how long had osama's whereabouts been known?

Video - Satellite pictures of Osama bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad,

Counterpunch | And Osama? What about Osama bin Laden? Now we know that the US knew of his whereabouts; they knew of the trail, they asked Leigh and Keller to remove relevant references. Why didn’t they capture him or kill him earlier?

OBL’s organisation did what the US authorities wanted to be done. They fought the Russians and ruined Afghanistan. They conspired and fought against Hezbollah, slaughtered Shias in Iraq, undermined Qaddafi, hated Hamas and Iran. They supported ethnic cleansing of ‘infidels’ in Chechnya and in the Balkans. They never ever attacked Israel: they preserved their vigor for Sayyed Nasrallah. Like a dreadful beast nurtured in the CIA secret labs, only once they reportedly rebelled against their merciless creator - on 9/11. Osama was greater than, but similar to such American friends as Jonas Savimbi of Angola or Shamil Basayev of Chechnya, and hopefully after his death his organization will vanish like Unita and Basayev did.

The Guantanamo files reveal utter wretchedness of Osama’s unlucky followers. With exception of a few dozen close associates, the rest of the prisoners made a wrong choice ever listening to him. They (especially foreigners) were idealists, who wanted to establish the Kingdom of God upon the earth; they were encouraged by the US to flock to Afghanistan to fight the Commies. The majority of them never even had a chance to hold the gun. They, the foreigners in Afghanistan and Pakistan were sold for bounty to the Americans as fast as possible. They paid for this by years of torture. And now they are about to learn that their supreme chief was safeguarded by the same Americans who tortured them!

But in the mind of the Muslim masses OBL will be remembered (justly or not) as the architect of the only successful response of the oppressed to the Empire on its own soil. And that ensured him greatness of his own and a place in history.

assassination details...,

alarabiya | Senior Pakistani security officials said Osama bin Laden’s daughter had confirmed her father was captured alive and shot dead by the US Special Forces during the first few minutes of the operation carried out at the huge compound in Bilal Town, Abbottabad. 



Besides recovering four bullet-riddled bodies from the compound, Pakistani security agencies also arrested two women and six children, aged between 2 and 12 years, after American forces flew toward Afghanistan. Some reports suggest 16 people, including women and children, were arrested from the house, most of them Arab nationals.

A Pakistani security source told Al Arabiya that Bin Laden family members had been transported to Rawalpindi, which is near Islamabad. He added, “They are now under treatment in the military hospital of Rawalpindi, where they have been transported in an helicopter.” A source told Al Arabiya that Bin Laden’s wife had been injured either in her leg or her shoulder.

He added that the members of the household were children and Bin Laden’s wife, in addition to a Yemeni woman. He added that the woman might be the personal doctor of the family. Bin Laden was known to be afflicted with renal failure. He had reportedly received treatment in Hyderabad, India, before the 9/11 attacks.

Sources speculated that US Forces could not arrest these family members because there weren’t enough places for them in the helicopter, after they lost another chopper during the operation.

About the slain woman: officials said she could either be Bin Laden’s wife or a close family member since she offered to sacrifice her life for him. “As per our information, she shielded Bin Laden during the operation and was killed by American commandos,” an official said. 


The US Special Forces only took two bodies with them in the military chopper; one is said to be Bin Laden’s and the other his son’s. By the time Pakistani security agencies and soldiers arrived at the spot, the US commandos were flying over the mountains in the Pakistani tribal belt, well on their way to Afghanistan. 



Sources said one of the two women taken into custody from the compound by Pakistani forces was one of Osama bin Laden’s several wives.

“She is Yemeni and became unconscious during the operation,” said an official. Pleading anonymity, he said the woman was provided necessary medical aid till she became conscious. 



“During preliminary investigations, the lady said they moved to the Abbottabad house five to six months ago,” the Pakistani official said, adding that she did not provide further information about bin Laden or his shifting to the house. 



The official said a 12-year-old daughter of bin Laden was among the six children rescued from the three-storey compound.

The daughter has reportedly told her Pakistani investigators that the US forces captured her father alive but shot him dead in front of family members. 



According to sources, Bin Laden was staying on the ground floor of the house and was dragged on the floor to the helicopter after being shot dead by US commandos. 



profile of states

Sources (all via States Perform ):
[1] U.S. Census Bureau, 2009 American Community Survey
[2] SAMHSA, Office of Applied Studies, National Survey on Drug Use and Health
Illicit drug use by those age 12+ in the past month. Illicit drugs include marijuana/hashish,
cocaine (including crack), heroin, hallucinogens, inhalants, or prescription-type psychotherapeutics used nonmedically. Based on the results from the 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health.
[3] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Division of STD Prevention, Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance 2008: November 2009
[4] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Division of STD Prevention, Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance 2008: November 2009
[5] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Division of STD Prevention, Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance 2008: November
[6] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Divisions of HIV/AIDS
prevention, Reported AIDS cases and annual rates (per 100,000 population), by area of residence, 2006, 2007 and cumulative United States and dependent areas: 2009
[7] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, Tobacco Use 2008: 2009
[8] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2008 Overweight and Obesity (BMI): 2009

are mexican oil politics keeping riches just out of reach?

NYTimes | To the Mexican people, one of the great achievements in their history was the day their president kicked out foreign oil companies in 1938. Thus, they celebrate March 18 as a civic holiday.

Yet today, that 72-year-old act has put Mexico in a straitjacket, one that threatens both the welfare of the country and the oil supply of the United States.

The national oil company created after the 1938 seizure, Pemex, is entering a period of turmoil. Oil production in its aging fields is sagging so rapidly that Mexico, long one of the world’s top oil-exporting countries, could begin importing oil within the decade.

Mexico is among the three leading foreign suppliers of oil to the United States, along with Canada and Saudi Arabia. Mexican barrels can be replaced, but at a cost. It means greater American dependence on unfriendly countries like Venezuela, unstable countries like Nigeria and Iraq, and on the oil sands of Canada, an environmentally destructive form of oil production.

“As you lose Mexican oil, you lose a critical supply,” said Jeremy M. Martin, director of the energy program at the Institute of the Americas at the University of California, San Diego. “It’s not just about energy security but national security, because our neighbor’s economic and political well-being is largely linked to its capacity to produce and export oil.”

Mexico probably still has plenty of oil, especially beneath the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, but Pemex lacks the technology and know-how to get it out. Inviting foreign companies into the country to help is one of the touchiest propositions in Mexican politics.

As the Mexican government struggles to find a way forward, production keeps falling.

The basic problem is simply that Mexico’s readily accessible oil is used up — pretty much the same thing that happened to the United States when production began falling in the 1970s. Output from Mexico’s giant Cantarell field, in shallow waters near the eastern shore, has plunged by 50 percent in recent years. Output at the country’s other large field is expected to begin falling in the next year or two.

Historically, oil has supplied 30 to 40 percent of the Mexican government’s revenue. Confronting a potential calamity, President Felipe Calderón has pushed through the strongest reforms he can defend politically, in hopes of attracting foreign investment. But he dare not do anything that would appear to reverse the 1938 nationalization. Even the modest reforms he has managed to pass are being challenged in court.

Officially, the government is optimistic that Mexico can reverse its decline as an oil-producing nation. But its efforts so far have yielded more rhetoric than oil.

Last year, on the day celebrating the 1938 seizure, the president’s helicopter landed in a hilly oil field outside this farming town. He announced that a new era of Mexican gushers would dawn soon.

“Under this soil,” Mr. Calderón told thousands of oil workers, lay “the richness that could propel development in our country and help Mexico accelerate our path to progress and well-being.” He promised that 20 wells would be spurting crude “very soon” from the ground on which he stood.

