Eideard

Yes, there are parts of Kashmir that look just like my neck of the prairie
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A much-despised law that suspends basic rights and shields security forces from prosecution in the disputed province of Kashmir will be lifted in some areas in the next few days.

Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir, said in a speech to police officers that the situation in many areas of Kashmir had become peaceful enough to warrant removing the law, which is known as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act.

Human rights activists have long argued that the act, which gives government security forces wide latitude in areas where insurgents operate, has led to widespread abuses. The discovery of thousands of unidentified bodies in mass graves in the region this summer seemed to underscore the impunity the law allowed.

Security officers cannot be prosecuted for acts committed while on duty in areas covered by the act without permission from the Home Ministry, and such permission has almost never been granted, even in cases where rape and murder were alleged.

The law was put in place in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir in 1990, when the state was in the grip of insurgents — partly fueled by Pakistan — who sought to wrest it free of India…The insurgency petered out in the late 1990s, and the past few years have been largely free from armed struggle. But the act has remained in force and was a crucial catalyst for unarmed protests that have swelled in Kashmir almost every summer in recent years. Last year more than 100 people died in protests, most of them killed by security officers who fired into rock-throwing crowds.

But this summer was largely tranquil, and the state government has been slowly reducing the visibility of its security presence in the region, removing heavily armored bunkers and taking machine-gun-toting security officers off the streets.

Like many activists around the world who support the range of struggle from national liberation movements in earlier days, pro-democracy movements, nowadays – I sincerely hope the Indian government can make it past sectarian insurgencies to support full-blown democracy in a region long in the search for its own voice in governing.

This could be a start.

Back in 2010, Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist and self-proclaimed climate skeptic, decided to launch the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project to review the temperature data that underpinned global-warming claims…

Muller’s stated aims were simple. He and his team would scour and re-analyze the climate data, putting all their calculations and methods online. Skeptics cheered the effort. “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong,” wrote Anthony Watts, a blogger who has criticized the quality of the weather stations in the United States that provide temperature data. The Charles G. Koch Foundation even gave Muller’s project $150,000 — and the Koch brothers, recall, are hardly fans of mainstream climate science.

So what are the end results? Muller’s team appears to have confirmed the basic tenets of climate science. Back in March, Muller told the House Science and Technology Committee that, contrary to what he expected, the existing temperature data was “excellent.” He went on: “We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups.” And, today, the BEST team has released a flurry of new papers that confirm that the planet is getting hotter. As the team’s two-page summary flatly concludes, “Global warming is real.”Here’s a chart comparing their findings with existing data…

Peer review must have, will have, its day. That’s a right and proper part of scientific research.

Still, I have to chuckle over the know-nothings who supported the BEST research project. I’ll bet they’ll be spending the peer review time working like busy little ants to construct new rationales to avoid anything like responsible decision-making to combat the obvious causes of climate change.

New York City authorities said they will shut down a city bus service run by Orthodox Jews if the group doesn’t stop making women sit at the back of the bus.

The Private Transportation Corp, which operates the city’s public B110 bus under a franchise arrangement, has come under criticism following publicity about its practice of making women give up their seats in the front to promote Hasidic customs of gender separation.

New York City’s Department of Transportation spokesman Scott Gastel said the agency’s executive director Anne Koenig has asked the company to respond to the allegations and was waiting to hear back…If such a violation is found, the franchise could be revoked, the DOT said in a statement…

The B110 bus runs through the sections of the borough of Brooklyn that are heavily populated by Orthodox Jews.

A student reporter at Columbia University in New York published a story about a woman told by other riders to give up her seat in the front. Other news organizations then sent reporters who encountered similar situations…

Cripes. This franchise is 38 years old. No one noticed? No one complained before now?

Sorry; but, I find that hard to believe. Can there really be an overwhelming number of women in Brooklyn who rode that bus line and never noticed anything this backward going on?

If you see a large glowing object plummeting from the sky late Saturday or early Sunday, duck.

A defunct European satellite called ROSAT is headed straight for Earth this weekend—and chances are even higher that a piece of space debris could hit someone than the odds placed on a NASA satellite that fell from orbit last month.

The German Aerospace Center, which led the development and construction of ROSAT, estimates that the chance of anyone being harmed by debris from the satellite is 1 in 2,000. For NASA’s UARS, the injury risk was roughly a third lower, at 1 in 3,200.

ROSAT is currently estimated to make an uncontrolled reentry during the early morning hours on Sunday, Greenwich Mean Time, said Heiner Klinkrad, head of the European Space Agency’s space debris office. But Klinkrad cautions that the satellite could enter Earth’s atmosphere up to 24 hours earlier or later than the estimated time…

Unfortunately, neither Klinkrad nor anyone else can say exactly where on Earth ROSAT is headed.

