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.'
Friday, June 24, 2011
Soured Relations - Gaddafi And Big 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.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
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.
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.
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."
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."
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
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.
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.
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."
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.
Monday, June 20, 2011
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.
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.
remote control killing - america's newest sport?
Video - RT goes in on the growing culture of the steel sky.
SJL | Defense contractor giants like Boeing, Lockeed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and others, as well as smaller rivals compete for growing demand for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). They include remote control operated killer drones, also called unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs).
It's America's newest sport. From distant command centers, far from target sights, sounds, and smells, operators dismissively ignore human carnage showing up as computer screen blips little different from video game images. The difference, of course, is people die, mostly noncombatants. More on that below.
On March 10, 2010, Der Spiegel writer Marc Pitzke headlined, "How Drone Pilots Wage War," saying:
They "sit in air-conditioned rooms far away from (America's wars). They guide their weapons with joysticks and monitors. The remote warriors work with a high degree of precision - at a fraction of the cost of a fighter jet," but just as deadly.
Operators use computer keyboards and five monitors. One says "I've got eight missiles and two bombs on two Predators. Weapons ready."
The main monitor shows a target's aerial view "from a considerable height....Three, two, one. Impact," after pushing a red button. "Excellent job," the man says after a destructive explosion. The entire mission lasted two minutes "against a faceless enemy" attacked by remote control half a world away.
"The whole thing looks like a computer game," virtual war "that doesn't require combatants to get their hands dirty" or perhaps souls compromised for mindlessly slaughtering civilians lawlessly - what America's media never explain or why Washington wages war.
Each drone system includes four aircraft, a ground station, a satellite link, and launch site maintenance crew, keeping UAVs ready to use round-the-clock on a moment's notice. Like America's wars, moreover, drone technology is a growth business, Insitu's Steven Sliwa saying the industry is well positioned like the aeronautical one during WW II - up-up-and-away for big profits.
SJL | Defense contractor giants like Boeing, Lockeed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and others, as well as smaller rivals compete for growing demand for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). They include remote control operated killer drones, also called unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs).
It's America's newest sport. From distant command centers, far from target sights, sounds, and smells, operators dismissively ignore human carnage showing up as computer screen blips little different from video game images. The difference, of course, is people die, mostly noncombatants. More on that below.
On March 10, 2010, Der Spiegel writer Marc Pitzke headlined, "How Drone Pilots Wage War," saying:
They "sit in air-conditioned rooms far away from (America's wars). They guide their weapons with joysticks and monitors. The remote warriors work with a high degree of precision - at a fraction of the cost of a fighter jet," but just as deadly.
Operators use computer keyboards and five monitors. One says "I've got eight missiles and two bombs on two Predators. Weapons ready."
The main monitor shows a target's aerial view "from a considerable height....Three, two, one. Impact," after pushing a red button. "Excellent job," the man says after a destructive explosion. The entire mission lasted two minutes "against a faceless enemy" attacked by remote control half a world away.
"The whole thing looks like a computer game," virtual war "that doesn't require combatants to get their hands dirty" or perhaps souls compromised for mindlessly slaughtering civilians lawlessly - what America's media never explain or why Washington wages war.
Each drone system includes four aircraft, a ground station, a satellite link, and launch site maintenance crew, keeping UAVs ready to use round-the-clock on a moment's notice. Like America's wars, moreover, drone technology is a growth business, Insitu's Steven Sliwa saying the industry is well positioned like the aeronautical one during WW II - up-up-and-away for big profits.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
ft. calhoun - how bad can it get?
Video - Arnie Gunderson on Fort Calhoun near Omaha, Nebraska
Hawaiinewsdaily | Radiation, at minimum in the form of tritium, and more likely other particles and radionuclides, are leaking into the Missouri River from the Fort Calhoun nuclear generation plant in Nebraska.
I do not have proof. What I do have is the knowledge that every reactor is susceptible to small leaks at any time. Typically they are undiscovered and thus unreported – they are a few drops here and a few drops there from an improper weld or a stressed fitting – maybe the last one of the day before pau-hana time. And he intended to check it later, but never did. New baby, vacation, other things to think about. So thirty years later there are a couple gallons of it sitting under a pipe somewhere, not visible from the inspection point – and hey, this is all sealed up anyway….except for that pesky water leak the NRC is upset about…but a little water can’t hurt….
Until the plant gets submerged — or nearly so by a fast-running river which doesn’t cover the top (yet) but sure washes out all the leaky lines and the incomplete repair jobs which we didn’t care much about at the time because the river would never go that high.
So we are all standing on top of the buildings watching water pour in one side and out the other. Sandbags are sandbags. One million gallons of water a second washes sandbags away and all the cute little plastic pipes full of water – supported by sandbags and chain and not designed to hold 8 million pounds of water a second. Tomorrow it might be 150 million gallons of water a minute. If the dams hold. But we all know they aren’t going to — they are are right at the top of the US DAM potential failure list. The ‘domino’ dams.
Let’s skip that. At least we know why there is a no-fly zone around the plant. Workers are being brought in by helicopter and boat — to the roof and to SECOND STORY windows — maybe third story by tomorrow.
