Illegal War Authorized by Head of Major World Power

Yes, news is that the leader of a major world power has approved a covert attack against a sovereign country, involving propaganda, misinformation, currency manipulation, and, more importantly, support of terrorists.

This is being approved by a very high-ranking official who has a history of being convicted of previous criminal activity against another country, only to be pardoned by the world leader's father when he was the president of his country.

Just imagine if these actions were perpetrated against the US. What would our reaction be?

ABCNews.com/The blotter:

The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert "black" operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a "nonlethal presidential finding' that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran's currency and international financial transactions.

...

Also briefed on the COA proposal, according to intelligence sources, were National Security Adviso Steve Hadley and deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams.

"The entire plan has been blessed by Abrams, in particular," said one intelligence source familiar with the plan." And Hadley had to put his chop on it."

Abrams' last involvement with attempting to destabilize a foreign government led to criminal charges.

He pleaded guilty in October 1991 to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress about the Reagon administrations's ill-fated efforts to destabilize the Nicataguan sandinista government in Central America, known as the Iran-Contra affair. Abrams was later pardoned by President H. W. Bush in December 1992.

In June 2001, Abrams was named by then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to head the National Security Council's office for democracy, human rights and international operations. On Feb. 2, 2005, National Security Advisor Hadley appointed Abrams deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for global democracy strategy, one of the nation's most senior national security positions.

As earlier reported on the Blotter on ABSNews.com, the United States has supported and encouraged an Iranian militant group, Jundullah, that has conducted deadly raids inside Iran from bases on the rugged Iran-Pakistan-Afghanistan "tri-border region."

U.S. officials deny any "direct funding" of Jundullah groups but say the leader of Jundullah was in regular contact with U.S. officials.

American intelligence sources say Jundullah has received money and weapons through the Afghanistan and Pakistan military and Pakistan's intelligence service. Pakistan has officially denied any connection.

A report broadcast on Iranian TB last Sunday said Iranian authorities had captured 10 men crossing the border with $500,000 in cash along with "maps of sensitive areas" and "modern spy equipment."

(Reminds me of some military leader mentioning in passing last year that the US had had covert agents operating in Iran for many months, passing out stacks of money to groups to stir up trouble.)

Even more striking and dangerously depressing, a quick scan of the first batch of hundreds of comments on this Blotter story reveals that most of them castigate ABC for "treasonously" daring to alert us to these actions. We seem to have entered a new era (or returned to an old one) in which international law is considered "quaint and old fashioned." Since the US is the "sole bastion of freedom and justice," it's quite proper to use covert terror and injustice to further it's aims. And many think it treasonous to mention it!

Remember those Germans back in the 40s who said "We didn't know about the illegal things our government was doing! How could we know? If we knew, we surely wouldn't have let this happen!" And we still held them responsible. Imagine if, instead, they had said, "When people told us about illegal things our country was doing, we didn't dispute it—indeed, we endorsed it!—but instead called the messengers traitors!"

Would we be inclined to forgive them now?

