ron paul say "legalize it, and dooon't criticize it"

Video - Ron Paul says legalize marijuana CNBC 6-22-2011

NaturalNews | Four decades of the so-called "War on Drugs" has led only to the suffering of millions of innocents, the crowding of our prisons with non-violent citizens, the utter waste of billions of dollars on law enforcement and the (in)justice system, and the enriching of underground drug gangs who thrive on violence. The outlawing of marijuana in America has been a disastrous political policy and an insane medical policy. It has labeled biochemical addicts "criminals" and thrown them in prisons to be treated like dogs.

The War on Drugs, through interdicting street supplies of drugs, has only made the drug gangs wealthier by driving up the value of the drugs that remain readily available. And it is now admitted that the ATF actually placed tens of thousands of weapons directly into the hands of Mexican drug gangs, giving rise to the very gang violence the agency claims to be preventing (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011...).

The U.S. government, it turns out, is actually contributing to the drug war violence!

Ron Paul, Barney Frank join forces to end the insanity
In an effort to end the insanity, Rep. Ron Paul has joined forces with Rep. Barney Frank to introduce legislation legalizing marijuana in America. President Obama, you may recall, promised voters on the campaign trail that he would do this, too, but it seems he's been too busy bombing Libya and using the U.S. Constitution as a floor mat to bother keeping any actual promises. (GITMO is still open for business, too, in case you haven't noticed...)

Of course, the War on Drugs is a very effective tool of tyranny to be used against the American people. It empowers the DEA and the federal government to conduct surprise searches of any home or business for any reason whatsoever (even without a warrant), it keeps the prison industry overflowing with endless cheap human labor, and it grants the big drug companies a monopoly over all those recreational drugs that are now sold as pharmaceuticals.

"Speed," for example, is now sold as an ADHD treatment for children. Big Pharma is also going after THC chemicals in marijuana and hopes to sell them as prescription drugs. By keeping the War on Drugs in place, Big Pharma is assured a monopoly that even the drug lords haven't been able to accomplish.

An issue that crosses political boundaries
One thing that's especially interesting about the so-called War on Drugs is how the best-informed people on both the left and the right now see it all as a complete fraud. Perhaps that's why Rep. Ron Paul (Republican) and Rep. Barney Frank (Democrat) are the perfect sponsors of this bill. Each has staked out positions on the opposite ends of the political spectrum for some issues, yet they both agree that it's time to end the failed Nixon-era policies that have only brought this nation suffering and injustice.

Ending the failed War on Drugs is not a conservative idea nor a liberal idea; it's a principle of liberty whose time has come in America.

Because in observing the War on Drugs, the prison crowding, the drug underground economy and all the other unintended consequence of marijuana prohibition, we must ask the question: Is society served in any way by criminalizing marijuana smokers? How does taking a medical addict and throwing them behind bars accomplish anything at all?

The prohibition against marijuana accomplishes nothing for society.

the gangs of IP will never die, just multipy...,

NYTimes | The recent flurry of hacking done for notoriety rather than financial gain “feels like a kind of return to a period in the past,” said Gabriella Coleman, an assistant professor at New York University who is studying groups like LulzSec and Anonymous.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a number of hacker groups brazenly attacked some major institutions. That wave was largely squelched after a crackdown in which well-known hackers, including Kevin Mitnick, were caught and given heavy punishments, Ms. Coleman said.

After that, hackers began working more quietly, and many joined the security industry, where there was a safer place to employ their skills. Meanwhile, organized crime began moving online, following the money that was flowing through Web-based commerce and banking systems.

The return of more public hacking has been inspired by WikiLeaks, whose disclosure of reams of United States government documents showed hackers and the computer adept that they could use their skills to participate in a new way in the public sphere, Ms. Coleman said.

That notion was fed by Anonymous, a large collective of online hackers that opposed the Church of Scientology, championed freedom on the Internet and came to the defense of WikiLeaks by attacking the Web sites of companies like MasterCard and PayPal, which had refused to process donations to WikiLeaks after it disclosed confidential diplomatic cables.

More recently, Anonymous has gotten behind an array of international political causes, from the democratic uprisings in the Middle East to anticorruption protests in India.

LulzSec began as a splinter group from Anonymous, and LulzSec’s members now seem to be focusing on operating through that larger network.

To judge from purported discussions between LulzSec members that were posted online by a rival hacker known as the Jester, the internal operations of LulzSec seem as chaotic as the anarchistic behavior online. The messages show continual infighting among group members as pressure from law enforcement agencies has increased, and some members have reportedly quit.

lulzsec put the work into AZDPS...,

Video - AZDPS wasting hard drive space with random douchery...,
OSNews | The hack of the Arizona law enforcement is a pretty big one, since the documents the hacking group leaked are incredibly detailed and contain all sorts of interesting stuff. For instance, Arizona law enforcement agencies are terrified of iPhones (and smartphones in general), because it allows people to easily record and share whatever the police might be doing or saying - and it allows people to remotely track and wipe their iPhones.

An internal memo details the worries Arizona law enforcement has about iPhones. "The ease of restoring the iPhone to it's last backup condition may encourage users who's phones have been temporarily seized by law enforcement to wipe all data to prevent law enforcement from gaining access to it," the memo reads. The horrid spelling isn't my doing - it's really in there. The memo instructs law enforcement officers to shield confiscated iPhones from wireless signals.

Several applications also worry the Arizona police, such as Cop Recorder, which allows iPhones to record whatever is being said, and can be activated while still in someone's pocket. I would consider the ability to record how an officer of the law treats you as your right as a citizen (in case they go too far), and that any worries about such an application can be negated by not abusing your authority as a cop - but then again, I've never been in trouble with the law, and I'm sure the police sometimes needs to walk on the edge in order to get things done - and random people recording everything you do could easily lead to a skewed image.

LulzSec hacked the Arizona law enforcement because of Arizona's strict illegal immigration policies, which have already ruffled some major feather all across the United States - and beyond.

"We are targeting AZDPS specifically because we are against SB1070 and the racial profiling anti-immigrant police state that is Arizona," LulzSec stated, "Every week we plan on releasing more classified documents and embarassing personal details of military and law enforcement in an effort not just to reveal their racist and corrupt nature but to purposefully sabotage their efforts to terrorize communities fighting an unjust 'war on drugs'."

Well, this plan to release more information every week may have been cut short, since yesterday late last night, the group announced they were calling it quits after 50 days. It is not entirely unwarranted to assume that law enforcement may be closing in on them, and that as such, they simply have to disappear for a while.

"We hope, wish, even beg, that the movement manifests itself into a revolution that can continue on without us. The support we've gathered for it in such a short space of time is truly overwhelming, and not to mention humbling," the statement reads, "Please don't stop. Together, united, we can stomp down our common oppressors and imbue ourselves with the power and freedom we deserve."

lulzsacked - takes HUGE data dump...,

Mashable | LulzSec, the hacker group that has hacked the CIA, U.S. Senate, Nintendo, Sony and others, has surprisingly announced that it is disbanding.

LulzSec, short for Lulz Security, claims that it intended to only operate for 50 days as an attempt to revive the AntiSec movement, which is opposed to the computer security industry.

“For the past 50 days we’ve been disrupting and exposing corporations, governments, often the general population itself, and quite possibly everything in between, just because we could,” the hacker group said in its announcement. “All to selflessly entertain others – vanity, fame, recognition, all of these things are shadowed by our desire for that which we all love.”

