A.K. Dewdney

Alexander Keewatin (A.K.) Dewdney, a professor of computer science at the University of Western Ontario, had a Computer Recreations column in Scientific American. He writes lots of books about math and science and the environment and computers and logic and reason and bad science. His latest book, Beyond Reason, tells how, despite media spin, there are things that are beyond our ability to know or do or make, like squaring the circle or building perpetual motion machines or predicting the future of chaotic systems. The guy really knows a lot.

His analysis of cell phone calls from airliners, such as those we all heard about on 9/11/2001, is eye opening.

Under the weight of evidence that the cellphone (not airfone) calls were essentially impossible as described by the Bush White House and the major media on the day in question, we have no alternative but to give serious consideration to the operational possibilities, as outlined here.

And what he outlines "here" is the way the calls could have been faked.

Your Tax Dollars at Work, Defending Liberty, Spreading Democracy

Riverbend reports this intriguing story from Iraq TV—several channels, in fact:

“The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians do not comply with the orders of the army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.”

This is the same army and police that US forces have trained— for, hmmm, is it three years now?—to maintain security in Iraq. Mission Accomplished!

Prime numbers linked to Reinman Geometry

And somehow, the answer is 42.

I had to check the date on this to make sure it wasn't April 1...but I still think someone is having too much fun here:

Using the connection, Keating and Snaith not only explained why the answer to life, the universe and the third moment of the Riemann zeta function should be 42, but also provided a formula to predict all the numbers in the sequence. Prior to this breakthrough, the evidence for a connection between quantum physics and the primes was based solely on interesting statistical comparisons. But mathematicians are very suspicious of statistics. We like things to be exact. Keating and Snaith had used physics to make a very precise prediction that left no room for the power of statistics to see patterns where there are none.

70 tons of Radioactive Tank

The San Francisco Bay View tells all you really need to know about "depleted" uranium weapons used by the US at home and abroad.

"In conclusion," Dr. Rokke urged, "the president of the United States, George W. Bush, and the prime minister of Great Britain, Tony Blair, must acknowledge and accept responsibility for willful use of illegal uranium munitions - their own "dirty bombs" - resulting in adverse health and environmental effects."

"President Bush and Prime Minister Blair also should order:

1) medical care for all casualties,

2) thorough environmental remediation,

3) immediate cessation of retaliation against all of us who demand compliance with medical care and environmental remediation requirements,

4) and ban the future use of depleted uranium munitions," Dr. Rokke concluded.

Bush may have started World War III

Retired Command Sergeant Major Eric Haney, founder of Delta Force, has this to say:

Q: What's your assessment of the war in Iraq?

A: Utter debacle. But it had to be from the very first. The reasons were wrong. The reasons of this administration for taking this nation to war were not what they stated. (Army Gen.) Tommy Franks was brow-beaten and ... pursued warfare that he knew strategically was wrong in the long term. That's why he retired immediately afterward. His own staff could tell him what was going to happen afterward.

We have fomented civil war in Iraq. We have probably fomented internecine war in the Muslim world between the Shias and the Sunnis, and I think Bush may well have started the third world war, all for their own personal policies.

....

Q: What do you make of the torture debate? Cheney ...

A: (Interrupting) That's Cheney's pursuit. The only reason anyone tortures is because they like to do it. It's about vengeance, it's about revenge, or it's about cover-up. You don't gain intelligence that way. Everyone in the world knows that. It's worse than small-minded, and look what it does.

The Worst Job In the West Bank

This April 3, 2006 Newsweek article, about the poor guy who was in jail when he was named Palestinian Authority's next Finance Minister, has hidden within its first paragraph this tidy little tidbit:

Released a week ago, Abdel-Razeq says he hasn't yet had time to sift through the World Bank's dire projections for 2006, warning of an economic downturn equivalent to the Great Depression.

Does this mean the World Bank forcasts a world-wide economic downturn, equivalent to the Great Depression? Or is it a Palestinian Great Depression? Seems like an odd way to put it. Oddly enough, the World Bank projections that I've found say nothing like this..but again, they project falling world-wide oil prices through 2010...

CNN.com QuickVote

Apparently the readers of CNN.com don't think the US Government has come clean over 911...

Do you agree with Charlie Sheen that the U.S. government covered up the real events of the 9/11 attacks?