Moon and Venus, May 2007

Observing Venus in the daytime. One of my oldest interests is astronomy. I was sufficiently fascinated by it as a tiny kid to ask for a telescope for Christmas. My mom made a deal with me. She said I could get a small telescope that year, and if I really used it perhaps the next year the big one in the catalog might appear. The first one I got was a small and black and focused by sliding the tube that holds the eyepiece in and out of the main tube. It was probably collapsed down to no more than a foot or so. Its tripod worked, but was quite small. I used to set it on top of walls and tables and other things to see anything up high. It soon became evident that I would like a bigger, "real" telescope, so I think the next Christmas I awoke to find a fine, "real" telecope beside the tree. It had a quite nice equitorial mount and a 60mm objective lense, with a selection of three eyepieces and even a sun filter. It was the best Montgomery Wards had to offer in those days. I could barely pick it up and carry it around the yard. It was considerably bigger than I was. The mount for the tube was just about the same height I was, which would have made me about a yard tall. I was soon dragging my mom and dad out to look at Jupiter and its moons and Saturn and it's rings. But of course you don't need a telescope to observe things. One thing I like to do is find Venus in the daytime. I probably have been doing this since before I got my first telescope, but the first distinct memory of this I have is one day when I was out at Ben Sharpsteen's lake with him and his granddaughter, sometime in the 1970s. I mentioned that Venus was particularly bright that week, and in fact it was visible in the daytime. Gale, the granddaughter, was quite amazed when I pointed it out to her and she saw it plainly, shining there in the daytime. I wonder if she remembers that. My mom got great pleasure out of seeing Venus in the daytime, too. She judged it to be yet another reason to recognize the greatness of God. I've wondered if my fairly lame old 2Mpixel Sony MVC-CD200 with its 3X optical zoom could discern Venus in the daytime. Now, after considerable finagling, I have photographic proof. Yesterday the moon passed right by Venus, so this was a good time to use the moon as a "pointer" to Venus. When I first looked for the planet this morning there were enough thin wispy clouds that I only could catch glimpses of the tiny pinpoint of light. But now Venus is near the zenith, and the clouds seem to have dissolved, so this is probably the best photo my camera is liable to get of Venus in the daytime. The incredibly dim little dot at the end of the arrow at the top of this photo is, indeed, Venus. The crescent moon is at the bottom of the picture. I've tried in vain to get this photo to show up bigger than this, but I can't seem to override the default settings in this blog. I hope you can see the dot that is Venus. If not, you'll just have to trust me. Now I can go on to other things, like trying to finish a painting, and getting ready for my first rehearsal with Larry Potts and his Rivertown Band.

Common Sense Ground for Dismissal, Says Court

SF Gate:

The incident occurred in January 2003, when Mayer was teaching a class of fourth- through sixth-graders at Clear Creek Elementary School. As Mayer recalled it later, the question about peace marches arose during a discussion of an article in the children's edition of Time magazine, part of the school-approved curriculum, about protests against U.S. preparations for war in Iraq.

When the student asked the question about taking part in demonstrations, Mayer said, she replied that there were peace marches in Bloomington, that she blew her horn whenever she saw a "Honk for Peace" sign, and that people should seek peaceful solutions before going to war.

A student complained to her father, who complained to the principal, who canceled the school's annual "Peace Month" observance and told Mayer never to discuss the war or her political views in class.

Mayer, who had been hired after the semester started and had received a good job evaluation before the incident, was dismissed at the end of the school year. The school said it was for poor performance, but the appeals court assumed that she had been fired for her comments and said the school had acted legally.

"Teachers hire out their own speech and must provide the service for which employers are willing to pay," a three-judge panel of the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Jan. 24. "The Constitution does not entitle teachers to present personal views to captive audiences against the instructions of elected officials."

Mayer, the court said, was told by her bosses that she could teach about the war "as long as she kept her opinions to herself." Like the Los Angeles district attorney's employee whose demotion led to the Supreme Court's 2006 ruling, the appellate panel said, Mayer had no constitutional right to say anything on the job that conflicted with her employer's policy.

Mayer's lawyer asked for a rehearing, saying the evidence was clear that the school had no such policy when Mayer answered the student's question. The court denied reconsideration in March without comment.

Did you get that? Her politically charged, highly controversial opinion was that
"people should seek peaceful solutions before going to war."

Boy, let's hope ideas like that are nipped in the bud!

Getting Health Workers to Wash Their Hands

This is a remarkable article in Alternet.org about the plague of infections in hospitals and how simply washing hands adequately could cut the rate of infection to almost nothing.

Ashcroft Hospital Bed Confrontation

Gonzalez and Card confronting Ashcroft and Comey is big breaking news, right? Well, it is, unless, as Meatball One reminds us, you happened to read about it January 1, 2006 in the New York Times, as mentioned in this blog on that very day.

The blogger, Effwit, also mentioned that Ashcroft "refused to sign off on the program during the hospital visit. . . . That tidbit came out this afternoon in the online edition of Newsweek."

Yes. The big scoop of the week was Comey repeating in detail what was already public knowledge over a year ago.

