If the situation in Iraq seems a little conflicted, part of it according to Greg Palast is that the NeoTheoCon chickenhawks driving the wagon have been a little slow on the uptake about exactly where the wagon's owners are heading.
Two years ago today - when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad - protesters claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered.
In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists".
"Big Oil" appears to have won...
Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US Government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme.
Mr Carroll told us he made it clear to Paul Bremer, the US occupation chief who arrived in Iraq in May 2003, that: "There was to be no privatisation of Iraqi oil resources or facilities while I was involved." ...
New plans, obtained from the State Department by Newsnight and Harper's Magazine under the US Freedom of Information Act, called for creation of a state-owned oil company favoured by the US oil industry. It was completed in January 2004 under the guidance of Amy Jaffe of the James Baker Institute in Texas.
Formerly US Secretary of State, Baker is now an attorney representing Exxon-Mobil and the Saudi Arabian government...
Questioned by Newsnight, Ms Jaffe said the oil industry prefers state control of Iraq's oil over a sell-off because it fears a repeat of Russia's energy privatisation. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, US oil companies were barred from bidding for the reserves.
Ms Jaffe says US oil companies are not warm to any plan that would undermine Opec and the current high oil price: "I'm not sure that if I'm the chair of an American company, and you put me on a lie detector test, I would say high oil prices are bad for me or my company."
The former Shell oil boss agrees. In Houston, he told Newsnight: "Many neo conservatives are people who have certain ideological beliefs about markets, about democracy, about this, that and the other. International oil companies, without exception, are very pragmatic commercial organizations. They don't have a theology."
Other than worshiping the Almighty Dollar.
Thanks to Juan Cole for the link.
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Friday, March 18, 2005
Committed
The Climate Change Commitment
Science, Vol 307, Issue 5716, 1766-1769 , 18 March 2005
T. M. L. Wigley
Even if atmospheric composition were fixed today, global-mean temperature and sea level rise would continue due to oceanic thermal inertia. These constant-composition (CC) commitments and their uncertainties are quantified. Constant-emissions (CE) commitments are also considered. The CC warming commitment could exceed 1°C. The CE warming commitment is 2° to 6°C by the year 2400. For sea level rise, the CC commitment is 10 centimeters per century (extreme range approximately 1 to 30 centimeters per century) and the CE commitment is 25 centimeters per century (7 to 50 centimeters per century). Avoiding these changes requires, eventually, a reduction in emissions to substantially below present levels. For sea level rise, a substantial long-term commitment may be impossible to avoid.
How Much More Global Warming and Sea Level Rise?
Science, Vol 307, Issue 5716, 1769-1772 , 18 March 2005
Gerald A. Meehl,* Warren M. Washington, William D. Collins, Julie M. Arblaster, Aixue Hu, Lawrence E. Buja, Warren G. Strand, Haiyan Teng
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.
Also, you might like to see what the gang at Kos has to say about it.
Of course, you need a Ph.D. in climatology, meterology, or marine science to really understand it- but you need to understand this: the world is changing, and there's nothing we can do to stop it.
But we can develop technology to minimize the damage.
And just as we release greenhouse gases, technology could be used to fix them.
Science, Vol 307, Issue 5716, 1766-1769 , 18 March 2005
T. M. L. Wigley
Even if atmospheric composition were fixed today, global-mean temperature and sea level rise would continue due to oceanic thermal inertia. These constant-composition (CC) commitments and their uncertainties are quantified. Constant-emissions (CE) commitments are also considered. The CC warming commitment could exceed 1°C. The CE warming commitment is 2° to 6°C by the year 2400. For sea level rise, the CC commitment is 10 centimeters per century (extreme range approximately 1 to 30 centimeters per century) and the CE commitment is 25 centimeters per century (7 to 50 centimeters per century). Avoiding these changes requires, eventually, a reduction in emissions to substantially below present levels. For sea level rise, a substantial long-term commitment may be impossible to avoid.
How Much More Global Warming and Sea Level Rise?
Science, Vol 307, Issue 5716, 1769-1772 , 18 March 2005
Gerald A. Meehl,* Warren M. Washington, William D. Collins, Julie M. Arblaster, Aixue Hu, Lawrence E. Buja, Warren G. Strand, Haiyan Teng
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.
Also, you might like to see what the gang at Kos has to say about it.
Of course, you need a Ph.D. in climatology, meterology, or marine science to really understand it- but you need to understand this: the world is changing, and there's nothing we can do to stop it.
But we can develop technology to minimize the damage.
And just as we release greenhouse gases, technology could be used to fix them.
Thursday, March 17, 2005
A Death Star for Darth Rumsfeld
"President Bush on Friday nominated Dr. Michael D. Griffin, a physicist and engineer who is a strong advocate of human space flight, to lead the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as it tries to revive the shuttle program and return humans to the moon.
Dr. Griffin, who is head of the space department at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., has held numerous posts in the aerospace industry and was president and chief operating officer of In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit investment organization sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency. He also served as the deputy for technology at the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization and worked on missile defense systems from 1986 to 1991...
In April 2004, Dr. Griffin took his current post as head of the space department at the Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, where he had worked in the early 1980's. In 1986, he joined the Pentagon's "Star Wars" program, which was aimed at developing a missile defense shield.
Dr. Griffin worked at NASA from 1991 to 1994 before moving on to posts in private industry, going to Orbital Science Corporation in Dulles, Va. He also worked for Computer Science Corporation in El Segundo, Calif.
As a top official at In-Q-Tel, he helped invest about $45 million a year in federal money in projects including software and other technology designed to sort massive quantities of data like intercepted e-mail messages and satellite images."
Computer Sciences Corporation? Hmmm... that sounds familiar.
Computer Sciences Corporation (NYSE: CSC) today announced that the company has completed its acquisition of DynCorp...
And where else... ah, I know: "The Volpe National Transportation Systems Center awards its new Onsite Technical Support Services Contract to Computer Sciences Corporation with EG&G as its Major Teaming Partner...
EG&G, headquartered in the Washington, DC area, is a leading provider of technical and support services to the U.S. Departments of Defense, Energy, Transportation, Treasury, Justice, and Commerce and to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The company, which is wholly owned by the Carlyle Group, employs 4,200 people worldwide."
I suppose if you're going to have Total Information Awareness, it pays to have the guys who run the computer systems run the satellites, too.
And it must be nice to have somebody like DynCorp around to do the dirty work.
Dr. Griffin, who is head of the space department at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., has held numerous posts in the aerospace industry and was president and chief operating officer of In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit investment organization sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency. He also served as the deputy for technology at the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization and worked on missile defense systems from 1986 to 1991...
In April 2004, Dr. Griffin took his current post as head of the space department at the Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, where he had worked in the early 1980's. In 1986, he joined the Pentagon's "Star Wars" program, which was aimed at developing a missile defense shield.
Dr. Griffin worked at NASA from 1991 to 1994 before moving on to posts in private industry, going to Orbital Science Corporation in Dulles, Va. He also worked for Computer Science Corporation in El Segundo, Calif.
As a top official at In-Q-Tel, he helped invest about $45 million a year in federal money in projects including software and other technology designed to sort massive quantities of data like intercepted e-mail messages and satellite images."
Computer Sciences Corporation? Hmmm... that sounds familiar.
Computer Sciences Corporation (NYSE: CSC) today announced that the company has completed its acquisition of DynCorp...
And where else... ah, I know: "The Volpe National Transportation Systems Center awards its new Onsite Technical Support Services Contract to Computer Sciences Corporation with EG&G as its Major Teaming Partner...
EG&G, headquartered in the Washington, DC area, is a leading provider of technical and support services to the U.S. Departments of Defense, Energy, Transportation, Treasury, Justice, and Commerce and to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The company, which is wholly owned by the Carlyle Group, employs 4,200 people worldwide."
I suppose if you're going to have Total Information Awareness, it pays to have the guys who run the computer systems run the satellites, too.
And it must be nice to have somebody like DynCorp around to do the dirty work.
Breakfast with Black Spot
I wonder if Black Spot chats with Dear Leader about this some mornings:
China, Japan, and the United States are the three most productive economies on Earth, but China is the fastest growing (at an average rate of 9.5% per annum for over two decades), whereas both the U.S. and Japan are saddled with huge and mounting debts and, in the case of Japan, stagnant growth rates. China is today the world's sixth largest economy (the U.S. and Japan being first and second) and our third largest trading partner after Canada and Mexico. According to CIA statisticians in their Factbook 2003, China is actually already the second-largest economy on Earth measured on a purchasing power parity basis -- that is, in terms of what China actually produces rather than prices and exchange rates. The CIA calculates the United States' gross domestic product (GDP) -- the total value of all goods and services produced within a country -- for 2003 as $10.4 trillion and China's $5.7 trillion.