So….it’s a sand castle and the tide is coming in. Once the water washes out the underpinnings, the whole thing may happily slosh downstream until it hits the next one…
Is that all? Not hardly. The Cooper nuclear plant can’t discharge sludge and it’s partially submerged just like Fort Calhoun. We don’t require any special knowledge to grasp what is going on. The plants have windows and doors and control rooms and pumps and heat exchangers and expended fuel pools. And they are all going underwater – but not like Fukushima where the water washed in and washed out. This is just going to get worse through August.
But it isn’t all bad. The Missouri river is cold enough to keep the pools and cores cool all by itself. And it’s also powerful to pull the fuel out and irradiate half the country.
And about that time, the hemp ropes are gonna come out.
Hawaiinewsdaily | Radiation, at minimum in the form of tritium, and more likely other particles and radionuclides, are leaking into the Missouri River from the Fort Calhoun nuclear generation plant in Nebraska.
I do not have proof. What I do have is the knowledge that every reactor is susceptible to small leaks at any time. Typically they are undiscovered and thus unreported – they are a few drops here and a few drops there from an improper weld or a stressed fitting – maybe the last one of the day before pau-hana time. And he intended to check it later, but never did. New baby, vacation, other things to think about. So thirty years later there are a couple gallons of it sitting under a pipe somewhere, not visible from the inspection point – and hey, this is all sealed up anyway….except for that pesky water leak the NRC is upset about…but a little water can’t hurt….
Until the plant gets submerged — or nearly so by a fast-running river which doesn’t cover the top (yet) but sure washes out all the leaky lines and the incomplete repair jobs which we didn’t care much about at the time because the river would never go that high.
So we are all standing on top of the buildings watching water pour in one side and out the other. Sandbags are sandbags. One million gallons of water a second washes sandbags away and all the cute little plastic pipes full of water – supported by sandbags and chain and not designed to hold 8 million pounds of water a second. Tomorrow it might be 150 million gallons of water a minute. If the dams hold. But we all know they aren’t going to — they are are right at the top of the US DAM potential failure list. The ‘domino’ dams.
Let’s skip that. At least we know why there is a no-fly zone around the plant. Workers are being brought in by helicopter and boat — to the roof and to SECOND STORY windows — maybe third story by tomorrow.
So….it’s a sand castle and the tide is coming in. Once the water washes out the underpinnings, the whole thing may happily slosh downstream until it hits the next one…
Is that all? Not hardly. The Cooper nuclear plant can’t discharge sludge and it’s partially submerged just like Fort Calhoun. We don’t require any special knowledge to grasp what is going on. The plants have windows and doors and control rooms and pumps and heat exchangers and expended fuel pools. And they are all going underwater – but not like Fukushima where the water washed in and washed out. This is just going to get worse through August.
But it isn’t all bad. The Missouri river is cold enough to keep the pools and cores cool all by itself. And it’s also powerful to pull the fuel out and irradiate half the country.
And about that time, the hemp ropes are gonna come out.
nosebleed, diarrhea, lack of energy in children in koriyama city, fukushima
ex-skf | What's happening to children in Koriyama City in Fukushima right now? Nosebleed, diarrhea, lack of energy - "Effect of radiation unknown" says the doctorReport by Ao Ideta, Tokyo Shinbun, June 16, 2011
On June 12, a non-profit organization called "The Bridge to Chernobyl" (チェルノブイリへのかけはし) held a free clinic in Koriyama City in Fukushima Prefecture, 50 kilometers [west] from Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant.
Worried about the effect of radiation exposure, 50 families brought their children to see the doctor.
A 39-year-old mother of two told the doctor that her 6-year-old daughter had nosebleed everyday for 3 weeks in April. For 1 week, the daughter bled copiously from both nostrils. The mother said their doctor told her it was just a seasonal allergy from pollen. Her other child, 2-year-old son, had nosebleed from end of April to May.
The pediatrician from The Bridge to Chernobyl, Yurika Hashimoto, told the mother it was hard to determine whether the nosebleed was the result of radiation exposure, but they should have the blood test done for white blood cells. It was important to keep record, the doctor advised.
The family move out temporarily from Koriyama City to Saitama Prefecture after the March 11 earthquake, but came back to Koriyama at the end of March.
The mother said about 10% of pupils at the elementary school have left Koriyama. Each school in Koriyama decides whether to have the pupils drink local milk that the school provide, which tends to concentrate radioactive materials. In her daughter's school, it is up to the parents to decide. But the mother said she let the daughter drink milk with other children because the daughter didn't want to get excluded by other children for not drinking milk with them.
A 40-year-old father of a 4-month-old baby daughter was so worried that he never let the daughter go outside, even though she didn't exhibit any ill effect of radiation so far. He said, "I'm so worried. I don't know how to defend ourselves."
I [the reporter of the story] used the radiation monitoring device over the low bush near the place where this event was being held. It measured 2.33 microsieverts/hour. As I raised the device higher, the radiation level went down to 1 microsievert/hour. The highest air radiation measured in Koriyama City was 8.26 microsieverts/hour on March 15. Since middle of May, it has been about 1.3 microsievert/hour.
If you live one year in a place with 1.3 microsievert/hour radiation, the cumulative radiation will exceed 11 millisieverts. [And that's only the external exposure.]
hot particles - slow death
Video - nighttime view of toxic radioactive steam rising off Fukushima 24/7
IMVA | Here in the above video we are looking at nuclear hell on earth, a night film of the radioactive steam that continues to rise from Fukushima 24 hours a day. Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear power industry executive, is one of the experts who has been saying from day one that the nuclear crisis in Japan was much worse than they were telling us.