Almost a year later, only three wells were pumping on a recent afternoon. Eleven had been shut after producing little or no oil. In fact, the effort to develop the geologically challenging Chicontepec field here, near the gulf coast, is deteriorating into an embarrassing disaster for Pemex, the latest in a string of them.

In all, Mexican oil output has dropped from just short of 3.5 million barrels a day in 2004 to a projected average of 2.5 million barrels this year. Mexican oil exports to the United States, now 1.1 million barrels a day, have fallen by nearly a third in the last six years.

The United States Energy Department projects that Mexican production will decline by an additional 600,000 barrels a day by 2020; combined with growing domestic demand, that would probably make the country an oil importer.

In the last two years, Mexico provided about 12 percent of all crude oil imports to the United States, supplying about 8 percent of the total oil used by American refineries, according to the Energy Department.

Pemex — officially Petróleos Mexicanos — is the most important company in Mexico, employing 140,000 people. Oil money is used for everything from building schools to fighting the war against drug cartels.

“The fact that Mexico’s production is rapidly declining could potentially cause a financial crisis not only for Pemex but for the government,” said Enrique Sira, the Mexico director of IHS Cera, an energy consulting firm.

complaining about mosquitos while a crocodile bites your leg

Post Carbon Institute | Last week, in a repeat of 2008, reports of fat earnings from the oil majors were met with blame and outrage from American consumers, who are stressed from $4+ gas prices and strapped finances. Exxon Mobil, the 18th-largest oil company in the world, with about 3% of world production (~4million barrels of oil equivalent per day), reported quarterly earnings of $10.7 billion dollars. Americans are upset because they envision such hefty profits as direct transfers from their thin pocketbooks to Exxon, itself the recipient of government oil and gas subsidies to boot.

I am not an oil industry apologist, but recognize that I live in an oil-centric world, own a car, enjoy air travel and partake in the daily smorgasbord of food, services, and novelty made possible in the cheap energy age. To me, given the problems our country and government face, blaming Exxon for high gasoline prices and excessive tax subsidies is akin to complaining about a mosquito bite on your arm when a crocodile has your leg in its mouth.

First, it is a stretch to say that Exxon is under-taxed; last year Exxon's worldwide total taxes amounted to $86 billion, or 23% of its revenue (by comparison, at this country's second-largest corporation — Apple, Inc. — taxes were 6.9% of revenue. Yet Exxon understandably is a lightning rod, because the ~3 cents per gallon it makes as the world's largest refiner add up to very large numbers. And yes they make large sums on their oil production when commodity prices rise more than costs. But these are two sides of the wrong argument, and are not the real story.

Under a lens of ecology and biophysical economics, the vitriol being expressed at the Exxon is misplaced at best and counterproductive at worst. Though our culture perceives dollars and digits in the bank as wealth, in reality they are only markers. Our real wealth comes from the sun, including its direct daily insolation, its role in photosynthesis (which creates biomass, including fossil fuels), and its pushing natural and hydrological cycles that perform vital services to our species and others.

Our primary wealth is our finite endowment of resources, like oil and gas, timber, water, and minerals. We extract resources from this natural "bank account" and combine them with human ingenuity and technology to produce things we can use, such as tractors, houses, and clothing. Our socio-political system then overlays monetary tokens: stocks, bonds, bank deposits and cash that function as markers of our real wealth, markers that are increasingly disconnected from the reality of our natural resource balance sheet.

But energy is different from iPads or Doritos in its impact on our lives. The laws of economics (more like guidelines) state that energy, capital and labor are all substitutable. This turns out not to be true; there is no substitution for energy in our economy — every single economic product created requires first an expenditure of energy.

The amount of human labor that oil and other fossil fuels have been able to replace or allocate to other pursuits is gargantuan. The average human can generate only about 0.6 kilowatt-hours per day from physical effort, which, based on median U.S. salaries, equates to more than $300 per kWh generated by human labor. Oil, even at $110 per barrel, costs us just 6 cents per kWh, or 500 times cheaper than human labor. This replacement of human effort with fossil fuels has been the single primary driver of economic riches of the past couple of generations. For all intents and purposes, on human time scales, oil in our lives is indistinguishable from magic.

And it is depleting. U.S. oil production has been in steady decline since its peak in 1970. World production has been stagnant since 2005, despite a tripling in price last decade. The marginal barrel of oil now costs $85, as we are drilling deeper and in harsher environments, and now having to include fuels with lower net BTUs like tar sands, natural gas liquids and ethanol into the oil category just to stay even.

So when Exxon reports $10.7 billion in earnings, this is the monetary accounting of the chemical and kinetic energy it contributed to society in the form of oil and gas sales. This oil and gas then went on to perform myriad other activities in our economy — and 4 million barrels per day is the equivalent of over 2 billion human-days of useable energy. About equal to the working population of the world. Quite a deal actually, for us.

Double "O"

the destruction of economic facts

Businessweek | During the second half of the 19th century, the world's biggest economies endured a series of brutal recessions. At the time, most forms of reliable economic knowledge were organized within feudal, patrimonial, and tribal relationships. If you wanted to know who owned land or owed a debt, it was a fact recorded locally—and most likely shielded from outsiders. At the same time, the world was expanding. Travel between cities and countries became more common and global trade increased. The result was a huge rift between the old, fragmented social order and the needs of a rising, globalizing market economy.

To prevent the breakdown of industrial and commercial progress, hundreds of creative reformers concluded that the world needed a shared set of facts. Knowledge had to be gathered, organized, standardized, recorded, continually updated, and easily accessible—so that all players in the world's widening markets could, in the words of France's free-banking champion Charles Coquelin, "pick up the thousands of filaments that businesses are creating between themselves."

The result was the invention of the first massive "public memory systems" to record and classify—in rule-bound, certified, and publicly accessible registries, titles, balance sheets, and statements of account—all the relevant knowledge available, whether intangible (stocks, commercial paper, deeds, ledgers, contracts, patents, companies, and promissory notes), or tangible (land, buildings, boats, machines, etc.). Knowing who owned and owed, and fixing that information in public records, made it possible for investors to infer value, take risks, and track results. The final product was a revolutionary form of knowledge: "economic facts."

Over the past 20 years, Americans and Europeans have quietly gone about destroying these facts. The very systems that could have provided markets and governments with the means to understand the global financial crisis—and to prevent another one—are being eroded. Governments have allowed shadow markets to develop and reach a size beyond comprehension. Mortgages have been granted and recorded with such inattention that homeowners and banks often don't know and can't prove who owns their homes. In a few short decades the West undercut 150 years of legal reforms that made the global economy possible.

The results are hardly surprising. In the U.S., trust has broken down between banks and subprime mortgage holders; between foreclosing agents and courts; between banks and their investors—even between banks and other banks. Overall, credit (from the Latin for "trust") continues to flow steadily, but closer examination shows that nongovernment credit has contracted. Private lending has dropped 21 percent since 2007. Outstanding loans to small businesses dropped more than 6 percent over the past year, while lending to large businesses, measured in commercial loans of more than $1 million, fell nearly 9 percent.

The importance of economic facts may not be obvious to Americans. "What does the fish know about the water in which it swims?" asked Albert Einstein. But it's easy to grasp from the perspective of the developing and former communist countries where I live and work. In these countries, most of our assets and relationships are in the informal sector, outside the legal economy. Because they're not recorded in public memory systems, they cannot be written up as facts and are, in effect, invisible. All we have are shadow markets.

