Eideard

What real crop circles look like

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he will step up efforts to supply energy to Asia after Washington delayed a decision on whether to approve a new oil pipeline from Canada to the United States.

In a subtle warning to Washington, Harper told Chinese President Hu Jintao that providing energy to Asia was an important priority for Canada.

“This does underscore the necessity of Canada making sure that we are able to access Asia markets for our energy products,” Harper told reporters on Sunday at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ meeting in Hawaii. “That will be an important priority of our government going forward and I indicated that yesterday to the president of China.”

Citing health, safety and environmental concerns, President Barack Obama’s administration said it would now study a possible new route for TransCanada Corp’s Keystone XL pipeline. The delay could end up killing the $7 billion project altogether if supporters back out or the administration is unable to chart a new route.

Health, safety and environment are the concerns voiced. Most are wholly illegitimate. I’d gladly discuss any real issues here – but, decades of experience as environment activist requires cutting through the political crap.

Canada is already the largest foreign supplier of oil, natural gas, electricity and uranium to the United States. The proposed pipeline has the capacity to move 700,000 barrels of crude produced from the Alberta tar sands to refineries in Texas…

Harper’s conservative government has repeatedly voiced disappointment at the delay and some big businesses say the move by the Obama administration was purely political to push the decision out past the November 2012 election.

Certainly, the issues are being discussed. I started to watch a presentation on CNN, yesterday; but, the sophistry, lies and hypocrisy were at the level of a Republican “debate” on commerce with China. As soon as the so-called environmentalist said the oil was being transported to the Gulf of Mexico to be transshipped to our “arch enemy, China” – I changed the channel back to an FA Cup match.

As it stands, Canadians still must commit one way or the other on the much more critical ecological decision ranging from nuclear power generation to landscape regeneration before any expansion of oil sands production.

Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown as president of Guatemala in a CIA-backed coup in 1954, a seminal event that historians say set the Central American country on a path of dictatorships and civil war that would last for decades.

Even though he was democratically elected and popular at the time, after Arbenz was deposed, his reputation was ruined and he was written out of Guatemala’s history books. He died in exile in 1971.

This week, 57 years later, current President Alvaro Colom made a public apology to the Arbenz family, a large gesture in Guatemala. There is also a larger rehabilitation of the image of Arbenz under way. Textbooks are being rewritten and a new biography will soon be published.

But this clearing of Arbenz’s reputation does not console everyone. Some ask: When will the United States, which was behind the coup, apologize for its meddling..?

The apology “doesn’t have a lot of resonance in the United States — though it should,” said Stephen Schlesinger, an Adjunct Fellow at the Century Foundation and co-author of a book on the 1954 coup.

The United States, after all, was the power behind the event.

I figure the US government will apologize for the Guatemalan coup about 3 years before never – which is just before they apologize for for overthrowing Iran’s first democratically-elected government and reinstating the Shah on behalf of Big Oil.

The rest of the world has a clear recollection of what we have done.

Thanks, Ursarodinia

A detailed, in-depth report from the Washington POST on the state of surveillance – your government keeping an eye on you:

Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.

The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation’s history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

The government’s goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States…

The Cold War is over. Excepting the federal bureaucracy has decreed the security interests of the nation are best served by keeping an eye on you. A bigger, stronger, better-funded apparatus for spying on American citizens than anything ever deemed useful in the bad old days.

Today’s story, along with related material on The Post’s Web site, examines how Top Secret America plays out at the local level. It describes a web of 4,058 federal, state and local organizations, each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions. At least 935 of these organizations have been created since the 2001 attacks or became involved in counterterrorism for the first time after 9/11…

* Technologies and techniques honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America.

* The FBI is building a database with the names and certain personal information, such as employment history, of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents whom a local police officer or a fellow citizen believed to be acting suspiciously. It is accessible to an increasing number of local law enforcement and military criminal investigators, increasing concerns that it could somehow end up in the public domain.

* Seeking to learn more about Islam and terrorism, some law enforcement agencies have hired as trainers self-described experts whose extremist views on Islam and terrorism are considered inaccurate and counterproductive by the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies.

* The Department of Homeland Security sends its state and local partners intelligence reports with little meaningful guidance, and state reports have sometimes inappropriately reported on lawful meetings.

RTFA. You may as well know who’s behind the wheel of that black Crown Vic parked down at the foot of your driveway.

Same as it ever was.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A federal judge has ordered the reinstatement of an openly lesbian former Air Force major who was dismissed from the military under the government’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

Judge Ronald Leighton of Tacoma, Washington, made his ruling Friday. It is the latest legal and political setback for the Obama administration, which is seeking to end the policy through a legislative and executive solution.

Uh, I would have to interject, here, that Obama is trying to dump it off on Congress. He knows, you and I know, that will accomplish nothing. Especially before the fall election. There is nothing “executive” happening.

And he apparently hasn’t the integrity to live up to his promises to the Gay and Lesbian community made during his presidential campaign.

Maj. Margaret Witt, a decorated flight nurse with 20 years of service, had sued to return to the Air Force Reserve. She was honorably discharged in July 2007 on the grounds that she had a six-year relationship with another woman, a civilian…

“Her discharge from the Air Force Reserves violated her substantive due process rights under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. She should be restored to her position as a flight nurse with the 446th AES as soon as is practicable,” wrote the judge…

She was described in employee reports and by trial witnesses as an “exemplary officer” who was an effective leader, caring mentor, and skilled clinician. She had hid her homosexuality for years…

Witt’s lawyers from the ACLU argued the Spokane native’s sexuality never led to any problems within her unit. Several members of her squadron had testified they would welcome her back.

“Today we heard the hammer of justice strike for Major Margaret Witt,” said ACLU of Washington Executive Director Kathleen Taylor. “We look forward to the day when all members of our military can serve our country without invidious discrimination. To discharge her simply because of her sexual orientation was entirely unfair to her and unwise for the military, which needs her significant skills.”

The saddest thing is that the Democrats and Obama are a slightly better alternative to the intellectually and ethically corrupt thugs in the Republican Party and their teabagger Brown Shirts. On some issues.

I can’t be moved to vote for the evil of two lessers.

Faced with a crisis more than a decade ago in which thousands of people were sickened from salmonella in infected eggs, farmers in Britain began vaccinating their hens against the bacteria. That simple but decisive step virtually wiped out the health threat.

But when American regulators created new egg safety rules that went into effect last month, they declared that there was not enough evidence to conclude that vaccinating hens against salmonella would prevent people from getting sick. The Food and Drug Administration decided not to mandate vaccination of hens — a precaution that would cost less than a penny per a dozen eggs.

Now, consumers have been shaken by one of the largest egg recalls ever, involving nearly 550 million eggs from two Iowa producers, after a nationwide outbreak of thousands of cases of salmonella was traced to eggs contaminated with the bacteria.

The F.D.A. has said that if its egg safety rules had gone into effect earlier, the crisis might have been averted. Those rules include regular testing for contamination, cleanliness standards for henhouses and refrigeration requirements, all of which experts say are necessary.

However, many industry experts say the absence of mandatory vaccination greatly weakens the F.D.A. rules, depriving them of a crucial step that could prevent future outbreaks.

Salmonella bacteria is passed from infected hens to the interior of eggs when they are being formed. The salmonella vaccines work both by reducing the number of hens that get infected and by making it more difficult for salmonella bacteria to pass through to the eggs…

The F.D.A. said it considered mandatory vaccination very seriously. “We didn’t believe that, based on the data we had, there was sufficient scientific evidence for us to require it,” said Dr. Nega Beru, director of the agency’s Office of Food Safety…

Unfortunately, no one decided to look beyond the prelimary studies from 1999. That seems to be as much a political decision as anything else.

Read the rest of this entry »

More than 400 people accused of having ties to trafficking for Mexican drug cartels were arrested in 16 U.S. states this week.

As part of the latest sweep, 429 people were arrested and nearly 3,000 pounds of marijuana, 247 pounds of cocaine, $5.8 million in U.S. currency and 141 weapons were seized, the Justice Department and Drug Enforcement Administration said.

The suspects were charged with various offenses, including conspiracy and distribution of illegal drugs such as cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines.

The sweep is the latest effort by Mexico and the Obama administration to try to clamp down on drug trafficking along the border where violence has escalated. Pressure has grown on the two governments to tackle the problems…

“There is a bond that exists between Mexico and the United States,” Eric Holder told reporters during a news conference to announce the drug arrests. “We have shared interests and I think that is what we focus on and that is what will keep this relationship strong…”

With the escalating violence along the U.S.-Mexico border, President Barack Obama plans to seek an additional $500 million for security and to send up to 1,200 National Guard troops to the border.

Thirty-nine of the arrests were in New Mexico – mostly up in the Española Valley north of Santa Fe. No one was surprised. Probably least of all the junkies and drug dealers.

They’re been there for decades. Once in a while there is a wave of arrests. It keeps the newspapers and TV happy and, after all, elections are coming, this autumn.

When we like a product, do we think others will like it, too? And when we believe others like a product, do we like it as well? A new study…says these two questions are fundamentally different.

“The answer to the first question (Will others like it?) requires people to start with their own product preferences, which we call projection,” write authors Caglar Irmak (University of South Carolina), Beth Vallen (Loyola University), and Sankar Sen (Baruch College). The second question (If others like it, do I?) makes people think first about others’ preferences and then decide whether they like the product or not, which is called “introjection.”

“We show that different psychological processes underlie projection and introjection,” the authors write. “In particular, we demonstrate that providing our own opinion about a product before thinking about others’ preferences, as in projection, affirms one’s unique concept.” This, in turn, weakens uniqueness motivations and leads consumers to predict others will like what they themselves like.

On the other hand, thinking about others’ preferences before our own (introjection) threatens our sense of uniqueness. “As a result, those who are in high need for uniqueness don’t like what other people like,” the authors explain…

“If we learn others’ preferences before forming our own, we tend to preserve our uniqueness by altering our product preferences accordingly,” the authors write. “If, however, we already have an opinion about a product, we are okay with others following us.”

Uh, OK.

Bill McKibben says – “Forty years in, we’re losing”.

This weekend, when speakers at Earth Day gatherings across the country hearken back to the first celebration in 1970, they’ll recall great victories: above all, cleaner air and cleaner water for Americans.

But for 20 years now, global warming has been the most important environmental issue — arguably the most important issue the planet has ever faced. And there we can boast an unblemished bipartisan record of accomplishing absolutely nothing.

To mark Earth Day this year, Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) were supposed to introduce their long-awaited rewrite of the House’s climate legislation. Now that’s been delayed for at least a few days, which is probably just as well, since, as Graham points out, it’s no longer really an environmental bill…

Worse, the bill might specifically remove the strongest tool the environmentalists won in the wake of Earth Day 1: the Environmental Protection Agency’s right to use the Clean Air Act to bring the fossil fuel industries to heel. Enforcement may be preempted under the new law. Even the right of states to pioneer new legislation, such as California’s landmark global warming bill, apparently could disappear with the new legislation…

That weakness has many sources, including the corrosive power of money in politics (and human beings have never found a greater source of money than fossil fuels). But at least part of the problem lies within environmentalism, which no longer does enough real organizing to build the pressure that could result in real change…

I remember interviewing Pete McCloskey, the California House member recruited by Gaylord Nelson to be the Republican sponsor of the original Earth Day…But just as important was what happened next: “About two weeks after Earth Day,” McCloskey said, “there was an article on the sixth or seventh page of the Washington Star — some of the Earth Day kids had labeled 12 members of Congress the Dirty Dozen and vowed to defeat them. Nobody paid much attention.

On the first Wednesday in June, though, everyone in Washington opened the paper to find that the two Democrats on that list — one a powerful committee chairman, the other a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee — had lost primary fights by fewer than a thousand votes. Within 24 hours, seven of the 10 Republicans on the list had come to me, even though I was despised, being against the war and all. ‘What’s this about water pollution, about air pollution? What can you tell us?’ ” For the next few sessions, anything tinged green passed Congress with ease: the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act.

The Golden Rule for American politicians is – “Get re-elected!” Nothing else really matters.

Get up on your hind legs and register folks to vote. Do it as a Green activist. Scare some Democrat or Republican into pretending they have a conscience and an understanding of science beyond Howdy Doody.

Photo by simontoplis

Which cities rule the world? When it comes to economic activity, political and intellectual influence and great places to live, one recent report holds few surprises.

New York, London and Tokyo all rank high in all of these categories, according to a 2010 survey of top world cities by property consultancy Knight Frank…

Knight Frank measures cities on four factors — economic activity, political power, knowledge base and quality of life — and then aggregates the scores to rank world cities…

According to its list, New York leads global powerhouses overall, overtaking London, which had topped the table last year.

Despite a reversal at the top in 2010, the leading four cities — New York, London, Paris and Tokyo — remained significantly ahead of any competition, scoring well ahead of their nearest rival, Los Angeles.

While these heavyweights rule on several fronts now, there are several up-and-coming cities to consider.

Chief among these emerging contenders is Berlin. Thanks to its quality of life, it was the highest overall riser in the survey, moving from 13th to eighth place.

Although Berlin remains outside the top 10 for its economic activity, political power and knowledge and influence, it is now rated by Knight Frank to be second in the world behind Paris for quality of life.

Beijing emerged as the second highest climber in the report, now ninth overall in the world, up from 12th in 2009.

As a political power, Beijing rose from seventh to fourth in the survey, overtaking London, Paris and Tokyo.

RTFA for the details, Top Ten. I’ve spent time in many of these and I think I’d be mellow in most – if I still cared to live in a city.