He was absolutely correct. Finally, three months later we are getting some numbers on what the real dangers are. And finally we can begin to understand the enormous cover-up of the nuclear doom that is reaching lungs all over the west coast of America, Canada, Alaska, Hawaii and at least half of Japan! For infants it’s a terrible valley of death we have created for them. As we shall see for years all of them have been born with already polluted bloodstreams and now the very young ones are dying in greater numbers on the west coast of the United States since Fukushima blew up.
After the first week, officials had enough information to call for evacuation of a wide area in Japan and also Hawaii, Alaska and the entire west coast of North America. They really should have evacuated all of northern Japan and also the west coast but that was almost as impossible as evacuating the entire planet or the entire northern hemisphere.
Evacuation of planet earth might be the best way for humanity to avoid the terrible nuclear, heavy metal and chemical toxicity we are now facing all at the same time. Avoiding exposure is always the best plan but there is no way to avoid breathing in air contaminated with tiny hot particles. Inhalation issues are much more frightening than ingestion issues because you can pick and choose what you eat and drink but you can’t buy bottled air.
Nuclear Toxicity Syndrome is about how to survive in nuclear and chemical hell. But one cannot do what is necessary to survive hell if a person doesn’t know they are living in one. It just keeps getting worse by the day and now we have Fort Calhoun nuclear plant outside Omaha, Nebraska on emergency alert as first fire and now flooding threatens to overwhelm yet another nuclear facility. With Mother Nature now angry (in a most bitter sense) we are really in more serious trouble than any of us would be comfortable imagining. We knew nuke power plants were bad news but who would think they would build them on fault lines or in flood zones?
IMVA | Here in the above video we are looking at nuclear hell on earth, a night film of the radioactive steam that continues to rise from Fukushima 24 hours a day. Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear power industry executive, is one of the experts who has been saying from day one that the nuclear crisis in Japan was much worse than they were telling us.
He was absolutely correct. Finally, three months later we are getting some numbers on what the real dangers are. And finally we can begin to understand the enormous cover-up of the nuclear doom that is reaching lungs all over the west coast of America, Canada, Alaska, Hawaii and at least half of Japan! For infants it’s a terrible valley of death we have created for them. As we shall see for years all of them have been born with already polluted bloodstreams and now the very young ones are dying in greater numbers on the west coast of the United States since Fukushima blew up.
After the first week, officials had enough information to call for evacuation of a wide area in Japan and also Hawaii, Alaska and the entire west coast of North America. They really should have evacuated all of northern Japan and also the west coast but that was almost as impossible as evacuating the entire planet or the entire northern hemisphere.
Evacuation of planet earth might be the best way for humanity to avoid the terrible nuclear, heavy metal and chemical toxicity we are now facing all at the same time. Avoiding exposure is always the best plan but there is no way to avoid breathing in air contaminated with tiny hot particles. Inhalation issues are much more frightening than ingestion issues because you can pick and choose what you eat and drink but you can’t buy bottled air.
Nuclear Toxicity Syndrome is about how to survive in nuclear and chemical hell. But one cannot do what is necessary to survive hell if a person doesn’t know they are living in one. It just keeps getting worse by the day and now we have Fort Calhoun nuclear plant outside Omaha, Nebraska on emergency alert as first fire and now flooding threatens to overwhelm yet another nuclear facility. With Mother Nature now angry (in a most bitter sense) we are really in more serious trouble than any of us would be comfortable imagining. We knew nuke power plants were bad news but who would think they would build them on fault lines or in flood zones?
japan strains to fix a reactor damaged before the quake
NYTimes | Three hundred miles southwest of Fukushima, at a nuclear reactor perched on the slopes of this rustic peninsula, engineers are engaged in another precarious struggle.The Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor — a long-troubled national project — has been in a precarious state of shutdown since a 3.3-ton device crashed into the reactor’s inner vessel, cutting off access to the plutonium and uranium fuel rods at its core.
Engineers have tried repeatedly since the accident last August to recover the device, which appears to have gotten stuck. They will make another attempt as early as next week.
But critics warn that the recovery process is fraught with dangers because the plant uses large quantities of liquid sodium, a highly flammable substance, to cool the nuclear fuel.
The Monju reactor, which forms the cornerstone of a national project by resource-poor Japan to reuse and eventually produce nuclear fuel, shows the tensions between the scale of Japan’s nuclear ambitions and the risks.
The plant, a $12 billion project, has a history of safety lapses. It was shuttered for 14 years after a devastating fire in 1995, one of Japan’s most serious nuclear accidents before this year’s crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Prefecture and city officials found that the operator had tampered with video images of the fire to hide the scale of the disaster. A top manager at the plant recently committed suicide, on the day that Japan’s atomic energy agency announced that efforts to recover the device would cost almost $21.9 million. And, like several other reactors, Monju lies on an active fault.
Even if the device can be removed, restarting the reactor will be risky, given its safety record and its use of highly toxic plutonium as fuel, said Hideyuki Ban, co-director of the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, a watchdog group, and a member of an advisory government committee on Japan’s long-term nuclear energy policy. The plant is 60 miles from Kyoto, a city of 1.5 million people, and the fast-breeder design of the reactor makes it more prone to Chernobyl-type runaway reactions in the case of a severe accident, critics say.
