is over on Iran. Seventy percent of Americans says Iran is trying to get nuclear weapons, so the Bush administration doesn't have to sell this war. We're in a very dangerous climate right now."
Think about the possible results of dropping a few "tactical" nuclear bombs on Iran. Besides the cruelty of such an act, the horrific destruction to cities and towns, the burning, anguish and death we would bring to thousands - possibly millions - of people, the poisonous clouds of nuclear dust that would be released into the atmosphere to circle the earth, what else might happen?
Pakistan, India and Israel have nuclear weapons. Once the concept of MAD - mutual assured destruction, an idea which has kept the world from a nuclear holocaust for over 60 years - is demolished, what will keep other countries from using their nukes? India and Pakistan over Kashmir? North Korea, which has developed and is testing nuclear weapons while we've been busy destroying Iraq, on South Korea and Japan?
Europe would be horrified, traumatized. Asia would be repelled. The Arab world, which already loathes the United States, would rise up in howling violence. Terrorism would increase. Israel would be at risk. Chaos would rule the Middle East.
Why aren't we, as citizens of this country and this world, screaming for this to stop right now?
Maybe it's because we know we can't do anything to stop this attack. Millions of us - around the world - poured into the streets to stop Bush from attacking Iraq. He did it anyway.
Here in America, we are living our day-to-day lives as if nothing will ever change. What movie will we see? Which car will we buy? Who will win the World Series?
Yet I'm reminded of the last scene in "Casablanca," when Rick says
, "Ilsa, I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."Someday, America, you'll understand that.
But probably not until Middle America winds up on a list
of the usual suspects.
¶ 7:54 AM 3 comments
links to this post
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
A Disturbance in the Force
...All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem. In the Indian state of Jharkhand near the western border of Bangladesh, 300 people were killed by elephants between 2000 and 2004. In the past 12 years, elephants have killed 605 people in Assam, a state in northeastern India, 239 of them since 2001; 265 elephants have died in that same period, the majority of them as a result of retaliation by angry villagers, who have used everything from poison-tipped arrows to laced food to exact their revenge. In Africa, reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from Zambia to Tanzania, from Uganda to Sierra Leone, where 300 villagers evacuated their homes last year because of unprovoked elephant attacks.
Still, it is not only the increasing number of these incidents that is causing alarm but also the singular perversity — for want of a less anthropocentric term — of recent elephant aggression. Since the early 1990’s, for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping
and killing rhinoceroses 
; this abnormal behavior, according to a 2001 study in the journal Pachyderm, has been reported in ‘‘a number of reserves’’ in the region. In July of last year, officials in Pilanesberg shot three young male elephants who were responsible for the killings of 63 rhinos 
, as well as attacks on people in safari vehicles. In Addo Elephant National Park, also in South Africa, up to 90 percent of male elephant deaths are now attributable to other male elephants 
, compared with a rate of 6 percent in more stable elephant communities.
For a number of biologists and ethologists who have spent their careers studying elephant behavior, the attacks have become so abnormal in both number and kind that they can no longer be attributed entirely to the customary factors. Typically, elephant researchers have cited, as a cause of aggression, the high levels of testosterone in newly matured male elephants or the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans. But in ‘‘Elephant Breakdown,’’ a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, Bradshaw and several colleagues argued that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.
It has long been apparent that every large, land-based animal on this planet is ultimately fighting a losing battle with humankind. And yet entirely befitting of an animal with such a highly developed sensibility, a deep-rooted sense of family and, yes, such a good long-term memory, the elephant is not going out quietly...
Elephants, when left to their own devices, are profoundly social creatures. A herd of them is, in essence, one incomprehensibly massive elephant: a somewhat loosely bound and yet intricately interconnected, tensile organism. Young elephants are raised within an extended, multitiered network of doting female caregivers that includes the birth mother, grandmothers, aunts and friends. These relations are maintained over a life span as long as 70 years. Studies of established herds have shown that young elephants stay within 15 feet of their mothers for nearly all of their first eight years of life, after which young females are socialized into the matriarchal network, while young males go off for a time into an all-male social group before coming back into the fold as mature adults.
When an elephant dies, its family members engage in intense mourning and burial rituals, conducting weeklong vigils over the body, carefully covering it with earth and brush, revisiting the bones for years afterward, caressing the bones with their trunks, often taking turns rubbing their trunks along the teeth of a skull’s lower jaw, the way living elephants do in greeting. If harm comes to a member of an elephant group, all the other elephants are aware of it. This sense of cohesion is further enforced by the elaborate communication system that elephants use. In close proximity they employ a range of vocalizations, from low-frequency rumbles to higher-pitched screams and trumpets, along with a variety of visual signals, from the waving of their trunks to subtle anglings of the head, body, feet and tail. When communicating over long distances — in order to pass along, for example, news about imminent threats, a sudden change of plans or, of the utmost importance to elephants, the death of a community member — they use patterns of subsonic vibrations that are felt as far as several miles away by exquisitely tuned sensors in the padding of their feet.
This fabric of elephant society, Bradshaw and her colleagues concluded, had effectively been frayed by years of habitat loss and poaching, along with systematic culling by government agencies to control elephant numbers and translocations of herds to different habitats. The number of older matriarchs and female caregivers (or ‘‘allomothers’’) had drastically fallen, as had the number of elder bulls, who play a significant role in keeping younger males in line. In parts of Zambia and Tanzania, a number of the elephant groups studied contained no adult females whatsoever. In Uganda, herds were often found to be ‘‘semipermanent aggregations,’’ as a paper written by Bradshaw describes them, with many females between the ages of 15 and 25 having no familial associations.
As a result of such social upheaval, calves are now being born to and raised by ever younger and inexperienced mothers. Young orphaned elephants, meanwhile, that have witnessed the death of a parent at the hands of poachers are coming of age in the absence of the support system that defines traditional elephant life. ‘‘The loss of elephant elders,’’ Bradshaw told me, ‘‘and the traumatic experience of witnessing the massacres of their family, impairs normal brain and behavior development in young elephants.’’
What Bradshaw and her colleagues describe would seem to be an extreme form of anthropocentric conjecture if the evidence that they’ve compiled from various elephant resesarchers, even on the strictly observational level, weren’t so compelling. The elephants of decimated herds, especially orphans who’ve watched the death of their parents and elders from poaching and culling, exhibit behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle response, unpredictable asocial behavior, inattentive mothering and hyperaggression. Studies of the various assaults on the rhinos in South Africa, meanwhile, have determined that the perpetrators were in all cases adolescent males that had witnessed their families being shot down in cullings. It was common for these elephants to have been tethered to the bodies of their dead and dying relatives until they could be rounded up for translocation to, as Bradshaw and Schore describe them, ‘‘locales lacking traditional social hierarchy of older bulls and intact natal family structures.’’
In fact, even the relatively few attempts that park officials have made to restore parts of the social fabric of elephant society have lent substance to the elephant-breakdown theory. When South African park rangers recently introduced a number of older bull elephants into several destabilized elephant herds in Pilanesburg and Addo, the wayward behavior — including unusually premature hormonal changes among the adolescent elephants — abated.
...If as recently as the end of the Vietnam War people were still balking at the idea that a soldier, for example, could be physically disabled by psychological harm — the idea, in other words, that the mind is not an entity apart from the body and therefore just as woundable as any limb — we now find ourselves having to make an equally profound and, for many, even more difficult leap: that a fellow creature as ostensibly unlike us in every way as an elephant is as precisely and intricately woundable as we are. And while such knowledge naturally places an added burden upon us, the keepers, that burden is now being greatly compounded by the fact that sudden violent outbursts... can no longer be dismissed as the inevitable isolated revolts of a restless few against the constraints and abuses of captivity.
They have no future without us. The question we are now forced to grapple with is whether we would mind a future without them, among the more mindful creatures on this earth and, in many ways, the most devoted. Indeed, the manner of the elephants’ continued keeping, their restoration and conservation, both in civil confines and what’s left of wild ones, is now drawing the attention of everyone from naturalists to neuroscientists. Too much about elephants, in the end — their desires and devotions, their vulnerability and tremendous resilience — reminds us of ourselves to dismiss out of hand this revolt they’re currently staging against their own dismissal. And while our concern may ultimately be rooted in that most human of impulses — the preservation of our own self-image — the great paradox about this particular moment in our history with elephants is that saving them will require finally getting past ourselves; it will demand the ultimate act of deep, interspecies empathy...
Moreover, the greater challenge is likely to require that those of us capable of feeling such an empathy deal with those of us
incapable of it.
¶ 9:57 PM 1 comments
links to this post
Still, it is not only the increasing number of these incidents that is causing alarm but also the singular perversity — for want of a less anthropocentric term — of recent elephant aggression. Since the early 1990’s, for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping
and killing rhinoceroses ; this abnormal behavior, according to a 2001 study in the journal Pachyderm, has been reported in ‘‘a number of reserves’’ in the region. In July of last year, officials in Pilanesberg shot three young male elephants who were responsible for the killings of 63 rhinos , as well as attacks on people in safari vehicles. In Addo Elephant National Park, also in South Africa, up to 90 percent of male elephant deaths are now attributable to other male elephants , compared with a rate of 6 percent in more stable elephant communities. For a number of biologists and ethologists who have spent their careers studying elephant behavior, the attacks have become so abnormal in both number and kind that they can no longer be attributed entirely to the customary factors. Typically, elephant researchers have cited, as a cause of aggression, the high levels of testosterone in newly matured male elephants or the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans. But in ‘‘Elephant Breakdown,’’ a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, Bradshaw and several colleagues argued that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.
It has long been apparent that every large, land-based animal on this planet is ultimately fighting a losing battle with humankind. And yet entirely befitting of an animal with such a highly developed sensibility, a deep-rooted sense of family and, yes, such a good long-term memory, the elephant is not going out quietly...
Elephants, when left to their own devices, are profoundly social creatures. A herd of them is, in essence, one incomprehensibly massive elephant: a somewhat loosely bound and yet intricately interconnected, tensile organism. Young elephants are raised within an extended, multitiered network of doting female caregivers that includes the birth mother, grandmothers, aunts and friends. These relations are maintained over a life span as long as 70 years. Studies of established herds have shown that young elephants stay within 15 feet of their mothers for nearly all of their first eight years of life, after which young females are socialized into the matriarchal network, while young males go off for a time into an all-male social group before coming back into the fold as mature adults.