China's trade volume for 2004 was $1.2 trillion, third in the world after the U.S. and Germany, and well ahead of Japan's $1.07 trillion...
The truly significant trade development of 2004 was the EU's emergence as China's biggest economic partner, suggesting the possibility of a Sino-European cooperative bloc confronting a less vital Japanese-American one...
...The CIA's National Intelligence Council forecasts that China's GDP will equal Britain's in 2005, Germany's in 2009, Japan's in 2017, and the U.S.'s in 2042. But Shahid Javed Burki, former vice president of the World Bank's China Department and a former finance minister of Pakistan, predicts that by 2025 China will probably have a GDP of $25 trillion in terms of purchasing power parity and will have become the world's largest economy followed by the United States at $20 trillion and India at about $13 trillion -- and Burki's analysis is based on a conservative prediction of a 6% Chinese growth rate sustained over the next two decades...
...The Bush administration is unwisely threatening China by urging Japan to rearm and by promising Taiwan that, should China use force to prevent a Taiwanese declaration of independence, the U.S. will go to war on its behalf. It is hard to imagine more shortsighted, irresponsible policies, but in light of the Bush administration's Alice-in-Wonderland war in Iraq, the acute anti-Americanism it has generated globally, and the politicization of America's intelligence services, it seems possible that the U.S. and Japan might actually precipitate a war with China over Taiwan..."
No, too many big words for Dear Leader.
Black Spot is nothing if not Respectful for the Leader of the Free World.
Thanks to Truthout for the link.
China, Japan, and the United States are the three most productive economies on Earth, but China is the fastest growing (at an average rate of 9.5% per annum for over two decades), whereas both the U.S. and Japan are saddled with huge and mounting debts and, in the case of Japan, stagnant growth rates. China is today the world's sixth largest economy (the U.S. and Japan being first and second) and our third largest trading partner after Canada and Mexico. According to CIA statisticians in their Factbook 2003, China is actually already the second-largest economy on Earth measured on a purchasing power parity basis -- that is, in terms of what China actually produces rather than prices and exchange rates. The CIA calculates the United States' gross domestic product (GDP) -- the total value of all goods and services produced within a country -- for 2003 as $10.4 trillion and China's $5.7 trillion.
China's trade volume for 2004 was $1.2 trillion, third in the world after the U.S. and Germany, and well ahead of Japan's $1.07 trillion...
The truly significant trade development of 2004 was the EU's emergence as China's biggest economic partner, suggesting the possibility of a Sino-European cooperative bloc confronting a less vital Japanese-American one...
...The CIA's National Intelligence Council forecasts that China's GDP will equal Britain's in 2005, Germany's in 2009, Japan's in 2017, and the U.S.'s in 2042. But Shahid Javed Burki, former vice president of the World Bank's China Department and a former finance minister of Pakistan, predicts that by 2025 China will probably have a GDP of $25 trillion in terms of purchasing power parity and will have become the world's largest economy followed by the United States at $20 trillion and India at about $13 trillion -- and Burki's analysis is based on a conservative prediction of a 6% Chinese growth rate sustained over the next two decades...
...The Bush administration is unwisely threatening China by urging Japan to rearm and by promising Taiwan that, should China use force to prevent a Taiwanese declaration of independence, the U.S. will go to war on its behalf. It is hard to imagine more shortsighted, irresponsible policies, but in light of the Bush administration's Alice-in-Wonderland war in Iraq, the acute anti-Americanism it has generated globally, and the politicization of America's intelligence services, it seems possible that the U.S. and Japan might actually precipitate a war with China over Taiwan..."
No, too many big words for Dear Leader.
Black Spot is nothing if not Respectful for the Leader of the Free World.
Thanks to Truthout for the link.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Mind Control and the U.S. Military (Pt 2): Framing the Debate
Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production...
An examination of government-produced news reports offers a look inside a world where the traditional lines between public relations and journalism have become tangled, where local anchors introduce prepackaged segments with "suggested" lead-ins written by public relations experts. It is a world where government-produced reports disappear into a maze of satellite transmissions, Web portals, syndicated news programs and network feeds, only to emerge cleansed on the other side as "independent" journalism...
Yet in three separate opinions in the past year, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that studies the federal government and its expenditures, has held that government-made news segments may constitute improper "covert propaganda" even if their origin is made clear to the television stations. The point, the office said, is whether viewers know the origin. Last month, in its most recent finding, the G.A.O. said federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports "that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those materials."
It is not certain, though, whether the office's pronouncements will have much practical effect. Although a few federal agencies have stopped making television news segments, others continue. And on Friday, the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget circulated a memorandum instructing all executive branch agencies to ignore the G.A.O. findings. The memorandum said the G.A.O. failed to distinguish between covert propaganda and "purely informational" news segments made by the government. Such informational segments are legal, the memorandum said, whether or not an agency's role in producing them is disclosed to viewers. ...
On Sept. 11, 2002, WHBQ, the Fox affiliate in Memphis, marked the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with an uplifting report on how assistance from the United States was helping to liberate the women of Afghanistan.
Tish Clark, a reporter for WHBQ, described how Afghan women, once barred from schools and jobs, were at last emerging from their burkas, taking up jobs as seamstresses and bakers, sending daughters off to new schools, receiving decent medical care for the first time and even participating in a fledgling democracy. Her segment included an interview with an Afghan teacher who recounted how the Taliban only allowed boys to attend school. An Afghan doctor described how the Taliban refused to let male physicians treat women.
In short, Ms. Clark's report seemed to corroborate, however modestly, a central argument of the Bush foreign policy, that forceful American intervention abroad was spreading freedom, improving lives and winning friends.
What the people of Memphis were not told, though, was that the interviews used by WHBQ were actually conducted by State Department contractors. The contractors also selected the quotes used from those interviews and shot the video that went with the narration. They also wrote the narration, much of which Ms. Clark repeated with only minor changes. ..
Ms. Clark, now Tish Clark Dunning, said in an interview that she, too, had no idea the report originated at the State Department. "If that's true, I'm very shocked that anyone would false report on anything like that," she said...
The Defense Department is working hard to produce and distribute its own news segments for television audiences in the United States.
The Pentagon Channel, available only inside the Defense Department last year, is now being offered to every cable and satellite operator in the United States. Army public affairs specialists, equipped with portable satellite transmitters, are roaming war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, beaming news reports, raw video and interviews to TV stations in the United States. All a local news director has to do is log on to a military-financed Web site, www.dvidshub.net, browse a menu of segments and request a free satellite feed.
Then there is the Army and Air Force Hometown News Service, a unit of 40 reporters and producers set up to send local stations news segments highlighting the accomplishments of military members.
''We're the 'good news' people,'' said Larry W. Gilliam, the unit's deputy director. ...
Now if you've been paying attention, you may notice that the New York Times is being Directed by a member of the Carlyle Group these days.
Perhaps this makes your head spin- why is a member of the Carlyle Group allowing it to get out that the Bu$h administration is fabricating news?
Before the vertigo takes you completely, let's remember another fact: the largest private donors and a lot of the major corporate donors to the 2004 Kerry campaign were also Carlyle Group members.
Could it be perhaps that we are witnessing a titanic struggle at the corporate level being played with our national interest? Could it be that different factions of the world's largest investment group are at odds for the minds and souls and wallets of the world? Are there good guys as well as evil ones in this struggle?
Is the Bu$hCo source of power- the Carlyle Group- fragmenting at the edges, with hundreds of little robber baron wannabe-Emperors playing their own bids for hegemony?
Or is it something simpler?
Ever seen a bullfight?
We report, you decide.
With thanks to Corrente and The Center for Media and Democracy and John Stauber.
An examination of government-produced news reports offers a look inside a world where the traditional lines between public relations and journalism have become tangled, where local anchors introduce prepackaged segments with "suggested" lead-ins written by public relations experts. It is a world where government-produced reports disappear into a maze of satellite transmissions, Web portals, syndicated news programs and network feeds, only to emerge cleansed on the other side as "independent" journalism...
Yet in three separate opinions in the past year, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that studies the federal government and its expenditures, has held that government-made news segments may constitute improper "covert propaganda" even if their origin is made clear to the television stations. The point, the office said, is whether viewers know the origin. Last month, in its most recent finding, the G.A.O. said federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports "that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those materials."
