remember yucca mountain?

NYTimes | Lawmakers and policy planners must revive the search for safe ways to store used fuel rods from nuclear power reactors. The long-term solution favored by most experts, which we endorse, is to bury the material in geologically stable formations capable of preventing leakage far into the future.

But no politically acceptable site has yet been found, and leaving the used fuel rods at each reactor — more than 62,000 metric tons had accumulated across the country by the end of 2009 — seems increasingly problematic. At least nine states have banned the construction of new reactors until a permanent storage site is found or progress toward finding one is made. The only potential permanent storage site examined so far — at Yucca Mountain in Nevada — has been blocked for more than two decades by technical problems, legal challenges and political opposition from the state.

President Obama pledged in the 2008 campaign to shut down the project, and his Energy Department withdrew its application for a license before the safety of the project could be evaluated. Mitt Romney said in a primary debate in Nevada that the state’s people should have the final say. Even without a permanent disposal facility, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a “waste confidence decision” in 2010 that asserted that used fuel rods could be stored at power plants for 60 years after they close down. It also asserted that a permanent repository would be ready to handle such wastes “when necessary.”

That decision was challenged in federal court, and last month a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the commission had failed to prepare an adequate analysis of the future risks, such as leaks and fires, if the used fuel rods end up being stored at nuclear plants indefinitely. That decision could slow the commission’s ability to extend the licenses of existing plants or grant new licenses.

state control of information and the ability to manipulate it makes the right to vote largely meaningless

Independent | As Julian Assange evades arrest by taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge to escape extradition to Sweden, and possibly the US, British commentators have targeted him with shrill abuse. They almost froth with rage as they cite petty examples of his supposed gaucheness, egotism and appearance, as if these were criminal faults.

These criticisms tell one more about the conventionality and herd instinct of British opinion-makers than they do about Assange. Ignored, in all this, is his achievement as founder of WikiLeaks in publishing US government cables giving people across the world insight into how their governments really behave. Such public knowledge is the core of democracy because voters must be accurately informed if they are to be able to chose representatives to carry out their wishes.

Thanks to WikiLeaks, more information has become available about what the US and allied states are doing and thinking than ever before. The only competing revelations that come to mind were the publication by the victorious Bolsheviks in 1917 of secret treaties, including plans to carve up the Middle East by Britain and France. A more obvious parallel was the publication of the Pentagon Papers thanks to Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, revealing systematic lying by the Johnson administration about Vietnam. In similar fashion to Assange, Ellsberg was reviled by the US government and threatened with the severest punishment.

An extraordinary aspect of the campaign against Assange is that op-ed writers feel free to pump out thousands of words about his alleged faults, with never a mention of far more serious state crimes revealed by WikiLeaks. All these critics, and readers who agree them, should first switch on YouTube and watch a 17-minute video film taken by the crew of an Apache helicopter over east Baghdad on 12 July 2007. It shows the helicopter crew machine-gunning to death people on the ground in the belief that they are all armed insurgents. In fact, I cannot see any arms and what in one case was identified as a gun turned out to be the camera of a young Reuters' photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, who was killed along with his driver, Saeed Chmagh. The video shows the helicopter coming in for a second attack on a van that had stopped to pick up the dead and wounded. The driver was killed and two children wounded. "Ha! Ha! I hit 'em," shouts one of the US crewmen triumphantly. "Look at those dead bastards."

I was in Baghdad when the shooting took place and I remember at the time disbelieving, along with other journalists, the Pentagon's claim that the dead were all armed insurgents, but we could not prove it. Rebel gunmen did not amble about the streets in plain view when a US helicopter was nearby. The existence of a video of the killings became known, but the US Defense Department adamantly refused to release it under the Freedom of Information Act. The official story of what had happened would not have been effectively challenged if a US soldier, Bradley Manning, had not turned over the video to WikiLeaks, which released it in 2010.

The cables obtained by Wiki–Leaks were published later that year in five newspapers – The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País – but the response to Assange himself was surprisingly mean-spirited and dismissive. Journalists seemed angry that their professional territory was being invaded by an Australian computer nerd who was doing their job. The British commentariat is notoriously club-like, conservative and hostile to those with different cultural and political norms.