When an elephant dies, its family members engage in intense mourning and burial rituals, conducting weeklong vigils over the body, carefully covering it with earth and brush, revisiting the bones for years afterward, caressing the bones with their trunks, often taking turns rubbing their trunks along the teeth of a skull’s lower jaw, the way living elephants do in greeting. If harm comes to a member of an elephant group, all the other elephants are aware of it. This sense of cohesion is further enforced by the elaborate communication system that elephants use. In close proximity they employ a range of vocalizations, from low-frequency rumbles to higher-pitched screams and trumpets, along with a variety of visual signals, from the waving of their trunks to subtle anglings of the head, body, feet and tail. When communicating over long distances — in order to pass along, for example, news about imminent threats, a sudden change of plans or, of the utmost importance to elephants, the death of a community member — they use patterns of subsonic vibrations that are felt as far as several miles away by exquisitely tuned sensors in the padding of their feet.
This fabric of elephant society, Bradshaw and her colleagues concluded, had effectively been frayed by years of habitat loss and poaching, along with systematic culling by government agencies to control elephant numbers and translocations of herds to different habitats. The number of older matriarchs and female caregivers (or ‘‘allomothers’’) had drastically fallen, as had the number of elder bulls, who play a significant role in keeping younger males in line. In parts of Zambia and Tanzania, a number of the elephant groups studied contained no adult females whatsoever. In Uganda, herds were often found to be ‘‘semipermanent aggregations,’’ as a paper written by Bradshaw describes them, with many females between the ages of 15 and 25 having no familial associations.
As a result of such social upheaval, calves are now being born to and raised by ever younger and inexperienced mothers. Young orphaned elephants, meanwhile, that have witnessed the death of a parent at the hands of poachers are coming of age in the absence of the support system that defines traditional elephant life. ‘‘The loss of elephant elders,’’ Bradshaw told me, ‘‘and the traumatic experience of witnessing the massacres of their family, impairs normal brain and behavior development in young elephants.’’
What Bradshaw and her colleagues describe would seem to be an extreme form of anthropocentric conjecture if the evidence that they’ve compiled from various elephant resesarchers, even on the strictly observational level, weren’t so compelling. The elephants of decimated herds, especially orphans who’ve watched the death of their parents and elders from poaching and culling, exhibit behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle response, unpredictable asocial behavior, inattentive mothering and hyperaggression. Studies of the various assaults on the rhinos in South Africa, meanwhile, have determined that the perpetrators were in all cases adolescent males that had witnessed their families being shot down in cullings. It was common for these elephants to have been tethered to the bodies of their dead and dying relatives until they could be rounded up for translocation to, as Bradshaw and Schore describe them, ‘‘locales lacking traditional social hierarchy of older bulls and intact natal family structures.’’
In fact, even the relatively few attempts that park officials have made to restore parts of the social fabric of elephant society have lent substance to the elephant-breakdown theory. When South African park rangers recently introduced a number of older bull elephants into several destabilized elephant herds in Pilanesburg and Addo, the wayward behavior — including unusually premature hormonal changes among the adolescent elephants — abated.
...If as recently as the end of the Vietnam War people were still balking at the idea that a soldier, for example, could be physically disabled by psychological harm — the idea, in other words, that the mind is not an entity apart from the body and therefore just as woundable as any limb — we now find ourselves having to make an equally profound and, for many, even more difficult leap: that a fellow creature as ostensibly unlike us in every way as an elephant is as precisely and intricately woundable as we are. And while such knowledge naturally places an added burden upon us, the keepers, that burden is now being greatly compounded by the fact that sudden violent outbursts... can no longer be dismissed as the inevitable isolated revolts of a restless few against the constraints and abuses of captivity.
They have no future without us. The question we are now forced to grapple with is whether we would mind a future without them, among the more mindful creatures on this earth and, in many ways, the most devoted. Indeed, the manner of the elephants’ continued keeping, their restoration and conservation, both in civil confines and what’s left of wild ones, is now drawing the attention of everyone from naturalists to neuroscientists. Too much about elephants, in the end — their desires and devotions, their vulnerability and tremendous resilience — reminds us of ourselves to dismiss out of hand this revolt they’re currently staging against their own dismissal. And while our concern may ultimately be rooted in that most human of impulses — the preservation of our own self-image — the great paradox about this particular moment in our history with elephants is that saving them will require finally getting past ourselves; it will demand the ultimate act of deep, interspecies empathy...
Moreover, the greater challenge is likely to require that those of us capable of feeling such an empathy deal with those of us
incapable of it.
¶ 9:57 PM 1 comments
links to this post
Be Very Afraid
Darth Rumsfeld has a plan for the re-organization of the entire United States- and world- government to make it work better. [thanks to Lambert for the link]
You know, the same way he's improved the military.
All that crap about the Constitution? Well, it's time to throw all that away, campers.
We're about to have government of the Peacekkeepers, by the Peacekeepers, for the Peacekeepers, if our resident Scarran Sith Lord has his way.
¶ 6:42 PM 0 comments
links to this post
You know, the same way he's improved the military.
All that crap about the Constitution? Well, it's time to throw all that away, campers.
We're about to have government of the Peacekkeepers, by the Peacekeepers, for the Peacekeepers, if our resident Scarran Sith Lord has his way.
¶ 6:42 PM 0 comments
links to this post
All in the Family
In the blowback from that itty bitty fizzled test, we see the beginnings of the manifest consequences of der decisions from Der Decider. In 2002:
...The US Government has announced that it will release $95m to North Korea as part of an agreement to replace the Stalinist country's own nuclear programme, which the US suspected was being misused.
Under the 1994 Agreed Framework an international consortium is building two proliferation-proof nuclear reactors and providing fuel oil for North Korea while the reactors are being built.
In releasing the funding, President George W Bush waived the Framework's requirement that North Korea allow inspectors to ensure it has not hidden away any weapons-grade plutonium from the original reactors.
President Bush argued that the decision was "vital to the national security interests of the United States"... [with thanks]
Vital, alright.
You can't have a blank check without endless war.
Once again, the Clenis® strikes !
So where was our good Sith Lord when Korea was starting its current nuclear buildup?
Why, selling them nuclear reactors, of course. From 2003:
Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, sat on the board of a company which three years ago sold two light water nuclear reactors to North Korea - a country he now regards as part of the "axis of evil" and which has been targeted for regime change by Washington because of its efforts to build nuclear weapons.
Mr Rumsfeld was a non-executive director of ABB, a European engineering giant based in Zurich, when it won a $200m (£125m) contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors. The current defence secretary sat on the board from 1990 to 2001, earning $190,000 a year. He left to join the Bush administration...
It's worth noting Rachel Weise's great timeline of North Korea's atomic march, given in detail here. ¶ 6:10 AM 0 comments links to this post
...The US Government has announced that it will release $95m to North Korea as part of an agreement to replace the Stalinist country's own nuclear programme, which the US suspected was being misused.
Under the 1994 Agreed Framework an international consortium is building two proliferation-proof nuclear reactors and providing fuel oil for North Korea while the reactors are being built.
In releasing the funding, President George W Bush waived the Framework's requirement that North Korea allow inspectors to ensure it has not hidden away any weapons-grade plutonium from the original reactors.
President Bush argued that the decision was "vital to the national security interests of the United States"... [with thanks]
Vital, alright.
You can't have a blank check without endless war.
Once again, the Clenis® strikes !
So where was our good Sith Lord when Korea was starting its current nuclear buildup?
Why, selling them nuclear reactors, of course. From 2003:
Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, sat on the board of a company which three years ago sold two light water nuclear reactors to North Korea - a country he now regards as part of the "axis of evil" and which has been targeted for regime change by Washington because of its efforts to build nuclear weapons.
Mr Rumsfeld was a non-executive director of ABB, a European engineering giant based in Zurich, when it won a $200m (£125m) contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors. The current defence secretary sat on the board from 1990 to 2001, earning $190,000 a year. He left to join the Bush administration...
It's worth noting Rachel Weise's great timeline of North Korea's atomic march, given in detail here. ¶ 6:10 AM 0 comments links to this post
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Fizzled Upizzled Excuses
It seems to have, anyway.
Never
mind!
The Saudis got the Twin Towers- so we showed 'em in Iraq!
The North Koreans are building nukes- onward to Iran!
The rationale is there, and it's plain as this thinktank policy statement what the reasoning is.
It really helps to read Dear Leader's critical thinkers that way. ¶ 12:33 PM 0 comments links to this post
Never
mind!The Saudis got the Twin Towers- so we showed 'em in Iraq!
The North Koreans are building nukes- onward to Iran!
The rationale is there, and it's plain as this thinktank policy statement what the reasoning is.
It really helps to read Dear Leader's critical thinkers that way. ¶ 12:33 PM 0 comments links to this post
Monday, October 09, 2006
The Mystic Cosmic Power of the Clenis®
I bet you think that's a joke.
In fact, as spotted by the Rude Pundit, it's not:
Yes, yes, Joseph K. would be laughing his ass off at Republican Patrick "Give Me Unsubstantiated, Random Accusations or Give Me Death" McHenry because it would all seem so, so familiar. CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked McHenry a perfectly reasonable question of whether or not the Congressman had any evidence that some unholy menage of Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emmanuel, and George Soros were responsible for, if the contorted reasoning can be understood, not revealing what they might have known about Mark Foley's one-handed IMing until just before an election despite the fact that Republicans weren't revealing it either. McHenry's response: "Do you have any evidence that they weren’t involved?"
Boo-ya. How do you answer that? 'Cause, realistically, at this point in time, sitting here, tap-tap-tappin' away at this with two hands, the Rude Pundit can't really think of any evidence that he wasn't involved in hiding the Foley e-mails... Hell, let's make this fun: The Rude Pundit can't prove that he didn't have sex with Rachel Bilson last night...
What is this strange effect
?
¶ 10:59 PM 0 comments
links to this post
I bet you think that's a joke.
In fact, as spotted by the Rude Pundit, it's not:
Yes, yes, Joseph K. would be laughing his ass off at Republican Patrick "Give Me Unsubstantiated, Random Accusations or Give Me Death" McHenry because it would all seem so, so familiar. CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked McHenry a perfectly reasonable question of whether or not the Congressman had any evidence that some unholy menage of Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emmanuel, and George Soros were responsible for, if the contorted reasoning can be understood, not revealing what they might have known about Mark Foley's one-handed IMing until just before an election despite the fact that Republicans weren't revealing it either. McHenry's response: "Do you have any evidence that they weren’t involved?"
Boo-ya. How do you answer that? 'Cause, realistically, at this point in time, sitting here, tap-tap-tappin' away at this with two hands, the Rude Pundit can't really think of any evidence that he wasn't involved in hiding the Foley e-mails... Hell, let's make this fun: The Rude Pundit can't prove that he didn't have sex with Rachel Bilson last night...
What is this strange effect
?
