3 Jan - Hope and Secrets

500 Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of "Man-Made" Global Warming

As Galileo was to the Catholic Church, anthropogenic climate change skeptics are to the Church of Settled Science

JANUARY 2, 2010 · 4 COMMENTS

Newsmaker of the year: The power player

As a physicist, he found a way to capture atoms and won a Nobel prize. Now he is marshalling scientists and engineers to transform the world's biggest energy economy. Eric Hand profiles the US energy secretary, Nature's Newsmaker of the Year.

Eric Hand

Farms-to-forest plan worries Vilsack

Plant less food, starve the people who are today benefiting from the best AG system in the world. That's bright! Then we need less food for fewer people. That's their idea of success? We're already losing millions of acres a year to developement, how much can we afford to lose in the future because when it's gone, it's gone!

"Swine flu vaccine part of depopulation agenda"

Northeast, Mid-Atlantic States Set Low-carbon Goal

Pope Benedict used his traditional New Year address on Friday to call on people to change their lifestyles to save the planet, saying environmental responsibility was essential for global peace.

Pakistan's government came under renewed pressure on Saturday to bring stability to the country after a suicide bombing at a volleyball game -- one of the worst attacks in more than two years -- killed at least 89 people.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSSGE5BU0CQ20100102
Underscoring public discontent with rising violence, the southern city of Karachi, the country's biggest and its commercial capital, was gripped by a strike on Friday.It was called by religious and political leaders after a suicide bomber killed 43 people at a religious procession of thousands on Monday. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility and threatened more attacks.

Violence has surged since army troops launched a major offensive against al-Qaeda-linked militants South Waziristan, suggesting crackdowns will not be enough to stabilize Pakistan.
Militants have killed hundreds of people since mid-October.
Analysts say that even if the government scores military defeats, it can only succeed in the long term if it wins the confidence of millions of Pakistanis suffering from poverty and lack of basis services such as electricity.

Shooting Handcuffed Children

Why Obama Must Continue Releasing Yemenis From Guantánamo
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/12/31/why-obama-must-continue-releasing-yemenis-from-guantanamo
The weekend before Christmas, 12 prisoners were released from Guantánamo. Yemenis make up nearly half of the remaining 198 prisoners in Guantánamo, and until these six men were repatriated, only 16 Yemenis had been freed from Guantánamo throughout the prison’s long history.

When it came to releasing Ali Ahmed, the government balked, and administration officials told the New York Times in October that, “Even if Mr. Ahmed was not dangerous in 2002 … Guantánamo itself might have radicalized him, exposing him to militants and embittering him against the United States.”

As I explained at the time, “only at Guantánamo can fear trump justice to such an alarming degree” that, “if [the officials’] rationale for not releasing any of the Yemenis from Guantánamo was extended to the US prison system, it would mean that no prisoner would ever be released at the end of their sentence, because prison ‘might have radicalized’ them, and also, of course, that it would lead to no prisoner ever being released from Guantánamo.”

In the end, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed was released — primarily, it seems, because Judge Kessler “appeared to be losing patience with the delay in complying with her May 11 release order,” and was about to criticize the government openly — and not because officials had truly considered the flawed basis of their unwillingness to release him. As a result, the release of six more Yemenis on the weekend of December 19-20 was a significant breakthrough, as it represented the first time that the Obama administration had, of its own volition, released Yemenis cleared by its own interagency Task Force.
As I hope to demonstrate below, in profiles of these six men, the administration’s reticence was unjustified, as their stories represent a cross-section of the horrendous mistakes made by the Bush administration in its search for “terrorists” to imprison without rights at Guantánamo, and also because they strongly suggest that other innocent Yemenis continue to be detained.

The importance of this should not be overlooked, especially because, in the wake of the failed bomb plot on a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day, the connections allegedly established by the would-be bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, with terrorists in Yemen has prompted lawmakers in the US to declare that no more Yemenis should be released from Guantánamo.

These claims now threaten to spiral out of control, with several media outlets reporting that two former Guantánamo prisoners from Saudi Arabia have assumed leadership positions in an al-Qaeda-inspired group, al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula, which has claimed responsibility for the failed attack, even though the Obama administration “remains cautious in linking” Abdulmutallab to al-Qaeda, and even though drawing connections between released Saudis and released Yemenis has no sound basis, as the Yemeni authorities stated categorically in October that none of the 16 Yemenis returned from Guantánamo between 2004 and 2008 had joined terrorist groups after their eventual release from Yemeni custody.