BD has created fine art....,

If you didn't already know about this, 50 years or so ago, in response to complaints about inadequate production of fine art, a federal agency, the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) was created with a budget to fund new works of art. One scandalous product, funded on a $15,000 commission was the award-winning The Piss Christ, a Crucifix in a jug of the artists own urine. Probably still on display in some hip trendy NYC art museum to a continued stream of oohs and aaahs from upscale apreciants...

BD has been inspired to create similarly: For your critical review, we present The Piss POTUS (attached) produced using BD's very own urine with a well-deserved touch of his fecal material. We confer this to the public domain, no rights are reserved. You are free to post it on your site, spam the appropriate link to key focal points, and rack up a few million hits when it goes viral....(John Kurman, eat your heart out)

{disclaimer - I didn't write any of the above, it is an "unfiltered" pass-through from an email sent me by Big Don yesterday. From Big Don's brainstem to your eyes, as it were...,}

recognizing the systemic negligence of an earth summit

laetusinpraesens | Oxfam has released a discussion paper produced by Kate Raworth (A Safe and Just Space for Humanity: can we live within the doughnut?, Oxfam, February 2012). The paper presents a single visual framework – shaped like a doughnut – that represents a space within which humanity can thrive. This doughnut-like area is defined by combining the much-debated set of 9 "planetary boundaries" with a new set of 11 social boundaries, based on the 11 dimensions of human deprivation that emerged from the issues raised by governments in their Rio+20 submissions.

The nine Earth-System boundaries are associated with nine natural processes – including the freshwater cycle, climate regulation, and the nitrogen cycle – which are critical for keeping the planet in the stable state that has allowed civilizations to arise and thrive over the past 10,000 years. The area within the nine Earth-system boundaries was called "a safe operating space for humanity". This has been widely recognized as a powerful means of giving comprehensible visual focus to the limits that conventional growth economics is widely acknowledged to have failed to recognize.

For Oxfam, however, something critical is still missing from this representation. This "safe operating space" may serve to protect the environment, but it speaks little to the millions of people living in extreme poverty.

As Raworth notes, the concept of social boundaries therefore needs to be added to the picture. Just as there is an environmental ceiling of resource use, above which lies unacceptable environmental degradation, so too there is a social foundation of resource use, below which lies unacceptable human deprivation including hunger, ill-health, income poverty and energy poverty. Resource use has both an environmental ceiling and a social foundation, below which lies deprivation, but the doughnut-shaped space between the two demands attention. This "doughnut" is understood as bringing fresh meaning to the idea of sustainable development, because pictures have the power to reshape the way we think. The simple image of planetary boundaries and social boundaries is seen as a neat way of articulating a goal for 21st-century prosperity: meeting everyone's human rights within the planet's critical natural thresholds (Kate Raworth, The doughnut can help Rio+20 see sustainable development in the round, The Guardian, 16 June 2012). The "doughnut" framework has been endorsed by various NGOs and is now the focus of a new blog to encourage debate on "Doughnut Economics".

In its focus on a visual framework, the Oxfam doughnut contrasts markedly with the report to the Earth Summit of the UN Secretary General's High Level Panel on Global Sustainability (Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing, 2012) -- which proved unable to embody its comprehensive vision in any visualization of significance.

In the spirit of recognizing both the value of a visual representation and what was missing from the environmental boundaries, the following is an exploration of the limitations of both the doughnut form and what is missing from the social dimensions it currently incorporates. As noted both with respect to Earth-System planetary boundaries and the Earth Summit preoccupations added by Oxfam, the concern is now how any significant political action is to be engendered -- hopefully at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro at this time. In that respect there is widespread recognition of the inadequacies of outcomes of past Earth Summits and significant concern at the probability of major inadequacies as a consequence of the current event (Richard Black, Uncertainty Hampers Rio+20 Talks, BBC News, 16 June 2012).

It was for this reason that a previous comment on the Earth-System boundaries resulted in a focus on the "boundaries" to any effective political action (Recognizing the Psychosocial Boundaries of Remedial Action: constraints on ensuring a safe operating space for humanity, 2009). However the concern here with what might be "missing" from a "doughnut" representation goes further. The question, notably highlighted by the current global financial crisis, is how "thoughtlessness" is to be appropriately associated with a "doughnut" form -- if only in ignoring factors which inhibit strategic action. To what extent is global civilization effectively "unconscious", as suggested by John Ralston Saul (The Unconscious Civilization, 1995) -- or constrained in the application of its ingenuity, as argued Thomas Homer-Dixon (The Ingenuity Gap, 2000)?

