US Army to spend $3 million on death rays
The American military's fascination with laser beams, plasma guns and death rays in general is demonstrated again today, with the announcement that it is to spend another $3.1 million (£1.9 million) on Laser Guided Energy (LGE) weapons.LGE is a new weapon technology in which a controllable high voltage electric charge can be guided by a laser through the atmosphere to induce "a range of effects" against "a variety of targets".
The company responsible for LGE, Applied Energetics, is currently touting LGE as a counter-IED system to help destroy roadside bombs from a safe distance.
All hail Private Thor of the US Army
LGE is described by Applied Energetics as 'man-made lightning', where an ultrashort pulse laser creates a conductive path in the atmosphere. This technology combines the accuracy of a laser beam with a "manageable lethality" that supposedly reduces the potential for inadvertent injury and collateral damage.
The company has already delivered a compact laser system specifically designed to enable the technology under a Government contract, and delivered a transportable laser system for field demonstration and testing.How to kill a coal plant
Found in comments
You don't need to close a coal plant to solve most of the problems associated with burning coal.
The only thing the coal is used for is to boil water.
We can boil water with natural gas just fine.
Just take out the coal grates and install gas burners.
Just like your kitchen stove or water heater---only larger.
Buildings, boilers, turbines, generators, transformers, controls, grid connections---all stay exactly the same.
If you burn natural gas, you get no sulphur or other acid rain producing chemicals in the emmissions, since NG is a gas, it is easy to remove them before it is used. You get no toxic heavy metal poisons. Since NG is already a gas---you get no unburned particulate emissions.
Natural gas is much easier to extract. No strip mines, no watershed pollution.
NG can be shipped by pipeline---no bulldozers, front loaders, trains, trucks and other equipment needed to handle it. Less pollution from those sources. Also, much less expense. And since NG is a gas, it can be shipped as nearly pure energy---coal on the other hand can contain up to as much as 40% contaminants---expensive mining and shipping and handling of contaminants that contain no energy--only pollution.
Natural gas is a fossil fuel that contains methane--CH4. Coal (energy containing portion) is pure carbon. When 1 ton of coal is burned---it becomes nearly 4 tons of CO2 released as emissions. When methane is burned, you burn 1 carbon atom and 4 hyrogen atoms. You get nearly twice the energy, and less than 1/4 the CO2. The methane in natural gas is exactly the same chemically as the methane in biomethane. When naturally produced methane goes into the atmosphere----it has 17 times the heat absorbing capacity of CO2. If we capture methane that would ordinarily escape into the atmosphere, for example, treating sewage, we need to treat sewage anyway----and mix it with fossil fuel natural gas----there will be no difference in performance, it is exactly the same stuff. However, we would be exchanging a high greenhouse effect gas(methane) for a much lower greenhouse effect gas(CO2). With a mix of anything over 6% biomethane----the entire greenhouse effect of the fossil fuel will be reduced by the exchange of methane for CO2 we get by mixing captured biomethane. The more biomethane we mix in(as a % of combustion fuel)----the greater the greenhouse effect is lowered.
We can use fossil fuel natural gas---and still reduce global warming if we do it right.
And if you don't believe in global warming----we have not sacrificed anything at all. We need to treat sewage, farm animal and plant waste anyway---all we've done is turn it into fuel as well.
We don't need to close coal burning electrical plants---all we need to do is change the fuel that they use.
Censoring the Voice of America
Why is it OK to broadcast terrorist propaganda but not taxpayer-funded media reports?( I believe there is a funding caveat against propagandizing the U.S. population from the budget. Comments were not kind.)
The purpose of VOA is for American Propaganda. I think this is the common ground for all of us here.
The VOA, strictly speaking from an unbiased 3rd person, is a government apparatus, for the purpose of turning citizens of another country against its government. You can justify it however you like, for as you know, history is written by the winner, and America might not be the winner of hearts, but is definitely the winners of war. But in the end, that's what it boils down to: Its propaganda that you believe in, streamed to another person's nation, hoping that those people would revolt against the current government that your country at the moment have a conflict of interest.
So in my perspective, your article is similar in degree to those people who want to skirt the Miranda rights just so police have an easier time convicting felons.
This might be true, but the reason America is great nation it is, despite all its flaws, is because of exactly these things, things that in peace time look outdated and inconvenient, but are the control points which secures it as the most democratic nation, where the law takes care of the people with a forward thinking mechanism.
ARMSTRONG: Persuasive politics
A brand new National Security Council directed the State Department to respond to the "coordinated psychological, political and economic measures designed to undermine non-Communist elements in all countries." The psychological struggle of the Cold War is lost by those who remember only the military confrontation. The "predominant aspect of the new diplomacy," wrote a young Henry Kissinger, "is its psychological dimension." But by the late 1960's, as the borders of the most important contested spaces were settled, the strategic value of this "new diplomacy" gave way to private, closed door diplomacy.
