One of the frontiers of Future Combat Systems is Robotics.
Why draft 'em when you can make 'em?
One of the more successful efforts in Robotics has to do with Unmanned Aircraft, possibly because autopilots were one of the first artificial intelligence systems.
It is curious that DARPA releases what ought to be one of its most exciting and revolutionary but practical concepts in robot aircraft in a document that can be captured and distributed to every techno-geek, competing foreign government, or budding terrorist that reads the web.
A lot of this materiel is being used as I write. A lot is in the pilot stage, and some hasn't begun to be tested.
For what's new, for example, check out (p.6):
2.1.3 RQ-4 Global Hawk
User Service: Air Force
Manufacturer: Northrop Grumman
Inventory: 12 Delivered/58 Planned (7 ACTD + 51 Production aircraft)
Background: The Air Force RQ-4 Global Hawk is a high altitude, long endurance UA designed to provide wide area coverage of up to 40,000 nm2 per day. The size differences between the RQ-4A (Block 10) and RQ-4B (Blocks 20, 30, 40) models are shown above. Global Hawk completed its first flight in February 1998 and transitioned from an ACTD into engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) in March 2001. Global Hawk carries both an EO/IR sensor and a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) with moving target indicator (MTI) capability, allowing day/night, all-weather reconnaissance. Sensor data is relayed over CDL LOS (X-band) and/or beyond line- of-site (BLOS) (Ku-band SATCOM) data links to its mission control element (MCE), which distributes imagery to up to seven theater exploitation systems...
Is it only me, or is it a strange thing for DARPA to brag about it's newest spy drones, and the models about to be built? Is it odd to talk about- to advertise futuristic experimental and doubtless (in other documents) Top Secret unmanned stealth fighters like (p. 11)
Boeing X-45C (L) and Northrop Grumman X-47B (R) J-UCAS Demonstrators
...
Characteristics:
Model---------------X-45C------------X-47B
Length--------------39 ft-------------38 ft
Wing Span-----------49 ft-------------62 ft
Gross Weight--------36,500 lb---------46,000 lb
Payload Capacity----4,500 lb----------4,500 lb
...
And more. Lots more. Fuel capacity, engine make, max/loiter speeds, ceiling, all the specifications someone who might have to fight it might want to know.
Or how about the brand new system DARPA wants to add to augment our ability to watch incoming Cruise missiles?
2.5.3 Joint Land Attack Elevated Netted Sensor (JLENS)
User Service: Joint (Army Lead)
Manufacturer: Raytheon/TCOM
Inventory: 12 Planned
Background: JLENS is primarily intended to tackle the growing threat of cruise missiles to U.S. forces deployed abroad with radars to provide over-the-horizon surveillance. A JLENS system consists of two aerostats, one containing a surveillance radar (SuR) and one containing a precision track illumination radar (PTIR). Each aerostat is tethered to a mobile mooring station and attached to a processing station via a fiber optic/power tether. The SuR provides the initial target detection and the
cueing to the PTIR, which generates a fire control quality track. The JLENS system is integrated into the joint tactical architecture via Link 16, cooperative engagement capability, single-channel ground and air radio system, and enhanced position location reporting system. Both radar systems will include identification, friend or foe interrogators...---p.33
It's a blimp, for crying out loud, a stationary target, and now anybody firing a cruise missile realizes they might want to shoot these things down first...
How much money are they spending building and implementing these toys? Not to mention shooting their surprise potential down before it's started.
(see Table 2.6-1). In the wake of September 11, 2001, FY03 was the first billion-dollar year in UAS history and FY05 will be the first two billion-dollar year (see Figure 2.6-1 and Tables 2.6-2 and 2.6-3). The U.S. UAS inventory is expected to grow from 250 today to 675 by 2010 and 1400 by 2015 (not including micro and mini UA) and to support a wider range of missions—e.g. signals intelligence (SIGINT), cargo, communication relay, and Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD)—compared to today’s imagery reconnaissance and strike roles.--pp.36-37.
One gets the impression it's been a good wake indeed.
Keeping this stuff Top Secret would be a little silly, particularly since our buddies the Russians are not only kissy-face with Dear Leader (like our buddies the Saudis) they're actually building a lot of stuff for us and deploying their own models (see pp 38-40).
And, presumably, buying it from- us? Or more precisely, the people who own the US these days. The whole document reads like an advertising brochure, and not just for Northop-Grumman or General Atomics. Because it's not just private contractors building this stuff, it's private contractors running it. Or showing the D.o'D. how to use it:
All DoD UAS operating today employ contractors to conduct the majority of their UAS training requirements....
-p.76
The entire document is splashed with Heroic high tech soldiers in Iraq, usually manly crewcut men (Jeff Gannon would fit right in) deploying drone aircraft designed to watch- and shoot at- insurgents.
There's a whole Homeland Security section. Yes, Virginia, they are watching you. They even show action pictures of it.
Where is all this vast and shiny expenditure heading? Why, to autonomous Warfighters, of course.
The number one future priority:
1. Develop and operationally assess for potential fielding a joint unmanned combat aircraft system capable of performing SEAD/Strike/Electronic Attack/ISR in high threat environments. (OSD, USAF, USN)...
-p. 75
This is all part of the Joint Roadmap for Robotics, downloadable at http://www.jointrobotics.com/activities_new/masterplan.shtml.
You know I'll have more to say about that later.
Note that the D.o'D. is again using a contractors to distribute a roadmap of current equipment, experimental plans, and projections for the next 25 years.
That's so the War Machine can franchise itself.
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Monday, August 15, 2005
Reality-based Education
Pharyngula points to an excellent essay regarding the teaching of evolution.
In the beginning, creationists tried to ban the teaching of evolution altogether. Most famously, 80 years ago, John Scopes was tried for breaking a Tennessee law outlawing such instruction. He was found guilty, and evolution effectively disappeared from the high school curriculum shortly thereafter, though it continued to be taught in universities.
But when university scientists began writing high school biology textbooks in the late 1950s and early '60s, evolution returned to the curriculum, provoking a second outbreak of anti-evolutionism during the '70s and '80s.
Creationism was repackaged as "creation science" in the hope that it would be taught along with evolution.
In the '70s and '80s, at least 26 states tried to legislate equal time for creation science with evolution, bringing the courts back in. The 1982 U.S. district court decision in McLean v. Arkansas— Scopes II — showed that such laws violated the First Amendment's Establishment Clause by promoting a sectarian religious idea inappropriate for the public school science classrooms. In 1987, the Supreme Court reached the same decision in Edwards v. Aguillard.
Such decisions doomed creation science in the public schools, but they opened a niche for a repackaging of creationism: "intelligent design" (ID).
Like creation science, ID was presented as a scientific "alternative" to evolution, though its scientific content was intentionally vague. Its proponents claimed to have a method to identify natural phenomena that are, supposedly, incapable of being explained by evolution. ID advocates contend that "irreducibly complex" structures such as the bacterial flagellum can only be explained by appealing to the action of an intelligent agent.
To secure a wide base of creationist supporters, ID advocates are coy about when and how such actions occurred. Because creation science, which insists on a 6,000-year-old Earth, is still the dominant form of anti-evolutionism, ID can't afford to take a stand to the contrary. Nonetheless, the mainstream of the ID movement is sympathetic to what theologians call progressive creationism, where God creates in fits and starts over time, rather than in six days. It's still creationism, and so is ID.
To avoid this accusation, and thus circumvent the Establishment Clause, ID advocates are also coy about the identity of the designer, claiming that it doesn't have to be God. But, token allusions to the possibility of extraterrestrial or time-traveling biochemists notwithstanding, no one is fooled into thinking that the designer is not the Designer: God.
Initially, ID proponents encouraged the teaching of ID in the public schools, but lately they've had second thoughts. They likely have figured out that if a school district required the teaching of ID, a judge would inevitably ask, "By the way, who's the 'intelligent designer'? Sounds a lot like God." And the jig will be up.
To avoid this legal predicament, the ID movement's leaders have shifted strategy, encouraging school districts and teachers not to teach ID but to teach "evidence against evolution" or "the controversy." This message comes too late for Dover, Pa., where last fall the school board passed a policy requiring the teaching of ID. In September, Dover's ID policy will go on trial, in what might aptly be called Scopes III.
Elsewhere — in Kansas, for example, where a creationist majority on the State Board of Education is monkeying with the state's science standards — "teach the controversy" is the new rallying cry of creationists. The hope is that if students are taught that evolution is suspect, they will automatically embrace creationism. But "teach the controversy" is not a pedagogical device that will help them in college: Evolution is taught matter-of-factly at the nation's most prestigious universities, including religious institutions such as Brigham Young, Baylor and Notre Dame.
The propaganda that evolution is a theory in crisis is hardly new. In 1925, William Jennings Bryan falsely contended that evolutionary science was on the verge of collapse, as his heirs argue today. Yet the evidence for evolution is stronger than ever.
Historically, improvements in the teaching of evolution are inevitably followed by a backlash. When anti-evolutionists couldn't ban evolution, they tried to get creationism taught alongside it. When the courts said creationism couldn't be taught in public schools, anti-evolutionists called for teaching spurious "evidence against evolution" in the hope that students would come to mistrust evolution and accept creationism by default...
What ought to be taught in high school science class? The basic methods and results of the consensus view of the scientific community. Evolution is part, and a vital part, of this consensus; creation science and intelligent design are not. Students should understand evolution, both if they are going on to college and for general scientific literacy. But in too many places across the country, students are not learning it.
And that's a problem, because it is widely recognized that the 21st century will be the century of biology, in which genomic, medical and biotechnological discoveries are bound to revolutionize our economy and our lives — and those of our children. America needs to produce the scientists who will pioneer in these fields, which means maintaining and improving the quality of science education — including a healthy dose of evolution, uncompromised by sectarian dogma, bad science and fake "critical analysis." Because those high school kids in India, China, Korea and Singapore are learning evolution, even if ours aren't.
Reality. At USA Today of all places. Whatever's going on there, let's hope it spreads.
In the beginning, creationists tried to ban the teaching of evolution altogether. Most famously, 80 years ago, John Scopes was tried for breaking a Tennessee law outlawing such instruction. He was found guilty, and evolution effectively disappeared from the high school curriculum shortly thereafter, though it continued to be taught in universities.
But when university scientists began writing high school biology textbooks in the late 1950s and early '60s, evolution returned to the curriculum, provoking a second outbreak of anti-evolutionism during the '70s and '80s.
Creationism was repackaged as "creation science" in the hope that it would be taught along with evolution.
In the '70s and '80s, at least 26 states tried to legislate equal time for creation science with evolution, bringing the courts back in. The 1982 U.S. district court decision in McLean v. Arkansas— Scopes II — showed that such laws violated the First Amendment's Establishment Clause by promoting a sectarian religious idea inappropriate for the public school science classrooms. In 1987, the Supreme Court reached the same decision in Edwards v. Aguillard.
Such decisions doomed creation science in the public schools, but they opened a niche for a repackaging of creationism: "intelligent design" (ID).
Like creation science, ID was presented as a scientific "alternative" to evolution, though its scientific content was intentionally vague. Its proponents claimed to have a method to identify natural phenomena that are, supposedly, incapable of being explained by evolution. ID advocates contend that "irreducibly complex" structures such as the bacterial flagellum can only be explained by appealing to the action of an intelligent agent.
To secure a wide base of creationist supporters, ID advocates are coy about when and how such actions occurred. Because creation science, which insists on a 6,000-year-old Earth, is still the dominant form of anti-evolutionism, ID can't afford to take a stand to the contrary. Nonetheless, the mainstream of the ID movement is sympathetic to what theologians call progressive creationism, where God creates in fits and starts over time, rather than in six days. It's still creationism, and so is ID.
To avoid this accusation, and thus circumvent the Establishment Clause, ID advocates are also coy about the identity of the designer, claiming that it doesn't have to be God. But, token allusions to the possibility of extraterrestrial or time-traveling biochemists notwithstanding, no one is fooled into thinking that the designer is not the Designer: God.
Initially, ID proponents encouraged the teaching of ID in the public schools, but lately they've had second thoughts. They likely have figured out that if a school district required the teaching of ID, a judge would inevitably ask, "By the way, who's the 'intelligent designer'? Sounds a lot like God." And the jig will be up.
To avoid this legal predicament, the ID movement's leaders have shifted strategy, encouraging school districts and teachers not to teach ID but to teach "evidence against evolution" or "the controversy." This message comes too late for Dover, Pa., where last fall the school board passed a policy requiring the teaching of ID. In September, Dover's ID policy will go on trial, in what might aptly be called Scopes III.
Elsewhere — in Kansas, for example, where a creationist majority on the State Board of Education is monkeying with the state's science standards — "teach the controversy" is the new rallying cry of creationists. The hope is that if students are taught that evolution is suspect, they will automatically embrace creationism. But "teach the controversy" is not a pedagogical device that will help them in college: Evolution is taught matter-of-factly at the nation's most prestigious universities, including religious institutions such as Brigham Young, Baylor and Notre Dame.
The propaganda that evolution is a theory in crisis is hardly new. In 1925, William Jennings Bryan falsely contended that evolutionary science was on the verge of collapse, as his heirs argue today. Yet the evidence for evolution is stronger than ever.
Historically, improvements in the teaching of evolution are inevitably followed by a backlash. When anti-evolutionists couldn't ban evolution, they tried to get creationism taught alongside it. When the courts said creationism couldn't be taught in public schools, anti-evolutionists called for teaching spurious "evidence against evolution" in the hope that students would come to mistrust evolution and accept creationism by default...
What ought to be taught in high school science class? The basic methods and results of the consensus view of the scientific community. Evolution is part, and a vital part, of this consensus; creation science and intelligent design are not. Students should understand evolution, both if they are going on to college and for general scientific literacy. But in too many places across the country, students are not learning it.
And that's a problem, because it is widely recognized that the 21st century will be the century of biology, in which genomic, medical and biotechnological discoveries are bound to revolutionize our economy and our lives — and those of our children. America needs to produce the scientists who will pioneer in these fields, which means maintaining and improving the quality of science education — including a healthy dose of evolution, uncompromised by sectarian dogma, bad science and fake "critical analysis." Because those high school kids in India, China, Korea and Singapore are learning evolution, even if ours aren't.
Reality. At USA Today of all places. Whatever's going on there, let's hope it spreads.
Sunday, August 14, 2005
New Tales from the DARPA Side of the Force
Lots of new stuff of interest at Defense Tech.
Yes, Virginia, we are living in a Philip K. Dick novel, and more so every day.
*The first public appearance of the Robot Fighter.
*Sonic blasters and super sensitive listening devices are being experimented with in Iraq (human experimentation on "insurgents"?) and distributed to some police forces like Los Angeles in the Homeland.
*The Pentagon came out with its Unmanned Forces Roadmap for the next 25 years, which is a declassified .pdf document you can get here from the Federation of American Scientists.
That's one roadmap you'll be hearing more about here in the days to come.
Yes, Virginia, we are living in a Philip K. Dick novel, and more so every day.
*The first public appearance of the Robot Fighter.
*Sonic blasters and super sensitive listening devices are being experimented with in Iraq (human experimentation on "insurgents"?) and distributed to some police forces like Los Angeles in the Homeland.
*The Pentagon came out with its Unmanned Forces Roadmap for the next 25 years, which is a declassified .pdf document you can get here from the Federation of American Scientists.
That's one roadmap you'll be hearing more about here in the days to come.
Who Ya Gonna Believe?
albert champion points to a nice perspective on the Able Danger revelations.
We knew the terrorists of 9/11 were waltzing around the country doing things like going to strip joints and throwing wild parties, but aside from the kinds of things a righteous Dominionist would disapprove of, the main$tream media has been really quiet about exactly what they were doing and who they were partying with.
Time sez:
Just how damning are allegations by Congressman Curt Weldon that a secret Pentagon intelligence operation pegged hijacker Mohammed Atta as a threat nearly two years before he led the 9/11 attacks? When Weldon first made the charge in a new book and in a June speech on the House floor, it met with little attention, but perhaps due to the August heat or the approaching fourth anniversary of the attacks, the accusation ignited controversy last week.
The question is whether it has any substance. Weldon says a data-mining exercise, called Able Danger, spotted Atta and other hijackers in 1999, but Pentagon lawyers in September 2000 blocked officials running the program from handing the tip to the FBI. Weldon’s further allegation that the 9/11 commission was alerted to the alleged oversight but ignored it prompted the defunct panel to conduct an investigation last week before issuing a statement late Friday saying members had received only an 11th-hour mention of Atta that “was not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation"...
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
Hopsicker asks :
Upon what basis did the 9.11 Commission conclude that the FBI’s timeline was correct and that an elite Army Intel unit was mistaken in saying they were tracking Mohamed Atta roaming freely across America during 1999 and 2000?
And why exactly is this important?