Debris could come down anywhere between 53 degrees north latitude and 53 degrees south latitude, an area that includes most of Earth’s land mass…That could be a worry, because the satellite’s 1.5-ton mirror is likely to survive the superheated trip through the atmosphere all the way to the ground, where it could make a major dent in whatever it strikes…

If bits of the satellite do land in a populated area, “they will be extremely hot,” added the German Aerospace Center’s Roland Gräve. “This is why we recommend not touching any satellite parts” that do make it to the ground.

And any ROSAT debris, no matter where it’s found, belongs to the German government, he said.

There are people like Jonathan McDowell from the Center for Astrophysics who are planning reentry parties. It’s tough keeping it on a schedule. He has a blanket email ready to go when he has concrete location numbers – just fill in the blanks and send it off into the Web.

We all can go “whoopee” while it crashes and burns.

Members of the congressional Super Committee have received more than $300,000 from 93 special interests in just six weeks since they were appointed, according to an analysis of FEC data by iWatch News. More than a third of the money came from health-related interests as the committee of 12 debates serious cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.

The donations from political action committees slightly favored the Republicans on the panel…Republicans got 84 donations for $181,000; Democrats received 63 donations totaling $121,000.

The analysis covered Aug. 11, the day the committee was formally announced, through Sept. 30, the end of the third quarter reporting period. And those dollar amounts will likely increase when the Senate contributions, which are not filed electronically, are submitted to the FEC…

The select panel has until the day before Thanksgiving to finish its work…

Of the 93 special interest groups who donated via their PACs…seven gave at least $10,000. They were:

FedEx, the shipping giant — $10,500
Pfizer, the pharmaceutical manufacturer — $10,000
The National Beer Wholesalers Association, a trade association for beer companies — $10,000
The American Dental Association, the trade association for dentists around the nation — $10,000
Walt Disney Productions, the entertainment conglomerate — $10,000
Chevron, the oil giant — $10,000
The Associated General Contractors of America, the trade association of the construction industry — $10,000
Fresenius Medical, a major dialysis provider— $10,000

A mix of health and pharmaceutical companies made up at least $111,500 of the donations, by far the biggest business sector. One focus of the Super Committee is to find ways to save money on health care, which many have speculated means potential cuts into Medicare and Medicaid.

RTFA for examples of the cut-and-paste hogwash used to justify the existence of the gladhanders.

Not all members of the committee are raising big bucks around their committee membership. Sen. John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, promised last month that he would raise no money until the committee’s work is completed in late November. Sen. Jon Kyl is not running for re-election.

We sit down to talk, the smile goes away!
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Islamabad — An unusually powerful American delegation arrived here on Thursday to deliver the starkest warning yet to Pakistan, according to a senior American official: that the United States would act unilaterally if necessary to attack extremist groups that use the country as a haven to kill Americans…

“This is a time for clarity,” Mrs. Clinton declared in Kabul, Afghanistan, where she met President Hamid Karzai before leaving for Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. “No one should be in any way mistaken about allowing this to continue without paying a very big price.”

“There’s no place to go any longer,” Mrs. Clinton added, referring to Pakistan’s leaders, whom the administration has accused of equivocating by supporting the Afghan insurgency…

Before the meeting, which took place at the residence of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, a senior administration official said that the delegation would make it clear that if the Pakistanis did not act against insurgents like the Haqqani network, then the United States would have to.

The Haqqani network uses Pakistan’s tribal areas as a base and has become the most potent part of the insurgency in Afghanistan. Before stepping down last month, Adm. Mike Mullen, General Dempsey’s predecessor, called the Haqqanis “a veritable arm” of Pakistan’s intelligence service…

Pakistan’s response remains to be seen…

RTFA. I understand they are between a rock and a hard place. It is – to a certain extent – a problem of their own making. The habit of funneling virtually all foreign aid through Pakistan’s military who dole it out to their bandit buddies as freely as they do to political hacks – ain’t any way to build and maintain democratic and progressive leadership of a nation still climbing out of the Stone Age they agreed to with the departure of the Brits at the end of colonial days.

If they don’t try, if they fail to take a stand for the advancement of the whole of Pakistan’s population while rejecting the sectarian bandits from fear of confrontation – US largesse and tribute must be cut off. Simple enough. Easy enough. Lose the Cold War mentality.

 
Thanks, honeyman

A ski area in the US state of Arizona hopes to become the latest in a small number of resorts using “recycled” sewer water to make snow. But the Hopi Indian tribe aims to stop what they describe as the desecration of their sacred mountain.

The San Francisco Peaks tower over the baking Arizona desert. Stands of white barked aspens, spruce and ponderosa pines dot the high tundra landscape, and the mountain is the highest in the state.

The writer must never have been there. This is near Flagstaff and one of the greenest parts of the state.

The US Forest Service, which manages the land, recommends it for hikers seeking solitude in the wilderness. The mountain is a holy entity for the Hopi and other Indian tribes who lived in the area centuries before Europeans arrived.