Yes		83%	44823 votes
No		17%	9106 votes
Total: 53929 votes

American-Turkish Council—What the heck is this?

Ever heard of this? Me neither. Madsen's report is doing a special report on this group. There seems to be a bunch of mid-Asia-related associations made up of heavy hitters from US business and government—as if there's a difference.

Here's the Wikipedia entry of the American-Turkish Council, containing this intriguing lineup from last year:

According to its 2005 annual report, current ATC board members include:

1. Brent Scowcroft, the board chairman and former national security adviser for George H. W. Bush
2. George Perlman of Lockheed Martin
3. Elizabeth Avery of Pepsico
4. Ozer Baysal of Pfizer
5. Andy Button of Boeing
6. Richard K. Douglas of General Electric
7. Sherry Grandjean of Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation
8. John R. Miller of Raytheon
9. Selig A. Taubenblatt of Bechtel
   

And this spicy little tidbit:

The ATC is where former Ambassador Joseph Wilson met his future wife and CIA operative, Valerie Plame, leading some to speculate Plame's CIA front company, Brewster-Jennings, was monitoring the same alleged nuclear trafficking of the ATC as Sibel Edmonds.

Here's a story from last year in www.onlinejournal.org containing another rogue's gallery:

ATC is joined in the creation of the New EuroAsia by the American Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce (AACC). AACC's Honorary Council of Advisors just happens to have Scowcroft and the following persons of significance: Henry Kissinger, Zibigniew Brezinski, Lloyd Benston, John Sununu and James Baker III. Former Council members include Dick Cheney and Richard Armitage, former undersecretary of state. Board of trustee members include media-overkill subject Richard Perle of AEI, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, and Frank Verrastro of CSIS.

The US Kazakhstan Business Association (UKBA) features, among others, benefactors and members ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhillips, Lockheed Martin, and Halliburton.

Here's a exceedingly eager and friendly speech of Wolfowitz's to the American-Turkish Council from early 2001—before 911. I imagine things cooled off greatly after Turkey refused to allow US planes to attack Iraq from Turkish bases, or even to overfly Turkish land.

Madsen also seem to think the next Neocon Oilrush is going to be in the Gulf of Guinea in Africa.

I also bet that, like me, you didn't know this, either. (More from the Wikipedia:)

Equatorial Guinea now has the second highest per capita income in the world, after Luxembourg

And:

A Senate report in 2004 found that Riggs Bank helped top officials of Equatorial Guinea steal hundreds of millions of dollars in oil revenues.

Three Choices

In this article Robert Parry gives three alternate courses the US could take. Two involve confrontations here at home that seem so unlikely as to be unfaceable—forcing Bush to resign, or having a Democratic congress impeach him—but Parry finds the third—capitulating with three more years of Bush rule—to be much more dangerous.

Ironically then, a U.S. attack on Iran to prevent its hypothetical development of nuclear weapons in a decade or so could lead to the rapid collapse of the Musharraf government and put Pakistan’s existing nuclear arsenal in the hands of radical Pakistani Muslims, with close ties to Osama bin-Laden’s al-Qaeda.

Bush’s air strikes against Iran also could lead to retaliation by Tehran against U.S. troops in neighboring Iraq. With close ties to Iraq’s new Shiite-dominated government, Iran could instigate bloody reprisals against American soldiers, including vulnerable U.S. trainers working inside the new Iraqi security forces.

Iran and angry Arab states could play the oil card, too, slashing American supplies or at least driving the prices up to levels that would endanger the U.S. economy. Already, some Arab oil ministries are quietly shifting some of their oil trading from dollars to euros, a transition that could further weaken the dollar and force a nasty restructuring of the American economy.

In short, the “safe” political option – to let Bush operate much as he has since Sept. 11, 2001 – has consequences that may be more dangerous than the other two more confrontational options.

Nontransitive dice -

This is about a group of four dice. You let your opponent pick one. You pick one of the rest. You each roll your die 10 or more time. You can win nearly every time. Check it out.

Ivars Peterson says no matter which die your opponent chooses, if you pick the right one of the remaining three, you have a 2/3 chance of winning...This sort of thing is unfathomable to me.

I remember Peterson from his weekly articles in Science News throughout the 80s and 90s. The guy knows math.

Another in the endless series of recent really frightening articles

James Wolcott | 'Worse than a Fool'

Wolcott, from Vanity Fair, tells of Richard Rainwater, who's made billions from previous "cataclysms"—Houston real estate and oil stocks—but the one he see coming this time makes even him nervous.