“Let’s say they make this fix, which is very complicated,” Mr. Ban said. “The rest of the reactor remains highly dangerous. And an accident at Monju would have catastrophic consequences beyond what we are seeing at Fukushima.”
there must be some kind of way out of here - said the joker to the thief...,
Video - All Along the Watchtower 1970 Atlanta
Book of Isaiah, Chapter 21, verses 5-9:
Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise ye princes, and prepare the shield./For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth./And he saw a chariot with a couple of horsemen, a chariot of asses, and a chariot of camels; and he hearkened diligently with much heed./...And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.
second nebraska nuclear plant threatened by flooding
BusinessInsider | A second nuclear power plant in Nebraska is being threatened by rising floodwaters, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a federal watchdog agency, says the plant's owners are taking the appropriate steps to ward off danger, according to a report in the Omaha World-Herald.The Cooper Power Station would have to go into cold shutdown should floodwaters rise an additional six feet, a prospect local officials say is highly unlikely.
The Cooper plant is located 70 miles south of Omaha. The other nuclear plant at risk of flooding, the Fort Calhoun power station, is just north of Omaha.
Officials say a key difference between the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan and the two plants in Nebraska is that the Japanese plant had only an hour after the devastating March earthquake to prepare for floods. The Nebraska plants have had weeks to prepare flood defenses.
“That's not enough time to relocate a nuclear plant to higher ground or jack it up on stilts,” a nuclear scientist told the Omaha World-Herald, “but it is plenty of time to check to ensure that watertight doors are intact, backup power supplies are available and functional, fuel oil tanks are topped off, etc.”
At Fort Calhoun, the plant's owner, the Omaha Public Power District, has erected flood barriers to protect the plant should waters rise to 1010"-1012". The cooling pool for spent fuel rods is at 1,038.5". The river was measured earlier this week at 1005.6".
Elizabeth Cory, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, told the Omaha World-Herald that the flight bans over the two nuclear plants are meant to avoid collisions between aircraft drawn to the scene by curiosity.
“When you keep the area above the ground safe, you're going to keep the people on the ground safe, too,” Cory said.
missouri river - flood of biblical proportions
CBSLocal | ST. LOUIS (KMOX) - An expert on Missouri River reservoirs is sounding a very loud, very urgent warning about the chance of catastrophic flooding this summer.Bernard Shanks, an adviser to the Resource Renewal Institute, says the Fort Peck Dam and five others along the Missouri are already full with the Army Corps of Engineers releasing record amounts of water to prepare for snow-melt and heavy rain up-river.
As a guest on KMOX’s Total Information AM Wednesday, Shanks was asked what he fears will happen should the Fort Peck Dam fail and set off a chain-reaction.
“There would be a flood like you’ve never seen,” Shanks told hosts Doug McElvein and Debbie Monterrey. “It would be literally of biblical proportions.”
He foresees a very real threat of “chest-high” water in St. Louis before summer’s end.
Shanks’ main concern: that the Fort Peck dam, which he maintains is built with a “flawed design”, would be overwhelmed by snow-melt and heavy rains up north and give way, causing reservoirs downstream to collapse in a domino effect.
If that happens?
“It would be the most epic man-made disaster in the United States,” Shanks replied bluntly.
He says most of the dams holding back water along the Missouri River are 50 to 70 years old, and like people they tend to weaken with time.
“I have followed this issue for 40 years, and I have never seen them more at-risk than they are today,” Shanks warned.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
lamb's bread, king's bread has spiritual botanical agents...,
Video - Igziabeher is meaning GOD in amharic...like medanielem'Igzee'abihier
The word 'Igzee'abihier is the Ethiopian name for God, meaning literally, "Lord of the Universe". This is composed of 'Igzee (Lord) 'ab (father) bihier (of the nation). The complete phrase, 'Igzee'abihier Yimmesgen, means "Let God be praised".
philosophers stoned...,
philosophypress | The fact is surprising, when you think about it. Why have philosophers not had more to say about the phenomenology and social, political, legal, economic, and medical aspects of cannabis? Plato wrote his dialogue Symposium about an after-theatre drinking party in ancient Athens, where Socrates and his friends discourse about the nature of love. But no one in almost two thousand five hundred years of Western philosophy has had much if anything to say about getting high. Philosophers, like approximately 1 out of 3 citizens in developed societies, presumably have tried marijuana, and some of them must regularly smoke it, just as they might enjoy the occasional bottle of wine. Are such indulgences so shameful for intellectuals, either intrinsically, or perhaps because they are illegal, that virtually no one in the philosophical community has been moved to remark at length on the psychology, pharmacology and sociology of cannabis intoxication?586px-jointdetailSensing a gap in current discussions of applied popular philosophy, I recently edited a book on the subject. It appeared under what for my tastes is the excessively provocative title, Cannabis – Philosophy for Everyone: What Were We Just Talking About? This was not my title, which was morphed by the editorial hierarchy at the press from its original mellifluous (I thought) and more easily parsed Cannabis & Philosophy: What Were We Just Talking About? For the record, I do not imagine that either cannabis or philosophy is literally for everyone. Cannabis is certainly not for children, studies show, particularly under the age of fifteen, nor for the psychically challenged, and I certainly do not advocate a cannabis-philosophy (whatever that would be) for everyone (no less). Philosophy for Everyone is instead the title of the series in which the book appears, a title that has wandered its way uninvited into the book title, ostensibly for the sake of distinguishing this set of books from other philosophy and popular culture series. There have already come to light such companion volumes as Porn – Philosophy for Everyone: How to Think With Kink, and Christmas – Philosophy for Everyone: Better Than a Lump of Coal, even though one hopes it is obvious once again that not everyone stands in need of either a Porn – or a Christmas – philosophy. Given the potential for misunderstanding my purposes inherent in the book’s bewildering title, I propose to air a few thoughts on the project and my motivations for editing a book on the relation between philosophy and, as I see it, the relatively innocent pleasures of hashish.