From such a perspective is there some kind of "cognitive hole" which undermines the ability for coherent political action, as previously discussed (Unthought as Cognitive Foundation of Global Civilization, 2012)? The Oxfam report specifically attributes "critical human deprivations" to the central hole of the doughnut. The question explored further here is whether these "deprivations" have a cognitive dimension associated with thoughtlessness, carelessness and negligence.

Is there a danger that the Earth-System focus on a "a safe operating space for humanity" and the doughnut focus on a "a safe and just space for humanity" simply ensure together a space for modes of behaviour which are inherently unsustainable -- but to which the doughnut form fails to draw attention in the more comprehensive overview it offers? What vital significance might be attributed to the hole in the doughnut with respect to effective strategic action -- and the assiduous avoidance of its consideration?

the agribusiness coup in paraguay: Monsanto’s latest assault on democracy

foodfirst | Curuguaty in the department of Canindeyú, Paraguay near the Brazilian border, to evict a group of peasants peacefully occupying a parcel of land. Upon arrival, another group of police snipers ambushed the officers and peasants, killing seventeen people: 6 police officers and 11 peasants, with dozens of people seriously injured.

The consequences of this baffling incident? The impeachment of the weak government of president Fernando Lugo by the right-wing controlled congress; a hard blow to the left, social movements and peasants, accused by the landed elite of instigating peasant occupations; the increased power of translational agribusiness firms like Monsanto; the continued persecution and eviction of peasants from their land; and finally, the stage set for the right’s triumphal return to power in the 2013 presidential elections.

On October 21, 2011, the Ministry of Agriculture, headed by Enzo Cardozo, illegally approved Bollgard BT cotton, a product of Monsanto, for commercial planting in Paraguay. Peasants and environmental organizations immediately protested. The cotton seed’s genetic material is crossed with the gene Bacillus thurigensis (Bt), a toxic bacterium that kills certain pests, such as the larvae of the weevil, a beetle that lays its eggs in the plant’s cocoon.

The National Service of Plant Health, Quality and Seeds (SENAVE), a government agency headed by Miguel Lovera, had not included the Bt variety in the official record of seed cultivars, since reports from the Ministries of Heath and Environment had not been submitted, as required by law.

mutated pests are quickly adapting to biotech crops in unpredicted and disturbing ways

io9 | Genetically modified crops are often designed to repel hungry insects. By having toxins built into the plant itself, farmers can reduce their use of environmentally unfriendly insecticide sprays. But as any first-year evolutionary biology student can tell you, insects are like the Borg in Star Trek: they quickly adapt. And this is precisely what is happening – but in ways that have startled the researchers themselves.

The discovery is a wakeup call to geneticists because it has highlighted the importance of having to closely monitor and counter pest resistance to biotech crops. The development also raises the question of the potential futility of having to change the genetic structure of crops in perpetuity; given that insects are constantly evolving, to what degree will geneticists have to go to ensure crop immunity to pests? And what does that say to the ongoing safety of such crops as far as human consumption is concerned?

Case in point are cotton bollworms. To deal with these pests, genetic scientists have developed an insect-killing cotton plant that produces toxins derived from the Bt bacterium (geneticists say that these toxins are harmless to most other creatures, including humans). But the bollworms are developing a resistance. Scientists have observed that a rare genetic mutation in bollworms makes them immune to Bt – and that the mutation isn't so rare any more.

One scientist who predicted that these insects would adapt is Bruce Tabashnik, head of the department of entomology at the University of Arizona College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and co-author of the study making note of these findings. To stay ahead of the game, Tabashnik studied bollworms in the lab just to see how they would adapt to the toxin. Then, expecting to see the same sorts of adaptations in the real world, he took a look at bollworms in China.

What he found there was a bit disturbing. Yes, he discovered bollworms that exhibited the exact same mutations as the ones in his lab – but the Chinese insects also showed some adaptations that were completely unexpected. Speaking through a University of Arizona release, Tabashnik noted that, "[W]e also found lots of other mutations, most of them in the same gene and one in a completely different gene." Fist tap Dale.

how the taste of tomatoes went bad and kept right on going...,

npr | The tomato is the vegetable (or fruit, if you must) that we love to hate. We know how good it can be and how bad it usually is. And everybody just wants to know: How did it get that way?

