UPI 6/15/ 20 13 3:56:04 AM
The Solar wind is a smoking 585 km/sec and there arwe 4 sunspots on the sun tpoday,
none of which pose a threat for flares. The western US is experiencing a record-setting
heat wave with temperatures reaching 128 F and higher. A geomagnetic storm that began
late on June 28th when Earth passed through a region of south-pointing magnetism in the
solar wind is subsiding. At its peak (Kp=7) on June 29th, the storm sparked Northern Lights
in the USA as far south as Kansas. In total, observers in more than a dozen US states
reported visual or photographic sightings of auroras.
WICHITA, Kan., June 14 (UPI) -A Kansas physician says he makes the same income and offers better quality care to his
patients after he dumped all health insurance companies.
Thirty-two-year old family physician Doug Nunamaker of Wichita, Kan., said after five
years of dealing with the red tape of health insurance companies and the high overhead
for the staff he hired just to deal with paperwork, he switched to a system of charging his
patients a monthly fee plus the price of an office visit or test, CNN/Money reported.
For example, under Nunamaker's membership plan -- also known as "concierge"
medicine or "direct primary care" practices -- each patient pays a flat monthly fee to
have unlimited access to the doctors and any medical service they can provide in the
practice, such as stitches or an EKG.
For adults up to age 44, Nunamaker charges $50 a month, pediatric services are $10 a
month, and for adults age 44 and older it costs $100 a month. Although Nunamaker
calls the practice "cash-only," he accepts credit and debit cards for the fees and services.
Nunamaker and his partner negotiated deals for services outside the office. A cholesterol
test costs the patient for $3, versus the $90 or more billed to insurance companies; an
MRI can cost $400, compared with $2,000 or more billed to insurance companies.
The practice encourages patients and families to also carry some type of high-deductible
health insurance plan in case of an emergency or serious illness requiring
hospitalization, Nunamaker said.
Nunamaker said his annual salary is around $200,000, and he gets to spend more time
with patients providing better care because he is not watching the clock and he gets to
spend more time with this family
New Breed of Asteroid
A big asteroid that flew past Earth last month belongs to a new category of space rock, scientists say.
Asteroid 1998 QE2 and its moon sailed within 3.6 million miles (5.8 million kilometers) of Earth on May
31, making their closest approach to our planet for at least the next two centuries. New radar images
captured by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico are revealing just how unique this binary asteroid is,
researchers say.
“Asteroid QE2 is dark, red, and primitive — that is, it hasn’t been heated or melted as much as other
asteroids," Arecibo's Ellen Howell said in a statement. "QE2 is nothing like any asteroid we've visited
with a spacecraft, or plan to, or that we have meteorites from. It's an entirely new beast in the menagerie
of asteroids near Earth."
The 1000-foot-wide (305 meters) Arecibo dish and NASA's 230-foot (70 m) Deep Space Network
antenna in Goldstone, Calif., tracked 1998 QE2 as it approached Earth last month, then kept following the
near-Earth asteroid as it receded into the depths of space.
The resulting radar images have helped researchers take 1998 QE2's measure. The dark, cratered main
asteroid is 1.9 miles (3 km) wide, and it has a 2,500-foot (750 m) moon that orbits it once every 32 hours.
"QE2's moon is roughly one-quarter the size of the main asteroid," Patrick Taylor, also of Arecibo, said in
a statement. "Similarly, our moon is also approximately one-fourth the size of our planet."
Studying the moon and its orbit should help scientists determine the mass of the main asteroid, which in
turn will shed light on the object's composition, researchers said.
Asteroid 1998 QE2 was discovered in August 1998 by astronomers working with MIT's Lincoln Near
Earth Asteroid Research program in New Mexico. The space rock completes one lap around the sun every
3.8 years.
There was never any danger of 1998 QE2 hitting Earth during last month's flyby, scientists say. If it had
hit us, the damage would have been severe; researchers think that any asteroid bigger than 0.6 miles (1
km) is capable of inflicting damage on a global scale, primarily by altering the planet's climate.
1998 QE2 is one of roughly 10,000 near-Earth asteroids that have been spotted to date. The total
population of close-flying space rocks is thought to exceed 1 million.
“M” Class Planets
NASA's Kepler spacecraft has spotted 503 new potential alien worlds, some of which may be
capable of supporting life as we know it.
"Some of these new planet candidates are small and some reside in the habitable zone of their
stars, but much work remains to be done to verify these results," Kepler mission manager Roger
Hunter, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., wrote in an update last Friday
(June 7).
The latest haul brings Kepler's tally of exoplanet candidates to 3,216. Just 132 of them have been
confirmed by follow-up observations to date, but mission scientists expect at least 90 percent
will end up being the real deal . [7 Greatest Kepler Discoveries (So Far)]
Uncertain future
The $600 million Kepler spacecraft launched in March 2009, kicking off a 3.5-year mission to
determine how common Earth-like planets are throughout the Milky Way galaxy.
Kepler spots exoplanets by detecting the tiny brightness dips caused when they pass in front of
their stars' faces from the instrument's perspective. The observatory does this precision work by
staying locked onto 150,000-plus target stars using three gyroscope-like devices called reaction
wheels.
Kepler launched with four functioning reaction wheels — three for immediate use and one spare.
But one wheel, known as number two, failed in July 2012. And a second (number four) gave up
the ghost last month, robbing the spacecraft of its precision pointing ability.
If at least one of the failed wheels cannot be recovered, Kepler's planet-hunting days are almost
certainly over and a new mission will have to be drawn up for the spacecraft.
Engineers have identified a number of tests that could help gauge the likelihood of bringing back
the balky wheels, Hunter said. They're currently developing these commands on the Kepler
testbed at Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colo., where the spacecraft was built.
"It will likely be several weeks before they are ready to implement the commands on the reaction
wheels aboard the spacecraft," Hunter wrote in the June 7 update. "We will continue to provide
updates on significant changes as these plans develop and mature."
Whether or not Kepler can get healthy again, the mission's exoplanet finds will keep rolling in
for years to come, researchers say.
Kepler has collected huge amounts of data, and team members
about half of it so far.
have had time to go through just
"We have excellent data for an additional two years," Kepler principal investigator Bill Borucki,
also of NASA Ames, told reporters last month. "So I think the most interesting, exciting
discoveries are coming in the next two years."
When a Nation needs Leadership
I want to reflect a little today in remembrance of the price we have paid as a nation to retain our
Republic. We have had our battles with greed and avarice. We have had our internal divisions,
which is some respect continue to this day. Leaders have attempted to unite us, but we really
remember the events that culminate when those efforts are dramatically defeated by leadership
that is not afraid to risk their politics to do so.
Abraham Lincoln inherited a nation that was economically divided and exploited by bankers and
industrialists to the point that Washington has become a liability to the Republic. Although
analysts have said there were many ways war could have been averted, the power of the banks
proved almost too great even for him to defeat.
Those powers drew us into war, and Lincoln found himself in a position to seek the faith and
support of the American people to overcome them. He won, but they killed him anyway. In
order for him to win, the North had to first win a battle. It was more than a victory for the
nation. It was a defeat of the bankers who tied his hands and sent hundreds of thousands of
Northern soldiers to their deaths in one defeat after another. Until Gettysburg.
That was the first battle won by his will to unite the country behind the ideal of the
Constitutional right to liberty and freedom. Lincoln could not pass up this opportunity. Within
three months of the victory at Gettysburg, and memorial graveyard and backdrop was
constructed with a single focus and around the clock construction. It was done for remembrance,
and it was done for one speech, one photo opportunity, as it were. And then the speech that
changed the war, won the faith of the voters and thus their congressmen, so that funds could be
raised.
So great was the challenge, by the way, that Northern bankers denied Lincoln loans to finance
the war. Lincoln had to create his own currency backed by nothing but the faith and credit of the
United States of America to defeat these banks. And then these 278 Earth changing words:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation,
conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived
and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to
dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that
nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this
ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our
poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it
can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the
unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to
be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take
increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we
here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall
have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people,
shall not perish from the earth.
We are now there again. Not at Gettysburg, per se. Not at the brink of civil war. But we are divided
between those who see us enslaved by the banks of the world, and those at remember what it is like to
be free. It has been so long, I doubt this generation even knows what it is like. The following facts and
reports are to alert you that leadership is needed now more than ever. Leadership that is not concerned
so much about the next election, but is dedicated to that proposition that is the liberty and freedom upon
which this nation, in fact the entire human race, was founded.
Perhaps these 278 words need to be spoken again. Perhaps we need a leader who has the integrity and
focused vision that we can recapture our Republic from the force that has us, in fact the entire civilized
world, in the grips of oppression and the slavery of debt and its derivatives. Let not another day of this
concerted effort by the Agency Government go by without thinking about this story.
By Douglas J . Hagmann
30 June 2013: As detailed by well known Erwin W. Lutzer in his book When a Nation Forgets
God, an unidentified Christian pastor shared a story with him of someone living in Germany
during the Nazi takeover. The person sharing the story was a churchgoing Christian and a
member of a small church located adjacent to railroad tracks. Every Sunday morning, according
to this eyewitness, the Christian congregation could hear the whistle of the train in the distance
as it neared the town, the noise of the wheels over the tracks, and as the train passed, the cries
coming from inside the train. The cries were those of the Jews being transported to concentration
camps, a process that occurred with regularity each Sunday morning during their worship
service.
According to this eyewitness, week after week the whistle would blow and the church members
grew to dread the sounds they heard. The screams tormented them. So, what did they do? Well,
as the train approached and in anticipation of the screams from the box-car-ed Jews, the
Christians sang their hymns louder to drown out the screams. Soon, they could hear them no
more.
The eyewitness ended his account by describing the torment of hearing the train whistle in his
sleep for the rest of his life, and pleaded for forgiveness for not only himself, but for all of those
who called themselves Christians but did nothing to intervene.
Regardless of your faith or station in life, chances are great that you are exactly like that
eyewitness, and equally, if not more accountable for the actions of our government today. What
is coming is going to be far worse than the world has ever seen, and is going to blindside many.
Don’t be one of them.
World War III is looming like the train whistle in the distance
A global war of unimaginable atrocities is being planned as I write this. It has been in the works
for some time, yet few will want to read what Mr. Hagmann has written. Rather, most will
instead choose to “sing louder” to drown out the screams of innocents, except this time, the
screams will be too loud, too frequent, and too many.
The United States of America has been overtaken from within by a group of heartless and
soulless individuals making up an Agency Government with designs on reshaping the world into
a state of global governance. They pass regulations, tax us, seize our properties and ideas, fine
us, and shut down our businesses by the thousands each month, and yet you have no
representation in that government. They are not elected by us. They do not answer to us. When
they are caught in their unconstitutional activities, they take the fifth and refuse to answer, while
still receiving their six-figure incomes made of your tax dollars.
They are members of both political parties, and part of their plans include reshaping American to
work for them and empowering the Middle East at any cost, including the inevitable and
incalculable cost of human life. Each Agency is run by a Secretary that has braod interpretive
powers over the laws under which they operate their corporate control over America. Each of
these secretaries answers to only one man. The president. Currently at the helm is Barack
Hussein Obama, although his way was paved by the majority of his predecessors and elected
officials of both parties.
He was purposely selected as the man for the job to insure that the inappropriately celebrated
Arab Spring that swept North Africa and the Middle East was conducted as planned. It was a
staged and orchestrated event by the globalists and those in power in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Using your tax dollars and in your name, the United States has been providing funding and
operational support to the groups toppling governments in favor of radical Islamic control.
Although millions upon millions of middle eastern citizens are protesting, such control is nothing
but a necessary means to an end. While many correctly decry the brutality of Islam, few realize
that is a tool of the globalists. We, the people, are not thinking big enough. The lie is bigger
than you have been told.
As I have previously written, a window of understanding, or a glimpse into this agenda, exists in
the murderous events that took place in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Full disclosure into
this event would reveal a criminal enterprise so vast and staggering that it would eclipse anything
we’ve ever seen.
Benghazi was not about any film, protest, or even a kidnapping operation. It was about weapons
smuggling to Syria to assist Islamic terrorists to topple Assad, install a Muslim Brotherhood
backed regime, causing further regional destabilization leading to a massive global war. Full
disclosure would reveal that the United States, through the approval of members of both political
parties we elected and acting in our name, are siding with associates having direct ties to al
Qaeda and other Islamic groups. We are feeding them at this very hour weapons, money, and
military support. The truth is sickening, revolting and shocking.
There are those who doubt this agenda, instead opting to believe that we are seeing inevitable
sectarian violence that existed in that part of the world for centuries. While the matter of
sectarian violence is indeed a factor, the U.S. has been funding, training, and equipping the antiAssad forces, the most well-trained of which are Al Qaeda soldiers to accomplish a takeover of
the world’s oil-rich nations. Again, this is the reason no elected official wants to open an
unbiased investigation into Benghazi, for it will reveal the extent of our complicity, and the
blood on their hands. There is no amnesty for these crimes. There is no backing down now for
them. They are now fully compromised, and you will soon see men and women whom you once
trusted say and stand for positions you thought impossible to believe.
For anyone doubting what is on the immediate horizon, I would like to direct your attention to a
picture I first saw published on the website Before it’s News last week. The picture accompanies
a graphic video and tells the story of an innocent, crying and distraught four-year-old girl
chained to a fence by the anti-Assad Islamic terrorists – the very group the United States is
funding. Perhaps you’ve seen it. She was chained to the fence and forced to watch the
decapitation ad dismemberment of her parents, whose only crime was being members of the Shia
sect. She was a witness. Who on Earth could she tell? No one. Certainly not you. She was
there to tell God of what was being done without remorse. It was as though they were daring
Him to strike out at them. He did not come. He was in a far corner of the universe, weeping.
These are the people our elected leaders, our State Department, and our CIA at the direction of
Barack Hussein Obama are helping. These are the people who claim to be on the side of
righteousness, by exacerbating the violence under the pretext of fighting oppression. Worse, they
are intentionally engaging in these evil and unspeakable acts in our name and with our tax
dollars.
At the same time, there is an active plan to fully destroy our economy by killing our national
currency, and driving into extinction the entrepreneurial spirit of our people by starving them of
capital. This is being done not only to stop any meaningful opposition to a global system of
governance though our financial enslavement, but to insure that our future generations are
beholden to a global financial power as well. Indeed your children don’t even remember what it
was like to be free to speak, to assemble, and to stand for truth. Our leadership lies and cheats
and flaunts their opulence in our faces like the kinds of old, while we are entertained with races
and games and provided a one in 23 million chance to join them through lotteries that drain the
poor and the stupid of their last few dollars.
Concurrently and as part of the larger picture, we have allowed the moral fabric of our nation
become ripped by last week’s Supreme Court decisions on destroying the sanctity of marriage
while at the same time mandating the commercial support of infanticide by spending billions on
abortion mills to kill the children of the poor by the millions.
The coming destruction
It is said a picture is worth a thousand words. I believe the picture of this small 4-year-old
witness says it all. It represents the evil we have become by singing louder, instead of taking
action. As uncomfortable as it will make you feel, I urge you to think about this picture of the
little girl. It is you, and it is your children that are numbed by this brazen violence against
humanity. But by the grace of God, that could be your little girl. If more people fail to awaken, it
very well could be.
We must not chose to cover the screams by merely singing louder, but by making a choice. Are
we going to allow this evil to progress unabated, or are we going to take a stand? Time is running
out as World War III looms on the horizon.
National Secrets: Treasure or Treason?