It is not certain, though, whether the office's pronouncements will have much practical effect. Although a few federal agencies have stopped making television news segments, others continue. And on Friday, the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget circulated a memorandum instructing all executive branch agencies to ignore the G.A.O. findings. The memorandum said the G.A.O. failed to distinguish between covert propaganda and "purely informational" news segments made by the government. Such informational segments are legal, the memorandum said, whether or not an agency's role in producing them is disclosed to viewers. ...
On Sept. 11, 2002, WHBQ, the Fox affiliate in Memphis, marked the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with an uplifting report on how assistance from the United States was helping to liberate the women of Afghanistan.
Tish Clark, a reporter for WHBQ, described how Afghan women, once barred from schools and jobs, were at last emerging from their burkas, taking up jobs as seamstresses and bakers, sending daughters off to new schools, receiving decent medical care for the first time and even participating in a fledgling democracy. Her segment included an interview with an Afghan teacher who recounted how the Taliban only allowed boys to attend school. An Afghan doctor described how the Taliban refused to let male physicians treat women.
In short, Ms. Clark's report seemed to corroborate, however modestly, a central argument of the Bush foreign policy, that forceful American intervention abroad was spreading freedom, improving lives and winning friends.
What the people of Memphis were not told, though, was that the interviews used by WHBQ were actually conducted by State Department contractors. The contractors also selected the quotes used from those interviews and shot the video that went with the narration. They also wrote the narration, much of which Ms. Clark repeated with only minor changes. ..
Ms. Clark, now Tish Clark Dunning, said in an interview that she, too, had no idea the report originated at the State Department. "If that's true, I'm very shocked that anyone would false report on anything like that," she said...
The Defense Department is working hard to produce and distribute its own news segments for television audiences in the United States.
The Pentagon Channel, available only inside the Defense Department last year, is now being offered to every cable and satellite operator in the United States. Army public affairs specialists, equipped with portable satellite transmitters, are roaming war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, beaming news reports, raw video and interviews to TV stations in the United States. All a local news director has to do is log on to a military-financed Web site, www.dvidshub.net, browse a menu of segments and request a free satellite feed.
Then there is the Army and Air Force Hometown News Service, a unit of 40 reporters and producers set up to send local stations news segments highlighting the accomplishments of military members.
''We're the 'good news' people,'' said Larry W. Gilliam, the unit's deputy director. ...
Now if you've been paying attention, you may notice that the New York Times is being Directed by a member of the Carlyle Group these days.
Perhaps this makes your head spin- why is a member of the Carlyle Group allowing it to get out that the Bu$h administration is fabricating news?
Before the vertigo takes you completely, let's remember another fact: the largest private donors and a lot of the major corporate donors to the 2004 Kerry campaign were also Carlyle Group members.
Could it be perhaps that we are witnessing a titanic struggle at the corporate level being played with our national interest? Could it be that different factions of the world's largest investment group are at odds for the minds and souls and wallets of the world? Are there good guys as well as evil ones in this struggle?
Is the Bu$hCo source of power- the Carlyle Group- fragmenting at the edges, with hundreds of little robber baron wannabe-Emperors playing their own bids for hegemony?
Or is it something simpler?
Ever seen a bullfight?
We report, you decide.
With thanks to Corrente and The Center for Media and Democracy and John Stauber.
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Feeding the Fires
On the surface, it's the biggest deal in the history of the Export-Import Bank of the United States - US$5 billion to finance the building of Chinese nuclear power plants by US firms in the energy-starved economic giant. But there's much more to it than big business: closer scrutiny and interviews with experts reveal a weak, inconsistent and ultimately dangerous US policy with regard to China and its past (some say present) weapons proliferation, as well as China's own efforts to acquire nuclear reactors and other Western high technology that could be passed on to less-than-responsible states.
In effect, in the interests of big business, the US is turning a blind eye to past proliferation by Chinese entities with which it deals...
the US Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im Bank), an independent federal agency that finances exports by US firms, approved a preliminary commitment for $5 billion in loans and loan guarantees to the China National Nuclear Corp (CNNC) to finance the building of nuclear power plants by US firms.
The Ex-Im loans and guarantees are part of aggressive efforts by US officials and diplomats, including former energy secretary Spencer Abraham and current Vice President Dick Cheney, to lobby the Chinese government to sign a deal with Monroeville, Pennsylvania-based power giant Westinghouse Electric Co. Westinghouse had previously lobbied hard to obtain clearance for the sale from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission last September.
You know Westinghouse: now a branch of the Carlyle Group. The Company that used to be headed by the nominee for the Secretary of the Army, Francis Bridge...
An engineer with 28 years of industrial experience that focused on the defense industry, Dr. Harvey was Chief Operating Officer of the Industries and Technology Group of Westinghouse Electric Company. He also held the positions of President of Westinghouse's Electronics Systems Group, which was later acquired by Northrop Grumman, as well as the President of their Government and Environmental Services Company. Dr. Harvey is affiliated with The Carlyle Group, serving on the boards of three Carlyle controlled corporations. He was also a White House Fellow in the U.S. Department of Defense in the late 1970s.
Isn't that special?
The government has just approved a sale of military technology to China- by a Carlyle-affiliated company that used to be headed by the Secretary of the Army.
You can't have the Blank Check if you don't have the Endless War.
In effect, in the interests of big business, the US is turning a blind eye to past proliferation by Chinese entities with which it deals...
the US Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im Bank), an independent federal agency that finances exports by US firms, approved a preliminary commitment for $5 billion in loans and loan guarantees to the China National Nuclear Corp (CNNC) to finance the building of nuclear power plants by US firms.
The Ex-Im loans and guarantees are part of aggressive efforts by US officials and diplomats, including former energy secretary Spencer Abraham and current Vice President Dick Cheney, to lobby the Chinese government to sign a deal with Monroeville, Pennsylvania-based power giant Westinghouse Electric Co. Westinghouse had previously lobbied hard to obtain clearance for the sale from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission last September.
You know Westinghouse: now a branch of the Carlyle Group. The Company that used to be headed by the nominee for the Secretary of the Army, Francis Bridge...
An engineer with 28 years of industrial experience that focused on the defense industry, Dr. Harvey was Chief Operating Officer of the Industries and Technology Group of Westinghouse Electric Company. He also held the positions of President of Westinghouse's Electronics Systems Group, which was later acquired by Northrop Grumman, as well as the President of their Government and Environmental Services Company. Dr. Harvey is affiliated with The Carlyle Group, serving on the boards of three Carlyle controlled corporations. He was also a White House Fellow in the U.S. Department of Defense in the late 1970s.
Isn't that special?
The government has just approved a sale of military technology to China- by a Carlyle-affiliated company that used to be headed by the Secretary of the Army.
You can't have the Blank Check if you don't have the Endless War.
Monday, March 14, 2005
Bubblicious
Assuming the Nasdaq stays in the historical "Mania Channel" of past bubbles -- an admittedly big "If" -- the pattern suggests that a potential move downwards (late 2005/early 2006) of as much as 25 - 33% is quite possible.
And that's not even the bad news (we'll get to that later). The good news is that from those lows, the Nasdaq could potentially double, rising up to nearly 3,000 late in 2007; The bad news (you knew it was coming) is that from those dizzying heights, the down side is horrific: The chart suggests we may visit, if not surpass, the post-bubble lows.
That is, according to the historical composite of previous bubbles.
Not quite the Bu$h Boom the Wrepublicans have in mind... but I guess the issue is which Wrepublicans you ask.
I can think of a few that would perfectly happy with this result.
And that's not even the bad news (we'll get to that later). The good news is that from those lows, the Nasdaq could potentially double, rising up to nearly 3,000 late in 2007; The bad news (you knew it was coming) is that from those dizzying heights, the down side is horrific: The chart suggests we may visit, if not surpass, the post-bubble lows.
That is, according to the historical composite of previous bubbles.
Not quite the Bu$h Boom the Wrepublicans have in mind... but I guess the issue is which Wrepublicans you ask.
I can think of a few that would perfectly happy with this result.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Electing the Brightest Smile
If you listen to the presidential debates, you can’t figure out what they’re saying, and that’s on purpose. The last debate was supposed to be about domestic issues. The New York Times commented that Kerry didn’t make any hint about possible government involvement in health care programs because that position has, in their words, “no political support.” Well, according to the most recent polls, 80% of the population thinks that the government ought to guarantee health care for everyone, and furthermore regard it as a moral obligation. That tells you something about people’s values. But there’s “no political support.”
Why? Because the pharmaceutical industry is opposed, the financial institutions are opposed, the insurance industry is opposed, so there’s “no political support.” It doesn’t matter if 80% of the population regard it as a moral obligation: That doesn’t count as political support. It tells you something about the elite conception. You’re supposed to vote for the image they’re projecting. That’s not surprising really. Just ask yourself, “Who runs the elections?”
