Humanitarian flashback

March 31, 2011March 31, 2011 ~ susie ~ 2 Comments

From David Swanson’s book War Is A Lie:

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia found that NATO’s bombing may have increased, rather than diminish, the war crimes it was justified by — most of which occurred during and not prior to the bombing.

In the June 14, 1999, issue of The Nation, George Kenney, a former State Department Yugoslavia desk officer, reported:

“An unimpeachable press source who regularly travels with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told this [writer] that, swearing reporters to deep-background confidentiality at the Rambouillet talks, a senior State Department official had bragged that the United States ‘deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept.’ The Serbs needed, according to the official, a little bombing to see reason.”

Jim Jatras, a foreign policy aide to Senate Republicans, reported in a May 18, 1999, speech at the Cato Institute in Washington that he had it “on good authority” that a “senior Administration official told media at Rambouillet, “under embargo” the following: “We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get.”
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The bitchez

March 31, 2011March 31, 2011 ~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Making up rapes to get abortions! You know how the bitchez are, right? Dear God, save me from your followers…

Across the universe

March 31, 2011March 30, 2011 ~ susie

It makes me so sad, what we’ve done to our planet. This isn’t going to go away:

From the Union of Concerned Scientists All Things Nuclear blog:

Today the IAEA has finally confirmed what some analysts have suspected for days: that the concentration per area of long-lived cesium-137 (Cs-137) is extremely high as far as tens of kilometers from the release site at Fukushima Dai-Ichi, and in fact would trigger compulsory evacuation under IAEA guidelines.

The IAEA is reporting that measured soil concentrations of Cs-137 as far away as Iitate Village, 40 kilometers northwest of Fukushima-Dai-Ichi, correspond to deposition levels of up to 3.7 megabecquerels per square meter (MBq/sq. m). This is far higher than previous IAEA reports of values of Cs-137 deposition, and comparable to the total beta-gamma measurements reported previously by IAEA and mentioned on this blog.

This should be compared with the deposition level that triggered compulsory relocation in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident: the level set in 1990 by the Soviet Union was 1.48 MBq/sq. m.

Thus, it is now abundantly clear that Japanese authorities were negligent in restricting the emergency evacuation zone to only 20 kilometers from the release site.

Go read the rest.

Baby you’re a rich man

March 31, 2011March 30, 2011 ~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Will Bunch has been all over this story, and I hope all Pennsylvanians tell everyone they know:

In case you needed any more proof that Gov. Tom Corbett came to Harrisburg with a mission — to do anything and everything to help his billionaire friends in the natural gas biz — and that all that other running-the-state stuff comes second, check out this stunning report tonight

Oil and gas inspectors policing Marcellus Shale development in Pennsylvania will no longer be able to issue violations to the drilling companies they regulate without first getting the approval of top officials.

That’s according to a directive laid out in a series of emails received by the Department of Environmental Protection staff last week and leaked to ProPublica. The emails say the new edict applies only to enforcement actions related to Marcellus Shale drilling and that failure to seek prior approval “will not be acceptable.”

You can read the leaked memos here and here.

John Hanger, who was the chief environmental official under Corbett’s predecessor, Ed Rendell, and who has been fairly down the middle until now about the new GOP governor’s policies toward the natural gas gold-rush in rural Pennsylvania involving hydrofracking, or “fracking,” is appalled by this new info. Hanger tells ProPublica the DEP directives are “really breathtaking,” “profoundly unwise,” and should be rescinded immediately.

As the article notes, Corbett has already named a major campaign donor from the coal industry with a history of anti-environmentalism to oversee new permit applications for natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale. All this, of course, comes after Corbett’s rigid refusal to consider the kind of tax on natural gas drilling that exists in the other 14 of the top 15 gas-producing states, even as his administration plans to slash spending for public schools and state universities to the bone.