Iraq for Sale

Robert Greenwald's new movie can be seen right online:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6621486727392146155

How Congress can Stop a New War

Jonathan Schwarz, of TinyRevolution.com, has a piece in the new Mother Jones about strategies the Congress could take to prevent a war with Iran, pointing out that if they don't do such things they become compicit in whatever happens.

On his own blog he has a couple of interesting Ron Paul videos snippets— (*) — (*)

Colony Collapse Disorder

The other night I overheard the latest Richard C. Hoagland flight of fantasy on the Coast to Coast AM radio show. The section of his always-entertaining rant I overheard was about the Honeybee Problem. Richard insisted that modern commercial beekeepers use a bigger form of hive, and the bigger hive cells form "torsion antennae" which the bees use to orient themselves (Richard's particular topic of the day seemed to be "torsion fields"), and which are being disrupted by some sort of change in the electromagnetic radiation field we find ourselves in these days. He even mentioned the size in millimeters of the average cells in the different hives. The kicker, the line that stuck in my mind, was that he menioned that this Colony Collapse Disorder only afflicts commercial bees, since organic hives have a smaller cell size, and are not tuned into the damaging frequencies which afflict the commercial hives. All very intriguing, but more than a little bizarre—Hoagland's habit is to take some odd scientific discovery and reframe it into "scientific conspiracy" language. (Richard also mentioned that global warming is due to the same alterations in the "torsion field" which the earth is going through, which relates to hyper-dimensionality and a host of other almost-but-not-quite-real-science things. He used to work for NASA, so of course, everything he says is says is true. Oddly enough, he says much of what NASA says is not true...)

Then I read this morning about a slightly different take on the same story. This is from an actual organic beekeeping Canadian, Sharon Labchuk. Here's the story, from the Guerrilla News Network. You decide.

Colony Collapse and Honeycomb Size

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500

By Sharon Labchuk

"Natural" beehives appear less affected by the strange new plague dubbed colony collapse disorder.

Colony Collapse Disorder in domestic honey bees is all the buzz lately, mostly because honey bees pollinate food crops for humans.

However, we would not be so dependent on commercial non-native factory farmed honey bees if we were not killing off native pollinators. Organic agriculture does not use chemicals or crops toxic to bees and, done properly, preserves wildlife habitat in the vicinity, recognizing the intimate relationship between cultivated fields and natural areas.

While no one is certain why honey bee colonies are collapsing, factory farmed honey bees are more susceptible to stress from environmental sources than organic or feral honey bees. Most people think beekeeping is all natural but in commercial operations the bees are treated much like livestock on factory farms.

I’m on an organic beekeeping email list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with commercial operations is pesticides used in hives to fumigate for varroa mites and antibiotics are fed to the bees to prevent disease. Hives are hauled long distances by truck, often several times during the growing season, to provide pollination services to industrial agriculture crops, which further stresses the colonies and exposes them to agricultural pesticides and GMOs.

Bees have been bred for the past 100 years to be much larger than they would be if left to their own devices. If you find a feral honeybee colony in a tree, for example, the cells bees use for egg-laying will be about 4.9 mm wide. This is the size they want to build – the natural size.

The foundation wax that beekeepers buy have cells that are 5.4 mm wide so eggs laid in these cells produce much bigger bees. It’s the same factory farm mentality we’ve used to produce other livestock – bigger is better. But the bigger bees do not fare as well as natural-size bees.

Varroa mites, a relatively new problem in North America, will multiply and gradually weaken a colony of large bees so that it dies within a few years. Mites enter a cell containing larvae just before the cell is capped over with wax. While the cell is capped, the bee transforms into an adult and varroa mites breed and multiply while feeding on the larvae.

The larvae of natural bees spend less time in this capped over stage, resulting in a significant decrease in the number of varroa mites produced. In fact, very low levels of mites are tolerated by the bees and do not affect the health of the colony. Natural-size bees, unlike large bees, detect the presence of varroa mites in capped over cells and can be observed chewing off the wax cap and killing the mites. Colonies of natural-size bees are healthier in the absence mites, which are vectors for many diseases.