The release continues on, explaining that the organization is not tied to its LulzSec identity and has succeeded in bringing back the AntiSec movement. The group, in fact, encourages others to take up its cause. “We hope, wish, even beg, that the movement manifests itself into a revolution that can continue on without us… Together, united, we can stomp down our common oppressors and imbue ourselves with the power and freedom we deserve.”

As its final parting gift, the group released one last data dump with data allegedly taken from AT&T, AOL, Disney, Universal, EMI and the FBI.

ku klux kannibal....,

Video - History channel excerpt on psychopathic monsters in the American body politic.

Wikipedia | Publicly a Prohibitionist and a defender of "Protestant womanhood," his spectacular 1925 trial for murder led to the downfall of the "Second Wave" of Klan activity. Stephenson was responsible for the abduction, forced intoxication, and rape of Madge Oberholtzer (who ran a state program to combat illiteracy), all leading to her suicide attempt and eventual death. Among other atrocities, Stephenson had bitten her so many times that one man who saw her described her condition as having been “chewed by a cannibal.”^[2] The jury convicted Stephenson of second-degree murder on 14 November 1925, on its first ballot. Stephenson was sentenced to life in prison on 16 November 1925.^[3]

In vengeful response to his conviction and to the refusal of Governor Jackson to grant clemency or to commute his sentence, on 9 September 1927 Stephenson released lists of public officials who were or had been on the Klan payroll. This publicity and the state's crackdown on Klan activity sped up its decline by the end of the 1920s.

The aftermath was shocking, indictments were filed against Governor Ed Jackson, Marion County Republican chairman George V. "Cap" Coffin, and attorney Robert I. Marsh, charging them with conspiring to bribe former Governor Warren McCray. The mayor of Indianapolis,John Duvall, was convicted and sentenced to jail for 30 days (and barred from political service for four years). Some Republican commissioners of Marion County also resigned from their posts on charges of accepting bribes from the Klan and Stephenson [1].

On 7 January 1941, the Valparaiso Vidette-Messenger reported that Democratic Governor Townsend was considering granting an early parole application by Stephenson; if so, this application was rejected.

Stephenson was paroled on 23 March 1950, but violated parole by disappearing on or before 25 September 1950. On 15 December 1950, he was captured in Minneapolis, and directed in 1951 to serve a further 10 years in prison. In 1953, he pleaded for release from prison, denying that he had ever been a leader of the Klan. On 22 December 1956, he was paroled again, on condition that he leave Indiana and never return. In 1961, he was arrested on charges of attempting to sexually assault a sixteen-year-old girl, and released after paying a $300 fine.^[3] The charges were later dropped on grounds of insufficient evidence.

Stephenson was infamous for having claimed "I am the law in Indiana."^[3]

Stephenson died in Jonesborough, Tennessee. He is buried in Johnson City, Tennessee.

ask and ye shall receive...,

a million libyans rally in support of gaddafi?

Video - demonstration held in Green square on (17/6/2011) in Tripoli to certify Libyan support for Muammar Gaddafi

Pravda | Last Friday one million Libyans took to the streets of Tripoli to march in favour of their Brother Leader Muammar al-Qathafi and against the criminal precision-terrorism wrought on Libya's population by NATO and the terrorist elements they are protecting. Yet where is this story?

In her interview with Press TV*, the journalist Lizzie Phelan spoke about what she saw on her travels around Libya. What she tells is not propaganda, it is first-hand evidence of the truth inside the country which Muammar al-Qathafi inherited as the poorest nation on Earth, and transformed it into the richest in Africa. Have his enemies done anything of the sort?

In this amazing interview, Lizzie Phelan backs up online reports from Pravda.Ru sources inside Libya that on Friday a mass demonstration in support of Muammar al-Qathafi took place in Tripoli. One million Libyans out of a total population of six million came out into the streets in support of their government and against the counter-revolutionary reactionary Islamist terrorists that NATO is supporting.

This would be the equivalent of a demonstration of ten million people in Britain or France or 50 million people in the USA. Would Cameron, Sarkozy or Obama draw such crowds of supporters? If they got ten times less they'd be letting off fireworks. It shows the measure of these, er...men, beside Colonel Gaddafi.

She referred to the revolt and disgust felt by ordinary Libyans, something communicated to us by our contacts, namely against the sheer evil of Cameron and Sarkozy and underlined the determination received by Pravda.Ru from sources that in future no contracts should be signed with British or French companies after this terrorist outrage.

PressTV | The mass pro-Gaddafi street demonstration of one million Libyans held in the capital Tripoli has gone unreported by Western media as has news of civilians killed for the past three months.

Press TV talks with Lizzie Phelan, journalist and political activist in London who has been to Libya and says that Western media is complicit in war crimes in the North African country through omission of fact and that the vast majority of the population are in support of the Libyan government. Following is a transcript of the interview.

Press TV: NATO have issued an apology for a strike so about this publicized NATO strike that has killed civilians, they have blamed 'technical error'. The conclusion we can draw from that is if that happens it may happen again, which relates to the risk of more civilian casualties. Concerning this air campaign - Do you think it has actually gone too far when it is not saving lives?

Phelan: Yet again we are seeing what the US and Europe shamefully call collateral damage in the form of human lives like we have seen previously in Iraq and Afghanistan and in many other parts of the world.

This apology by NATO is an absolute joke. It's the first apology we've had from them in the three months despite the fact that civilians have been dying at the hands of NATO air strikes everyday in the past three months there have been thousands of strikes on the country so they made the apology yesterday on Sunday. But again at 2am in the morning there was another attack on the city of Sorman, 130km west of Tripoli where a further fifteen civilians were killed and a further three children were killed.

In previous weeks we have seen the bombing of al-Nasr university in Tripoli in the daytime where civilians were killed and so these are the military targets that we're seeing them bomb - we're seeing them bomb universities; we're seeing them bomb Friday market street in Tripoli where there is no military site in the area. Friday market street - I've been there - it begins with a GPO post office and ends with a primary school and they bombed four buildings and killed nine civilians including a toddler of four months old.

So, we are seeing what 'humanitarian intervention' and the 'protection of civilians' al-a-NATO means - it means the killing of children as we are seeing.

The real crime here is the crime of the media. Where has the media been? The media has picked up on this now because NATO has made their apology, but we've been seeing civilians dying every day for the past three months; we have a swarm of western journalists based in Tripoli...

Press TV: The NATO apology concerns it's responsibility for the deaths of 9 civilians and 18 injured in an early morning strike at an apartment building. In terms of what NATO is exercising it does put into question the goals of what NATO has on the ground... and this comes when there are CIA officers and covert operators as has been reported that are on the ground in touch with the revolutionaries.

Phelan: I wouldn't call anybody who is inviting NATO or the CIA or intelligence services into their country revolutionaries, they are in fact counter-revolutionaries.

The purpose is clear and that is to curb the Arab spring, but it goes back further than that since the revolution (military coup) of 1969-70, when Gaddafi kicked out the British and the Americans and closed their military bases and nationalized the oil. The West has had an agenda since then to get back into Libya and take complete control of the oil resources. Yes they've had a period of reproachment with Libya whereby they have been able to make some good deals with Libya, but they haven't had any where near the kind of control that they would like to have - like they have in Saudi Arabia or Qatar or the other Gulf states where these are effectively client regimes.

So the agenda is clear to completely violate international law and assassinate Gaddafi against the will of the Libyan people without actually every asking them what the Libyan people want.

Press TV: Since you have visited Libya, what is the support that Muammar Gaddafi has and what is going on in terms of the tribal allegiance that exists there? Because as we understand there has been a split along traditional tribal lines - animosity has existed; and also based on some research done this has indeed been funded by the West.