The result was the transformation of what is now known as public diplomacy from a national security imperative aggressively targeting foreign public opinion to something more resembling a passive "beauty contest." While Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs James Glassman has been effective in resurrecting public diplomacy, more must be done. Sixty years after the Act was passed, rumor and disinformation play an even greater role in today's 24/7 global information environment. First impressions matter more than ever and perceptions make or break confidence in everything from financial markets to issues of global health. The wealth of information is surpassed only by the poverty of attention to digest it. If the media is the oxygen of the terrorist, it is also the oxygen of the counterterrorist. ......................
Rebuilding America's arsenal of persuasion requires re-examining the law that affects how the government engages the world. Clouded today by misinformation in the irony of ironies, it is time to revisit Smith-Mundt and strip away years of distortions and understand its intended purposes.
Matt Armstrong is a principal at Armstrong Strategic Insights GroupBlogroll - Full
Glycine is an amino acid found in proteins, the sophisticated molecules that organisms use to build and maintain their systems.
It was detected in the material ejected from Comet Wild-2 in 2004 and grabbed by Nasa's Stardust probe
CowBoss' News
Sissy Farmer, Joel Salatin, speaks out
http://thebovine.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/sissy-farmer-joel-salatin-speaks-out
CowBoss
Sunday August 16, 2009, 10:05 am
“….One of our bedrock values is that we’re trying to use nature as a template in a commercial domestic production model. Look, for example, at herbivores. They don’t eat fermented forage, like silage, they don’t eat grain, and they certainly don’t eat chicken manure, dead chickens or dead cows [all common food in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations].
So, if we’re going to raise herbivores, we’re going to not feed those kinds of things to them. We’re also going to look at herds of herbivores in nature and determine how they live, what they eat, and what they do.
What we noticed is they don’t spread out over a pasture; they’re mobbed up for predator protection. They move every day to a new spot, and new grass, and away from yesterdays toilet area. They mow. They’re not eating grain like in a feed lot. So when you start taking those principles, like a pattern or a template, and start laying them down on domestic production then that pushes us. How can we get them in a mob? We use electric fencing and we move them everyday to a new spot. All that this is is simply trying to duplicate what buffalo, wolves, fire, and Native Americans were doing for a millennia before Europeans came. That’s all it is. That model, that technique, is what built the fertile prairies that we’re still exploiting in the grain basket of America.
Why do you think this idea of biomimicry is not more widely espoused?
Hubris. I think it’s just our human arrogance and pride that we think we can outfox nature. We’ve gotta understand that in our western culture we are a product of fragmentation, compartmentalization, systemization, disconnectedness, and individualism. All of that essentially says there’s no moral or ethical parameter on what I can innovate. So we’ve innovated things that we cannot physically, spiritually, or emotionally metabolize. We’ve innovated chemicals that make three legged salamanders and unfertile frogs..... more at site, please visit
Health care debate creates new diseases
The Center for Disease Control has identified a new strain of the Mad Cow Disease called Insane Donkey Virus running rampant among elected officials, Obama Administration personnel and high profile personalities. The CDC believes recent debate over health-care reform worsens symptoms which include spewing gibberish, having a lame brain, loss of rationale, loss of perspective, break from reality and the uncanny ability to blow smoke. Those inflicted are easily identified, as they also suffer from Hoof-n-Mouth Disease.Coroners 'should test for CJD to monitor spread of mad cow disease in humans'
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1207596/Coroners-test-CJD-monitor-spread-mad-cow-disease-humans.html?ITO=1490#ixzz0OhGrvKqz
Food processors' spraying leaves west Michigan wells contaminated
But erasing water woes a tough taskFENNVILLE -- John Dekker feels like he's camping out in his own home. He showers with bottled water and drags his laundry to a Laundromat. He can't sell his house without disclosing its glaring flaw -- his well is contaminated.
Neighbor Kari Craton's fingernails turned orange; her appliances were destroyed. Diana Bennett's garden is useless.
Some 50 families live near a plume of groundwater contaminated with metals that spread from the local Birds Eye processing plant. At a nearby Minute Maid juice plant, there's another plume.
In rural west Michigan, food processors have sprayed so much wastewater onto fields that heavy metals seeped into groundwater, contaminating wells. State officials have known of the polluting for at least a decade but, residents complain, moved slowly.
The list of tainted sites keeps growing. And the contamination plumes continue to spread as the Department of Environmental Quality and companies argue behind closed doors over what must be done. Frustrated residents say they're bearing the costs -- altered lives and fear of the water that pours from their taps -- even as state and industry officials say there's no acute health threat. "You're living with all these problems, but you can't get out," Craton said.
Kowtowing to Monsanto still leaves a nasty aftertaste
Rather than ceding control to biotech companies, the government must take full charge of food policyRSPCA's Supermarket Animal Welfare Competition
http://www.thebeefsite.com/news/28166/rspcas-supermarket-animal-welfare-competition
Minister warned over 'UK Roswell'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8202157.stm
A former head of the armed forces told the defence secretary a UFO claim known as Britain's Roswell could be a "banana skin", newly released files show.
In 1985 Lord Hill-Norton wrote to Michael Heseltine about the "Rendlesham incident" in 1980, when US airmen in Suffolk said they saw strange lights.
He said an unauthorised aircraft may have entered and left UK airspace.
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