No, We're Not a Broken People
http://antemedius.com/content/no-were-not-broken-people
By David Swanson

In 2004 I began speaking at rallies and forums around the country on issues of peace and justice, something I've done off-and-on ever since. Up through 2008, it was extremely unusual for questions from the audience to consist of pure defeatism. In 2009, it was rare to get through a Q&A session without being asked what the point was of trying.

And the defeatism is so contagious that it will be hard for me to make it through 2010 if people don't shut up about how doomed we are. If current trends continue, by 2011 the only people showing up at forums on peace and justice will all be old enough to tell my grandparents they're too young to understand how pointless it is to try. And my grandparents are dead.
One of the most insightful and useful articles I've read this year is Bruce Levine's "Are Americans a Broken People?" published by Alternet. Levine diagnoses us as abused citizens and points out that the more we learn about how badly we're being abused by our government, the less able we are to push back. We're ashamed of our subservience, and every new report of it increases it.

Levine finds causes of our disempowerment in financial stress, social isolation, institutions of higher education that train submissiveness, the treating of rebelliousness with pharmaceuticals, the damaging effects of television, and the replacement of citizenship with consumerism.

Levine finds solutions in "encouragement, small victories, models of courageous behaviors." We don't need to be told what's wrong, he says. We need the morale boost of seeing people succeed in doing what's right.
Levine offers no analysis of why we are lacking in encouragement, small victories, or models of courageous behaviors. I believe the answer has more to do with our communications system than anything else, which means that the solution cannot simply be for you or I as isolated individuals to act courageously -- which is not to say that we shouldn't.

We've been told for years that we shouldn't impeach criminal officials, but wait and replace them in an election. Now we're told that we shouldn't prosecute their crimes, but elect people who might not commit all of them as severely. And we're told to support our congress members in dumping all of our resources into Wall Street, wars, and health insurance corporations in order to support the president, as if our duty is to him, rather then his duty being to the laws written by our representatives. There are more people refusing to do their civic duty right now out of loyalty to the president than out of discouragement in efforts to pressure congress. But those two groups combined dominate the handful of us belonging to neither of them. We need to recruit converts away from both despair and presidentialism with morale boosts, better analysis, or both.
Some of the local victories I've heard about, such as victories in counter-recruitment (keeping military testing out of schools, closing recruiting stations, barring recruiters from school grounds, etc.) amount to progress on the national level when they are added together. But nobody adds them together.
Our independent media is too much a follower of the corporate media, spinning its stories in a different way, not covering the stories that no one else has covered. When we hear of successes, they are often disguised as something else. When a policy decision follows public pressure, the pressure is left out of the story. Politicians give other reasons for their actions, and stenographic reporters report them. And, of course, when a policy decision has not been made yet, the media instruct everyone not to imagine they can have any effective input.
The U.S. Army recently opened a murderous video arcade recruitment center in a shopping mall near Philadelphia, where 13-year-olds learn how much fun it can be to pretend to be in the Army. Picketing and civil disobedience generated such bad press that the Army began talking about closing the place down.
Only the Army didn't credit the protesters with that possible success. The Army claimed it didn't need the "Army Experience Center" any more, given the boost in recruitment from the lousy economy. This was transparent nonsense, given the Army's continued investment in all sorts of other recruitment tools, and yet some of the very activists responsible for the AEC's poor performance quoted the Army's bogus explanation.
When we forced U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign, he was replaced with someone just as bad, and yet we had done something very interesting in a very interesting way, with the pressure of hearings, independent media, and a legislative push for impeachment.
We should be studying such successes for both morale and strategy. The same goes for keeping Social Security alive thus far. The same goes for keeping the United States (or Israel) from bombing Iran yet. The same goes for having made the United Nations refuse legal cover for the invasion of Iraq, a step that may yet make possible the criminal prosecution of that war's architects.
We have to be the media. We have to report on our successes. (I will post any good stories you send me at http://afterdowningstreet.org ) We have to use the media. We have to actively search out the sorts of stories we want to learn about. We have to reform the media, bust the monopolies, provide equal access, support community and public and independent outlets. We have to build organizations that create good media and press independently and democratically for good media reforms. We have to stop supporting bad media in any way. Don't buy it. Don't buy ads in it. Don't participate in it. Put everything into enlarging good outlets that report the news.