Today, scientists revealed a small but intriguing chapter in that story: a genetic mutation that seemed like a real improvement in the tomato's quality, but which actually undermined its taste.

Before we get to the mutation, though, let's start with the old tomatoes — the varieties that people grew a century or more ago.

Thanks to enthusiastic seed savers and heirloom tomato enthusiasts, you can still find many of them. Eric Rice, owner of Country Pleasures Farm near Middletown, Md., first encountered heirloom tomatoes when he was a graduate student in North Carolina.

"I decided I really liked them," he says. He liked the vivid taste and the unusual colors, from orange to purple. These tomatoes also have great names: Cherokee Purple, Dr. Wyche's, Mortgage Lifter.

Rice now grows these tomatoes to sell at a farmers market in Washington, D.C. But he admits that all that tomato personality can make heirlooms harder to grow and sell. "Heirloom tomatoes don't ship very well because they're softer. And frankly, they're all different shapes and sizes." This makes them more difficult to pack.

There's something else you'll notice as these tomatoes start to get ripe — something central to this story. The part of the tomato near the stem — what's called the shoulder of the fruit — stays green longer.

"I think it is an issue for the consumer," says Rice, "because people do buy with their eyes. And green shoulders also mean it's not entirely ripe or not as soft and tasty there."

Those green shoulders turn out to be more significant than you might think. In this week's issue of the journal Science, scientists report that when they disappeared from modern tomatoes, some of the tomato's taste went with them.

Here's how. Sometime before 1930, somewhere in America, a tomato grower noticed a plant that was producing distinctive fruit. These fruit turned red from stem to tip in a uniform way. They didn't have any of those bothersome green shoulders.

It was a new mutation, and plant breeders saw it as the next big thing.

They called it the "uniform ripening" trait. In 1930, the agricultural experiment station in Fargo, N.D., released a new tomato variety containing this mutation. The variety was called All Red.

the museum of failed products...,

Guardian | The Museum of Failed Products was itself a kind of accident, albeit a happier one. Its creator, a now-retired marketing man named Robert McMath, merely intended to accumulate a "reference library" of consumer products, not failures per se. And so, starting in the 1960s, he began purchasing and preserving a sample of every new item he could find. Soon, the collection outgrew his office in upstate New York and he was forced to move into a converted granary to accommodate it; later, GfK bought him out, moving the whole lot to Michigan. What McMath hadn't taken into account was the three-word truth that was to prove the making of his career: "Most products fail." According to some estimates, the failure rate is as high as 90%. Simply by collecting new products indiscriminately, McMath had ensured that his hoard would come to consist overwhelmingly of unsuccessful ones.

By far the most striking thing about the museum, though, is that it should exist as a viable, profit-making business in the first place. You might have assumed that any consumer product manufacturer worthy of the name would have its own such collection – a carefully stewarded resource to help it avoid making errors its rivals had already made. Yet the executives who arrive every week at Sherry's door are evidence of how rarely this happens. Product developers are so focused on their next hoped-for success – so unwilling to invest time or energy thinking about their industry's past failures – that they only belatedly realise how much they need to access GfK's collection. Most surprising of all is that many of the designers who have found their way to the museum have come there to examine – or been surprised to discover – products that their own companies had created, then abandoned. They were apparently so averse to dwelling on the unpleasant business of failure that they had neglected even to keep samples of their own disasters.

Failure is everywhere. It's just that most of the time we'd rather avoid confronting that fact.

brookings metromonitor

NORTH AMERICA
U.S. metros were most heavily affected by the Great Recession. Many rebounded strongly in the rankings in the recovery period due to robust income growth, but continued to post modest employment losses. To Track the Nation's non-existent recovery, the MetroMonitor goes interactive

what does $80 billion of food stamps buy?

washingtontimes | Americans spend $80 billion each year financing food stamps for the poor, but the country has no idea where or how the money is spent.

Food stamps can be spent on goods ranging from candy to steak and are accepted at retailers from gas stations that primarily sell potato chips to fried-chicken restaurants. And as the amount spent on food stamps has more than doubled in recent years, the amount of food stamps laundered into cash has increased dramatically, government statistics show.