The gratification I speak of is already known to many from first-hand experience. The philosophical challenge is to try to put the experience into words in a descriptive psychology or phenomenology. What is it like to be high? How is the sensation of being high on cannabis different from normal straight consciousness? It is expedient but philosophically unhelpful to reply, “get high and find out”. There is a great difference between, on the one hand, having an experience and knowing firsthand what the words for such experiences attempt to name and describe, and on the other, understanding the internal structures and qualitative aspects of such experiences as phenomenology described by expert investigators. The phenomenology of getting high should be no different in this regard from that of pain or perception. We must nevertheless turn to poets like Baudelaire, Allen Ginsberg, and Paul Bowles for insights where philosophers have dared to say so little. One might conclude they have never actually heard of the stuff.
As for the social-economic-political-legal, medical, and other aspects of cannabis consumption, the whole topic would be altogether philosophically trivial and otherwise unworthy of philosophical attention, if it were not for the fact that cannabis is illegal. If I were prepared to say anything about the current state of cannabis worldwide, it would be that prohibition deprives us of the opportunity to develop mature attitudes and wise, scientifically-informed policies about recreational and other uses of mildly psychoactive hedonistic substances, as we have done in the case of many other things that are significantly less good for the user and society at large.
Friday, June 17, 2011
james earl carter: call off the global drug war
NYTimes | In a message to Congress in 1977, I said the country should decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, with a full program of treatment for addicts. I also cautioned against filling our prisons with young people who were no threat to society, and summarized by saying: “Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.”These ideas were widely accepted at the time. But in the 1980s President Ronald Reagan and Congress began to shift from balanced drug policies, including the treatment and rehabilitation of addicts, toward futile efforts to control drug imports from foreign countries.
This approach entailed an enormous expenditure of resources and the dependence on police and military forces to reduce the foreign cultivation of marijuana, coca and opium poppy and the production of cocaine and heroin. One result has been a terrible escalation in drug-related violence, corruption and gross violations of human rights in a growing number of Latin American countries.
The commission’s facts and arguments are persuasive. It recommends that governments be encouraged to experiment “with models of legal regulation of drugs ... that are designed to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens.” For effective examples, they can look to policies that have shown promising results in Europe, Australia and other places.
But they probably won’t turn to the United States for advice. Drug policies here are more punitive and counterproductive than in other democracies, and have brought about an explosion in prison populations. At the end of 1980, just before I left office, 500,000 people were incarcerated in America; at the end of 2009 the number was nearly 2.3 million. There are 743 people in prison for every 100,000 Americans, a higher portion than in any other country and seven times as great as in Europe. Some 7.2 million people are either in prison or on probation or parole — more than 3 percent of all American adults!
Some of this increase has been caused by mandatory minimum sentencing and “three strikes you’re out” laws. But about three-quarters of new admissions to state prisons are for nonviolent crimes. And the single greatest cause of prison population growth has been the war on drugs, with the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses increasing more than twelvefold since 1980.
Not only has this excessive punishment destroyed the lives of millions of young people and their families (disproportionately minorities), but it is wreaking havoc on state and local budgets. Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pointed out that, in 1980, 10 percent of his state’s budget went to higher education and 3 percent to prisons; in 2010, almost 11 percent went to prisons and only 7.5 percent to higher education.
Maybe the increased tax burden on wealthy citizens necessary to pay for the war on drugs will help to bring about a reform of America’s drug policies. At least the recommendations of the Global Commission will give some cover to political leaders who wish to do what is right.
help end the "war on drugs" and mass criminalization
Video - Nixon enlists governors' aid to wage war on drugs.
Evolver | Join us in a peaceful protest to help end the war on drugs! We will be carrying picket signs and handing out literature to garner support for our cause by those who are most affected by failed drug policy.
June 17th marks the 40th anniversary of the War on Drugs declared by Richard Nixon in 1971. This devastating, trillion dollar policy resulted in the ruin of countless individuals and families across the nation. It disproportionately criminalized minorities leaving wounds felt by three generations. For decades, we have stood by and watched as mainstream America gawks at the number of minority prisoners in the US. We joke and conjecture at potential causes for the disappearance of Black men over lattes. Blaming everything from evolution to upbringing, our policy makers have all but ignored the elephant in the room, our grossly discriminatory and aggressive criminal justice policy. We believe it is time for a change. No longer will we allow our fathers, uncles, brothers, husbands, wives, children, and grand children to be "acceptable casualties" of the war on drugs.
A few facts for your consideration:
• Given current rates of incarceration, three in ten of the next generation of black men can expect to be disenfranchised at some point in their lifetime. In states that disenfranchise ex-offenders, as many as 40% of black men may permanently lose their right to vote.