Calling unwelcome attention to the massive inaccuracies in the FBI’s timeline was probably not Republican Curt Weldon’s purpose when he brought the story to light...But if his efforts to implicate Clinton Administration officials results in highlighting the FBI's incomplete and corrupt investigation, we think he get some kind of medal, maybe called the Inadvertent 'Dumb-Ass' Hero Award.
We suspect his Republican friends would much prefer to let sleeping dogs lie. Because it isn’t just one elite Army Intel unit that’s saying it... In the aftermath of the 9.11 attack numerous eyewitnesses came forward to attest to Atta’s presence in the U.S. before June of 2000.
Their number even includes a U.S. Government official with a signed and dated loan application from Mohamed Atta his-ownself.
In interviews with major news organizations Johnelle Bryant, an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, revealed that Atta and three other September 11th terrorists visited her Florida office seeking a government loan.
ABC’s Brian Ross reported: “Johnelle Bryant is the USDA loan officer in Homestead, Florida, who Atta approached in May of 2000, long before al-Qaeda and bin Laden were household words.”
Mr. Atta swung by in May, 2000, and Ms. Bryant remembers quite a bit about it.
"At first," she says, "he refused to speak with me," on the grounds that she was, in his words, "but a female."
"I told him that if he was interested in getting a farm-service agency loan in my servicing area, then he would need to deal with me."
Ms. Bryant says the applicant was asking for $650,000 to start a crop-dusting business. His plan was to buy a six-seater twin-prop and then remove the seats. "He wanted to build a chemical tank that would fit inside the aircraft and take up every available square inch of the aircraft except for where the pilot would be sitting."
Here’s the kicker, or rather, the smoking gun: Before Atta left her office he filled out a loan application.
Loan applications are dated, aren’t they? That’s why Johnelle Bryant knows exactly when Atta was in her office. so, without even referencing any of the other numerous indicators of Atta’s presence in the U.S., one thing that can be said with absolute certainty:
The FBI’s timeline, their chronology of events, the essential tool of any homicide investigation, is wrong. And not wrong by accident, either.
Wrong on purpose. Wrong by design.
By the way: don’t try dropping by Bryant’s Homestead office to confirm the details with her, as we did...She’s no longer there.
She’s (presumably) been airlifted to the Island of Lost Witnesses...
There's lots more to ponder. The gist is there are some major inconsistencies in the timeline the FBI published with the 9/11 commission. But as to what the truth is... only the Players know.
We knew the terrorists of 9/11 were waltzing around the country doing things like going to strip joints and throwing wild parties, but aside from the kinds of things a righteous Dominionist would disapprove of, the main$tream media has been really quiet about exactly what they were doing and who they were partying with.
Time sez:
Just how damning are allegations by Congressman Curt Weldon that a secret Pentagon intelligence operation pegged hijacker Mohammed Atta as a threat nearly two years before he led the 9/11 attacks? When Weldon first made the charge in a new book and in a June speech on the House floor, it met with little attention, but perhaps due to the August heat or the approaching fourth anniversary of the attacks, the accusation ignited controversy last week.
The question is whether it has any substance. Weldon says a data-mining exercise, called Able Danger, spotted Atta and other hijackers in 1999, but Pentagon lawyers in September 2000 blocked officials running the program from handing the tip to the FBI. Weldon’s further allegation that the 9/11 commission was alerted to the alleged oversight but ignored it prompted the defunct panel to conduct an investigation last week before issuing a statement late Friday saying members had received only an 11th-hour mention of Atta that “was not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation"...
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
Hopsicker asks :
Upon what basis did the 9.11 Commission conclude that the FBI’s timeline was correct and that an elite Army Intel unit was mistaken in saying they were tracking Mohamed Atta roaming freely across America during 1999 and 2000?
And why exactly is this important?
Calling unwelcome attention to the massive inaccuracies in the FBI’s timeline was probably not Republican Curt Weldon’s purpose when he brought the story to light...But if his efforts to implicate Clinton Administration officials results in highlighting the FBI's incomplete and corrupt investigation, we think he get some kind of medal, maybe called the Inadvertent 'Dumb-Ass' Hero Award.
We suspect his Republican friends would much prefer to let sleeping dogs lie. Because it isn’t just one elite Army Intel unit that’s saying it... In the aftermath of the 9.11 attack numerous eyewitnesses came forward to attest to Atta’s presence in the U.S. before June of 2000.
Their number even includes a U.S. Government official with a signed and dated loan application from Mohamed Atta his-ownself.
In interviews with major news organizations Johnelle Bryant, an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, revealed that Atta and three other September 11th terrorists visited her Florida office seeking a government loan.
ABC’s Brian Ross reported: “Johnelle Bryant is the USDA loan officer in Homestead, Florida, who Atta approached in May of 2000, long before al-Qaeda and bin Laden were household words.”
Mr. Atta swung by in May, 2000, and Ms. Bryant remembers quite a bit about it.
"At first," she says, "he refused to speak with me," on the grounds that she was, in his words, "but a female."
"I told him that if he was interested in getting a farm-service agency loan in my servicing area, then he would need to deal with me."
Ms. Bryant says the applicant was asking for $650,000 to start a crop-dusting business. His plan was to buy a six-seater twin-prop and then remove the seats. "He wanted to build a chemical tank that would fit inside the aircraft and take up every available square inch of the aircraft except for where the pilot would be sitting."
Here’s the kicker, or rather, the smoking gun: Before Atta left her office he filled out a loan application.
Loan applications are dated, aren’t they? That’s why Johnelle Bryant knows exactly when Atta was in her office. so, without even referencing any of the other numerous indicators of Atta’s presence in the U.S., one thing that can be said with absolute certainty:
The FBI’s timeline, their chronology of events, the essential tool of any homicide investigation, is wrong. And not wrong by accident, either.
Wrong on purpose. Wrong by design.
By the way: don’t try dropping by Bryant’s Homestead office to confirm the details with her, as we did...She’s no longer there.
She’s (presumably) been airlifted to the Island of Lost Witnesses...
There's lots more to ponder. The gist is there are some major inconsistencies in the timeline the FBI published with the 9/11 commission. But as to what the truth is... only the Players know.
Are Technophobes Necessary?
The New York Pravda editorial page as usual skips past the details and gets right down to the nitty-gritty the Dominionists and the Carlyle War Machine would like the people to think about:
Is the Space Station Necessary?
Now that the space shuttle fleet has been grounded until NASA can solve its foam-shedding problem, it's time to re-examine the future of the International Space Station.
The space station is circling the globe, partly finished, some 240 miles overhead. Its fate and that of the shuttle fleet are intertwined. The shuttle is a finicky and technologically outdated vehicle that should be replaced with a safer and more reliable spacecraft. The rub is that a replacement is at least five years away and the space station cannot be completed without many more shuttle flights.
If the space station did not have to be finished, there would be little reason to keep the shuttle fleet in operation beyond a single flight to refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope. But how important, really, is the station?...
Juxtaposed to it is this little ditty: Meanwhile, People Starve.
Somehow the Pravda NeoLibs Hawks weren't really concerned about starving innocent people in the lead -up to the Iraqi War where Judith Miller and the Pravda played a front line role in convincing the nation to go for broke.
Why the bother to shoot down the international space station?
Think of all that money that could be going to DARPA contractors. Northrop-Grumman. Raytheon. All the D.o'D. black budget items that aren't as transparent as NASA.
Don't get me wrong. With an ex-CIA money launderer in charge of NASA, I'm quite sure the budget is a little, shall we say, padded. It's also a good bet that despite the fact the man is a Ph.D. physicist from M.I.T., scientific curiosity isn't tops on his agenda.
But let's get real. They don't like the space station because it can't be Darth Rumsfeld's tinker toy. They can't make a Death Star with the Russians on board.
Count on it: they'll see this one fall and burn up like Mir, and float another one- D.o'D. controlled- for their interplanetarypork aspirations.
Meanwhile, as pointed out to me by a friend, global warming has progressed to a point where Mount Kilimanjaro is stripped of its snowcap for the first time in 11,000 years. This photo was intended to be shown at London this summer, but with all the terra'ist chaos, somehow the point just didn't sink in to the main$tream media.
It's a similar tactic: distraction and subversion.
The space program could be designed as a model for international co operation and the development of new technology to spur international economies. But that grates on the Dominionists, who don't like all those new fangled ideas being spread around, nor do they like the evidence for a non-theological cosmology. It grates on the Military-Industrial complex, who like the idea of moving technological toys for quick bucks, not the idea of producing technology directed for a purpose. And finally it grates on the NeoCon jingoists, who view co operation as big obstacle to Empire.
Is the Space Station Necessary?
Now that the space shuttle fleet has been grounded until NASA can solve its foam-shedding problem, it's time to re-examine the future of the International Space Station.
The space station is circling the globe, partly finished, some 240 miles overhead. Its fate and that of the shuttle fleet are intertwined. The shuttle is a finicky and technologically outdated vehicle that should be replaced with a safer and more reliable spacecraft. The rub is that a replacement is at least five years away and the space station cannot be completed without many more shuttle flights.
If the space station did not have to be finished, there would be little reason to keep the shuttle fleet in operation beyond a single flight to refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope. But how important, really, is the station?...
Juxtaposed to it is this little ditty: Meanwhile, People Starve.
Somehow the Pravda NeoLibs Hawks weren't really concerned about starving innocent people in the lead -up to the Iraqi War where Judith Miller and the Pravda played a front line role in convincing the nation to go for broke.
Why the bother to shoot down the international space station?
Think of all that money that could be going to DARPA contractors. Northrop-Grumman. Raytheon. All the D.o'D. black budget items that aren't as transparent as NASA.
Don't get me wrong. With an ex-CIA money launderer in charge of NASA, I'm quite sure the budget is a little, shall we say, padded. It's also a good bet that despite the fact the man is a Ph.D. physicist from M.I.T., scientific curiosity isn't tops on his agenda.
But let's get real. They don't like the space station because it can't be Darth Rumsfeld's tinker toy. They can't make a Death Star with the Russians on board.
Count on it: they'll see this one fall and burn up like Mir, and float another one- D.o'D. controlled- for their interplanetary
Meanwhile, as pointed out to me by a friend, global warming has progressed to a point where Mount Kilimanjaro is stripped of its snowcap for the first time in 11,000 years. This photo was intended to be shown at London this summer, but with all the terra'ist chaos, somehow the point just didn't sink in to the main$tream media.
It's a similar tactic: distraction and subversion.
The space program could be designed as a model for international co operation and the development of new technology to spur international economies. But that grates on the Dominionists, who don't like all those new fangled ideas being spread around, nor do they like the evidence for a non-theological cosmology. It grates on the Military-Industrial complex, who like the idea of moving technological toys for quick bucks, not the idea of producing technology directed for a purpose. And finally it grates on the NeoCon jingoists, who view co operation as big obstacle to Empire.
Friday, August 12, 2005
The Carlyle Group Hearts Google
You knew it was only a matter of time (thanks to Lambert ) :
Somehow, even through all the outages and that Chinese government thing, I always thought of Google as a different kind of corporation. Another illusion—shattered. A strong draft of UK-grade irony here...
... Via alert reader Alice Marshall, Google now has a new Vice President: Scott "Sucker MC" McClellan lacky and Caryle Group Associate Dan "I am the Mouth of Bremer" Senor. Yech...
Over at my favorite Canadian tinfoil site, Jeff Wells reminds us the best way to cook a frog is by a slow boil.
After the shock of a mass casuality event, and during the aftershocks of martial law, what will be the chief tone Homeland Security will want to set? It will be reassurance. Why? Because FEMA may have many camps, but it doesn't have enough to hold everyone. For the few to maintain power, the many need to participate in their own subjugation. They must be self-contained. And so, Michael Chertoff will attempt to alleviate the psychological sting of martial law, while he rubs the poison in, and invite Americans to "go about their business." (Privacy fears unjustified, Chertoff said this week.) It will be a soft sell of "temporary" measures, dictated by a supposed self-necessity. Americans will be encouraged to pretend that things are normal, or normal enough, and that the measures, while serious and unfortunate, don't affect them. And to keep it that way, many will watch what they say and watch what they do, and become detainees under self-monitored house arrest.
Somehow, even through all the outages and that Chinese government thing, I always thought of Google as a different kind of corporation. Another illusion—shattered. A strong draft of UK-grade irony here...
... Via alert reader Alice Marshall, Google now has a new Vice President: Scott "Sucker MC" McClellan lacky and Caryle Group Associate Dan "I am the Mouth of Bremer" Senor. Yech...
Over at my favorite Canadian tinfoil site, Jeff Wells reminds us the best way to cook a frog is by a slow boil.
After the shock of a mass casuality event, and during the aftershocks of martial law, what will be the chief tone Homeland Security will want to set? It will be reassurance. Why? Because FEMA may have many camps, but it doesn't have enough to hold everyone. For the few to maintain power, the many need to participate in their own subjugation. They must be self-contained. And so, Michael Chertoff will attempt to alleviate the psychological sting of martial law, while he rubs the poison in, and invite Americans to "go about their business." (Privacy fears unjustified, Chertoff said this week.) It will be a soft sell of "temporary" measures, dictated by a supposed self-necessity. Americans will be encouraged to pretend that things are normal, or normal enough, and that the measures, while serious and unfortunate, don't affect them. And to keep it that way, many will watch what they say and watch what they do, and become detainees under self-monitored house arrest.
It's Worse Than They Thought
Satellite and weather-balloon research released Friday removes a last bastion of scientific doubt about global warming, researchers say.
Surface temperatures have shown small but steady increases since the 1970s, but the tropics had shown little atmospheric heating - and even some cooling. Now, after sleuthing reported in three papers released by the journal Science, revisions have been made to that atmospheric data.
After examining the satellite data, collected since 1979 by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather satellites, Carl Mears and Frank Wentz of Remote Sensing Systems in Santa Rosa, Calif., found that the satellites had drifted in orbit, throwing off the timing of temperature measures. Essentially, the satellites were increasingly reporting nighttime temperatures as daytime ones, leading to a false cooling trend. The team also found a math error in the calculations...
So get your boats ready, campers:
Two global coupled climate models show that even if the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had been stabilized in the year 2000, we are already committed to further global warming of about another half degree and an additional 320% sea level rise caused by thermal expansion by the end of the 21st century. Projected weakening of the meridional overturning circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean does not lead to a net cooling in Europe. At any given point in time, even if concentrations are stabilized, there is a commitment to future climate changes that will be greater than those we have already observed.
----------Science, Vol 307, Issue 5716, 1769-1772 , 18 March 2005
Surface temperatures have shown small but steady increases since the 1970s, but the tropics had shown little atmospheric heating - and even some cooling. Now, after sleuthing reported in three papers released by the journal Science, revisions have been made to that atmospheric data.
After examining the satellite data, collected since 1979 by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather satellites, Carl Mears and Frank Wentz of Remote Sensing Systems in Santa Rosa, Calif., found that the satellites had drifted in orbit, throwing off the timing of temperature measures. Essentially, the satellites were increasingly reporting nighttime temperatures as daytime ones, leading to a false cooling trend. The team also found a math error in the calculations...
So get your boats ready, campers:
Two global coupled climate models show that even if the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had been stabilized in the year 2000, we are already committed to further global warming of about another half degree and an additional 320% sea level rise caused by thermal expansion by the end of the 21st century. Projected weakening of the meridional overturning circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean does not lead to a net cooling in Europe. At any given point in time, even if concentrations are stabilized, there is a commitment to future climate changes that will be greater than those we have already observed.
----------Science, Vol 307, Issue 5716, 1769-1772 , 18 March 2005
Thursday, August 11, 2005
They Stone 'Em in the Kingdom
Some observations on some odd behavior...
In a rare move, the Army relieved a four-star general of his command amid allegations that he had an extramarital affair with a civilian, Army officials said yesterday.
Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, 55, led the Army's Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Va., where he supervised the recruitment and academic programs at 33 Army schools, from basic training to the war colleges. Byrnes, who several military sources said had a previously unblemished record, was set to retire in November after 36 years of service.
The Army released few details about the decision to relieve one of its 11 four-star generals, with spokesmen saying only that Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, relieved Byrnes of his command on Monday as the result of an investigation by the Defense Department's inspector general. A spokesman said Army officials could find no case of another four-star general being relieved of duty in modern times...
His defense attorney, Lt. Col. David H. Robertson, said the allegation against Byrnes involves an affair with a private citizen. Byrnes has been separated from his wife since May 2004; their divorce was finalized on Monday, coincidentally the same day he was relieved of command, Robertson said...
Yes, the same D.o'D. run by people who maintained a male prostitute to deliver propaganda for White House press briefings fired this General.
Sure, I believe that. Who wouldn't? Apparently not Simbaud, who points to two alternative explanations.
The paranoid explanation (wild man Wayne Madsen):
The sudden firing of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine (TRADOC) Commander, four star General and New York City native Kevin P. Byrnes, one of only 11 four star generals in the Army, has much more to do with a policy dispute than an anonymous Pentagon-reported story about an alleged "extra-marital affair." Although Byrnes has recently been involved in divorce proceedings, Pentagon insiders report that Byrnes was fired for insubordination . . . .