But the government won’t say which stores are doing the most business in food stamps, and even it doesn’t know what kinds of food those taxpayer dollars buy.

Coinciding with lobbying by convenience stores, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program in conjunction with states, contends that disclosing how much each store authorized to accept benefits, known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), receives in taxpayer funds would amount to revealing trade secrets.

As a result, fraud is hard to track and the efficacy of the massive program is impossible to evaluate.

As the House debates the once-every-five-years farm bill, the majority of which goes to food stamps, there is a renewed and fervent call from a broad spectrum of camps that the information — some of the most high-dollar, frequently requested and closely held secrets of the government — be set free.

“We can’t release it based on federal rules. If it were up to us, I wouldn’t have a problem releasing the information. It’s taxpayer money,” said Tom Steinhauser with the division of benefit programs for the Virginia Department of Social Services.

The District said it would be illegal to tell the newspaper how many food stamp dollars were flowing to each local vendor, but first offered to sell The Washington Times the information for $125,000.

“Why don’t you just pay the charges? Your paper has a lot of money,” said David Umansky, spokesman for the District’s chief financial officer.

Told that the newspaper would not pay, the CFO’s office then said that only JP Morgan, to which it contracted out operations, had access to the store totals and that the office had never looked at them. After six months of the local government attempting to extract the information from JP Morgan, the District finally said that releasing the information would be illegal.

States instructed not to tell

Maryland denied The Times’ request for data under the Freedom of Information Act, saying the information belonged to the federal government, which instructed states not to release it.

secret state

golemxiv | We are all now sadly familiar with the role of Off-shore tax havens. They allow companies to avoid having to pay tax. They also allow companies to hide any dealings they may not want scrutinized by prying regulatory authorities. Tax havens are, as Nicholas Shaxson in his wonderful book Treasure Islands has suggested, better thought of as ‘secrecy jurisdictions’. They are purpose built for shrouding in impenetrable and legally protected secrecy any morally dubious financial arrangements which might be embarrassing or costly if revealed to regulators or governments. The world of Off-shore provides a legal and moral nul-space in where most things can be arranged for a price.

But that nul-space is growing and more than simply growing it is maturing.

Recently Off-shore havens have added to financial secrecy another valuable service – data and communications secrecy. There are now companies based in off-shore havens which offer to protect emails and data caches from prying regulatory or legal scrutiny. Take this company for example – Private layer. Private Layer operates out of Panama and Switzerland. It’s purpose? This is from its web site.

In the recent years, the amount of frivolous litigation that companies face has grown exponentially,…In many of these cases, companies are irreparably damaged when their private communications and company data is exposed to competitors and the public by frivolous blanket subpoenas. This problem can be easily circumvented by locating your communications and data in a jurisdiction that protects that corporate privacy and by choosing a hosting company that actually cares about your privacy.

If News International had used their services there would be no phone hacking scandal and certainly no Leveson enquiry. An enquiry would have been impossible for the simple reason that Leveson would have got zero compliance. Private layer would have got their lawyers to write to Mr Leveson pointing out that he had no jurisdiction whatsoever over data held in Panama and that Panama had no treaty with the UK, or anyone else for that matter, obliging them to hand over data or to cooperate with any other nation’s enquiries. And that would have been the summary end of that.

There is a clear disdain for democracy being voiced among those who run and own global finance, who make up the supra-national world of the IMF, the WTO and other non-national, non-democratic global technocratic bodies. We all know what disdain the global financial and media companies have for the laws which ‘regulate them’. We know how far outside their own laws and international law our governments have gone in rendition and torture of civilians.

It seems to me you don’t have to subscribe to any conspiracy theory to find this enough to worry about.

unprecedented freedom to pursue dopamine hits...,

Monbiot | So now what do we do to defend life on Earth?

It is, perhaps, the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war. The Earth’s living systems are collapsing, and the leaders of some of the most powerful nations – the US, the UK, Germany, Russia – could not even be bothered to turn up and discuss it. Those who did attend the Earth summit last week solemnly agreed to keep stoking the destructive fires: sixteen times in their text they pledged to pursue “sustained growth”, the primary cause of the biosphere’s losses(1).