Source:
Sentencing Project, "Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States," (Washington, DC: March 2010), p. 1.
Between 2006 and 2008 people of color were between 4 and 12 times as likely to be arrested for a marijuana related offense than whites. This disparity in the arrest rate was found in all cities and all counties in California, and was averaged over three years to remove any one year statistical anomalies.
Source: Drug Policy Alliance
African Americans have been admitted to prison on drug charges at a rate up to 57 times higher than whites. In some states, 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison have been African American. The rate of Latino imprisonment has been staggering as well. Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been black and Latino.
Source: http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/more-media-and-culture/2011/5/3/m...
2,424,279 or 1 in every 99.1 adults were behind bars in 2009 in federal, state and local prisons and jails, the highest incarceration rate in the world.
2/3 of people incarcerated for a drug offense in state prison are black or Hispanic, although these groups use and sell drugs at similar rates as whites.
Evolver | Join us in a peaceful protest to help end the war on drugs! We will be carrying picket signs and handing out literature to garner support for our cause by those who are most affected by failed drug policy.
June 17th marks the 40th anniversary of the War on Drugs declared by Richard Nixon in 1971. This devastating, trillion dollar policy resulted in the ruin of countless individuals and families across the nation. It disproportionately criminalized minorities leaving wounds felt by three generations. For decades, we have stood by and watched as mainstream America gawks at the number of minority prisoners in the US. We joke and conjecture at potential causes for the disappearance of Black men over lattes. Blaming everything from evolution to upbringing, our policy makers have all but ignored the elephant in the room, our grossly discriminatory and aggressive criminal justice policy. We believe it is time for a change. No longer will we allow our fathers, uncles, brothers, husbands, wives, children, and grand children to be "acceptable casualties" of the war on drugs.
A few facts for your consideration:
• Given current rates of incarceration, three in ten of the next generation of black men can expect to be disenfranchised at some point in their lifetime. In states that disenfranchise ex-offenders, as many as 40% of black men may permanently lose their right to vote.
Source:
Sentencing Project, "Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States," (Washington, DC: March 2010), p. 1.
Between 2006 and 2008 people of color were between 4 and 12 times as likely to be arrested for a marijuana related offense than whites. This disparity in the arrest rate was found in all cities and all counties in California, and was averaged over three years to remove any one year statistical anomalies.
Source: Drug Policy Alliance
African Americans have been admitted to prison on drug charges at a rate up to 57 times higher than whites. In some states, 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison have been African American. The rate of Latino imprisonment has been staggering as well. Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been black and Latino.
Source: http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/more-media-and-culture/2011/5/3/m...
2,424,279 or 1 in every 99.1 adults were behind bars in 2009 in federal, state and local prisons and jails, the highest incarceration rate in the world.
2/3 of people incarcerated for a drug offense in state prison are black or Hispanic, although these groups use and sell drugs at similar rates as whites.
Video - Nixon declares victory in the war on drugs.
sandbags and nuclear power plants don't go together...,
Video - *High Alert* - Fire -Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant near Omaha Nebraska- Flooding Missouri River
Business Insider | A fire in Nebraska's Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant briefly knocked out the cooling process for spent nuclear fuel rods, ProPublica reports.
The fire occurred on June 7th, and knocked out cooling for approximately 90 minutes. After 88 hours, the cooling pool would boil dry and highly radioactive materials would be exposed.
On June 6th, the Federal Administration Aviation (FAA) issued a directive banning aircraft from entering the airspace within a two-mile radius of the plant.
"No pilots may operate an aircraft in the areas covered by this NOTAM," referring to the "notice to airmen," effective immediately.
Since last week, the plant has been under a "notification of unusual event" classification, becausing of the rising Missouri River. That is the lowest level of emergency alert.
The OPPD claims the FAA closed airspace over the plant because of the Missouri River flooding. But the FAA ban specifically lists the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant as the location for the flight ban.
The plant is adjacent to the now-flooding river, about 20 minutes outside downtown Omaha, and has been closed since April for refueling.
WOWT, the local NBC affiliate, reports on its website:
"The Ft. Calhoun Nuclear Facility is an island right now but it is one that authorities say is going to stay dry. They say they have a number of redundant features to protect the facility from flood waters that include the aqua dam, earthen berms and sandbags."
OPPD spokesman Jeff Hanson told Business Insider that the nuclear plant is in a "stable situation." He said the Missouri River is currently at 1005.6" above sea level, and that no radioactive fuel had yet been released or was expected to be released in the future.
Asked about the FAA flight ban, Hanson it was due to high power lines and "security reasons that we can't reveal." He said the flight ban remains in effect.
Business Insider | A fire in Nebraska's Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant briefly knocked out the cooling process for spent nuclear fuel rods, ProPublica reports.
The fire occurred on June 7th, and knocked out cooling for approximately 90 minutes. After 88 hours, the cooling pool would boil dry and highly radioactive materials would be exposed.
On June 6th, the Federal Administration Aviation (FAA) issued a directive banning aircraft from entering the airspace within a two-mile radius of the plant.
"No pilots may operate an aircraft in the areas covered by this NOTAM," referring to the "notice to airmen," effective immediately.
Since last week, the plant has been under a "notification of unusual event" classification, becausing of the rising Missouri River. That is the lowest level of emergency alert.
The OPPD claims the FAA closed airspace over the plant because of the Missouri River flooding. But the FAA ban specifically lists the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant as the location for the flight ban.