David Martin
Sitting in the mist just north of the Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau mountains in Wilderswil, I
watched the momentary afternoon sun concede to the onslaught of rain that soaked me earlier in
the day. The dense fog erased the glaciers, then the rocky crags, and then the nubile clouds
dropped curtains of rain blocking everything beyond the closest tree-line. Shrouded in their
watery vapor, these sentinel mountains vanished. Switzerland’s notoriety as a state of discretion
and secrecy was, in modern times, highly valued as the 1934 Swiss Banking Act shielded
countless assets from “enemies” of the Nazi state – notably continental European corporate and
Jewish deposits from occupied countries. Secrecy and privacy as constitutional rights under
Article 13 of the Swiss Federal Constitution affords absolute protection of citizens’ “private and
family life”. Swiss banking and securities professionals are prohibited from breaching
confidential client information (Article 47 of the Banking Act and Article 43 of the Federal Act
on Stock Exchanges and Securities Trading).
Swiss secrecy predated the scourge of Nazi Germany by several hundred years. Swiss cantons
were both the sanctuary and crucible for 16th century religious reformers who, together with their
patrons, sought to move life and wealth to safety in the mountain state. On the lam arising from
charges of ecclesiastical treason and heresy, Swiss resident John Calvin opened the door to
equitable usury which created an ethical loophole for Protestant bankers to exploit. Catholic and
Protestant bankers alike all found this more expansive interpretation of canonical sin desirable.
Discretion regarding the identities of their valued depositors during a period of religious and
political upheaval was a helpful corollary to solidify the Swiss primacy of fiduciary secrecy.
Reminiscent of the conditions giving rise to Swiss secrecy in the era of Calvin and Zwingli, and
the codification of the same on the eve of war, secrecy and treason have once again vaulted onto
the awkward international stage. The Swiss National Council just rejected “Lex USA” – a bill
that would have aligned Swiss rules with demands in the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance
Act (FATCA). While the U.S. will undoubtedly pierce the Swiss veil to go after tax evaders
(together with their EU taxation counterparties), one cannot avoid the paradoxical timing of this
simmering conflict. The U.S. wants disclosure of information from Swiss bankers at the same
time it seeks to prosecute information disclosure by Booz Allen Hamilton former employee
turned temporary Moscow airport resident Edward Snowden. Apparently the “self-evident
Truths” version of “truth” and “TRUTH” are not compatible. If it serves the corporate objectives
of Obama’s “powers that be”, then we want as much information as possible. If it could
incriminate them for treasonous acts against the U.S. national interests (like disclosing
intelligence covert operations and covert financing), then we want to lock-up the leaker.
Incoming National Security Advisor Susan Rice assured the public that Snowden’s activities had
“not weakened the President.” That’s true. Given that many of the programs outlined in
Snowden’s leaky goodie bag likely predate this Administration, it’s reasonable to assume that
Obama’s Guantanamo-perpetuating, willy-nilly drone assassination reputation won’t be further
tarnished. Maybe she hasn’t been fully briefed on what Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and
Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey seem to know. But in a time when the Internal
Revenue Service is rushing to deal with damage control on its identity targeting; with the
President justifying violations to fundamental Constitutional rights; and, with a runner in
Moscow with secrets that are either trivial or of dire consequence if leaked, I’m fascinated by the
myth and mystique of secrets.
What’s in a secret? And why do we presume that they are a necessary component of the social
order? The notion that a democratic, representational power – such as a country – can only
secure itself through opacity is oxymoronic. Undercover representational government is
somewhere between offensively elitist and fascist. It is contrary to the principles of commerce
(willing buyers and sellers informed of all material facts), contract (fully-informed
counterparties), and community (consensus to an established, stated order). There’s no surprise
then that it is fiduciary interests, not representational governments that need secrecy. Our
paternalistic lords know that if they were operating in full transparency, neither they nor their
benefactors would enjoy the benign endorsement of the taxed and governed.
For Switzerland, there’s a fraction of 10.3% of its economy derived from the financial sector
(CHF 59.4 billion) that’s riding on secrecy. For the U.S., there’s at least that much or more
riding on keeping the national defense and central intelligence budget (and their contractors)
secret. And for We The People, it may be time to actually step into the light and break the
tyrannical illusion that secrecy is in our interest. As long as we espouse its merits, we’re subject
to its oppression and misuse. Prioritizing transparency and accountability within ourselves and
our communities will diminish the value of opacity. And lest I be misinterpreted, I’m not
suggesting that discretion and privacy need to be abandoned in inter-personal relationships. But
in positions of stewarded power and accountability, secrecy should have no quarter for in its
precinct thrives treachery and treason which knows no rank, office, or distinction
The Bear of Gold
The collapse in the price of gold has surprised many investors, but it really shouldn't be a
surprise for those who know their financial history.
Gold closed at an all-time high of $1,895 on Sept. 5, 2011. While it had dropped to $1,690 a year
later, an upward swing caused many to predict that gold was again on the rise. Those predictions
and the almost uninterrupted rally since 2002, when the precious metal was trading below $300,
drove investor interest in gold. As the price continued to soar, gold became so popular that a
2011 Gallup poll found that 34 percent of Americans said gold was the best long-term
investment, far more than chose real estate, stocks or bonds. For anyone with a memory of the
tech bubble, that should have been a warning, as individual investors almost always get it wrong,
being late to the party.
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Is the gold rally over?
Ignore the "buy gold now" crowd
The arguments for and against investing in gold
Gold has now dropped to $1,229.20, and holdings of SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) hit their lowest
mark since November 2009. At least some investors must now be concerned about the idea that
gold is a good store of value. For those who know their history, the drop is reminiscent of what
happened to gold after hitting its peak close of $850 on Jan. 21, 1980. By April 3, 1980, it had
dropped all the way to $486. It recovered to $590 by year's end, but closed the following year at
just $398 and languished for the next 20 years. In real terms, the price of gold fell about 85
percent from its peak before bottoming out in 2002. Gold is now reportedly below the cost of
production, which means the Plasser mines will close until the price goes back up.
While the "gold bugs" often cite as a basis for the predictions that the real price of gold based on
its 1980 peak of $850 would be well over $2,000, that's choosing as their basis the peak of a
bubble. That's the equivalent of basing a forecast on the Nasdaq using the March 9, 2000 peak of
more than 5,000 as your base and saying the Nasdaq is way undervalued. I don't think anyone
would make that argument, yet it's made all the time about gold.
There's also the fact that gold has a strong tendency to revert to a real return of zero. If that's true,
gold could end up falling a lot further, as research by economists Campbell Harvey and Claude
Erb shows. You see, the value of gold has traditionally never changed. It buys the same amount
today, as it did in 1850. That is not the case now. For the first time in recorded history, gold will
buy less than the dollar amount associated with it. In other words, gold brings less than land, oil,
or derivatives. This is the most dangerous financial position to reach. If you could scrape
together $1230, you could not buy an ounce of gold. No one will sell it to you at that price, even
if they had it.
Here's another warning. Momentum is the tendency of assets that have done well recently to
continue to do well for a while longer, and vice versa. It has been well documented across a wide
range of assets. Clearly the momentum in gold is negative. Here's another fact to consider.
Momentum is a short-term phenomenon, and it doesn't bode well for gold. It's also important to
remember that momentum leads to reversals in the long term -- assets that performed well over a
long period tend to subsequently underperform, and vice versa. Another warning as gold soared
over the past decade.
It's important to acknowledge that I didn't forecast the collapse of the price of gold. In fact, while
not shocked by the price drop, I was surprised that it came without the Federal Reserve's
tightening monetary policy. It was Fed Chairman Paul Volcker's decision to drive up real interest
rates that led to the demise of gold in 1980. And it was Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's decision
to suppress rates in 2003 that led to gold's resurrection. But, again, my crystal ball is always
cloudy.
With that said, my advice remains the same. If you invest in gold because you value the
diversification benefits gold can provide -- hedging the risks of loose monetary policy and some
geopolitical events -- it's perfectly appropriate to have a small part of your portfolio in gold as
part of your asset allocation plan. Just be sure that you are disciplined in rebalancing, not one
who gets caught up in the noise and emotions the noise can create. That's the only way you get
gold's diversification benefits. On the other hand, if you're a speculator, forewarned is forearmed:
Paraphrasing Winston Churchill, the collapse of gold might not be at its end. It might not even be
the beginning of the end. It just might be the end of the beginning.
LINK
GMO Update
A recent study conducted by a German university found very high concentrations of
Glyphosate, a carcinogenic chemical found in herbicides like Monsanto’s Roundup, in
all urine samples tested. The amount of glyphosate found in the urine was staggering,
with each sample containing concentrations at 5 to 20-fold the limit established for
drinking water. This is just one more piece of evidence that herbicides are, at the very
least, being sprayed out of control.
Glyphosate in Monsanto’s Roundup Impacting Global Health
This news comes only one month after it was found that glyphosate, contained in
Monsanto’s Roundup, is contaminating the groundwater in the areas in which it is used.
What does this mean? It means that toxic glyphosate is now polluting the world’s
drinking water through the widespread contamination of aquifers, wells and springs.
The recent reports of glyphosate showing up in all urine samples only enhances these
past findings.
Monsanto continues to make the claim that their Roundup products are completely safe
for both animals and humans. However many environmentalists, scientists , activists,
and even doctors say otherwise. Glyphosate radically affects the metabolism of plants
in a negative way. It is a systemic poison preventing the formation of essential amino
acids, leading to weakened plants which ultimately die from it.
A formula seems to have been made to not only ruin the agricultural system, but also
compromise the health of millions of people worldwide. With the invent of Monsanto’s
Roundup Ready crops, resistant superweeds are taking over farmland and public health
is being attacked. As it turns out, glyphosate is also leaving behind its residue on
Roundup Ready crops, causing further potential concern for public health. Glyphosate
is even contributing to escalating rates of mental illness and obesity through the
depletion of beneficial gut flora that directly regulates these functions. But it certainly
doesn’t stop there.
Researchers tested roundup on mature male rats at a concentration range between 1
and 10,000 parts per million (ppm), and found that within 1 to 48 hours of exposure,
testicular cells of the mature rats were either damaged or killed. Even at a
concentration of 1 ppm, the Roundup was able to affect the test subjects by decreasing
their testosterone concentrations by as much as 35%.
By Dr. Mercola
Have you ever used Roundup to kill weeds in your lawn or garden?
As the most widely used herbicide in the United States, there's a good chance you
have.
In fact, millions of pounds are used every year on U.S. gardens, lawns and, extensively
on farms growing genetically modified (GM) "Roundup Ready" crops.
You may forget about the herbicide soon after you spray it -- and may never give it a
second thought when consuming corn chips or countless processed foods that contain
GM Roundup Ready corn and soy -- but it doesn't just magically disappear.
Instead, new research is showing that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's
Roundup herbicide, is contaminating everything from food and air to groundwater and
even human beings.
Glyphosate Now Detected in Human Urine
Research in the German journal Ithaca revealed significant concentrations of
glyphosate in the urine samples of city dwellers.
The chemical is used not only for food production, but also is often sprayed onto railway
lines, urban pavements and roadsides.
The article revealed that study participants had concentrations of glyphosate that were 5
to 20 times the limit for drinking water!
This is an alarming finding because glyphosate is easily one of the world's most
overlooked poisons. Research published in 2010 showed that the chemical, which
works by inhibiting an enzyme called EPSP synthase that is necessary for plants to
grow, causes birth defects in frogs and chicken embryos at far lower levels than used in
agricultural and garden applications.i
The malformations primarily affected the:
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Skull
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Face
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Midline and developing brain
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Spinal cord
Quite shockingly, the amount of glyphosate residue you can be exposed to through food
is remarkably high, in terms of being close to the maximum residue limit (MRL) allowed.
According to a report in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology, the highest MRL
for glyphosate in food and feed products in the EU is 20 mg/kg. GM soybeans have
been found to contain residue levels as high as 17 mg/kg, and malformations in frog
and chicken embryos occurred at 2.03 mg/kg!ii
That's 10 times lower than the MRL.
Other independent scientific research has also found that glyphosate has the potential
to cause grave health damage, including a 2009 study that tested formulations of
Roundup that were highly diluted (up to 100,000 times or more) on human cells, and
even then the cells died within 24 hours!iii
The researchers hailed a warning cry that still has not been heard by regulators around
the world, who continue to allow massive amounts of Roundup to be sprayed into the
environment:
" … the proprietary mixtures available on the market could cause cell damage and even
death around residual levels to be expected, especially in food and feed derived from
[Roundup] formulation-treated crops."
Not to mention, when applied to crops glyphosate becomes systemic throughout the
plant, so it cannot be washed off. And once you eat this crop, the glyphosate ends up in
your gut where it can decimate your beneficial bacteria. This can wreak havoc with your
health as 80 percent of your immune system resides in your gut (GALT – Gut
Associated Lymph Tissue) and is dependent on a healthy ratio of good and bad
bacteria! Separate research has also uncovered the following effects from glyphosate
Real Estate Flea Market Coming
Despite the 6.5% stock market rally over the last three months, a handful of billionaires are
quietly dumping their American stocks . . . and fast.
Warren Buffett, who has been a cheerleader for U.S. stocks for quite some time, is dumping
shares at an alarming rate. He recently complained of “disappointing performance” in dyed-inthe-wool American companies like Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, and Kraft Foods.
In the latest filing for Buffett’s holding company Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett has been
drastically reducing his exposure to stocks that depend on consumer purchasing habits. Berkshire
sold roughly 19 million shares of Johnson & Johnson, and reduced his overall stake in
“consumer product stocks” by 21%. Berkshire Hathaway also sold its entire stake in Californiabased computer parts supplier Intel.
With 70% of the U.S. economy dependent on consumer spending, Buffett’s apparent lack of
faith in these companies’ future prospects is worrisome.
Unfortunately Buffett isn’t alone.
Fellow billionaire John Paulson, who made a fortune betting on the subprime mortgage
meltdown, is clearing out of U.S. stocks too. During the second quarter of the year, Paulson’s
hedge fund, Paulson & Co., dumped 14 million shares of JPMorgan Chase. The fund also
dumped its entire position in discount retailer Family Dollar and consumer-goods maker Sara
Lee.
Finally, billionaire George Soros recently sold nearly all of his bank stocks, including shares of
JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs. Between the three banks, Soros sold more than
a million shares.
So why are these billionaires dumping their shares of U.S. companies?
After all, the stock market is still in the midst of its historic rally. Real estate prices have finally
leveled off, and for the first time in five years are actually rising in many locations. And the
unemployment rate seems to have stabilized.
It’s very likely that these professional investors are aware of specific research that points toward
a massive market correction, as much as 90%.
One such person publishing this research is Robert Wiedemer, an esteemed economist and author
of the New York Times best-selling book Aftershock.
Editor’s Note: Wiedemer Gives Proof for His Dire Predictions in This Shocking Interview.
Before you dismiss the possibility of a 90% drop in the stock market as unrealistic, consider
Wiedemer’s credentials.
In 2006, Wiedemer and a team of economists accurately predicted the collapse of the U.S.
housing market, equity markets, and consumer spending that almost sank the United States. They
published their research in the book America’s Bubble Economy.
The book quickly grabbed headlines for its accuracy in predicting what many thought would
never happen, and quickly established Wiedemer as a trusted voice.
A columnist at Dow Jones said the book was “one of those rare finds that not only predicted the
subprime credit meltdown well in advance, it offered Main Street investors a winning strategy
that helped avoid the forty percent losses that followed . . .”