What has not been reported is that recently, one of Byrnes' subordinate commands, Fort Rucker in Alabama, had been told to stand by for an influx of 50,000 military trainees -- a level the base has not seen since the Vietnam War. Byrnes' relief of command came on the heels of the Pentagon announcing that it might permit Spanish-language entrance examinations. Byrnes, who was in charge of Army training, would not only face recruits with lower education levels, criminal records, but a lack of proficiency in English. Pentagon insiders report that it was Byrnes' policy disagreements with the Pentagon neo-cons over the new recruitment policies and the potential for calling up Army retirees and reinstating military conscription without adequate TRADOC funding that resulted in his firing. The personal misconduct charges were concocted by the Pentagon to cover up the fact that there are serious disagreements with Bush and Rumsfeld among the flag officer ranks in the military...
This has a wiff of reality about it, though. The next one is somewhat more intriguing:
The tinfoil explanation (Prison Planet):
Other sources however have offered a different explanation for Byrnes' dismissal which ties in with the Bush administration's unpopular plan to attack Iran and the staged nuclear attack in the US which would provide the pretext to do so.
According to reporter Greg Szymanski, anonymous military sources said that Brynes was the leader of a faction that was preparing to instigate a coup against the neo-con hawks in an attempt to prevent further global conflict.
Indications are that, much like popular opinion amongst the general public, half the military oppose the neo-con's agenda and half support it.
Further revelations were imparted by journalist Leland Lehrman who appeared today on The Alex Jones Show.
Lehrman's army sources, including a former Captain in intelligence, became outraged when they learned that the official story behind 9/11 was impossible.
They told Lehrman that the imminent Northcom nuclear terror exercise based in Charleston, S.C, where a nuclear warhead is smuggled off a ship and detonated, was originally intended to 'go live' - as in the drill would be used as the cover for a real false flag staged attack. This website has relentlessly discussed similar style drills which took place on the morning of 9/11 and on the morning of 7/7 in London.
"Speculation exists that he had potentially discovered the fact that it was gonna go live and that he was trying to put a stop to it or also speculation indicates that he may be part of a military coup designed to prevent the ridiculous idea of doing a nuclear war with Iran, " said Lehrman.
Lehrman said that other sources had told him all army leave had been cancelled from September 7th onwards, opening the possibility for war to be declared within that time frame...
Speaking of terra'ist activities, what do you call it when a young Wrepublican boards an airplane with a home-made bomb?
OKLAHOMA CITY -- A small explosive device was found in a passenger's carryon bag as the man passed through a checkpoint, and federal agents arrested him, the FBI said Thursday.
Officials have found no apparent connection between Charles Alfred Dreyling Jr. and any terrorist group or activity, said Agent Gary Johnson, an FBI spokesman.
Dreyling, 24, was going through the security checkpoint at Will Rogers World Airport on Wednesday when a Transportation Security Administration employee noticed something suspicious in his bag on the X-ray machine, Johnson said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Bob Troester described the device as a carbon-dioxide cartridge with a black-powder detonator.
But Dreyling's landlord, former Oklahoma City Mayor Kirk Humphreys, said he had created a "glorified firecracker" and forgot it was in his luggage.
"I know Charlie Dreyling quite well," Humphreys said. "I appreciate what the authorities are doing making our airlines safe. I have every confidence that they'll find out Charlie Dreyling is a fine young man and no terrorist."
Dreyling had planned to take a Delta flight that travels to Philadelphia through Atlanta, airport spokeswoman Karen Carney said.
He was at the Oklahoma County jail on a federal hold and was to appear before a federal magistrate Thursday afternoon, the U.S. Attorney's office said. He could face charges related to possessing an explosive device at an airport, Johnson said.
The arrest did not disrupt any flights, Carney said...
I wonder if it had exploded, would we be dropping nukes on Tehran right now?
I wonder if recent events have Karl Rove and Tom DeLay trying to talk Company people into finding someone to do something similar right now?
In a rare move, the Army relieved a four-star general of his command amid allegations that he had an extramarital affair with a civilian, Army officials said yesterday.
Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, 55, led the Army's Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Va., where he supervised the recruitment and academic programs at 33 Army schools, from basic training to the war colleges. Byrnes, who several military sources said had a previously unblemished record, was set to retire in November after 36 years of service.
The Army released few details about the decision to relieve one of its 11 four-star generals, with spokesmen saying only that Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, relieved Byrnes of his command on Monday as the result of an investigation by the Defense Department's inspector general. A spokesman said Army officials could find no case of another four-star general being relieved of duty in modern times...
His defense attorney, Lt. Col. David H. Robertson, said the allegation against Byrnes involves an affair with a private citizen. Byrnes has been separated from his wife since May 2004; their divorce was finalized on Monday, coincidentally the same day he was relieved of command, Robertson said...
Yes, the same D.o'D. run by people who maintained a male prostitute to deliver propaganda for White House press briefings fired this General.
Sure, I believe that. Who wouldn't? Apparently not Simbaud, who points to two alternative explanations.
The paranoid explanation (wild man Wayne Madsen):
The sudden firing of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine (TRADOC) Commander, four star General and New York City native Kevin P. Byrnes, one of only 11 four star generals in the Army, has much more to do with a policy dispute than an anonymous Pentagon-reported story about an alleged "extra-marital affair." Although Byrnes has recently been involved in divorce proceedings, Pentagon insiders report that Byrnes was fired for insubordination . . . .
What has not been reported is that recently, one of Byrnes' subordinate commands, Fort Rucker in Alabama, had been told to stand by for an influx of 50,000 military trainees -- a level the base has not seen since the Vietnam War. Byrnes' relief of command came on the heels of the Pentagon announcing that it might permit Spanish-language entrance examinations. Byrnes, who was in charge of Army training, would not only face recruits with lower education levels, criminal records, but a lack of proficiency in English. Pentagon insiders report that it was Byrnes' policy disagreements with the Pentagon neo-cons over the new recruitment policies and the potential for calling up Army retirees and reinstating military conscription without adequate TRADOC funding that resulted in his firing. The personal misconduct charges were concocted by the Pentagon to cover up the fact that there are serious disagreements with Bush and Rumsfeld among the flag officer ranks in the military...
This has a wiff of reality about it, though. The next one is somewhat more intriguing:
The tinfoil explanation (Prison Planet):
Other sources however have offered a different explanation for Byrnes' dismissal which ties in with the Bush administration's unpopular plan to attack Iran and the staged nuclear attack in the US which would provide the pretext to do so.
According to reporter Greg Szymanski, anonymous military sources said that Brynes was the leader of a faction that was preparing to instigate a coup against the neo-con hawks in an attempt to prevent further global conflict.
Indications are that, much like popular opinion amongst the general public, half the military oppose the neo-con's agenda and half support it.
Further revelations were imparted by journalist Leland Lehrman who appeared today on The Alex Jones Show.
Lehrman's army sources, including a former Captain in intelligence, became outraged when they learned that the official story behind 9/11 was impossible.
They told Lehrman that the imminent Northcom nuclear terror exercise based in Charleston, S.C, where a nuclear warhead is smuggled off a ship and detonated, was originally intended to 'go live' - as in the drill would be used as the cover for a real false flag staged attack. This website has relentlessly discussed similar style drills which took place on the morning of 9/11 and on the morning of 7/7 in London.
"Speculation exists that he had potentially discovered the fact that it was gonna go live and that he was trying to put a stop to it or also speculation indicates that he may be part of a military coup designed to prevent the ridiculous idea of doing a nuclear war with Iran, " said Lehrman.
Lehrman said that other sources had told him all army leave had been cancelled from September 7th onwards, opening the possibility for war to be declared within that time frame...
Speaking of terra'ist activities, what do you call it when a young Wrepublican boards an airplane with a home-made bomb?
OKLAHOMA CITY -- A small explosive device was found in a passenger's carryon bag as the man passed through a checkpoint, and federal agents arrested him, the FBI said Thursday.
Officials have found no apparent connection between Charles Alfred Dreyling Jr. and any terrorist group or activity, said Agent Gary Johnson, an FBI spokesman.
Dreyling, 24, was going through the security checkpoint at Will Rogers World Airport on Wednesday when a Transportation Security Administration employee noticed something suspicious in his bag on the X-ray machine, Johnson said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Bob Troester described the device as a carbon-dioxide cartridge with a black-powder detonator.
But Dreyling's landlord, former Oklahoma City Mayor Kirk Humphreys, said he had created a "glorified firecracker" and forgot it was in his luggage.
"I know Charlie Dreyling quite well," Humphreys said. "I appreciate what the authorities are doing making our airlines safe. I have every confidence that they'll find out Charlie Dreyling is a fine young man and no terrorist."
Dreyling had planned to take a Delta flight that travels to Philadelphia through Atlanta, airport spokeswoman Karen Carney said.
He was at the Oklahoma County jail on a federal hold and was to appear before a federal magistrate Thursday afternoon, the U.S. Attorney's office said. He could face charges related to possessing an explosive device at an airport, Johnson said.
The arrest did not disrupt any flights, Carney said...
I wonder if it had exploded, would we be dropping nukes on Tehran right now?
I wonder if recent events have Karl Rove and Tom DeLay trying to talk Company people into finding someone to do something similar right now?
Because That Would Be Telling
The Sept. 11 commission knew military intelligence officials had identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta as a member of al-Qaida who might be part of U.S.-based terror cell more than a year before the terror attacks but decided not to include that in its final report, a spokesman acknowledged Thursday.
Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the commission's follow-up project called the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, had said earlier this week that the panel was unaware of intelligence specifically naming Atta. But he said subsequent information provided Wednesday confirmed that the commission had been aware of the intelligence.
The information did not make it into the final report because it was not consistent with what the commission knew about Atta's whereabouts before the attacks, Felzenberg said.
The intelligence about Atta recently was disclosed by Rep. Curt Weldon, vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees. The Pennsylvania Republican has expressed anger that the intelligence never was forwarded by the military establishment to the FBI.
The discourse project, Pentagon and at least two congressional committees are looking into the issue. If found accurate, the intelligence would change the timeline for when government officials first became aware of Atta's links to al-Qaida.
According to Weldon, a classified military intelligence unit called "Able Danger" identified Atta and three other hijackers in 1999 as potential members of a terrorist cell in New York City. Weldon said Pentagon lawyers rejected the unit's recommendation that the information be turned over to the FBI in 2000...
Thanks to Woody for the heads up.
This link was from Rigorous Intuition, where they've a lot of interesting links tonight.
Here’s the scenario …A seafaring vessel transporting a 10-kiloton nuclear warhead makes its way into a port off the coast of Charleston, S.C. Terrorists aboard the ship attempt to smuggle the warhead off the ship to detonate it. Is this really a possibility?
Joint Task Force Civil Support (JTF-CS) here is planning its next exercise on the premise that this crisis is indeed plausible.
Sudden Response 05 will take place this August on Fort Monroe and will be carried out as an internal command post exercise. The exercise is intended to train the JTF-CS staff to plan and execute Consequence Management operations in support of Federal Emergency Management Agency Region IV’s response to a nuclear detonation...
You get a lot of Homeland Security cookies with that one. Not for the tinfoil paranoid.
Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the commission's follow-up project called the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, had said earlier this week that the panel was unaware of intelligence specifically naming Atta. But he said subsequent information provided Wednesday confirmed that the commission had been aware of the intelligence.
The information did not make it into the final report because it was not consistent with what the commission knew about Atta's whereabouts before the attacks, Felzenberg said.
The intelligence about Atta recently was disclosed by Rep. Curt Weldon, vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees. The Pennsylvania Republican has expressed anger that the intelligence never was forwarded by the military establishment to the FBI.
The discourse project, Pentagon and at least two congressional committees are looking into the issue. If found accurate, the intelligence would change the timeline for when government officials first became aware of Atta's links to al-Qaida.
According to Weldon, a classified military intelligence unit called "Able Danger" identified Atta and three other hijackers in 1999 as potential members of a terrorist cell in New York City. Weldon said Pentagon lawyers rejected the unit's recommendation that the information be turned over to the FBI in 2000...
Thanks to Woody for the heads up.
This link was from Rigorous Intuition, where they've a lot of interesting links tonight.
Here’s the scenario …A seafaring vessel transporting a 10-kiloton nuclear warhead makes its way into a port off the coast of Charleston, S.C. Terrorists aboard the ship attempt to smuggle the warhead off the ship to detonate it. Is this really a possibility?
Joint Task Force Civil Support (JTF-CS) here is planning its next exercise on the premise that this crisis is indeed plausible.
Sudden Response 05 will take place this August on Fort Monroe and will be carried out as an internal command post exercise. The exercise is intended to train the JTF-CS staff to plan and execute Consequence Management operations in support of Federal Emergency Management Agency Region IV’s response to a nuclear detonation...
You get a lot of Homeland Security cookies with that one. Not for the tinfoil paranoid.
Hedonic Adjustments
Because it's the quality that matters.
Now that we're on the downside of the Hubbert Oil curve, the prices of petroleum and petroleum-based products will inevitably rise.
So how do Greenspan and Bu$hCo get away with the lie that inflation is under control?
Uggabugga points out how the main$tream media propagates the disinformation, but if you read the fine print you can find the spin source:
Gasoline has risen $1.00 from $1.50 to $2.50 in three years, a 66% increase, or 18% per year. And that's just gasoline at the pump. Higher gasoline prices also affect what you pay for other goods since transportation costs are folded into food and other merchandise.
How come the inflation rate is reported to be so low? Samuelson gives a hint with this line: (emp add)
"In June new car prices -- after adjustment for quality improvements -- were actually 2.1 percent lower than 10 years earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics."
That's the controversial "hedonic adjustments" you've heard about. A new computer comes out with double the CPU speed, but has same retail price as a similar model a year ago. The adjustment by the BLS results in a computer at half the price! This didn't happen in the past. Improvements in performance had been assumed to be part of the territory and not something to be "adjusted" for.
Hedonic adjustments are an economic tool used to compare actual prices with the quality of what you're enjoying right now.
So if you're paying $2.50 a gallon for gasoline, it's obvious that you're only really paying a dollar or so, because with that gasoline you're buying a Righteous Dear Leader and everything the Company has to improve your life.
If your vote is vaporized into the ether by an algorithm from the Diebold Corporation, you are actually more empowered than ever before, because you've $elected a popular president.
Or at least that's what the hedonic adjustment says.
Now that we're on the downside of the Hubbert Oil curve, the prices of petroleum and petroleum-based products will inevitably rise.
So how do Greenspan and Bu$hCo get away with the lie that inflation is under control?
Uggabugga points out how the main$tream media propagates the disinformation, but if you read the fine print you can find the spin source:
Gasoline has risen $1.00 from $1.50 to $2.50 in three years, a 66% increase, or 18% per year. And that's just gasoline at the pump. Higher gasoline prices also affect what you pay for other goods since transportation costs are folded into food and other merchandise.
How come the inflation rate is reported to be so low? Samuelson gives a hint with this line: (emp add)
"In June new car prices -- after adjustment for quality improvements -- were actually 2.1 percent lower than 10 years earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics."
That's the controversial "hedonic adjustments" you've heard about. A new computer comes out with double the CPU speed, but has same retail price as a similar model a year ago. The adjustment by the BLS results in a computer at half the price! This didn't happen in the past. Improvements in performance had been assumed to be part of the territory and not something to be "adjusted" for.
Hedonic adjustments are an economic tool used to compare actual prices with the quality of what you're enjoying right now.
So if you're paying $2.50 a gallon for gasoline, it's obvious that you're only really paying a dollar or so, because with that gasoline you're buying a Righteous Dear Leader and everything the Company has to improve your life.
If your vote is vaporized into the ether by an algorithm from the Diebold Corporation, you are actually more empowered than ever before, because you've $elected a popular president.
Or at least that's what the hedonic adjustment says.
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Halliburton: Bringing Good Things to Iranian Life
Scandal-plagued Halliburton, the oil services company once headed by Vice President Dick was secretly working with one of Iran’s top nuclear program officials on natural gas related projects and, allegedly, selling the officials' oil development company key components for a nuclear reactor, according to Halliburton sources with intimate knowledge into both companies’ business dealings.
Just last week a National Security Council report said Iran was a decade away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. That time frame could arguably have been significantly longer if Halliburton, which just reported a 284 percent increase in its fourth quarter profits due to its Iraq reconstruction contracts, was not actively providing the Iranian government with the financial means to build a nuclear weapon.
Now comes word that Halliburton, which has a long history of flouting U.S. law by conducting business with countries the Bush administration said has ties to terrorism, was working with Cyrus Nasseri, the vice chairman of the board of directors of Oriental Oil Kish, one of Iran’s largest private oil companies, on oil development projects in Tehran. Nasseri is also a key member of Iran’s nuclear development team.