The elections are run by the same guys who sell toothpaste. They show you an image of a sports hero, or a sexy model, or a car going up a sheer cliff or something, which has nothing to do with the commodity, but it’s intended to delude you into picking this one rather than another one. Same when they run elections. But they’re assigned that task in order to marginalize the public, and furthermore, people are pretty well aware of it.
Read the whole thing.
And again thank Truthout for the link.
Why? Because the pharmaceutical industry is opposed, the financial institutions are opposed, the insurance industry is opposed, so there’s “no political support.” It doesn’t matter if 80% of the population regard it as a moral obligation: That doesn’t count as political support. It tells you something about the elite conception. You’re supposed to vote for the image they’re projecting. That’s not surprising really. Just ask yourself, “Who runs the elections?”
The elections are run by the same guys who sell toothpaste. They show you an image of a sports hero, or a sexy model, or a car going up a sheer cliff or something, which has nothing to do with the commodity, but it’s intended to delude you into picking this one rather than another one. Same when they run elections. But they’re assigned that task in order to marginalize the public, and furthermore, people are pretty well aware of it.
Read the whole thing.
And again thank Truthout for the link.
Saturday, March 12, 2005
Department of Homeland Cover Ups
Who investigates Al-Qaeda finanical ties? That, you might imagine, would be the real way to unearth the sleeper cells we're all supposed to be so worried about.
Shortly after 9/11 it was Operation Greenquest, "the high-profile federal task force set up to target the financiers of Al Qaeda and other international terrorist groups." The aggressive, Customs-led task force was folded into Homeland Security, sending both the FBI and its minders at the Department of Justice into a tizzy. They "demanded that the White House instead give the FBI total control over Greenquest."
Who was stridently asking for control of Operation Greenquest?
Greenquest was created by former U.S. Customs chief Robert Bonner just after the September 11 terror attacks, Greenquest agents have conducted some of the Bush administration’s best-publicized and most controversial terrorist-finance cases—including a series of raids against the offices of Islamic charities in the Washington area last year...
FBI officials have derided Greenquest agents as a bunch of “cowboys” whose actions have undermined more important, long-range FBI investigations into terrorist financing. Greenquest sources in turn accuse the FBI of jealousy...
The FBI-Justice move, pushed by DOJ Criminal Division chief Michael Chertoff and Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, has enraged Homeland Security officials, however. They accuse the bureau of sabotaging Greenquest investigations—by failing to turn over critical information to their agents—and trying to obscure a decadelong record of lethargy in which FBI offices failed to aggressively pursue terror-finance cases.
“They [the FBI] won’t share anything with us,” said a Homeland Security official. “Then they go to the White House and they accuse us of not sharing … If they can’t take it over, they want to kill it.”
One prime example of the tension is the investigation into Ptech, the Boston-area computer software firm that had millions of dollars in sensitive government contracts with the Air Force, the Energy Department and, ironically enough, the FBI. In what turned into a minor embarrassment for the bureau, the firm’s main investors included Yasin Al-Qadi, a wealthy Saudi businessman whom the Bush administration had formally designated a terrorist financier under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Al-Qadi has vigorously denied any connection to terrorism.
The Ptech case turned into an ugly dispute last year when company whistleblowers told Greenquest agents about their own suspicions about the firm’s owners. Sources close to the case say those same whistleblowers had first approached FBI agents, but the bureau apparently did little or nothing in response. With backing from the National Security Council, Greenquest agents then mounted a full-scale investigation that culminated in a raid on the company’s office last December. After getting wind of the Greenquest probe, the FBI stepped in and unsuccessfully tried to take control of the case.
It's nice to know Michael Chertoff no longer has to work so hard to keep a lid on all the unpleasantness.
It's hard to find much on Al-Qadi that's recent on the web. A lot of the original links seemed to have been purged. Time passes; servers do get cleaned out.
Still, if you play with Google, you can find this:
Ptech's customers included sensitive government and intelligence agencies such as the FBI and the Air Force. "But until last fall," the GLOBE reported on Jan. 22, 2003, "few seemed aware an early financial backer of Ptech was Yasin al-Qadi, a Saudi businessman named as a suspected terrorist financier by the Bush Administration in October 2001." ...
The tale begins almost right after the 9/11 attack, when, in October of 2001, handful of ex-Ptech employees alerted the FBI to evidence indicating that the firm had Saudi terror connections ...
Almost a year later the Boston FBI had still done nothing about it. They had, in fact, shut down their cursory investigation and taken no action ...
Thus Ptech was still operating at the highest levels of American society in the Spring of 2002, when the firm showed up hustling business at the door of Wall Street's JP Morgan Chase. The question is "why?" ...
Indira Singh, who later became a whistleblower, was an unwitting eyewitness to the "train wreck."
"I invited Ptech to come down and give a presentation and a customized demo to JP Morgan Chase," states Singh, who was a consultant to the bank on "risk architecture," an arcane software specialty which calculates enterprise risk. In one of the story's many ironic twists, Singh was at the time designing a system to help JP Morgan Chase detect terrorist money laundering.
When Ptech showed up, Singh quickly realized that she was witnessing her worst fears about compromised security come true ...
Moreover, she learned, Yasin Al-Qadi had been fingered by the Bush Administration in October 2001, over six months before. So how was it that Ptech was still making presentations to top American companies six months later? ...
When Singh flew to Washington D.C. to meet some of the ex-Ptech employees to verify their allegations, she received another shock. "I met with five extraordinarily scared people. These people were scared for their lives, and for their families. Some were about to leave the country. They told me, 'Indira, you don't know who you're dealing with.'
Sadly, when she told us what happened next, it came as no surprise: When Singh alerted authorities, and her employer, what she encountered was the inexplicable wrath of a top Wall Street Bank, as well as an official wall of silence at the FBI ...
After talking to the Boston FBI, Singh said she had been ''shocked'' and ''frustrated'' to learn that the FBI had not alerted any of the government agencies using Ptech software that there were questions about the company's ties to suspected terrorist fund-raisers ...
When we first heard whistleblower Indira Singh tell her story it sounded so incredible that we would have found it unbelievable, except that we had already encountered stories like it in Venice, of witnesses bullied and intimidated by authorities into silence.
For example, the FBI was all over tenants at the Sandpiper Apartments across the street from the Venice Airport, to keep them from talking about Mohamed Atta's two-month long 'shack-up' with an American girlfriend named Amanda Keller.
In addition to warning Keller not to talk, a warning she took so seriously she left town and disappeared from view, FBI agents bullied and intimidated apartment residents who remembered the pair, and even the apartment manager of the complex, Charles Grapentine, an ex-marine, who told us grimly, "They called me a liar, and told me to keep my mouth shut. Nobody likes to hear that: that they didn't see something they know they saw."
Atta and Amanda's next door neighbor, a 50-year old housewife named Stephanie Frederickson, confirmed the apartment manager's remarks.
"The question they asked was always the same," she told us. "You aren't saying anything to anybody, are you?"
Now, it seems that FBI agents in Boston were engaged in equally-dubious behavior. Mistakes, malfeasance, and even missed opportunities to avert the Sept 11 attack... There's been a regular drumbeat of depressing news about the FBI.
Singh told us that disgruntled Boston FBI agents told her privately that their hands were tied on Ptech, because, they said, "Saudis have been given a free pass for 9/11."
"And that," says Singh, "is when I began to get really scared."''
Shortly after 9/11 it was Operation Greenquest, "the high-profile federal task force set up to target the financiers of Al Qaeda and other international terrorist groups." The aggressive, Customs-led task force was folded into Homeland Security, sending both the FBI and its minders at the Department of Justice into a tizzy. They "demanded that the White House instead give the FBI total control over Greenquest."
Who was stridently asking for control of Operation Greenquest?
Greenquest was created by former U.S. Customs chief Robert Bonner just after the September 11 terror attacks, Greenquest agents have conducted some of the Bush administration’s best-publicized and most controversial terrorist-finance cases—including a series of raids against the offices of Islamic charities in the Washington area last year...
FBI officials have derided Greenquest agents as a bunch of “cowboys” whose actions have undermined more important, long-range FBI investigations into terrorist financing. Greenquest sources in turn accuse the FBI of jealousy...
The FBI-Justice move, pushed by DOJ Criminal Division chief Michael Chertoff and Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, has enraged Homeland Security officials, however. They accuse the bureau of sabotaging Greenquest investigations—by failing to turn over critical information to their agents—and trying to obscure a decadelong record of lethargy in which FBI offices failed to aggressively pursue terror-finance cases.