The chief investment strategist at Standard & Poor’s said that Wiedemer’s track record
“demands our attention.”
And finally, the former CFO of Goldman Sachs said Wiedemer’s “prescience in (his) first book
lends credence to the new warnings. This book deserves our attention.”
In the interview for his latest blockbuster Aftershock, Wiedemer says the 90% drop in the stock
market is “a worst-case scenario,” and the host quickly challenged this claim.
Wiedemer calmly laid out a clear explanation of why a large drop of some sort is a virtual
certainty.
It starts with the reckless strategy of the Federal Reserve to print a massive amount of money out
of thin air in an attempt to stimulate the economy.
“These funds haven’t made it into the markets and the economy yet. But it is a mathematical
certainty that once the dam breaks, and this money passes through the reserves and hits the
markets, inflation will surge,” said Wiedemer.
“Once you hit 10% inflation, 10-year Treasury bonds lose about half their value. And by 20%,
any value is all but gone. Interest rates will increase dramatically at this point, and that will cause
real estate values to collapse. And the stock market will collapse as a consequence of these other
problems.”
And this is where Wiedemer explains why Buffett, Paulson, and Soros could be dumping U.S.
stocks:
“Companies will be spending more money on borrowing costs than business expansion costs.
That means lower profit margins, lower dividends, and less hiring. Plus, more layoffs.”
No investors, let alone billionaires, will want to own stocks with falling profit margins and
shrinking dividends. So if that’s why Buffett, Paulson, and Soros are dumping stocks, they have
decided to cash out early and leave Main Street investors holding the bag.
But Main Street investors don’t have to see their investment and retirement accounts decimated
for the second time in five years.
Wiedemer’s video interview also contains a comprehensive blueprint for economic survival
that’s really commanding global attention.
Now viewed over 40 million times, it was initially screened for a relatively small, private
audience. But the overwhelming amount of feedback from viewers who felt the interview should
be widely publicized came with consequences, as various online networks repeatedly shut it
down and affiliates refused to house the content.
“People were sitting up and taking notice, and they begged us to make the interview public so
they could easily share it,” said Newsmax Financial Publisher Aaron DeHoog.
“Our real concern,” DeHoog added, “is the effect even if only half of Wiedemer’s predictions are
an accurate memory of the future.
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CENTRAL BANKS SELL RECORD SUMS OF US DEBT
By Robin Wigglesworth in London, Michael Mackenzie in New York and Josh Noble in
Hong Kong
Central banks sold a record amount of US Treasury debt last week while bond funds
suffered the biggest ever investor withdrawals as markets shuddered at the prospect of
the US Federal Reserve ending its quantitative easing programme.
Holdings of US Treasuries held at the Fed on behalf of official foreign institutions
dropped a record $32.4bn to $2.93tn, eclipsing the prior mark of $24bn in August 2007.
It was the third week of outflows in the past four.
Private investors are also dumping fixed income. Bond funds tracked by EPFR Global, a
data provider, saw total redemptions of $23.3bn in the week to June 26. US funds were
the worst hit, with withdrawals totalling $10.6bn, but emerging market debt funds also
saw record redemptions of $5.6bn.
Over the past five weeks emerging market debt and equity fund outflows have totalled
$35bn, of which $22.5bn has fled stock market funds.
“People are throwing in the towel,” said Markus Rosgen, chief Asia equity strategist at
Citigroup. “It’ll drag the market down lower over the course of the summer.”
Fixed income markets have tumbled since Fed chairman Ben Bernanke first signalled on
May 22 that the US central bank would begin reducing its asset purchases later this
year. Yields on 10-year US Treasuries have risen sharply since then, hitting 2.52 per cent
on Friday compared with 1.62 per cent at the start of May.
The noticeable rise in short-term Treasury yields – in spite of the Fed stressing it is in
no hurry to tighten policy – could be the result of developing countries selling Treasury
holdings to finance currency interventions.
“We can only speculate at this point about which countries were selling, and what
maturities were being unloaded,” said Lou Crandall, economist at Wrightson Icap. “One
obvious possibility is that emerging market nations whose currencies have been under
heavy pressure sold shorter-dated Treasuries for intervention purposes.”
People are throwing in the towel. It’ll drag the market down lower over the course of the
summer
- Markus Rosgen, chief Asia equity strategist at Citigroup
Global markets have recently regained some of their footing, with bond yields declining
and most stock markets clawing back some losses. The FTSE All World Index has gained
2.7 per cent since Tuesday.
Fund managers stress that the Fed is still buying billions of dollars’ worth of bonds for
months to come, and point out that actual interest rate increases are far away.
But some asset managers are concerned that if outflows continue it could force some to
sell positions once more and trigger another, deeper leg in the fixed income rout,
particularly during the illiquid summer months.
“The summer is hot and shallow. If people capitulate then it will not be nice,” warns one
senior asset manager.
Equity funds failed to benefit from the move out of fixed income, with redemptions
hitting $13bn in the week ending June 26.
Japan was the only place to see net equity inflows in the past week, but Japanese
investors, big holders of US Treasury debt, dumped a net $12bn of foreign bonds last
week, their biggest sale in 14 months
JESSICA
HER
THE
ROUND
MIDDLE
CADDIE
AT
KORDA
THE
DURING
OFU.S.
FIRED
HER
OPEN
By Shane Bacon
A lot of people think the only job of a caddie is to carry the bag. That couldn't be more wrong. A
caddie is a swing coach, a mental coach, a voice of reason and persuasion and the person who
makes sure, if you go on tilt, that things can smooth over so you can finish your round and not
post some absurdly high number.
Jessica Korda obviously was not thinking about all those things during her third round at the U.S.
Open. According to the Golf Channel's Kelly Tilghman, the 20-year-old LPGA player fired her
caddie mid-round at Sebonack Golf Club, pulling her boyfriend into loop for the remainder of
her round. "Johnny, grab the bag, let's go," she said, according to AP.
I thought this was significant, because American business for more than 70 years has
had seen a wholesale takeover of local banks serving the local communities by world
banks who simply act as though they are advising, but are all along simply extracting
wealth from our professional activities for their own gain. I think it’s time for us to fire
them, grab a friend and say, “Come on, Johnny. Grab the bag and let’s go.” Let’s get
back in the game and show them what we can do.
Flight 800
An unreleased documentary on the 1996 TWA Flight 800 explosion offers "solid proof that there was
an external detonation," its co-producer said Wednesday.
"Of course, everyone knows about the eyewitness statements, but we also have corroborating
information from the radar data, and the radar data shows a(n) asymmetric explosion coming out of
that plane -- something that didn't happen in the official theory," Tom Stalcup told CNN's "New Day."
A number of people have come forward, "all saying the same thing: that there was an external force
-- not from the center wing tank, there's no evidence of that -- but there is evidence of an external
explosion that brought down that plane," Stalcup said.
He cited "corroborating information from the radar data" and complained that "not one single
eyewitness was allowed to testify -- that's unheard of."
Photos: TWA Flight 800
The documentary’s producers are submitting a petition -- signed by "many" former investigators -asking for the National Transportation Safety Board to reopen its investigation, based on new
evidence offered by the documentary, Stalcup said.
"The family members need to know what happened to their loved ones," he said.
Asked why such information might have been suppressed, he said, "That's a question that should be
answered when this investigation gets reopened."
The NTSB ruled that the explosion was caused by an electrical short circuit, most likely originating in
a fuel gauge line, which found its way into the center wing fuel tank, where it detonated fuel vapors
and caused the B-747 to fall in pieces into the waters off Long Island.
Skeptics have long theorized that TWA Flight 800 was brought down by sinister forces.
They include Hank Hughes, who served as a senior accident investigator with the NTSB and helped
reconstruct the aircraft. Others include Bob Young, a TWA investigator who participated in the
investigation, and Jim Speer, an accident investigator for the Airline Pilots Association.
"These investigators were not allowed to speak to the public or refute any comments made by their
superiors and/or NTSB and FBI officials about their work at the time of the official investigation," a
news release announcing the documentary said.
"They waited until after retirement to reveal how the official conclusion by the (NTSB) was falsified
and lay out their case."
The documentary, "TWA Flight 800," will premiere July 17, the 17th anniversary of the crash.
Stalcup is co-founder of the Flight 800 Independent Researchers Organization and has been a
longtime and passionate critic of the official investigation.
Suspicions that criminals or terrorists were behind the TWA 800 explosion are not new. The FBI
conducted a parallel investigation, but concluded that the incident was not a crime or terrorist attack.
The NTSB said Tuesday that it was aware of the pending release of the documentary, which will air
on EPIX TV network, and of the producers' intent to file a petition to reopen the investigation.
"As required by NTSB regulation, a petition for reconsideration of board findings ... must be based
on the discovery of NEW evidence or on a showing that the board's findings are erroneous," NTSB
spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said in a statement. "At this point, the NTSB has not received a petition,
however, we stand ready to review one, should it be filed."
Petitions are reviewed and a determination typically is made within 60 days, but the NTSB can take
longer if necessary, she said. The safety board's investigation of TWA 800 lasted four years and
"remains one of the NTSB's most extensive investigations," Nantel said.
Investigators "spent an enormous amount of time reviewing, documenting and analyzing facts and
data, and held a five-day public hearing to gather additional facts before determining the probable
cause of the accident," she said.
But her statement leaves open the possibility the case will be reopened.
"While the NTSB rarely re-investigates issues that have already been examined, our investigations
are never closed, and we can review any new information not previously considered by board," it
said.
The documentarians said they have a "trifecta of elements" that will "prove that the officially
proposed fuel-air explosion did not cause the crash." That trifecta includes forensic evidence,
firsthand sources and corroborating witnesses, and the new statements from retired investigators.
The evidence proves that "one or more ordnance explosions outside the aircraft caused the crash,"
the producers said. But it does not identify or speculate on the source of the ordnance explosions.
All 230 people aboard TWA 800 died when the plane, headed for Paris, exploded and crashed into
the Atlantic Ocean shortly after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
Scores of witnesses observed a streak of light and a fireball, giving early rise to suspicions that the
terrorists had struck the plane with a rocket.
Investigators concluded the streak was likely burning fuel streaming from the plane's wing tank.
LINK
Words from Sacha
Midsummer falls upon us, and in the shadow of a peoples revolution, ocean bowels off the Egyptian coast
reveal the sunken city of Heracleion. Like timeless ghosts, ancient colossi of Isis (goddess of motherhood,
magic and fertility) and Hapi (throne protector of the dismembered Osiris) break surface from their
watery graves, touch air for the first time in millennia and breathe again within the mortal realm. Primeval
totems of reconstitution, so perfectly timed, symbolising the rebirth of a long downgraded, dispossessed
and glorious race of humans. Like the Rosetta Stone or Dead Sea Scrolls coughed up from Coptic
catacombs, these pivotal archetypes of our future-past emerge just in time to rewire history and remind
our luckless civilisation, how very little we know of ourselves. And one another.
A Turkish Sultan trapped in the body of a mere Prime Minister glances in the direction of Taksim Square,
as his people demand fresh air and trees over shopping malls and consumer-mind-control. The silkensuited, tie-pinned, shiny-shoed, glossy-haired sock-puppet broadcasts a dictum to the mothers of his
nation, directs them to retrieve protesting family members to the safety of home. The mothers (God love
them) head to Taksim Square and form a human chain. Protect their families from the stormtroopers.
Erdogan-the-Great uses the worlds media to bleat to the worlds media that social-networking (the worlds
media) is to blame. Tells his people 'move along now - nothing to see here', as state sponsored terrorism
disguised as police, fire gas canisters point-blank into the skulls of pretty girls gathered in the sunshine.
Pressure-hoses laced with chemical poison smash young men into the pavements until they are dead.
Broken and dead. Thats what happens when you permit your government to play with sharp instruments.
The people gather still. Flowers in their arms this time.
Syria and Iran stand sentinel as the last firewall between 'us' and Armageddon. End-of-days has already
been visited on them, as it has Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and other oil and resource rich developing
nations. More than 110 000 private security contractors operate in Afghanistan alone. Thats government
sanctioned mercenaries to you and I. Foreign terrorists to the native people. Crop-haired goons in
camouflage wielding guns. An ad hoc cherry-picking militia operating on behalf of US and Western
commercial interests. Kids who didn't grow up in ways that matter - didn't suckle sufficiently on the tit.
Boys with toys, having little or no accountability to the lawless agencies which sanction them. They shoot
to kill. They plunder like the horrendous vikings of old.
And on the other side of the world a man stands up, clears his voice, and wishes to be heard. Professor
Henry Graff, arguably Columbia University's most distinguished and honoured professor, with a 46 year
tenure of service. The Diplomatic History Professor at the time of Obamas graduation states simply: “I’m
very upset by the whole story. I don’t consider him a Columbia student. I have no idea what he did on the
Columbia campus. No one knows him.” All the students who gathered recently at their 30th college
reunion remain equally confused at the legend. Nobody met or saw him or can remember him at all.
Columbia alumni or not, it appears that Obama is no longer a 'lawyer' in any event, having surrendered
his license back in 2008 in order to escape charges he lied on his bar application. A 'Voluntary Surrender'
of license is a last-ditch option when you’ve been accused of something serious, in order to avoid having
the state suspend you. Curiously enough, Michelle Obama voluntarily surrendered her law license as
well, in 1993 after a Federal Judge gave her the choice between surrendering it or standing trial for
Insurance fraud.
These factual events chillingly suggest that the most powerful man on earth is at the heart of a diabolical
conspiracy. A man who has not, in real terms. supplied sufficient paperwork as evidence of identity to
qualify as a ground-keeper at the White House let alone Commander-in-Chief. It suggests elements within
the global military industrial complex and intel community tagged to the deal. Suggests an insidious
program of illegal public surveillance, covert mainstream media control and gross manipulation by
shadow government.
All standard fare and common knowledge at this time.
A few short months since the 2012 winter solstice where our blue-pearl-planet conjuncted the intersection
of the Milky Way and the plane of the ecliptic, resurrecting us from a 13000 year galactic sleep
cycle…..and the contrast between sheer good and evil becomes apparent to all but the terminally
unconscious.
It is a time when the world of men busy themselves with pursuit of trivia whilst the antics of insane
leaders pass unnoticed. A time when a man empowered to murder innocent people (collateral) across the
globe with remote-controlled drones holds the Nobel peace prize. A time when the bravest amongst us,
whistleblowers risking life and limb, take up the cross of humanity and are hunted down for treason. A
time when a man can be extradited as a spy for revealing to the public that its elected government is
unlawfully spying.
It is a time when war protestors get arrested for 'disturbing the peace'. A time when that gravest of all
insults to civilisation, those privately owned commercial enterprises called 'government' are so deeply
embedded in mechanistic survival that they articulate almost all the evils prevalent in our world; hunger,
poverty, murder, genocide, environmental rape, disintegration of families and communities, and
dereliction of the most precious commodity of all: human sovereignty.
It is indeed a time of high treason, where the most powerful leaders of nations, all but declare war on their
own citizens. They draft codes, statutes and ordinances which revile the very rule of law. They conspire to
usurp God-given rights and protections afforded the common man by desecrating the constitutions which
mandate their own powers.