Without standardization, the values of assets and relationships are so variable that they can't be used to guarantee credit, to generate mortgages and bundle them into securities, to represent them in shares to raise capital. Nor do they fit the standard slots required to enter global markets. That's why credit crunches and massive unemployment are chronic conditions for most people forced to operate in the informal economy. These are the ones you see protesting in the streets of Arab countries or living in tents surrounding Port-au-Prince. We know only too well that facts don't speak for themselves: They have to be constructed through legal processes and kept transparent. They have to be defended, too.

all hail the PUBLIC library..,

Onthecommons | "The word 'public' has been removed from the name of the Fort Worth Library. Why? Simply put, to keep up with the times." From the Media release on the rebranding of the Fort Worth Library

Fort Worth, you leave me speechless. You’re certainly correct about one thing. The public library is indeed an institution that has not kept up with the times. But given what has happened to our times, why do you see that as unhealthy? In an age of greed and selfishness, the public library stands as an enduring monument to the values of cooperation and sharing. In an age where global corporations stride the earth, the public library remains firmly rooted in the local community. In an age of widespread cynicism and distrust of government, the 100 percent tax supported public library has virtually unanimous and enthusiastic support.

This is not the time to take the word “public” out of the public library. It is time to put it in capitals.

The public library is a singularly American invention. Europeans had subscription libraries for 100 years before the United States was born. But on a chilly day in April 1833 the good citizens of Peterborough, New Hampshire created a radical new concept—a truly PUBLIC library. All town residents, regardless of income, had the right to freely share the community’s stored knowledge. Their only obligation was to return the information on time and in good condition, allowing others to exercise that same right.

By the 1870s 11 states boasted 188 public libraries. By 1910 all states had them. Today 9,000 central buildings plus about 7500 branches have made public libraries one of the most ubiquitous of all American institutions, exceeding Starbucks and McDonalds.

Almost two thirds of us carry library cards. At least once a year, about half of us visit a public library, many more than once. Library use varies by class and race and by age and educational level. But the majority of blacks and Latinos as well as whites, old as well as young, poor as well as rich, high school dropouts as well as university graduates, use the public library.

neighborhood tool-sharing

Video - Portland's neighborhood tool sharing libraries.

PeakMoment | Need a tool for a few days? Don’t have it? Neighbor doesn’t have it? Borrow it from your neighborhood tool library! No tool library? Check out Portland, where several neighborhoods have started successful tool libraries just in the last few years. Organizers Tom Thompson, Karen Tarnow and Stephen Couche discuss how they got started, stories of community generosity, and the enthusiastic response of all who stop by. In these neighborhoods, there’s no reason not to grab the tools you need and do that project!

the world's last typewriter factory closes in india

Business Insider | Obsolete technologies don't die right away, they just move to places like India. Such was the case with typewriters, which were produced by Godrej & Boyce in Mumbai until recently.

Now the typewriter era is officially over.

Godrej & Boyce's Milind Dukle tells the Business Standard:

"From the early 2000 onwards, computers started dominating. All the manufacturers of office typewriters stopped production, except us. Till 2009, we used to produce 10,000 to 12,000 machines a year.

"We stopped production in 2009 and were the last company in the world to manufacture office typewriters. Currently, the company has only 500 machines left. The machines are of Godrej Prima, the last typewriter brand from our company, and will be sold at a maximum retail price of Rs 12,000."

The factory has been converted to a refrigerator manufacturing unit.

family bidnis this past weekend...,

Video - Michael Corleone concludes all family business.


Video - Hon.Bro.Preznit says bin laden dead.


Video - Gaddafi survives near miss, youngest son dead.


Video - Hon.Bro.Preznit in swaggerando-delicto on Fauxnews and the donald...,


Video - British women working the hats and outfits.

julian jaynes - poetry and song

All the above discusssion is mere literary tradition and sounds more plea than proof. We should, therefore, ask if there is another way of approaching the matter to show the relationship of poetry to the bicameral mind more scientifically. There is I think, if we look at the relation of poetry to music.

First of all, early poetry was song. The difference between song and speech is a matter of discontinuities of pitch. In ordinary speech, we are constantly changing pitch, even in the pronunciation of a single syllable. But in song, the change of pitch is discrete and discontinuous. Speech reels around all over a certain portion of an octave (in relaxed speech about a fifth). Song steps from note to note on strict and delimited feet over a more extended range.

Modern poetry is a hybrid. It has the metrical feet of song with the pitch glissandos of speech. But ancient poetry is much closer to song. Accents were not by intensity stress as in our ordinary speech, but by pitch. In ancient Greece, this pitch is thought to have been precisely the interval of a fifth above the ground note of the poem, so that on the notes of our scale, dactyls would go GCC, GCC, with no extra emphasis on the G. Moreover, the three extra accents, acute, circumflex, and grave, were, as their notations /,^,\ imply, a rising pitch within the syllable, a rising and falling on the same syllable, and a falling pitch respectively. The result was a poetry sung like plainsong with various auditory ornamentation that gave it beautiful variety.

Now how does all this relate to the bicameral mind? Speech, as has long been known, is a function primarily of the left cerebral hemisphere. But song, as we are presently discovering is primarily a function of the right cerebral hemisphere. The evidence is various but consistent.

• It is common medical knowledge that many elderly patients who have suffered cerebral hemorrhages on the left hemisphere such that they cannot speak can still sing.

• The so-called Wada Test is sometimes performed in hospitals to find out a person's cerebral dominance. Sodium anytal is injected into the carotid artery on one side, putting the corresponding hemisphere under heavy sedation but leaving the other awake and alert. When the injection is made on the left side so that the left hemisphere is sedated and only the right hemisphere is active, the person is unable to speak, but can still sing. When the injection is on the right so that only the left hemisphere is activeactive, the person can speak but cannot sing.

• Patients in whom the entire left hemisphere has been removed because of glioma can only manage a few words, if any, postoperatively. But at least come can sing. One such patient with only a speechless right hemisphere to his name was able to sing "America" and "Home on the Range" rarely missing a word and with nearly perfect enunciation.

• Electrical stimulation on the right hemisphere in regions adjacent to the posterior temporal lobe, particularly the anterior temporal lobe, often produces hallucinations of singing and music. I have already described some of these patients in I.5. And this in general is the area, corresponding to Wernicke's area on the left hemisphere, which I have hypothesized was where the auditory hallucinations of the bicameral mind were organized.

Singing and melody then are primarily right hemisphere activities. And since poetry in antiquity was sung rather than spoken, it was perhaps largely a right hemisphere funtion, as the theory of the bicameral mind in I.5. would predict. More specifically, ancient poetry involved the posterior part of the right temporal lobe, which I have suggested was responsible for organizing divine hallucinations, together with adjacent areas which even today are involved in music.

julian jaynes - poetry was the language of gods

Why has so much of the textual material we have used as evidence in the earlier chapters been poetry? And why does poetry flash with recognitions of thoughts we did not know we had, finding its unsure way to something in us that knows and has known all the time, something, I think, older than the present organization of our nature?

I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were Gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind. The God-side of our ancient mentality, at least in a certain period of history, usually or perhaps always spoke in verse. This means that most men at one time, throughout the day, were hearing poetry (of a sort) composed and spoken within their own minds.The evidence is, of course, only inferential. It is that all of those individuals who remained bicameral into the conscious age, when speaking of or from the divine side of their minds, spoke in poetry.

The great epics of Greece were of course heard and spoken by the aoidoi as poetry. The ancient writings of Mesopotamia and Egypt are darkened with our ignorance of how such languages were pronounced, but with such assurances in transliteration as we can muster, such writings when spoken were also poetry. In India, the oldest literature is the Veda, which were dictated by gods to the rishi or prophets; these too were poetry. Oracles spoke poetry. From time to time, their utterances from Delphi and elsewhere were written down, and every one of them that survives as more than a simple phrase is in dactylic hexameter. The Hebrew prophets also, when realying the hallucinated utterances of Yahweh, were often poets, though their scribes did not in every case preserve such speech in verse.