Phelan: Exactly. Just on Friday there was a complete blackout in the media except for one CNN report about a march of one million Libyans in a country of six million people in Tripoli towards Green Square in support of the government and also in support of the people of Benghazi and Misrata who are being harassed and persecuted by what I call counter-revolutionaries, which is what others call rebels - in particular black Libyans who because of the really shameful story that al-Jazeera has pumped out about Gaddafi hiring African mercenaries, black Libyans in places like Misrata and Benghazi - I've met refugees from these areas who are victims of these atrocities - black Libyans being lynched publicly and the most unspeakable atrocities are being committed against them by pro-NATO counter revolutionaries.

In terms of the tribes in Libya - from my sources I have information that 90% of the tribes in Libya are supportive of the government including the largest tribe in Libya.

Of course, before the uprising there were frustrations In Libya as there are within every singly country, but the Libyan people are an extremely non-confrontational people that will go to the ends of the earth to resolve in a non-confrontational way.

GOP position on the deficit is not about the money

Video - Uncle Jay presents the not funny truth about our useless Congress

TPM | If congress does nothing, the deficit will disappear. On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office released its updated long-term budget forecast, which looked surprisingly like the previous version of its long-term budget forecast.

It showed, as one might expect, that if the Bush tax-cuts remain in effect and Medicare and Medicaid spending isn't constrained in some way, the country will topple into a genuine fiscal crisis -- not the fake one the Congress is pretending the country's in right now.

Republicans, of course, seized on that particular projection, and claimed (a bit ridiculously) that it proved the government must adopt their precise policy views: major spending cuts, particularly to entitlement programs.

While all this -- from the findings to the politicization of them -- is perfectly expected, the forecast also presents another opportunity to remind people that the medium-term budget outlook is perfectly fine if Congress adheres to the law as it's currently written. That means no repealing the health care law, for one, but more significantly it means allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, and (unfathomably) allowing Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors to fall to the levels prescribed by the formula Congress wrote almost 15 years ago. In other words, no more "doc fixes."

WaPo | Reporting on the same CBO report, you'd think it was an entirely different document. The national debt will exceed the size of the entire U.S. economy by 2021 — and balloon to nearly 200 percent of GDP within 25 years — without dramatic cuts to federal health and retirement programs or steep tax increases, congressional budget analysts said Wednesday.

The dire outlook from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office comes as the White House and congressional leaders are locked in negotiations aimed at cutting spending and stabilizing future borrowing. The CBO report highlights the enormity of that task and the immense difficulty of paying off the debt, given an aging population and soaring health-care costs.

WaPo Blog | The Congressional Budget Office just released the latest edition of its long-term budget outlook (pdf), and it shows the same thing as always: If Congress lets the Bush tax cuts expire or offsets their extension, implements the Affordable Care Act as scheduled and makes or offset the Medicare cuts prescribed by the 1997 Balanced Budget Act — which CBO calls the “extended baseline scenario” — the national debt will be totally manageable. If Congress passes laws extending the Bush tax cuts without offsetting the cost, repealing the Affordable Care Act and its cost controls and protecting doctors from Medicare cuts without making up the savings elsewhere — the “alternative fiscal scenario” — the national debt will be totally out of control:This is a good time to remind everyone that when you hear politicians telling you that their plan cuts taxes or balances the budget, you always need to ask what baseline they’re using. Almost all the plans on the table, for instance, do less to balance the budget than simply doing nothing. But since they use a version of the “alternative fiscal scenario” as their baseline, they don’t have to admit that before they make the deficit somewhat better, they’re first planning to make it much, much worse. Fist tap Rembom.

for computer geeks, financial speculators, and drug dealers...,

Newsweek | What if people could use the Internet to create a new kind of money, one that didn’t involve governments and central banks and could be used anonymously, like cash? That is the idea behind Bitcoin, a virtual currency that has caught the attention of computer geeks, financial speculators, and drug dealers. For the first time, you can buy anything online without giving your credit-card number or bank-account information—leaving no trace at all.

Hundreds of merchants accept Bitcoins for things like books, computers, and professional services. The currency trades on a handful of Bitcoin exchanges, where the price of a Bitcoin fluctuates based on demand. Not long ago a single Bitcoin sold for less than a dollar, but in recent months the price climbed to $8, then to $20, then above $30, before falling back to $18, the current level.

What exactly are you buying? A Bitcoin is basically just a little bit of encrypted code that can be zipped over the Internet and stored in a digital wallet. The concept was proposed by a mysterious hacker named Satoshi Nakamoto (no one knows who he is, and the name is believed to be a pseudonym), who published a white paper describing a way in which computers connected over the Internet could be used to create an unregulated “cryptocurrency.”

New York Sen. Charles Schumer recently called Bitcoin “an online form of money laundering,” after learning about an online warehouse called Silk Road where sellers advertise an astounding array of illegal wares—marijuana, hashish, LSD, ecstasy, cocaine, heroin—and where the only currency accepted is the Bitcoin. (Silk Road is currently shut down, though its anonymous manager claims he intends to start back up soon.)

Right now there are about 6.5 million Bitcoins in circulation. The money supply is controlled by software algorithms and the total supply will max out at 21 million coins. You can crank out Bitcoins on a PC, but it’s an incredibly computer-intensive task, and it will keep getting harder as the number of Bitcoins in existence increases. Some people have pooled together hundreds of machines to “mine” Bitcoins. Most folks, however, just buy them on an exchange.

Some already are hoarding Bitcoins, expecting a Bitcoin bubble will drive the value up to hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars per coin. The biggest holder, whose identity is not known, is sitting on about 300,000 coins, currently worth about $6 million, says Donald Norman, who runs the London-based Bitcoin Consultancy, which advises companies that want to get in on the action.

Norman says the power of Bitcoins is that they can free people from the tyranny of middlemen: banks; credit-card companies; and money shippers like Western Union, which charge exorbitant fees for performing a rather simple task.

But for a lot of people the appeal lies in the chance to get rich quick by getting in early on the next Internet craze. Still, investing in Bitcoins is extremely risky. You don’t know who’s running the exchanges, and you can’t be sure these guys won’t just take your money and run.

Adding to the risk, authorities might take action. But even if Bitcoin goes away, others like it will spring up. “Now that we have the technology to create decentralized currencies,” Norman says, “they are definitely here to stay.”

google tackles BD's justification for the war on drugs...,

Video - inside look at Google's driverless vehicle.

DailyMail | Self-driving cars designed by Google will soon be a reality on the roads of Nevada.

State legislators have passed a bill that requires the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles to draw up rules for driver-less vehicles.

Assembly Bill No 511 paves the way for Google's automated Toyota Priuses and Audi TT to be operated legally in the Silver State.

The hybrid vehicles use laser range finders and video cameras to detect traffic, and detailed maps to find their way from point to point.

'Drivers' simply set their destination and the car calculates the route and drives itself there.

The first amendment, which was passed last week, relates to an electric-vehicle bill providing for the licensing and testing of autonomous vehicles.

The second amendment, which has yet to be passed, is for an exemption that would permit sending a text message while 'behind the wheel'.

mexico's hidden war...,

Video - Aljazeera's excellent Faultline video series covers genocidal murder of indigenes in Mexico

aljazeera | The spectacular violence of Mexico's drug war grabs international attention. Some 40,000 people have been killed since 2006, when President Felipe Calderon deployed Mexican military and security forces in the so-called war against the cartels - often in gruesome and sadistic ways.