By the way, the "Worse than a Fool" in the title refers to someone other than Mr. Rainwater. Someone whose approval rating is in the 30s right now...

New Orleans today

Firedoglake reports a striking story from a victim in New Orleans.

"...Sometimes I feel so damned alone, even with all these people out there who say they are so concerned about what is going on. That kind of concern is nice but it doesn’t really do anything. I’ve come across a couple of volunteer groups, some helping to feed people, some actually helping to fix houses. That, in my opinion is true concern, which develops into action.

"So, my fellow americans, what have you been doing for the past six months? What are you doing today? How about a phone call? How about a little legal help. As sure as Katrina, I can’t afford a lawyer. How about a little pressure on the federal government not just to answer for their lack of action, but to actually get up and do something. Everytime there’s a war overseas, I see people marching against it. Why don’t I see anyone marching against this war?"

Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwald: Administration tells Congress (again) - We won't abide by your "laws"

By a particularly circuitous route, I arrived at this blog, which has a blindingly clear explanation of the sheer lawlessness, by design, of the Bush Administration.

Here's an excerpt:

Thus, Sen. DeWine can pass his cute little bill purporting to require oversight, or Sen. Specter can pass his, or they can do nothing and leave FISA in place. None of that matters, because no matter what Congress or even the President do with regard to the law, the law does not restrict what the President can do in any way. They are telling the Congress to its face that all of the grand debates it is having and the negotiations it is conducting are all irrelevant farces, because no matter what happens, the President retains unlimited power and nothing that Congress does can affect that power in any way.

Ho Hum, Another day, Same Old Stuff

Here's a great rundown of some US sponsored terrorism. Check the March 24, 2006 entry. Heck, check the rest as well. It's all incredible.

And here's Bush's latest illegal flaunting of the constitution—

"In the statement, Bush said that he did not consider himself bound to tell Congress how the Patriot Act powers were being used and that, despite the law's requirements, he could withhold the information if he decided that disclosure would "impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties."

Decline and fall

Salon.com reviews Kevin Phillips's new book, "American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century."

Yes, you have to click through a tiny flash commercial to read it. Do it anyway. It's depressing, but it's worth it.

Scientists Find Big Afghan Oil Resources

Surprise!

Nearly 1.6 billion barrels of oil, mostly in the Afghan-Tajik Basin, and about 15.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, mainly in the Amu Darya Basin, could be tapped, said the

U.S. Geological Survey and Afghanistan's Ministry of Mines and Industry.

Storm-battered parish considers hired guns

Just what we need—hired mercenaries replacing police here in the US.

Three Blackwater guards working with FEMA helped patrol a security checkpoint with the deputies, and when the department got a call about a bar fight nearby that could involve a gun, some of the contractors came along to help, said Lt. Jefferson Lee, a 21-year veteran of the department. "They were making $300 a day, but those guys had my back."

The proposal to work with DynCorp would be a more permanent solution, lasting up to three years. Under the plan, DynCorp employees working for the sheriff's department would take over security at several FEMA trailer sites and establish three highway checkpoints. The DynCorp guards would report directly to a sheriff's deputy, who would be on site to supervise them, said Tufaro.

The department did not hold a competition before recommending DynCorp for the work but would consider other contactors if FEMA recommended it, said Tufaro. The department thinks DynCorp is the cheapest alternative, noting that it would charge less than $700 per day, compared with the $950 a day charged by Blackwater, he said.

You'd think the reason hired mercenaries would be called in might be because there are insufficient police, right? And the reason there'd be insufficient police would be, oh, maybe, because there's insufficient money? So where does the money come to pay DynCorp or Blackwater either $950 or $700 per day? Is that really cheaper than paying real police, who are used to dealing with civilians instead of armies?

A little farther along we find the answer...

Tufaro [of the Sherriff's department] thinks the parish has the solution: DynCorp International LLC, the Texas company that provided personal security to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and is one of the largest security contractors in Iraq. If the Federal Emergency Management Agency approves the sheriff's department's proposal, which would cost $70 million over three years, up to 100 DynCorp employees would be deputized to be make arrests, carry weapons, and dress in the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Department khaki and black uniforms.

Let's think now. $70M over three years for up to 100 employees. That's $233,333 per year per employee. Such a deal!