Poetry then was divine knowledge. And after the breakdown of the bicameral mind, poetry was the sound and tenor of authorization. Poetry commanded where prose could only ask. It felt good. In the wanderings of the Hebrews after the exodus from Egypt, it was the sacred shrine that was carried before the multitude and followed by the people, but it was the poetry of Moses that determined when they would start and when stop, where they would go and where stay.

The association of rhythmical or repetitively patterned utterance with supernatural knowledge endures well into the later conscious period. Among the early Arabic peoples, the word for poet was sha'ir "the knower", or a person endowed with knowledge by the spirits; his metered speech in recitation was the mark of its divine origin. The poet and the divine seer have a long tradition of association in the ancient world, and several Indo-European languages have a common term for them. Rhyme and alliteration too were always the linguistic province of the gods and the prophets. In at least some instances of spontaneous possession, the demonic utterances are in meter. Even glossolalia today, as we have seen in III.2, wherever it is practiced, tends to fall into metrical patterns, particularly dactyls.

Poetry then was the language of gods.

dimming of the globe...,

Video - City lights from space

FCNP | Late last month a newly enhanced web site, www.energyshortage.org, dedicated to collecting articles concerning energy shortages around the world reappeared on the web after an absence of some months. The stories deal with coal, electricity and natural gas shortages as well as oil. In the course of the past month the web site has located and linked to nearly 200 stories that deal with some aspect of the developing global energy shortage. Most of these stories come from local paper and taken together paint a distressing picture of looming societal breakdown in many parts of the world that is not as yet generally appreciated by the public.

Most of the problems reported on deal with electricity shortages - which in several countries have deteriorated to the point where economies are threatened with collapse. In South Asia - Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and later in India - a combination of too many people, hydro-power reducing droughts, depleting fossil fuel reserves and inadequate investment in infrastructure raises the possibility that many urban areas may soon be uninhabitable.

In Pakistan the electricity is now turned off for 18-20 hours some days in many cities and 20 hours in rural villages. The onset of summer temperatures, shortages of fuel oil for thermal generation and falling water levels have increased the power shortfall to record levels. Without electricity to run the pumps urban water supplies quickly shut down. Without power to run the mills, exports are falling, leaving the country without money to import oil. In short we are seeing a classical downward spiral. The lack of electricity to sell is creating serious hardships for electricity companies which can no longer afford to pay for energy - coal, oil, or natural gas - and are being shut off by suppliers.

Pakistan is hoping that increased imports of liquefied natural gas which is for now is relatively plentiful, transportable, and affordable will be a short term solution for economic survival. Over the longer run natural gas pipelines from Iran and Turkmenistan may help someday provided the numerous dissident groups in the area don't blow them up. Demand for electricity in Pakistan is growing at 6-7 percent a year and all agree that building more dams is the best long term solution. This of course requires prodigious amounts of capital and the cooperation of Mother Nature to supply the necessary rains in an era of rapidly changing climatic conditions.

At the other side of the subcontinent is Bangladesh, a country of 158 million people and minimal natural resources. The country is currently generating 4,000 megawatts vs. a demand of 5,500 resulting in rolling blackouts across the country. The real problem however comes in keeping the fresh water flowing. Only half of Dhaka's 577 water pumps are equipped with back-up generators. Falling water tables and falling energy supplies suggest that major humanitarian disasters are not far away.

In the center of the sub-continent lies Nepal. Here the problem is 14 hours a day without power coupled with the inability to pay the Indian oil company for imported oil and gas. The Indians recently reduced fuel supplies to Nepal by 60 percent until the 1.25 billion rupee fuel bill is paid. There is no obvious way out of this situation.

Finally we get to India with its 1.2 billion people and 8 percent annual GDP growth. Although the country has sizeable reserves of coal, oil and natural gas, these are not adequate for a country of this size and rate of growth. Domestic coal production is not meeting the needs of a rapidly growing economy. This year the coal shortfall may be as much as 142 million tons as compared to needs. A few years from now it could be 250 million tons. Rolling blackouts have begun in some parts of the country and the projected demand for ever increasing amounts of expensive imported coal extends into the indefinite future.

China too seems to be facing coal and oil shortages this summer. Despite coal production of 3.2 billion tons a year, this is not sufficient to support the demand for electricity which is increasing at circa 11 percent a year. Beijing, of course, can afford to import all the coal, oil, and natural gas it needs and probably will. The problem will come with local shortages that may force companies to resort to emergency diesel power generation and thereby increase China's demand for imported oil.

america's worst nuclear power plants

a guide to looting

NoBSSurvival | If you’re a law abiding citizen I suggest you don’t read this section. In some historical instances extraordinary measures have been taken against looters during times of crisis. It’s not uncommon in some countries for looters to be shot, either by police, army, or business owners. Some governments will justify the shooting of looters with the excuse of “preventing further damage to the economy”. I suggest you get out of countries that value the economy over your life.

Warnings aside… Let’s get down to business!

What is Looting?
Looting is essentially the act of stealing goods during a catastrophe, riot, war, or natural disaster and can also be referred to as sacking, plundering or pillaging. Looting is almost always opportunistic and usually occurs during a collapse in authority.

Looting can be justified in many ways. Some people may feel that if the goods are not stolen, they will be wasted. Another common belief is that if they don't steal the goods, it will be stolen by someone else. In the aftermath of a large disaster, these beliefs both hold credence and are good reasons for you to be looting!

Preparing
As with any endeavor, preparation is the key to success. In order to take optimal advantage of a disaster and loot effectively you’ll want to get several things handled ahead of time. The next few pages will cover all the information you need to become a master looter.

Make a Looting Kit
There are a few items that will make looting a lot easier. You’ll want to keep these items ready and on hand for when shit hits the fan. They should be kept together in the location for easy access so you just pick them up and go when it’s time.

Crow bar
The ultimate urban survival tool! A nice, heavy crowbar can be used to break into stores, clear your way through rubble and it can be used as a weapon! Don’t underestimate the crowbar. There are a million things you can do with a crowbar, just use your imagination.

Bump keys
These are keys that have been grinded down in such a way that they can be used to open almost any lock. Bump keys are used by locksmiths and they’re relatively easy to use. A crowbar will get you through any door or window but a bump key will get you through without making a mess.

Laundry bag
A strong, large drawstring bag is a definite must for looting. Laundry bags are great for the purpose of looting. They have a large carrying capacity and when empty they can be folded to fit in your pocket. You can always go for a large backpack, duffle bag or rucksack but they’re cumbersome, expensive and made for looks more then anything else.

A dollar coin or quarter
You may be wondering… a dollar coin or quarter? What the hell for? Well the answer may be a lot simpler then you imagine. The coin is for a shopping cart! Just make sure you get one before the other looters! If you don’t want to use a coin, you can always use the crowbar to break the chains holding them together.

Flash light / Lantern
It’s very likely that if the situation permits looting, the power is probably out. Good luck getting over fallen shelves and getting food in the dark. Looting with one hand will also be difficult but there are a few methods around that. I suggest placing the lantern or flash light in the shopping cart, get a head lamp, or just bring someone along to shine the light and push the cart.

Make a Looting Team
Find several friends or family members and make a plan! It’s all about leverage, you can get a lot more done if your work as team. Get everyone together in a room and discuss a plan of action. Here are the questions you’ll want to have answered:

* Under what circumstances will looting take place?
* Where will the goods be kept?
* Who has a vehicle for transportation?
* What are the best locations for looting?
* Should each individual go to a different store?
* Should everyone go as team?
* What goods have priority?

If each person focuses on acquiring a certain type of item, you’ll collectively save a lot of time and effort. What I mean by this is that one person will collect water filters, one person will collect rice and beans, and the other person will collect fuel. That’s just an example and should be customized to fit your team needs.