Thus, Barak Hussein Obama a.k.a Barry Soetoro, an Indo-Kenyan impostor by sensible reckoning,
installed at the White House, finger on the trigger of a quadrillion dollar nuclear war-machine, begins to
creak and groan under the weight of his administrations sheer toxicity. He makes time each Tuesday to
personally compile a death-list of perceived enemies, whereupon important looking men pluck the list
from his hand and plod away on thick-piled carpet to activate drone-assassinations of wedding parties
taking place in foreign lands. The Clinton woman ducks out of DC just in time to avoid the shit-storm she
ghoulishly seeded. A clutch of old cognac swilling Anglo-Saxons in the basement howl with laughter as
their dark effigy begins to spark and pop, with evidenced counts of treason adding up. The old New
World is finally pitched, timed and poised for the greatest fall in history. Wild and woolly conspiracy
theorists exhale for the first time in years.....hands swollen from having beaten the drums since long
before 'audacity of hope' and 'inconvenient truth' was thrown at our beaming faces like psychointellectual slime.
As the late demigod Terence McKenna warned in his last interview, in the short years ahead as we
converge toward the eschaton, that transcendental object at the end of time…..things are going to get
weirder and weirder, until they become so weird that we will no longer be able to ignore the weirdness.
Thus we see the artifice of sectarian statehood melt in the glare of an awakening planet, ears pressed to
the ground, we hear amid the thundering footsteps, McKenna's classic exhortation: "culture is not your
friend".
Neither is religion. Particularly if you are one of the incalculable victims who have suffered at the hands
of pedophile rings issuing from the heart of the Catholic church. Or victims of church and state sponsored
genocide currently being exposed by Nobel Peace Prize nominee Reverend Kenneth Annett, Field
Secretary for the International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State. Or one of countless victims of
the abuses of fundamentalist Islam, neo-aggressive Buddhism, et al.
Like thunderbolts from Zeus, resplendent solar flares spit celestial admonitions of grace at our spinning
orb, as homo-sapiens begin the galactic shrug of jettisoning ourselves from arcane mind-control software
designed to cage us within civilisational, religious, cultural, social and mental prisons. We see ourselves
in one another across those revolutionary city-squares, see ourselves in one another as we shuffle along
interminable security lines at airports, as we are frisked, herded, cajoled and terrified in a thousand
ways….by a grotesquery of elites, oligarchies and priesthoods, cowering behind their armour plated thugs
wielding dangerous toys and godlessness.
Exactly how weird does it get?......Let the math speak:
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In the USA an eighth grade student is facing a year in prison for wearing a T-shirt with an NRA
(National Rifle Association) logo.
In the USA this year a 9 year old child was tazered twice before being handcuffed on her own
doorstep - for skipping school.
On May 4th in the US, a 10 year old boy was tazered at school (two barbs penetrating his chest)
by a policeman wishing to make a point about what happens to folks who don't obey orders.
Over 500 human beings have died from being tazered by police in the USA: brothers, sisters,
mothers, fathers, children, husbands, wives.
In the UK tasers are used against children more than 140 times a year.
Official guidelines in the UK warn of potentially fatal health problems if youths are hit by the
50,000-volt devices. Despite this, use of these shock weapons in confrontations with under-18s
rose by almost 600 per cent in three years.
World governments spent $1735 billion dollars on war in 2012 (44% of it underwritten by the
USA).
It would take about $135 billion (less than 10% of the 2012 war chest) to eradicate global
poverty.
The US ranks first in the world in: Global Crime, Rape, C02 Emissions, Divorce Rate, Teen Birth
Rate, Heart Attacks,Plastic Surgery, Prisons and Prisoners.
The US issue the most vaccines and yet has the worst under 5 mortality rate and high infant
mortality rate on earth.
25 members of the team who allegedly killed Osama Bin Laden are dead, including the SEAL
Team 4 Commanding Officer.
In 2012 more than 85,000 military veterans were treated for sexual abuse suffered whilst serving
in the US military, 40 % of them were men.
The number of active members of the U.S. military that are killing themselves now exceeds the
number that are dying on the battlefield.
On any given night, approximately 200,000 military veterans are homeless in the United States.
22 service veterans commit suicide each day in the United States. Over 8000 per year - and
rising.
The federal government is increasingly labelling military veterans as “potential domestic
terrorists” if they express viewpoints that are critical of the government.
In 2011, 2012, and so far in 2013 only less than two dozen U.S. citizens were killed worldwide as
a result of terrorism including deaths in all their theatres of war.
We produce food sufficient to feed over 12 billion people in the world, with a population of under
7 billion.
Iraq broke 2 UN resolutions and got invaded, bombed and destroyed.
Israel has broken 65 UN resolutions with no consequences.
20,000 Jews protested the State of Israel in Federal Plaza in New York City on June 9th 2013
with no media coverage.
By 2020 one in two will have cancer according to the UK government report in 2013.
In 2013 it remains against FDA regulations, which have the force of law, to claim that you have
discovered a cure or treatment for any disease even if you have discovered a cure for any type of
cancer.
About 17 000 farmers commit suicide in India each year due to debt and crop failure largely
attributed to genetic modification of crops.
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Monsanto GM products are being banned from nations around the world for the dangers they
present to food production, and yet Barak Obama has appointed a former VP of Monsanto as the
Food Safety Tsar for the US government. And Monsanto chief Robert Fraley was granted the
World Food Prize by the US State Department in June 2013.
Over 2 million people in 436 cities across 52 nations marched against Monsanto and it's overt
abuses in May 2013. There was zero news coverage.
President Barack Obama, former editor of the Harvard Law Review, is no longer a “lawyer”. He
surrendered his license back in 2008 in order to escape charges he lied on his bar application. A
“Voluntary Surrender” of license is something you do when you’ve been accused of something,
and you enact before the state suspends you.
Michelle Obama “voluntarily surrendered” her law license in 1993. after a Federal Judge gave
her the choice between surrendering her license or standing trial for Insurance fraud.
It is worth noting here that America, a country which merely represents all of the world, is not 'the' bad
guy, just a pathologically ignorant one, at this juncture in history.
True financial, political and intellectual power issue more directly from European houses. Old bloodlines
which articulated the precepts of usury and bonded slavery a long time ago. Since inception of the Federal
Reserve in 1913 the US dollar was birthed as the singularity toward which the wealth of all nations has
been coerced or butchered into subservience. Exactly 100 years later, the top 25 U.S. banks have more
than 212 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives combined, yet only have assets totalling 8.9 trillion
dollars combined, ie: exposure of the largest banks to derivatives outweigh their total assets by a ratio of
about 24 to 1. This is beyond financial meltdown. It is the net result of arguably the greatest deception
and engineered strike against the wellbeing and prosperity of humanity in the history of our fragile world.
We are supposed to slump into semi-consciousness when men in suits start talking derivates, exposures,
cross-collateralizations, dragnet clauses …precisely so they can continue with their mad, bad science of
gutting the common-wealth, unmolested or scrutinised by you or I. And whilst the affluent raid coffers
from dusk till dawn, Uncle Sam, trillions of dollars in debt, gives out billions more in foreign aid. How
does that compute? The answer is that it is not 'aid' being dispensed at all, but blood money, bribes,
coercion fees and baksheesh. All a necessary and logical function of the need for the system to survive,
and protect itself. Even at the cost of wholesale human survival. To wit: Monsanto, the nefarious
multinational enterprise seeking to mutate the worlds food supply into zombie-fodder, lurches from nation
to nation, pumping the sweaty hands of eager diplomats whilst setting in motion global depopulation as a
United Nations protocol (see Agenda 21).
Old grinning billionaires stalk the international stage, their private helicopters descending amid adobe
huts in the African veld. Worthy poses are struck in places where flies buzz around dying black babies.
Desperate are some, it would seem, to get their hands on the ultimate rite of engineered genocide
(population reduction) via mass vaccination and food and water control. Bill Gates, son of the erstwhile
chief of Planned Parenthood, that glossed up enterprise for eugenics, continues Daddy's great dream by
pumping billions of dollars into programs which radiate the scrotum of dark-skinned men to render them
sterile. Give these custodians of humankind a microphone and without a trace of irony they will then talk
up the 'healthy' aspects of proposed 'death-panels' to determine who lives and who dies. War is a most
useful tool in their visionary objectives.
Depopulation is not the same thing as population control. Think about it.
As for money, the stuff which measures and stores our ideas of value and exchange. Did we ever wrap
our sweet, stupid heads around what it is? To divine the mysteries of the Luciferian symphony of usury:
articulated deception of promissory notes printed by a club of pathological liars, leant against the currency
of human bondage and the future debt of wage-slaves. You and I - our time and motion. Our energy and
our lives.
Harvest of the innocents becomes the base tone of our civilisation. As it ever was. Yet in such
recognition, are we able, as children of the new earth, to tear down the prison walls within our feverish
minds and sullied hearts. See the prison-planet we permission with every non-thought and every nonaction. This our world - this our death-camp. Are we able to understand the idiocy of patriotism, of
nationalism, of any goddamned 'ism'. Can we begin to see that flexing muscle, pumping bullets and
nuclear warheads into people and objects is not cool. Is not defending anything other than evil. Protects
nought but the deviants who devise and exercise this rationale.
Midsummer is upon us, and it seems that amid the darkening skies of war, we are met again through the
mist of ages by the steady rumble of a collapsing house of Babylon. At the onset of a catastrophic failure
of the modern male experiment of organising humans with fear, time and money - we are left so ruined,
so poisoned, with little choice but to embrace the emergent 'other'…..art, beauty and consciousness.
Grace. The stuff which augers an awakening of our greater aspect: the 'all seeing eye' which peers not
from a dollar bill and the masonic dungeons of a dying priesthood, but which resides as the quanta in the
very heart of humankind.
Grace. Reminding us of our capacity for remembrance and for love. Reminding us of our worthiness, our
beauty and our timeless divinity.
Man-made particles lowered hurricane frequency: study
Higher levels of air pollution reduced the frequency of North Atlantic hurricanes and other tropical storms
for most of the 20th century, a study said last week
.
Adding to evidence for mankind's impact on the weather system, the probe found a link between these
powerful storms and aerosols, the scientific term for specks of matter suspended in a gas.
Aerosols can occur in natural form -- as dusty volcanic plumes, clouds or fog -- but are also man-made,
such as sooty particles from burning coal or oil.
The study focused on particles from North America and Europe that were generated mainly from burning
fossil fuels. Researchers from the UK Met Office created weather simulations covering the period 1860
to 2050. They found that tropical storms were much less frequent during periods when emissions of manmade aerosols increased over the North Atlantic. "Increases in anthropogenic emissions (particularly of
aerosols) through most of the last century is found to have reduced hurricane activity."
"The cooling impact of man-emitted aerosols may have had a more important regional impact on climate
than we previous appreciated." Aerosols reflect solar rays and change the brightness of clouds, which
affects how much of the Sun's heat is projected onto the surface of the sea, the authors suggest.
Ocean warmth provides the raw energy for tropical storms, which in extreme conditions can brew into
destructive hurricanes.
Conversely, the study found that measures since the 1980s to tackle pollution and improve air quality
reduced levels of aerosols -- and in turn ramped up hurricane activity.
"The clean-up of industrial aerosols in the last 20 years, while being beneficial for human health and
linked to a recovery of African Sahel rains since the 1980s droughts, may have contributed to increases in
Atlantic hurricane activity," Booth said by email.
The authors said their study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, is the first to demonstrate a link
between aerosols and Atlantic tropical storms. The research team postulates that in the future, it will be
Earth-warming greenhouse gases, much longer-lasting than aerosols, that will exert the most influence on
tropical storm frequency.
Previous work published in Nature Climate Change had said that while the number of tropical storms was
not projected to increase in future, their intensity was.
The hurricane season runs from June to November. For 2013, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) has predicted 13 to 20 "named" storms, seven to 11 hurricanes and three to six
major hurricanes
Power Outage on Pacific Coast
SANTA MARIA, Calif. (AP) -- Crews have restored power to most of the 145,000 Pacific Gas and
Electric Co. customers hit by a weekend outage that darkened a large part of California's Central
Coast.
An outage map on the company's website shows just one customer in Santa Maria remains without
electricity early Monday morning.
Santa Maria, which has about 100,000 residents, was the largest city affected by the Sunday night
outage that stretched from the beach town of Cambria in San Luis Obispo county to Solvang in Santa
Barbara's wine country.
PG&E tweeted that equipment failure at a substation caused the outage.
"At first we thought it was a brown out, with half of the city lights out about 9:15 p.m.," the city's
police Chief Ralph Martin said. "But 10, 15 minutes later the whole city was without power."
Martin said the outage forced the police department to switch to generator power.
Extra officers were called to patrol the streets, direct traffic and respond to several reports of
vandalism at local businesses, he said.
PG&E tweeted that equipment failure at a substation caused the outage, and that crews restored
power to about 90,000 customers around midnight
The Hastings Assassination
Former U.S. National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism
Richard Clarketold The Huffington Post on Monday that the fatal crash of journalist Michael
Hastings’ Mercedes C250 coupe last week is “consistent with a car cyber attack.”
“There is reason to believe that intelligence agencies for major powers” — including the United
States — know how to remotely seize control of a car,” Clarke said.
On Saturday, Infowars.com posted a video of a talk presented by Dr. Kathleen Fisher, a program
manager for DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an agency of the United
States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technologies. Fisher
admitted that the Pentagon has researched remotely controlling cars through hacking on board
computers.
In 2011, Car and Driver magazine published an article substantiating the Pentagon research.
“Currently, there’s nothing to stop anyone with malicious intent and some computerprogramming skills from taking command of your vehicle. After gaining access, a hacker could
control everything from which song plays on the radio to whether the brakes work,” writes Keith
Barry, citing research conducted by the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security, a
partnership between the University of California San Diego and the University of Washington.
“What has been revealed as a result of some research at universities is that it’s relatively easy to
hack your way into the control system of a car, and to do such things as cause acceleration when
the driver doesn’t want acceleration, to throw on the brakes when the driver doesn’t want the
brakes on, to launch an air bag,” Clarke told The Huffington Post. “You can do some really
highly destructive things now, through hacking a car, and it’s not that hard.”
Clarke was careful not to directly implicate the government in hacking Hastings’ car. “So if there
were a cyber attack on the car — and I’m not saying there was,” he said, “I think whoever did it
would probably get away with it.”
He also put credence in the FBI’s claim – despite claims to the contrary by associates of the
writer – that the agency was not investigating him. “I believe the FBI when they say they weren’t
investigating him,” said Clarke. “That was very unusual, and I’m sure they checked very
carefully before they said that.”
“I’m not a conspiracy guy. In fact, I’ve spent most of my life knocking down conspiracy
theories,” said Clarke. “But my rule has always been you don’t knock down a conspiracy theory
until you can prove it [wrong]. And in the case of Michael Hastings, what evidence is available
publicly is consistent with a car cyber attack. And the problem with that is you can’t prove it.”
Despite the overwhelming evidence that Michael Hastings was targeted and assassinated for his
journalism – most notably his story resulting in the fall of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and remarks
on NSA surveillance – the establishment media continues to portray the attack on Hastings as the
delusional meanderings of conspiracy theorists. Clarke’s comments serve as the latest pièce de
résistance in an unfolding drama revealing just how far the government will go to silence critics
and truth tellers.
Prior to his apparent murder, Hastings said the Obama administration had declared war on any
reporters who produced any work criticizing the President or his agendas. His desire to go into
hiding – expressed in an email mere hours before his assassination – demonstrates the ability of
the government to monitor opponents by using a well-developed NSA surveillance grid and take
executive action against investigative journalists and others who dare to stand up to the national
security state.
