Month: May 2012
Seismically active
We have another lunar eclipse coming up June 4th, but what’s more important is that the approximate space between the solar eclipse on the 20th and this one was predicted as very seismically active (5.0 or higher) and should be for another week or so.
Italy (in what was said to be a non-seismically active area), Argentina, Tonga, Fiji, Japan, Bulgaria, Chile, New Zealand, India, and Norway. There were also several 4.0 and higher, and a whole lot of micro-quakes in areas that don’t normally have a lot, but only 5.0+ is considered to be statistically significant.
How Obama learned to kill
This is an enlightening piece, and of course it’s good to know that Obama agonizes over the risk to civilians, I guess. My deep disgust isn’t even specifically with him (because after all, all presidents have done this kind of thing) but with the entire nature of this “war on terror” apparatus: Namely, if we’re attacking groups of people because of their “characteristics” and as a deterrent effect to keep possible terrorists from gathering, well, doesn’t that make us terrorists? Going after broad targets to make the rest of them afraid seems to be the very definition:
Obama settled into his high-backed, black-leather chair. Hayden was seated at the other end of the table. The conversation quickly devolved into a tense back-and-forth over the CIA’s vetting procedures for drone attacks. The president was learning for the first time about a controversial practice known as “signature strikes,” the targeting of groups of men who bear certain signatures, or defining characteristics associated with terrorist activity, but whose identities aren’t known. They differed from “personality” or “high-value individual” strikes, in which a terrorist leader is positively identified before the missile is launched.
Sometimes called “crowd killing,” signature strikes are deeply unpopular in Pakistan. Obama struggled to understand the concept. Steve Kappes, the CIA’s deputy director, offered a blunt explanation. “Mr. President, we can see that there are a lot of military-age males down there, men associated with terrorist activity, but we don’t always know who they are.” Obama reacted sharply. “That’s not good enough for me,” he said. But he was still listening. Hayden forcefully defended the signature approach. You could take out a lot more bad guys when you targeted groups instead of individuals, he said. And there was another benefit: the more afraid militants were to congregate, the harder it would be for them to plot, plan, or train for attacks against America and its interests.
Obama remained unsettled. “The president’s view was ‘OK, but what assurances do I have that there aren’t women and children there?’?” according to a source familiar with his thinking. “?‘How do I know that this is working? Who makes these decisions? Where do they make them, and where’s my opportunity to intervene?’?”
In the end, Obama relented—for the time being. The White House did tighten up some procedures: the CIA director would no longer be allowed to delegate the decision to carry out a drone strike down the chain. Only the director would have that authority, or his deputy if he was not available. And the White House reserved the right to pull back the CIA’s signature authority in the future. According to one of his advisers, Obama remained uneasy. “He would squirm,” recalled the source. “He didn’t like the idea of ‘kill ’em and sort it out later.’”
UPDATE: Charlie Pierce has more, God bless ‘im.
Koch brothers war chest
Sneaky little bastards, aren’t they?
‘Super potent form of LSD’
Making shit up, and the librul media reports it as fact. Way to go, librul media!
Radioactive tuna
I wonder how much has already gotten into the food supply?
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Across the vast Pacific, the mighty bluefin tuna carried radioactive contamination that leaked from Japan’s crippled nuclear plant to the shores of the United States 6,000 miles away — the first time a huge migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance.
“We were frankly kind of startled,” said Nicholas Fisher, one of the researchers reporting the findings online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The levels of radioactive cesium were 10 times higher than the amount measured in tuna off the California coast in previous years. But even so, that’s still far below safe-to-eat limits set by the U.S. and Japanese governments.
Previously, smaller fish and plankton were found with elevated levels of radiation in Japanese waters after a magnitude-9 earthquake in March 2011 triggered a tsunami that badly damaged the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors.
But scientists did not expect the nuclear fallout to linger in huge fish that sail the world because such fish can metabolize and shed radioactive substances.
I know they’d never lie to us, so I won’t worry about it one bit.
Insanity
This really says it all, doesn’t it?
“A female solider in Iraq is more likely to be attacked by a fellow soldier than killed by military fire,” declared a piece on rape in the US military in the Guardian last December. As if the details of ensuing isolation, lack of psychological support and risk of homelessness weren’t enough, one travesty was left out: unless life is at risk, military medical insurance does not fund abortion for women who are left pregnant after such attacks. Period.