¶ 10:59 PM 0 comments
links to this post
October Surprise
Just in time for Dear Leader, as his Partei- and his polls get shot out from under him:
Not quite as good as Them, and not as good as Those
, but the way Karl Rove looks at it, if a puppet on a string 
rattles Team America's chain, 
then he has a sale.
Update: I hate it when I'm right. ¶ 10:22 PM 0 comments links to this post
Not quite as good as Them, and not as good as Those
, but the way Karl Rove looks at it, if a puppet on a string rattles Team America's chain, then he has a sale.Update: I hate it when I'm right. ¶ 10:22 PM 0 comments links to this post
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Welcome to the Multiverse
As much as the current CIA-DynCorp management at NASA loathes them, the best of NASA has shown itself the best science in the world again.
The New York Pravda makes the effort to explain what the latest Nobel Prize in Physics is all about for the mercantile classes:
FOURTEEN years ago, when a Berkeley astronomer named George F. Smoot declared that he and his satellite, the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, had detected the astrophysical equivalent of the fingerprints of God, his euphoria was easy to understand. For a few happy years, one of the last big pieces of the cosmological puzzle seemed to be in place — an explanation why the universe has blossomed into such an interesting place to live.
Had it not been for the whorls and dimples Dr. Smoot and his NASA collaborator, John C. Mather, found in the background radiation — the afterimage of the Big Bang — there would be no cosmic scenery. No galaxies or other vast conglomerations of matter, just a smooth expanse of visual nothing. Kansas instead of Colorado...
It's easier to visualize what this means if you use a simple light/ dark projection of the data instead of being so mystically psychedelic in your data depiction:
[An aside: The purpose of the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) mission was to take precise measurements of the diffuse radiation between 1 micrometer and 1 cm over the whole celestial sphere. The following quantities were measured: (1) the spectrum of the 3 K radiation over the range 100 micrometers to 1 cm; (2) the anisotropy of this radiation from 3 to 10 mm; and, (3) the spectrum and angular distribution of diffuse infrared background radiation at wavelengths from 1 to 300 micrometers.
The experiment module contained the instruments and a dewar filled with 650 liters of 1.6 K liquid helium, with a conical sun shade. The base module contained the attitude control, communications and power systems. The satellite rotated at 1 rpm about the axis of symmetry to control systematic errors in the anisotropy measurements and to allow observations of the zodiacal light at various solar elongation angles. The orientation of the spin axis was maintained anti-earth and at 94 degrees to the sun-earth line. The operational orbit was dawn-dusk sun-synchronous so that the sun was always to the side and thus was shielded from the instruments. With this orbit and spin-axis orientation, the instruments performed a complete scan of the celestial sphere every six months.
Instrument operations were terminated 1993-12-23. As of January 1994, engineering operations were to conclude that month, after which operation of the spacecraft would be transferred to Wallops for use as a test satellite.
Another projection of the image:
]
Back to Pravda for the masses:
...Subsequent discoveries have muddled the picture, so much so that last week’s announcement that the two men will share a Nobel Prize in physics was almost bittersweet — an occasion to celebrate a pivotal moment in science but also to look back with nostalgia on more innocent times.
The creation story supported by the data from the COBE satellite had seemed almost tantalizingly complete. Dr. Smoot’s smudges themselves weren’t sticky enough to gather particles into globs the size of the Milky Way or the Virgo supercluster. But if you spiked the Big Bang with an invisible additive called dark matter — a clumping factor — and hot-rodded the theory with a brief, early burst of rapid expansion called cosmological inflation, you could get the tiny irregularities in the background radiation to sprawl into something like today’s sky.
If only it had been that simple. Six years after COBE, another Berkeley scientist, Saul Perlmutter, found something that almost no one had expected. By now, it was assumed, the universe should have settled down, expanding at a steady pace or even slowing, braked by its own gravity. Instead it appeared to be in overdrive, not ballooning as violently as it had in the inflationary era but expanding at a faster and faster rate. Something seemed to be pushing on the accelerator — what has come to be called dark energy, a mysterious kind of anti-gravity.
Shoehorning the new ingredient into the prevailing framework has created new Nobel-sized problems. Basic physics predicts that if it exists at all, this repulsive force should be extremely large. Instead, the dark energy is infinitesimal and no one has been able to say why.
Except, that is, for followers of a controversial doctrine called the anthropic principle. There is no fundamental reason, they say, why the dark energy is so weak. It is just that if it were much stronger, space would have expanded too rapidly to harbor stars and, ultimately, life. The implication is that there is a multitude of possible universes, each with its own physics. Naturally, we are in one where it is possible for us to exist.
Depending on their temperament, physicists find the idea of a spectrum of universes each ruled by different laws either liberating or a source of despair. Since the days of the Greek philosophers, the reigning assumption, more mystical than scientific, has been that things are necessarily the way they are. There is one universe and lurking somewhere within is a deep principle that explains why the strength of gravity, the speed of light, the heft of matter — all the constants of nature — have taken certain values.
With Smoot and Mather, science seemed closer to finding the key — a hope that now sometimes seems as egotistical as the pre-Copernican belief that we live at the center of creation instead of on a hospitable rock orbiting an obscure star in an obscure galaxy in a universe that may be obscurer still.
More recently this faith in our own uniqueness has been tested again by a related finding in superstring theory, which began some 30 years ago as an attempt to pull all the numbers of the cosmos from a few basic calculations. Just as x + y + z = 42 has many solutions (infinitely many if you allow fractions or negative numbers), so do the equations of superstring theory. By one reckoning, the number of conceivable universes, each with a different dose of dark energy, is so vast that it is “measured not in the millions or billions but in googols or googolplexes.” (Before it was retooled into the name of a search engine, a googol was defined as 10 to the power of 100 and a googolplex as 10 to the power of googol.) Why we find ourselves in, say, universe number 110,310,077,252 would again be a tautology: if we weren’t we wouldn’t be here to ask. There may yet be a way out of the muddle with some insight that focuses superstrings into a beam illuminating the one true theory.
But new ideas, some physicists complain, are a dime a dozen. What they crave is new data, perhaps from the Large Hadron Collider scheduled to go online near Geneva next year. What is discovered there might do for physics what the COBE measurements did for cosmology in 1992: provide some long-needed reality testing.
If not there is always Plan B.
Maybe physicists in another universe are coming closer to an answer.
Doubtless an infinite number already have.
Me, I'm hitchhiking a ride the next time John Titor passes through.
I'm willing to pay for gas, too. In the multiverse, it's always better to pay as you go. Infinite interest is teh beotch to pay.
Doubtless there is a grand unifying theory of everything. The facts, if not the Truths, are out there
. Most of us, I've been told 
, just aren't ready for it yet.
¶ 11:46 AM 3 comments
links to this post
The New York Pravda makes the effort to explain what the latest Nobel Prize in Physics is all about for the mercantile classes:
FOURTEEN years ago, when a Berkeley astronomer named George F. Smoot declared that he and his satellite, the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, had detected the astrophysical equivalent of the fingerprints of God, his euphoria was easy to understand. For a few happy years, one of the last big pieces of the cosmological puzzle seemed to be in place — an explanation why the universe has blossomed into such an interesting place to live.
Had it not been for the whorls and dimples Dr. Smoot and his NASA collaborator, John C. Mather, found in the background radiation — the afterimage of the Big Bang — there would be no cosmic scenery. No galaxies or other vast conglomerations of matter, just a smooth expanse of visual nothing. Kansas instead of Colorado...
It's easier to visualize what this means if you use a simple light/ dark projection of the data instead of being so mystically psychedelic in your data depiction:
[An aside: The purpose of the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) mission was to take precise measurements of the diffuse radiation between 1 micrometer and 1 cm over the whole celestial sphere. The following quantities were measured: (1) the spectrum of the 3 K radiation over the range 100 micrometers to 1 cm; (2) the anisotropy of this radiation from 3 to 10 mm; and, (3) the spectrum and angular distribution of diffuse infrared background radiation at wavelengths from 1 to 300 micrometers.
The experiment module contained the instruments and a dewar filled with 650 liters of 1.6 K liquid helium, with a conical sun shade. The base module contained the attitude control, communications and power systems. The satellite rotated at 1 rpm about the axis of symmetry to control systematic errors in the anisotropy measurements and to allow observations of the zodiacal light at various solar elongation angles. The orientation of the spin axis was maintained anti-earth and at 94 degrees to the sun-earth line. The operational orbit was dawn-dusk sun-synchronous so that the sun was always to the side and thus was shielded from the instruments. With this orbit and spin-axis orientation, the instruments performed a complete scan of the celestial sphere every six months.
Instrument operations were terminated 1993-12-23. As of January 1994, engineering operations were to conclude that month, after which operation of the spacecraft would be transferred to Wallops for use as a test satellite.
Another projection of the image:
]Back to Pravda for the masses:
...Subsequent discoveries have muddled the picture, so much so that last week’s announcement that the two men will share a Nobel Prize in physics was almost bittersweet — an occasion to celebrate a pivotal moment in science but also to look back with nostalgia on more innocent times.
The creation story supported by the data from the COBE satellite had seemed almost tantalizingly complete. Dr. Smoot’s smudges themselves weren’t sticky enough to gather particles into globs the size of the Milky Way or the Virgo supercluster. But if you spiked the Big Bang with an invisible additive called dark matter — a clumping factor — and hot-rodded the theory with a brief, early burst of rapid expansion called cosmological inflation, you could get the tiny irregularities in the background radiation to sprawl into something like today’s sky.
If only it had been that simple. Six years after COBE, another Berkeley scientist, Saul Perlmutter, found something that almost no one had expected. By now, it was assumed, the universe should have settled down, expanding at a steady pace or even slowing, braked by its own gravity. Instead it appeared to be in overdrive, not ballooning as violently as it had in the inflationary era but expanding at a faster and faster rate. Something seemed to be pushing on the accelerator — what has come to be called dark energy, a mysterious kind of anti-gravity.
Shoehorning the new ingredient into the prevailing framework has created new Nobel-sized problems. Basic physics predicts that if it exists at all, this repulsive force should be extremely large. Instead, the dark energy is infinitesimal and no one has been able to say why.
Except, that is, for followers of a controversial doctrine called the anthropic principle. There is no fundamental reason, they say, why the dark energy is so weak. It is just that if it were much stronger, space would have expanded too rapidly to harbor stars and, ultimately, life. The implication is that there is a multitude of possible universes, each with its own physics. Naturally, we are in one where it is possible for us to exist.
Depending on their temperament, physicists find the idea of a spectrum of universes each ruled by different laws either liberating or a source of despair. Since the days of the Greek philosophers, the reigning assumption, more mystical than scientific, has been that things are necessarily the way they are. There is one universe and lurking somewhere within is a deep principle that explains why the strength of gravity, the speed of light, the heft of matter — all the constants of nature — have taken certain values.
With Smoot and Mather, science seemed closer to finding the key — a hope that now sometimes seems as egotistical as the pre-Copernican belief that we live at the center of creation instead of on a hospitable rock orbiting an obscure star in an obscure galaxy in a universe that may be obscurer still.
More recently this faith in our own uniqueness has been tested again by a related finding in superstring theory, which began some 30 years ago as an attempt to pull all the numbers of the cosmos from a few basic calculations. Just as x + y + z = 42 has many solutions (infinitely many if you allow fractions or negative numbers), so do the equations of superstring theory. By one reckoning, the number of conceivable universes, each with a different dose of dark energy, is so vast that it is “measured not in the millions or billions but in googols or googolplexes.” (Before it was retooled into the name of a search engine, a googol was defined as 10 to the power of 100 and a googolplex as 10 to the power of googol.) Why we find ourselves in, say, universe number 110,310,077,252 would again be a tautology: if we weren’t we wouldn’t be here to ask. There may yet be a way out of the muddle with some insight that focuses superstrings into a beam illuminating the one true theory.
But new ideas, some physicists complain, are a dime a dozen. What they crave is new data, perhaps from the Large Hadron Collider scheduled to go online near Geneva next year. What is discovered there might do for physics what the COBE measurements did for cosmology in 1992: provide some long-needed reality testing.
If not there is always Plan B.
Maybe physicists in another universe are coming closer to an answer.Doubtless an infinite number already have.
Me, I'm hitchhiking a ride the next time John Titor passes through.
I'm willing to pay for gas, too. In the multiverse, it's always better to pay as you go. Infinite interest is teh beotch to pay.
Doubtless there is a grand unifying theory of everything. The facts, if not the Truths, are out there
. Most of us, I've been told , just aren't ready for it yet.
¶ 11:46 AM 3 comments
links to this post
Lies, Ignorance, and the Refreshing Taste of Kool-Aid
poputonian at Hullabaloo expands on Olberman's discussion of lies and writes about the worst damage the Company has done to the nation:
One of the things that bothers me about neo-Republicanism and its entire foundation of lies, is the division it has created within families. I can hardly speak to my wingnut brother anymore, and we can't speak at all about politics. We had numerous heated debates in the first couple of years following the invasion of Iraq, but he would counter every sourceable evidence I put forward with a lie he had been fed by Fox News, Rush Phlegmball, or The President -- people who really have no honor whatsoever.
When I informed an uncle (in his sixties) about PNAC as evidence of pre-meditation of the war in Iraq, he asked me with complete and genuine concern if I had been getting information from the Internet, as if the Internet was a big tub of lies, with no sources to back up any assertion. His source of information about Iraq? He admitted it: newspaper editorials and the aforementioned Mr. Phlegmball.
It seems every political debate conducted in the family setting ends in emotional turmoil. If you're serious about the politics of death and dying, your own flesh and blood are the ones you most want to convince of how wrong and dishonorable the current administration is. But convincing the last thirty percent of deeply entrenched wingnuts, even if they're family, isn't going to happen given that the current Republican leadership is the most dishonorable lot of American politicians ever. They have institutionalized and legitimated the art of lying to where it is now an officially accepted practice. I really think they see lying as an important part of the political gamesmanship, the country be damned.
With a population close to 300 million, and Dear Leader's Faithful hovering at about a third of us, you get the idea of the size of the problem. One third of the nation is accusing the other two thirds of Treason. The other two thirds is at best, puzzled and hurt. At worst?
What did Olberman say? Quoted over at Hullabaloo, expanded here a little more for context, you should really check out the whole transcript and watch the video:
Yesterday at a fundraiser for an Arizona Congressman, Mr. Bush claimed, quote, 177 of the opposition party said 'You know, we don't think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists."
The hell they did.
177 Democrats opposed the President's seizure of another part of the Constitution.
Not even the White House press office could actually name a single Democrat who had ever said the government shouldn't be listening to the conversations of terrorists.
President Bush hears… what he wants.
Tuesday, at another fundraiser in California, he had said "Democrats take a law enforcement approach to terrorism. That means America will wait until we're attacked again before we respond."
Mr. Bush fabricated that, too.
And evidently he has begun to fancy himself as a mind-reader.
"If you listen closely to some of the leaders of the Democratic Party," the President said at another fundraiser Monday in Nevada, "it sounds like they think the best way to protect the American people is — wait until we're attacked again."
The President doesn't just hear what he wants. He hears things, that only he can hear...
Rhetorically, it is about an inch short of Mr. Bush accusing Democratic leaders; Democrats; the majority of Americans who disagree with his policies — of treason... Read it all. Olberman's hit it precisely.
Pundits like Coulter, Limbaugh, and Savage have long accused Dear Leader's opponents of treason. Lately that's expanded to Fox News, too, as they thrash and desperately try to energize their waning audience. Still, that 30% remains Faithful.
As one of the many Americans with a great deal of family- all of my blood outside of my wife and kids, really- taking the word of Dear Leader as the Word of God, you might say this issue concerns me deeply.
But this issue isn't new. A young John Adams, himself a devout Christian, eleven years before the Revolutionary War, observed the marriage of theocratic and feudal interests, and commented on how they maintain control of minds:
..."All these opinions they were enabled to spread and rivet among the people by reducing their minds to a state of sordid ignorance and staring timidity, and by infusing into them a religious horror of letters and knowledge..."
It's in old English, and hard to read, but worth it, because the same human issues
continue to plague us today.
They've had many guises, slogans and labels,over the years, but the antagonists of freedom have been very similar in their aims and mode of action over the years.
The taste of Kool-Aid isn't nutritious. The great problem of those who would rule instead of govern is that they have a hard time keeping the trains running on time, all their promises to the contrary. As I've posted here over the years, there are major forces acting against the status quo.
These forces won't bring families together in a very pleasant way at all.
You can bet the state of sordid staring purposeful ignorance of that third of us will make a muddle of the decisions that have to be made.
Perhaps, though, as the Founders intended, we'll be less likely to follow the cults of personality that those who would rule engender.
Just don't count on it. ¶ 7:21 AM 0 comments links to this post
poputonian at Hullabaloo expands on Olberman's discussion of lies and writes about the worst damage the Company has done to the nation:
One of the things that bothers me about neo-Republicanism and its entire foundation of lies, is the division it has created within families. I can hardly speak to my wingnut brother anymore, and we can't speak at all about politics. We had numerous heated debates in the first couple of years following the invasion of Iraq, but he would counter every sourceable evidence I put forward with a lie he had been fed by Fox News, Rush Phlegmball, or The President -- people who really have no honor whatsoever.
When I informed an uncle (in his sixties) about PNAC as evidence of pre-meditation of the war in Iraq, he asked me with complete and genuine concern if I had been getting information from the Internet, as if the Internet was a big tub of lies, with no sources to back up any assertion. His source of information about Iraq? He admitted it: newspaper editorials and the aforementioned Mr. Phlegmball.
It seems every political debate conducted in the family setting ends in emotional turmoil. If you're serious about the politics of death and dying, your own flesh and blood are the ones you most want to convince of how wrong and dishonorable the current administration is. But convincing the last thirty percent of deeply entrenched wingnuts, even if they're family, isn't going to happen given that the current Republican leadership is the most dishonorable lot of American politicians ever. They have institutionalized and legitimated the art of lying to where it is now an officially accepted practice. I really think they see lying as an important part of the political gamesmanship, the country be damned.
With a population close to 300 million, and Dear Leader's Faithful hovering at about a third of us, you get the idea of the size of the problem. One third of the nation is accusing the other two thirds of Treason. The other two thirds is at best, puzzled and hurt. At worst?
What did Olberman say? Quoted over at Hullabaloo, expanded here a little more for context, you should really check out the whole transcript and watch the video:
Yesterday at a fundraiser for an Arizona Congressman, Mr. Bush claimed, quote, 177 of the opposition party said 'You know, we don't think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists."
The hell they did.
177 Democrats opposed the President's seizure of another part of the Constitution.
Not even the White House press office could actually name a single Democrat who had ever said the government shouldn't be listening to the conversations of terrorists.
President Bush hears… what he wants.
Tuesday, at another fundraiser in California, he had said "Democrats take a law enforcement approach to terrorism. That means America will wait until we're attacked again before we respond."
Mr. Bush fabricated that, too.
And evidently he has begun to fancy himself as a mind-reader.
"If you listen closely to some of the leaders of the Democratic Party," the President said at another fundraiser Monday in Nevada, "it sounds like they think the best way to protect the American people is — wait until we're attacked again."
The President doesn't just hear what he wants. He hears things, that only he can hear...
Rhetorically, it is about an inch short of Mr. Bush accusing Democratic leaders; Democrats; the majority of Americans who disagree with his policies — of treason... Read it all. Olberman's hit it precisely.
Pundits like Coulter, Limbaugh, and Savage have long accused Dear Leader's opponents of treason. Lately that's expanded to Fox News, too, as they thrash and desperately try to energize their waning audience. Still, that 30% remains Faithful.
As one of the many Americans with a great deal of family- all of my blood outside of my wife and kids, really- taking the word of Dear Leader as the Word of God, you might say this issue concerns me deeply.
But this issue isn't new. A young John Adams, himself a devout Christian, eleven years before the Revolutionary War, observed the marriage of theocratic and feudal interests, and commented on how they maintain control of minds:
..."All these opinions they were enabled to spread and rivet among the people by reducing their minds to a state of sordid ignorance and staring timidity, and by infusing into them a religious horror of letters and knowledge..."
It's in old English, and hard to read, but worth it, because the same human issues
continue to plague us today. They've had many guises, slogans and labels,over the years, but the antagonists of freedom have been very similar in their aims and mode of action over the years.
The taste of Kool-Aid isn't nutritious. The great problem of those who would rule instead of govern is that they have a hard time keeping the trains running on time, all their promises to the contrary. As I've posted here over the years, there are major forces acting against the status quo.
These forces won't bring families together in a very pleasant way at all.
You can bet the state of sordid staring purposeful ignorance of that third of us will make a muddle of the decisions that have to be made.
Perhaps, though, as the Founders intended, we'll be less likely to follow the cults of personality that those who would rule engender.
Just don't count on it. ¶ 7:21 AM 0 comments links to this post
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Giving Them All They Ask For
Removing our bases from Saudi Arabia, ending the Constitution as we've always known it, is there anything Dear Leader still has to do to make Al Qaeda and its Saudi benefactors- lienholders on the Bu$h family- happy?
How about Staying the Course in Iraq?
A newly translated letter (.pdf format) from al-Qaeda’s leadership to their Iraq organization shows the Bush administration’s “stay the course” Iraq strategy is exactly what al Qaeda wants:
"The most important thing is that you continue in your jihad in Iraq, and that you be patient and forbearing, even in weakness, and even with fewer operations; even if each day had half of the number of current daily operations, that is not a problem, or even less than that. So, do not be hasty. The most important thing is that the jihad continues with steadfastness and firm rooting, and that it grows in terms of supporters, strength, clarity of justification, and visible proof each day. Indeed, prolonging the war is in our interest, with God’s permission."
¶ 8:52 PM 0 comments
links to this post
Removing our bases from Saudi Arabia, ending the Constitution as we've always known it, is there anything Dear Leader still has to do to make Al Qaeda and its Saudi benefactors- lienholders on the Bu$h family- happy?
How about Staying the Course in Iraq?
A newly translated letter (.pdf format) from al-Qaeda’s leadership to their Iraq organization shows the Bush administration’s “stay the course” Iraq strategy is exactly what al Qaeda wants:
"The most important thing is that you continue in your jihad in Iraq, and that you be patient and forbearing, even in weakness, and even with fewer operations; even if each day had half of the number of current daily operations, that is not a problem, or even less than that. So, do not be hasty. The most important thing is that the jihad continues with steadfastness and firm rooting, and that it grows in terms of supporters, strength, clarity of justification, and visible proof each day. Indeed, prolonging the war is in our interest, with God’s permission."
¶ 8:52 PM 0 comments
links to this post
Gambling Problem
From xan at Correntwire:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China has beamed a ground-based laser at U.S. spy satellites over its territory, a U.S. agency said, in an action that exposed the potential vulnerability of space systems that provide crucial data to American troops and consumers around the world.
The Defense Department remains tight-lipped about details, including which satellite was involved or when it occurred.
The Pentagon's National Reconnaissance Office Director Donald Kerr last week acknowledged the incident, first reported by Defense News, but said it did not materially damage the U.S. satellite's ability to collect information...
Hitchens also emphasized that it would be extremely difficult to disable a satellite with a laser -- and even U.S. scientists had not developed a system to do that.
But there is growing concern among lawmakers about U.S. efforts to develop such anti-satellite weapons.
House of Representatives lawmakers tried to block a planned test of Starfire, a satellite and star tracking program, for fiscal 2007 after learning it could also be used as an anti-satellite weapon. The funds were reinstated only after the Air Force assured lawmakers it would be used only for tracking.
The Chinese incident also underscored the need to develop an international code of conduct for space. Currently, there are no specific rules or treaties governing behavior of the 40 countries that operate satellites, and about a dozen countries that have launch capability, Hitchens said.
In order to perpetuate their endless cash flow they feel they have to perpetuate endeless war.
To help this along, Dear Leader is endlessly saber-rattling.
The Dear Leader and Darth Rumsfeld suggest publically that the United States is going to develop new types of nukes and test them. So of course, the North Koreans do the same.
They publish policy statements identifying China as a long term "inevitable enemy" despite current peaceful relations and act like they expect no Chinese to notice.
They announce to the world they're going to focus on space-based laser weaponry, but instead of developing education here to produce enough scientists and engineers they hire and sub-contract them from the country who is feverishly trying to catch up on American weapon technology because they've been threatened by Americans.
They obsess with secrecy but hire the same nationals to help build and maintain the same information apparatus that guards their secrets.
One wonders if this is the same brilliant strategery Prescott Bu$h used to deal with the Third Reich. ¶ 6:30 AM 0 comments links to this post
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China has beamed a ground-based laser at U.S. spy satellites over its territory, a U.S. agency said, in an action that exposed the potential vulnerability of space systems that provide crucial data to American troops and consumers around the world.
The Defense Department remains tight-lipped about details, including which satellite was involved or when it occurred.
The Pentagon's National Reconnaissance Office Director Donald Kerr last week acknowledged the incident, first reported by Defense News, but said it did not materially damage the U.S. satellite's ability to collect information...
Hitchens also emphasized that it would be extremely difficult to disable a satellite with a laser -- and even U.S. scientists had not developed a system to do that.
But there is growing concern among lawmakers about U.S. efforts to develop such anti-satellite weapons.
House of Representatives lawmakers tried to block a planned test of Starfire, a satellite and star tracking program, for fiscal 2007 after learning it could also be used as an anti-satellite weapon. The funds were reinstated only after the Air Force assured lawmakers it would be used only for tracking.
The Chinese incident also underscored the need to develop an international code of conduct for space. Currently, there are no specific rules or treaties governing behavior of the 40 countries that operate satellites, and about a dozen countries that have launch capability, Hitchens said.
In order to perpetuate their endless cash flow they feel they have to perpetuate endeless war.
To help this along, Dear Leader is endlessly saber-rattling.
The Dear Leader and Darth Rumsfeld suggest publically that the United States is going to develop new types of nukes and test them. So of course, the North Koreans do the same.
They publish policy statements identifying China as a long term "inevitable enemy" despite current peaceful relations and act like they expect no Chinese to notice.
They announce to the world they're going to focus on space-based laser weaponry, but instead of developing education here to produce enough scientists and engineers they hire and sub-contract them from the country who is feverishly trying to catch up on American weapon technology because they've been threatened by Americans.
They obsess with secrecy but hire the same nationals to help build and maintain the same information apparatus that guards their secrets.
One wonders if this is the same brilliant strategery Prescott Bu$h used to deal with the Third Reich. ¶ 6:30 AM 0 comments links to this post
Friday, October 06, 2006
It Could Be Worse
Tom Tommorrow agrees:
We might all be breathing alien chlorine atmospheres, right? Good thing environmental regulations are a priority of Dear Leader! ¶ 10:22 AM 0 comments links to this post
We might all be breathing alien chlorine atmospheres, right? Good thing environmental regulations are a priority of Dear Leader! ¶ 10:22 AM 0 comments links to this post
Thursday, October 05, 2006
If you can't dazzle them with brilliance
...
Congress has so complex-ified the defense budget and stuffed it with spending gimmicks, it is difficult to understand just how much is being spent on national defense and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has become such a jumble that some journalists seem to rely upon press releases from the Senate and House Appropriations Committees and the Senate and House Armed Services Committees to report on the budget. Doing so is a serious mistake; the committees’ numbers are highly misleading, and sometimes have absolutely nothing to do with what is actually spent on defense.
For example, on Sept. 21, the Senate Appropriations Committee announced the completion of the House-Senate Conference Committee to resolve differences in two very dissimilar versions of the Department of Defense Appropriations bills the House and Senate had passed earlier in the year. Describing the final result, the Senate Appropriations Committee stated “The bill provides $436.6 billion in new discretionary spending authority for the Department of Defense for functions under the Defense subcommittee’s jurisdiction, including $70 billion in additional appropriations to fund operations related to the Global War on Terror (GWOT).”[1]
The next day, the House Appropriations Committee said in its press release that the bill’s total was “$377.6 billion (PLUS a $70.0 billion bridge fund for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan).”[2] $377.6 billion plus $70.0 billion equals $447.6 billion, not the $436.6 billion the Senate Appropriations Committee cited. There’s an $11 billion difference in describing the same bill!
Both statements are technically correct and quite misleading at the same time...
An excellent analysis, and about as good a breakdown as we can make.
The total? Far over a half trillion dollars for the D.o'D. for next year. The full .pdf here, but CDI's breakdown should be read first. ¶ 9:54 PM 1 comments links to this post
Congress has so complex-ified the defense budget and stuffed it with spending gimmicks, it is difficult to understand just how much is being spent on national defense and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has become such a jumble that some journalists seem to rely upon press releases from the Senate and House Appropriations Committees and the Senate and House Armed Services Committees to report on the budget. Doing so is a serious mistake; the committees’ numbers are highly misleading, and sometimes have absolutely nothing to do with what is actually spent on defense.
For example, on Sept. 21, the Senate Appropriations Committee announced the completion of the House-Senate Conference Committee to resolve differences in two very dissimilar versions of the Department of Defense Appropriations bills the House and Senate had passed earlier in the year. Describing the final result, the Senate Appropriations Committee stated “The bill provides $436.6 billion in new discretionary spending authority for the Department of Defense for functions under the Defense subcommittee’s jurisdiction, including $70 billion in additional appropriations to fund operations related to the Global War on Terror (GWOT).”[1]
The next day, the House Appropriations Committee said in its press release that the bill’s total was “$377.6 billion (PLUS a $70.0 billion bridge fund for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan).”[2] $377.6 billion plus $70.0 billion equals $447.6 billion, not the $436.6 billion the Senate Appropriations Committee cited. There’s an $11 billion difference in describing the same bill!
Both statements are technically correct and quite misleading at the same time...
An excellent analysis, and about as good a breakdown as we can make.
The total? Far over a half trillion dollars for the D.o'D. for next year. The full .pdf here, but CDI's breakdown should be read first. ¶ 9:54 PM 1 comments links to this post
They Get It By Kissing?
Maybe this explains the implosion going on in Washington:
Science 6 October 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5796, pp. 133 - 136
DOI: 10.1126/science.1132661
Infectious Prions in the Saliva and Blood of Deer with Chronic Wasting Disease
A critical concern in the transmission of prion diseases, including chronic wasting disease (CWD) of cervids, is the potential presence of prions in body fluids. To address this issue directly, we exposed cohorts of CWD-naïve deer to saliva, blood, or urine and feces from CWD-positive deer. We found infectious prions capable of transmitting CWD in saliva (by the oral route) and in blood (by transfusion). The results help to explain the facile transmission of CWD among cervids and prompt caution concerning contact with body fluids in prion infections.
Remind me not to eat venison.
You might want to avoid getting too friendly with anyone who does, too. ¶ 9:05 PM 0 comments links to this post
Science 6 October 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5796, pp. 133 - 136
DOI: 10.1126/science.1132661
Infectious Prions in the Saliva and Blood of Deer with Chronic Wasting Disease
A critical concern in the transmission of prion diseases, including chronic wasting disease (CWD) of cervids, is the potential presence of prions in body fluids. To address this issue directly, we exposed cohorts of CWD-naïve deer to saliva, blood, or urine and feces from CWD-positive deer. We found infectious prions capable of transmitting CWD in saliva (by the oral route) and in blood (by transfusion). The results help to explain the facile transmission of CWD among cervids and prompt caution concerning contact with body fluids in prion infections.
Remind me not to eat venison.
You might want to avoid getting too friendly with anyone who does, too. ¶ 9:05 PM 0 comments links to this post
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Worlds Like Grains of Sand
...on an endless beach.
More worlds than you imagine. More worlds than you can imagine. More to see and touch and think about than you can ever finish.
No wonder the TheoConfederacy hates the Hubble.
No wonder the rest of us love it.
Like the Mars Rovers, some technologies are good ideas. The Hubble was and remains a very good idea. Even if NASA remains overrun with ruthless mercenary pirates.
Those with eyes to see, will see.
Incidently, Larry Niven, an excellent writer with apparently no real understanding of reality-based American politics (alas), once predicted the first sign of an Outsider moving in our direction using a sublightspeed interstellar drive might be a surge of lithium radicals from the general direction of Sagittarius (i.e., the galactic core region). ¶ 9:27 PM 0 comments links to this post
More worlds than you imagine. More worlds than you can imagine. More to see and touch and think about than you can ever finish.
No wonder the TheoConfederacy hates the Hubble.
No wonder the rest of us love it.
Like the Mars Rovers, some technologies are good ideas. The Hubble was and remains a very good idea. Even if NASA remains overrun with ruthless mercenary pirates.
Those with eyes to see, will see.
Incidently, Larry Niven, an excellent writer with apparently no real understanding of reality-based American politics (alas), once predicted the first sign of an Outsider moving in our direction using a sublightspeed interstellar drive might be a surge of lithium radicals from the general direction of Sagittarius (i.e., the galactic core region). ¶ 9:27 PM 0 comments links to this post
Who Needs a Navy When The Force is Strong Within You?
Another Reptilican Rumsfeld hater:
Over lunch at the Four Seasons during a hectic week in New York, a former secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, shared his alarm about America's security.
"We're building only five ships a year; we're on the way to a 150-ship Navy" he says. In his view, that is courting disaster. "That is not enough to cover our security requirements," he says. "Seventy-percent of the world is covered by water. We no longer have basing rights around the world. If you have combat operations going on you need air cover and support 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and that comes from the Navy. To fly one ton of cargo into Iraq takes 14 tons of fuel. That's not cheap. It's got to go by sea, so you have to protect it. The Iranians, for instance, have very good submarines."
The ultimate threat, he says, is China, which "is now building their 600-ship Navy, to fill the vacuum, and they're very good ships."
...While not wanting to be an armchair quarterback, Mr. Lehman is critical not of the decision to go into Iraq, which he claims was justified by the intelligence available at the time, but of the management of the aftermath. "The problem with the insurgency resulted from inadequate planning, or no significant planning, for the post-period to stabilize the country," he says. "One of the historic blunders of all time for the U.S. military was the decision to dismantle the security forces — the police, the army, the civil service, and not having any plan to replace them."
Mr. Lehman despairs about America's intelligence community. "The conclusions of the WMD Commission and the 9/11 Commission were that our leadership is not getting the minimum of what they should expect from the intelligence community," he said. "It's become bloated and bureaucratized. … The U.S. has become the GM of international security. The jihadists are the lean, flexible challengers. It's time for reform."
He also sets high goals, such as his well-known ambition to build a 600-ship Navy. As secretary, it was his job to promote his department; as a civilian, he continues to advocate a stronger maritime presence. He is also an advocate of lean, efficient management in the private and the public sectors. This is not, in his view, the profile of today's Navy.
"Defense costs are skyrocketing out of sight," he says. "Costs for ships are way beyond what they should be, even allowing for inflation. It's being managed by a bureaucracy, not by accountable people. When I was in office my last budget was $11 billion and we built 28 ships; last year's budget was about $11 billion and they built five ships. That's not inflation, that's unilateral disarmament."
Mr. Lehman is equally concerned that bureaucratic bungling has sidetracked the effort to enact the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, on which he served. "We called for ‘leaning out' the 15 different intelligence agencies to create a more agile intelligence effort. Instead, the president added another layer of bureaucracy."
...Mr. Lehman today is actively managing a highly successful private equity shop that invests primarily in aerospace, defense, and marine companies. J.F. Lehman & Company was founded in 1992 and has provided investors with "high double-digit rates of return." He and his partners have just raised their third fund, and currently have well more than $1 billion invested.
In this arena, too, Mr. Lehman has high standards: "We have an average transaction size of $30 to $300 million. We're flying under Wall Street's radar; we look for good technology, intellectual property. We're value investors; we're not chasing the flavor of the year. We want profitable companies with strong market positions. We go in and help management reengineer the business, make it leaner. Sometimes we help management expand globally."
Where does the group look for deals? There are two main sources. "We look at orphans, or third-tier companies owned by conglomerates. Also, we work with entrepreneurs. There are literally thousands of companies out there that grew up in the defense build-up years of the 1970s and 1980s.
"We have a reputation for being good to work with, for closing deals. We don't bait and switch. We're very hands-on. Every company we've owned has ended up better off," he says.
Echoing concerns of many observers, Mr. Lehman is skeptical about the mega-deals making headlines on Wall Street these days. He describes much of this activity as nothing more than financial engineering, and says he doubts that much value is added as assets are swapped in and out of the giant private equity consortiums so popular today.
...Hard work, indeed, but not so timeconsuming that Mr. Lehman isn't engaged in the political game. He is a fan of Senator McCain, and will be working for his presidential campaign...
Not one to destroy a Ring of Power
, of course, the General would use it himself to Fight Evildoers.
Never mind. The $election will be Diebolded according to the Chimperor's plan, and the Sith Lord will deal
with the Unfaithful when the time comes.
Unless, of course, all the Reptilican incumbents are forced to resign before the $election.
Now, that's funny. ¶ 8:05 PM 0 comments links to this post
Over lunch at the Four Seasons during a hectic week in New York, a former secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, shared his alarm about America's security.
"We're building only five ships a year; we're on the way to a 150-ship Navy" he says. In his view, that is courting disaster. "That is not enough to cover our security requirements," he says. "Seventy-percent of the world is covered by water. We no longer have basing rights around the world. If you have combat operations going on you need air cover and support 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and that comes from the Navy. To fly one ton of cargo into Iraq takes 14 tons of fuel. That's not cheap. It's got to go by sea, so you have to protect it. The Iranians, for instance, have very good submarines."
The ultimate threat, he says, is China, which "is now building their 600-ship Navy, to fill the vacuum, and they're very good ships."
...While not wanting to be an armchair quarterback, Mr. Lehman is critical not of the decision to go into Iraq, which he claims was justified by the intelligence available at the time, but of the management of the aftermath. "The problem with the insurgency resulted from inadequate planning, or no significant planning, for the post-period to stabilize the country," he says. "One of the historic blunders of all time for the U.S. military was the decision to dismantle the security forces — the police, the army, the civil service, and not having any plan to replace them."
Mr. Lehman despairs about America's intelligence community. "The conclusions of the WMD Commission and the 9/11 Commission were that our leadership is not getting the minimum of what they should expect from the intelligence community," he said. "It's become bloated and bureaucratized. … The U.S. has become the GM of international security. The jihadists are the lean, flexible challengers. It's time for reform."
He also sets high goals, such as his well-known ambition to build a 600-ship Navy. As secretary, it was his job to promote his department; as a civilian, he continues to advocate a stronger maritime presence. He is also an advocate of lean, efficient management in the private and the public sectors. This is not, in his view, the profile of today's Navy.
"Defense costs are skyrocketing out of sight," he says. "Costs for ships are way beyond what they should be, even allowing for inflation. It's being managed by a bureaucracy, not by accountable people. When I was in office my last budget was $11 billion and we built 28 ships; last year's budget was about $11 billion and they built five ships. That's not inflation, that's unilateral disarmament."
Mr. Lehman is equally concerned that bureaucratic bungling has sidetracked the effort to enact the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, on which he served. "We called for ‘leaning out' the 15 different intelligence agencies to create a more agile intelligence effort. Instead, the president added another layer of bureaucracy."
...Mr. Lehman today is actively managing a highly successful private equity shop that invests primarily in aerospace, defense, and marine companies. J.F. Lehman & Company was founded in 1992 and has provided investors with "high double-digit rates of return." He and his partners have just raised their third fund, and currently have well more than $1 billion invested.
In this arena, too, Mr. Lehman has high standards: "We have an average transaction size of $30 to $300 million. We're flying under Wall Street's radar; we look for good technology, intellectual property. We're value investors; we're not chasing the flavor of the year. We want profitable companies with strong market positions. We go in and help management reengineer the business, make it leaner. Sometimes we help management expand globally."
Where does the group look for deals? There are two main sources. "We look at orphans, or third-tier companies owned by conglomerates. Also, we work with entrepreneurs. There are literally thousands of companies out there that grew up in the defense build-up years of the 1970s and 1980s.
"We have a reputation for being good to work with, for closing deals. We don't bait and switch. We're very hands-on. Every company we've owned has ended up better off," he says.
Echoing concerns of many observers, Mr. Lehman is skeptical about the mega-deals making headlines on Wall Street these days. He describes much of this activity as nothing more than financial engineering, and says he doubts that much value is added as assets are swapped in and out of the giant private equity consortiums so popular today.
...Hard work, indeed, but not so timeconsuming that Mr. Lehman isn't engaged in the political game. He is a fan of Senator McCain, and will be working for his presidential campaign...
Not one to destroy a Ring of Power
, of course, the General would use it himself to Fight Evildoers.Never mind. The $election will be Diebolded according to the Chimperor's plan, and the Sith Lord will deal
with the Unfaithful when the time comes.Unless, of course, all the Reptilican incumbents are forced to resign before the $election.
Now, that's funny. ¶ 8:05 PM 0 comments links to this post
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Just an Itty Bitty One
SEOUL, Oct 3 (Reuters) - An increasingly isolated North Korea said on Tuesday it would conduct its first-ever nuclear test, blaming a U.S. "threat of nuclear war and sanctions" for forcing its hand.
The statement by North Korea's foreign ministry, carried on the official KCNA news agency, was condemned by neighbouring Japan as "unacceptable" and caused South Korea to increase its security alert.
Britain said it would view any nuclear test as a highly provocative act.
The announcement confirms weeks of rumours the communist state was planning a test and came amid increasingly sour relations with the outside world after it test-fired missiles in July.
"The U.S. extreme threat of a nuclear war and sanctions and pressure compel the DPRK (North Korea) to conduct a nuclear test, an essential process for bolstering nuclear deterrent, as a corresponding measure for defence," the statement said.
But it added that North Korea would never use nuclear weapons first and would "do its utmost to realise the denuclearisation of the peninsula and give impetus to the world-wide nuclear disarmament and the ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons."
Analysts say North Korea probably has enough fissile material to make six to eight nuclear bombs but probably does not have the technology to make one small enough to mount on a missile.
Pyongyang's latest and, to date, most extreme sabre-rattling was most probably aimed at trying to force the United States into direct talks and end a painful financial crackdown on impoverished North Korean offshore bank accounts, analysts said.
Japan's new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, said any nuclear test by North Korea would be unacceptable...
...The North did not say when it would attempt to test a weapon, and experts inside and outside the Bush administration said the announcement itself is a negotiating ploy, intended to force the White House into lifting economic sanctions and conducting one-on-one talks with the isolated country.
American intelligence officials said they saw no signs that a test was imminent. But they cautioned that two weeks ago, American officials who have reviewed recent intelligence reports said American spy satellites had picked up evidence of indeterminate activity around North Korea’s main suspected test site. It was unclear to them whether that was part of preparations for a test, or perhaps a feint related to the visit at that time to Washington of South Korea’s president, Roh Moo Hyun.
At that meeting, Mr. Bush and Mr. Roh discussed the possibility of a test, and Mr. Roh said the event would “change the nature” of South Korea’s policy of economic engagement with the North, Mr. Roh told Americans he met afterward.
But they did not appear to have a coordinated strategy, and a senior Asian diplomat in Washington said today “no one is quite sure how to respond” if the North conducts a test in coming weeks or months.
In public, the Bush administration’s response was muted on Tuesday and left the American response as unclear as the North Korean threat...
I think they're
down with that idea.
¶ 9:50 PM 0 comments
links to this post
SEOUL, Oct 3 (Reuters) - An increasingly isolated North Korea said on Tuesday it would conduct its first-ever nuclear test, blaming a U.S. "threat of nuclear war and sanctions" for forcing its hand.
The statement by North Korea's foreign ministry, carried on the official KCNA news agency, was condemned by neighbouring Japan as "unacceptable" and caused South Korea to increase its security alert.
Britain said it would view any nuclear test as a highly provocative act.
The announcement confirms weeks of rumours the communist state was planning a test and came amid increasingly sour relations with the outside world after it test-fired missiles in July.
"The U.S. extreme threat of a nuclear war and sanctions and pressure compel the DPRK (North Korea) to conduct a nuclear test, an essential process for bolstering nuclear deterrent, as a corresponding measure for defence," the statement said.
But it added that North Korea would never use nuclear weapons first and would "do its utmost to realise the denuclearisation of the peninsula and give impetus to the world-wide nuclear disarmament and the ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons."
Analysts say North Korea probably has enough fissile material to make six to eight nuclear bombs but probably does not have the technology to make one small enough to mount on a missile.
Pyongyang's latest and, to date, most extreme sabre-rattling was most probably aimed at trying to force the United States into direct talks and end a painful financial crackdown on impoverished North Korean offshore bank accounts, analysts said.
Japan's new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, said any nuclear test by North Korea would be unacceptable...
...The North did not say when it would attempt to test a weapon, and experts inside and outside the Bush administration said the announcement itself is a negotiating ploy, intended to force the White House into lifting economic sanctions and conducting one-on-one talks with the isolated country.
American intelligence officials said they saw no signs that a test was imminent. But they cautioned that two weeks ago, American officials who have reviewed recent intelligence reports said American spy satellites had picked up evidence of indeterminate activity around North Korea’s main suspected test site. It was unclear to them whether that was part of preparations for a test, or perhaps a feint related to the visit at that time to Washington of South Korea’s president, Roh Moo Hyun.
At that meeting, Mr. Bush and Mr. Roh discussed the possibility of a test, and Mr. Roh said the event would “change the nature” of South Korea’s policy of economic engagement with the North, Mr. Roh told Americans he met afterward.
But they did not appear to have a coordinated strategy, and a senior Asian diplomat in Washington said today “no one is quite sure how to respond” if the North conducts a test in coming weeks or months.
In public, the Bush administration’s response was muted on Tuesday and left the American response as unclear as the North Korean threat...
I think they're
down with that idea.
¶ 9:50 PM 0 comments
links to this post
...Reptiles Love Trout
But the fish are talking, and really big lizards seem destined to take a dive.
Predatory behaviour among this crew of Reptilicans has been going on since Poppy got tired of Babs, but since he became the Witch-King, Poppy has been able to keep a tight lid on it.
Lambert's got a series of great posts on this, starting here.
Then there's the whole Jeff Gannon/ James Guckert flap, that was totally buried by the media quickly enough. Not surprisingly, there seems to have been a lot of looking the other way this time around too. I look for all of this to implode faster than a BEC, and make a lot less noise.
But the problem is the stories of sexual predation among Reptilican politicians just get bigger and scarier. Jeff Wells has been collecting some pretty unbelievable data along these lines for quite awhile. While there's a good bit of disinformation and absurd stuff there, a lot of the data does seem solid.
These people know each other, work together, and cover up the unspeakable.
Power seems to attract terribly pathological personalities willing to do anything to hold on to it. ¶ 8:41 AM 0 comments links to this post
But the fish are talking, and really big lizards seem destined to take a dive.
Predatory behaviour among this crew of Reptilicans has been going on since Poppy got tired of Babs, but since he became the Witch-King, Poppy has been able to keep a tight lid on it.
Lambert's got a series of great posts on this, starting here.
Then there's the whole Jeff Gannon/ James Guckert flap, that was totally buried by the media quickly enough. Not surprisingly, there seems to have been a lot of looking the other way this time around too. I look for all of this to implode faster than a BEC, and make a lot less noise.
But the problem is the stories of sexual predation among Reptilican politicians just get bigger and scarier. Jeff Wells has been collecting some pretty unbelievable data along these lines for quite awhile. While there's a good bit of disinformation and absurd stuff there, a lot of the data does seem solid.
These people know each other, work together, and cover up the unspeakable.
Power seems to attract terribly pathological personalities willing to do anything to hold on to it. ¶ 8:41 AM 0 comments links to this post
Monday, October 02, 2006
An Explosion of Octarine
Spotted at Slashdot from Zonk:
ultracool writes "Two separate research groups claim to have observed Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) in quasiparticles at much higher temperatures than atomic BEC — one at 19 Kelvin and the other at room temperature. The 19 K BEC was composed of half-matter, half-light quasi-particles called polaritons, and the room temperature condensate was composed of 'magnons' (packets of magnetic energy). There is some skepticism among physicists as to whether these really are BECs. If they are true BECs, these experiments are the first evidence of them in the solid state."
Just in case you need a brush up on BEC, like I did, check out the Wikipedia article on Bose-Einstein condensation.
So one can't help but wonder if a BEC at room temperature is a magnetic monopole.
BEC's have some really weird theoretical behavior, being frictionless, they tend to flow out of their containers. Gravity doesn't have much effect on BEC's. They haven't been produced in the past beyond at few thousand atoms at close to absolute zero, so their physical and chemical properties haven't been really studied.
A room temperature BEC is counter-intuitive... but believe it, quantum mechanics is always counter-intuitive. Pretty much you can forget Newtonian physics when you describe this state of matter.
There's another peculiar property of BECs. Atoms disappear in BACs. To quote Wikipedia:
Further experimentation by the JILA team in 2000 uncovered a hitherto unknown property of Bose–Einstein condensate. Cornell, Wieman, and their coworkers originally used rubidium-87, an isotope whose atoms naturally repel each other making a more stable condensate. The JILA team instrumentation now had better control over the condensate so experimentation was made on naturally attracting atoms of another rubidium isotope, rubidium-85 (having negative atom-atom scattering length). Through a process called Feshbach resonance involving a sweep of the magnetic field causing spin flip collisions, the JILA researchers lowered the characteristic, discrete energies at which the rubidium atoms bond into molecules making their Rb-85 atoms repulsive and creating a stable condensate. The reversible flip from attraction to repulsion stems from quantum interference among condensate atoms which behave as waves.
When the scientists raised the magnetic field strength still further, the condensate suddenly reverted back to attraction, imploded and shrank beyond detection, and then exploded, blowing off about two-thirds of its 10,000 or so atoms. About half of the atoms in the condensate seemed to have disappeared from the experiment altogether, not being seen either in the cold remnant or the expanding gas cloud. Carl Wieman explained that under current atomic theory this characteristic of Bose–Einstein condensate could not be explained because the energy state of an atom near absolute zero should not be enough to cause an implosion; however, subsequent mean-field theories have been proposed to explain it.
Due to the fact that supernovae explosions are implosions, the explosion of a collapsing Bose–Einstein condensate was named "bosenova."
The atoms that seem to have disappeared are almost certainly still around in some form, just not in a form that could be detected in that current experiment...
Only if you want to believe the law of conservation of mass and energy holds in this bubble of the multiverse.
Just do us all a favor, Zonk, and don't tell Darth Rumsfeld if somebody's really developed a room temperature BEC... ¶ 10:11 PM 0 comments links to this post
ultracool writes "Two separate research groups claim to have observed Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) in quasiparticles at much higher temperatures than atomic BEC — one at 19 Kelvin and the other at room temperature. The 19 K BEC was composed of half-matter, half-light quasi-particles called polaritons, and the room temperature condensate was composed of 'magnons' (packets of magnetic energy). There is some skepticism among physicists as to whether these really are BECs. If they are true BECs, these experiments are the first evidence of them in the solid state."
Just in case you need a brush up on BEC, like I did, check out the Wikipedia article on Bose-Einstein condensation.
So one can't help but wonder if a BEC at room temperature is a magnetic monopole.
BEC's have some really weird theoretical behavior, being frictionless, they tend to flow out of their containers. Gravity doesn't have much effect on BEC's. They haven't been produced in the past beyond at few thousand atoms at close to absolute zero, so their physical and chemical properties haven't been really studied.
A room temperature BEC is counter-intuitive... but believe it, quantum mechanics is always counter-intuitive. Pretty much you can forget Newtonian physics when you describe this state of matter.
There's another peculiar property of BECs. Atoms disappear in BACs. To quote Wikipedia:
Further experimentation by the JILA team in 2000 uncovered a hitherto unknown property of Bose–Einstein condensate. Cornell, Wieman, and their coworkers originally used rubidium-87, an isotope whose atoms naturally repel each other making a more stable condensate. The JILA team instrumentation now had better control over the condensate so experimentation was made on naturally attracting atoms of another rubidium isotope, rubidium-85 (having negative atom-atom scattering length). Through a process called Feshbach resonance involving a sweep of the magnetic field causing spin flip collisions, the JILA researchers lowered the characteristic, discrete energies at which the rubidium atoms bond into molecules making their Rb-85 atoms repulsive and creating a stable condensate. The reversible flip from attraction to repulsion stems from quantum interference among condensate atoms which behave as waves.
When the scientists raised the magnetic field strength still further, the condensate suddenly reverted back to attraction, imploded and shrank beyond detection, and then exploded, blowing off about two-thirds of its 10,000 or so atoms. About half of the atoms in the condensate seemed to have disappeared from the experiment altogether, not being seen either in the cold remnant or the expanding gas cloud. Carl Wieman explained that under current atomic theory this characteristic of Bose–Einstein condensate could not be explained because the energy state of an atom near absolute zero should not be enough to cause an implosion; however, subsequent mean-field theories have been proposed to explain it.
Due to the fact that supernovae explosions are implosions, the explosion of a collapsing Bose–Einstein condensate was named "bosenova."
The atoms that seem to have disappeared are almost certainly still around in some form, just not in a form that could be detected in that current experiment...
Only if you want to believe the law of conservation of mass and energy holds in this bubble of the multiverse.
Just do us all a favor, Zonk, and don't tell Darth Rumsfeld if somebody's really developed a room temperature BEC... ¶ 10:11 PM 0 comments links to this post
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Because it makes them money
Why bother with torture? It's inhumane, it's unConstitutional, and it doesn't work- the data you get is notoriously unreliable and colored with the bias of the torturer.
Paul Krugman thinks it's because they can.
That's far too random and unprofitable a motive. MJS points to a better rationale.
Juan Cole calls it right:
The Bush administration has been about "the Greater Middle East" (including Central Asia). It has been about basing rights in those areas. It says it is fighting a "war on terror" that is unlike past wars and may go on for decades. It has been about rounding up and torturing large numbers of Iraqis, Afghans and others. This region has most of the world's proven oil and gas reserves.
Why is the Bush administration so attached to torturing people that it would pressure a supine Congress into raping the US constitution by explicitly permitting some torture techniques and abolishing habeas corpus for certain categories of prisoners...?
Boys and girls, it is because torture is what provides evidence for large important networks of terrorists where there aren't really any, or aren't very many, or aren't enough to justify 800 military bases and a $500 billion military budget...
Read it all for an explanation of the strategery that's as good as any I've read.
Lambert's comment:
"That torture elicits unreliable information is the point. It isn’t just the war crimes they want to hide, it’s the entire criminal enterprise.
Now, what was the point of having no reconstruction plan in Iraq? Chaos is the plan?"
Sometime the truth just reaches out and grabs you.
Juan Cole comments on his own post regarding the game of musical chairs that is the world powers jockeying for dwindling fossil fuel reserves:
"One way you make sure you don't get caught without a chair is to pull a gun on the other players and order them over into the corner while you sit on the chairs."
This observation is exactly right. This incidently is also why alternative energy development is so discouraged. Who would want to play a game of rigged musical chairs with a man holding a gun?
On the other hand, if alternative energy isn't developed until the men with the guns are in total control of it the game continues on.
He is also totally correct about the use of torture, which is not only inhumane but no way to really get accurate information on what is happening.
You can torture anyone into admitting anything, and the victims' statements provide a paper trail that the ruthless can use to justify or scapegoat anything they want.
It's not just a simple matter of torturing "because they can". It's a matter of torturing because they think they can profit from it.
Similarly, the chaos in Iraq is not a simple case of ineptitude. It serves a purpose for someone, or some ruthless group or groups of people. The carnage will continue until there is no more profit in it for them.
Or so says my Palantir. ¶ 6:23 PM 0 comments links to this post
Paul Krugman thinks it's because they can.
That's far too random and unprofitable a motive. MJS points to a better rationale.
Juan Cole calls it right:
The Bush administration has been about "the Greater Middle East" (including Central Asia). It has been about basing rights in those areas. It says it is fighting a "war on terror" that is unlike past wars and may go on for decades. It has been about rounding up and torturing large numbers of Iraqis, Afghans and others. This region has most of the world's proven oil and gas reserves.
Why is the Bush administration so attached to torturing people that it would pressure a supine Congress into raping the US constitution by explicitly permitting some torture techniques and abolishing habeas corpus for certain categories of prisoners...?
Boys and girls, it is because torture is what provides evidence for large important networks of terrorists where there aren't really any, or aren't very many, or aren't enough to justify 800 military bases and a $500 billion military budget...
Read it all for an explanation of the strategery that's as good as any I've read.
Lambert's comment:
"That torture elicits unreliable information is the point. It isn’t just the war crimes they want to hide, it’s the entire criminal enterprise.
Now, what was the point of having no reconstruction plan in Iraq? Chaos is the plan?"
Sometime the truth just reaches out and grabs you.
Juan Cole comments on his own post regarding the game of musical chairs that is the world powers jockeying for dwindling fossil fuel reserves:
"One way you make sure you don't get caught without a chair is to pull a gun on the other players and order them over into the corner while you sit on the chairs."
This observation is exactly right. This incidently is also why alternative energy development is so discouraged. Who would want to play a game of rigged musical chairs with a man holding a gun?
On the other hand, if alternative energy isn't developed until the men with the guns are in total control of it the game continues on.
He is also totally correct about the use of torture, which is not only inhumane but no way to really get accurate information on what is happening.
You can torture anyone into admitting anything, and the victims' statements provide a paper trail that the ruthless can use to justify or scapegoat anything they want.
It's not just a simple matter of torturing "because they can". It's a matter of torturing because they think they can profit from it.
Similarly, the chaos in Iraq is not a simple case of ineptitude. It serves a purpose for someone, or some ruthless group or groups of people. The carnage will continue until there is no more profit in it for them.
Or so says my Palantir. ¶ 6:23 PM 0 comments links to this post
Under a Watchful Eye
Now that Congress has given Dear Leader the okay for Total Information Awareness- as long as, you know, he doesn't call it that and is sure he really wants to do it- the defense industry is clamoring to help.
With ballons. Really, really, big ones.
Blimps were pretty much discarded as being of military value during the Second World War, because they're easy for aircraft and missiles to shoot down. Although with helium mixes and newer titanium-magnesium alloys they're no longer flying bombs and can go to the edge of space, so can modern military technology post-1950. The Russians, the Chinese, and most of the Third World have ordnance that can hit a floating 50 yard long target at 70,000 feet.
But World War III is being waged against mostly civilian populations so far, and soon it looks to be against 'Murikas own Faithless citizens at that, the good people at Lockheed have just the thing for Darth Rumsfeld and Guernica Negroponte:
US$10 million skin for DARPA's remarkable ISIS stratospheric airship
September 29, 2006 Lockheed Martin has received a US$10 million contract to further develop advanced material technology and next-generation hull material for DARPA's Integrated Sensor Is Structure (ISIS) program. The ISIS program will develop the core technologies necessary to integrate an extremely capable sensor package directly into the structure of stratospheric airships, which operate at approximately 70,000 feet. The planned capabilities of the ISIS project are straight out of a sci fi film – ISIS will provide a dynamic, detailed, real-time picture of all movement on or above the battlefield: friendly, neutral or enemy – a big picture map showing everything moving for hundreds of kilometers...
A leader in airship and aerostat development, fabrication, systems integration and operations, Lockheed Martin has developed more than 300 airships and thousands of aerostats. Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor for the Missile Defense Agency's High Altitude Airship, a stratospheric airship prototype, which will provide persistent surveillance along with other critical capabilities. The company also has provided tethered aerostat surveillance systems to both the U.S. Army for deployment in Iraq and to the U.S. Air Force to support air sovereignty and counter-drug operations along the southern U.S. border...
“Air defense commanders can observe all activity within hundreds of kilometers. The tracking accuracy will be so good that they will not need any other radar systems to complete engagement of hostile targets. ISIS is a sensor integrated into an unmanned stratospheric airship. The stationary platform gives ISIS the stability to see slow moving targets such as dismounted troops. The seventy thousand foot altitude allows ISIS to persistently track targets at very long ranges..."
Of course, these will require some interfacing with civilian air traffic control, but they're working out the bugs in that (thanks to Defense Tech for the links).
Just the kind of toys to make your borders secure. It only looks like a UFO, I'm sure the government would have never used devices like this
before to keep an eye on things. But it's just what the New World Order's Warfighters will need to keep track of the most dangerous enemies to the State- its' own citizens.
¶ 7:50 AM 0 comments
links to this post
With ballons. Really, really, big ones.
Blimps were pretty much discarded as being of military value during the Second World War, because they're easy for aircraft and missiles to shoot down. Although with helium mixes and newer titanium-magnesium alloys they're no longer flying bombs and can go to the edge of space, so can modern military technology post-1950. The Russians, the Chinese, and most of the Third World have ordnance that can hit a floating 50 yard long target at 70,000 feet.
But World War III is being waged against mostly civilian populations so far, and soon it looks to be against 'Murikas own Faithless citizens at that, the good people at Lockheed have just the thing for Darth Rumsfeld and Guernica Negroponte:
US$10 million skin for DARPA's remarkable ISIS stratospheric airship
September 29, 2006 Lockheed Martin has received a US$10 million contract to further develop advanced material technology and next-generation hull material for DARPA's Integrated Sensor Is Structure (ISIS) program. The ISIS program will develop the core technologies necessary to integrate an extremely capable sensor package directly into the structure of stratospheric airships, which operate at approximately 70,000 feet. The planned capabilities of the ISIS project are straight out of a sci fi film – ISIS will provide a dynamic, detailed, real-time picture of all movement on or above the battlefield: friendly, neutral or enemy – a big picture map showing everything moving for hundreds of kilometers...
A leader in airship and aerostat development, fabrication, systems integration and operations, Lockheed Martin has developed more than 300 airships and thousands of aerostats. Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor for the Missile Defense Agency's High Altitude Airship, a stratospheric airship prototype, which will provide persistent surveillance along with other critical capabilities. The company also has provided tethered aerostat surveillance systems to both the U.S. Army for deployment in Iraq and to the U.S. Air Force to support air sovereignty and counter-drug operations along the southern U.S. border...
“Air defense commanders can observe all activity within hundreds of kilometers. The tracking accuracy will be so good that they will not need any other radar systems to complete engagement of hostile targets. ISIS is a sensor integrated into an unmanned stratospheric airship. The stationary platform gives ISIS the stability to see slow moving targets such as dismounted troops. The seventy thousand foot altitude allows ISIS to persistently track targets at very long ranges..."
Of course, these will require some interfacing with civilian air traffic control, but they're working out the bugs in that (thanks to Defense Tech for the links).
Just the kind of toys to make your borders secure. It only looks like a UFO, I'm sure the government would have never used devices like this
before to keep an eye on things. But it's just what the New World Order's Warfighters will need to keep track of the most dangerous enemies to the State- its' own citizens.
¶ 7:50 AM 0 comments
links to this post