Do you think that the Toyota Prius crashes were a sort of test for this type of assassination? Do you
remember when Pruis owners were reporting that their cars were going to full throttle and were
unstoppable by drivers? There is technology now in equipped patrol cars whereby Vehicles can be
disabled by police from behind by shutting off the throttle pack. This defuses the risk for loss to the
public and property caused by high-speed chases. I never thought about the throttle being sent a
message to go to 100% from a remote position to do exactly the opposite; to kill the occupant regardless
of risk to the surrounding environment.
Now, you ask me why didn’t Mr. Hastings just step on the brakes? Well, here is why. The National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration requires all vehicles to have Electronic Stability Control systems
that control the brakes by computer. This means that the vehicle can be kept from going out of control by
an onboard computer preventing the brakes from applying and thus allegedly correcting the vehicle back
into a safe mode of operation automatically. The NHTSA stated in its regulation final rule that about
2.800 lives would be saved annually with this brake override feature. However, that onboard computer
can be hacked or fooled to prevent the brakes from applying with exactly the same remote programming
tool. Now, you ask, why doesn’t he turn the ignition off?
That is because the Mercedes does not have a key switch. It uses a proximity sensor that the driver has in
his pocket. He simply pushes a button on the dash to start and stop the vehicle. The STOP button is
disabled, unless the vehicle is in PARK. Once the motor is running, and the car is driving, the vehicle
cannot be stopped with the button. The vehicle cannot be placed into PARK while it is rolling. The
parking pawl will not engage.
This means that Hastings’ car would be sent down the road into a flaming heap, and there would be
nothing the driver could do. He could not even open the doors, because they are locked to prevent them
from opening while the vehicle is moving. His only choice would have been to roll down the windows or
open the sunroof and to jump out onto the street, which was flashing by at over 100 miles an hour. Not
much choice but to hope the air bags and seat belt would save his life. By the way, those devices are only
effective in collisisons of around 30 miles an hour.
Whistleblower Says Spy Agency Targeting Top American Leaders
NSA whistleblower Russel Tice – a key source in the 2005 New York Times report that blew the
lid off the Bush administration’s use of warrantless wiretapping – told Peter B. Collins on
Boiling Frogs Post (the website of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds): Here is what he reported.
They went after–and I know this because I had my hands literally on the paperwork for
these sort of things–they went after high-ranking military officers; they went after
members of Congress, both Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees
and on the armed services committees and some of the–and judicial. But they went after
other ones, too. They went after lawyers and law firms. All kinds of–heaps of lawyers and law
firms. They went after judges. One of the judges is now sitting on the Supreme Court that I
had his wiretap information in my hand. Two are former FISA court judges.
They went after State Department officials. They went after people in the executive service
that were part of the White House–their own people. They went after antiwar groups. They
went after U.S. international–U.S. companies that that do international business, you know,
business around the world. They went after U.S. banking firms and financial firms that do
international business. They went after NGOs that–like the Red Cross, people like that that go
overseas and do humanitarian work. They went after a few antiwar civil rights groups. So, you
know, don’t tell me that there’s no abuse, because I’ve had this stuff in my hand and looked at it.
And in some cases, I literally was involved in the technology that was going after this stuff. And
you know, when I said to [former MSNBC show host Keith] Olbermann, I said, my particular
thing is high tech and you know, what’s going on is the other thing, which is the dragnet. The
dragnet is what Mark Klein is talking about, the terrestrial dragnet. Well my specialty is outer
space. I deal with satellites, and everything that goes in and out of space. I did my spying via
space. So that’s how I found out about this.
Collins asks this question: Now Russ, the targeting of the people that you just mentioned, top
military leaders, members of Congress, intelligence community leaders and the–oh, I’m sorry, it
was intelligence committees, let me correct that–not intelligence community, and then executive
branch appointees. This creates the basis, and the potential for massive blackmail.
Tice: Absolutely! And remember we talked about that before, that I was worried that the
intelligence community now has sway over what is going on. Now here’s the big one. I haven’t
given you any names. This was is summer of 2004. One of the papers that I held in my hand was
to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with, with a 40-something-year-old wannabe senator
from Illinois. You wouldn’t happen to know where that guy lives right now, would you? It’s a
big white house in Washington, DC. That’s who they went after. And that’s the president of the
United States now.
Other whistleblowers say the same thing. When the former head of the NSA’s digital spying
program – William Binney – disclosed the fact that the U.S. was spying on everyone in the U.S.
and storing the data forever, and that the U.S. was quickly becoming a totalitarian state, the Feds
tried to scare him into shutting up:
[Numerous] FBI officers held a gun to Binney’s head as he stepped naked from the shower. He
watched with his wife and youngest son as the FBI ransacked their home. Later Binney was
separated from the rest of his family, and FBI officials pressured him to implicate one of the
other complainants in criminal activity. During the raid, Binney attempted to report to FBI
officials the crimes he had witnessed at NSA, in particular the NSA’s violation of the
constitutional rights of all Americans. However, the FBI wasn’t interested in these disclosures.
Instead, FBI officials seized Binney’s private computer, which to this day has not been returned
despite the fact that he has not been charged with a crime.
Other NSA whistleblowers have also been subjected to armed raids and criminal prosecution.
After high-level CIA officer John Kiriakou blew the whistle on illegal CIA torture, the
government prosecuted him for espionage. Even the head of the CIA was targeted with extraconstitutional spying and driven out of office. Indeed, Binney makes it very clear that the
government will use information gained from its all-pervasive spying program to frame anyone it
doesn’t like.
(More examples here.)
Retired high-level CIA analyst Ray McGovern – the top CIA briefer to numerous presidents –
said this a few weeks ago on a radio program:
Which leads to the question, why would [Obama] do all these things? Why would he be afraid
for example, to take the drones away from the CIA? Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s
afraid. Number one, he’s afraid of what happened to Martin Luther King Jr. And I know from a
good friend who was there when it happened, that at a small dinner with progressive supporters –
after these progressive supporters were banging on Obama before the election, “Why don’t you
do the things we thought you stood for?” Obama turned sharply and said, “Don’t you remember
what happened to Martin Luther King Jr.?” That’s a quote, and that’s a very revealing quote.
McGovern also said:
In a speech on March 21, second-term Obama gave us a big clue regarding his concept of
leadership – one that is marked primarily by political risk-avoidance and a penchant for “leading
from behind”: “Speaking as a politician, I can promise you this: political leaders will not take
risks if the people do not demand that they do. You must create the change that you want to see.”
John Kennedy was willing to take huge risks in reaching out to the USSR and ending the war in
Vietnam. That willingness to take risks may have gotten him assassinated, as James Douglass
argues in his masterful JFK and the Unspeakable.
Martin Luther King, Jr., also took great risks and met the same end. There is more than just
surmise that this weighs heavily on Barack Obama’s mind. Last year, pressed by progressive
donors at a dinner party to act more like the progressive they thought he was, Obama
responded sharply, “Don’t you remember what happened to Dr. King?”
We’re agnostic about McGovern’s theory. We don’t know whether Obama is a total corrupt sellout … or a chicken. We don’t think it matters … as the effect is the same.
INCIDENTAL ARTICLE
Posted on June 16, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog
Whistleblower Claims Validated … and Then Some
The government is attacking whistleblower Edward Snowden by claiming that he was lying
about the scope of the NSA’s spying on Americans.
However, CNET reports today:
The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not
need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to
members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply
based on an analyst deciding that.”
If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other
legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an
attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.
Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA’s formidable eavesdropping
apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted
federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.
Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text
messages, and instant messages, Nadler’s disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also
access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking
approval.
The disclosure appears to confirm some of the allegations made by Edward Snowden, a former
NSA infrastructure analyst who leaked classified documents to the Guardian. Snowden said in a
video interview that, while not all NSA analysts had this ability, he could from Hawaii “wiretap
anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president.”
***
Earlier reports have indicated that the NSA has the ability to record nearly all domestic and
international phone calls — in case an analyst needed to access the recordings in the future. A
Wired magazine article last year disclosed that the NSA has established “listening posts” that
allow the agency to collect and sift through billions of phone calls through a massive new data
center in Utah, “whether they originate within the country or overseas.” That includes not just
metadata, but also the contents of the communications.
***
A requirement of the 2008 law is that the NSA “may not intentionally target any person known
at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States.” A possible interpretation of that
language, some legal experts said, is that the agency may vacuum up everything it can
domestically — on the theory that indiscriminate data acquisition was not intended to “target” a
specific American citizen.
***
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the head of the Senate Intelligence committee, separately
acknowledged this week that the agency’s analysts have the ability to access the “content of a
call.”
Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell indicated during a House Intelligence
hearing in 2007 that the NSA’s surveillance process involves “billions” of bulk communications
being intercepted, analyzed, and incorporated into a database.
***
Former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente told CNN last month that, in national security
investigations, the bureau can access records of a previously made telephone call. “All of that
stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not,” he said. Clemente
added in an appearance the next day that, thanks to the “intelligence community” — an apparent
reference to the NSA — “there’s a way to look at digital communications in the past.”
Remember that Snowden also revealed that the NSA is tapping into the servers of 9 big internet
companies. Two government officials have admitted that as many as 50 American companies are
now feeding the NSA with real-time user data. And we’ve documented that the NSA gives
information gained through spying to large corporations.
Bloomberg reports:
Thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely with
U.S. national security agencies, providing sensitive information and in return receiving
benefits that include access to classified intelligence, four people familiar with the process
said. [We documented Tuesday that the government is illegally spying on all Americans ... and
then giving the info to giant corporations.]
These programs, whose participants are known as trusted partners, extend far beyond what was
revealed by Edward Snowden . Makers of hardware and software, banks, Internet security
providers, satellite telecommunications companies and many other companies also
participate in the government programs. In some cases, the information gathered may be used
not just to defend the nation but to help infiltrate computers of its adversaries.
Along with the NSA, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation
and branches of the U.S. military have agreements with such companies to gather data that
might seem innocuous but could be highly useful in the hands of U.S. intelligence or cyber
warfare units, according to the people, who have either worked for the government or are in
companies that have these accords.
***
Microsoft and other software or Internet security companies have been aware that this type of
early alert allowed the U.S. to exploit vulnerabilities in software sold to foreign governments,
according to two U.S. officials. Microsoft doesn’t ask and can’t be told how the government uses
such tip-offs, said the officials, who asked not to be identified because the matter is confidential.
***
Some U.S. telecommunications companies willingly provide intelligence agencies with access to
facilities and data offshore that would require a judge’s order if it were done in the U.S.…
***
Most of the arrangements are so sensitive that only a handful of people in a company know
of them, and they are sometimes brokered directly between chief executive officers and the
heads of the U.S.’s major spy agencies, the people familiar with those programs said.
Michael Hayden, who formerly directed the National Security Agency and the CIA, described
the attention paid to important company partners: “If I were the director and had a relationship
with a company who was doing things that were not just directed by law but were also valuable
to the defense of the Republic, I would go out of my way to thank them and give them a sense
as to why this is necessary and useful.”
***
Intel’s McAfee unit, which makes Internet security software, regularly cooperates with the NSA,
FBI and the CIA, for example ….
***
In exchange, leaders of companies are showered with attention and information by the
agencies to help maintain the relationship, the person said.
***
Following an attack on his company by Chinese hackers in 2010, Sergey Brin, Google’s cofounder, was provided with highly sensitive government intelligence linking the attack to a
specific unit of the People’s Liberation Army, China’s military, according to one of the people,
who is familiar with the government’s investigation. Brin was given a temporary classified
clearance to sit in on the briefing, the person said.
According to information provided by Snowden, Google, owner of the world’s most popular
search engine, had at that point been a Prism participant for more than a year.
***
The information provided by Snowden also exposed a secret NSA program known as Blarney.
As the program was described in the Washington Post (WPO), the agency gathers metadata on
computers and devices that are used to send e-mails or browse the Internet through principal data
routes, known as a backbone.
That metadata includes which version of the operating system, browser and Java software are
being used on millions of devices around the world, information that U.S. spy agencies could
use to infiltrate those computers or phones and spy on their users.
“It’s highly offensive information,” said Glenn Chisholm, the former chief information officer
for Telstra Corp (TLS)., one of Australia’s largest telecommunications companies, contrasting it
to defensive information used to protect computers rather than infiltrate them.
According to Snowden’s information, Blarney’s purpose is “to gain access and exploit foreign
intelligence,” the Post said.
***
Lawmakers who oversee U.S. intelligence agencies may not understand the significance of
some of the metadata being collected, said Jacob Olcott, a former cybersecurity assistant for
Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the Democratic chairman of the Senate
Commerce Committee.
“That’s what makes this issue of oversight so challenging,” said Olcott, now a principal at Good
Harbor Security Risk Management in Washington. “You have a situation where the
technology and technical policy is far outpacing the background and expertise of most
elected members of Congress or their staffs.”
While companies are offered powerful inducements to cooperate with U.S. intelligence,
many executives are motivated by patriotism or a sense they are defending national security, the
people familiar with the trusted partner programs said.
Indeed, former top NSA executives Thomas Drake and William Binney, Congresswoman
Loretta Sanchez – a member of the Committee on Homeland Security and the Armed Services
Committee’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities – and others say that
Snowden’s revelations are only “the tip of the iceberg”.
AP reports:
Interviews with more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and
outside experts show that, while Prism has attracted the recent attention, the program actually is
a relatively small part of a much more expansive and intrusive eavesdropping effort.
Americans who disapprove of the government reading their emails have more to worry about
from a different and larger NSA effort that snatches data as it passes through the fiber
optic cables that make up the Internet’s backbone. That program … copies Internet traffic as
it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis.
***
Deep in the oceans, hundreds of cables carry much of the world’s phone and Internet traffic.
Since at least the early 1970s, the NSA has been tapping foreign cables. It doesn’t need
permission. That’s its job.
But Internet data doesn’t care about borders. Send an email from Pakistan to Afghanistan and it
might pass through a mail server in the United States, the same computer that handles messages
to and from Americans. The NSA is prohibited from spying on Americans or anyone inside the
United States. That’s the FBI’s job and it requires a warrant.
Despite that prohibition, shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush
secretly authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the United
States, knowing it would give the government unprecedented, warrantless access to Americans’
private conversations.
Tapping into those cables allows the NSA access to monitor emails, telephone calls, video
chats, websites, bank transactions and more. It takes powerful computers to decrypt, store and
analyze all this information, but the information is all there, zipping by at the speed of light.
“You have to assume EVERYTHING is being collected,” said Bruce Schneier, who has been
studying and writing about cryptography and computer security for two decades.
***
The New York Times disclosed the existence of this effort in 2005. In 2006, former AT&T
technician Mark Klein revealed that the company had allowed the NSA to install a computer at
its San Francisco switching center, a spot where fiber optic cables enter the U.S.
***
Americans’ personal emails can live in government computers, but analysts can’t access, read or
listen to them unless the emails become relevant to a national security investigation.
The government doesn’t automatically delete the data, officials said, because an email or phone
conversation that seems innocuous today might be significant a year from now.
***
Two decades from now, the government could have a trove of American emails and phone
records it can tap to investigative whatever Congress declares a threat to national security.
***
In slide made public by the newspapers, NSA analysts were encouraged to use data coming from
both Prism and from the fiber-optic cables.
Prism, as its name suggests, helps narrow and focus the stream. If eavesdroppers spot a
suspicious email among the torrent of data pouring into the United States, analysts can use
information from Internet companies to pinpoint the user.
With Prism, the government gets a user’s entire email inbox. Every email, including contacts
with American citizens, becomes government property.
Once the NSA has an inbox, it can search its huge archives for information about everyone with
whom the target communicated. All those people can be investigated, too.