The plant is adjacent to the now-flooding river, about 20 minutes outside downtown Omaha, and has been closed since April for refueling.
WOWT, the local NBC affiliate, reports on its website:
"The Ft. Calhoun Nuclear Facility is an island right now but it is one that authorities say is going to stay dry. They say they have a number of redundant features to protect the facility from flood waters that include the aqua dam, earthen berms and sandbags."
OPPD spokesman Jeff Hanson told Business Insider that the nuclear plant is in a "stable situation." He said the Missouri River is currently at 1005.6" above sea level, and that no radioactive fuel had yet been released or was expected to be released in the future.
Asked about the FAA flight ban, Hanson it was due to high power lines and "security reasons that we can't reveal." He said the flight ban remains in effect.
fukushima is much worse than you think...,
aljazeera | "Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind," Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.Japan's 9.0 earthquake on March 11 caused a massive tsunami that crippled the cooling systems at the Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. It also led to hydrogen explosions and reactor meltdowns that forced evacuations of those living within a 20km radius of the plant.
Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.
"Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed," he said, "You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively."
TEPCO has been spraying water on several of the reactors and fuel cores, but this has led to even greater problems, such as radiation being emitted into the air in steam and evaporated sea water - as well as generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive sea water that has to be disposed of.
"The problem is how to keep it cool," says Gundersen. "They are pouring in water and the question is what are they going to do with the waste that comes out of that system, because it is going to contain plutonium and uranium. Where do you put the water?"
Even though the plant is now shut down, fission products such as uranium continue to generate heat, and therefore require cooling.
"The fuels are now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor," Gundersen added. "TEPCO announced they had a melt through. A melt down is when the fuel collapses to the bottom of the reactor, and a melt through means it has melted through some layers. That blob is incredibly radioactive, and now you have water on top of it. The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water."
Independent scientists have been monitoring the locations of radioactive "hot spots" around Japan, and their findings are disconcerting.
"We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl," said Gundersen. "The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl."
female sex-slaves just make sense
Video - Kuwaiti politician on the benefits of having sex slaves.
IBT | A female Kuwaiti politician called for the legalization of the sex slavery, saying it would protect "decent, devout and virile Kuwaiti men" from adultery. It would keep them from the temptation of being seduced by another woman's beauty.
Salwa al Mutairi, a social activist who once ran for parliament, suggested bringing in female prisoners from war-torn countries, as it would be a "better life" for them, and they would not die of starvation.
Mutairi maintains there is "no shame in it and it is not haram (forbidden) under Islamic Sharia law."
To justify her claim, Mutairi cites an 8th century Muslim leader Haroun al-Rashid, who is rumoured to have had 2,000 mistresses.
In a recent visit to Mecca, she asked Muslim religious scholars what the Islamic ruling was on owning sex slaves, and was told that it is NOT haram.
Therefore, Mutairi claims, the ruling was confirmed by 'specialized people of the faith'.
"They said, that's right, the only solution for a decent man who has the means, who is overpowered by desire and who does not want to commit fornication, is to acquire jawari." Jawari is a plural form of the Arabic term 'sex slave'
She explains "For example, in the Chechnyan war, surely there are female Russian captives.
"So go and buy those and sell them here in Kuwait. Better than to have our men engage in forbidden sexual relations."
Mutairi detailed her proposal further, recommending that sex trade offices could operate the same way that recruitment agencies provide housemaids. And to "consider" the woman's feelings, the female prisoner should be at least 15 years old.
According to the politician, free women must be married with a contract, but with concubines, "the man just buys her and that's it."
Her suggestions, which went public via a Youtube video, brought in heavy criticism from fellow Kuwaitis and people around the world.
One person tweeted to Mutairi, "you're a disgrace to women everywhere."
Despite criticism, Mutairi insists, "I don't see any problem in this, no problem at all."
IBT | A female Kuwaiti politician called for the legalization of the sex slavery, saying it would protect "decent, devout and virile Kuwaiti men" from adultery. It would keep them from the temptation of being seduced by another woman's beauty.
Salwa al Mutairi, a social activist who once ran for parliament, suggested bringing in female prisoners from war-torn countries, as it would be a "better life" for them, and they would not die of starvation.
Mutairi maintains there is "no shame in it and it is not haram (forbidden) under Islamic Sharia law."
To justify her claim, Mutairi cites an 8th century Muslim leader Haroun al-Rashid, who is rumoured to have had 2,000 mistresses.
In a recent visit to Mecca, she asked Muslim religious scholars what the Islamic ruling was on owning sex slaves, and was told that it is NOT haram.
Therefore, Mutairi claims, the ruling was confirmed by 'specialized people of the faith'.
"They said, that's right, the only solution for a decent man who has the means, who is overpowered by desire and who does not want to commit fornication, is to acquire jawari." Jawari is a plural form of the Arabic term 'sex slave'
She explains "For example, in the Chechnyan war, surely there are female Russian captives.
"So go and buy those and sell them here in Kuwait. Better than to have our men engage in forbidden sexual relations."
Mutairi detailed her proposal further, recommending that sex trade offices could operate the same way that recruitment agencies provide housemaids. And to "consider" the woman's feelings, the female prisoner should be at least 15 years old.
According to the politician, free women must be married with a contract, but with concubines, "the man just buys her and that's it."