(...)

To Tufaro and other law enforcement officials, St. Bernard Parish is facing an emergency. Money dried up so fast after Katrina hit that Sheriff Jack Stephens, an imposing, 6-foot-4-inch New Orleans native, took out a loan of more than $4 million on behalf of the department, which he says he would be held personally responsible for if he left office before its repayment. "It is what I had to do," he said.

(...)

But while the plan is for the DynCorp employees to eat and live with the other deputies in the same trailer camp, the hired guns would earn "significantly more" than the $18,000 annual salary of an entry-level deputy and the $30,000-a-year salary of a seasoned officer.

Police would be cheaper. Just like outsourcing military jobs in Iraq, we end up paying more—and frequently gets worse service.

From Kurt Nimmo's blog about mercenaries:

Now law enforcement is increasingly militarized and military duties are jobbed out to the likes of DynCorp and Blackwater. “These guys run loose in this country [Iraq] and do stupid stuff. There’s no authority over them, so you can’t come down on them hard when they escalate force,” Brigadier General Karl Horst, deputy commander of the Third Infantry Division in charge of security in Baghdad, complained in September, 2005. “They shoot people, and someone else has to deal with the aftermath. It happens all over the place.”

The whole blog entry is mind-boggling. Read it.

Things are heating up

Here are a couple of hot stories:

In Iraq "...a security contractor working for a private ccompany possesed explosives which were found in his car..."(*)

Meanwhile, Japanese and US researchers say "Capsaicin, which makes peppers hot, can cause prostate cancer cells to kill themselves, U.S. and Japanese researchers said on Wednesday."(*)

Rigorous Intuition

Jeff Wells's latest couple of posts, Innoculation and Leprosy Treatment, are well worth reading—as are the rest of his enormous blog.

Dahr Jamail | Iraq: Permanent US Colony

This cannot be said often enough. Here is what your tax dollars (billions and billionsof them) are constructing in Iraq at this very minute:

At Camp Anaconda, located in al-Anbar province where resistance is fierce, the occupation forces live in air-conditioned units where plans are being drawn up to run internet, cable television and overseas telephone access to them.

The thousands of civilian contractors live at the base in a section called "KBR-land," and there is a hospital where doctors carry out 400 surgeries every month on wounded troops.

Air Force officials on the base claim the runway there is one of the busiest in the world, where unmanned Predator drones take off carrying their Hellfire missiles, along with F-16's, C-130's, helicopters, and countless others, as the bases houses over 250 aircraft.

If troops aren't up for the rather lavish dinners served by "Third Country Nationals" from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh who work for slave wages, they can visit the Burger King, Pizza Hut, Popeye's or Subway, then wash it down with a mocha from the Starbucks. Occupying 15 square miles of Iraq, the base boasts two swimming pools (not the plastic inflatable type), a gym, mini-golf course and first-run movie theater.

Camp Victory near Baghdad Airport, which - according to a reporter for Mother Jones magazine - when complete will be twice the size of Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo. The Kosovo base is currently one of the largest overseas bases built since the war in Vietnam.

Camp Liberty is adjacent to Camp Victory - where soldiers even compete in their own triathlons. "The course, longer than 140 total miles, spanned several bases in the greater Camp Victory area in west Baghdad," says a news article on a DOD web site.

More recently, on May 22 of last year, US military commanders announced that they would consolidate troops into four large air bases. It was announced at this time that while buildings were being made of concrete instead of the usual metal trailers and tin-sheathed buildings, military officers working on the plan "said the consolidation plan was not meant to establish a permanent US military presence in Iraq."

Mission Accomplished.

Lessons of Iraq War Start With US History

Howard Zinn reminds us that Presidents lie, and our succeptibility to their lies is proportional to our ignorance of history.

NASA - Solar Storm Warning

It could be 2010. It could be 2012. But some solar experts who believe they've figured out the mechanism behind solar sun spot recycling from one sunspot cycle to the next think the peak of the upcoming sun spot cycle may be as intense as the famously powerful one in 1958, when auroras were seen three time in Mexico.

AutoStitch

AutoStitch
looks like a miracle program for stitching together photo murals. I'll have to try the demo and see if it works as good as my eye and Photoshop.

Finally! The scoop on Sandia Ray Gun Weapons!

I heard about it last year, but I could never quite track down the straight scoop—Until now.