The efforts of governments are concentrated not on defending the living Earth from destruction, but on defending the machine that is destroying it. Whenever consumer capitalism becomes snarled up by its own contradictions, governments scramble to mend the machine, to ensure – though it consumes the conditions that sustain our lives – that it runs faster than ever before.

The thought that it might be the wrong machine, pursuing the wrong task, cannot even be voiced in mainstream politics. The machine greatly enriches the economic elite, while insulating the political elite from the mass movements it might otherwise confront. We have our bread; now we are wandering, in spellbound reverie, among the circuses.

We have used our unprecedented freedoms, secured at such cost by our forebears, not to agitate for justice, for redistribution, for the defence of our common interests, but to pursue the dopamine hits triggered by the purchase of products we do not need. The world’s most inventive minds are deployed not to improve the lot of humankind but to devise ever more effective means of stimulation, to counteract the diminishing satisfactions of consumption. The mutual dependencies of consumer capitalism ensure that we all unwittingly conspire in the trashing of what may be the only living planet. The failure at Rio de Janeiro belongs to us all.

eerie intimations of a ghost town in the making...,

Kunstler | The techno-narcissism flowed like a melted Slurpee this torrid weekend at the annual Aspen Environment Forum where scores of scientists, media figures, authors, professors, and policy wonks convened to settle the world's hash - at least in theory. The trouble started Friday night when Stewart Brand, 74, impresario of The Whole Earth Catalog, and an economic cornucopian these days, exhorted the skittish audience to show a little goshdarn optimistic spirit about the future instead of just griping about climate change, peak oil, imploding global finance, and a few other vexing trifles. The audience's response was to not line up and buy a signed copy of his latest book.

The Aspen Institute is supported by a bizarre array of corporate donors and individuals ranging from the secretive, devious, extreme right-wing Koch brothers to Goldman Sachs, to Michael Eisner to Duke Energy. The mission of the Environment Forum is divided about equally between publicizing the gathering horrors of climate change and promoting an ethos of wishful thinking that all the problems of mankind will yield to technological rescue remedies.

It's a very odd mix of hard-headed science and the most dismaying sort of crypto-religious faith in happy endings, tinged with overtones of corporate log-rolling and government propaganda. The basic message is: the world is hopelessly fucked up but thank God for technology. There is not even a dim apprehension that many of the aforementioned vexations originate in technology itself, and its blowbacks. Alas, this is about the best that the American intelligentsia can do right now, collectively, and it explains why we have such uniformly impotent and clueless leadership across the board in America, from the White House to the CEO offices to the diploma mills to the news media and every other realm of endeavor where thinking realistically about the future might be considered valuable.

syria - writing is on the wall

menafn | It was expected that US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who met in Mexico last Monday, would agree to disagree over international action to stop the 16-month-old bloodbath in Syria and bring about a political solution to the crisis. What was surprising was an Iranian announcement on the same day that Russia, China and Iran are planning a joint military exercise in Syria.

Details of the exercise or the contribution of the three countries - and that of Syria itself - have not been released, but it is being called "the biggest of its kind ever staged in the Middle East", with 90,000 personnel, 400 airplanes and 900 tanks taking part.

China has reportedly sought Egyptian permission for 12 naval ships to pass through the Suez Canal in late June, heading for the Russian naval base in the Syrian port of Tartous. Russian naval vessels with soldiers on board are already heading for Tartous.

Iran, which has thrown its weight behind its staunchest Arab ally, Syria, has not announced how many vessels and soldiers it will offer for the exercise, which will mark the first time that Russia and China would be introducing such a substantial military strength to the Middle East.

There could only be one conclusion from the exercise: Russia and China are moving to preempt foreign military intervention against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Not to be outdone in the effort to save the Syrian regime, Iran is chipping in.

Reports in the US media have spoken of a plan by Obama to stage a "limited offensive" against Syria that could involve an enforcement of a no-fly zone and air strikes that would weaken the deeply entrenched Alawite officers in Syrian military.

The operation will also see the Syrian opposition forces getting heavier weapons. Apparently, the US hopes that the combined impact of grounding Syrian warplanes and helicopters, and of the advances that the rebel forces could make on the ground would prompt Syrian military officers to realise their vulnerability, defect or stage a coup against Assad. But that bet is off now because the planned large-scale Russian and Chinese presence in Syria will be a deterrent against the US plan.