On the mountain’s western face lies the Arizona Snowbowl ski resort, a narrow 777-acre block of land poking 10,000ft (3,048m) into the wilderness area, which surrounds it on three sides.

People have been skiing there since 1938. But Arizona is one of the driest states in the US, and a recent run of dry winters has left the operators scrambling to find water to make artificial snow to keep skiers – and their dollars – on the slopes.

The resort’s owners, who manage the resort under an agreement with the US government, are embroiled in a row with the Hopi Indian tribe, which has filed a lawsuit to stop Snowbowl’s plan to pump highly treated wastewater from the nearby city of Flagstaff up the ski runs to make artificial snow.

The Hopi say spraying treated wastewater on the mountain – even just within the boundaries of the ski resort – would irreparably sully it and threaten their ability to carry out their religious rites among the peaks. And they say it would defile the pristine wilderness for all those who want to enjoy it without skis on.

I’m not going to waste space on the myths of religious beliefs which wholly ignore science and scientific testing. Recycling wastewater is a successful process worldwide. It’s such a standard in the world of recycling that the topic is boring.

Solve the Hopi worries the same way they have always been solved. Give them a percentage of the business. That may be cold; but, it’s pretty much acceptable to all the Native American nations in the region. Usually the only question is which tribe gets the fees.

“I switched back to Windows, this time!”

When the California Christian group known as Family Radio predicted the beginning of the end of the world as we know it back in the spring (not for the first time), Harold Camping and his followers splashed dire warnings on billboards around the globe.

But then nothing happened on May 21. There was no rapture and true believers weren’t swept to heaven while everyone else was left waiting to be consumed in the total destruction of Earth by Oct. 21.

Despite that setback, the California-based group is still looking on Friday as a day of reckoning, even if its predictions have been toned down.

There aren’t any billboards this time, and the 90-year-old Camping has shifted from definitive language to adding the word “probably” to his vocabulary.

So, if history repeats itself, the world will be just fine on Saturday. In fact, one observer expects Family Radio, which describes itself as a “non-profit, non-commercial Christian radio network,” will keep sending out its signals, too.

I doubt that Camping’s followers will experience sufficient frustration over his latest klutzup to stop sending in their hard-earned money. One thing that’s consistent about True Believers is that repeated failure does not constitute contradiction.

Thanks, Cinaedh

Obama speaking at fire station in Virginia
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Maybe as early as Thursday night, the Senate will take its first vote on one bite-size piece of President Obama’s jobs bill, a $35 billion measure to fund the hiring of 400,000 teachers and a smaller number of cops and firefighters. It will fail. As usual not a single Republican will vote for it, and since a majority in the Senate is now not 51 but 60 because the Republicans filibuster nearly everything, it will fall well short of passage…

The basic facts are these. The public supports this bill. Senate Democratic sources say that of all the individual pieces of the larger jobs bill, this one polled the best by far. Better than payroll tax cuts. That’s why they decided to go with it first. The funding mechanism is also highly popular. It is a 0.5 percent (don’t miss that decimal point!) surtax on dollars earned above $1 million—so, for example, a person whose salary is $1.2 million would pay the extra 0.5 percent only on those dollars above $1 million, for a whopping tax increase of $1,000. I have not seen polling on this specific amount of tax, but surveys constantly show that the generic “millionaire’s tax” wins broad support. Just yesterday, National Journal put it at 68 percent, including 90 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of independents…

In an earlier time, in normal times, when legislators used to behave the way legislators are supposed to behave, the minority’s leaders would have brought the price tag down, made the majority and the White House agree to something they wanted—peeling back one of those EPA regulations the Republicans hate—and we’d have had a deal…the minority would have actually paid a bit of attention to those polls showing the American people backed this.

Of course, Republicans can’t say that they’ll oppose Obama on everything, but they don’t have to. People get it. It seeps out of them, like oil from a polluted stream.

It’s difficult to attempt politeness describing what passes for Republican ideology, nowadays. I frequently discuss politics [and economics, technology, education] with one of my kinfolk who is a former Republican. That is, a former member of the Republican Party. After 50 years of commitment to traditional American conservatism – the whole range from environmental conservation to fiscal soundness with a healthy taste of what Bush and Cheney would have characterized as isolationism – he left that party. He doesn’t ask me to be polite – as long as I recognize the difference between conservatism and populist hypocrites. That’s good enough for me.

Watching the effete prancing in the worst political minuet played to patriot tunes since George Wallace tried to lead the White Citizens Councils into Congress and the White House – how could anyone who hasn’t lost his mind defend these deliberate attempts to sabotage the American economy, the American people?

UPDATE: Democrats Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mark Pryor of Arkansas voted against the administration proposal last night, as did independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. No Republican supported the measure.

Three especially worthless politicians + the predictable in-your-pants vote for the wealthiest 1% of America.