“Nasseri, a senior Iranian diplomat negotiating with Europe over Iran's controversial nuclear program is at the heart of deals with US energy companies to develop the country's oil industry”, the Financial Times reported.
Nasseri was interrogated by Iranian authorities in late July for allegedly providing Halliburton with Iran’s nuclear secrets and accepting as much as $1 million in bribes from Halliburton, according to Iranian government officials.
It’s unclear whether Halliburton was privy to any of Iran’s nuclear activities. A company spokesperson did not return numerous calls for comment. A White House spokesperson also did not return calls for comment.
Oriental Oil Kish dealings with Halliburton became public knowledge in January when the company announced that it had subcontracted parts of the South Pars natural gas drilling project to Halliburton Products and Services, a subsidiary of Dallas-based Halliburton that is registered in the Cayman Islands.
Following the announcement, Halliburton announced the South Pars gas field project in Tehran would be its last project in Iran. The BBC reported that Halliburton, which took in $30-$40 million from its Iranian operations in 2003, "was winding down its work due to a poor business environment." ...
This isn't just about a sleazy back room deal by bunch of uranium-for-oil smuggling gangstahs.
The Company has connections to Iran reaching back to the hostage crisis of the 1970s.
Although the administration has discredited the story, there are former hostages who think the new hardline Iranian president was one of the minds behind the kidnappers.
..."As soon as I saw the face, it rang a lot of bells to me," Don Sharer, who served as the embassy's naval attache at the time, told CNN.
"...Take 20 years off of him. He was there. He was there in the background, more like an adviser."
Abbas Abdi, the man well-known to be the leader of the 1979 hostage-takers, told CNN that Ahmadinejad, the Tehran mayor, "absolutely was not" part of the event that involved the captivity of 52 people.
Abdi later became a supporter of reformist President Mohammed Khatami and was recently released from jail for advocating closer ties with the United States.
Iranian officials also deny Ahmadinejad was involved...
Like any of that can be taken at face value.
With a new Iranian hardline preznit, deeply religious and righteous as Hell, Iran is doing the manly macho one might say Texan thing and cranking up its uranium enrichment facilities again.
ISFAHAN, Iran - A defiant
Iran resumed full operations at its uranium conversion plant Wednesday, as Europe and the United States struggled to find a way to stop the Islamic republic from pushing ahead with a nuclear program they fear will lead to weapons of mass destruction.
ADVERTISEMENT
With
United Nations inspectors watching, Iranian officials removed U.N. seals that had been placed voluntarily on equipment at the facility eight months ago when Tehran agreed to freeze most of its nuclear program.
Technicians then immediately resumed work on the process that turns raw uranium into gas for enrichment.
The breaking of the seals at the facility in the mountains outside the southern city of Isfahan was the latest move of Iranian brinkmanship over its nuclear ambitions. The hard-line government's determination to move ahead left Europe and the United States scrambling over what to do next...
Scrambling? Surely you jest. Why, I'm sure Big Time Dick and the other Carlyle Barons are investing shrewdly in this opportunity even as you read this.
Doubtless the new deeply religious King of a devout nation surrounded by burning sands and sitting on top of most of the world's oil is pleased to see his biggest customer and his biggest sectarian and remaining production rival are getting ready to do the Wild Thing. It's gotta be good for him to lay his money down. No matter who gets burned, he and his Princes win.
Not to mention the posse at General Electric ( more good things from Saudi Arabia ), Bechtel, General Dynamics, and the rest of the Carlyle Crew.
Just last week a National Security Council report said Iran was a decade away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. That time frame could arguably have been significantly longer if Halliburton, which just reported a 284 percent increase in its fourth quarter profits due to its Iraq reconstruction contracts, was not actively providing the Iranian government with the financial means to build a nuclear weapon.
Now comes word that Halliburton, which has a long history of flouting U.S. law by conducting business with countries the Bush administration said has ties to terrorism, was working with Cyrus Nasseri, the vice chairman of the board of directors of Oriental Oil Kish, one of Iran’s largest private oil companies, on oil development projects in Tehran. Nasseri is also a key member of Iran’s nuclear development team.
“Nasseri, a senior Iranian diplomat negotiating with Europe over Iran's controversial nuclear program is at the heart of deals with US energy companies to develop the country's oil industry”, the Financial Times reported.
Nasseri was interrogated by Iranian authorities in late July for allegedly providing Halliburton with Iran’s nuclear secrets and accepting as much as $1 million in bribes from Halliburton, according to Iranian government officials.
It’s unclear whether Halliburton was privy to any of Iran’s nuclear activities. A company spokesperson did not return numerous calls for comment. A White House spokesperson also did not return calls for comment.
Oriental Oil Kish dealings with Halliburton became public knowledge in January when the company announced that it had subcontracted parts of the South Pars natural gas drilling project to Halliburton Products and Services, a subsidiary of Dallas-based Halliburton that is registered in the Cayman Islands.
Following the announcement, Halliburton announced the South Pars gas field project in Tehran would be its last project in Iran. The BBC reported that Halliburton, which took in $30-$40 million from its Iranian operations in 2003, "was winding down its work due to a poor business environment." ...
This isn't just about a sleazy back room deal by bunch of uranium-for-oil smuggling gangstahs.
The Company has connections to Iran reaching back to the hostage crisis of the 1970s.
Although the administration has discredited the story, there are former hostages who think the new hardline Iranian president was one of the minds behind the kidnappers.
..."As soon as I saw the face, it rang a lot of bells to me," Don Sharer, who served as the embassy's naval attache at the time, told CNN.
"...Take 20 years off of him. He was there. He was there in the background, more like an adviser."
Abbas Abdi, the man well-known to be the leader of the 1979 hostage-takers, told CNN that Ahmadinejad, the Tehran mayor, "absolutely was not" part of the event that involved the captivity of 52 people.
Abdi later became a supporter of reformist President Mohammed Khatami and was recently released from jail for advocating closer ties with the United States.
Iranian officials also deny Ahmadinejad was involved...
Like any of that can be taken at face value.
With a new Iranian hardline preznit, deeply religious and righteous as Hell, Iran is doing the manly macho one might say Texan thing and cranking up its uranium enrichment facilities again.
ISFAHAN, Iran - A defiant
Iran resumed full operations at its uranium conversion plant Wednesday, as Europe and the United States struggled to find a way to stop the Islamic republic from pushing ahead with a nuclear program they fear will lead to weapons of mass destruction.
ADVERTISEMENT
With
United Nations inspectors watching, Iranian officials removed U.N. seals that had been placed voluntarily on equipment at the facility eight months ago when Tehran agreed to freeze most of its nuclear program.
Technicians then immediately resumed work on the process that turns raw uranium into gas for enrichment.
The breaking of the seals at the facility in the mountains outside the southern city of Isfahan was the latest move of Iranian brinkmanship over its nuclear ambitions. The hard-line government's determination to move ahead left Europe and the United States scrambling over what to do next...
Scrambling? Surely you jest. Why, I'm sure Big Time Dick and the other Carlyle Barons are investing shrewdly in this opportunity even as you read this.
Doubtless the new deeply religious King of a devout nation surrounded by burning sands and sitting on top of most of the world's oil is pleased to see his biggest customer and his biggest sectarian and remaining production rival are getting ready to do the Wild Thing. It's gotta be good for him to lay his money down. No matter who gets burned, he and his Princes win.
Not to mention the posse at General Electric ( more good things from Saudi Arabia ), Bechtel, General Dynamics, and the rest of the Carlyle Crew.
More Churning in the Combine
Looks like Pat Fitzgerald is burning his candle at both ends now there's a good chance the Bu$hCo $yndicate will have his new boss shut him down in October.
CHICAGO - Federal prosecutors investigating corruption at a state pension fund have subpoenaed records concerning $4.5 million in fees a Washington-based investment firm is paying the new treasurer of the Republican National Committee, government sources confirmed Tuesday.
The subpoena calls for documents related to the fund, the Carlyle Group and Robert Kjellander, said sources familiar with the investigation who spoke only on condition of anonymity, saying prosecutors want details of the probe kept secret.
Kjellander, a Springfield-based lobbyist who headed President Bush's re-election campaign in three states, was named the RNC's treasurer over the weekend.
Illinois Teachers Retirement System officials expressed concern about the amount of finders fees Carlyle offered Kjellander for helping to land business with the pension fund - $3.1 million paid and $1.4 million due.
"I believe that we were all taken aback when we learned of the size of his compensation for services to the Carlyle Group," said Jon Bauman, executive director of the pension fund...
CHICAGO - Federal prosecutors investigating corruption at a state pension fund have subpoenaed records concerning $4.5 million in fees a Washington-based investment firm is paying the new treasurer of the Republican National Committee, government sources confirmed Tuesday.
The subpoena calls for documents related to the fund, the Carlyle Group and Robert Kjellander, said sources familiar with the investigation who spoke only on condition of anonymity, saying prosecutors want details of the probe kept secret.
Kjellander, a Springfield-based lobbyist who headed President Bush's re-election campaign in three states, was named the RNC's treasurer over the weekend.
Illinois Teachers Retirement System officials expressed concern about the amount of finders fees Carlyle offered Kjellander for helping to land business with the pension fund - $3.1 million paid and $1.4 million due.
"I believe that we were all taken aback when we learned of the size of his compensation for services to the Carlyle Group," said Jon Bauman, executive director of the pension fund...
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
With Liens Like This, Who Needs Enemies?
Mortgaged to the House of Saud
The only evidence you need that President Bush is losing the "war on terror" is this: On Sunday, the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia said that relations with the United States "couldn't be better."
Tell that to the parents of those who have died in two wars defending this corrupt spawning ground of violent extremism. Never mind the ugly facts: We are deeply entwined with Saudi Arabia even though it shares none of our values and supports our enemies.
Yet on Friday, Bush's father and Vice President Dick Cheney made another in a long line of obsequious American pilgrimages to Riyadh to assure the Saudis that we continue to be grateful for the punishment they dish out.
"The relationship has tremendously improved with the United States," Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al Faisal told a news conference in Riyadh. "With the government, of course, it is very harmonious, as it ever was. Whether it has returned to the same level as it was before in terms of public opinion [in both countries], that is debatable."
Well, score one for public opinion. It makes sense to distrust the mercenary and distasteful alliance between the US and Saudi Arabia. We protect the repressive kingdom that spawned Osama bin Laden, and most of the 9/11 hijackers, in exchange for the Saudis keeping our fecklessly oil-addicted country lubricated.
Yes, it has stuck deep in the craw of many of us Americans that after 9/11, Washington squandered global goodwill and a huge percentage of our resources invading a country that had nothing to do with al Qaeda, while continuing to pander to this dysfunctional dynasty. After all, Saudi Arabia is believed to have paid Bin Laden's murderous gang millions in protection money in the years before 9/11, and it lavishly funds extremist religious schools throughout the region that preach and teach anti-Western jihad.
"Al Qaeda found fertile fundraising ground in the kingdom," noted the 9/11 commission report in one of its many careful understatements. The fact is, without Saudi Arabia, there would be no al Qaeda today.
Our president loves to use the word "evil" in his speeches, yet throughout his life he and his family have had deep personal, political and financial ties with a country that represents everything the American Revolution stood against: tyranny, religious intolerance, corrupt royalty and popular ignorance. This is a country where women aren't allowed to drive and those who show "too much skin" can be beaten in the street by officially sanctioned mobs of fanatics. A medieval land where newspapers routinely publish the most outlandish anti-Semitic rants. A place where executions are held in public, torture is the norm in prison and the most extreme and expansionist version of Islam is the state religion.
It's hard to see how Saddam Hussein's brutal and secular Iraq was worse than the brutal theocracy run by the House of Saud. Yet one nation we raze and the other we fete. Is it any wonder that much of the world sees the United States as the planet's biggest hypocrite?
As insider books by former White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke, journalist Bob Woodward and others have recounted, punishing Saudi Arabia in any way for its long ideological and financial support of terrorism was not even on the table in the days after 9/11. Instead, within hours of the planes hitting the towers, the powerful neoconservatives in the White House rushed to use the tragedy as an excuse for a long-dreamed invasion of Iraq.
Meanwhile, after two wars to make the Middle East safe for the Saudis, wars that cost hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and thousands of American lives, the price of oil is soaring - up 42% from just a year ago. Good thing we just passed a pork-laden energy bill that will do little to nothing to ease our crushing - and rising - dependence on imported oil. Federal officials project that by 2025, the US will have to import 68% of its oil to meet demand, up from 58% today.
There are those who argue that the best rationale for invading Iraq was to ease our dependence on Saudi Arabia's massive oil fields, which might allow for a more rational or moral relationship. Yet the dark irony is that with Iraq in chaos and its oil flow limited by insurgent attacks and a bungled reconstruction, Saudi Arabia is now more important to the United States than ever.
It's scary, but these gaping contradictions don't seem to trouble our president a whit.
As the drumbeat of devastating terrorist attacks in Baghdad, London and elsewhere continue, Bush prattles on - five times in a speech last Wednesday - about his pyrrhic victories in the "war on terror." This is a sorry rhetorical device that disguises the fact that the forces of Islamic fanaticism in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the world are stronger than ever.
The only evidence you need that President Bush is losing the "war on terror" is this: On Sunday, the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia said that relations with the United States "couldn't be better."
Tell that to the parents of those who have died in two wars defending this corrupt spawning ground of violent extremism. Never mind the ugly facts: We are deeply entwined with Saudi Arabia even though it shares none of our values and supports our enemies.
Yet on Friday, Bush's father and Vice President Dick Cheney made another in a long line of obsequious American pilgrimages to Riyadh to assure the Saudis that we continue to be grateful for the punishment they dish out.
"The relationship has tremendously improved with the United States," Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al Faisal told a news conference in Riyadh. "With the government, of course, it is very harmonious, as it ever was. Whether it has returned to the same level as it was before in terms of public opinion [in both countries], that is debatable."
Well, score one for public opinion. It makes sense to distrust the mercenary and distasteful alliance between the US and Saudi Arabia. We protect the repressive kingdom that spawned Osama bin Laden, and most of the 9/11 hijackers, in exchange for the Saudis keeping our fecklessly oil-addicted country lubricated.
Yes, it has stuck deep in the craw of many of us Americans that after 9/11, Washington squandered global goodwill and a huge percentage of our resources invading a country that had nothing to do with al Qaeda, while continuing to pander to this dysfunctional dynasty. After all, Saudi Arabia is believed to have paid Bin Laden's murderous gang millions in protection money in the years before 9/11, and it lavishly funds extremist religious schools throughout the region that preach and teach anti-Western jihad.
"Al Qaeda found fertile fundraising ground in the kingdom," noted the 9/11 commission report in one of its many careful understatements. The fact is, without Saudi Arabia, there would be no al Qaeda today.
Our president loves to use the word "evil" in his speeches, yet throughout his life he and his family have had deep personal, political and financial ties with a country that represents everything the American Revolution stood against: tyranny, religious intolerance, corrupt royalty and popular ignorance. This is a country where women aren't allowed to drive and those who show "too much skin" can be beaten in the street by officially sanctioned mobs of fanatics. A medieval land where newspapers routinely publish the most outlandish anti-Semitic rants. A place where executions are held in public, torture is the norm in prison and the most extreme and expansionist version of Islam is the state religion.
It's hard to see how Saddam Hussein's brutal and secular Iraq was worse than the brutal theocracy run by the House of Saud. Yet one nation we raze and the other we fete. Is it any wonder that much of the world sees the United States as the planet's biggest hypocrite?
As insider books by former White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke, journalist Bob Woodward and others have recounted, punishing Saudi Arabia in any way for its long ideological and financial support of terrorism was not even on the table in the days after 9/11. Instead, within hours of the planes hitting the towers, the powerful neoconservatives in the White House rushed to use the tragedy as an excuse for a long-dreamed invasion of Iraq.
Meanwhile, after two wars to make the Middle East safe for the Saudis, wars that cost hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and thousands of American lives, the price of oil is soaring - up 42% from just a year ago. Good thing we just passed a pork-laden energy bill that will do little to nothing to ease our crushing - and rising - dependence on imported oil. Federal officials project that by 2025, the US will have to import 68% of its oil to meet demand, up from 58% today.
There are those who argue that the best rationale for invading Iraq was to ease our dependence on Saudi Arabia's massive oil fields, which might allow for a more rational or moral relationship. Yet the dark irony is that with Iraq in chaos and its oil flow limited by insurgent attacks and a bungled reconstruction, Saudi Arabia is now more important to the United States than ever.
It's scary, but these gaping contradictions don't seem to trouble our president a whit.
As the drumbeat of devastating terrorist attacks in Baghdad, London and elsewhere continue, Bush prattles on - five times in a speech last Wednesday - about his pyrrhic victories in the "war on terror." This is a sorry rhetorical device that disguises the fact that the forces of Islamic fanaticism in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the world are stronger than ever.