But behind the headlines, under cover of impunity, a low-intensity war is being waged.

In the second episode of a two-part series, Josh Rushing and the Fault Lines team travel to the state of Guerrero to investigate claims that Mexican security forces are using the drug war as a pretext to repress indigenous and campesino communities.

In one of Mexico's poorest and top drug-producing states, where struggling farmers are surrounded by the narco-economy, we ask about the cost of taking the struggle against dispossession into your own hands.

ciudad juarez: murder capital of the world

Video - Faultlines documentary on the war on drugs - life is cheap in Juarez.

aljazeera | "People in Amsterdam aren't stuffing headless bodies in the trunk of a car, or hanging dead bodies from bridges," he tells Al Jazeera, an image seen far too often in Mexico.

Al Jazeera's Faultlines explores the violent effects of the 'War on Drugs' on the Mexico-US border region

The city of Juarez, on the border of El Paso, Texas, sees about 3,000 murders every year - no thanks to tight drug policies, says Gibler.

"Illegality has done nothing to stop [the violence], but has done the opposite - fuelling it by creating the profit margins associated with that much wealth," he told Al Jazeera.

Charles Bowden, an investigative journalist and author of Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields, told Al Jazeera's Faultlines : "If you want to know one of the biggest causes of death in Mexico, it is the American drug prohibition."

"Al-Qaeda couldn't do to Juarez what the US government's done," he added.

Beyond sky-high murder rates, Gibler told Al Jazeera that border violence stemming from the drug war has an ugly and much deeper reach.

"The rate of almost every other kind of violent crime in Mexico has shot up, which is because of two things. On the one hand it's the drug trafficking organisations expanding into other areas. On the other hand, it's a result of this overwhelming climate of impunity, where people think that they can get away with it; and so many times, the cops are actually or tangentially involved [in the murders]."

In a country where, according to a confidential 2010 report turned over to the Mexican Senate by the Attorney General, only five per cent of murders are investigated, "it issues a kind of post-mortem death sentence, [where] anyone who ends up dead on the street corner is guilty of their own murder", said Gibler.

Given the level of violence, decriminalising small-scale possession or even sales would probably not affect a major difference in Mexico's border region.

Alternatively, Gibler suggests all-in parameters for curbing violence.

"Decriminalisation can't just be at the end point for the users, but it needs to somehow have a regulation package that recognises the entire industry."

PROHIBITION, not drugs, yields undesirable social consequences

Video - Billie Holiday at the 1958 Monterrey Jazz Festival

STLBeacon | There are currently more than 2 million people in American prisons and jails. Some view that statistic as an alarming indictment of our criminal justice system. Others -- like myself -- find it alarming that we have so many criminals. In either event, the number represents well under 1 percent of the total population.

A fashionable criticism of this state of affairs is that we are wasting scarce resources by jailing nonviolent offenders, especially drug users. Before you make up your mind on this issue, Beth, I'd like you to consider two points. One concerns the way in which we classify offenders; the other pertains to the actual cost of crime.

Although criminals sometimes have a distinctive M.O., crime is not a union job. Yesterday's common thief can be today's burglar or tomorrow's stick-up man. We define a criminal by the offense for which he was most recently convicted. Because most convictions are the result of plea bargains, these classifications can be misleading. The violent crime of robbery, for instance, may be negotiated into the nonviolent offense of stealing from a person, thus rehabilitating the offender by a fiat of semantics.

Drug users are the poster children of bleeding hearts who argue that these souls need treatment, not punishment. Two awkward facts tend to refute that notion: The cure rate for addiction is dismal at best and users steal to support their habit.

A heroin addict is not a guy who wants to party but is too lazy to work. The junkie steals for the same reason you get vaccinated -- he doesn't want to get sick. Imagine a severe case of the flu: the muscle ache, joint pain, throbbing head and most of all the nausea -- the overwhelming, all-consuming, sicker-than-a-dog nausea. That's what a day without junk is like for a heavy user. He doesn't necessarily want to hurt you, but given the alternative, he'll do whatever it takes to get his fix. He can't possibly support a several hundred dollar a day drug habit by honest labor, so he becomes a one-man crime wave.

And at what cost to the rest of us? The city of Detroit has been virtually decimated by narcotics use and the crime it spawns. Some now contemplate converting broad stretches of the inner city into farmland. Farmland! What price tag do we put on the loss of a major American city?

Without discounting the humane values of compassion and empathy, the best argument for incarceration is that it works. Every day the offender is confined is another day that he is unable to ply his trade. Compared to the true cost of crime, I would argue that prison is a bargain. Fist tap Big Don.

noam chomsky: the west is terrified of arabic democracies...,

Video - G8 leaders backed the Arab Spring by pledging billions

Indypendent | Noam Chomsky is one of the major intellectuals of our time. The eighty-two-year-old American linguist, philosopher and activist is a severe critic of US foreign and economic policy. Ceyda Nurtsch talked to him about the Arabic spring in its global context

Many people claim that the Arab world is incompatible with democracy. Would you say that the recent developments falsify this thesis?

Noam Chomsky: The thesis never had any basis whatsoever. The Arab-Islamic world has a long history of democracy. It’s regularly crushed by western force. In 1953 Iran had a parliamentary system, the US and Britain overthrew it. There was a revolution in Iraq in 1958, we don’t know where it would have gone, but it could have been democratic. The US basically organized a coup.

Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh during a visit in the US in 1951, two years before the CIA’s coup d’état that ousted him In internal discussions in 1958, which have since been declassified, President Eisenhower spoke about a campaign of hatred against us in the Arab world. Not from the governments, but from the people. The National Security Council’s top planning body produced a memorandum – you can pick it up on the web now – in which they explained it. They said that the perception in the Arab world is that the United States blocks democracy and development and supports harsh dictators and we do it to get control over their oil. The memorandum said, this perception is more or less accurate and that’s basically what we ought to be doing.

That means that western democracies prevented the emergence of democracies in the Arab world?

I won’t run through the details, but yes, it continues that way to the present. There are constant democratic uprisings. They are crushed by the dictators we – mainly the US, Britain, and France – support. So sure, there is no democracy because you crush it all. You could have said the same about Latin America: a long series of dictators, brutal murderers. As long as the US controls the hemisphere, or Europe before it, there is no democracy, because it gets crushed.

So you were not surprised at all by the Arab Spring?

a murderer in the white house?

Video - Minister Louis Farrakhan speaking to over 500 religious leaders in New York on May 28, 2011

Soured Relations - Gaddafi And Big Oil

MediaLens | Remarkably, then, we found nothing in any article in any national UK newspaper reporting the freely-available facts revealed by WikiLeaks on Western oil interests in Libya. And nothing linking these facts to the current war.

By contrast, in his June 11 article for the Washington Post, Steven Mufson focused intensely on WikiLeaks exposés in regard to Libyan oil. In November 2007, a leaked State Department cable reported 'growing evidence of Libyan resource nationalism'. In his 2006 speech marking the founding of his regime, Gaddafi had said:

'Oil companies are controlled by foreigners who have made millions from them. Now, Libyans must take their place to profit from this money.'

Gaddafi's son made similar comments in 2007. As (honest) students of history will know, these are exactly the kind of words that make US generals sit up and listen. The stakes for the West were, and are, high: companies such as ConocoPhillips and Marathon have each invested about $700 million over the past six years.

Even more seriously, in late February 2008, a US State Department cable described how Gaddafi had 'threatened to dramatically reduce Libya's oil production and/or expel... U.S. oil and gas companies'. The Post explained how, in early 2008, US Senator Frank R. Lautenberg had enraged the Libyan leader by adding an amendment to a bill that made it easier for families of the victims of the Lockerbie bombing to 'go after Libya's commercial assets'.