I was a little concerned that this ray gun might be dangerous, but don't worry! The 95 GHz beam only penetrates 1/64 of an inch into your skin, just deep enough to reach those tender nerve endings, so your involuntary pain receptors take over. Remember, this is billed as a non-lethal directed energy weapon.

This intense heating sensation stops only if the individual moves out of the beam’s path or the beam is turned off. The sensation caused by the system has been described by test subjects as feeling like touching a hot frying pan or the intense radiant heat from a fire. Burn injury is prevented by limiting the beam’s intensity and duration.

Just limit the intensity or the duration—so, all you have to do is move out of the beam for the pain to stop! So simple. Of course, this pre-supposes that you've moved into the beam in the first place. What if you didn't move at all, but the beam was swept over you?

I first read about these directed beam weapons in relation to crowd control. Just imagine being in a crowd, like at a demonstration, and such a beam is turned on you. You respond as if you've touched a hot poker—all over your body. How does your autonomic nervous system know which way to go to get away? It doesn't. You just thrash around in horrible pain. Your goose is cooked.

But some of the other stuff that's termed non-lethal is only marginally better. How about this:

In 2004 American soldiers in Iraq were equipped with a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) used for land based and naval applications. LARD works like a highly directional, high power megaphone, able to blast sounds (such as crowd-dispersal instructions in Arabic) in a narrow beam and with great clarity at a deafening 150 decibels (50 times the human threshold of pain)

Zap! instant material ID

First that article about the Z machine...and now this.... We are indeed living in the future. This reminds me more than a little of Tom Swift Jr.'s Spectroscope...

Imagine you need to find out what something's made of. Maybe a vial of a powdery substance. Maybe a plant. Maybe a mineral. Maybe a biopsy. Maybe...anything.

Imagine a device the size of a cell phone. A tiny laser from it shines on a substance and in ten seconds it tells you what the substance is.

Oh, you say, that's a Star Trek Tricorder. Pure science fiction!

I'd have agreed with you until tonite. A slightly larger prototype of this device is called a non-destructive, portable Raman Spectrograph. The cell-phone-sized model due out in June is hoped to be $2000-$5000. NASA is planning to use one on it's 2009 Mars mission.

The spectra detected by this device is caused by quantum effects so complex that they cannot be computed, so a specimen's spectra has to be compared to a pre-scanned spectra database. The folks behind this hope to have the spectra of everything on Earth on file within six years. Money for this catalogue is coming from Mike Scott, founding president of Apple Computers, who was looking for a way to non-destructively analyze his world-class gem collection.

The database already has 700 minerals in it, and the Miami police department supposedly has 220,000 drug spectra already scanned. As a demonstration, the chemist who's the brain behind this, M. Bonner Denton, can take his device and in ten seconds identify the powder in a plastic vial of Tylenol, as well as the type of plastic in the vial.

(By the way, Denton is also the fastest prof in the west—"...In 1964 and 1965, he won the American Hot Rod Association's national drag racing championships in the unlimited modified sports car category...")

According to the interview, things that can be identified include plants from their leaves, animals from their skins, and even breast cancer cells!

I was hoping to be asleep by now, but I find stuff like this awakens a sense of wonder that keeps me up late.

Osama's Web Presence

Ironic. The Internet, created by DARPA in 1969 to be invulnerable to attack, is being used for precisely that reason by Al Qida (to use Richard Clarke's original spelling.)

Meanwhile, Kurt Vonnegut is a peaceful man who's not happy about the way things are going, and an electronic-Voting System Adds 100,000 votes in a Texas county during Tuesday's primary election.

Dahr Jamail | See Dick Loot

Cheney. Halliburton. 'Nuff said...

LiveScience.com - Record Set for Hottest Temperature on Earth: 3.6 Billion Degrees in Lab

Does this strike anyone else as—odd? Like, impossible?

One thing that puzzles scientists is that the high temperature was achieved after the plasma’s ions should have been losing energy and cooling. Also, when the high temperature was achieved, the Z machine was releasing more energy than was originally put in, something that usually occurs only in nuclear reactions.

I seem to recall that the Z Machine has something to do with fusion research.

Ah yes. Here it is:

Last year, when physicists placed a capsule of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, at the focus of the z-pinch, they detected neutrons flying out from the implosion site – a signal that fusion reactions were taking place, as they do in the sun.