That’s one example of how emails belonging to Americans can become swept up in the hunt.
In that way, Prism helps justify specific, potentially personal searches. But it’s the broader
operation on the Internet fiber optics cables that actually captures the data, experts agree.
“I’m much more frightened and concerned about real-time monitoring on the Internet backbone,”
said Wolf Ruzicka, CEO of EastBanc Technologies, a Washington software company. “I cannot
think of anything, outside of a face-to-face conversation, that they could not have access
to.”
***
Schneier, the author and security expert, said it doesn’t really matter how Prism works,
technically. Just assume the government collects everything, he said.
He said it doesn’t matter what the government and the companies say, either …. “No one is
telling the truth.”
ADDITIONAL INFO INTERVIEW WITH SNOWDEN
Tech Fixes to Illegal Spying
NSA spying whistleblower Edward Snowden says that NSA agents as well as private contractors
who work for the American security services can decide on their own to access any American’s
digital communications. Snowden said in a video interview that he could from Hawaii “wiretap
anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president.”
In a question and answer session today through the Guardian newspaper, Snowden said:
Question:
Anthony De Rosa
17 June 2013 2:18pm
1) Define in as much detail as you can what “direct access” means.
2) Can analysts listen to content of domestic calls without a warrant?
Answer:
1) More detail on how direct NSA’s accesses are is coming, but in general, the reality is this: if
an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can
enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone
handset id (IMEI), and so on – it’s all the same. The restrictions against this are policy based,
not technically based, and can change at any time. Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete,
and easily fooled by fake justifications. For at least GCHQ [the British equivalent of the NSA],
the number of audited queries is only 5% of those performed.
Updated at 11.41am ET
11.40am ET
Anthony De Rosa
17 June 2013 2:18pm
1) Define in as much detail as you can what “direct access” means.
2) Can analysts listen to content of domestic calls without a warrant?
2) NSA likes to use “domestic” as a weasel word here for a number of reasons. The reality is that
due to the FISA Amendments Act and its section 702 authorities, Americans’ communications
are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a
warrant. They excuse this as “incidental” collection, but at the end of the day, someone at
NSA still has the content of your communications. Even in the event of “warranted” intercept,
it’s important to understand the intelligence community doesn’t always deal with what you
would consider a “real” warrant like a Police department would have to, the “warrant” is more of
a templated form they fill out and send to a reliable judge with a rubber stamp.
Glenn Greenwald follow up: When you say “someone at NSA still has the content of your
communications” – what do you mean? Do you mean they have a record of it, or the actual
content?
Both. If I target for example an email address, for example under FAA 702, and that email
address sent something to you, Joe America, the analyst gets it. All of it. IPs, raw data, content,
headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time – and can be extended
further with waivers rather than warrants.
CNET confirms:
The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not
need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to
members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply
based on an analyst deciding that.”
If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other
legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an
attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.
Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA’s formidable eavesdropping
apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted
federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.
Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text
messages, and instant messages, Nadler’s disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also
access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking
approval.
The disclosure appears to confirm some of the allegations made by Edward Snowden ….
Earlier reports have indicated that the NSA has the ability to record nearly all domestic and
international phone calls — in case an analyst needed to access the recordings in the future.
A Wired magazine article last year disclosed that the NSA has established “listening posts” that
allow the agency to collect and sift through billions of phone calls through a massive new data
center in Utah, “whether they originate within the country or overseas.” That includes not just
metadata, but also the contents of the communications.
***
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the head of the Senate Intelligence committee, separately
acknowledged this week that the agency’s analysts have the ability to access the “content of a
call.”
Yesterday, top NSA whistleblowers confirmed Snowden’s claims:
[USA Today]: Thomas Drake, you worked as a contractor for the NSA for about a decade before
you went on staff there. Were you surprised that a 29-year-old contractor based in Hawaii was
able to get access to the sort of information that he released?
Drake: It has nothing to do with being 29. It’s just that we are in the Internet age and this is the
digital age. So, so much of what we do both in private and in public goes across the Internet.
Whether it’s the public Internet or whether it’s the dark side of the Internet today, it’s all affected
the same in terms of technology. …
One of the critical roles in the systems is the system administrator. Someone has to maintain it.
Someone has to keep it running. Someone has to maintain the contracts.
Binney: Part of his job as the system administrator, he was to maintain the system. Keep the
databases running. Keep the communications working. Keep the programs that were
interrogating them operating. So that meant he was like a super-user. He could go on the network
or go into any file or any system and change it or add to it or whatever, just to make sure —
because he would be responsible to get it back up and running if, in fact, it failed.
So that meant he had access to go in and put anything. That’s why he said, I think, “I can even
target the president or a judge.” If he knew their phone numbers or attributes, he could insert
them into the target list which would be distributed worldwide. And then it would be collected,
yeah, that’s right. As a super-user, he could do that.
[USA Today]: As he said, he could tap the president’s phone?
Binney: As a super-user and manager of data in the data system, yes, they could go in and
change anything.
And the analysts’ decision to tap your communications can go backwards … a long way. For
example, NBC News reports:
NBC News has learned that under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, the government has been collecting
records on every phone call made in the U.S.
Former FBI counter-terrorism agent Tim Clemente told CNN:
There’s a way to look at digital communications in the past.
In other words, if an analyst wants to spy on you, he can pull up your communications since
9/11. (Remember, the private Internet Archive has been archiving web pages since the 1990s.
So the NSA has undoubtedly been doing the same thing with digital communications).
The high-level NSA executive who largely created the NSA’s electronic data-gathering system –
William Binney, a 32-year NSA veteran with the title of senior technical director, who headed
the agency’s global digital data gathering program (featured in a New York Times documentary,
and the source for much of what we know about NSA spying) – says that information gained
through spying will be used to frame Americans that the government – or presumably anyone
with the information – takes a dislike to:
Even if you’re not doing anything wrong you’re being watched and recorded. And the storage
capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude … to where
it’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply have
to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody – even by a wrong call. And then they can use
this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend
you’ve ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort to derive
suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.
Binney also says that there is a cheap and easy technological fix for the government’s massive
illegal spying program. Specifically, Binney says that he set up the NSA’s system so that all of
the information would automatically be encrypted, so that the government had to obtain a search
warrant based upon probably cause before a particular suspect’s communications could be
decrypted.
But the NSA now collects all data in an unencrypted form, so that no probable cause is needed to
view any citizen’s information. He says that it is actually cheaper and easier to store the data in
an encrypted format: so the government’s current system is being done for political – not
practical – purposes.
Binney’s statements have been confirmed by other top NSA whistleblowers.
Yesterday, these top NSA whistleblowers again explained that it is technically simple to keep
America safe … while protecting our Constitutional rights:
[USA Today]: Is there a way to collect this data that is consistent with the Fourth Amendment,
the constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure?
Binney: Two basic principles you have to use. … One is what I call the two-degree principle. If
you have a terrorist talking to somebody in the United States — that’s the first degree away from
the terrorist. And that could apply to any country in the world. And then the second degree
would be who that person in the United States talked to. So that becomes your zone of suspicion.
And the other one (principle) is you watch all the jihadi sites on the Web and who’s visiting
those jihadi sites, who has an interest in the philosophy being expressed there. And then you add
those to your zone of suspicion.
Everybody else is innocent — I mean, you know, of terrorism, anyway.
Wiebe: Until they’re somehow connected to this activity.
Binney: You pull in all the contents involving (that) zone of suspicion and you throw all the rest
of it away. You can keep the attributes of all the communicants in the other parts of the world,
the rest of the 7 billion people, right? And you can then encrypt it so that nobody can interrogate
that base randomly.
That’s the way of preventing this kind of random access by a contractor or by the FBI or any
other DHS (Department of Homeland Security) or any other department of government. They
couldn’t go in and find anybody. You couldn’t target your next-door neighbor. If you went in
with his attributes, they’re encrypted. … So unless they are in the zone of suspicion, you won’t
see any content on anybody and you won’t see any attributes in the clear. …
It’s all within our capabilities.
Drake: It’s been within our capabilities for well over 12 years.
Wiebe: Bill and I worked on a government contract for a contractor not too far from here. And
when we showed him the concept of how this privacy mechanism that Bill just described to you
— the two degrees, the encryption and hiding of identities of innocent people — he said,
“Nobody cares about that.” I said, “What do you mean?”
This man was in a position to know a lot of government people in the contracting and buying of
capabilities. He said. “Nobody cares about that.”
Drake: This (kind of surveillance) is all unnecessary. It is important to note that the very
best of American ingenuity and inventiveness, creativity, had solved the major challenge
problem the NSA faced: How do you make sense of vast amounts of data, provide the
information you need to protect the nation, while also protecting the fundamental rights
that are enshrined in the Constitution?
The government in secret decided — willfully and deliberately — that that was no longer
necessary after 9/11. So they said, you know what, hey, for the sake of security we are going to
draw that line way, way over. And if it means eroding the liberties and freedoms of Americans
and others, hey, so be it because that’s what’s most important. But this was done without the
knowledge of the American people.
Indeed, not only is gathering the communications of all Americans not necessary to protect us,
it’s actually counter-productive.
And yesterday, these top NSA whistleblowers explained to USA Today that an easy technical fix
could also keep contractors away from Americans’ confidential information that they’re not
entitled to view:
[USA Today]: Would it make a difference if contractors weren’t used?
Wiebe: I don’t think so. They are human beings. You know, look at what’s going on with the
IRS and the Tea Party. You know, there (are) human beings involved. We are all human beings
— contractors, NSA government employees. We are all human beings. We undergo clearance
checks, background investigations that are extensive and we are all colors, ages and religions. I
mean this is part of the American fabric.
Binney: But when it comes to these data, the massive data information collecting on U.S. citizens
and everything in the world they can, I guess the real problem comes with trust. That’s really the
issue. The government is asking for us to trust them.
It’s not just the trust that you have to have in the government. It’s the trust you have to have in
the government employees, (that) they won’t go in the database — they can see if their wife is
cheating with the neighbor or something like that. You have to have all the trust of all the
contractors who are parts of a contracting company who are looking at maybe other competitive
bids or other competitors outside their — in their same area of business. And they might want
to use that data for industrial intelligence gathering and use that against other companies
in other countries even. So they can even go into a base and do some industrial espionage.
So there is a lot of trust all around and the government, most importantly, the government has
no way to check anything that those people are doing.
[USA Today]: So Snowden’s ability to access information wasn’t an exception?
Binney: And they didn’t know he was doing (it). … That’s the point, right? …They should
be doing that automatically with code, so the instant when anyone goes into that base with
a query that they are not supposed to be doing, they should be flagged immediately and
denied access. And that could be done with code.
But the government is not doing that. So that’s the greatest threat in this whole affair.
US general to testify about Benghazi terror attacks, military
response
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/17/top-us-general-in-libya-region-totestify-about-fatal-benghazi-terror-attacks/?intcmp=obinsite#ixzz2XFgST7uE
For the second time since the Sept. 11, 2012 Benghazi attacks, the four-star general in charge of
U.S. military assets in the Africa region will testify before Congress about what happened that
night.
The hearing has been scheduled for June 26 at 9:00 a.m. ET and will be held by the House
Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
Although the hearing will be closed to the public, retired Gen. Carter Ham will be questioned
about his oversight of military assets in the region while dozens of Americans battled extremists
for nearly eight hours in Benghazi on Sept. 11 and 12 . No U.S. military assets other than an
unarmed drone were ever provided to assist in the fight.
At the time of the attack Ham was serving as Commander of AFRICOM and happened to be in
Washington D.C. for meetings. He spent much of the night in the National Military Command
Center, a basement office and war operations center in the Pentagon.
Ham's retirement was announced just weeks after the incident, sparking rumors that he was being
pushed aside after having expressed his desire for a more aggressive military response. It’s a
claim that Ham and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Martin Dempsey, have strongly
denied.
Ham previously provided closed-door testimony in March on the Benghazi attacks to the House
Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Lt. Col. Steve "Hoot" Gibson and RADM Brian Losey are also scheduled to testify next
Wednesday. Gibson is the Army lieutenant colonel who was in charge of a small group of
special operators that, according to Deputy Chief of Mission Greg Hicks, received "stand down"
orders after requesting to move from Tripoli to Benghazi on Sept. 12. RADM Brian Losey is the
former Special Operations Commander for Africa who is said to have administered those orders.
Losey was stationed at AFRICOM's headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany on the night of the
attack. In addition asking about his alleged “stand down” orders, lawmakers will likely ask why
his team of European-based special operators known as the CIF, or Commanders in Extremis
Force, was not available to go to Benghazi sooner. Though they deployed that night, the team
only made it as far as a staging base in Sigonella, Italy
The U.S.'s Insane Attempt to Build a Harbor with a Two Megaton Nuclear
Bomb
The nuclear bomb has been detonated over 2,000 times since the start of the Cold War, but it was
used on people only twice. This week marks 67 years since the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The combined death toll of the two cities reached between 150,000 and
250,000 within a few months, while the world was introduced to the specter of nuclear war,
which has since faded but will never disappear. Despite that, some scientists and politicians tried
to find something redemptive in the most powerful weapons ever built.
Its destructive force aside, the bomb represented the pinnacle of American scientific
development in the mid-20th century. And even as scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer seemed
rather horrified at what they’d unleashed, others became more consumed by the scientific
possibilities of the atomic age. The most famous proponent of nuclear was Edward Teller, the
father of the hydrogen bomb and one of the inspirations for Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.
Edward Teller
As the world’s superpowers raced towards mutually-assured destruction, Teller became more
enthusiastic about finding potential non-weapon uses for the phenomenal power of splitting or
fusing the atom. Teller liked nuclear energy; his final paper, in 2006, would detail how to build
an underground thorium reactor. But as the Cold War heated up, Teller became obsessed with
using actual atomic bombs for civil engineering. Thanks to that type of numbers-driven thinking
— if a bomb is as powerful as a million tons of TNT, why not use it to reshape the Panama
Canal? — as well as Teller’s incessant prodding, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)
created Project Chariot. The mission: to create a new port in northwestern Alaska using a series
of underwater nuclear explosions.
A well-meaning weapon
Project Chariot was born in 1958 out of the AEC’s cartoonishly-named Operation Plowshare,
whose mission, begun in 1957 at the University of California Radiation Laboratory in
Livermore, was to find peacetime uses for atomic bombs. I say cartoonish because Teller, who
was a driving force behind the project, actually did propose the use of a couple dozen A-bombs
as a giant shovel to widen the Panama Canal, amongst other similarly giant projects. But the
Plowshare name has been attributed to Isaiah 2:3-5, a passage focused on repurposing the
weapons of war for the tools of peace:
They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore.
To say that Plowshare was massive in scope would be a comical understatement.
“In considering possible tasks, the imagination is free to explore projects hundreds or thousands
of times larger than have ever been undertaken,” Dr. Gerald Johnson, who was co-director of
Plowshare with Dr. Harold Brown, told Popular Science in 1958. The implication was simple:
Now that mankind could blow things up orders of magnitude more efficiently than it could
before, what piddling public works project could stand it its way?
Plowshare’s vision was as enormous as its tools. One proposal, called Project Carryall, would
have used nuclear bombs to cut a new 11,000 foot long railway pass through the Bristol
Mountains in California. According to a 1964 feasibility study, Carryall would have required 22
bombs ranging between 20 and 200 kilotons to make the deepest parts of the pass, which would
have measured about 350 feet deep. Parts of the pass ranging around 100 feet deep would have
been dug with conventional means for “technological and economic reasons.”