Mapping and Creating a List of Target Addresses
Get a detailed map of your city and mark off important looting locations. Make a legend with symbols to represent different types of locations, for instance, use a circle for food stores, triangles for hunting/outdoor stores, squares for hospitals and pharmacies etc. A good resource for finding addresses and locations is Google maps, just type in a store name and Google will give you all the addresses for that store in your area. Copy and paste the results into a .txt file and print it out for future use. This map is extremely important and should be kept in a safe area. The map should be copied and distributed among friends and family. Here’s a list of some locations to keep in mind:

* Hospitals
* Restaurants
* Grocery stores
* Large stores and warehouses
* Police stations
* Fire stations
* Factories
* Shipyards
* Pharmacies
* Liquor stores
* Malls
* People’s houses
* Schools
* Sporting good stores
* Outdoor living stores
* Garden stores
* Hardware stores
* Military / Armory bases
* Gas stations
* Air ports
* Shipping container sites
* Hotels

What to Loot
Some items are important to loot and some aren’t. A wide screen TV for instance will not contribute to your chances of survival. The highest priority should be on food and water but depending on location, finding water may be a problem. Water is too heavy to move around so instead of looting water bottles the focus should be on buckets and water filters. The value of money may be worthless in a disaster situation and therefore should not be a high priority. The most important items to loot are as follows:

* Personal medicine (if required)
* Water filters and water
* Rice
* Dried lentils, legumes, beans
* Salt
* Oatmeal
* Whole wheat flour
* Sugar
* Cooking oil
* Coffee
* Money (preferably in change)
* Alcohol
* Cigarettes
* Energy bars
* Coo laid/ electrolytes
* Fuel/oil

Places to Avoid
The family run corner stores should be avoided as the owners actually have an interest in the store. The best historical example to illustrate this point occurred during the LA riots... remember Korea town?. Go for the Walmarts and Super stores as the employees could care less about you looting (they have no vested interest in the store).

Looting When Shit Hits the Fan
You have a plan and you know what to do but now we’ll going into the details of what happens next.
It’s my personal belief that violence will not break out in the first stages of a disaster since food and supplies are still in relative abundance and people have what they need to survive. This has been proven during hurricane Katrina and many other disasters. The first few weeks of a disaster should be spent looting and acquiring resources. Everyone in your team should loot the area and acquire as much as a possible. It’s only after several weeks of looting that gangs and groups will have formed and violence will erupt. Fighting will most likely occur over food and resources. All looting from that time on should be executed with extreme caution.

33 ways to encourage atlas to shrug

Video - Koch funded tea party randian high camp.

Survivalblog | Ayn Rand's 1957 novel "Atlas Shrugged" is enjoying renewed popularity following the release of the new Atlas Shrugged movie. Rand's story describes a group of American industrialists that lose patience with onerous regulation and taxation, and "shrug"--disappearing from their normal lives to relocate to a hidden valley called Galt's Gulch. While this tale is fictional, it has some strong parallels to modern-day America. And despite the fact that Ayn Rand was an atheist and favored legalized abortion, she was a good judge of both character and the inevitable tendencies of elected governments. When I consider the regulatory and tax burdens that have been implemented in my lifetime--I was born in 1960--I believe that Rand had amazing prescience. Let's face it: We no longer live in a free market capitalist nation. At best, it could called a "mixed" economy with statist tendencies, and verging on socialism.

Reading the news headlines in recent months has led me to believe that the Galt's Gulch concept has a lot of merit. If The Powers That Be wanted to encourage the Atlases of the world to shrug, they couldn't have done a better job. What is the best way to get the most productive Citizens of our nation to go on strike, and retreat to "gulches"? Consider the following "to do" list for those whom Ayn Rand called "The Destroyers":

corporate america's war on political transparency

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission - Jeffrey Toobin
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

Corp-Focus | Companies that bid for government contracts should disclose their campaign spending, in order to diminish the likelihood that contracts are a payoff for political expenditures.

The Obama administration has indicated that it plans to impose such a rule, through an executive order. Ideally, the rule would prohibit contractors and lobbyists from campaign spending, but a disclosure standard is a very positive if modest step.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the trade association for big business, however, takes a somewhat different view.

"We will fight it through all available means," Bruce Josten, the chief lobbyist for the Chamber, told the New York Times. "To quote what they say every day on Libya, all options are on the table."

Other business lobbyists use less charged rhetoric* but echo Josten's stridency. "The President and his administration seem to be using the executive order powers for political purposes," says John Engler, president of the Business Roundtable, an association of major company CEOs. "The suggestion that federal procurement choices are the result of contributions is being seen as discouraging free speech by intimidating business donors."

Gosh, is it really a stretch to suggest that contractors think political donations help them obtain contracts? Did Lockheed really spend $16 million on campaign contributions over the last two decades -- divided fairly evenly between the two major parties (55-45 split for Republicans) -- for any other reason? Heck, the company spent $60 million over just the last five years on lobbying, primarily to affect how the government spends money.

This is a case -- there have been precious few -- where the President is going head to head with the Big Business lobby. It's up to us to help him stand strong for what's right. Go here to sign a petition urging President Obama to ignore the business pressure and issue the executive order requiring disclosure of contractors' election expenditures.

The need for such action is directly traceable to the Supreme Court's decision Citizens United v. FEC, which lifted restrictions on political spending by corporations, and paved the way for companies to make massive expenditures from their general treasuries to influence election outcomes. While companies are prohibited from making direct contributions to federal candidates, and while direct contributions from individual managers and employees of companies and their political action committees are publicly reported, it remains nearly impossible to trace most of the corporate political spending designed to curry favor and access with government officials. After Citizens United, corporations can now easily make secret and unlimited donations directly out of their corporate treasuries to "front" organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that then use the money for campaign expenditures.

Not only did Citizens United badly damage the functioning of our democracy, it invited a major uptick in corruption narrowly defined.

While government corruption comes in many forms, nowhere is it more prevalent than in government contracting. "Pay-to-play" deals are a form of government contracting abuse in which a business entity makes campaign contributions or expenditures on behalf of a public official in order to obtain preferential treatment in receiving government contracts. Occasionally, pay-to-play constitutes outright bribery for a government contract. More often, pay-to-play involves a contractor buying favoritism. The practice is widespread in local, state, and federal contracting but is usually kept well hidden due to inadequate monitoring of government contracting procedures. The pay-to-play system encourages fraud and abuse of power, prevents contracts from being awarded to businesses based on merit, wastes taxpayer dollars, and facilitates privatization and contracting out of services that otherwise could or should be provided by government agencies.

deficits don't matter?

Video - George W. Bush and Dick Cheney both declared that deficits don't matter.

Globalresearch | “Deficit terrorists” are gutting governments and forcing the privatization of public assets, all in the name of “deficit reduction.” But deficits aren’t actually a bad thing. In today’s monetary scheme, in which most money comes from debt, debt and deficits are actually necessary to have a stable money supply. The public debt is the people’s money.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney famously said, "Deficits don't matter." A staunch Republican, he was arguing against raising taxes on the rich; but today Republicans seem to have forgotten this maxim. They are bent on stripping social programs, privatizing public assets, and gutting unions, all in the name of "deficit reduction."

Worse, Standard & Poor’s has now taken up the hatchet. Some bloggers are calling it blackmail. This private, for-profit rating agency, with a dubious track record of its own, is dictating government policy, threatening to downgrade the government’s long-held triple AAA credit rating if Congress fails to deal with its deficit in sufficiently draconian fashion. The threat is a real one, as we’ve seen with the devastating effects of downgrades in Greece, Ireland and other struggling countries. Lowered credit ratings force up interest rates and cripple national budgets.

The biggest threat to the dollar’s credit rating, however, may be the game of chicken being played with the federal debt ceiling. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are said to be in favor of a freeze on May 16, when the ceiling is due to be raised; and Tea Party-oriented politicians could go along with this scheme to please their constituents.