If researchers can learn to tame these fusion reactions, the setup can rely on a seemingly endless supply of deuterium fuel in seawater.

MSN Money - The numbers behind the lies

Ever wonder why there's such a disconnect between the reports you hear in the media about how "the economic boom is coming along just great!" and your personal experience of barely getting by? About how inflation is never mentioned, but you notice virtually everything other than electronics is costing more and more every week? How is this possible?

Here's an article that's a review of an article that's not available yet. But the review itself is pretty mind-boggling. Here are a few quotes:

Williams differentiates between two data-manipulation practices. One is "systemic manipulations, where methodologies are changed." That's done in order to align the government's view of the world with the world, i.e., make things look better than they are. The second practice is out-and-out fudging of the data to produce whatever result is desired. Williams describes instances where various administrations have literally reverse-engineered the data to achieve that result (though politics is not the main purpose of the article).

(. . .)

Then for the ticking time bomb: Social Security. The proceeds from withholding do not go into a lockbox or trust fund. They are spent, thereby reducing the size of the stated deficit. More importantly, he notes that the government's accounting for the deficit doesn't include any accruals for Social Security or Medicare liability.

In fact, if that were done and the government used GAAP accounting, the deficits for 2003, 2004, and 2005 would each have been around $3.5 trillion. That's a trillion, not billion. In 2004 alone, the deficit on an accrual basis would have been $11.1 trillion, due to a huge one-time spike for setting up the Medicare drug benefits. In essence, as he points out, we're piling up additional liabilities in an amount roughly equivalent to our total GDP every three years.

(. . .)

Returning to the subject of GDP, Williams illuminates a wrinkle that I had not known about, called "imputations": They are "an outgrowth of the theoretical structure of the national income accounts. Any benefit a person receives has an imputed income component. If you're a homeowner, the government assumes that you pay yourself rent on your house, so that's rental income. ... Imputed interest income, for instance, accounted for 21% of all personal interest income in 2002, and was growing at an annual rate of over 8%. Meanwhile, fully 62% of total rental income that year was the imputed variety."*"

Rigorous Intuition

In his blog, Rigorous Intuition, Jeff Wells adds his to the unsettling chorus of voices trying to alert people to the fact that not all reports of violence between Sunni and Shia in Iraq are in fact that, and asking, who would wish to inflame such violence?

There are lots of tidbits here. Like this email from an aide worker:

Since the bombing of the Al-Askari Shrine in Samarra on 22 February 2006, local media and friends have deluged the Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) in Iraq with information. Iraqi Islamic television reported that the U.S. military and Iraqi police were seen at the shrine the night before it was bombed. The next morning, two shrine guards were found alive but handcuffed inside. Baghdadiya television aired the same report. The Minister of Housing and Reconstruction said the job would have taken ten men about twelve hours to set up enough explosives to do this kind of damage. We have not heard this information reported outside Iraq. The U.S. made offers to rebuild the shrine, but the Iraqi Islamic Party asked that repair be delayed until an independent investigation was completed. Samarra citizens have locked down the shrine to preserve evidence.

Dubai and the Straits of Hormuz

At Dissident Voice, Mike Whitney explains why the Dubai deal is so urgent for Bush, despite opposition from nearly everyone else.

He then adds this tidbit about Iran's future:

The NPT [Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty] is dead.

Will this final assault on international agreements clear the path for war with Iran?

It is hard to say, but the Financial Times reported that, “Iranian activists involved in a classified research project for the marines told the FT the Pentagon was examining the depth and nature of grievances against the Islamic government (Iran) and appeared to be studying whether Iran would be prone to violent fragmentation along the same kind of fault-lines that are splitting Iraq.”

Rotation Of Earth Plunges Entire North American Continent Into Darkness

Just to keep things in perspective, here's a horrifying, ongoing story of a calamity befalling the entire world, courtesy of the Onion.

US Gun Ships moved to Iraq

The US Air Force has begun moving heavily armed AC-130 aircraft—the lethal "flying gunships" of the Vietnam War—to a base in Iraq as commanders search for new tools to counter the Iraqi resistance, the Associated Press has learned.

These are fiercely armed planes, credited with destroying 10,000 trucks along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and were flown from outside the country to suport the US attacks on Falluja. Basing them in Iraq will cut hours off their flying time.

Ok, I confess. I only linked this story up so I could post this cool picture.