The Libyan equivalent of the deputy foreign minister told US officials that the Lautenberg amendment was 'destroying everything the two sides have built since 2003,' according to a State Department cable. In 2008, Libyan oil minister Shokri Ghanem warned an Exxon Mobil executive that Libya might 'significantly curtail' its oil production to 'penalize the US,' according to another cable.

The Post concluded: 'even before armed conflict drove the U.S. companies out of Libya this year, their relations with Gaddafi had soured. The Libyan leader demanded tough contract terms. He sought big bonus payments up front. Moreover, upset that he was not getting more U.S. government respect and recognition for his earlier concessions, he pressured the oil companies to influence U.S. policies'.

Similarly, compare the chasm in rational analysis separating the mainstream UK media and the dissident Real News Network, hosted by Paul Jay. Last month, Jay interviewed Kevin G. Hall, the national economics correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers. Jay concluded with a summary of their conversation discussing oil shenanigans in Libya:

'So you've got the Italian oil companies already at odds with the US over Iran. The Italian oil company is going to, through its deals with Gazprom, allow the Russians to take a big stake in Libyan oil. And then you have the French. As we head towards the Libyan war, the French Total have a small piece of the Libyan oil game, but I suppose they would like a bigger piece of it. And then you wind up having a French-American push to overthrow Gaddafi and essentially shove Gazprom out. I mean, I guess we're not saying one and one necessarily equals two, but it sure - it makes one think about it.'

Hall responded:

'Yeah, it's not necessarily causation, but there's - you might suggest there's correlation. And clearly this shows the degree to which oil is kind of the back story to so much that happens. As a matter of fact, we went through 251,000 [leaked] documents - or we have 250,000 documents that we've been pouring through. Of those, a full 10 percent of them, a full 10 percent of those documents, reference in some way, shape, or form oil. And I think that tells you how much part of, you know, the global security question, stability, prosperity - you know, take your choice, oil is fundamental.' (Our emphasis)

Jay replied with a wry smile:

'And we'll do more of this. But those who had said it's not all about oil, they ain't reading WikiLeaks.'

Hall replied: 'It is all about oil.'

guess who's coming to dinner at ft. calhoun?

HawaiiNewsDaily | Earlier this month, workers at the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant surrounded the reactor and other key parts of the facility with a massive water berm called an “AquaDam”.

Fort Calhoun had a foot-deep pool next to the reactor for spent fuel rods. The pool was so full in 2009 that they were sealing the fuel rods up in dry casks and sticking them in an on-site ‘mausoleum’.

This, of course, is why there is a no-fly zone around the plant — someone might realize that wherever the fuel casks and underground fuel pools are, they are NOT inside the condom.

Hat tip and a bow to Arthur Hu for finding the dry-storage bunker, half-submerged OUTSIDE the condom. It’s the smaller brown building adjacent to the white tank.

No one really knows what their condition is – or even if the spent fuel is still on-site. No one in the major media is asking the question, and the operators aren’t saying.

So who made the dry storage cask containers at Fort Calhoun?

That would be Transnuclear, Inc.

And who owns Transnuclear? Areva.

And what else is Aveva doing?

Selling water purification tanks and systems to TEPCO for Fukushima.

What else does Areva do? Anything it wants, since it’s a giant multinational behemoth.

what the hon.bro.administrator talking about???

Video - NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden encouraging NASA employees to get prepared.

solar storms, EMP, and the future of the grid...,

ResourceInsights | In late August 1859 the most severe solar storm ever witnessed began and lasted through the first few days of September. It produced vivid auroras in the night sky as far south as Cuba and was so bright campers in the Rocky Mountains got up in the middle of the night thinking daylight had arrived. During the storm telegraph operators felt as if some alien force had overtaken their equipment. Even disconnecting power to the wires failed to quiet their telegraphs. In some places the paper strip used to record the dots and dashes of Morse code caught fire because of the electrical surges coursing through the telegraph lines.

Today, the world we live in might be thought of as one big telegraph system composed of computer chips, telephone lines, fiber optics, cellphone towers, satellites, undersea cables and an electrical grid that supplies energy to the terrestrial parts of that system. An event as severe as the 1859 solar storm--called the Carrington Event after the respected British astronomer Richard Carrington who detected it as it developed--could cripple vast areas of the world, shutting down entire national grids not just for days, but possibly for months or years.

The simple fact is that most electrical systems and equipment including computers are not shielded to protect against such an event. One critical link, electrical transformers, would quickly be knocked out and would have to be replaced. Since few spare transformers are available, and it can take 12 months to build one, the world might have to wait years to fully recover--and that's assuming it would still be possible to produce new transformers which, after all, take electricity to manufacture. There is also the problem of what state modern civilization might be in if it faced months or years without electricity. Critical systems that pump and purify water and treat sewage, for example, would no longer function.

A fictional version of what all this might look like in our communities comes to us in a book by William Forstchen entitled One Second After. (For a brief nonfiction version of such an event, see this 2009 piece from New Scientist.) One Second After is set in the not-so-fictional town of Black Mountain, North Carolina where the author not-so-coincidently lives. It turns out to be a good choice of settings since Forstchen can give us an intimate portrait of a town and region he knows well while treating us to detailed but unobtrusive illustrations coming from his meticulous research into the effects of a total and prolonged blackout. To be clear, the cause of the blackout in the novel is the explosion of a nuclear weapon high above the Earth's surface over the continental United States, an explosion designed specifically to produce a crippling electromagnetic pulse (EMP). The effects of an EMP are in most ways similar to those that would result from another Carrington Event, and so the novel gives us a portrait of how such a disaster caused by either might unfold.

Perhaps the first thing a sensitive urbanite residing in the northern part of the United States will notice about One Second After is the number of guns produced by the novel's characters. But having lived in both the northern and southern parts of the United States, I can assure you that this would hardly raise an eyebrow south of the Mason-Dixon line where armory and home are very often one and the same. What is clear in the aftermath of the blackout is that order has broken down. Guns offer some protection and ultimately provide the force behind the small group of town leaders trying to guide Black Mountain through the worst disaster it will ever experience. The leaders succeed to a certain extent, but at a terrible cost as they are forced to put the mere survival of the community above all other values.

north korea tests super EMP weapon...,

Video - National Geographic nuclear explosion in the sky.

benzinga | Gary Samore, a top Obama administration national security official, warned of new sanctions if North Korea conducted a third round of nuclear tests on Monday, as reports surfaced that North Korea has miniaturized its nuclear warheads so they can be delivered by ballistic missile.

North Korea's last round of tests, conducted in May 2009, appear to have included a “super-EMP” weapon, capable of emitting enough gamma rays to disable the electric power grid across most of the lower 48 states, says Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, a former CIA nuclear weapons analyst and president of EMPact America, a citizens lobbying group.

Samore, who handles arms control and non-proliferation issues, warned that “additional strong sanctions will be imposed on the North with the support of Russia and China.”

North Korea's nuclear tests have been dismissed as failures by some analysts because of their low explosive yield. But Dr. Pry believes they bore the “signature” of the Russian-designed “super-EMP” weapon, capable of emitting more gamma radiation than a 25-megaton nuclear weapon.

Pry believes the U.S. intelligence community was expecting North Korea to test a first generation implosion device with an explosive yield of 10 to 20 kilotons, similar to the bomb the U.S. exploded over Nagasaki in 1945. He said, “So when they saw one that put off just three kilotons, they said it failed. That is so implausible.”