If they get what they wish for, the party could be over for the whole economy. The Chinese are dumping U.S. Treasuries, and the Fed is backing off from its “quantitative easing” program, in which it has been buying federal securities with money simply created on its books. When the Fed buys Treasuries, the government gets the money nearly interest-free, since the Fed rebates its profits to the government after deducting its costs. When the Chinese and the Fed quit buying Treasuries, interest rates are liable to shoot up; and with a frozen debt ceiling, the government would have to default, since any interest increase on a $14 trillion debt would be a major expenditure. Today the Treasury is paying a very low .25% on securities of 9 months or less, and interest on the whole debt is about 3% (a total of $414 billion on a debt of $14 trillion in 2010). Greece is paying 4.5% on its debt, and Venezuela is paying 18% -- six times the 3% we’re paying on ours. Interest at 18% would add $2 trillion to our tax bill. That would mean paying three times what we’re paying now in personal income taxes (projected to be a total of $956 billion in 2011), just to cover the interest.

There are other alternatives. Congress could cut the military budget -- but it probably won’t, since this option is never even discussed. It could raise taxes on the rich, but that probably won’t happen either. A third option is to slash government services. But which services? How about social security? Do you really want to see Grandma panhandling? Congress can’t agree on a budget for good reason: there is no good place to cut.

Fortunately, there is a more satisfactory solution. We can sit back, relax, and concede that Cheney was right. Deficits aren’t necessarily a bad thing! They don’t matter, so long as they are at very low interest rates; and they can be kept at these very low rates either by maintaining our triple A credit rating or by borrowing from the Fed essentially interest-free.

u.s. nuclear reactor evacuation zones

PSR | Do you live within 50 miles of a nuclear reactor? One third of Americans do. Property contaminated by nuclear materials is not covered by insurance, so if your house is affected, you could be displaced permanently and lose everything. Use the tool below to find out if you are within an evacuation zone and are at risk. Also notice the number of people who would have to be evacuated if there was an accident at the plant closest to you. Do you really think that is possible? We don't.

The 25th anniversary of Chernobyl and the continuing crisis at Fukushima -- both Level 7 nuclear disasters -- are clear reminders that standard evacuation zones cannot protect the public from a nuclear accident. Current NRC regulations stipulate a 10 mile evacuation zone around nuclear plants. This is clearly insufficient and 50 miles has been recommended.

radiation readings at highest level since crisis began

Gundersen Postulates Unit 3 Explosion May Have Been Prompt Criticality in Fuel Pool from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

Bloomberg | Radiation readings at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi station rose to the highest since an earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems, impeding efforts to contain the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl.

Two robots sent into the reactor No. 1 building at the plant yesterday took readings as high as 1,120 millisierverts of radiation per hour, Junichi Matsumoto, a general manager at Tokyo Electric Power Co., said today. That’s more than four times the annual dose permitted to nuclear workers at the stricken plant.

Radiation from the station, where four of six reactors have been damaged by explosions, has forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people and contaminated farmland and drinking water. A plan to flood the containment vessel of reactor No. 1 with more water to speed up emergency cooling efforts announced yesterday by the utility known as Tepco may not be possible now.

“Tepco must figure out the source of high radiation,” said Hironobu Unesaki, a nuclear engineering professor at Kyoto University. “If it’s from contaminated water leaking from inside the reactor, Tepco’s so-called water tomb may be jeopardized because flooding the containment vessel will result in more radiation in the building.”

culture of complicity

NYTimes | Given the fierce insularity of Japan’s nuclear industry, it was perhaps fitting that an outsider exposed the most serious safety cover-up in the history of Japanese nuclear power. It took place at Fukushima Daiichi, the plant that Japan has been struggling to get under control since last month’s earthquake and tsunami.

In 2000, Kei Sugaoka, a Japanese-American nuclear inspector who had done work for General Electric at Daiichi, told Japan’s main nuclear regulator about a cracked steam dryer that he believed was being concealed. If exposed, the revelations could have forced the operator, Tokyo Electric Power, to do what utilities least want to do: undertake costly repairs.

What happened next was an example, critics have since said, of the collusive ties that bind the nation’s nuclear power companies, regulators and politicians.

Despite a new law shielding whistle-blowers, the regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, divulged Mr. Sugaoka’s identity to Tokyo Electric, effectively blackballing him from the industry. Instead of immediately deploying its own investigators to Daiichi, the agency instructed the company to inspect its own reactors. Regulators allowed the company to keep operating its reactors for the next two years even though, an investigation ultimately revealed, its executives had actually hidden other, far more serious problems, including cracks in the shrouds that cover reactor cores.

Investigators may take months or years to decide to what extent safety problems or weak regulation contributed to the disaster at Daiichi, the worst of its kind since Chernobyl. But as troubles at the plant and fears over radiation continue to rattle the nation, the Japanese are increasingly raising the possibility that a culture of complicity made the plant especially vulnerable to the natural disaster that struck the country on March 11.

Already, many Japanese and Western experts argue that inconsistent, nonexistent or unenforced regulations played a role in the accident — especially the low seawalls that failed to protect the plant against the tsunami and the decision to place backup diesel generators that power the reactors’ cooling system at ground level, which made them highly susceptible to flooding.

A 10-year extension for the oldest of Daiichi’s reactors suggests that the regulatory system was allowed to remain lax by politicians, bureaucrats and industry executives single-mindedly focused on expanding nuclear power. Regulators approved the extension beyond the reactor’s 40-year statutory limit just weeks before the tsunami despite warnings about its safety and subsequent admissions by Tokyo Electric, often called Tepco, that it had failed to carry out proper inspections of critical equipment.

The mild punishment meted out for past safety infractions has reinforced the belief that nuclear power’s main players are more interested in protecting their interests than increasing safety. In 2002, after Tepco’s cover-ups finally became public, its chairman and president resigned, only to be given advisory posts at the company. Other executives were demoted, but later took jobs at companies that do business with Tepco. Still others received tiny pay cuts for their role in the cover-up. And after a temporary shutdown and repairs at Daiichi, Tepco resumed operating the plant.

In a telephone interview from his home in the San Francisco Bay Area, Mr. Sugaoka said, “I support nuclear power, but I want to see complete transparency.”

something odd at reactor 4 spent fuel pool...,

Video - Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen notes that the spent fuel rods in reactor number 4 have no water, and the rods are exposed.

Washingtonblog | The Number 4 spent fuel pool stores 1,535 fuel rods, the most at the nuclear complex. (Bear in mind that the amount of radioactive fuel at Fukushima dwarfs Chernobyl.) As I noted on April 2nd.

The operator of the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is carefully monitoring the situation at the Number 4 spent fuel pool, where the water temperature is rising despite increased injections of cooling water.

Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, says it will inject 210 tons of water into the pool on Monday, after finding on Sunday evening that the temperature in the pool had risen to 81 degrees Celsius.

The utility firm had earlier limited the amount of water being injected into the pool to 70 tons a day, saying the weight of the water could weaken the reactor building, which was already damaged in last month's hydrogen explosion.

On Friday, TEPCO found that the pool's temperature had reached 91 degrees, so it began injecting 2 to 3 times the amount of water.

TEPCO says the pool's water temperature dropped to 66 degrees on Saturday after water was injected, but started to rise again, to 81 degrees.

The operator says the water level in the pool was 2.5 meters lower than normal after 165 tons of water were injected on Sunday. It is carefully monitoring the water level and temperature to avoid further troubles.

The Number 4 spent fuel pool stores 1,535 fuel rods, the most at the nuclear complex.

drum is the ear of god

Richard Hodges | Every culture lives within the interplay of two movements, an outer movement of performing the activities necessary for the continuation of physical life and an inner movement towards relating to forces, being and intelligence beyond and above that life. The music of a culture is a measure of the relationship and balance between these two movements.