US lawyers attack Israeli security agent "thugs"�

This article is mind boggling. Muhammad Salah, a US citizen, formerly convicted and imprisoned for five years in Israel after what he claimed was 53 days of torture for being a Hamas supporter (at a time when Hamas was not considered a terrorist organization by the US) is now on trial for supporting Hamas—and the US prosecutor wants to use his signed confession (which he claims he only signed due to torture) against him.

Here's a story about how the Israel courts themselves have ruled the sort of torture supposedly used against illegal.

But wait. There's more. Part of his interrogation was witnessed by—Judith Miller.

Is this bizarre? Yes.

Here's another story telling another side, about how Salah might not have done anything wrong, and about possible complications involving Judith Miller and the Plame case.

Kissinger on Iraq and Kurdistan

In this article in the Kurdistan Observer, which it took me all morning to find, one sentence hit me:

"A sovereign Iraq on whose soil coalition forces will remain by agreement rather than occupation presupposes government that is representative, secure, accepted internationally, and compatible with a peaceful world."

Yeah, like a government which does our bidding, and not the Iraqi peoples'.

I turned this up while searching for the original appearance of a statement by Kissinger that Iraq might be better off split into three countries.

Here's where it came up:

While this is far from the preferred outcome, if the democracies are unable to produce democratic central institutions and unwilling to support a benevolent autocrat like Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (founder of the Turkish Republic), then a breakup into three states is preferable to refereeing an open-ended civil war.

Actual Letter to Senator Feinstein

On Thursday, January 19, 2006, at 03:51 PM, senator@feinstein.senate.gov wrote:

January 19, 2006

Dear Mr. Steve:

(...inspiring letter about actions taken to enforce the FISA act.)

Again, thank you for writing. I hope that you will continue to
write to me on issues of importance to you. Best regards.

Sincerely yours,

Dianne Feinstein
United States Senator


Senator Feinstein:

Thanks for the invitation, and all you did to attempt to hold the administration's feet to the fire in reference to their bashing of the FISA statute.

I was just reading the news and noted this:

Senators voting against S. 2271 (USA PATRIOT Act Additional Reauthorizing Amendments Act of 2006):

Byrd (D-WV)
Feingold (D-WI)
Harkin (D-IA)
Jeffords (I-VT)

Senator Inouye (D-HI) did not cast a vote. All other U.S. Senators voted to amend the bill, set to be reauthorized.

There must be some mistake. I do no see your name here. Surely someone with the respect you have for the US Bill of RIghts would never agree to reinstitute the horrors of the Patriot Act! Remember what Franklin said: Those willing to give away their freedom in exchange for security deserve neither.

I am hoping that this was simply a misprint in the news. Please tell me that you didn't vote to reauthorize this bill.

Do you remember what Senator Feingold had to say about the bill?

“What we are witnessing is quite simply a capitulation to the intransigent and misleading rhetoric of a White House that sees any effort to protect civil liberties as a sign of weakness,” Feingold said on the Senate floor February 15.

“Protecting American values is not weakness, Mr. President.

“Standing on principle is not weakness.

“And committing to fighting terrorism aggressively without compromising the rights and freedoms this country was founded upon—that’s not weakness either.”

I have read that under this new Patriot Act, peaceful protest at a Secret Service event can be labeled "disruptive or potentially dangerous conduct" and if I were to do it I could face a year in prison. Is this true? Has someone burned the Bill of Rights when I wasn't looking?

Can you imagine living in a country where holding a sign or peacefully protesting can land you in prison? Please tell me that this is not the case.

sincerely,

Steve

Mission Accomplished

Spy Chief: Iraq May Spark Regional Fight - Yahoo! News

Tuesday, at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on global threats, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said in an unusually frank assessment,"If chaos were to descend upon Iraq or the forces of democracy were to be defeated in that country ... this would have implications for the rest of the Middle East region and, indeed, the world."

He did not go on to add to this self-fulfilling prophecy by adding that it has been our objective for the past 5 years to establish a permanent US presence in Iraq. Any unity between Sunni and Shia threatens this presence, since it's well known that the vast majority of Iraqis want the US to leave. If we can just keep them fighting each other, they won't have the unity to fight us.

Negroponte once served as U.S. ambassador to Honduras during the training and promotion of death squads there, a phenomenon that has recently surfaced in Iraq.