Monday, August 08, 2005
Failed $tate
If you haven't gotten into the habit of reading TomDispatch, you should:
...The truth is that Iraq, which was to be only the first stop on a Bush administration (and neocon) military tour of the Middle East, and then assumedly the world, has so far proven the last stop on the global domination line. It has revealed to a startled world the remarkable weakness of the Earth's last superpower, the land which was, Roman-style, supposed to imprint a Pax Americana on the planet. It has ripped up the all-volunteer military and confounded the dreams of the ever angrier neocons.
In the period before 9/11, neocon writers often focused on the spread of a failed-state world, a supposed jungle of unrulable instability out there on the peripheries, one on which only the sole global hyperpower would assumedly have the capability to impose some level of order. Some of those neocons, in their eagerness to whack various regimes in the Middle East -- Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon -- probably didn't care greatly if, as a result, they created failed states throughout the region. Chaos didn't perhaps seem the worst fate for many of those lands (as long as Ariel Sharon's Israel was strengthened in the process).
Little did they know. Now, they have indeed succeeded in creating a failed-state right in the oil-rich heart of the Middle East and the chaos of Iraq has proceeded to suck the American military as well as Bush administration policies and dreams of every sort down with it, creating maneuvering space for countries as disparate as Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.
In fact, it's unlikely that the Bush administration -- possibly any American government -- will be able to live comfortably with Iraq as a failed state, its ripples of chaos spreading regionally, even globally. And yet the administration has already demonstrated with definitive thoroughness that it is capable of doing little about the situation -- except continually making it worse.
Someday, withdrawal will come, "permanent" bases or no. Staying is not conceivable and the longer we remain, the worse the situation is likely to be when we depart. But on such subjects and on the matter of taking any responsibility for its actions, this administration is not only shameless, but quite hopeless. It can only create more chaos, foster yet more mad plans for future operations like -- if the latest rumors leaked to ex-CIA official Philip Giraldi of American Conservative magazine are to be believed -- taking out the Iranian nuclear program using... doh!... nuclear weapons. Even Homer Simpson, six beers to the wind, couldn't have come up with that one, but evidently our Vice President has...
Ouch, that's gotta hurt.
Pity Bu$hie can't read without his earpiece, and Big Time Dick is too busy counting the WarBuck$ to feel the pain. Besides, these same plans are coming out as big fluff pieces, distractions planted with the main worry about American troops being used on U.S. soil.
The war plans represent a historic shift for the Pentagon, which has been reluctant to become involved in domestic operations and is legally constrained from engaging in law enforcement. Indeed, defense officials continue to stress that they intend for the troops to play largely a supporting role in homeland emergencies, bolstering police, firefighters and other civilian response groups.
Like it's never happened yet.
Protecting the Homeland was what the National Guard was for. But while they're sweating the heat in Iraq, you might as well bring those DynCorp/ CACI/ Blackwater private contractors home, Big Time. After the next Big Strike run by your Saudi buddies they'll smoke out those terra'ists fighting your plans to drill in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge.
But Englehardt's got it. The Bu$hCo strategeries are all like the demented plans of some stoned Yale fratboys. The harder Big Time hits, the messier it gets.
Fifty years from now they'll seem hilarious to our great-grandchildren.
Assuming, of course, we stop them in time, and there's anyone left in the world to do the laughing.
...The truth is that Iraq, which was to be only the first stop on a Bush administration (and neocon) military tour of the Middle East, and then assumedly the world, has so far proven the last stop on the global domination line. It has revealed to a startled world the remarkable weakness of the Earth's last superpower, the land which was, Roman-style, supposed to imprint a Pax Americana on the planet. It has ripped up the all-volunteer military and confounded the dreams of the ever angrier neocons.
In the period before 9/11, neocon writers often focused on the spread of a failed-state world, a supposed jungle of unrulable instability out there on the peripheries, one on which only the sole global hyperpower would assumedly have the capability to impose some level of order. Some of those neocons, in their eagerness to whack various regimes in the Middle East -- Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon -- probably didn't care greatly if, as a result, they created failed states throughout the region. Chaos didn't perhaps seem the worst fate for many of those lands (as long as Ariel Sharon's Israel was strengthened in the process).
Little did they know. Now, they have indeed succeeded in creating a failed-state right in the oil-rich heart of the Middle East and the chaos of Iraq has proceeded to suck the American military as well as Bush administration policies and dreams of every sort down with it, creating maneuvering space for countries as disparate as Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.
In fact, it's unlikely that the Bush administration -- possibly any American government -- will be able to live comfortably with Iraq as a failed state, its ripples of chaos spreading regionally, even globally. And yet the administration has already demonstrated with definitive thoroughness that it is capable of doing little about the situation -- except continually making it worse.
Someday, withdrawal will come, "permanent" bases or no. Staying is not conceivable and the longer we remain, the worse the situation is likely to be when we depart. But on such subjects and on the matter of taking any responsibility for its actions, this administration is not only shameless, but quite hopeless. It can only create more chaos, foster yet more mad plans for future operations like -- if the latest rumors leaked to ex-CIA official Philip Giraldi of American Conservative magazine are to be believed -- taking out the Iranian nuclear program using... doh!... nuclear weapons. Even Homer Simpson, six beers to the wind, couldn't have come up with that one, but evidently our Vice President has...
Ouch, that's gotta hurt.
Pity Bu$hie can't read without his earpiece, and Big Time Dick is too busy counting the WarBuck$ to feel the pain. Besides, these same plans are coming out as big fluff pieces, distractions planted with the main worry about American troops being used on U.S. soil.
The war plans represent a historic shift for the Pentagon, which has been reluctant to become involved in domestic operations and is legally constrained from engaging in law enforcement. Indeed, defense officials continue to stress that they intend for the troops to play largely a supporting role in homeland emergencies, bolstering police, firefighters and other civilian response groups.
Like it's never happened yet.
Protecting the Homeland was what the National Guard was for. But while they're sweating the heat in Iraq, you might as well bring those DynCorp/ CACI/ Blackwater private contractors home, Big Time. After the next Big Strike run by your Saudi buddies they'll smoke out those terra'ists fighting your plans to drill in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge.
But Englehardt's got it. The Bu$hCo strategeries are all like the demented plans of some stoned Yale fratboys. The harder Big Time hits, the messier it gets.
Fifty years from now they'll seem hilarious to our great-grandchildren.
Assuming, of course, we stop them in time, and there's anyone left in the world to do the laughing.
Combine
The farmer comments on letters:
I have been reading pages and pages about the DNC and the DLC and I want to tell you why I am so opposed to the direction the DLC has taken the Party in the last 20 years.
I have been advocating, writing letters, talking locally within the Democratic Party for 25 frickin' years now. To no avail.
My message is simple: talk about workers' rights. Unionizing, outsourcing (especially outsourcing!), management cheating (we have ALL been cheated out of portions of our wages by innumerable statistical tricks). SPEAK OF THEM and blue-collar men go absolutely NUTS with recognition of the problems! Followed 5 minutes later with the most intense hunger to do something about it all that you have ever witnessed.
I speak of them to my blue-collar friends all the time! All. By. Myself.
Millions of white, male blue-collar workers go around in right-wing talk radio induced ignorance. Each and every one of them thinks that the problems they have with their employer is unique, puzzling and sure to get better after a change of management ...or something.
What I do: I simply point up how these "puzzling anomalies" are actually well-known and ancient un-fair labor practices. With NAMES!
Speed-ups. Wage stagnation policies. Two-tiered wage systems. Worker isolation. These are some of the names of the classic Unfair Labor Practices that my friends experience everyday. But they don't even know that there are such things as Unfair Labor Practices!
I'd say what's going on with the blue collar worker ought to be opening the eyes of the DNC.
Howard Dean likely sees it, but the bitter fact is the American worker has been sold down the river by the organized crime syndicates running the Unions.
Digby had a nice piece on the Illinois Combine of corrupt Democrat and Republican government that Patrick Fitzgerald's been taking down in his spare time, but the DINOcrat-Wrepublican Combine may prove a tougher nut to crack, especially now Fitzgerald's new boss is in Bu$hCo's pocket.
The departure this week of Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who has accepted the post of general counsel at Lockheed Martin, leaves a question mark in the probe into who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Comey was the only official overseeing special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation. With Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recused, department officials say they are still trying to resolve whom Fitzgerald will now report to. Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum is "likely" to be named as acting deputy A.G., a DOJ official who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter tells NEWSWEEK. But McCallum may be seen as having his own conflicts: he is an old friend of President Bush's and a member of his Skull and Bones class at Yale.
That's supposed to be in press by the 15th. Let's hope it makes it out. Often such news is amended before it hits the presses.
Bu$hCo is an organized criminal syndicate if there ever was one- and it's in organized crime's and Bu$hCo's best interest to keep the American worker ignorant and in harness.
In another story in the same issue, we see more ex-Agency people saying what John Kerry made public in 2004: the DINOcrat-Wrepublican combine extends all the way to Saudi Arabia, and even to Afghanistan, where they let Osama take an airlift out of Tora Bora.
...in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. "He was there," Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen's remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. "Bin Laden was never within our grasp." Berntsen says Franks is "a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was."
In his book—titled "Jawbreaker"—the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon's own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora, says Berntsen's lawyer, Roy Krieger. (Berntsen would not divulge the book's specifics, saying he's awaiting CIA clearance.) That backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a "strategic disaster" because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members. Maj. Todd Vician, a Defense Department spokesman, says the problem at Tora Bora "was not necessarily just the number of troops."...
Now that's a Combine.
I have been reading pages and pages about the DNC and the DLC and I want to tell you why I am so opposed to the direction the DLC has taken the Party in the last 20 years.
I have been advocating, writing letters, talking locally within the Democratic Party for 25 frickin' years now. To no avail.
My message is simple: talk about workers' rights. Unionizing, outsourcing (especially outsourcing!), management cheating (we have ALL been cheated out of portions of our wages by innumerable statistical tricks). SPEAK OF THEM and blue-collar men go absolutely NUTS with recognition of the problems! Followed 5 minutes later with the most intense hunger to do something about it all that you have ever witnessed.
I speak of them to my blue-collar friends all the time! All. By. Myself.
Millions of white, male blue-collar workers go around in right-wing talk radio induced ignorance. Each and every one of them thinks that the problems they have with their employer is unique, puzzling and sure to get better after a change of management ...or something.
What I do: I simply point up how these "puzzling anomalies" are actually well-known and ancient un-fair labor practices. With NAMES!
Speed-ups. Wage stagnation policies. Two-tiered wage systems. Worker isolation. These are some of the names of the classic Unfair Labor Practices that my friends experience everyday. But they don't even know that there are such things as Unfair Labor Practices!
I'd say what's going on with the blue collar worker ought to be opening the eyes of the DNC.
Howard Dean likely sees it, but the bitter fact is the American worker has been sold down the river by the organized crime syndicates running the Unions.
Digby had a nice piece on the Illinois Combine of corrupt Democrat and Republican government that Patrick Fitzgerald's been taking down in his spare time, but the DINOcrat-Wrepublican Combine may prove a tougher nut to crack, especially now Fitzgerald's new boss is in Bu$hCo's pocket.
The departure this week of Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who has accepted the post of general counsel at Lockheed Martin, leaves a question mark in the probe into who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Comey was the only official overseeing special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation. With Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recused, department officials say they are still trying to resolve whom Fitzgerald will now report to. Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum is "likely" to be named as acting deputy A.G., a DOJ official who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter tells NEWSWEEK. But McCallum may be seen as having his own conflicts: he is an old friend of President Bush's and a member of his Skull and Bones class at Yale.
That's supposed to be in press by the 15th. Let's hope it makes it out. Often such news is amended before it hits the presses.
Bu$hCo is an organized criminal syndicate if there ever was one- and it's in organized crime's and Bu$hCo's best interest to keep the American worker ignorant and in harness.
In another story in the same issue, we see more ex-Agency people saying what John Kerry made public in 2004: the DINOcrat-Wrepublican combine extends all the way to Saudi Arabia, and even to Afghanistan, where they let Osama take an airlift out of Tora Bora.
...in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. "He was there," Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen's remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. "Bin Laden was never within our grasp." Berntsen says Franks is "a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was."
In his book—titled "Jawbreaker"—the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon's own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora, says Berntsen's lawyer, Roy Krieger. (Berntsen would not divulge the book's specifics, saying he's awaiting CIA clearance.) That backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a "strategic disaster" because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members. Maj. Todd Vician, a Defense Department spokesman, says the problem at Tora Bora "was not necessarily just the number of troops."...
Now that's a Combine.
Sunday, August 07, 2005
"What Is It Good For?"
...So the anniversary of the use of the atomic bomb against human beings is being noted this weekend, and as it inevitably will, the discussion has arisen as to whether it was justified. The usual arguments are made for it: that a million servicemen's lives were saved, that Japan would have never surrendered otherwise, that an example had to be made to ensure their will was broken and they never became a threat again, that Truman warned them and they wouldn't listen. That something good came out of it after all. That like the war itself, it was a moral action justified in the cause of eradicating evil. That it was a lesser evil chosen for a greater good.
My head, much like Hiroshima, wants to explode.
There are plenty of sites on the internet and at the library where you can immerse yourself in the facts and fantasies that surrounded the event, and although I believe the bombings were the greatest atrocities my nation ever committed (and I do not believe they saved my father's life), I'm more interested in the idea of a "moral" war. Chris Hedges, in his wonderful book, Losing Moses on the Freeway, calls on his many years as a war reporter, and interview with a Vietnam vet who went on to become a Bishop in the Episcopal church, to answer those who posit the existence of a moral war. After recounting incidents from the war in which the bishop committed acts he would have never thought himself capable, Hedges says this:
"Bishop Packard discovered in the war the capacity we all have for evil. He discovered the darkness that allows us, when the restraints are cut, to commit acts of brutality against the weak and the defenseless, including children. He discovered the ghoulish delight soldiers can take in killing...
"Wars come wrapped in patriotic slogans, call for self-sacrifice and glory. They come wrapped in the claims of divine providence... It is what is right and just. War is always waged...to make the nation and the world a better place, to cleanse evil...
But up close war is a soulless void. War quickly descends to raw barbarity, perversion, pain and an unchecked orgy of death. It is a state where human decency and tenderness are crushed, where those who make war work overtime to destroy love, where all human beings become objects to use or kill. The noise, the stench, the fear, the eviscerated bodies and bloated corpses, the crying wounded spin us into another universe. In this moral void, blessed by institutions at home, the hypocrisy of our social conventions are laid bare. We call for strict adherence to some commandments and laud the purposeful violation of others. Hypocrisy rules. War, for all its horror, has the power to strip away the trivial and the banal, the empty chatter and foolish obsessions. It lets us see."...
Read all of Riggsveda's excellent post.
It turns out the Secretary of State Byrnes and Harry Truman, as well as Stalin, blocked the early surrender Japan. For different reasons, of course.
At the time, many thought the atomic bombing of Japan unneccessary. Like whom?
~~~DWIGHT EISENHOWER
"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."
- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380
In a Newsweek interview, Eisenhower again recalled the meeting with Stimson:
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
- Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63
Ike also warned us all about the Military-Industrial Complex that so many in his- and every American government since- loved so much.
What Is It Good For?
Absolutely Nothing.
My head, much like Hiroshima, wants to explode.
There are plenty of sites on the internet and at the library where you can immerse yourself in the facts and fantasies that surrounded the event, and although I believe the bombings were the greatest atrocities my nation ever committed (and I do not believe they saved my father's life), I'm more interested in the idea of a "moral" war. Chris Hedges, in his wonderful book, Losing Moses on the Freeway, calls on his many years as a war reporter, and interview with a Vietnam vet who went on to become a Bishop in the Episcopal church, to answer those who posit the existence of a moral war. After recounting incidents from the war in which the bishop committed acts he would have never thought himself capable, Hedges says this:
"Bishop Packard discovered in the war the capacity we all have for evil. He discovered the darkness that allows us, when the restraints are cut, to commit acts of brutality against the weak and the defenseless, including children. He discovered the ghoulish delight soldiers can take in killing...
"Wars come wrapped in patriotic slogans, call for self-sacrifice and glory. They come wrapped in the claims of divine providence... It is what is right and just. War is always waged...to make the nation and the world a better place, to cleanse evil...
But up close war is a soulless void. War quickly descends to raw barbarity, perversion, pain and an unchecked orgy of death. It is a state where human decency and tenderness are crushed, where those who make war work overtime to destroy love, where all human beings become objects to use or kill. The noise, the stench, the fear, the eviscerated bodies and bloated corpses, the crying wounded spin us into another universe. In this moral void, blessed by institutions at home, the hypocrisy of our social conventions are laid bare. We call for strict adherence to some commandments and laud the purposeful violation of others. Hypocrisy rules. War, for all its horror, has the power to strip away the trivial and the banal, the empty chatter and foolish obsessions. It lets us see."...
Read all of Riggsveda's excellent post.
It turns out the Secretary of State Byrnes and Harry Truman, as well as Stalin, blocked the early surrender Japan. For different reasons, of course.