And the children shall lead them?
http://futura.edublogs.org/2009/12/04/and-children-shall-lead-them
How often do students not want an assignment to end?

In the blogosphere, we often talk about the transformative power of assignments that ignite student passions and connect them to a global audience, and the importance a tool like blogging can play in that.

In this case, Christian Long’s Alice Project  wasn’t just about blogging but allowing students to discover, write about, and share their ideas and understanding with one another.  What tremendous power in giving students the reins to discover their own understanding.   But who can describe the power of it better than students who have experienced that personally?

In her post, “Time to Wake Up,“  Melissa, a student in Christian Long’s Alice Project reflects on the end of their blogging assignment, and the poignancy of her feelings about it are palpable:

Vatican reveals Secret Archives
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/vaticancityandholysee/6917990/Vatican-reveals-Secret-Archives.html

 Son of Alex Constantine's Blacklist 

Headlines

• Two Fake Books on the Kennedy Assassination, Ultimate Sacrifice & Legacy of Secrecy, Move the Onus from CIA to Mafia
• Another Mega-Confabulating Psyop Artist on the Internet
• Give Churches a Choice: Give Up Tax Exempt Status or Give Up Lobbying
• Sarah Palin’s Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories
• Consumer Group Responds to Governor Schwarzenegger’s Incorrect Claims About the Impact of Medical Malpractice Caps
• Lockerbie Megrahi Lifespan Row
• Racial Politics, Internet Fraud & the "Mayor of West Oakland"
• GOP Rep. Virginia Foxx used the Phrase “Tar Baby” on the House Floor
• Who Will Investigate CIA/RAND/APA Torture “Workshop”?
• Anti-Tea Party Tide Turning Bloody
• Benito Mussolini Regarded Adolf Hitler as a ‘Sentimentalist’
• A Marxist Perspective on Ponzi Capitalism and the Deepening Moral Crisis
• CIA ‘Ran Secret Prison for Al-Qaeda’ in Lithuanian Riding School
• Paying Off The Warlords
• Tea-Party “Conservative” Threatens Repeat of Ft. Hood at Michigan Newspaper
• Liberia’s Charles Taylor & the CIA
• MIND CONTROL: DEBKAFILE, AN ISRAELI PSYOP, MAKES YOU DUMBER
• MOVIE: Saudi Prince Nayef Al-Shaalan, International Cocaine Trafficker
• Obama’s DOJ Against Siegelman Appeal to Supreme Court
• Men Sue Mormon Church, Boy Scouts over Alleged Sex Abuse in 1970s

Mufti Usmani Holds Blackwater Responsible for Ashura Bomb Blast

Also see: “American Sponsorship of Global Terrorism,” and “USAID

A Majority of GOP Voters Think ACORN Stole the ‘08 Election for Obama

http://blogs.ajc.com/political-insider-jim-galloway/2009/11/19/a-majority-of-gop-voters-think-acorn-stole-the-08-election-for-obama/

Greg Craig’s Ties to Republican PR Firm

Also see: Karl Rove’s buddy resigns post as WH

Invetech designs 3D bio-printer for human tissue repair
http://www.tgdaily.com/general-sciences-features/45253-invetech-designs-3d-bio-printer-for-human-tissue-repair

Invetech has designed a 3D bio-printer that will be used by scientists to advance human tissue repair and organ replacement.
The first production model has already been delivered to Organovo, which is expected to supply the system to institutions and medical research centers around the world.
"Scientists and engineers can use the 3D bio printers to enable placing cells of almost any type into a desired pattern in 3D. Researchers can place liver cells on a preformed scaffold, support kidney cells with a co-printed scaffold, or form adjacent layers of epithelial and stromal soft tissue that grow into a mature tooth," explained Organovo CEO Keith Murphy.

 Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/6847227/Questions-over-business-deals-of-UN-climate-change-guru-Dr-Rajendra-Pachauri.html

  The head of the UN's climate change panel - Dr Rajendra Pachauri - is accused of making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies.

No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.

Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.

What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.

These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.

Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’