“They [the FBI] won’t share anything with us,” said a Homeland Security official. “Then they go to the White House and they accuse us of not sharing … If they can’t take it over, they want to kill it.”
One prime example of the tension is the investigation into Ptech, the Boston-area computer software firm that had millions of dollars in sensitive government contracts with the Air Force, the Energy Department and, ironically enough, the FBI. In what turned into a minor embarrassment for the bureau, the firm’s main investors included Yasin Al-Qadi, a wealthy Saudi businessman whom the Bush administration had formally designated a terrorist financier under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Al-Qadi has vigorously denied any connection to terrorism.
The Ptech case turned into an ugly dispute last year when company whistleblowers told Greenquest agents about their own suspicions about the firm’s owners. Sources close to the case say those same whistleblowers had first approached FBI agents, but the bureau apparently did little or nothing in response. With backing from the National Security Council, Greenquest agents then mounted a full-scale investigation that culminated in a raid on the company’s office last December. After getting wind of the Greenquest probe, the FBI stepped in and unsuccessfully tried to take control of the case.
It's nice to know Michael Chertoff no longer has to work so hard to keep a lid on all the unpleasantness.
It's hard to find much on Al-Qadi that's recent on the web. A lot of the original links seemed to have been purged. Time passes; servers do get cleaned out.
Still, if you play with Google, you can find this:
Ptech's customers included sensitive government and intelligence agencies such as the FBI and the Air Force. "But until last fall," the GLOBE reported on Jan. 22, 2003, "few seemed aware an early financial backer of Ptech was Yasin al-Qadi, a Saudi businessman named as a suspected terrorist financier by the Bush Administration in October 2001." ...
The tale begins almost right after the 9/11 attack, when, in October of 2001, handful of ex-Ptech employees alerted the FBI to evidence indicating that the firm had Saudi terror connections ...
Almost a year later the Boston FBI had still done nothing about it. They had, in fact, shut down their cursory investigation and taken no action ...
Thus Ptech was still operating at the highest levels of American society in the Spring of 2002, when the firm showed up hustling business at the door of Wall Street's JP Morgan Chase. The question is "why?" ...
Indira Singh, who later became a whistleblower, was an unwitting eyewitness to the "train wreck."
"I invited Ptech to come down and give a presentation and a customized demo to JP Morgan Chase," states Singh, who was a consultant to the bank on "risk architecture," an arcane software specialty which calculates enterprise risk. In one of the story's many ironic twists, Singh was at the time designing a system to help JP Morgan Chase detect terrorist money laundering.
When Ptech showed up, Singh quickly realized that she was witnessing her worst fears about compromised security come true ...
Moreover, she learned, Yasin Al-Qadi had been fingered by the Bush Administration in October 2001, over six months before. So how was it that Ptech was still making presentations to top American companies six months later? ...
When Singh flew to Washington D.C. to meet some of the ex-Ptech employees to verify their allegations, she received another shock. "I met with five extraordinarily scared people. These people were scared for their lives, and for their families. Some were about to leave the country. They told me, 'Indira, you don't know who you're dealing with.'
Sadly, when she told us what happened next, it came as no surprise: When Singh alerted authorities, and her employer, what she encountered was the inexplicable wrath of a top Wall Street Bank, as well as an official wall of silence at the FBI ...
After talking to the Boston FBI, Singh said she had been ''shocked'' and ''frustrated'' to learn that the FBI had not alerted any of the government agencies using Ptech software that there were questions about the company's ties to suspected terrorist fund-raisers ...
When we first heard whistleblower Indira Singh tell her story it sounded so incredible that we would have found it unbelievable, except that we had already encountered stories like it in Venice, of witnesses bullied and intimidated by authorities into silence.
For example, the FBI was all over tenants at the Sandpiper Apartments across the street from the Venice Airport, to keep them from talking about Mohamed Atta's two-month long 'shack-up' with an American girlfriend named Amanda Keller.
In addition to warning Keller not to talk, a warning she took so seriously she left town and disappeared from view, FBI agents bullied and intimidated apartment residents who remembered the pair, and even the apartment manager of the complex, Charles Grapentine, an ex-marine, who told us grimly, "They called me a liar, and told me to keep my mouth shut. Nobody likes to hear that: that they didn't see something they know they saw."
Atta and Amanda's next door neighbor, a 50-year old housewife named Stephanie Frederickson, confirmed the apartment manager's remarks.
"The question they asked was always the same," she told us. "You aren't saying anything to anybody, are you?"
Now, it seems that FBI agents in Boston were engaged in equally-dubious behavior. Mistakes, malfeasance, and even missed opportunities to avert the Sept 11 attack... There's been a regular drumbeat of depressing news about the FBI.
Singh told us that disgruntled Boston FBI agents told her privately that their hands were tied on Ptech, because, they said, "Saudis have been given a free pass for 9/11."
"And that," says Singh, "is when I began to get really scared."''
Friday, March 11, 2005
Pravda
At the helm at the New York Times .
William E. Kennard was elected to the Board of Directors of The New York Times Company in 2001.
Mr. Kennard joined The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm, in May 2001 as a managing director in the global telecommunications and media group. Before joining The Carlyle Group, Mr. Kennard served as Chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission from November 1997 to January 2001.
Like you couldn't tell.
William E. Kennard was elected to the Board of Directors of The New York Times Company in 2001.
Mr. Kennard joined The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm, in May 2001 as a managing director in the global telecommunications and media group. Before joining The Carlyle Group, Mr. Kennard served as Chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission from November 1997 to January 2001.
Like you couldn't tell.
Mind Control and the U.S. Military (Part 1): We're Gonna Pump You Up
American soldiers traumatised by fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are to be offered the drug ecstasy to help free them of flashbacks and recurring nightmares.
The US food and drug administration has given the go-ahead for the soldiers to be included in an experiment to see if MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, can treat post-traumatic stress disorder.
Oh, really? What I learned was more along the lines of this:
MDMA (3-4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine) is a synthetic, psychoactive drug chemically similar to the stimulant methamphetamine and the hallucinogen mescaline...
Research in animals indicates that MDMA is neurotoxic; whether or not this is also true in humans is currently an area of intense investigation. MDMA can also be dangerous to health and, on rare occasions, lethal.
MDMA exerts its primary effects in the brain on neurons that use the chemical serotonin to communicate with other neurons. The serotonin system plays an important role in regulating mood, aggression, sexual activity, sleep, and sensitivity to pain...
Cognitive Effects
Chronic users of MDMA perform more poorly than nonusers on certain types of cognitive or memory tasks. Some of these effects may be due to the use of other drugs in combination with MDMA, among other factors.
Physical Effects
In high doses, MDMA can interfere with the body's ability to regulate temperature. This can lead to a sharp increase in body temperature (hyperthermia), resulting in liver, kidney, and cardiovascular system failure.
Because MDMA can interfere with its own metabolism (breakdown within the body), potentially harmful levels can be reached by repeated drug use within short intervals.
Users of MDMA face many of the same risks as users of other stimulants such as cocaine and amphetamines. These include increases in heart rate and blood pressure, a special risk for people with circulatory problems or heart disease, and other symptoms such as muscle tension, involuntary teeth clenching, nausea, blurred vision, faintness, and chills or sweating.
Psychological Effects
These can include confusion, depression, sleep problems, drug craving, and severe anxiety. These problems can occur during and sometimes days or weeks after taking MDMA.
Neurotoxicity
Research in animals links MDMA exposure to long-term damage to neurons that are involved in mood, thinking, and judgment. A study in nonhuman primates showed that exposure to MDMA for only 4 days caused damage to serotonin nerve terminals that was evident 6 to 7 years later. While similar neurotoxicity has not been definitively shown in humans, the wealth of animal research indicating MDMA's damaging properties suggests that MDMA is not a safe drug for human consumption.
About the last thing I'd use to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.
Strangely enough, once the Iraq war got going, this got "officially retracted".
Ecstasy has a lot of interesting effects- and believe it, the larger scientific community has in no way retracted what we think about this drug. In fact, you can find a lot of free data- from the NIH, not the DoD, here.
I like this one:
"Ecstasy" (MDMA) and related drugs are amphetamine derivatives that also have some of the pharmacological properties of mescaline. They have become popular with participants in "raves," because they enhance energy, endurance, sociability and sexual arousal...