Her suggestions, which went public via a Youtube video, brought in heavy criticism from fellow Kuwaitis and people around the world.
One person tweeted to Mutairi, "you're a disgrace to women everywhere."
Despite criticism, Mutairi insists, "I don't see any problem in this, no problem at all."
Thursday, June 16, 2011
african land grab: acres for a bottle of scotch
Zerohedge | Everyone who eats is aware that agricultural prices have been on a tear the past few years. With this has come a sharp increase in the value of arable land. Deep topsoil farmland in Iowa has changed hands as high as $11,000 an acre recently. That’s up from about $6,000 just a few years ago.The shortage of arable land has gone global. Africa has seen an explosion of activity since 2008. How big is the land grab? Who’s doing the grabbing? It’s hard to tell as there is no central source of information and many of the transactions are not made public. An outfit called the Oakland Institute has been compiling information on this. From their June 8 press release:
The scale, rate and negative impact of land deals is alarming. In 2009 alone nearly 60 million ha– an area the size of France – was purchased or leased in comparison to an average annual expansion of global agricultural land of less than 4 million ha before 2008. Fist tap Big Don.
day light robbery in ethiopia: “doing business” with african dictators
abugidainfo | Dear People of India:I greet you in peace and hope that the good people of India, who have yourselves thrown off the shackles of colonialism only 63 years ago, will join with Ethiopians and other Africans in confronting the hundreds of Indian companies who are now at the forefront of colluding with African dictators in robbing the people of their land, resources, lives and future! As either prospective buyers or simply as justice-loving Indians, you deserve to have full disclosure regarding the nature of these Ethiopian “business deals,” the impact it is having on “real people” on the ground, and the risks of “doing business” in Ethiopia with the current dictator of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi.
On June 8, 2011, Oakland Institute (OI) and the Solidarity Movement for a New Ethiopia (SMNE) released a joint investigative report on Ethiopia, Understanding Land Investments in Ethiopia, part of a larger study of nine African countries affected by the new phenomenon called land-grabs. In Ethiopia, these “land-grabs” are being carried out as foreign investors make deals to lease some of the most fertile agricultural land for up to 99 years at negligible prices. Because private land ownership is prohibited in Ethiopia, “land deals” are being negotiated in secret agreements between these foreign investors and the Ethiopian government; without any consultation with the people.
My name is Obang Metho and I am writing this to you on behalf of the Solidarity Movement for a New Ethiopia (SMNE), a non-violent, grassroots social justice movement of diverse Ethiopians committed to bringing truth, justice, freedom, equality and the respect for human and civil rights to the people of Ethiopia and beyond. Our guiding principles are based on putting “humanity before ethnicity,” or any other distinctive that dehumanizes other human beings; and secondly, that “no one is truly free until all are free,” meaning that ignoring or contributing to the injustice, exploitation and oppression of our neighbors, near or far, creates greater insecurity and disharmony for all of us in this global world.
I come to you first and foremost as a fellow human as I call you to join our effort to stop the plundering of Ethiopia and Africa by African dictators, their cronies and their foreign partners—some of whom are Indian—who are hungry for our resources but care little for our people. An indigenous Ethiopian man described it this way: “This regime is one of the most hated regimes in Ethiopian history… they kill the people like they are nothing and with no remorse.” In light of this, I must warn you that those who are “doing business” in Ethiopia, are partnering with an illegitimately elected dictator and his authoritarian regime built on the brutal suppression of the rights of its citizens. The intent of my open letter is to expose the dark underside of these “deals” with the hope of joining forces with those in India who demand justice and human rights for all.
Ethiopia is controlled by a repressive regime, posing as a democracy, which maintains its power not by the ballot, but by the bullet; clearly shown by its99.6% claim to victory in the 2010 election and complete closing off of any political space. All sectors of society are tightly controlled by a one-party minority regime (TPLF), which politicizes all benefits—including business opportunities, education, jobs, agricultural supports and even food aid (see recent Human Rights Watch report)—and punishes any dissent; creating a silenced Ethiopian society.
Ethiopians are pro-business and pro-investment; particularly as Ethiopia is reported to be the second poorest country in the world with 90% of the people living under the poverty level. What we oppose is the daylight robbery of Ethiopia by modern day bandits who are willing to make secret deals with a corrupt government that would be illegal in India and other more developed countries. Abundant resources; combined with a disenfranchised public, few protective regulatory mechanisms, a lack of transparency, duty-free deals and regime promises of cheap labor have brought opportunists from all over the world—from India, China, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Egypt, Turkey and beyond—all hungry to eat off the weakened carcass of the future hopes of the Ethiopian people.
Into this environment, have come over 500 Indian companies—more than from any other country in the world—to capitalize on this “goldmine of opportunity.” One Ethiopian from the Oromia region protested: “Our land is being given to the Indian companies and anyone who speaks out against it is labeled as a terrorist who is not supposed to have any rights or question any actions by the government.”
Why would any Indians be part of this? Any who resent the colonial past of your own country, should know that it began through the British East India Trading Company; where some of the more unscrupulous often colluded with corrupt indigenous government officials. What would Gandhi say today were he to know that Indians, who were only freed from the shackles of colonialism in recent history, were now at the forefront of this “land-grabbing” as part of the race for foreign control over African land and resources; currently being called the Neo-Colonialism of Africa?
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