The technology for producing a first generation implosion weapon has been around since 1945, and is thoroughly described in open source literature.

South Korean defense minister, Kim Kwan-jin, told his country's parliament on Monday that North Korea had succeeded in miniaturizing its nuclear weapons design, allowing them to place a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile.

His analysis coincided with Congressional testimony in March by Lt. Gen. Ronald L. Burgess, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who stated that North Korea “may now have several plutonium-based warheads that it can deliver by ballistic missiles.”

The Soviet Union conducted an atmospheric test of an EMP weapon in 1962 over Kazakhstan whose pulse wave set on fire a power station 300 kilometers away and destroyed it within 10 seconds.

Such a weapon — equal to a massive solar flare such as the “solar maxima” predicted by NASA to occur in 2012 — poses “substantial risk to equipment and operation of the nation's power grid and under extreme conditions could result in major long term electrical outages,” said Joseph McClelland of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Senate testimony last month.

Pry said that a group of Russian nuclear weapons scientists approached him in 2004 when he served as staff director of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, to warn the United States that the technology to make that weapon “had leaked” to North Korea, and possibly to Iran.

“They told us that Russian scientists had gone to North Korea to work on building the super-EMP weapon,” Pry told Newsmax. “The North Koreans appear to have tested it in 2006 and again in 2009.”

North Korea's main partner in its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs is Iran. Dr. William Graham, chairman of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, warned Congress three years ago that Iran had conducted missile launches in an EMP mode, detonating them high in the atmosphere.

let the flood of political narrative begin!

Video - RT goes in on DHS information blackout on nuclear power plants

AmericanThinker | The Missouri River basin encompasses a vast region in the central and west-central portion of our country. This river, our nation's longest, collects the melt from Rocky Mountain snowpack and the runoff from our continents' upper plains before joining the Mississippi river above St. Louis some 2,300 miles later. It is a mighty river, and dangerous.

Some sixty years ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) began the process of taming the Missouri by constructing a series of six dams. The idea was simple: massive dams at the top moderating flow to the smaller dams below, generating electricity while providing desperately needed control of the river's devastating floods.

The stable flow of water allowed for the construction of the concrete and earthen levees that protect more than 10 million people who reside and work within the river's reach. It allowed millions of acres of floodplain to become useful for farming and development. In fact, these uses were encouraged by our government, which took credit for the resulting economic boom. By nearly all measures, the project was a great success.

But after about thirty years of operation, as the environmentalist movement gained strength throughout the seventies and eighties, the Corps received a great deal of pressure to include some specific environmental concerns into their MWCM (Master Water Control Manual, the "bible" for the operation of the dam system). Preservation of habitat for at-risk bird and fish populations soon became a hot issue among the burgeoning environmental lobby. The pressure to satisfy the demands of these groups grew exponentially as politicians eagerly traded their common sense for "green" political support.

kids, this is why you cannot beat the state - umm-kayyy...?

NYTimes | The F.B.I. seized Web servers in a raid on a data center early Tuesday, causing several Web sites, including those run by the New York publisher Curbed Network, to go offline.

The raid happened at 1:15 a.m. at a hosting facility in Reston, Va., used by DigitalOne, which is based in Switzerland, the company said. The F.B.I. did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the raid.

In an e-mail to one of its clients on Tuesday afternoon, DigitalOne’s chief executive, Sergej Ostroumow, said: “This problem is caused by the F.B.I., not our company. In the night F.B.I. has taken 3 enclosures with equipment plugged into them, possibly including your server — we cannot check it.”

Mr. Ostroumow said that the F.B.I. was only interested in one of the company’s clients but had taken servers used by “tens of clients.”

He wrote: “After F.B.I.’s unprofessional ‘work’ we can not restart our own servers, that’s why our Web site is offline and support doesn’t work.” The company’s staff had been working to solve the problem for the previous 15 hours, he said.

Mr. Ostroumow said in response to e-mailed questions that it was not clear if the issues would be resolved by Wednesday.

A government official who declined to be named said earlier in the day that the F.B.I. was actively investigating the Lulz Security group and any affiliated hackers. The official said the F.B.I. had teamed up with other agencies in this effort, including the Central Intelligence Agency and cybercrime bureaus in Europe.

Mr. Ostroumow declined to name the company targeted by the F.B.I. and said that he did not know why it had drawn their interest. It was also unclear why the agents took more servers with them than they sought, he said.

gnurds fitna get shot or go to the big house...,

IBT | Hacktivist groups Anonymous and LulzSec are sailing out for a cyber war against "any and all" government agencies around the globe, without taking a breath from the recent rash of high-profit hacks.

"Operation Anti-Security is in effect. Join the fleet and tear the government and whitehat peons limb from limb," LulzSec tweeted on Monday. The hacker group continued, "You are all now lulz lizards. Add the finishing touches to your ships and sail into attack formation: we are now declaring war on the peons."

On the same day, the group released a statement saying, "As we're aware, the government and whitehat security terrorists across the world continue to dominate and control our Internet ocean. Sitting pretty on cargo bays full of corrupt booty, they think it's acceptable to condition and enslave all vessels in sight. Our Lulz Lizard battle fleet is now declaring immediate and unremitting war on the freedom-snatching moderators of 2011. Welcome to Operation Anti-Security (#AntiSec) - we encourage any vessel, large or small, to open fire on any government or agency that crosses their path. We fully endorse the flaunting of the word "AntiSec" on any government website defacement or physical graffiti art. We encourage you to spread the word of AntiSec far and wide, for it will be remembered. To increase efforts, we are now teaming up with the Anonymous collective and all affiliated battleships."

LulzSec's "battleship" seems to be gaining supporters - Iranian Cyber Army, a hacker group that has attacked government systems, expressed its support through Twitter, "@LulzSec @Anonymouse we do support you, from now on."

LulzSec set the top priority as "to steal and leak classified government information, including email spools and documentation," and their prime targets are "banks and other high-ranking establishments."

The high-profile hacking victims of LulzSec include the FBI, CIA and the US government among numerous game sites and companies.

Monday afternoon, LulzSec claimed a DDoS attack on SOCA, the UK's Serious Organized Crime Agency, making its website sporadically inaccessible. LulzSec tweeted a couple of hours ago, "DDoS is of course our least powerful and most abundant ammunition. Government hacking is taking place right now behind the scenes."

Before moving onto the next governmental target, LulzSec may need to combat some enemies from its own tribe. On a new blog called LulzSec Exposed, "Team Web Ninjas" has been doxing LulzSec members, claiming its knowledge of their identities.

"The Leader of LulzSec is Doxed. Game Over for you Guys !!! We are just posting his pic, We do have his Name, Address, location and work but we are not publishing," Web Ninjas stated on the website on Monday. The subsequent post claimed, "Web Ninjas" does and will stop Lulzsec." The information regarding LulzSec, due to its sensitivity, will be directly sent to FBI, while the website has already revealed photos and information regarding several other persons believed to be LulzSec members.

While the warfare between hacker groups may end up in their self-destruction, the increased hacking activities pose a serious threat to the authorities around the world, and they have not remained silent.

mebbe they'll pat down some nuclear power plants?

Video - TSA bus station VIPR swarm.

AmericanThinker | Americans must decide if, in the name of homeland security, they are willing to allow TSA operatives to storm public places in their communities with no warning, pat them down, and search their bags. And they better decide quickly.