But these drugs also have serious toxic effects, both acute and chronic, that resemble those previously seen with other amphetamines and are caused by an excess of the same sympathomimetic actions for which the drugs are valued by the users. Neurotoxicity to the serotonergic system in the brain can also cause permanent physical and psychiatric problems. A detailed review of the literature has revealed over 87 "ecstasy"-related fatalities, caused by hyperpyrexia, rhabdomyolysis, intravascular coagulopathy, hepatic necrosis, cardiac arrhythmias, cerebrovascular accidents, and drug-related accidents or suicide. The toxic or even fatal dose range overlaps the range of recreational dosage. The available evidence does not yet permit an accurate assessment of the size of the problem presented by the use of these drugs.
-Harold Kalant, CMAJ. 2001 October 2; 165(7): 917–928.
A Canadian journal, mind you.
On the other hand, if I wanted to keep my troops wired, fired, bonded, and fighting crazy...
The use of psychotropic drugs in soldiers is not new.
In fact, these guys had great success with these in their war- until, of course, reality caught up with them.
The US food and drug administration has given the go-ahead for the soldiers to be included in an experiment to see if MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, can treat post-traumatic stress disorder.
Oh, really? What I learned was more along the lines of this:
MDMA (3-4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine) is a synthetic, psychoactive drug chemically similar to the stimulant methamphetamine and the hallucinogen mescaline...
Research in animals indicates that MDMA is neurotoxic; whether or not this is also true in humans is currently an area of intense investigation. MDMA can also be dangerous to health and, on rare occasions, lethal.
MDMA exerts its primary effects in the brain on neurons that use the chemical serotonin to communicate with other neurons. The serotonin system plays an important role in regulating mood, aggression, sexual activity, sleep, and sensitivity to pain...
Cognitive Effects
Chronic users of MDMA perform more poorly than nonusers on certain types of cognitive or memory tasks. Some of these effects may be due to the use of other drugs in combination with MDMA, among other factors.
Physical Effects
In high doses, MDMA can interfere with the body's ability to regulate temperature. This can lead to a sharp increase in body temperature (hyperthermia), resulting in liver, kidney, and cardiovascular system failure.
Because MDMA can interfere with its own metabolism (breakdown within the body), potentially harmful levels can be reached by repeated drug use within short intervals.
Users of MDMA face many of the same risks as users of other stimulants such as cocaine and amphetamines. These include increases in heart rate and blood pressure, a special risk for people with circulatory problems or heart disease, and other symptoms such as muscle tension, involuntary teeth clenching, nausea, blurred vision, faintness, and chills or sweating.
Psychological Effects
These can include confusion, depression, sleep problems, drug craving, and severe anxiety. These problems can occur during and sometimes days or weeks after taking MDMA.
Neurotoxicity
Research in animals links MDMA exposure to long-term damage to neurons that are involved in mood, thinking, and judgment. A study in nonhuman primates showed that exposure to MDMA for only 4 days caused damage to serotonin nerve terminals that was evident 6 to 7 years later. While similar neurotoxicity has not been definitively shown in humans, the wealth of animal research indicating MDMA's damaging properties suggests that MDMA is not a safe drug for human consumption.
About the last thing I'd use to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.
Strangely enough, once the Iraq war got going, this got "officially retracted".
Ecstasy has a lot of interesting effects- and believe it, the larger scientific community has in no way retracted what we think about this drug. In fact, you can find a lot of free data- from the NIH, not the DoD, here.
I like this one:
"Ecstasy" (MDMA) and related drugs are amphetamine derivatives that also have some of the pharmacological properties of mescaline. They have become popular with participants in "raves," because they enhance energy, endurance, sociability and sexual arousal...
But these drugs also have serious toxic effects, both acute and chronic, that resemble those previously seen with other amphetamines and are caused by an excess of the same sympathomimetic actions for which the drugs are valued by the users. Neurotoxicity to the serotonergic system in the brain can also cause permanent physical and psychiatric problems. A detailed review of the literature has revealed over 87 "ecstasy"-related fatalities, caused by hyperpyrexia, rhabdomyolysis, intravascular coagulopathy, hepatic necrosis, cardiac arrhythmias, cerebrovascular accidents, and drug-related accidents or suicide. The toxic or even fatal dose range overlaps the range of recreational dosage. The available evidence does not yet permit an accurate assessment of the size of the problem presented by the use of these drugs.
-Harold Kalant, CMAJ. 2001 October 2; 165(7): 917–928.
A Canadian journal, mind you.
On the other hand, if I wanted to keep my troops wired, fired, bonded, and fighting crazy...
The use of psychotropic drugs in soldiers is not new.
In fact, these guys had great success with these in their war- until, of course, reality caught up with them.
Thursday, March 10, 2005
Evolution and Entropy
Think of it this way: which requires more food- a cold blooded 300 lbs crocodile that eats every week, or a warm blooded 300 lbs tiger that eats every day?
Both are highly evolved; but from our perspective, the more advanced tiger beats the croc every time. This is because the tiger has specialized in a set of tools that enable it to use more of its environment's energy. Here, the energy is in the form of the living material that constitute its prey.
All energy in our biosphere derives from the sun.
At some point, a billion years ago on a world where the core is constantly torn between the gravitational influence of a large moon and its solar primary, water oscillates wildly between gas, liquid, and solid phase. The churning, electrostatically charged atmosphere and the turbulent heated mantle interact at the surface, releasing energy that provided an environment where organic molecules could stabily replicate themselves. The molecules that formed complexes that did it the best used the energy in the environment to release heat.
Only a few of the infinite combinations did this well, so they predominated. The ones that survived best in this world were those that were able to propagate an advantage for themselves, and so the long road to evolution began. This evolutionary process is driven by entropy, because the more evolved organisms have an advantage over their resource competitors that enable them to better utilize their environment and propagate themselves through space and time.
The ones that are less efficient soon cease to exist- or find a niche that no longer competes with the organisms with the selective advantage.
From the acquisition of mitochondria to utilize oxygen in eukaryotes, to the aquisition of chloroplasts in plants, to the development of multicellularity, or a backbone, or the ability to use air as an oxygen source, each mutation that survives confers an advantage to the organism.
There are poor mutations that confer disadvantage that are quickly weeded ot.
There are mutations that are neither helpful nor a problem: and the genetic mechanism is again selected that retains these diverse elements in the population against the day an ice age begins, or insolation increases or decreases, or some unforseen novel event makes a neutral mutation bouncing around the gene pool a sudden advantage.
And again, what constitutes an advantage in the Jungle of Life? A trait that enables an organism to better utilize the energy present in the environment for survival and propagation. Living systems must use an energy source to run their bodies that releases free energy, creates heat, and increases entropy. This is called the Gibbs Free Energy relation: dG = dH - T(dS).
Energetically, the second law of thermodynamics favors the formation of the majority of all known complex and ordered chemical compounds directly from their simpler elements. Thus, contrary to popular opinion, the second law does not dictate the decrease of ordered structure in its predictions, it only demands a "spreading out" of energy in all processes.
In short: evolution, like life itself, requires an increase in entropy and is always accompanied by an increase in entropy.
It's just that the laws of thermodynamics that make most macroscopic events possible are such a given in our perception of the universe that we don't have to write them down.
This has to do with most of the silly things Creationists say.
Take, for example, their confusion about phenomena like the Sun. A creationist will point at the Sun and say there's surely an example that the Will of God violates all our scientific mumbo-jumbo. I say it's more a case of the misunderstanding of the ignorant being unable to decipher what the mumbo-jumbo means.
The laws of thermodynamics- or gravity- or evolution- are manifestations of the special cases of the natural laws that a Newton or a Darwin could percieve in our 4 dimensional universe.
A particle physicist would tell you that there are more dimensions than 4 that make up our universe. Exactly how many is something for people that understand the math to argue about. A big problem is that we're limited to the scale of the universe we can intuitively grasp, and by what the neuronal wetware in even the brightest of our skulls can process.
Presumably if intelligence keeps getting selected for, we'll keep getting smarter- or at least the ones of us that survive to reproduce will.
But something like the Sun or any thermonuclear reaction is a great example of a macroscopic event that's heavily dependent of those quantum dimensional interactions.
Energy isn't created- but the particle interactions on a scale we're incapable of intuitively understanding make the energy release inevitable.
[ posted as a comment to a post of DarkSyd's ]
Both are highly evolved; but from our perspective, the more advanced tiger beats the croc every time. This is because the tiger has specialized in a set of tools that enable it to use more of its environment's energy. Here, the energy is in the form of the living material that constitute its prey.
All energy in our biosphere derives from the sun.