Another Plowshare project, Project Gnome, was even more ambitious. While it was partly meant
to be a study of how underground nuclear explosions interacted with the rock around them, it
was also an attempt to sort out how electrical energy could be produced from underground
detonations (pdf). Gnome was first announced in 1958 during a U.S.-Soviet moratorium on
nuclear testing. But after the Soviets broke the self-imposed ban in late 1961 with the Tsar
Bomba, the most powerful weapon in history, the U.S. went ahead with Gnome, burying a 3.1
kiloton device over 1,100 feet deep in a massive salt deposit below New Mexico in what was the
first “peaceful nuclear explosion” (PNE) carried out by the Plowshare program.
According to a Defense Nuclear Agency report concerned with health problems in soldiers
exposed to radiation, Gnome was tasked with studying “the possibility of converting the heat
produced by a nuclear explosion into steam for the production of electric power,” which would
be caused by the immense heat of a massive molten salt slurry, as well as exploring “the
feasibility of recovering radioisotopes for scientific and industrial applications.” In essence,
Gnome was an attempt at trapping a nuclear explosion underground in order to either siphon off
the heat it created (in the form of steam or molten salt) to produce power, or recover expensive
and hard to produce isotopes trapped within. The only problem, as the DNA report notes, was it
wasn’t exactly easy to seal off a nuclear explosion buried in fragile rock:
Although it had been planned as a contained explosion, GNOME vented to the atmosphere. A
cloud of steam started to appear at the top of the shaft two to three minutes after the detonation.
Gray smoke and steam, with associated radioactivity, emanated from the shaft opening about
seven minutes after the detonation. Radioactive materials vented to the atmosphere about 340
meters southwest of ground zero.
Project Sedan
Still, despite Gnome’s release of radioactive steam just 25 miles southeast of Carlsbad, New
Mexico, the door had been opened for so-called peaceful nuclear explosions. Project Sedan,
whose crater is shown above, was the second Plowshare experiment to be carried out. It basically
was a test to see how big of a hole a nuclear bomb could make. It proved to be a really big hole.
The 104-kiloton device moved 12 million tons of earth, producing the largest man-made crater in
the country, which measured 1,280 feet wide and 320 feet deep. Shot in Nevada, Sedan spewed
fallout over Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, and South Dakota, and contaminated more Americans than
any other nuclear test.
Plowshare went on to feature a total of 27 blasts, mostly at the Department of Energy’s Nevada
Test Site. But the final Plowshare test, which was likely the most audacious one to be carried out,
was fired in May 1973 at Rifle, Colorado. Project Rio Blanco was an attempt to release 300
trillion cubic feet of natural gas under the Rocky Mountains by blasting apart caverns more than
a mile deep with a trio of 33-kiloton bombs. It was the final of three attempts by Plowshare
researchers to create what basically amounted to nuclear fracking, and, as noted by a 1973 Time
article, came at a time when Plowshare was under increasing attack by, well, nearly everyone.
The test didn’t work, and thanks to nuclear contamination and damage from gas flares, the Rio
Blanco test area is still a huge mess.
Needless to say, Project Plowshare created environmental disasters everywhere it traveled during
its 12 year run of active testing. What’s rather absurd, however, is that despite a rather terrible
track record — both environmentally as well as in terms of meeting stated goals — Plowshare
wasn’t shuttered until 1977, two decades after it was conceived, amidst public uproar.
“Project Gnome vented radioactive steam over the very press gallery that was called to confirm
its safety,” writes Benjamin Sovacool in his book Contesting the Future of Nuclear Power. “The
next blast, a 104-kiloton detonation at Yucca Flat, Nevada, displaced 12 million tons of soil and
resulted in a radioactive dust cloud that rose 12,000 feet and plumed toward the Mississippi
River. Other consequences – blighted land, relocated communities, tritium-contaminated water,
radioactivity, and fallout from debris being hurled high into the atmosphere – were ignored and
downplayed until the program was terminated in 1977, due in large part to public opposition.”
But Plowshare’s skeptics didn’t simply emerge in the months before Rio Blanco, or even
Gnome. Plowshare had been a source of controversy since long before the dissolution of the
nuclear testing moratorium made its numerous live tests possible.
Chariot of really big fire
Plowshare was first conceived by the AEC as a chance to rehabilitate the image of nuclear
explosives following years of above-ground weapons testing by both the U.S. and Soviet Russia.
It was born out of the belief among AEC scientists that nuclear power could indeed be harnessed
for constructive purposes. And yet, even when the project was formally inaugurated, in June 19,
1957, scientists had no clear initial applications in mind.
That changed with the launch of Sputnik by the USSR in October 1957. In what stands as the
preeminent example of the high-stakes one-upmanship that fueled the Cold War, Sputnik’s
launch put a ton of pressure on U.S. researchers to come up with a similar marquee scientific
achievement. As historian Norman Chance explains, scientists at the Lawrence Radiation
Laboratory suggested that using nuclear bombs as huge shovels would offer the “highest
probability of early beneficial success” in the early stages of Plowshare. On a tight time frame, it
was a lot easier to simply blast a giant hole in the ground than to build a massive underground
water-filled chamber that could contain continual steam-generating nuclear blasts — which
indeed was another early proposal.
Teller (white shirt) headed to the Chariot site
Teller, of course, supported the nuclear shovel idea wholeheartedly, and suggested Cape
Thompson, in the Ogotoruk Valley way up in Northwest Alaska, as the perfect location for a test.
In light of the Plowshare programs that would eventually be carried out, Teller’s early proposal
was absolutely over the top: a 2.4 megaton device would be buried off the coast and detonated to
instantly create a new deep-water harbor that could be used to tap into northern Alaska’s rich
coal, oil, and mineral resources. That proposal became known as Project Chariot.
Just 30 miles away from the proposed Chariot site sits Point Hope, an Inuit fishing town whose
population numbered around 300 in the late 50s. Alaska, which didn’t become a state until
January 1959, was still considered to be little more than a barren territory thousands of miles
away from Washington. So when Chariot was first proposed, along with the AEC’s request for a
test area larger than Rhode Island, the fact that Cape Thompson was mere miles from an Inuit
town that had hosted residents for nearly 2,200 years did not register much concern. In 1959, the
AEC received approval from the Bureau of Land Management to reserve 1,024,000 acres for
testing, and the AEC soon began building facilities to house up to 90 working researchers.
Surprisingly, according to a report by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a number of Alaskans
were all for the AEC’s work in the territory. In 1960, George Sundberg, the editor of the
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, wrote “We think the holding of a huge nuclear blast in Alaska
would be a fitting overture to the new era which is opening for our state.” For a budding Alaska
looking to secure federal investment and its statehood, a project like Chariot seemed like the
perfect chance to open its doors to power players in American science.
Notice the awe with which he regards the potential of civil nuclear explosives, which, in his
defense, was hardly limited to himself. How were otherwise intelligent people able to so easily
look past the incredible dangers of fallout? Like the Plowshare director in that 1958 Popular
Science article, some researchers were still pushing the idea that a “clean” bomb – as in, one with
little to no fallout – was technically possible. This is how the magazine discusses the idea,
somehow with a straight face:
Using the cleanest available type of bomb would be desirable to reduce the usually heavy fallout
of surface or near-surface blasts. The major part of any fallout will descend, downwind, within
200 miles of the site.
‘Hottest’ after the detonation, radioactively, will be the harbor-forming crater itself. (Even a 100percent-clean bomb would induce a little radioactivity, for a time, in nearby earth or rock.) But
the crater will be immediately inundated, and partly submerged, by the sea. Tides, washing in
and out, will speed the gradual dying-down of the radioactivity by carrying some away. Within
several months at most, it should be safe to enter and use the harbor.
In short, the proposed blast would flood the ocean with some radioactivity and launch a
radioactive cloud that would spread only 200 miles. Teller, speaking in Fairbanks, sold Alaskans
on Chariot by saying that nuclear explosions were so easily controlled that the Chariot team
could “dig a harbor in the shape of a polar bear, if desired.” And as insane as that sounds, note
that Chariot came two decades before Three Mile Island. The true danger of radiation was only
just becoming known to the general public.
From Popular Science in 1958
But that’s not to say that the facts about radiation weren’t known at all. It was simply that the
American people, it was determined, couldn’t handle them. Peter Libassi, the chairman of the
Interagency Task Force on the Health Effects of Ionizing Radiation, explained that “[There was]
a general atmosphere and attitude that the American people could not be trusted with the
uncertainities, and therefore the information was withheld from them. I think there was concern
that the American people, given the facts, would not make the right risk-benefit judgments.”
Citizens at Point Hope — like civilians and soldiers throughout the Cold War era — weren’t
educated fully in the dangers, because it could mean a roadblock to the development of
“peaceful” nuclear power.
So while it was clear that detonating a 2.4 megaton device just 30 miles from Point Hope (and, as
later plans suggested, perhaps three more bombs to create a channel into the harbor) would likely
blanket the community in fallout, the AEC told Point Hope residents that everything would be
just fine. It wasn’t until 1960, a full two years after Chariot was conceived and Teller had begun
building support around the state, that AEC officials first paid a visit to Point Hope.
A young geographer named Don Charles Foote, who was attached to the Environmental Studies
Program of the AEC, wrote a follow-up report to the officials’ visit that shows the AEC was
feeding the town a pack of lies:
To the detriment of the Commission and Project Chariot, the officials who spoke in March, 1960,
made several statements which could not be substantiated in fact. Among other things the Point
Hope people were told that the fish in and around the Pacific Proving Grounds were not made
radioactive by nuclear weapons tests and [there would not be]… any danger to anyone if the fish
were utilized; that the effects of nuclear weapons testing never injured any people, anywhere;
that once the severely exposed Japanese people recovered from radiation sickness…there were
no side effects; that the residents of Point Hope would not feel any seismic shock at all from
Project Chariot; and that copies of the Environmental Program studies would be made
immediately available to the Point Hope council upon the return of the AEC officials to
California.
One of the Chariot plans
It’s interesting that the officials took such a definitive stance that Chariot wouldn’t cause
environmental damage when the predicted results of the explosion were nothing more than
guesses. It was unclear if the Alaskan tundra would react in the same way to an underground
blast as test sites in Nevada and the Pacific, and as an excellent Harper’s article from 1962
points out, the AEC’s prediction that only five percent of the bomb’s radioactive yield would
have ended up as fallout could have also been one percent or 25 percent, according to other
experts versed in available data. How dirty such an explosion would be was simply unknown,
despite the AEC’s assertion.
Perhaps because the AEC was so adamant that there would be zero environmental damages,
Point Hope residents were immediately skeptical of Chariot. In 1961, as the project seemed to be
gaining steam, the Point Hope Village Council wrote a scathing letter to President Kennedy
stating that Chariot was too close to the town and the fishing grounds the town subsisted on.
From a section of the letter quoted in Harper’s:
We read about “the cumulative and retained isotope burden in man that must be considered.” We
also know about strontium 90, how it might harm people if too much of it get in our body. We
have seen the Summary Reports of 1960, National Academy of Sciences on “The Biological
Effects of Atomic Radiation.” We are deeply concerned about the health of our people now and
for the future that is coming.
In fact, the Inuit were being contaminated by bomb radiation well before any test had come
anywhere near their homes. The report the Point Hope council refers to, amongst a wealth of
other work, showed that Eskimos who subsisted on hunting caribou in the vast regions
encompassed by Project Chariot had already showed high levels of harmful radionuclides in their
bodies. By some reports, their results seemed to “to be higher in Sr 90 (Strontium 90) content
than any other group in the world.”
The blame lay with worldwide nuclear testing, decades of which caused tons of radioactive dust
to be launched into the atmosphere. That radioactive dust was eventually absorbed in vast
quantities by the lichen (which survive in harsh conditions by absorbing airborne minerals) that
cover the Alaskan tundra. Caribou fed on the lichen, and the Inuit fed on the caribou, which
meant the citizens of Point Hope were being poisoned by nuclear testing even before Chariot had
been proposed.
Because of those studies, some scientists joined Point Hope residents and a small subset of
conservationists in opposing the project. A pair of scientists working at the AEC station in Cape
Thompson were relieved of their duties, while others were allegedly blacklisted from working
elsewhere. But eventually, mounting pressure from those groups, as well as excellent reportage
like that from Paul Brooks and Joseph Foote at Harper’s, changed the political calculus. Chariot
became too costly a project because of the growing uproar, especially when sites in Nevada were
more than feasible test sites. Chariot, or at least the explosion part, was shelved.
Although the AEC decided not to detonate thermonuclear bombs at Cape Thompson, the agency
still had a million acres of free land to play with. So it decided to try to solve a riddle it had
previously posed to the U.S. Geological Survey: Would underground nuclear explosions poison
drinking water? The AEC, in all its brilliance, conducted its tests by throwing imported
radioactive material on the ground, watering it to simulate rainfall, and testing the runoff.
Archival footage of Point Hope residents from 1941. Via Alaska’s Digital Archive
I’ll bet you can guess the outcome of that. An investigation in the early ’90s, found that the
residents of Point Hope had suffered from extremely high rates of cancer in the previous 30 years
thanks to radioactive material poisoning their food and water supply.
“We, the Inupiat of Point Hope, have the ability to face the arrogant policies of the former
Atomic Energy Commission and its Project Chariot,” read an October 1992 press release from
the village. “We will not be willing victims for the genocidal and inhuman policies of the
Nuclear Energy Commission.” But while the Point Hope residents were indeed vocal and
unwilling victims, that didn’t stop the AEC from conducting its “peaceful” work. Forty years
later, the residents of Point Hope are still making noise because their traditions are being
threatened by — you guessed it — climate change.
The Legacy of Deceit
“Today we do not covet the boundless expanse of tundra where the caribou range at will, as did
once the buffalo on the great plains,” Brooks and Foote of Harper’s wrote in their excellent
summation of Point Hope. “The Alaskan Eskimos offer no threat to our way of life; how far must
we inevitably be a threat to theirs?”
Their report was published before Chariot was officially canceled, but I doubt their refrain would
have changed. Chariot stands as a testament to the cold calculus that fueled all facets of the Cold
War nuclear age, even when nuclear scientists were shooting for peaceful uses for bombs. While
Oppenheimer and Einstein struggled with the reality of unleashing a power that’s indescribable
in its might, Teller and the folks at the AEC were blinded, shunning all human considerations in
pursuit of an attempt at taming that power.
It’s possible to try to understand the giddy excitement of riding the cutting edge of physics and
technology; just glancing at the buoyant prose in Popular Science at the time shows just how
infectious the massive possibilites swirling around nonviolent megatons could be. And just
imagine if one really could build a new railway through the mountains of California by
unleashing a series of massive, clean bombs: the potential lives, money, and time saved by
avoiding dangerous construction is incalculable. “If your mountain is not in the right place,” Dr.
Teller said in Anchorage, “just drop us a card.” He was only partly kidding.
But the reality never matched the dream. A decade or more of testing increasingly-massive
bombs had poisoned the air and earth, and no matter how good the yields, any percentage of
radioactive fallout released from bombs that large would be devastating to the local environment.
It’s a testament to the brutish single-mindedness of the AEC that it could tell such blatant lies in
its supposed pursuit of utility. (There was no risk to Point Hope from 30 miles away? Give me a
break.)