It’s now possible to buy small cell foundation from US suppliers, but most beekeepers in Canada have either never heard of small cell beekeeping, aren’t willing to put the effort into changing or are skeptical of the benefits. This alternative is not promoted at all by the Canadian Honey Council, an organization representing the beekeeping industry, which even tells its members on their website that, “The limitations to disease control mean that losses can be high for organic beekeepers.” [ref link]

Organic beekeeping, as defined by certification agencies, allows the use of less toxic chemicals. It’s more an IPM approach to beekeeping than organic.

Commercial beekeeping today is just another cog in the wheel of industrial agriculture – necessary because pesticides and habitat loss are killing native pollinators, and vast tracks of monoculture crops aren’t integrated into the natural landscape.

In an organic Canada, native pollinators would flourish and small diversified farms would keep their own natural bees for pollination and local honey sales.

The factory farm aspects of beekeeping, combined with an onslaught of negative environmental factors, puts enough stress on the colonies that they are more susceptible to dying out.

Some small cell beekeeping resources::

Organic Beekeeper list
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/Organicbeekeepers/

Michael Bush’s site:
http://www.bushfarms.com/bees.htm

BeeSource:
http://www.beesource.com/pov/lusby/index.htm

Sharon Labchuk
Earth Action (and organic beekeeper)
—————————————
Sharon Labchuk is a longtime environmental activist and part-time organic beekeeper from Prince Edward Island. She has twice run for national Parliament, making a strong showings around 5% for Canada’s fledgling Green Party. She is leader of the provincial wing of the party.

Here's what's on Michael Bush's site (linked above)

Most of us beekeepers are fighting with the Varroa mites. I'm happy to say my biggest problems are things like trying to get nucs through the winter and coming up with hives that won't hurt my back from lifting or better ways to feed the bees.

This change from fighting the mites is mostly because I've gone to natural sized cells. In case you weren't aware, and I wasn't for a long time, the foundation in common usage results in much larger bees than what you would find in a natural hive. I've measured sections of natural worker brood comb that are 4.6mm in diameter. This 4.6mm comb was drawn by a hive of commercial Carniolans and this 4.7mm comb was drawn on the first try by a package of commercial Carniolans. What most people use for worker brood is foundation that is 5.4mm in diameter. If you translate that into three dimensions, instead of one, that produces a bee that is about half again as large as is natural. By letting the bees build natural sized cells, I have virtually eliminated my Varroa and Tracheal mite problems. One cause of this is shorter capping times by one day and shorter post capping times by one day. This means less Varroa get into the cells and less Varroa reproduce in the cells. I have mostly done this either with wax coated PermaComb (fully drawn plastic comb) or self drawn comb on foundationless frames or frames with blank starter strips. 4.9mm foundation is available from Dadant and Sons and from Brushy Mt. This size(4.9mm) has been found sufficient to resolve the mite problems. For more information on small cell:

Dee Lusby's POV on Beesource
Natural Cell Size

Patrick Cockburn reports from Iraq

This is mandatory reading.

An excerpt:

For their part, the Shia, have become increasingly suspicious that the U.S. and Britain do not intend to relinquish real control over security to the elected Iraqi government. There were many examples of this. For instance, in the Middle East the most important force underpinning every government is the intelligence service. In theory (as I explain in my book, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq), the Iraqi government should get its information from the Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) that was established in 2004 by the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority. But a peculiarity of the INIS is that its budget is not provided by the Iraqi Finance Ministry but by the CIA.

Over the next three years, they paid $3 billion to fund its activities. During this time it was run by General Mohammed Shahwani, who had been the central figure in a CIA-run coup in 1996 against Saddam Hussein that had failed disastrously. For long periods he was even banned from attending Iraqi cabinet meetings. A former Iraqi cabinet minister, who was a member of the country's National Security Council, complained to me that "we only get information that the CIA wants us to hear." Iraqis did not fail to spot the extent to which the power of their elected government was being trimmed. The poll cited above showed that by Spring 2007 only 34% of Iraqis thought their country was being run by their own government; 59% believed the U.S. was in control. The Iraqi government had been robbed of legitimacy in the eyes of its own people.