The question that is unanswered yet is whether Russia and China will fight a war with the US-led West to save the Syrian regime. Of course, Iran is ready to do so.

The introduction of the Russian, Chinese and Iranian military into the conflict, under whatever pretext, will change the rules of the game. The planned joint military exercise is a clear declaration that Russia and China are determined to enforce their resolve not to allow the US and allies to stage military operations to end the Syrian regime's violent crackdown against dissent. It also signals the end of the UN effort led by former secretary general Kofi Annan to broker a peaceful transition of power in Syria.

a georgia town takes the people's business private

NYTimes | With public employee unions under attack in states like Wisconsin, and with cities across the country looking to trim budgets, behold a town built almost entirely on a series of public-private partnerships — a system that leaders around here refer to, simply, as “the model.”

Cities have dabbled for years with privatization, but few have taken the idea as far as Sandy Springs. Since the day it incorporated, Dec. 1, 2005, it has handed off to private enterprise just about every service that can be evaluated through metrics and inked into a contract.

To grasp how unusual this is, consider what Sandy Springs does not have. It does not have a fleet of vehicles for road repair, or a yard where the fleet is parked. It does not have long-term debt. It has no pension obligations. It does not have a city hall, for that matter, if your idea of a city hall is a building owned by the city. Sandy Springs rents.

The town does have a conventional police force and fire department, in part because the insurance premiums for a private company providing those services were deemed prohibitively high. But its 911 dispatch center is operated by a private company, iXP, with headquarters in Cranbury, N.J.

“When it comes to public safety, outsourcing has always been viewed with a kind of suspicion,” says Joseph Estey, who manages the Sandy Springs 911 service in a hushed gray room a few miles from city hall. “What I think really tipped the balance here is that they were outsourcing just about everything else.”

Does the Sandy Springs approach work? It does for Sandy Springs, says the city manager, John F. McDonough, who points not only to the town’s healthy balance sheet but also to high marks from residents on surveys about quality of life and quality of government services.

But that doesn’t mean “the model” can be easily exported — Sandy Springs has the built-in advantage that comes from wealth — or that its widespread adoption would enhance the commonweal. Critics contend that the town is a white-flight suburb that has essentially seceded from Fulton County, a 70-mile-long stretch that includes many poor and largely African-American areas, most of them in Atlanta and points south.

The prospect of more Sandy Springs-style incorporations concerns people like Evan McKenzie, author of “Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government.” He worries that rich enclaves may decide to become gated communities writ large, walling themselves off from areas that are economically distressed.

“You could get into a ‘two Americas’ scenario here,” he says. “If we allow the more affluent to institutionally isolate themselves, then the poor are supposed to do — what? They’re supposed to have all the poverty and all the social problems and deal with them?”

The champions of Sandy Springs counter that they still send plenty of tax dollars to the county and that race had nothing to do with the decision to incorporate. (The town’s minority population is now 30 percent and growing, they note.) Leaders here say they had simply grown tired of the municipal service offered by Fulton County.

“We make no apologies for being more affluent than other parts of the metro area,” says Eva Galambos, the mayor of Sandy Springs. And what does she make of the attitude of the town’s detractors? “Pure envy,” she says.

why are tanks training on the streets of st. louis?

zerohedge | I have to say that this event, which is being labeled a "training exercise", makes very little sense to me. U.S. Army troops all the way from Maryland running open exercises in armored personnel carriers on the busy streets of St. Louis? I know Maryland is a small state, but is there really not enough room at Ft. Detrick to accommodate a tank column and some troops? Are there not entire fake neighborhood and town complexes built with taxpayer dollars on military bases across the country meant to facilitate a realistic urban environment for troops to train in? And why travel hundreds of miles to Missouri? At the very least, this is a massive waste of funds.

On the other hand, such an action on the part of the Department of Defense makes perfect sense if the goal is to acclimate citizens to the idea of seeing tanks and armed military acting in a policing capacity. Just check out the two random idiots the local news affiliate picked to interview in St. Louis on the subject. Both state that they think the exercise is a "great idea", because having the military on the streets would help to "reduce crime":

I suspect that the news affiliate did not go out of its way to get any counter-opinions, even though they admitted to being contacted by those voicing concerns over martial law.