There is a music, nowadays practiced mainly in certain places where the traditional spirit has not completely given way to modernity, that uses its power over the feelings to cut through the self-absorption of everyday life and bring one to an experience of communion, the sense of being part of the vast play of forces that encompass and connect all beings. In Africa music and dance evoke a sense of communion on many levels in a rich tapestry that includes spiritual aspiration, religious experience, evocation of deity, psychic and physical empowerment, enactment of myth and history, teaching, healing, courtship, cultural assimilation and solidarization, mutual criticism, celebration, entertainment and exercise.

Traditional Africa maintains a distinction between religious music and social music. This distinction corresponds to the widespread understanding that spiritual life and material life are on different levels. While many processes of a secular nature may take place in a religious context and vice versa, this is felt as part of the unique drama of each situation, not as an undesirable contradiction. In effect, this ambiguity represents an affirmation that spiritual life and material life are inseparably united as constant reciprocal movements of the human spirit.

In Africa, as in many other traditional cultures, religious music and dance play the central role of invoking possession-trance. In possession, the person loses consciousness of himself as an individual and becomes the vehicle or mouthpiece of a "deity," a personification of one of the great forces of the inner or the outer world. The actions and speech of the person possessed are regarded as those of the deity and are looked to for advice, healing, prophecy, and magical power.

The deities in whose service music and dance are performed are traditionally understood not as being divine in themselves-rather, their divinity is a particle of the Divinity of a higher principle, the creative principle behind the Universe. But this principle is already always everywhere and in everything and hence needs no service to call its presence. No special temporal material condition, such as a temple, ceremony, or artifact, can concentrate its force. Its action at our level is non-action. Its symbol is silence. In music, it is expressed by the rhythmic pulses that are heard innerly though the instrument is not played; through their silence, these pulses give shape and meaning to the rhythm that is heard outerly.

The Great Principle is too far above the level of man for him to relate to It directly. The deities are necessary intermediaries through whom man and God address each other. In some traditions the drums themselves are also specially invested as divine intermediaries. The Dogon say that Drum is the ear of God and one must beat it with the attitude that one is speaking to God on behalf of mankind. This attitude requires respect, but also great force. In the words of a religious song of the Blekete cycle (Blekete is the name of a deity of the Ewe people of Ghana and also the name of the principal drum that is used in this cycle): "A feeble effort will not fulfill the self."

why the west wants the fall of gaddafi

DissidentVoice | It was [Mouammar] Gaddafi’s Libya that offered all of Africa its first revolution in modern times – connecting the entire continent by telephone, television, radio broadcasting and several other technological applications such as telemedicine and distance teaching. And thanks to the WMAX radio bridge, a low cost connection was made available across the continent, including in rural areas.

It began in 1992, when 45 African nations established RASCOM (Regional African Satellite Communication Organization) so that Africa would have its own satellite and slash communication costs in the continent. This was a time when phone calls to and from Africa were the most expensive in the world because of the annual US$500 million fee pocketed by Europe for the use of its satellites like Intelsat for phone conversations, including those within the same country.

An African satellite only cost a onetime payment of US$400 million and the continent no longer had to pay a US$500 million annual lease. Which banker wouldn’t finance such a project? But the problem remained – how can slaves,
seeking to free themselves from their master’s exploitation ask the master’s help to achieve that freedom? Not surprisingly, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the USA, Europe only made vague promises for 14 years. Gaddafi put an end to these futile pleas to the western ‘benefactors’ with their exorbitant interest rates. The Libyan guide put US$300 million on the table; the African Development Bank added US$50 million more and the West African Development Bank a further US$27 million – and that’s how Africa got its first communications satellite on 26 December 2007.

China and Russia followed suit and shared their technology and helped launch satellites for South Africa, Nigeria, Angola, Algeria and a second African satellite was launched in July 2010. The first totally indigenously built satellite and manufactured on African soil, in Algeria, is set for 2020. This satellite is aimed at competing with the best in the world, but at ten times less the cost, a real challenge.

This is how a symbolic gesture of a mere US$300 million changed the life of an entire continent. Gaddafi’s Libya cost the West, not just depriving it of US$500 million per year but the billions of dollars in debt and interest that the initial loan would generate for years to come and in an exponential manner, thereby helping maintain an occult system in order to plunder the continent.

African Monetary Fund, African Central Bank, African Investment Bank
The US$30 billion frozen by Mr Obama belong to the Libyan Central Bank and had been earmarked as the Libyan contribution to three key projects which would add the finishing touches to the African federation – the African
Investment Bank in Syrte, Libya, the establishment in 2011 of the African Monetary Fund to be based in Yaounde with a US$42 billion capital fund and the Abuja-based African Central Bank in Nigeria which when it starts printing African money will ring the death knell for the CFA franc through which Paris has been able to maintain its hold on some African countries for the last fifty years. It is easy to understand the French wrath against Gaddafi.

The African Monetary Fund is expected to totally supplant the African activities of the International Monetary Fund which, with only US$25 billion, was able to bring an entire continent to its knees and make it swallow questionable privatisation like forcing African countries to move from public to private monopolies. No surprise then that on 16-17 December 2010, the Africans unanimously rejected attempts by Western countries to join the African Monetary Fund, saying it was open only to African nations.

It is increasingly obvious that after Libya, the western coalition will go after Algeria, because apart from its huge energy resources, the country has cash reserves of around €150 billion. This is what lures the countries that are bombing Libya and they all have one thing in common – they are practically bankrupt. The USA alone, has a staggering debt of $US14,000 billion, France, Great Britain and Italy each have a US$2,000 billion public deficit compared to less than US$400 billion in public debt for 46 African countries combined.

this will be the arab world's next battle

Guardian | Population growth and water supply are on a collision course. Hunger is set to become the main issue. Long after the political uprisings in the Middle East have subsided, many underlying challenges that are not now in the news will remain. Prominent among these are rapid population growth, spreading water shortages, and growing food insecurity.

In some countries grain production is now falling as aquifers – underground water-bearing rocks – are depleted. After the Arab oil-export embargo of the 1970s, the Saudis realised that since they were heavily dependent on imported grain, they were vulnerable to a grain counter-embargo. Using oil-drilling technology, they tapped into an aquifer far below the desert to produce irrigated wheat. In a matter of years, Saudi Arabia was self-sufficient in its principal food staple.

But after more than 20 years of wheat self-sufficiency, the Saudis announced in January 2008 that this aquifer was largely depleted and they would be phasing out wheat production. Between 2007 and 2010, the harvest of nearly 3m tonnes dropped by more than two-thirds. At this rate the Saudis could harvest their last wheat crop in 2012 and then be totally dependent on imported grain to feed their population of nearly 30 million.

The unusually rapid phaseout of wheat farming in Saudi Arabia is due to two factors. First, in this arid country there is little farming without irrigation. Second, irrigation depends almost entirely on a fossil aquifer – which, unlike most aquifers, does not recharge naturally from rainfall. And the desalted sea water the country uses to supply its cities is far too costly for irrigation use – even for the Saudis.

Saudi Arabia's growing food insecurity has led it to buy or lease land in several other countries, including two of the world's hungriest, Ethiopia and Sudan. In effect, the Saudis are planning to produce food for themselves with the land and water resources of other countries to augment their fast-growing imports.

In neighbouring Yemen, replenishable aquifers are being pumped well beyond the rate of recharge, and the deeper fossil aquifers are also being rapidly depleted. Water tables are falling throughout Yemen by about two metres per year. In the capital, Sana'a – home to 2 million people – tap water is available only once every four days. In Taiz, a smaller city to the south, it is once every 20 days.