Tiny Amounts of Targeted Drugs Attack Cancer with No Side Effects

also from Physorg.com:

Australia scientists announce cancer drug breakthrough

Australian scientists said Friday they have developed a cancer treatment which could deliver lethal doses of drugs to tumours without the usual harmful side-effects such as nausea and hair loss.

Research scientist Jennifer MacDiarmid said the cutting-edge technique uses nanotechnology to create particles which directly attack cancer cells with a "lethal payload" of drugs, without flooding the body with toxic chemicals.

Treatments such as chemotherapy typically involve subjecting the patient's entire body to the powerful drugs in order to kill the cancer, causing debilitating side-effects that the new, targeted technique would eliminate.

"Your hair wouldn't fall out, you wouldn't throw up... some chemotherapy is life-threatening in itself," MacDiarmid told AFP.

MacDiarmid said scientists at Sydney-based biotechnology company EnGeneIC, where she is a managing director, used a bacteria cell stripped of reproductive powers to develop a particle capable of carrying any chemotherapy drug.

The nano-cell, which is about one-fifth the size of a normal cell, is then tagged with antibodies which are attracted to cancerous tumours. Once the cell hits the cancer, the drug is released directly into the malignant growth.

"There is no other system where you can get so much drug concentrated into a little parcel," MacDiarmid said.

The results of animal trials published this week in the US-based journal Cancer Cell show that the technique has reduced tumours in animals without toxic side-effects and by using only a very small amount of drugs.

MacDiarmid said the treatment could potentially be used on any solid tumours including those in the breasts, ovaries, colon and lungs.

In future, the treatment could allow for the creation of customised drug "cocktails" to be used on patients to counter drug resistance and could lower costs as a smaller amount of drugs would be needed, she said.

The team hopes to start human trials by the end of this year.

Now, this is really strange...

from Physorg.com:

Numbers follow a surprising law of digits, and scientists can't explain why

By Lisa Zyga

This graph shows several examples of data sets from the Spaniard National Institute of Statistics that follow Benford’s logarithmic law. Data from the lottery, however, is random and uniform. Credit: Jesús Torres, et al.

Does your house address start with a 1? According to a strange mathematical law, about 1/3 of house numbers have 1 as their first digit. The same holds true for many other areas that have almost nothing in common: the Dow Jones index history, size of files stored on a PC, the length of the world’s rivers, the numbers in newspapers’ front page headlines, and many more.

Ok. I think to myself, I think, well, since the first block of house numbers that start with one number would be the "1"s, and some streets never get past that block, and shorter streets are probably more common than longer streets, there's no mystery about house numbers. But then the article mentions, well, everything else... and the more you read about it, the weirder this gets. Read on...

The law is called Benford’s law after its (second) founder, Frank Benford, who discovered it in 1935 as a physicist at General Electric. The law tells how often each number (from 1 to 9) appears as the first significant digit in a very diverse range of data sets.

Besides the number 1 consistently appearing about 1/3 of the time, number 2 appears with a frequency of 17.6%, number 3 at 12.5%, on down to number 9 at 4.6%. In mathematical terms, this logarithmic law is written as F(d) = log[1 + (1/d)], where F is the frequency and d is the digit in question.

If this sounds kind of strange, scientists Jesús Torres, Sonsoles Fernández, Antonio Gamero, and Antonio Sola from the Universidad de Cordoba also call the feature surprising. The scientists published a letter in the European Journal of Physics called “How do numbers begin? (The first digit law),” which gives a short historical review of the law. Their paper also includes useful applications and explains that no one has been able to provide an underlying reason for the consistent frequencies.

“The Benford law has been an intriguing question for me for years, ever since I read about it,” Torres, who specializes in plasma physics, told PhysOrg.com. “I have used it as a surprising example at statistical physics classes to arouse the curiosity of my pupils.”