At some point, a billion years ago on a world where the core is constantly torn between the gravitational influence of a large moon and its solar primary, water oscillates wildly between gas, liquid, and solid phase. The churning, electrostatically charged atmosphere and the turbulent heated mantle interact at the surface, releasing energy that provided an environment where organic molecules could stabily replicate themselves. The molecules that formed complexes that did it the best used the energy in the environment to release heat.
Only a few of the infinite combinations did this well, so they predominated. The ones that survived best in this world were those that were able to propagate an advantage for themselves, and so the long road to evolution began. This evolutionary process is driven by entropy, because the more evolved organisms have an advantage over their resource competitors that enable them to better utilize their environment and propagate themselves through space and time.
The ones that are less efficient soon cease to exist- or find a niche that no longer competes with the organisms with the selective advantage.
From the acquisition of mitochondria to utilize oxygen in eukaryotes, to the aquisition of chloroplasts in plants, to the development of multicellularity, or a backbone, or the ability to use air as an oxygen source, each mutation that survives confers an advantage to the organism.
There are poor mutations that confer disadvantage that are quickly weeded ot.
There are mutations that are neither helpful nor a problem: and the genetic mechanism is again selected that retains these diverse elements in the population against the day an ice age begins, or insolation increases or decreases, or some unforseen novel event makes a neutral mutation bouncing around the gene pool a sudden advantage.
And again, what constitutes an advantage in the Jungle of Life? A trait that enables an organism to better utilize the energy present in the environment for survival and propagation. Living systems must use an energy source to run their bodies that releases free energy, creates heat, and increases entropy. This is called the Gibbs Free Energy relation: dG = dH - T(dS).
Energetically, the second law of thermodynamics favors the formation of the majority of all known complex and ordered chemical compounds directly from their simpler elements. Thus, contrary to popular opinion, the second law does not dictate the decrease of ordered structure in its predictions, it only demands a "spreading out" of energy in all processes.
In short: evolution, like life itself, requires an increase in entropy and is always accompanied by an increase in entropy.
It's just that the laws of thermodynamics that make most macroscopic events possible are such a given in our perception of the universe that we don't have to write them down.
This has to do with most of the silly things Creationists say.
Take, for example, their confusion about phenomena like the Sun. A creationist will point at the Sun and say there's surely an example that the Will of God violates all our scientific mumbo-jumbo. I say it's more a case of the misunderstanding of the ignorant being unable to decipher what the mumbo-jumbo means.
The laws of thermodynamics- or gravity- or evolution- are manifestations of the special cases of the natural laws that a Newton or a Darwin could percieve in our 4 dimensional universe.
A particle physicist would tell you that there are more dimensions than 4 that make up our universe. Exactly how many is something for people that understand the math to argue about. A big problem is that we're limited to the scale of the universe we can intuitively grasp, and by what the neuronal wetware in even the brightest of our skulls can process.
Presumably if intelligence keeps getting selected for, we'll keep getting smarter- or at least the ones of us that survive to reproduce will.
But something like the Sun or any thermonuclear reaction is a great example of a macroscopic event that's heavily dependent of those quantum dimensional interactions.
Energy isn't created- but the particle interactions on a scale we're incapable of intuitively understanding make the energy release inevitable.
[ posted as a comment to a post of DarkSyd's ]
It's Against the Law to do Business with Iran.
It's Treason, even.
Unless, of course, you're Halliburton.
U.S. companies aren't supposed to do business here.
Yet, in January, Halliburton won a contract to drill at a huge Iranian gas field called Pars, which an Iranian government spokesman said "served the interests" of Iran.
"I am baffled that any American company would want to have employees operating in Iran," says Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. "I would think they'd be ashamed."
Halliburton says the operation — videotaped by NBC News — is entirely legal. It's run by a subsidiary called "Halliburton Products and Services Limited," based outside the U.S. In fact, the law allows foreign subsidiaries of U.S. corporations to do business in Iran under strict conditions.
Other U.S. oil services companies, like Weatherford and Baker Hughes, also are in Iran. And foreign subsidiaries of NBC's parent company, General Electric, have sold equipment to Iran, though the company says it will make no more sales...
For Halliburton to have done this legally, the foreign subsidiary operating in Iran must be independent of the main operation in Texas. Yet, when an NBC producer approached managers in Iran, he was sent to company officials in Dubai. But they said only Halliburton headquarters in Houston could talk about operations in Iran.
Once again, some of us animals are more equal than others.
Thanks to Tom Tomorrow for the link.
Unless, of course, you're Halliburton.
U.S. companies aren't supposed to do business here.
Yet, in January, Halliburton won a contract to drill at a huge Iranian gas field called Pars, which an Iranian government spokesman said "served the interests" of Iran.
"I am baffled that any American company would want to have employees operating in Iran," says Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. "I would think they'd be ashamed."
Halliburton says the operation — videotaped by NBC News — is entirely legal. It's run by a subsidiary called "Halliburton Products and Services Limited," based outside the U.S. In fact, the law allows foreign subsidiaries of U.S. corporations to do business in Iran under strict conditions.
Other U.S. oil services companies, like Weatherford and Baker Hughes, also are in Iran. And foreign subsidiaries of NBC's parent company, General Electric, have sold equipment to Iran, though the company says it will make no more sales...
For Halliburton to have done this legally, the foreign subsidiary operating in Iran must be independent of the main operation in Texas. Yet, when an NBC producer approached managers in Iran, he was sent to company officials in Dubai. But they said only Halliburton headquarters in Houston could talk about operations in Iran.
Once again, some of us animals are more equal than others.
Thanks to Tom Tomorrow for the link.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
What the NeoTheoCons Don't Want You to Know
Science is a particular way of knowing about the world. In science, explanations are restricted to those that can be inferred from confirmable data—the results obtained through observations and experiments that can be substantiated by other scientists. Anything that can be observed or measured is amenable to scientific investigation. Explanations that cannot be based on empirical evidence are not a part of science.
The National Academy of Science is so concerned about fundamentalists destroying the educational base of this country they've put a whole textbook, Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science online.
It's totally free, very easy to read, and very enjoyable.
If the natural world, facts, and the reason why rational thought works is at all appealing to you.
Read it. Point it out to a friend. It's got nice graphics that can, of course, be exploded for close examination by clicking on the image.
And if you didn't know this stuff, you might walk away from it feeling a little more rational.
And if you do know this stuff, you will appreciate the reason in the world even more.
The National Academy of Science is so concerned about fundamentalists destroying the educational base of this country they've put a whole textbook, Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science online.
It's totally free, very easy to read, and very enjoyable.
If the natural world, facts, and the reason why rational thought works is at all appealing to you.
Read it. Point it out to a friend. It's got nice graphics that can, of course, be exploded for close examination by clicking on the image.
And if you didn't know this stuff, you might walk away from it feeling a little more rational.
And if you do know this stuff, you will appreciate the reason in the world even more.
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
The PNAC-AEI Delegate at the UN
President George W. Bush just tapped a man known for hating the United Nations to serve as U.S. ambassador to the UN...
He began excoriating evil in the Reagan administration when, despite a lack of experience in developing countries, he held a series of posts in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) before winding up as one of Attorney General Edwin Meese's top aides.
In that capacity, he resisted all efforts by Congress to investigate the Justice Department role in the Iran-Contra affair, as well as efforts by Sen. John Kerry to investigate drug and gun-running by the Nicaraguan contras in the mid-1980s.
His effectiveness gained him a promotion under President H.W. Bush to the position of assistant secretary of state for international organizations, a post he held until 1993 when he joined first the right-wing Manhattan Institute and then the neoconservative-dominated American Enterprise Institute (AEI)...
In the summer of 2001, he shocked foreign delegations and non-governmental organizations at the UN Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons when he announced that Washington would oppose any attempt to regulate the trade in firearms or non-military rifles or any other effort that would "abrogat (e) the constitutional right to bear arms."
He played a similar role several months later when, amid the public shock that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the anthrax scare, Bolton single-handedly sabotaged a UN meeting to forge an international verification protocol designed to put teeth into a treaty on bioweapons...
Bolton was also engaged in a lengthy argument with U.S. intelligence agencies over his public charge that Cuba had an offensive biological warfare program. His assertion became an embarrassment after anonymous intelligence officials and retired senior military officers—including the former head of the U.S. Southern Command—told the media that no such evidence existed and charged that Bolton was politicizing intelligence.
In July 2003, Bolton was poised to testify to Congress that Syria's alleged programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction had developed to such an extent that they threatened regional stability, an assertion that reportedly provoked a ''revolt'' by U.S. intelligence analysts, who insisted that the evidence did not warrant such a conclusion...
What a career.
And an on-the-record liar to the Senate about the presence of WMD in Syria.