Yemen, with one of the world's fastest-growing populations, is becoming a hydrological basket case. With water tables falling, the grain harvest has shrunk by one-third over the last 40 years, while demand has continued its steady rise. As a result the Yemenis import more than 80% of their grain. With its meagre oil exports falling, with no industry to speak of, and with nearly 60% of its children physically stunted and chronically undernourished, this poorest of the Arab countries is facing a bleak and potentially turbulent future.

fukushima cannot be sealed like chernobyl

Video - RT talks to Professor Christopher Busby, Scientific secretary of the European Committee for a little more insight on 21st century's most serious nuclear crisis at Fukushima.

can japan get off the nuclear pipe?

Counterpunch | To stabilize not just Fukushima, but Japan itself, the disastrous and irresponsible decisions taken by governments over the past half-century to pursue nuclear energy as a sacrosanct national project, have to be reversed. The immediate priority must attach to close the Fukushima and Hamaoka (and other extreme high-risk sites including Kashiwazaki-Kariwa in Niigata prefecture, the world’s largest nuclear generation complex);5 to secure, stabilize, and remediate the Fukushima sites, resettling and compensation the refugee population and rebuilding shattered infrastructure; to cancel all planned and under construction reactor works (including Hamaoka Number 6 and Kaminoseki in Yamaguchi prefecture); to suspend all existing and experimental projects for uranium enrichment, plutonium accumulation, use, and fast-breeding; to stop the planned export of nuclear plants to countries such as Vietnam (personally promoted by Prime Minister Kan as late as October 2010); and to adjust public and private investment priorities to a completely different vision of energy production and consumption.

What is called for, in short, is the reversal of a half century of core national policies.6 Such a strategic decision, turning the present disaster into the opportunity to confront the key challenge of contemporary civilization, amounts to a revolutionary agenda, one only possible under the pressure of a mobilized and determined national citizenry. At this crucial juncture, how Japan goes, the world is likely follow. The challenge is fundamentally political: can Japan’s civil society accomplish the sovereignty guaranteed it under the constitution and wrest control over the levers of state from the irresponsible bureaucratic and political forces that have driven it into the present crisis?

On such a trajectory, instead of a subordinate and secondary role in the current (now stalled) global “nuclear renaissance,” and the continuing feeble presence on the world political and diplomatic stage as a US “client state,” Japan could become a world leader. It is the sort of challenge to which Japan’s best and brightest might rise, and around which its people might unite.

March 2011 is set to mark a caesura in Japanese history comparable to August 1945: the end of a particular model of state, economy and society, both marked by nuclear catastrophes that shook the world (even if the present one seems likely to be slightly muted and the meltdown kept to partial, the regional consequences may be broader, the number of people disastrously affected greater). Where the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki signalled the end-point of the path chosen by the young officers of the Kwantung Army in the 1930s, the chaos and apocalyptic apprehension of post-quake and tsunami Fukushima in 2011 is the end-point of the path chosen by senior state bureaucrats and their corporate and political collaborators in the 1950s and steadily, incrementally, reinforced ever since then. Their legacy is today’s nuclear state Japan. 1945 was a purely human-caused disaster. 2011 differs in that it was occasioned by natural disaster, but human factors hugely exacerbated it.

Japan’s “Hiroshima syndrome” of fear and loathing for all things nuclear meant that cooperation with US nuclear war-fighting strategy had to be kept secret, in mitsuyaku or “secret treaties,” especially in the 1960s and 1970s that have only become public in the past two years. The nuclear energy commitment, also pressed by the US, had likewise to be concealed, never submitted to electoral scrutiny, and continually subject of manipulation (extensive advertising campaigns), cover-up (especially of successive incidents), and deception (as to risk and safety levels). The extent of that too is now laid bare.

The way forward out of the current disaster remains unclear. The debate over Japan’s energy and technology future will be long and hard, but what is now clear is that Japanese democracy has to rethink the frame within which this elite was able to overrun all opposition and push the country to its present brink. The crisis is not just one of radiation, failed energy supply, possible meltdown, the death of tens of thousands, health and environmental hazard, but of governability, of democracy. Civic democracy has to find a way to seize control over the great irresponsible centers of fused state-capital monopoly and open a new path towards sustainability and responsibility. A new mode of energy generation and of socio-economic organization has to be sought. Ultimately it has to be a new vision for a sustainable society.

really mixed signals from media, TEPCO, and government..,

Video - SOS from Mayor of Minami Soma City, next to the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant

JapanFocus | Mistrust of the media has surged among the people of Fukushima Prefecture. In part this is due to reports filed by mainstream journalists who are unwilling to visit the area near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. But above all it is the result of contradictory reportsreleased by the media, TEPCO and the government.

On the one hand, many local officials and residents in Fukushima insist that the situation is safe and that the media, in fanning unwarranted fears, are damaging the economy of the region.By contrast, many freelance journalists in Tokyo report that the central government is downplaying the fact that radiation leakage has been massive and that the threat to public health has been woefully underestimated. While the government long hewed to its original definition of a 20 kilometer exclusion zone, following the April 12 announcement that the Fukushima radiation severity level has been raised from a level 5 event (as with Three Mile Island) to a level 7 event (as with Chernobyl), the government also extended the radiation exclusion zone from 20 kilometers to at least five communities in the 30-50 kilometer range.

In recent weeks, many Fukushima residents who fled in the first week of the nuclear crisis have begun returning home and attempting to resume normal activities. For example, some local people in Iwaki city, 40-50 km from the Fukushima Daiichi reactor, are convinced that it is now safe to return despite the high radiation levels recorded. Here is one example.

In Japan, April’s cherry blossoms signal a symbolic beginning, a new stage in life. On April 6th, along with school children across the nation, Iwaki City, within the 40 km radiation exclusion zone, held many school entrance ceremonies for elementary, middle and high schools.

Iwaki's Yumoto Daini Middle School’s ceremony was a bit different: not only were there 33 new students, but refugees living on the school grounds and some members of the Self Defense Force also attended. Overall 107 people participated in the ceremony. Headmaster Sawai Shiro may have exceeded his authority in taking the humanitarian step of granting permission for the refugees to remain on campus as the school year begins, at the risk of being punished later for breaking rules.

Local sources report that in the first week or so after the nuclear crisis began, Iwaki City experienced difficulties in receiving supplies like food and fuel because many agents refused to deliver.Since early April, refugees who had evacuated outside the prefecture started returning. Restaurants in downtown Iwaki are reopening and many convenience stores boast reasonably well-stocked shelves, while gas, water and electricity have been restored. Iwaki City has repeatedly confirmed that “radiation is at a stable level which is not harmful to human health.” Iwaki officials explain that this judgment is based on figures provided by the Fukushima prefectural government regularly updated since March 11.

Principal Sawai began his welcome speech by saying, "I am glad to be able to confirm that all 33 new students are participating in this ceremony amidst a disaster that had forced many people to leave Yumoto.""In our district,” he continued,“some people survived by drinking water from their bath for weeks as there was no running water. I want you to care for each other especially for anyone who is in trouble." He concluded, "You young students, are the future of Japan. Now, we should be bound as one beyond differences in ideas, position or self interest."

Though all the new students attended, not all teachers were there. As a result of the catastrophe, personnel for the school was frozen and new teachers were not dispatched to the school, Sawai explained. As a result of the lack of teachers, there will be only one class run by a teacher for each grade.

School Doctor Informs Children “The radiation problem is already finished.”
Following the principal’s speech, the school’s doctor in his white coat stated matter-of-factly that, based on science, people should know that the worst of the earthquake damage had passed and that radiation leakages from the Fukushima Daiichi plant were decreasing and would soon fade away.

“The radiation problem is already finished,” he told the children and their parents. “You can go to school and go outside without any problem. You should not fear malicious gossip.”