At the time, many thought the atomic bombing of Japan unneccessary. Like whom?
~~~DWIGHT EISENHOWER
"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."
- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380
In a Newsweek interview, Eisenhower again recalled the meeting with Stimson:
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
- Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63
Ike also warned us all about the Military-Industrial Complex that so many in his- and every American government since- loved so much.
What Is It Good For?
Absolutely Nothing.
Saturday, August 06, 2005
The Age of Resource Wars, and Those Who Want Them
Truthout points to an article by Michael T. Clare nested in excellent commentary by Tom Englehardt:
The Chevron ad began: "It took us 125 years to use the first trillion barrels of oil. We'll use the next trillion in 30. Energy will be one of the defining issues of this century. One thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over..."
I rubbed my eyes and read on:
"What we all do next will determine how well we meet the energy needs of the entire world in this century and beyond. Demand is soaring like never before. As populations grow and economies take off, millions in the developing world are enjoying the benefits of a lifestyle that requires increasing amounts of energy. In fact, some say that in 20 years the world will consume 40% more oil than it does today. At the same time, many of the world's oil and gas fields are maturing. And new energy discoveries are mainly occurring in places where resources are difficult to extract, physically, economically and even politically. When growing demand meets tighter supplies, the result is more competition for the same resources.
"We can wait until a crisis forces us to do something. Or we can commit to working together, and start by asking the tough questions: How do we meet the energy needs of the developing world and those of industrialized nations? What role will renewables and alternative energies play? What is the best way to protect our environment? How do we accelerate our conservation efforts?..."
I rubbed my eyes again. Most of this ad, part of a new campaign by an oil major, might easily have been taken more or less word for word from any of the pieces Michael Klare -- author of the indispensable Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum -- has been writing for Tomdispatch over these many months. When Klare writes such passages and they prove accurate somewhere down the line, they can perhaps be called "prescient." When the Chevron ad people do the same, what you have is something like a confession reflecting a seismic shift in mainstream consciousness -- and we have to take our seismic shifts where we find them. After all this time, it seems that "peak oil" may suddenly be on some part of Big Oil's agenda, which tells you something about the cul-de-sac into which we've blithely managed to drive our SUVs.
Just to add a little footnote of my own: During last year's fierce hurricane season, after catching endless TV and newspaper coverage of the destruction, and finding hardly a passing mention of the possibility of a link between the weather of that moment (commonly referred to as "bizarre" or "strange") and global warming, I wondered aloud whether our media (like our President) wasn't living in something of a bubble world ( Xtreme weather meets Xtreme media bubble ). Numerous journalists promptly wrote in angrily to suggest that I was off the wall; that, scientifically speaking, such a linkage was not even worthy of being raised in a respectable newspaper.
This year, with the first hurricanes arriving earlier, fiercer, and in record numbers, and hurricane prediction numbers for the rest of the season soaring, the TV news finds itself more regularly switching from scenes of destruction in the south to unnaturally melting vistas in the north, and its reporters regularly wondering on air about global warming tie-ins. And when, in a study which first appeared in the British science magazine Nature, Kerry Emanuel, an MIT ocean climatologist, suggested that the rise in hurricane intensity might indeed be linked to global warming, the news was not relegated to science journals, anxious insurance company publications, or on-line environmental websites. It could be found in USA Today ("Hurricanes have grown fiercer in recent decades, spurred by global warming, and even tougher storms are likely on the way, a researcher predicts...") and a wide range of other major publications. This too represents at least a modestly seismic shift worth noting...
Tom goes on to reproduce Klare's article, parts of which are posted here:
...The concept of a "twilight" of petroleum derives from what is known about the global supply and demand equation. Energy experts have long acknowledged that the global production of oil will someday reach a moment of maximum (or "peak") daily output, followed by an increasingly sharp drop in supply. But while the basic concept of peak oil has gained substantial worldwide acceptance, there is still much confusion about its actual character. Many people who express familiarity with the concept tend to view peak oil as a sharp pinnacle, with global output rising to the summit one month and dropping sharply the next; and looking back from a hundred years hence, things might actually appear this way. But for those of us embedded in this moment of time, peak oil will be experienced as something more like a rocky plateau -- an extended period of time, perhaps several decades in length, during which global oil production will remain at or near current levels but will fail to achieve the elevated output deemed necessary to satisfy future world demand. The result will be perennially high prices, intense international competition for available supplies, and periodic shortages caused by political and social unrest in the producing countries...
This new era will not begin with a single, clearly defined incident, but rather with a series of events suggesting the transition from a period of relative abundance to a time of persistent scarcity. These events will take both economic and political form: on the one hand, rising energy prices and contracting supplies; on the other, more diplomatic crises and military assertiveness...
"We've entered a new era of oil prices," said energy expert Daniel Yergin in an April interview with Time Magazine. If markets remain as tight as they are at present, "you'll see a lot more volatility, and you could see prices spike up as high as $65 to $80."
Analysts at Goldman Sachs are even more pessimistic, suggesting that oil could reach as high as $105 a barrel in the near future...
...On July 8, Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman told reporters from the Christian Science Monitor that the era of cheap and abundant petroleum may now be over. "For the first time in my lifetime," he declared, major oil suppliers like Saudi Arabia "are right at their ragged edge" in their ability to satisfy rising world demand for energy...
...Eventually, of course, global oil production will not merely be stagnant, as during the Twilight Era, but will begin a gradual, irreversible decline, leading to the end of the Petroleum Age altogether. Just how difficult and dangerous the Twilight Era proves to be, and just how quickly it will come to an end, will depend on one key factor: How quickly we move to reduce our reliance on petroleum as a major source of our energy and begin the transition to alternative fuels. This transition cannot be avoided. It will come whether we are prepared for it or not. The only way we can avert its most painful features is by moving swiftly to lay the foundations for a post-petroleum economy.
It's worthwhile reading the whole thing.
On another front, there are those having a Big Time surfing the downside of the oil supply curve:
President Bush might not have turned up personally in Riyadh yesterday but he certainly sent a high-powered delegation to pay his respects to the new leader of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah.
The American turnout, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, former President George H. W. Bush, and former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, was the latest signal that relations between the two countries have thawed since the strains of 9/11...
The warmer relations between Saudi Arabia and the United States were on display last April, when Crown Prince Abdullah - who succeeded his half brother, Fahd, on Monday as king - visited President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Tex. As a sign of public diplomacy, and personal bonds, they kissed on the cheek and held hands.
Yesterday represented a kind of reunion for the Americans who led the first gulf war in 1991. The United States delegation met with King Abdullah at the monarch's farm near Riyadh. In any event, the group remained in the country less than four hours.
"As the world's largest producer and as the world's largest consumer, our two countries have a special relationship," Samuel W. Bodman, the secretary of energy, said earlier this year after meeting in Washington with his Saudi counterpart, Ali al-Naimi. "We are, at least in certain respects, partners."
Even the contentious issue of high oil prices has been smoothly swept under the rug. Over the last two years, crude oil prices have more than doubled, and closed yesterday at a record $62.31, up 1.5 percent on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
The administration has acknowledged that Saudi Arabia has been doing all it can to step up production, and the current spike was fed by higher demand, not curbs from suppliers.
"The Saudis aren't feeling any pressure from the high prices," said Thomas W. Lippman, a scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington. "People are waving money at them for something they are going to produce anyway. So why not take it?"
An Ownership Society, indeed.
And now that we've done the dirty work and eliminated Saudi Arabia's main competitor in Iraq- not to mention a nation full of godless seculars- I'm sure King Abdullah, Poppy, and Big Time Dick had some strategery to go over while Junior's sipping whiskey sours in Crawford.
Who to take out next? The godless Syrians, or the Shiite competitors to the Wahhabis for the Mantle of Islamic Righteousness? We all know what Big Time wants: whoever has the most oil to plunder, and that would be Iran.
The Chevron ad began: "It took us 125 years to use the first trillion barrels of oil. We'll use the next trillion in 30. Energy will be one of the defining issues of this century. One thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over..."
I rubbed my eyes and read on:
"What we all do next will determine how well we meet the energy needs of the entire world in this century and beyond. Demand is soaring like never before. As populations grow and economies take off, millions in the developing world are enjoying the benefits of a lifestyle that requires increasing amounts of energy. In fact, some say that in 20 years the world will consume 40% more oil than it does today. At the same time, many of the world's oil and gas fields are maturing. And new energy discoveries are mainly occurring in places where resources are difficult to extract, physically, economically and even politically. When growing demand meets tighter supplies, the result is more competition for the same resources.
"We can wait until a crisis forces us to do something. Or we can commit to working together, and start by asking the tough questions: How do we meet the energy needs of the developing world and those of industrialized nations? What role will renewables and alternative energies play? What is the best way to protect our environment? How do we accelerate our conservation efforts?..."
I rubbed my eyes again. Most of this ad, part of a new campaign by an oil major, might easily have been taken more or less word for word from any of the pieces Michael Klare -- author of the indispensable Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum -- has been writing for Tomdispatch over these many months. When Klare writes such passages and they prove accurate somewhere down the line, they can perhaps be called "prescient." When the Chevron ad people do the same, what you have is something like a confession reflecting a seismic shift in mainstream consciousness -- and we have to take our seismic shifts where we find them. After all this time, it seems that "peak oil" may suddenly be on some part of Big Oil's agenda, which tells you something about the cul-de-sac into which we've blithely managed to drive our SUVs.
Just to add a little footnote of my own: During last year's fierce hurricane season, after catching endless TV and newspaper coverage of the destruction, and finding hardly a passing mention of the possibility of a link between the weather of that moment (commonly referred to as "bizarre" or "strange") and global warming, I wondered aloud whether our media (like our President) wasn't living in something of a bubble world ( Xtreme weather meets Xtreme media bubble ). Numerous journalists promptly wrote in angrily to suggest that I was off the wall; that, scientifically speaking, such a linkage was not even worthy of being raised in a respectable newspaper.
This year, with the first hurricanes arriving earlier, fiercer, and in record numbers, and hurricane prediction numbers for the rest of the season soaring, the TV news finds itself more regularly switching from scenes of destruction in the south to unnaturally melting vistas in the north, and its reporters regularly wondering on air about global warming tie-ins. And when, in a study which first appeared in the British science magazine Nature, Kerry Emanuel, an MIT ocean climatologist, suggested that the rise in hurricane intensity might indeed be linked to global warming, the news was not relegated to science journals, anxious insurance company publications, or on-line environmental websites. It could be found in USA Today ("Hurricanes have grown fiercer in recent decades, spurred by global warming, and even tougher storms are likely on the way, a researcher predicts...") and a wide range of other major publications. This too represents at least a modestly seismic shift worth noting...
Tom goes on to reproduce Klare's article, parts of which are posted here:
...The concept of a "twilight" of petroleum derives from what is known about the global supply and demand equation. Energy experts have long acknowledged that the global production of oil will someday reach a moment of maximum (or "peak") daily output, followed by an increasingly sharp drop in supply. But while the basic concept of peak oil has gained substantial worldwide acceptance, there is still much confusion about its actual character. Many people who express familiarity with the concept tend to view peak oil as a sharp pinnacle, with global output rising to the summit one month and dropping sharply the next; and looking back from a hundred years hence, things might actually appear this way. But for those of us embedded in this moment of time, peak oil will be experienced as something more like a rocky plateau -- an extended period of time, perhaps several decades in length, during which global oil production will remain at or near current levels but will fail to achieve the elevated output deemed necessary to satisfy future world demand. The result will be perennially high prices, intense international competition for available supplies, and periodic shortages caused by political and social unrest in the producing countries...
This new era will not begin with a single, clearly defined incident, but rather with a series of events suggesting the transition from a period of relative abundance to a time of persistent scarcity. These events will take both economic and political form: on the one hand, rising energy prices and contracting supplies; on the other, more diplomatic crises and military assertiveness...
"We've entered a new era of oil prices," said energy expert Daniel Yergin in an April interview with Time Magazine. If markets remain as tight as they are at present, "you'll see a lot more volatility, and you could see prices spike up as high as $65 to $80."
Analysts at Goldman Sachs are even more pessimistic, suggesting that oil could reach as high as $105 a barrel in the near future...
...On July 8, Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman told reporters from the Christian Science Monitor that the era of cheap and abundant petroleum may now be over. "For the first time in my lifetime," he declared, major oil suppliers like Saudi Arabia "are right at their ragged edge" in their ability to satisfy rising world demand for energy...
...Eventually, of course, global oil production will not merely be stagnant, as during the Twilight Era, but will begin a gradual, irreversible decline, leading to the end of the Petroleum Age altogether. Just how difficult and dangerous the Twilight Era proves to be, and just how quickly it will come to an end, will depend on one key factor: How quickly we move to reduce our reliance on petroleum as a major source of our energy and begin the transition to alternative fuels. This transition cannot be avoided. It will come whether we are prepared for it or not. The only way we can avert its most painful features is by moving swiftly to lay the foundations for a post-petroleum economy.
It's worthwhile reading the whole thing.
On another front, there are those having a Big Time surfing the downside of the oil supply curve:
President Bush might not have turned up personally in Riyadh yesterday but he certainly sent a high-powered delegation to pay his respects to the new leader of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah.
The American turnout, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, former President George H. W. Bush, and former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, was the latest signal that relations between the two countries have thawed since the strains of 9/11...
The warmer relations between Saudi Arabia and the United States were on display last April, when Crown Prince Abdullah - who succeeded his half brother, Fahd, on Monday as king - visited President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Tex. As a sign of public diplomacy, and personal bonds, they kissed on the cheek and held hands.
Yesterday represented a kind of reunion for the Americans who led the first gulf war in 1991. The United States delegation met with King Abdullah at the monarch's farm near Riyadh. In any event, the group remained in the country less than four hours.
"As the world's largest producer and as the world's largest consumer, our two countries have a special relationship," Samuel W. Bodman, the secretary of energy, said earlier this year after meeting in Washington with his Saudi counterpart, Ali al-Naimi. "We are, at least in certain respects, partners."
Even the contentious issue of high oil prices has been smoothly swept under the rug. Over the last two years, crude oil prices have more than doubled, and closed yesterday at a record $62.31, up 1.5 percent on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
The administration has acknowledged that Saudi Arabia has been doing all it can to step up production, and the current spike was fed by higher demand, not curbs from suppliers.
"The Saudis aren't feeling any pressure from the high prices," said Thomas W. Lippman, a scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington. "People are waving money at them for something they are going to produce anyway. So why not take it?"
An Ownership Society, indeed.
And now that we've done the dirty work and eliminated Saudi Arabia's main competitor in Iraq- not to mention a nation full of godless seculars- I'm sure King Abdullah, Poppy, and Big Time Dick had some strategery to go over while Junior's sipping whiskey sours in Crawford.
Who to take out next? The godless Syrians, or the Shiite competitors to the Wahhabis for the Mantle of Islamic Righteousness? We all know what Big Time wants: whoever has the most oil to plunder, and that would be Iran.
Where Daddy WarBuck$ Spends Your Money
With thanks and a tip o' the tinfoil hat to granny:
In the latest of a string of buyouts of capital markets technology providers and processors, SS&C Technologies is selling itself for $941 million to Sunshine Acquisition Corp., an affiliate of private equity powerhouse Carlyle Group...
SS&C sells its software, which ranges from order management to portfolio accounting, to insurance companies, banks and other commercial lenders, hedge funds, asset managers and pension funds. The company has been especially focused on the fast-growing hedge fund sector.
"Financial Interactive's FundRunner product provides the hedge fund market with a powerful relationship management system and fund-profiling infrastructure," said William Stone, SS&C's CEO, referring to an SS&C subsidiary in a conference call late last week.
"We get to see an awful lot of things as far as the reporting requirements for master feeder funds and incentive fee calculations and different partnership processes," added Stone. "We are one of the only firms that do both aggregation and layering. Most of our competitors state that they only want to do aggregation, but generally it's because it's easier and they don't have the software to process it."
Stone, who started SS&C in 1986, has engineered a series of acquisitions, the largest of which was a $159 million March purchase of Canadian software firm Financial Models Co. Two months later, SS&C announced a deal to buy Financial Interactive for about $13 million. In February of this year, SS&C bought the membership interests in Eisnerfast, which offers back-office accounting and administration services to hedge funds and private equity funds. Financial Models, in turn, brought a complementary client base in traditional equity funds.
SS&C also has built a substantial presence in the derivatives arena with Debt & Derivatives, a product it inherited with the acquisition of the Savid Group in April 1998, and TradeThru, which it acquired in the takeover of OMR Systems last year...
What are the Carlyle Kids doing with the hundreds of billions they're making on Bu$hCo's War on Terra?
Why, betting on the market with it, of course, and trying to develop better software to make their betting better.
What other way to make large sums of money disappear from view?
In the latest of a string of buyouts of capital markets technology providers and processors, SS&C Technologies is selling itself for $941 million to Sunshine Acquisition Corp., an affiliate of private equity powerhouse Carlyle Group...