Despite the cancellation of Project Chariot, there were still 27 live tests that were carried out by
the AEC in its obsessive bid to keep playing with its toys. Plowshare stands as a shocking
example of institutional addiction; one imagines a drunken artist saying he needs just one more
glass to help him make his big breakthrough, even while lying facedown in a gutter oblivious to
the filth around him. In the effort to make good on nuclear energy’s promise, in the wake of its
unrivaled destruction over Japan, the U.S. fiendishly tailored its facts to deceive the very people
it was entrusted to protect.
The end result, of course, were a series of endless half-truths and outright lies delivered to
continue work that had long been proved to be far more costly than it was worth. The moral of
that folly is equally clear: When offered the ability to chase after force with seemingly unlimited
potential, there is no end to the lengths some will go to justify continuing that pursuit
The White House Is Convening an Emergency Meeting to Prepare
for the Arctic Death Spiral
Some of the most terrifying conversations on the planet probably take place in closed-door
meetings at the White House: Hush-hush chats about drone strikes on American soil, or about
how yeah, Assad definitely has a crap-ton of chemical weapons. Nobody really wants to know
how close we've actually come to bombing Iran.
But there hasn't been a whole lot of talk about one of the planet's biggest masses of ice melting
away. Yet, anyways. See, next week, the nation's top climatologists, NASA scientists, and Arctic
ice experts are heading to the White House for an "emergency policy meeting" to tell Obama's
team all about how the Arctic might melt. Two years from now. As far as topics that warrant an
urgent meeting at the White House go, the potentially unhaltable Arctic death spiral should
probably rank pretty high up there.
The Guardian reports that the meeting will include "NASA's acting chief scientist, Gale Allen,
the director of the US National Science Foundation, Cora Marett, as well as representatives from
the US Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon."
The agenda will be topped by the fact that the Arctic may be completely ice-free in just a few
hundred days. Scientists have referred to this phenomenon, in which Arctic ice is melting much
faster than climate models previously predicted, as "the Arctic Death Spiral." Scientists, mind
you, like Dr. Walter Serreze, not sensationalism-loving journalists like me.
The Vancouver Sun helpfully supplies a list of other phrases scientists have used to describe the
vanishing Arctic: "unprecedented","amazing", "extreme", "hard to exaggerate", "incredibly
fast", and "heading for oblivion".
One of the scientists attending the meeting is the marine scientist Dr. Carlos Duarte. The
Australian researcher notably wrote in the IPCC's last major international climate report
that "The Arctic situation is snowballing: dangerous changes in the Arctic derived from
accumulated anthropogenic green house gases lead to more activities conducive to further
greenhouse gas emissions. This situation has the momentum of a runaway train."
And the train doesn't stop until there's no ice left in the Arctic during the summer. Remember,
the Arctic ice sheds and accumulates ice cyclically—it's still going to be cold and frozen up
north for the foreseeable future. But for the first time in millions of years, it might melt in
August.
So what might Obama's team do about it? Not much, on the mitigation end, anyways. This ship
has sailed; the Arctic is as good as thawed—there's little we can do to pervent iceless North Pole
summers now. But we could, if we conjured the political will, adapt to the fallout—and maybe
stop our march towards an iceless Arctic, period.
The scientists will emphasize the incipient weather extremes, rising levels, and the resultant
dangers to human populations, like food shortages and exposure to violent storms. The Pentagon,
meanwhile, is interested in the destabilizing nature of this change, as well as a new geopolitical
hot spot that's going to be highly trafficked by Russia, Canada, Scandinavian nations and China.
But the Department of Homeland Security is also interested in the positives:
"Melting sea ice in the Arctic may lead to new opportunities for shipping, tourism, and resource
exploration, but the increase in human activity may require a significant increase in operational
capabilities in the region in order to safeguard lawful trade and travel and to prevent exploitation
of new routes for smuggling and trafficking."
The scientists will probably cringe at the word "opportunities," but the DoD has a point: a whole
new frontier is opening up, and we're going to have to get used to it. The Arctic is likely going to
be dead, at least part-time—the key now is going to be getting brakes installed on that runaway
train before it takes out everything else, too.
Obama to unveil new climate regulations, as adviser pushes 'war on
coal'
President Obama is aiming to sidestep Congress as part of his plan to combat climate change, in
what one adviser openly hoped would be the start of a "war on coal."
Critics of the president's energy policies have long accused the administration of prosecuting a
so-called "war" on fossil fuel industries. Obama, all along, has claimed he's in favor of an all-ofthe-above energy strategy.
His speech at Georgetown University on Tuesday, though, will push government regulations
toward cracking down further on fossil fuels. Among the proposals, Obama is expected to
announce the first-ever federal regulations on emissions from existing power plants.
Ahead of the speech, White House climate adviser Daniel P. Schrag reportedly told The New
York Times that "action" is needed, particularly on coal.
"The one thing the president really needs to do now is to begin the process of shutting down the
conventional coal plants. Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they're having a war on
coal. On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what's needed," he said. Schrag is a geochemist
and the head of Harvard University's Center for the Environment. He also sits on a White House
advisory panel.
Republican lawmakers bristled at that remark. "It really encapsulates the attitude this
administration holds in regard to states like mine," Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell,
who represents coal-heavy Kentucky, said Tuesday.
Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican from West Virginia, said the proposal "could deliver
an unrecoverable blow to coal-rich states" like hers.
The industry, as well, issued similar warnings on Tuesday.
Advocates of the industry argue that it has made strides toward making coal more
environmentally friendly. According to the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity
(ACCCE), 10 clean-coal technology plants have launched since 2011. Another five are under
development or scheduled to come online.
Group President Robert M. "Mike" Duncan said EPA regulations have played a big role in the
closure of nearly 290 coal plants so far this year.
"Further regulation could force even more plant closures," he said in a statement, claiming the
industry is evolving to expand clean-coal technologies -- provided the federal government allows
it to.
Obama will announce he's issuing a presidential memorandum to implement the regulations,
meaning none of the steps involved in the plan will require congressional approval.
In addition, Obama will say he is directing his administration to allow enough renewables on
public lands to power 6 million homes by 2020, effectively doubling the capacity from solar,
wind and geothermal projects on federal property.
Obama also was to announce $8 billion in federal loan guarantees to spur investment in
technologies that can keep carbon dioxide produced by power plants from being released into the
atmosphere.
In taking action on his own, Obama is also signaling he will no longer wait for lawmakers to act
on climate change, and instead will seek ways to work around them.
The linchpin of Obama's plan, and the step activists say will have the most dramatic impact,
involves limits on carbon emissions for new and existing power plants. The Obama
administration has already proposed controls on new plants, but those controls have been delayed
and not yet finalized.
Tuesday's announcement will be the first public confirmation that Obama plans to extend carbon
controls to coal-fired power plants that are currently pumping heat-trapping gases into the
atmosphere.
"This is the holy grail," said Melinda Pierce of Sierra Club, an environmental advocacy group.
"That is the single biggest step he can take to help tackle carbon pollution."
Forty percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, and one-third of greenhouse gases overall, come
from electric power plants, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the Energy
Department's statistical agency.
Obama is expected to lay out a broad vision Tuesday, without detailed emission targets or
specifics about how they will be put in place. Instead, the president will launch a process in
which the Environmental Protection Agency will work with states to develop specific plans to
rein in carbon emissions, with flexibility for each state's circumstances.
Under one scenario envisioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental
group, states could draw on measures such as clean energy sources, carbon-trapping technology
and energy efficiency to reduce the total emissions released into the air.
One key issue Obama is not expected to address Tuesday is Keystone XL, a pipeline that would
carry oil extracted from tar sands in western Canada to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast. A
concerted campaign by environmental activists to persuade Obama to nix the pipeline as a
"carbon bomb" appears to have gained little traction. The oil industry has been urging the
president to approve the pipeline, citing jobs and economic benefits.
Obama raised climate change as a key second-term issue in his inaugural address in January, but
has offered few details since. In his February State of the Union, he issued an ultimatum to
lawmakers: "If Congress won't act soon to protect future generations, I will."
The poor prospects for getting any major climate legislation through a Republican-controlled
House were on display last week when Speaker John Boehner responded to the prospect that
Obama would put forth controls on existing power plants by deeming the idea "absolutely
crazy."
"Why would you want to increase the cost of energy and kill more American jobs?" said
Boehner, R-Ohio, echoing the warnings of some industry groups.
Sidestepping Congress by using executive action doesn't guarantee Obama smooth sailing.
Lawmakers could introduce legislation to thwart Obama's efforts. And the rules for existing
power plants will almost certainly face legal challenges in court. The Supreme Court has upheld
the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, but how the EPA goes
about that effort remains largely uncharted waters.
Even if legal and political obstacles are overcome, it will take years for the new measures to be
put in place, likely running up against the end of Obama's presidency or even beyond it. White
House aides say that's one reason Obama is ensuring the process starts now, while there are still
more than three years left in his final term.
Under the process outlined in the Clean Air Act, the EPA cannot act unilaterally, but must work
with states to develop the standards, said Jonas Monast, an attorney who directs the climate and
energy program at Duke University. An initial proposal will be followed by a months-long
public comment period before the EPA can issue final guidance to states. Then the states must
create actual plans for plants within their borders, a process likely to take the better part of a
year.
Then the EPA has another four months to decide whether to approve each state's plan before the
implementation period can start.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
World Ignores Obama Coal War
We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at
all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say ‘OK.’ That's not
leadership. That's not going to happen.”
-- Then-Sen. Barack Obama at a campaign rally in Oregon, May 17, 2008.
World leaders don’t seem to be paying much heed to President Obama. And not just when it
comes to domestic spy leaker Edward Snowden’s ultimate destination.
Obama today will announce what promises to be a hammer blow to cheap, coal-fired electricity
as part of his legacy project of curbing global warming. But as Obama prepares to deliver what
U.S. environmentalists hope will be a knockout punch to coal power here, the rest of the world is
gobbling up every coal BTU it can get.
U.S. carbon emissions dropped last year more than any other major industrialized country, due in
substantial part to the first round of Obama’s EPA regulations (aided by cheaper natural gas from
Obama-approved fracking and a perpetually sluggish economy).
Meantime, China, India, Russia and other growing economies were firing up the coal furnaces.
In the last decade, global carbon output increased by 2.6 billion tons beyond anything emitted in
the United States, according to BP’s latest global survey on energy and the environment.
Obama and new Secretary of State John Kerry say they remain committed to making the U.S. a
signatory to a U.N. carbon treaty. As unlikely as that may be in the U.S. Senate, it looks even
more unlikely given the tendencies in other major emitters. President Putin of Russia and
President Xi of China seem especially unlikely to do anything that would slow their domestic
growth to levels seen in places already under a carbon crackdown like the U.S. and Europe.
But Obama, who as a candidate promised to “bankrupt” power companies that rely on coal
power, will today make good. This action, he says, will set an example for the other nations to
follow.
The courts and the voting public have blocked Obama from delivering any of his comprehensive
plans on carbon dioxide, which he and many others attribute to an increase in global
temperatures prior to the late 1990s.
Global temperatures have been steady for the last 15 or so years despite massive increases in
carbon dioxide output. Climatologists who believe mankind is driving climate changes are
looking for ways to explain why warming has stalled despite forecasts that the past 15 years
would bring catastrophic warming. Their models have so far proved incorrect.
But those extremely alarmed about carbon, including Obama, argue that the consequences are
still seen in severe weather events like hurricanes and tornadoes.
Obama, who is working hard to shore up his political base after revelations that he hugely
expanded secret domestic surveillance programs, may not be able to impose federal fees on
carbon emissions or regulate carbon dioxide as a toxic substance as he previously tried to do, but
he still may be able to make electricity so expensive that his preferred green alternatives
(especially given heavy federal subsidies) will be cost-effective.
Global temperatures have been steady for the last 15 or so years despite massive increases in
carbon dioxide output.
This effort will be even more important to Obama’s shaky political fortunes if he, as expected,
accedes to pressure from business and labor groups to authorize a pipeline to bring Canadian oil
to American refineries. Environmentalists are howling over the project that they say will increase
U.S. complicity in climate change. Obama needs something to offer these folks, already unhappy
to find out the size of his domestic spy regime, if he really is going to cave on Keystone.
Obama doesn’t need Congress to cripple carbon. By expanding the EPA’s standards for new
plants to existing plants, Obama will hasten the conversion to fracked natural gas by utilities.
Even though the programs will take time to implement and face legal challenges, power
companies have long seen the writing on the wall and are already switching to more expensive
fuels. The conversion and the price increases due to heightened demand will accelerate.
The idea here is for Americans to pay the price to show a moral example on climate to the rest of
the world. It’s not that it will make much difference to the composition of the atmosphere but
that previously reticent nations will want to follow suit.
But as it turns out, the world doesn’t much care about America’s carbon footprint. For most of
the planet’s 7 billion residents, the question is how they are living, not what the United States is
emitting. Add to that the mounting questions about climate science and it is hard to see Putin and
others jumping on the bandwagon of more expensive energy.
Today’s announcement will be more good news for the president’s patrons and political partners
in the green energy and natural gas businesses who have already benefited hugely from his
policies. But as far as changing the planet, its looking like a great big “nyet.”
'Insider threat'? Program urging federal workers to tattle on each
other raises concerns
Amid the furor in Washington over government leaks and media exposés, a little-known
executive order signed by President Obama in October of 2011 could fuel the paranoia.
It requires government agencies to "implement an insider threat detection and prevention
program" -- in effect, ordering all government employees, regardless of security clearances or the
sensitivity of their work, to police fellow workers as potential security threats, and report the
suspicious behavior to superiors.
Asked Monday about the executive order, as first reported by McClatchy Newspapers, White
House Press Secretary Jay Carney said: "I confess I didn't see the story. I'll have to take the
question."
The edict applies to all government agencies, even those with no involvement in national
security matters such as the Peace Corps and the Department of Education.
As an example of the order's broad sweep, a Department of Education security systems webinar
describes how, "certain life experiences can alter a person's normal behavior and cause them to
act illegally or irresponsibly."
It points to "stress, divorce, untreated mental illness, financial problems, frustrations with coworkers or the organization" as warning signs that must be reported.
Mark Zaid, an attorney who has represented government whistle-blowers accused of
wrongdoing, said the program may lead some ethical workers with constructive suggestions to
do the wrong thing.
"It's hitting a small problem, although a significant one, with sledgehammer," he said.
"There is a psychological component to it -- that they are actually pushed in the wrong direction
toward being more of an insider threat," he said. "I've seen over the years where I've had
intelligence clients say to me in frustration that, "You know, 'why don't I just walk over to the
Russian Embassy and just sell the information'."
Some advocates for transparency, including the new FBI Director nominee James Comey,
believe workers need more freedom to air grievances, not less.
Comey expressed that sentiment in a promotional video for one of his recent employers,
Bridgewater Securities. In the video, Comey claimed to have been attracted to the company,
because of its philosophy of openness. -- a stark contrast to his experience in the federal
government where he was once as assistant attorney general during the George W. Bush
administration. "I had sat in the White House situation room, in meetings chaired by the
president, where I could tell from the body language of people around the table that they had
things to say and couldn't say them," he said.
The Obama administration's crackdown on leaks has already had a chilling effect on the flow of
news. In an appearance at the National Press Club last week, Associated Press boss Gary Pruitt
said, "Some of our longtime trusted sources have become nervous and anxious about talking to
us, even on stories that aren't about national security."
Pruitt, whose organization's phones records were seized by the Department of Justice in a leak
probe, added, "Government employees that we once checked in with regularly will no longer
speak to us by phone."
Zaid said a larger problem is that most government agencies have no place where workers with
legitimate grievances can go within the organization, without fear of being branded a malcontent
-- or worse, a potential national security threat