Even if a woman can afford to pay for her own termination, military hospitals are currently outlawed from performing the procedure. The March Act, proposed by senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Barbara Boxer, Jeanne Shaheen, Patty Murray and Frank Lautenberg, seeks to change that. Endorsed by the Department of Defence, and given its appeal to patriotism as much as its pinpointing of this grievous human rights violation, can this be the law to finally persuade America’s anti-choicers of the compassionate abortion argument? Or will it merely be the exception that proves the rule?
Much of the current legislative restriction on civilian abortion in the US relates to the 1976 Hyde amendment, which declared that federal funding should not cover abortion (initially relating to services offered by the low-income healthcare provider Medicaid), except in cases of rape, incest or where the life of the mother was at risk. Its relevance was alarmingly renewed in March 2010 when Barack Obama signed an executive order reiterating that protection of federal funds to save the $940bn healthcare bill.
Here we go again
And of course both sides will use the debt ceiling fiasco to force “compromise” in which Wall Street will get not only everything they want, but things they didn’t even ask for. Like a cat with a dead mouse, their political mercenaries will lay the resulting morsel of mass misery at their feet.
Yum!
Florida expert suspended for refusing wetlands permit
Wetlands are a vital part of the ecosystem, and there are all sorts of shenanigans that go on with the state mitigation programs – Florida being infamous for all kinds of backchannel practices:
Florida’s top state wetlands expert has been suspended after she refused to issue a permit on a controversial project — one that she said her boss was willing to bend the rules to approve.
The project: turning a North Florida pine plantation into a business that attempts to make up for wetlands that are wiped out by new roads and development. At stake: millions of dollars in wetland “credits” that can be sold to government and developers.
The problem, according to a May 9 memo from Department of Environmental Protection wetlands expert Connie Bersok, is that the owners want the DEP to give them lots of wetland credits for land that isn’t wet.
After being told by Deputy Secretary Jeff Littlejohn to ignore the rules she had followed on other permits, Bersok wrote, “I hereby state my objection to the intended agency action and refusal to recommend this permit for issuance.”
Two days later, Bersok was suspended pending an investigation, her personnel file shows. She declined to comment for this article without DEP permission. DEP officials would not allow a reporter to speak with her. A spokeswoman would not discuss her case.
“It smells really bad to me,” said Aliki Moncrief, a former DEP attorney who is now executive director of Environment Florida, an activist group.
The application that led to Bersok’s suspension came from the Highlands Ranch Mitigation Bank, which has repeatedly tussled with permitting officials.
“They’re scrappy, these guys,” said Glenn Lowe, who lost his job with the St. Johns River Water Management District after he refused to give Highlands Ranch what its owners wanted. Former water district executive director Kirby Green said Lowe and other employees lost their jobs because Gov. Rick Scott’s pro-business administration didn’t like the way they treated Highlands Ranch.
Rerun
You can understand why the U.S. government was so unhappy with Bradley Manning when we get to connect the dots on information like this:
“Days after the Deepwater Horizon blow-out, a message came in to our offices in New York from an industry insider floating on a ship in the Caspian Sea. He stated there had been a blow-out, just like the one in the Gulf, and BP had covered it up.To confirm this shocking accusation, I flew with my team to the Islamic republic of Azerbaijan.
“Outside the capital, Baku, near the giant BP terminal, we found workers, though too frightened to give their names, who did confirm that they were evacuated from the BP offshore platform as it filled with explosive methane gas.
“Before we could get them on camera, my crew and I were arrested and the witnesses disappeared.
“Expelled from Azerbaijan, we still obtained the ultimate corroboration: a secret cable from the U.S. Embassy to the State Department in Washington laying out the whole story of the 2008 Caspian blow-out.
“The source of the cable, classified “SECRET,” was a disaffected U.S. soldier, Private Bradley Manning who, throughWikiLeaks.org, provided hot smoking guns to The Guardian.The information found in the U.S. embassy cables is a block-buster. The cables confirmed what BP will not admit to this day: there was a serious blow-out and its cause was the same as in the Gulf disaster two years later—the cement (“mud”) used to cap the well had failed.
“Bill Schrader, President of BP-Azerbaijan, revealed the truth to our embassy about the Caspian disaster:
“Schrader said that the September 17shutdown of the Central Azeri (CA) platform…was the largest such emergency evacuation in BP’s history. Given the explosive potential, BP was quite fortunate to have been able to evacuate everyone safely and to prevent any gas ignition. … Due to the blowout of a gas-injection well there was ‘a lot of mud’ on the platform.”
“From other sources, we discovered the cement which failed had been mixed with nitrogen as a way to speed up drying, a risky process that was repeated on the Deepwater Horizon.
Continue reading “Rerun”