Fortunately, at the time there were still enough honest people in the CIA to stop this disinformation train before it got out of the station.
There still are; unfortunately their careers- if not their lives- are now at risk if they don't play the game: praise democracy while killing it..
He began excoriating evil in the Reagan administration when, despite a lack of experience in developing countries, he held a series of posts in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) before winding up as one of Attorney General Edwin Meese's top aides.
In that capacity, he resisted all efforts by Congress to investigate the Justice Department role in the Iran-Contra affair, as well as efforts by Sen. John Kerry to investigate drug and gun-running by the Nicaraguan contras in the mid-1980s.
His effectiveness gained him a promotion under President H.W. Bush to the position of assistant secretary of state for international organizations, a post he held until 1993 when he joined first the right-wing Manhattan Institute and then the neoconservative-dominated American Enterprise Institute (AEI)...
In the summer of 2001, he shocked foreign delegations and non-governmental organizations at the UN Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons when he announced that Washington would oppose any attempt to regulate the trade in firearms or non-military rifles or any other effort that would "abrogat (e) the constitutional right to bear arms."
He played a similar role several months later when, amid the public shock that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the anthrax scare, Bolton single-handedly sabotaged a UN meeting to forge an international verification protocol designed to put teeth into a treaty on bioweapons...
Bolton was also engaged in a lengthy argument with U.S. intelligence agencies over his public charge that Cuba had an offensive biological warfare program. His assertion became an embarrassment after anonymous intelligence officials and retired senior military officers—including the former head of the U.S. Southern Command—told the media that no such evidence existed and charged that Bolton was politicizing intelligence.
In July 2003, Bolton was poised to testify to Congress that Syria's alleged programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction had developed to such an extent that they threatened regional stability, an assertion that reportedly provoked a ''revolt'' by U.S. intelligence analysts, who insisted that the evidence did not warrant such a conclusion...
What a career.
And an on-the-record liar to the Senate about the presence of WMD in Syria.
Fortunately, at the time there were still enough honest people in the CIA to stop this disinformation train before it got out of the station.
There still are; unfortunately their careers- if not their lives- are now at risk if they don't play the game: praise democracy while killing it..
More Faces Behind the Curtain.
Meet Morton Blackwell.
Blackwell, as it turns out, is one of the founding members of the ugly side of the American Conservative movement. He was there at the creation with jokers like Brent Bozell, William F. Buckley, and Phyllis Schlafly. His "non-partisan" Leadership Institute has trained thousands of conservative footsoldiers, including Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed...
This guy Blackwell is a long time GOP operative. Started as a Young Republican and since the 70's has run an outfit called the Leadership Institute... who gave him the $8,230,655 budget they spent in 2000 grooming young people to train tens of thousands of students to be GOP activists?
And...
Blackwell was executive director of the College Republican National Committee from 1965 to 1970, back when it became a school for Nixonian dirty tricks that turned out Karl Rove, Lee Atwater, Terry Dolan, and Roger Stone...
In 1979, Blackwell founded the Leadership Institute, which has been devoted for 25 years to turning out right-wing activists and journalists. Karl Rove is its best-known graduate.
So Rove trained in two groups run by this guy? And Blackwell's another member of the Council on National Policy whose stated aim is to reshape America in their image.
What do these guy want to do?
Founded in 1981, its first president was Tim LaHaye famed millenialist preacher and writer of the Left Behind series of popular books about the "end-times" and the Second Coming of Christ...
...affiliated with the John Birch Society...
...subsidizing efforts to prove blacks are genetically inferior to whites.
...replace American law with "biblical law.
into trashing the U.S. Constitution and replacing it with the harsh legal code of the Old Testament. They advocate the death penalty for adulterers, blasphemers, incorrigible teenagers, gay people, "witches" and those who worship "false gods."
Trainers of Karl Rove and Grover Norquist. Major fund raisers for the Wrepublicans. Using cyberspace and the blogsphere in their attack on free speech . It's who we're fighting. The real traitors to the American Dream of personal freedon, the pursuit of happiness, the rule of law, and justice for all.
The American Taliban.
Blackwell, as it turns out, is one of the founding members of the ugly side of the American Conservative movement. He was there at the creation with jokers like Brent Bozell, William F. Buckley, and Phyllis Schlafly. His "non-partisan" Leadership Institute has trained thousands of conservative footsoldiers, including Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed...
This guy Blackwell is a long time GOP operative. Started as a Young Republican and since the 70's has run an outfit called the Leadership Institute... who gave him the $8,230,655 budget they spent in 2000 grooming young people to train tens of thousands of students to be GOP activists?
And...
Blackwell was executive director of the College Republican National Committee from 1965 to 1970, back when it became a school for Nixonian dirty tricks that turned out Karl Rove, Lee Atwater, Terry Dolan, and Roger Stone...
In 1979, Blackwell founded the Leadership Institute, which has been devoted for 25 years to turning out right-wing activists and journalists. Karl Rove is its best-known graduate.
So Rove trained in two groups run by this guy? And Blackwell's another member of the Council on National Policy whose stated aim is to reshape America in their image.
What do these guy want to do?
Founded in 1981, its first president was Tim LaHaye famed millenialist preacher and writer of the Left Behind series of popular books about the "end-times" and the Second Coming of Christ...
...affiliated with the John Birch Society...
...subsidizing efforts to prove blacks are genetically inferior to whites.
...replace American law with "biblical law.
into trashing the U.S. Constitution and replacing it with the harsh legal code of the Old Testament. They advocate the death penalty for adulterers, blasphemers, incorrigible teenagers, gay people, "witches" and those who worship "false gods."
Trainers of Karl Rove and Grover Norquist. Major fund raisers for the Wrepublicans. Using cyberspace and the blogsphere in their attack on free speech . It's who we're fighting. The real traitors to the American Dream of personal freedon, the pursuit of happiness, the rule of law, and justice for all.
The American Taliban.
Sunday, March 06, 2005
Hydrogen on the cheap.
Pharyngula points to this:
The hydrogenosome is a special organelle found in eukaryotic microbes as well as some fungi that like to live in poor oxygen environments.
In order to generate energy for the cell, it oxidizes pyruvate and releases hydrogen and produces ATP. Sound familiar? In fact, hydrogenosomes have an uncanny likeness to mitochondria--not only do both organelles produce ATP, but morphologically they are similar--they are both surrounded by a double membrane and they both compartmentalize their different metabolic functions.
The only big difference between the two is that hydrogenosomes use the anaerobic (fermentative) pathway while mitochondria use the aerobic pathway (Krebs cycle).
Some of us like to splice and dice genomes.
When asked whether there was any chance of putting a hydrogenosome in a blue-green algae (or maybe better a eukaryote algae?) and coupling photosynthesis to hydrogen generation- creating a commercially viable fuel source-producing recombinant, Syaffolee suggests a better alternative would be the cultivation of a naturally occuring green algae, Scenedesmus.
The significance of all this is that we don't need to burn fossil fuels to generate hydrogen fuels for automobiles or industry.
We could cultivate specific strains of algae that use photosynthesis to generate hydrogen on their own. Or engineer improvements in these microorganisms to get it on an industrial production line.
It means cheap energy to fuel industrial growth about as expensive as sunlight once the process is worked out.
That's why Bu$hCo wants to suppress science.
The hydrogenosome is a special organelle found in eukaryotic microbes as well as some fungi that like to live in poor oxygen environments.
In order to generate energy for the cell, it oxidizes pyruvate and releases hydrogen and produces ATP. Sound familiar? In fact, hydrogenosomes have an uncanny likeness to mitochondria--not only do both organelles produce ATP, but morphologically they are similar--they are both surrounded by a double membrane and they both compartmentalize their different metabolic functions.
The only big difference between the two is that hydrogenosomes use the anaerobic (fermentative) pathway while mitochondria use the aerobic pathway (Krebs cycle).
Some of us like to splice and dice genomes.
When asked whether there was any chance of putting a hydrogenosome in a blue-green algae (or maybe better a eukaryote algae?) and coupling photosynthesis to hydrogen generation- creating a commercially viable fuel source-producing recombinant, Syaffolee suggests a better alternative would be the cultivation of a naturally occuring green algae, Scenedesmus.
The significance of all this is that we don't need to burn fossil fuels to generate hydrogen fuels for automobiles or industry.
We could cultivate specific strains of algae that use photosynthesis to generate hydrogen on their own. Or engineer improvements in these microorganisms to get it on an industrial production line.
It means cheap energy to fuel industrial growth about as expensive as sunlight once the process is worked out.
That's why Bu$hCo wants to suppress science.
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