Bus travelers were shocked when jackbooted TSA officers in black SWAT-style uniforms descended unannounced upon the Tampa Greyhound bus station in April with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies and federal bureaucrats in tow.

A news report by ABC Action News in Tampa showed passengers being given the signature pat downs Americans are used to watching the Transportation Security Administration screeners perform at our airports. Canine teams sniffed their bags and the buses they rode. Immigration officials hunted for large sums of cash as part of an anti-smuggling initiative.

The TSA clearly intends for these out-of-nowhere swarms by its officers at community transit centers, bus stops and public events to become a routine and accepted part of American life.

The TSA has conducted 8,000 of these security sweeps across the country in the past year alone, TSA chief John Pistole told a Senate committee June 14. They are part of its VIPR (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response) program, which targets public transit related places.

All of which is enough to make you wonder if we are watching the formation of the "civilian national security force" President Obama called for on the campaign trail "that is just as powerful, just as strong and just as well funded" as the military.

The VIPR swarm on Wednesday, the TSA's largest so far, was such a shocking display of the agency's power that it set the blogosphere abuzz.

In a massive flex of muscle most people didn't know the TSA had, the agency led dozens of federal and state law enforcement agencies in a VIPR exercise that covered three states and 5,000 square miles. According to the Marietta Times, the sweep used reconnaissance aircraft and "multiple airborne assets, including Blackhawk helicopters and fixed wing aircraft as well as waterborne and surface teams."

When did the TSA get this powerful? Last year, Pistole told USA Today he wanted to "take the TSA to the next level," building it into a "national-security, counterterrorism organization, fully integrated into U.S. government efforts."

What few people realize is how far Pistole has already come in his quest. This is apparently what that next level looks like. More than 300 law enforcement and military personnel swept through a 100-mile stretch of the Ohio Valley alone, examining the area's industrial infrastructure, the Charleston Gazette reported.

Federal air marshals, the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Coast Guard, the FBI, the Office of Homeland Security and two dozen other federal, state and local agencies teamed up to scour the state's roads, bridges, water supply and transit centers under the TSA's leadership.

What is remarkable about these security swarms is that they don't just involve federal, state and local law enforcement officials. The TSA brings in squads of bureaucrats from state and federal agencies as well, everything from transportation departments to departments of natural resources.

the owners give the checkbook to management?!?!?!

Video - Nebraska aerial flood tour.

WorldNuclearNews | On 6 June, Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) declared a 'notification of unusual event' at its Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant due to the rising level of the Missouri River and some onsite flooding. This is the least-serious of four emergency classifications that are standard in the US nuclear industry.

The utility noted projections from the US Army Corps of Engineers that the river level at the plant site - 19 miles (31 kilometres) north of Omaha, Nebraska - was expected to reach 1004 feet (306 metres) above mean sea level and to remain above that level for more than one month. The alert is set to remain in effect at Fort Calhoun until OPPD can be sure the level of the river would remain below 1004 feet.

The single 482 MWe pressurized water reactor at Fort Calhoun has been in safe shutdown since 9 April, when it entered a scheduled refuelling outage.

OPPD said, "In addition to the existing flood-protection at the plant, OPPD employees and contractors have built earth berms (raised barriers) and sandbagged around the switchyards and additional buildings on site. They also are filling water-filled berms around the plant and other major buildings on site, have staged additional diesel fuel inside the Protected Area and are building additional overhead power lines to provide another option for power for the plant's administration building, training centre and one of its warehouses."

Separately OPPD declared a level two alert at the plant on 7 June due to smoke in an electrical switchgear room. An investigation found no fire or release of radiation and the plant was subsequently returned to the level one emergency classification. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which is monitoring the situation at Fort Calhoun, said, "Although the plant briefly lost its normal ability to cool the spent fuel pool, temperatures in the pool remained at safe levels and the plant recovered pool cooling without the need for any of the plant's multiple back-up systems."

On 16 June, OPPD's board of directors approved a measure to authorize plant management to buy any material, equipment or services it needed to prevent flooding at Fort Calhoun, without having to go through the usual procurement process.

"The high volume of water released from upstream dams already has caused some flooding in OPPD's service area," the company said in a statement. It added, "Those water releases continue to pose a threat to the electric system and generation facilities along the river."

The company stressed, "No release of radioactive material requiring offsite response or monitoring has occurred or is expected."

man down...,

Video - Domestic violence arrests spark homelessness

Kunstler | Last week, in an incident that didn't get much attention in the national news, a man named Tom Ball set himself on fire in front of the county courthouse in Keene, NH. He left a fifteen-page suicide note explaining his actions. He was angry at the state child protection bureaucracy and the courts after a ten-year battle over a child abuse charge that became, for him, a Kafkaesque struggle with cruel authority. The long suicide note he left was a thoughtful and disturbing indictment of the legal procedures now common across America that have had many unanticipated consequences - from breaking up families to homelessness - but it was also a grim comment on the condition of American manhood.

A casual Martian observer hanging around any convenience store in the "fly-over" zones of this nation must be impressed with the striking way that American men present themselves to the world. Forgive me for revisiting an oft-dredged-up theme - male costuming and adornment in our time - but I wouldn't keep bringing it up if I didn't think it was significant. On the whole, American men present themselves as savages. I think they do it because they feel very insecure about themselves - similar to the insecurity that prompts a politician to wear a flag lapel pin. Should there be any doubt that an elected official cares about his country? Or maybe we should ask: what kind of country produces such craven, weak, pandering elected officials? What kind of culture produces men who get themselves up like chain-saw murderers?

The same country that furnishes an endless diet of super-hero movies to pubescent males who are not expected to develop normal adult coping powers. The same country that supplies gruesome, sado-masochistic video games to occupy the idle hours of young men - and then lets them take those "skills" to some tilt-up bunker in Nevada where they sit in air-conditioned comfort and direct drone aircraft ten thousand miles away to incinerate suspected "enemies" in mud villages. (Sometimes "mistakes are made" and they blow up a wedding party or something - but the drone controllers still get to leave the bunker at the end of their shift and roll down the strip for a plastic tray full of burritos.)

This month's WeinerGate was another instructive incident. Up-and-coming wonderboy politician revealed to be secret sex schlemiel, undone by "social media" - which turns out to have the unanticipated consequence of undermining the impulse control of supposedly grown men. Who knew? But what interested me more than Weiner's pitiful dishonesty was the parade of women journalists on cable TV news who all agreed that poor Weiner's downfall was yet another conclusive demonstration of how hopeless men are - not to mention that their male colleagues on-screen, Blitzer, King, O'Donnell, sheepishly agreed with them. This ceremonial posturing for moral brownie points in an extremely moralistic and puritanical culture does tend to obscure the reality that adult male humans are sexually alert in an inconvenient way that is not identical to the experience of females.

finger in the dyke

Video - Especially those who work at the Cooper nuclear power plant in Browneville.

KCUR | The Missouri River approaching Kansas City is becoming more bloated than it's been in decades. Overflow, by millions-of-gallons a minute is being dumped from brimming reservoirs in the Dakotas. Interests along the river watch with a keen eye. They range from farmers to railroads to people who live behind levees. KCUR's Dan Verbeck has been attuned to the river for weeks and filed this account.

By time the river is past St. Joseph and Leavenworth, it's ready to push through curves and wriggles in its path toward the heart of the metro region.

We picked an arbitrary segment of flatland to watch. This extends from a few miles south of Weston down to the community of Waldron. Two levees guard it. The federal government paid for installation in the 1950's. Local taxes pay for upkeep.