SS&C sells its software, which ranges from order management to portfolio accounting, to insurance companies, banks and other commercial lenders, hedge funds, asset managers and pension funds. The company has been especially focused on the fast-growing hedge fund sector.
"Financial Interactive's FundRunner product provides the hedge fund market with a powerful relationship management system and fund-profiling infrastructure," said William Stone, SS&C's CEO, referring to an SS&C subsidiary in a conference call late last week.
"We get to see an awful lot of things as far as the reporting requirements for master feeder funds and incentive fee calculations and different partnership processes," added Stone. "We are one of the only firms that do both aggregation and layering. Most of our competitors state that they only want to do aggregation, but generally it's because it's easier and they don't have the software to process it."
Stone, who started SS&C in 1986, has engineered a series of acquisitions, the largest of which was a $159 million March purchase of Canadian software firm Financial Models Co. Two months later, SS&C announced a deal to buy Financial Interactive for about $13 million. In February of this year, SS&C bought the membership interests in Eisnerfast, which offers back-office accounting and administration services to hedge funds and private equity funds. Financial Models, in turn, brought a complementary client base in traditional equity funds.
SS&C also has built a substantial presence in the derivatives arena with Debt & Derivatives, a product it inherited with the acquisition of the Savid Group in April 1998, and TradeThru, which it acquired in the takeover of OMR Systems last year...
What are the Carlyle Kids doing with the hundreds of billions they're making on Bu$hCo's War on Terra?
Why, betting on the market with it, of course, and trying to develop better software to make their betting better.
What other way to make large sums of money disappear from view?
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Bu$hCo Looks for Another Blank Check
According to Ray McGovern :
Whatever plans Dick Cheney and his neo-conservatives may have had to conjure up a nuclear threat from Iran as "justification" for military action have been sharply undercut by some timely leaks to the Washington Post. In a redux of President George W. Bush's spin on the "grave and growing" danger from Iraq, Cheney protégé and newly appointed U.N. Ambassador John Bolton is on record warning that Iranian "deception" must not be allowed to continue much longer: "It will be too late. Iran will have nuclear weapons."
Not for ten more years, report sources close to the U.S. intelligence community in yesterday's lead story in the Post. Several government officials with access to the most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran have told journalist Dafna Linzer of its main judgments. By doing so, Linzer's sources seem determined not to sit idly by as our country is misled once again into a war favored only by "neo-conservatives" in Washington and their counterparts in the far-right Likud government in Israel who share a vision of remaking the map of the Middle East.
Linzer has shown commendable tenacity on Iran and the nuclear issue-tenacity highly unusual by today's lax media standards. According to Linzer's sources, the National Intelligence Estimate states that, while there are credible signs that the Iranian military is doing some clandestine work, there is no information to connect that work directly to a nuclear weapons program. Moreover, U.N. inspectors have found no convincing proof that Iran is conducting a nuclear weapons program or that it has a nuclear warhead design.
The NIE concludes that Iran will not be able to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon until "early to mid-next decade," with general consensus among intelligence analysts that 2015 would actually be the earliest...
The exposure of these intelligence judgments is extremely well timed. It comes amid rumors that Vice President Cheney's office has ordered up contingency plans for a large-scale air assault on Iran using not only conventional weapons but also tactical nuclear weapons to take out hardened underground nuclear facilities. The action would be framed as a response to a terrorist act-whether sponsored by Iran or not-on the United States. According to former CIA operative Philip Giraldi, senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are appalled that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked attack but, sadly, no one wants to jeopardize a career by posing objections... ( Thanks to Truthout for the link. )
It's nice to see despite the best efforts of Goss that not everyone in the Agency belongs to the Company. They're playing Spy vs. Spy in Washington. The problem is we have met the enemy, and he is us.
You might ask what would be the point of risking your career by posing objections. If you did, you'd be out on your ass in a moment. No, I commend the Agency people and the real American soldiers at the D. o'D. who keep their lips buttoned in front of the Company people, but do their best to try to inform the main$tream media who will listen (and the progressive blogsphere) about what treasonous nonsense Cheneyburton and Bu$hCo are planning.
Still, the harder it is for Big Time Dick to sell his shiny new War in Iran, the closer we are to a major terrorist event here at home.
If someone lights a nuke on American soil, look for a mushroom cloud over Tehran, and Company men taking Iranian oilfields.
No matter who actually does it.
But does it matter who does it? We know precisely who profits from it. The real question is how far does the secret war between the Agency and the Company have to go before things get really out of hand.
Whatever plans Dick Cheney and his neo-conservatives may have had to conjure up a nuclear threat from Iran as "justification" for military action have been sharply undercut by some timely leaks to the Washington Post. In a redux of President George W. Bush's spin on the "grave and growing" danger from Iraq, Cheney protégé and newly appointed U.N. Ambassador John Bolton is on record warning that Iranian "deception" must not be allowed to continue much longer: "It will be too late. Iran will have nuclear weapons."
Not for ten more years, report sources close to the U.S. intelligence community in yesterday's lead story in the Post. Several government officials with access to the most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran have told journalist Dafna Linzer of its main judgments. By doing so, Linzer's sources seem determined not to sit idly by as our country is misled once again into a war favored only by "neo-conservatives" in Washington and their counterparts in the far-right Likud government in Israel who share a vision of remaking the map of the Middle East.
Linzer has shown commendable tenacity on Iran and the nuclear issue-tenacity highly unusual by today's lax media standards. According to Linzer's sources, the National Intelligence Estimate states that, while there are credible signs that the Iranian military is doing some clandestine work, there is no information to connect that work directly to a nuclear weapons program. Moreover, U.N. inspectors have found no convincing proof that Iran is conducting a nuclear weapons program or that it has a nuclear warhead design.
The NIE concludes that Iran will not be able to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon until "early to mid-next decade," with general consensus among intelligence analysts that 2015 would actually be the earliest...
The exposure of these intelligence judgments is extremely well timed. It comes amid rumors that Vice President Cheney's office has ordered up contingency plans for a large-scale air assault on Iran using not only conventional weapons but also tactical nuclear weapons to take out hardened underground nuclear facilities. The action would be framed as a response to a terrorist act-whether sponsored by Iran or not-on the United States. According to former CIA operative Philip Giraldi, senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are appalled that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked attack but, sadly, no one wants to jeopardize a career by posing objections... ( Thanks to Truthout for the link. )
It's nice to see despite the best efforts of Goss that not everyone in the Agency belongs to the Company. They're playing Spy vs. Spy in Washington. The problem is we have met the enemy, and he is us.
You might ask what would be the point of risking your career by posing objections. If you did, you'd be out on your ass in a moment. No, I commend the Agency people and the real American soldiers at the D. o'D. who keep their lips buttoned in front of the Company people, but do their best to try to inform the main$tream media who will listen (and the progressive blogsphere) about what treasonous nonsense Cheneyburton and Bu$hCo are planning.
Still, the harder it is for Big Time Dick to sell his shiny new War in Iran, the closer we are to a major terrorist event here at home.
If someone lights a nuke on American soil, look for a mushroom cloud over Tehran, and Company men taking Iranian oilfields.
No matter who actually does it.
But does it matter who does it? We know precisely who profits from it. The real question is how far does the secret war between the Agency and the Company have to go before things get really out of hand.
A Future So Bright, Ya Gotta Wear Pork Barrel Shades
Billmon points to this example of our government making your tax dollars work for them.
And providing future employment for the D.o'D. as well. From the Washington Post:
A provision tucked into the 1,724-page energy bill that Congress is poised to enact today would ease export restrictions on bomb-grade uranium, a lucrative victory for a Canadian medical manufacturer and its well-wired Washington lobbyists.
The Burr Amendment -- named for its sponsor, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) -- would reverse a 13-year-old U.S. policy banning exports of weapons-grade uranium unless the recipients agree to start converting their reactors to use less-dangerous uranium. The Senate rejected the measure last month after critics in both parties warned that it would accelerate the worldwide proliferation of nuclear materials, but a House-Senate conference committee agreed this week to include it in the final bill.
The amendment is just one of dozens of obscure special-interest provisions included in the energy bill, which the House passed yesterday and the Senate is expected to pass today. The amendment's supporters say it will ensure a steady supply of medical isotopes, which are used to diagnose and treat 14 million Americans every year, including patients afflicted with cancer, heart disease and epilepsy. But it will also be a boon to the world's leading producer of those isotopes, an Ottawa-based company called MDS Nordion, which would otherwise have to spend millions of dollars to retrofit its reactor for low-grade uranium.
Critics say the Burr Amendment will not only provide special perks for one foreign company but also encourage the proliferation that politicians in both parties have identified as a dire threat to national security in the post-Sept. 11 world...
Since 2003, the Alpine Group's main energy lobbyists -- James D. Massie, Richard C. White and Rhod Shaw -- have contributed more than $25,000 to members of the energy committees, and nuclear medicine trade groups have donated tens of thousands more. They have also drummed up support from doctors; the computer signature on one letter to a senator, purportedly written by a radiologist, was actually White's...
Billmon goes on to say:
...I learned that weapons-grade uranium is the nuclear feedstock, so to speak, for a number of medical isotopes.
I learned that the companies that make those isotopes operate their own private reactors, using uranium purchased from the U.S. government.
And I learned that those reactors are not, repeat not, subject to the same security restrictions as government-owned megadeath factories:
"By contrast, Nordion already has enough highly enriched uranium to make one or two Hiroshima-size bombs, and its factories do not have to meet the same security standards as Energy Department facilities."
Nordion is the Canadian company that purchased the export loophole in the energy bill -- which, under the circumstances, we might reasonably call the "Arm Osama Amendment."...
I realize unbridled corruption in the U.S. Senate is one of those 19th century values the Republicans are determined to restore to our great nation -- no matter what the cost. But even I'm finding it incredible that they could really go this far: auctioning the right to buy weapons-grade uranium from the U.S. government off to the highest bidder. Instead of trying to get the nuclear genie back in his bottle, they want to give him his own PAC.
This really is getting into the hazy area between corruption and treason. To borrow the apocryphal Lenin quotation, Sen. Barr and his colleagues are practically selling Al Qaeda the rope with which to hang us. Or at least making it easier for someone else to do the selling.
It only reinforces something I've suspected for awhile: If Bin Ladin really wanted to destroy America, he'd forget about the terrorist cells and the hijackings and just hire himself an extremely well-connected Washington lobbying firm. If he was willing to spread enough cash around Capitol Hill, I bet he could have us nuking ourselves, Milo Minderbinder style...
Good point, that. But the Saudi Royals know that as much as they detest us, they love the money they can make off of us even more. Besides, they've had lobbyists and continue to lobby.
if the Saudi and Carlyle connections to father and son Bush don’t raise alarms, then the whole history of the Bush Administration’s dealings with the Taliban should. The primary focus of these dealings was the renewal of a planned pipeline from the natural gas rich fields of Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to other Asian markets. Behind this whole operation was the Unocal company. Among the advisors to Unocal was Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American academic, who in addition to being an advisor to Unocal in the 1990’s was also part of the foreign policy think-tanks that included Frank Carlucci. Khalilzad joined the Taliban’s lobbyist, Laila Helms (a relative of former CIA director, Richard Helms) in direct talks between representatives of the Taliban and the Bush Administration right up through July of 2001. When the Taliban broke off the talks, refusing the pipeline offers, the Bush Administration made known its efforts to strike back at the Taliban as early as August of 2001.
Ostensibly attacking the Taliban for its refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden, the Bush Administration refused any alternatives to the military option. During the whole military operation, the Pentagon has tried to establish security points that reflect the route of the proposed pipeline. Moreover, Harmid Karzai, the hand-picked US leader of Afghanistan, was, at one time, also a consultant for Unocal. Along with Khalilzad, who now is the US representative to Afghanistan’s interim government, Karzai is effectuating plans for the pipeline...
...In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 a number of news stories appeared concerning investments in “put” options in United and American Airlines. Put options are shares that are bets on falling market prices for specific stocks. In the week before September 11 put options in United and American Airlines went through a furious and unprecedented spasm of investment. In addition put options for Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, two of the biggest occupants of the World Trade Center, also saw abnormal activity. Most of the investments in these put options originated in Germany through the Deutsche Bank. Deutshce Bank had earlier acquired Banker’s Trust, a investment banking firm whose Vice Chairman in charge of “private client relations” in the late 1990’s was A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard. In March of 2001, Krongard was appointed Executive Director of the CIA.
Certainly, the CIA has a history of laundering money and dealings with shady investment characters. What becomes particularly relevant in the lead-up to 9/11 is the August CIA briefing of Bush concerning the potential threat of attacks by bin Laden using hijacked planes on certain sites, such as the Pentagon and World Trade Center, and the fact that the CIA had bugging equipment on bin Laden messages and international banking operations. Although no one has apparently claimed the money from the put options, questions remain about Krongard and the CIA’s involvement...
Now that's free enterprise.
And providing future employment for the D.o'D. as well. From the Washington Post:
A provision tucked into the 1,724-page energy bill that Congress is poised to enact today would ease export restrictions on bomb-grade uranium, a lucrative victory for a Canadian medical manufacturer and its well-wired Washington lobbyists.
The Burr Amendment -- named for its sponsor, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) -- would reverse a 13-year-old U.S. policy banning exports of weapons-grade uranium unless the recipients agree to start converting their reactors to use less-dangerous uranium. The Senate rejected the measure last month after critics in both parties warned that it would accelerate the worldwide proliferation of nuclear materials, but a House-Senate conference committee agreed this week to include it in the final bill.
The amendment is just one of dozens of obscure special-interest provisions included in the energy bill, which the House passed yesterday and the Senate is expected to pass today. The amendment's supporters say it will ensure a steady supply of medical isotopes, which are used to diagnose and treat 14 million Americans every year, including patients afflicted with cancer, heart disease and epilepsy. But it will also be a boon to the world's leading producer of those isotopes, an Ottawa-based company called MDS Nordion, which would otherwise have to spend millions of dollars to retrofit its reactor for low-grade uranium.
Critics say the Burr Amendment will not only provide special perks for one foreign company but also encourage the proliferation that politicians in both parties have identified as a dire threat to national security in the post-Sept. 11 world...
Since 2003, the Alpine Group's main energy lobbyists -- James D. Massie, Richard C. White and Rhod Shaw -- have contributed more than $25,000 to members of the energy committees, and nuclear medicine trade groups have donated tens of thousands more. They have also drummed up support from doctors; the computer signature on one letter to a senator, purportedly written by a radiologist, was actually White's...
Billmon goes on to say:
...I learned that weapons-grade uranium is the nuclear feedstock, so to speak, for a number of medical isotopes.
I learned that the companies that make those isotopes operate their own private reactors, using uranium purchased from the U.S. government.
And I learned that those reactors are not, repeat not, subject to the same security restrictions as government-owned megadeath factories:
"By contrast, Nordion already has enough highly enriched uranium to make one or two Hiroshima-size bombs, and its factories do not have to meet the same security standards as Energy Department facilities."
Nordion is the Canadian company that purchased the export loophole in the energy bill -- which, under the circumstances, we might reasonably call the "Arm Osama Amendment."...
I realize unbridled corruption in the U.S. Senate is one of those 19th century values the Republicans are determined to restore to our great nation -- no matter what the cost. But even I'm finding it incredible that they could really go this far: auctioning the right to buy weapons-grade uranium from the U.S. government off to the highest bidder. Instead of trying to get the nuclear genie back in his bottle, they want to give him his own PAC.
This really is getting into the hazy area between corruption and treason. To borrow the apocryphal Lenin quotation, Sen. Barr and his colleagues are practically selling Al Qaeda the rope with which to hang us. Or at least making it easier for someone else to do the selling.
It only reinforces something I've suspected for awhile: If Bin Ladin really wanted to destroy America, he'd forget about the terrorist cells and the hijackings and just hire himself an extremely well-connected Washington lobbying firm. If he was willing to spread enough cash around Capitol Hill, I bet he could have us nuking ourselves, Milo Minderbinder style...
Good point, that. But the Saudi Royals know that as much as they detest us, they love the money they can make off of us even more. Besides, they've had lobbyists and continue to lobby.
if the Saudi and Carlyle connections to father and son Bush don’t raise alarms, then the whole history of the Bush Administration’s dealings with the Taliban should. The primary focus of these dealings was the renewal of a planned pipeline from the natural gas rich fields of Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to other Asian markets. Behind this whole operation was the Unocal company. Among the advisors to Unocal was Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American academic, who in addition to being an advisor to Unocal in the 1990’s was also part of the foreign policy think-tanks that included Frank Carlucci. Khalilzad joined the Taliban’s lobbyist, Laila Helms (a relative of former CIA director, Richard Helms) in direct talks between representatives of the Taliban and the Bush Administration right up through July of 2001. When the Taliban broke off the talks, refusing the pipeline offers, the Bush Administration made known its efforts to strike back at the Taliban as early as August of 2001.
Ostensibly attacking the Taliban for its refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden, the Bush Administration refused any alternatives to the military option. During the whole military operation, the Pentagon has tried to establish security points that reflect the route of the proposed pipeline. Moreover, Harmid Karzai, the hand-picked US leader of Afghanistan, was, at one time, also a consultant for Unocal. Along with Khalilzad, who now is the US representative to Afghanistan’s interim government, Karzai is effectuating plans for the pipeline...
...In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 a number of news stories appeared concerning investments in “put” options in United and American Airlines. Put options are shares that are bets on falling market prices for specific stocks. In the week before September 11 put options in United and American Airlines went through a furious and unprecedented spasm of investment. In addition put options for Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, two of the biggest occupants of the World Trade Center, also saw abnormal activity. Most of the investments in these put options originated in Germany through the Deutsche Bank. Deutshce Bank had earlier acquired Banker’s Trust, a investment banking firm whose Vice Chairman in charge of “private client relations” in the late 1990’s was A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard. In March of 2001, Krongard was appointed Executive Director of the CIA.
Certainly, the CIA has a history of laundering money and dealings with shady investment characters. What becomes particularly relevant in the lead-up to 9/11 is the August CIA briefing of Bush concerning the potential threat of attacks by bin Laden using hijacked planes on certain sites, such as the Pentagon and World Trade Center, and the fact that the CIA had bugging equipment on bin Laden messages and international banking operations. Although no one has apparently claimed the money from the put options, questions remain about Krongard and the CIA’s involvement...
Now that's free enterprise.
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
$ecurity Risks: Ya Gotta Spend Money to Make Money
Federal authorities arrested 582 alleged gang members over a two-week period, officials said Monday, targeting an estimated 80 violent groups they say have spawned street crimes across the country.
Investigators picked up most of the offenders between July 16 and July 28 on immigration violations for being in the United States illegally. Seventy-six face criminal charges, ranging from illegal possession of a firearm to holding fraudulent documents.
"For too long, these gangs have gone unchecked _ flouting all laws and demonstrating a blatant disregard for public safety," Chertoff said in announcing the arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. ICE is an arm of the Homeland Security Department.
Investigators targeted members in 27 states of what they considered to be the most violent street gangs, including Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13; Sure Inos; the 18th Street Gang; Latin Kings; the Mexican Mafia; Border Brothers; Brown Pride and numerous others.
Many of the arrests came in large urban areas, including 61 in Boston, 28 in Denver, and 23 each in Los Angeles and Detroit. But even smaller cities have been infiltrated by the gangs, the arrests showed, including 42 in Birmingham, Ala., and one each in Grand Rapids, Mich.; Sioux Falls, S.D.; and North Platte, Neb...
More than half of them have been members of MS-13, a street gang rooted in Central America where members have been known to behead enemies and attack with grenades and machetes. Federal officials estimate between 8,000 and 10,000 MS-13 members live in 31 states _ the majority of them in the country illegally.
"We're just getting started," said ICE investigations chief Marcy Forman.
I'm sure.
There's a history here (in the multiverse everything has a history).
MS-13 members are the sons of immigrants from El Salvador and other Central American countries that were forced to flee because of the CIA instigated war during the Reagan Administration that completely destroyed the physical, economic, social, religious and cultural infrastructure of the region. MS-13 was founded in Los Angeles by the offspring of the immigrants for protection.
You can find items like this out there: Al-Qaida nukes already in U.S.
Terrorists, bombs smuggled across Mexico border by MS-13 gangsters.
The wingnuts are all a-twitter about suitcase nukes being smuggled across the border by MS-13. No links, because I have this thing about promoting hate and ignorance. You know how to find that if you want it.
There might be suitcase nukes in this country, but to my knowledge the smallest nukes Pakistan or North Korea can make are about the size of an SUV. If there are suitcase nukes- and according to the D.o'D. and international treaties we don't even have them- they've been produced by a massively funded black budget somewhere. Of course I can't imagine what country would be paranoid enough to produce such an evil thing.
Much less hand them to a terrorist organization that they, themselves, created as an excuse to have somebody to play their Game with.
Investigators picked up most of the offenders between July 16 and July 28 on immigration violations for being in the United States illegally. Seventy-six face criminal charges, ranging from illegal possession of a firearm to holding fraudulent documents.
"For too long, these gangs have gone unchecked _ flouting all laws and demonstrating a blatant disregard for public safety," Chertoff said in announcing the arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. ICE is an arm of the Homeland Security Department.
Investigators targeted members in 27 states of what they considered to be the most violent street gangs, including Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13; Sure Inos; the 18th Street Gang; Latin Kings; the Mexican Mafia; Border Brothers; Brown Pride and numerous others.
Many of the arrests came in large urban areas, including 61 in Boston, 28 in Denver, and 23 each in Los Angeles and Detroit. But even smaller cities have been infiltrated by the gangs, the arrests showed, including 42 in Birmingham, Ala., and one each in Grand Rapids, Mich.; Sioux Falls, S.D.; and North Platte, Neb...
More than half of them have been members of MS-13, a street gang rooted in Central America where members have been known to behead enemies and attack with grenades and machetes. Federal officials estimate between 8,000 and 10,000 MS-13 members live in 31 states _ the majority of them in the country illegally.
"We're just getting started," said ICE investigations chief Marcy Forman.
I'm sure.
There's a history here (in the multiverse everything has a history).
MS-13 members are the sons of immigrants from El Salvador and other Central American countries that were forced to flee because of the CIA instigated war during the Reagan Administration that completely destroyed the physical, economic, social, religious and cultural infrastructure of the region. MS-13 was founded in Los Angeles by the offspring of the immigrants for protection.
You can find items like this out there: Al-Qaida nukes already in U.S.
Terrorists, bombs smuggled across Mexico border by MS-13 gangsters.
The wingnuts are all a-twitter about suitcase nukes being smuggled across the border by MS-13. No links, because I have this thing about promoting hate and ignorance. You know how to find that if you want it.
There might be suitcase nukes in this country, but to my knowledge the smallest nukes Pakistan or North Korea can make are about the size of an SUV. If there are suitcase nukes- and according to the D.o'D. and international treaties we don't even have them- they've been produced by a massively funded black budget somewhere. Of course I can't imagine what country would be paranoid enough to produce such an evil thing.
Much less hand them to a terrorist organization that they, themselves, created as an excuse to have somebody to play their Game with.
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Unintelligent Designs on Minds
Preznit Bu$h stated today that evolution should be taught on an equal footing with the mythology his backers support.
Why only his backers? Because the man has a sociopathic regard for human life and is willing to manipulate the lives and welfare of the rest of the human race to achieve his own desires. With an attitude like that, he's no real Christian, although his willingness to pretend to be a Christian leader is a well-learned role.
Pharyngula has it right:
Scientists have established the fact of evolution with thousands of lines of evidence and the work of hundreds of thousands of researchers. This idea is based on material evidence and repeated experiment, extensively documented in the scientific literature.
This evidence flatly contradicts literal religious accounts. Religious conservatives have mounted a long running social and political campaign to get their falsified dogma treated as the truth, despite the absence of any material or logical support for their position.
This debate is not about assessing the evidence, but about getting faith-based bullshit taught as science.
And that is what should be taught: teachers, we need to get in front of our students and expose them to both sides. We need to stand up and plainly state that creationism is a lie and any attempt to incorporate faith and the supernatural into science is as destructive to the enterprise as would be requiring religion to provide concrete, repeatable tests of their beliefs.
That's the only rational version of "equal time" that will work.
Oh, yeah, and we also have to work to make sure that every goddamned Republican in our capitols is out on their ear in the next couple of election cycles. The root of our problem is that the know-nothings and lunatics are in power, and are trying to wreck anything that does not pander to their ideology—and science opposes the Republican agenda.
Want to understand why intelligent design isn't science? Or even basically what science is? Check out what the National Academy of Science says on Teaching Evolution and the Nature of Science. Take your time and enjoy the browse- it's a free on-line textbook.
Why only his backers? Because the man has a sociopathic regard for human life and is willing to manipulate the lives and welfare of the rest of the human race to achieve his own desires. With an attitude like that, he's no real Christian, although his willingness to pretend to be a Christian leader is a well-learned role.
Pharyngula has it right:
Scientists have established the fact of evolution with thousands of lines of evidence and the work of hundreds of thousands of researchers. This idea is based on material evidence and repeated experiment, extensively documented in the scientific literature.
This evidence flatly contradicts literal religious accounts. Religious conservatives have mounted a long running social and political campaign to get their falsified dogma treated as the truth, despite the absence of any material or logical support for their position.
This debate is not about assessing the evidence, but about getting faith-based bullshit taught as science.
And that is what should be taught: teachers, we need to get in front of our students and expose them to both sides. We need to stand up and plainly state that creationism is a lie and any attempt to incorporate faith and the supernatural into science is as destructive to the enterprise as would be requiring religion to provide concrete, repeatable tests of their beliefs.
That's the only rational version of "equal time" that will work.
Oh, yeah, and we also have to work to make sure that every goddamned Republican in our capitols is out on their ear in the next couple of election cycles. The root of our problem is that the know-nothings and lunatics are in power, and are trying to wreck anything that does not pander to their ideology—and science opposes the Republican agenda.
Want to understand why intelligent design isn't science? Or even basically what science is? Check out what the National Academy of Science says on Teaching Evolution and the Nature of Science. Take your time and enjoy the browse- it's a free on-line textbook.
Monday, August 01, 2005
A Future So Bright, Ya Gotta Wear Bollywood Shades
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A recent U.S.-India nuclear agreement was so hastily concluded the Bush administration is only now beginning to figure out how to implement it in the face of tough questions from the U.S. Congress and nonproliferation experts.
The agreement, announced July 18 after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met President Bush at the White House, upends decades-old nonproliferation rules and will require changes in U.S. law and international policy.
U.S. officials are optimistic the Republican-controlled Congress will approve steps to fulfill Bush's promise to sell civilian nuclear technology to India.
Such sales are now prohibited under U.S. law because India refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, or NPT, and is producing nuclear weapons banned by the pact and other agreements.
With the new deal, the United States in effect accepts India as a nuclear-weapon state.
U.S. and Indian officials had aimed to conclude an agreement before Bush makes an expected trip to India in early 2006. But the atmosphere seemed ripe while Singh was in Washington, so U.S. and Indian negotiators worked around-the-clock to seal a deal.
Early grumblings among lawmakers and experts who believe the accord weakens nuclear-weapons controls suggest Bush could face a battle to amend or waive U.S. law. Congressional sources say a growing Indian-American community will be a factor in supporting the accord.
So far, ``the administration has no clear plan'' to implement the agreement, said a Republican participant in a recent briefing for congressional staff. The participant said officials had ``no good answers'' on how the deal would affect international security...
The Plan: Bechtel and General Electric and the whole Carlyle Crew make a big pile of money. Then, there's the money to be made on Pakistan trying to play catch-up. Not to mention futures in fighter airplanes and missiles and all the other goodies the Company's subsidiaries all sell to either side.
But there's another reason, of course. With Bu$hCo there's always another reason, because there are so many weasels in this crew. It's not just the Pakistani push and pull.
Let's look at what Hong Kong's Asia Times has to say about the deal:
...American investments in India, especially in new technology areas, will help US companies to reduce costs and become more competitive globally. US firms are already leading the foreign investment drive in India. I believe 400 of the Fortune 500 are already in India."
Among the significant initiatives that were unveiled at the meeting between Singh and US President George W Bush has been the launch of a high-level bilateral CEO forum. The forum is intended to provide effective private sector participation in the economic dialogues between India and the US. The CEO forum brings together 10 top businessmen each from India and the US to promote Indo-US economic cooperation in the coming years. Not conceived as a pressure group on the two governments, the forum has been designed to provide a practical and hands-on body influencing economic policymaking in both countries.
Hell, no pressure. These boys own the governments:
...The Indian CEOs in the forum are Ratan Tata (Tata group), Mukhesh Ambani (Reliance), Nandan Nilekani (Infosys), Yogesh Deveshwar (ITC), Dr Pratap Reddy (Apollo Hospitals), Baba N Kalyani (Bharat Forge), Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw (Biocon India), Deepak Parekh (HDFC), Ashok Ganguly (ICICI) and Analjit Singh (Max India). Those in the American team are Charles Prince (Citigroup), Warren Stanley (Cargill), Steven Reinemund (Pepsi), David Cote (Honeywell), Paul Hanrahan (AES Corporation), William Harrison Jr (JP MorganChase), Harold McGraw III (McGraw-Hill Companies), Thomas J O'Neill (Parsons Brinckerhoff), Christopher Rodrigues (Visa International) and Anne M Mulcahy (Xerox).
The US is India's biggest trading partner and its largest investor. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) totaled over US$4 billion in 2004, more than double the figure in 1998. Trade in merchandise stood at $21.7 billion last year. But these figures are still puny compared to the trade and investment figures between China and the US. "Our focus remains on instituting policies of high growth aimed at encouraging investment flows and expanding trade. We are currently receiving about $6 billion annually as foreign investment. We need several times this amount," Singh said.
There you have it. They're trying to make a competitor for Team Xinhua. You play Tigers against Tigers in the world of Bu$hCo-style poker. The real humor is in their failure to understand when you run out of meat for the growing Tiger, he's much more likely to eat you than another Tiger.
The agreement, announced July 18 after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met President Bush at the White House, upends decades-old nonproliferation rules and will require changes in U.S. law and international policy.
U.S. officials are optimistic the Republican-controlled Congress will approve steps to fulfill Bush's promise to sell civilian nuclear technology to India.
Such sales are now prohibited under U.S. law because India refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, or NPT, and is producing nuclear weapons banned by the pact and other agreements.
With the new deal, the United States in effect accepts India as a nuclear-weapon state.
U.S. and Indian officials had aimed to conclude an agreement before Bush makes an expected trip to India in early 2006. But the atmosphere seemed ripe while Singh was in Washington, so U.S. and Indian negotiators worked around-the-clock to seal a deal.
Early grumblings among lawmakers and experts who believe the accord weakens nuclear-weapons controls suggest Bush could face a battle to amend or waive U.S. law. Congressional sources say a growing Indian-American community will be a factor in supporting the accord.
So far, ``the administration has no clear plan'' to implement the agreement, said a Republican participant in a recent briefing for congressional staff. The participant said officials had ``no good answers'' on how the deal would affect international security...
The Plan: Bechtel and General Electric and the whole Carlyle Crew make a big pile of money. Then, there's the money to be made on Pakistan trying to play catch-up. Not to mention futures in fighter airplanes and missiles and all the other goodies the Company's subsidiaries all sell to either side.
But there's another reason, of course. With Bu$hCo there's always another reason, because there are so many weasels in this crew. It's not just the Pakistani push and pull.
Let's look at what Hong Kong's Asia Times has to say about the deal:
...American investments in India, especially in new technology areas, will help US companies to reduce costs and become more competitive globally. US firms are already leading the foreign investment drive in India. I believe 400 of the Fortune 500 are already in India."
Among the significant initiatives that were unveiled at the meeting between Singh and US President George W Bush has been the launch of a high-level bilateral CEO forum. The forum is intended to provide effective private sector participation in the economic dialogues between India and the US. The CEO forum brings together 10 top businessmen each from India and the US to promote Indo-US economic cooperation in the coming years. Not conceived as a pressure group on the two governments, the forum has been designed to provide a practical and hands-on body influencing economic policymaking in both countries.
Hell, no pressure. These boys own the governments:
...The Indian CEOs in the forum are Ratan Tata (Tata group), Mukhesh Ambani (Reliance), Nandan Nilekani (Infosys), Yogesh Deveshwar (ITC), Dr Pratap Reddy (Apollo Hospitals), Baba N Kalyani (Bharat Forge), Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw (Biocon India), Deepak Parekh (HDFC), Ashok Ganguly (ICICI) and Analjit Singh (Max India). Those in the American team are Charles Prince (Citigroup), Warren Stanley (Cargill), Steven Reinemund (Pepsi), David Cote (Honeywell), Paul Hanrahan (AES Corporation), William Harrison Jr (JP MorganChase), Harold McGraw III (McGraw-Hill Companies), Thomas J O'Neill (Parsons Brinckerhoff), Christopher Rodrigues (Visa International) and Anne M Mulcahy (Xerox).
The US is India's biggest trading partner and its largest investor. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) totaled over US$4 billion in 2004, more than double the figure in 1998. Trade in merchandise stood at $21.7 billion last year. But these figures are still puny compared to the trade and investment figures between China and the US. "Our focus remains on instituting policies of high growth aimed at encouraging investment flows and expanding trade. We are currently receiving about $6 billion annually as foreign investment. We need several times this amount," Singh said.
There you have it. They're trying to make a competitor for Team Xinhua. You play Tigers against Tigers in the world of Bu$hCo-style poker. The real humor is in their failure to understand when you run out of meat for the growing Tiger, he's much more likely to eat you than another Tiger.
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