Even so, it's sad and simultaneously terrifying that there are plenty of mindless dupes out there who do not understand the dangers of the Army crossing the Rubicon and acting in a civil law enforcement capacity, never mind that they are completely ignorant of the fact that it violates the Posse Comitatus Act. One of the interviewees even points out that in some countries they don't use police at all; only military. This is true. We call those countries "tyrannies"...

Add to the mix the reality that the DOD refuses to respond to any further inquiries by the press concerning details of the training, and you get yet another suspicious instance of behavior on the part of the establishment that seems preparatory for domestic action. I believe that the high frequency at which these activity reports have been coming in over the past year is certainly cause for alarm...

warsocialism lives!!!

Business Insider | The U.S. Navy has its sight set on this new drone that was recently unveiled by defense company partner Northrop Grumman.

They've been working on the MQ-C4 Triton over the last several years, and it's now ready for test flights.

See what the drone offers;

With 360-degree scanning capability and an Automatic Identification System — meaning it can classify different types of ships by itself — the MQ-C4 is pegged to be the mainstay of the Navy's spying capabilities at sea from 2015 onwards.

But even without its state-of-the-art sensors and cameras, the aircraft itself is capable. It can fly for over a day at twice the altitude of commercial jets, reaching a maximum height of 60,000 feet (11 miles) overhead.

And Popular Mechanics explains that the drone is "vertically agile", so it won't have a problem quickly swooping down from high altitudes to take pictures of ships.

Apart from being used for combat-related surveillance missions, the drone could also keep tabs on piracy, human smuggling, fishery violations, and organized crime. Essentially, it's all-seeing.

Here's a break-down of the new drone and how it'll give the Navy even more control of the high seas. Fist tap Big Don.

the dark continuum of watergate

consortiumnews | The 40^th anniversary of the Watergate break-in has brought reflections on the scandal’s larger meaning, but Official Washington still misses the connection to perhaps Richard Nixon’s dirtiest trick, the torpedoing of Vietnam peace talks that could have ended the war four years earlier, Rober Parry reports.

The origins of the Watergate scandal trace back to President Richard Nixon’s frantic pursuit of a secret file containing evidence that his 1968 election campaign team sabotaged Lyndon Johnson’s peace negotiations on the Vietnam War, a search that led Nixon to create his infamous “plumbers” unit and to order a pre-Watergate break-in at the Brookings Institution.

Indeed, the first transcript in Stanley I. Kutler’s Abuse of Power, a book of Nixon’s recorded White House conversations relating to Watergate, is of an Oval Office conversation on June 17, 1971, in which Nixon orders his subordinates to break into Brookings because he believes the 1968 file might be in a safe at the centrist Washington think tank.

Unknown to Nixon, however, President Lyndon Johnson had ordered his national security adviser, Walt Rostow, to take the file out of the White House before Nixon was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1969. Rostow labeled it “The ‘X’ Envelope” and kept it until after Johnson’s death in 1973 when Rostow turned it over to the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, with instructions to keep it secret for decades.

Yet, this connection between Nixon’s 1968 gambit and the Watergate scandal four years later has been largely overlooked by journalists and scholars. They mostly have downplayed evidence of the Nixon campaign’s derailing of the 1968 peace negotiations while glorifying the media’s role in uncovering Nixon’s cover-up of his re-election campaign’s spying on Democrats in 1972.

One of the Washington press corps’ most misguided sayings – that “the cover-up is worse than the crime” – derived from the failure to understand the full scope of Nixon’s crimes of state.

Similarly, there has been a tendency to shy away from a thorough recounting of a series of Republican scandals, beginning with the peace talk sabotage in 1968 and extending through similar scandals implicating Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush – in the 1980 interference of President Jimmy Carter’s hostage negotiations with Iran, drug trafficking by Reagan’s beloved Nicaraguan Contra rebels, and the Iran-Contra Affair – and reaching into the era of George W. Bush, including his Florida election theft in 2000, his use of torture in the “war on terror” and his aggressive war (under false pretenses) against Iraq.

In all these cases, Official Washington has chosen to look forward, not backward. The one major exception to that rule was Watergate, which is again drawing major attention around the 40^th anniversary of the botched break-in at the Democratic National Committee on June 17, 1972.

the purpose of the "left" is to make resistance harmless and ineffectual...,

Fist tap Dale.

ecuador mulls the anglospheric threats its ambassador was recalled to report...,