Menno Attema farms 2500 acres of it and he's head of the levee board. The Army Corps of Engineers sets standards for how they're supposed to be built.. The Corps also is releasing the deluge upstream-- "there's no such thing as guarantees but I'm confident our system can withstand that. Its always to which degree because the Corps has indicated with their models, a low flow event. That means minimal rainfall for this area. We would be able to manage it relatively easy. During an extreme high rainfall situation, even our system would be challenged to withstand that." This is about protecting land from flooding. And people, ultimately.

Drivers passing on Missouri Highway 45, also known as Northwest 64th closer to Parkville, may not notice a lot of homes out in the flatland. The levee board president says--"There's 70 some homes still in the Farley-Beverly District. And then, in the Waldron area quite a bit less but still more than you would think." Attema and his family are among those 70 families and the levee holding is vitally important to them all.

corps general in jefferson city...,

Video - General John McMahon on Missouri river flooding.

OzarksFirst | The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' commander for the Missouri River basin came to the state capital Monday and stayed on script before an audience best described as skeptical.

Brigadier General John McMahon answered questions in front of an audience of about 40 people at Jefferson City's city hall Monday for about 20 minutes, before meeting with business owners at a private lunch and finally touring the city's northern river front.

For weeks, the corps has been saying its management plan for releasing water from the upper Missouri River basin through it's series of reservoirs and dams was on schedule until heavy rains struck Montana in May.

Farmer Terry Hilgedick from nearby Hartsburg, an area prone to flooding, questioned McMahon about the corps' policy of releasing water at a relatively slow rate, despite record snowfall and snow-pack in Montana and the Dakotas.

"You knew that you had a larger snow -pack and even larger projections than even last year, which was the second highest (snow fall and snow-pack) in a year," said Hilgedick.

"We had everything in place to accommodate the snow-pack," said McMahon. "What we didn't have in place was this unprecedented amount of rain in the upper basin states that took away our flexibility."

The general's comments echo the corps' position on the reasoning behind its record releases of water over the last month or so. As of Monday, the dams along the upper Missouri, including the final dam, Gavins Point near Yankton South Dakota, continue to pump out a record volume of 150,000 cubic feet per second.

The Gavins Point Dam began pumping that full volume of water on June 14. The first of that surge is just now reaching Kansas City. McMahon said it would be at least another week before river levels came up in Jefferson City, and another three days or so beyond that before the surge reaches St. Charles and the confluence with the Mississippi River.

Already, levees are being overtopped and breached in northwest Missouri where residents of the town of Big Lake have evacuated. The river reached an all time record level at Rulo Nebraska earlier Monday, and officials in southwest Iowa continue to eye flood waters that are lapping at a new flood wall built to protect the south end of the community of Hamburg. McMahon said the corps will continue running water at Gavins Point and its other dams at their current volume until at least the middle of July, and could go longer if rain continues over the northern basin. And McMahon said the reservoirs continue to take in more water than they are pumping out.

McMahon and Kansas City corps commander, Col. Anthony Hoffmann came to Jefferson City at the request of Ninth District Congressman Blaine Luetkemeyer and Fourth District congresswoman Vicky Hartzler.

"There's a lot of questions out there about how the corps arrived at the decisions they have," said Rep. Hartzler. "This is a precarious situation."

fukushima usa?

DailyMail | Dangerous radioactive leaks and cracked foundations go unpunished at American nuclear power plants. Safety has taken a back seat to cost-cutting at most of the nation's nuclear power plants, sparking fears that America could be facing its own Fukushima disaster.

An investigation by the Associated Press has revealed federal regulators are repeatedly weakening - or simply failing to impose - strict rules.

Officials at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission have frequently decided that original regulations were too strict, arguing that safety margins could be eased without peril.

The constant danger of aging reactors operating without the highest standards has resulted in rising fears the NRC is significantly undermining safety.

Such negligence is destined to to bring the plants closer to a catastrophic accident that could harm millions and jeopardize the future of nuclear power in the U.S.

Examples abound.

When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed — up to 20 times the original limit.

When rampant cracking caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of the tubes was devised, so plants could meet standards.

within 18 inches of shutdown, and only 8 more rainy weeks to go..,

Video - Brownsville NE levee is breaching at Brownsville Bridge (Cooper Nuclear plant is in Brownsville)

Joplin Globe | The bloated Missouri River rose to within 18 inches of forcing the shutdown of a nuclear power plant in southeast Nebraska but stopped and ebbed slightly Monday, after several levees in northern Missouri failed to hold back the surging waterway.

The river has to hit 902 feet above sea level at Brownville before officials will shut down the Cooper Nuclear Plant, which sits at 903 feet, Nebraska Public Power District spokesman Mark Becker said.

Flooding is a concern all along the river because of the massive amounts of water that the Army Corps of Engineers has released from six dams. Any significant rain could worsen the flooding especially if it falls in Nebraska, Iowa or Missouri, which are downstream of the dams.

The river is expected to rise as much as 5 to 7 feet above flood stage in much of Nebraska and Iowa and as much as 10 feet over flood stage in parts of Missouri. The corps predicts the river will remain that high until at least August.

Becker said the river rose to 900.56 feet at Brownville on Sunday, then dropped to 900.4 feet later in the day and remained at that level Monday morning. The National Weather Service said the Missouri River set a new record Sunday at Brownville when its depth was measured at 44.4 feet. That topped the record of 44.3 feet set during the 1993 flooding.

The Cooper Nuclear Plant is operating at full capacity Monday, Becker said.

The Columbus-based utility sent a "notification of unusual event" to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission when the river rose to 899 feet early Sunday morning. The declaration is the least serious of four emergency notifications established by the federal commission.

"We knew the river was going to rise for some time," Becker said Sunday. "It was just a matter of when."

The nuclear plant has been preparing for the flooding since May 30. More than 5,000 tons of sand has been brought in to construct barricades around it and access roads, according to NPPD.

war evolves with drones, some as small as bugs...,

NYTimes | Two miles from the cow pasture where the Wright Brothers learned to fly the first airplanes, military researchers are at work on another revolution in the air: shrinking unmanned drones, the kind that fire missiles into Pakistan and spy on insurgents in Afghanistan, to the size of insects and birds.

The base’s indoor flight lab is called the “microaviary,” and for good reason. The drones in development here are designed to replicate the flight mechanics of moths, hawks and other inhabitants of the natural world. “We’re looking at how you hide in plain sight,” said Greg Parker, an aerospace engineer, as he held up a prototype of a mechanical hawk that in the future might carry out espionage or kill.

Half a world away in Afghanistan, Marines marvel at one of the new blimplike spy balloons that float from a tether 15,000 feet above one of the bloodiest outposts of the war, Sangin in Helmand Province. The balloon, called an aerostat, can transmit live video — from as far as 20 miles away — of insurgents planting homemade bombs. “It’s been a game-changer for me,” Capt. Nickoli Johnson said in Sangin this spring. “I want a bunch more put in.”

From blimps to bugs, an explosion in aerial drones is transforming the way America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones, the Cessna-sized workhorses that have dominated unmanned flight since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are by now a brand name, known and feared around the world. But far less widely known are the sheer size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly expanding drone universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it.

The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones, compared with fewer than 50 a decade ago. Within the next decade the Air Force anticipates a decrease in manned aircraft but expects its number of “multirole” aerial drones like the Reaper — the ones that spy as well as strike — to nearly quadruple, to 536. Already the Air Force is training more remote pilots, 350 this year alone, than fighter and bomber pilots combined.

“It’s a growth market,” said Ashton B. Carter, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer.