Neutrinos have been clocked breaking the universal speed limit. Physics crumbles.
Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
Neutrinos have been clocked breaking the universal speed limit. Physics crumbles.
Mr. Peres said in an interview in Jerusalem that he tried to convince Mr. Abbas that United Nations membership would not help because what is needed is independence for the Palestinians and security for the Israelis, and the United Nations can deliver neither.
“He told me, ‘I’m alone, betrayed by the United States, betrayed by Israel and by everyone else,’ ” Mr. Peres recalled from a recent conversation.
Mr. Abbas echoed those sentiments on Tuesday night. Terje Roed-Larsen, a former United Nations envoy to the Mideast who now leads the International Peace Institute in New York, hugged him and asked for a meeting later in the evening.
“Tonight our schedule is full with the Americans,” Mr. Abbas replied. “They want us to meet, but we don’t, really we don’t want.”
Mr. Larsen asked why he was going then. “I don’t know why really,” Mr. Abbas said, “I am not happy with anybody, not with the Americans, nor the Arabs. I am fed up with all these people and I don’t know what to do when I return back.”
Grizzlies are high profile this year.
A lingering winter and late berry crop kept bears in proximity to humans longer than normal, perhaps contributing to a stream of headlines about grizzlies killing people and people killing grizzlies.
Meanwhile, a young lady on a big horse charged out of the pack of grizzly stories near Glacier National Park. In a cloud of dust, the 25-year-old wrangler likely saved a boy’s life while demonstrating that skill, quick-thinking and guts sometimes are the best weapons against a head-on charging grizzly.
[What heroes!]
To balance out the pessimism* of Donal's German Army Report, IEEE recently posted an article declaring that we can get 100% of our energy from wind, water, and solar power. (Not even nuclear power is required.) I'm skeptical, but I hope they're right. It's worth noting that the IEEE is a technical organization (of which I'm a member), and does not have a particularly strong left or right bias (you'll find members with both strong left and right biases, however). I'm sure the comments will be as interesting as the article.
*Not to suggest that the pessimism is unwarranted.
[Whipple writes] ... All professional military services know that in the last century they have become so dependent on liquid fuels that their effectiveness would be severely degraded should shortages or extremely high oil prices develop.
Last year two military planning organizations went public with studies predicting that serious consequences from oil depletion will befall us shortly. In the U.S. the Joint Forces Command concluded, without saying how they arrived at their dates, that by 2012 surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear and that by 2015 the global shortfall in oil production could be as much as 10 million b/d. Later in the year a draft of a German army study, which went into greater detail in analyzing the consequences of peaking world oil production, was leaked to the press. The German study which was released recently is unique for the frankness with which it explores the dire consequences which may be in store for us.
By David A. Graham, The Daily Beast, Sept. 19, 2011
With the headings:
Also see
Michiko Kakutani's Sept. 18 book review for the New York Times' Arts section;
"Where It All Went Wrong: Ron Suskind's new book and the competing theories for Obama's collapse" by David Wiegel at Slate, Sept. 20, 2011;
"Obama’s Economic Quagmire: Frank Rich and Adam Moss Talk About What’s Really in Ron Suskind’s Revealing New Book About the White House" Daily Intel @ newyorkmag.com, Sept. 17, 2011.
In order to preserve the so-called right of return for the millions of people designated as refugees by UNRWA in Arab countries as well as in Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian leaders have already stated that Palestinian refugees will not eligible for citizenship in a new Palestinian state. So, if the UN recognizes Palestine as an independent nation, it will be a Palestinian nation with Palestinian refugees living in relative squalor in camps provided by the UNRWA (where the United States is a principal donor).
One afternoon last fall at Fort Benning, Ga., two model-size planes took off, climbed to 800 and 1,000 feet, and began criss-crossing the military base in search of an orange, green and blue tarp.
The automated, unpiloted planes worked on their own, with no human guidance, no hand on any control.
After 20 minutes, one of the aircraft, carrying a computer that processed images from an onboard camera, zeroed in on the tarp and contacted the second plane, which flew nearby and used its own sensors to examine the colorful object. Then one of the aircraft signaled to an unmanned car on the ground so it could take a final, close-up look.
Target confirmed.
This successful exercise in autonomous robotics could presage the future of the American way of war: a day when drones hunt, identify and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans. Imagine aerial “Terminators,” minus beefcake and time travel.
Every September 22, people from around the world get together in the streets, intersections, and neighbourhood blocks to remind the world that we don't have to accept our car-dominated society.
But we do not want just one day of celebration and then a return to "normal" life. When people get out of their cars, they should stay out of their cars. It is up to us, it is up to our cities, and our governments to help create permanent change to benefit pedestrians, cyclists, and other people who do not drive cars.
Let World Carfree Day be a showcase for just how our cities might look like, feel like, and sound like without cars…365 days a year.
And here's what he says about they Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
Now I know that for many in this hall, one issue stands as a test for these principles – and for American foreign policy: the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians.
One year ago, I stood at this podium and called for an independent Palestine. I believed then – and I believe now – that the Palestinian people deserve a state of their own. But what I also said is that genuine peace can only be realized between Israelis and Palestinians themselves. One year later, despite extensive efforts by America and others, the parties have not bridged their differences. Faced with this stalemate, I put forward a new basis for negotiations in May. That basis is clear, and well known to all of us here. Israelis must know that any agreement provides assurances for their security. Palestinians deserve to know the territorial basis of their state.
I know that many are frustrated by the lack of progress. So am I. But the question isn’t the goal we seek – the question is how to reach it. And I am convinced that there is no short cut to the end of a conflict that has endured for decades. Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the UN – if it were that easy, it would have been accomplished by now. Ultimately, it is Israelis and Palestinians who must live side by side. Ultimately, it is Israelis and Palestinians – not us – who must reach agreement on the issues that divide them: on borders and security; on refugees and Jerusalem.
Peace depends upon compromise among peoples who must live together long after our speeches are over, and our votes have been counted. That is the lesson of Northern Ireland, where ancient antagonists bridged their differences. That is the lesson of Sudan, where a negotiated settlement led to an independent state. And that is the path to a Palestinian state.
We seek a future where Palestinians live in a sovereign state of their own, with no limit to what they can achieve. There is no question that the Palestinians have seen that vision delayed for too long. And it is precisely because we believe so strongly in the aspirations of the Palestinian people that America has invested so much time and effort in the building of a Palestinian state, and the negotiations that can achieve one.
America’s commitment to Israel’s security is unshakeable, and our friendship with Israel is deep and enduring. And so we believe that any lasting peace must acknowledge the very real security concerns that Israel faces every single day. Let’s be honest: Israel is surrounded by neighbors that have waged repeated wars against it. Israel’s citizens have been killed by rockets fired at their houses and suicide bombs on their buses. Israel’s children come of age knowing that throughout the region, other children are taught to hate them. Israel, a small country of less than eight million people, looks out at a world where leaders of much larger nations threaten to wipe it off of the map. The Jewish people carry the burden of centuries of exile, persecution, and the fresh memory of knowing that six million people were killed simply because of who they were.
These facts cannot be denied. The Jewish people have forged a successful state in their historic homeland. Israel deserves recognition. It deserves normal relations with its neighbors. And friends of the Palestinians do them no favors by ignoring this truth, just as friends of Israel must recognize the need to pursue a two state solution with a secure Israel next to an independent Palestine.
That truth – that each side has legitimate aspirations – is what makes peace so hard. And the deadlock will only be broken when each side learns to stand in each other’s shoes. That’s what we should be encouraging. This body – founded, as it was, out of the ashes of war and genocide; dedicated, as it is, to the dignity of every person – must recognize the reality that is lived by both the Palestinians and the Israelis. The measure of our actions must always be whether they advance the right of Israeli and Palestinian children to live in peace and security, with dignity and opportunity. We will only succeed in that effort if we can encourage the parties to sit down together, to listen to each other, and to understand each other’s hopes and fears. That is the project to which America is committed. And that is what the United Nations should be focused on in the weeks and months to come.
By Sebnum Arsu, New York Times, September 20/21, 2011
ISTANBUL — A suspected terrorist attack in central Ankara on Tuesday killed three people and injured at least 34, the interior minister said, in the first deadly bombing in the Turkish capital in more than four years. Three of the injured people were in critical condition late on Tuesday.
Idris Naim Sahin, the interior minister, said the explosion and fire were “highly likely to be a terror attack.”There was no immediate claim of responsibility. “This is an attack that did not focus on a specific target,” Mr. Sahin said. “Anyone could be a target, and there is no divide between babies or elderly, police or regular citizens. The target is the Turkish citizen and Turkey as a whole.” ....
The first good news I have read since Cheney got sick!
All we have to do is increase taxes on those making over one million bucks a year and
O'RELLY WILL QUIT!
LET'S DO IT!
This is like a member of some militaristic racist group decrying that if a Black Man is ever elected President of the United States:
I WILL MOVE.
All I have to say in response is:
GOODBY AND GOD SPEED!
Al Jazeera, September 20, 2010
Barack Obama, the US president, has led an international welcome for Libya's new interim leaders at the UN, promising that NATO would carry on with air strikes while civilians are "threatened".
With the new Libyan flag flying at the UN headquarters in new York on Tuesday, interim government leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil thanked all nations who aided with the "success of the Libyan revolution" which he said had left at least 25,000 people dead.
Al Jazeera correspondent Mike Hanna, reporting from New York, described the UN welcome as "very significant" and noted how much the international image of Libya has changed.....
Also see:
Obama Praises Libya’s Post-Qaddafi Leaders at U.N.
By Helene Cooper, New York Times, September 20, 2011, 1:06 PM ET
President Obama met the transitional leader for the first time on Tuesday, and extolled what he called the Libyan people’s successful struggle to depose Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
Al Jazeera, September 20, 2011
Burhanuddin Rabbani, president during Mujahiddeen rule, was leading country's peace efforts to reach out to Taliban.
.....Al Jazeera's Abdullah Shahood, reporting from Kabul, said Rabbani was meeting with a Taliban delegation at his home when the attack happened. "I just spoke to one of the High Peace Council members near Rabbani's home," said Shahood. "He said at the meeting with a Taliban delegation, one of the members approached him to try to shake hands and detonated his explosives that he had hidden in his turban."
The latest in a series of targeted killings, Rabbani's is the most high-profile political assassination since 2001....
By Matthew Yglesias, Thinkprogress.org, September 19, 2011
I wrote yesterday that there was no particular boom in construction of new homes during the “housing boom” of the aughts. This prompted several correspondents to write that their may not have been an unprecedented boom in new starts, but I need to consider the boom in home sizes. Again, though, while home sizes certainly increased they didn’t increase at any kind of unusual rate. The Census Bureau has convenient data (PDF) going back to the 1970s:.....
By Omar Chatriwala, ForeignPolicy.com, September 19, 2011
Is the rapidly expanding Middle East satellite television network and voice of the Arab Spring as independent as it claims?
By George Soros, for the New York Review of Books, September 15, 2011
....There is some similarity between the euro crisis and the subprime crisis that caused the crash of 2008. In each case a supposedly riskless asset—collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), based largely on mortgages, in 2008, and European government bonds now—lost some or all of their value.
Unfortunately the euro crisis is more intractable. In 2008 the US financial authorities that were needed to respond to the crisis were in place; at present in the eurozone one of these authorities, the common treasury, has yet to be brought into existence. This requires a political process involving a number of sovereign states. That is what has made the problem so severe. The political will to create a common European treasury was absent in the first place; and since the time when the euro was created the political cohesion of the European Union has greatly deteriorated. As a result there is no clearly visible solution to the euro crisis. In its absence the authorities have been trying to buy time.
In an ordinary financial crisis this tactic works: with the passage of time the panic subsides and confidence returns. But in this case time has been working against the authorities. Since the political will is missing, the problems continue to grow larger while the politics are also becoming more poisonous.....
The anniversary of the largest oil spill in American history passed with little notice this summer. On July 15, 2010, the ruptured BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico was finally sealed after gushing oil for nearly three months, but there were few stories to commemorate it a year later, owing in part to the headline-consuming hacking scandal that had broken out at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The occasion might have gone unnoticed even if there had been nothing to nudge it aside, because business-as-usual has returned with surprising speed to the Gulf of Mexico and to America.
A drilling moratorium imposed by President Obama was lifted last fall, tourists are back on the area’s beaches, commercial fishing has resumed, energy consumption is rising across the country, and BP has returned to the Gulf drilling scene—a well it owns was given the first permit after the moratorium was lifted. Tony Hayward, the BP chief executive who was forced to step down in October 2010, largely as a result of the disaster, has gotten his life back quite nicely, raising $2.18 billion earlier this summer for a new investment firm he has set up with the financier Nathaniel Rothschild.
The eleven workers who were killed at the ruptured well, and the 4.9 million barrels of oil that spilled, are slipping out of memory. The short-term environmental damage was not as catastrophic as feared, and the long-term impact—the toll the oil will take as it moves through the food chain of Gulf marine life—is not yet known. Yet the reports of the past year and anniversary-themed books on the disaster provide a trove of data that reveals how the oil and gas industry is as reckless and unaccountable as the too-big-to-fail banks that brought on the financial crisis of 2008. The BP disaster revealed the same problems—lax government regulation, corporate profits despite the risks, a fawning press—that characterized the financial meltdown. Big banks and big oil have more in common than their size.
From Faux News Paul Ryan (R-WI), the GOP head of the powerful House Appropriations Committee rejects any increased tax on millionaires, as Obama has proposed in his 'Warren Buffett Tax', calling it 'class warfare'. Warren Buffett has said it isn't fair that billionaires like him pay a lower percentage of taxes than middle income workers. This summer Ryan was caught by a Rutgers Professor being wined and dined by lobbyists in rich style in DC, with (2) - $350 bottles of French wine.
Does Ryan fear he might be reduced to being schmoozed with California wine instead of $350 bottles of expensive French wine?
There is mounting evidence of permits not being addressed properly, along with company gift-giving to local institutions in order to discourage criticism.
A great sadness is that our grandchildren may look at what has happened and, as E. O. Wilson has said, will know more about critical links between environment and health than any of us can ever imagine. while at the same time despise us for not protecting, in our generation and time, the quality of our air, our forests, and our water.
A couple of highlights from an Op-Ed piece in The Mining Journal of Marquette, MI.
Also see:
http://keweenawnow.blogspot.com/2011/09/protect-earth-2011-part-2-jessic...
for more in-depth information on current developments of the Kennecott/Rio Tinto mining operations in the Great Lake Basin, if interested in such matters.
In the continuing Dagblog tradition of highlighting great moments in Tennis..for Donal
ALBANY -- Dozens of scientists, including four from the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, warned Gov. Andrew Cuomo that it will be practically impossible for municipal drinking water systems to protect against chemicals used in natural gas hydraulic fracturing, also called hydrofracking.
Their letter to the governor, released Thursday, was signed by 59 experts from 18 states and seven foreign countries, included scientists from Cornell University, the State University College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and the State University at Stony Brook.
"We urge the state to reconsider its position that existing water filtration systems provide adequate protection against the risk of hydraulic fracturing, should materials from flow-back fluids migrate to lakes, reservoirs, or groundwater used for municipal water supplies," the letter states.
...
A copy of the letter can be found at the Green Blog: http://blog.timesunion.com/green
/
By Walter Hamilton, Los Angeles Times, September 15/16, 2011
The action by the Federal Reserve and central banks of Europe, England, Japan and Switzerland will give European banks ample access to dollars and ease concerns about ripple effects of Greece's debt crisis. Global stock markets rallied.
The Federal Reserve and four other central banks moved to inject billions of U.S. dollars into Europe's troubled banking system, giving a dose of confidence to investors who have grown worried about the ripple effects of the Greek debt crisis.
The coordinated action is intended to give large European banks ample access to dollars, thus heading off the risk of a lending crunch that could gum up the credit markets and worsen the global economy.
European banks, particularly in France, have had trouble raising dollars from U.S. investors and financial institutions, which are scared off by the Europeans' heavy exposure to Greece. European banks need the cash to make loans to their U.S. customers and repay their own dollar-denominated borrowings.
Central bankers are heeding lessons from the bankruptcy of Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc....
By Barry Meier, New York Times, September 15/16, 2011
In a troubling development for people with all-metal artificial hips, a registry that tracks orthopedic implants in Britain reported on Thursday that the failure rate of the devices was increasing.....
While the patients tracked by the British registry are not in the United States, doctors and patients here pay close attention to the registry’s findings because no such body exists in this country, where there is far greater use of artificial hips and knees...
There was already heightened concern in the United States about the all-metal hips. In the first six months of this year, the Food and Drug Administration received more reports about problems with the all-metal hips than it had in the previous four years combined, according to an analysis by The New York Times. In May, the F.D.A. took the unusual step of ordering producers of the devices to study how frequently they were failing and to examine the health implications for patients.....