Torres et al. explain that, before Benford, a highly esteemed astronomer named Simon Newcomb discovered the law in 1881, although Newcomb’s contemporaries did not pay much attention to his publication. Both Benford and Newcomb stumbled upon the law in the same way: while flipping through pages of a book of logarithmic tables, they noticed that the pages in the beginning of the book were dirtier than the pages at the end. This meant that their colleagues who shared the library preferred quantities beginning with the number one in their various disciplines.

Benford took this observation a step further than Newcomb, and began investigating other groups of numbers, finding that the “first digit law” emerged in groups as disparate as populations, death rates, physical and chemical constants, baseball statistics, the half-lives of radioactive isotopes, answers in a physics book, prime numbers, and Fibonacci numbers. In other words, just about any group of data obtained by using measurements satisfies the law.

On the other hand, data sets that are arbitrary and contain restrictions usually don’t follow Benford’s law. For example, lottery numbers, telephone numbers, gas prices, dates, and the weights or heights of a group of people are either random or arbitrarily assigned, and not obtained by measurement.

As Torres and his colleagues explain, scientists in the decades following Benford performed numerous studies, but discovered little more about the law other than racking up a wide variety of examples. However, scientists did discover a few curiosities. For one, when investigating second significant digits of data sets, the law still held, but with less importance. Similarly, for the third and fourth digits, the appearance of the numbers started becoming equal, leveling out at a uniform 10% for the fifth digit. A second discovery attracted even more scientific interest:


“In 1961, Pinkham discovered the first general relevant result, demonstrating that Benford’s law is scale invariant and is also the only law referring to digits which can have this scale invariance,” the scientists wrote in their letter. “That is to say, as the length of the rivers of the world in kilometers fulfill Benford’s law, it is certain that these same data expressed in miles, light years, microns or in any other length units will also fulfill it.”

Torres et al. also explain that in the last years of the 20^th century, some important theoretical advances have been proven (base invariance, unicity, etc.), mainly by Ted Hill and other mathematicians. While some cases can be explained (for example, house addresses almost always start with 1’s, and lower numbers must occur before higher numbers), there is still no general justification for all examples. The scientists also explain that there is no a priori criteria that tells when a data set should or should not obey the law.

“Nowadays there are many theoretical results about the law, but some points remain in darkness,” said Torres. “Why do some numerical sets, like universal physical constants, follow the law so well? We need to know not only mathematical reasons for the law, but also characterize this set of experimental data. For example, what are their points of contact? Where they come from? Apparently, they are independent.

”I hope the general necessary and sufficient conditions will be discovered in the future—many people are interested in the law, especially economists—but I also know it could be not possible ever,” he added, mentioning Godel.

Nevertheless, scientists have been using the law for many practical applications. For example, because a year’s accounting data of a company should fulfill the law, economists can detect falsified data, which is very hard to manipulate to follow the law. (Interestingly, scientists found that numbers 5 and 6, rather than 1, are the most prevalent, suggesting that forgers try to “hide” data in the middle.)

Benford’s law has also been recently applied to electoral fraud in order to detect voting anomalies. Scientists found that the 2004 US presidential election showed anomalies in the state of Florida, as well as fraud in Venezuela in 2004 and Mexico in 2006.

“The story about how it was discovered—twice—from dirty pages … it is almost incredible,” said Torres. “Benford's law has undeniable applications, and this useful aspect was not clear when the law was discovered. It seemed to be only a math curiosity. For me, this is an example of how simplicity can be unexpectedly marvelous.”

For more details on Benford’s law, the highly readable letter is temporarily available at:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0143-0807/28/3/N04 (with free registration).

Citation: Torres, J. Fernández, S., Gamero, A., Solar, A. “How do numbers begin? (The first digit law).” Eur. J. Phys. 28 (2007) L17-25.

Company will convert your Prius into a plug-in

This is potentially big news. This is right off their website.

Tomorrow’s Technology for Today’s Vehicle

Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle If someone asks you today if there is a car that can cut North America's oil imports to a minimum and reduce pollution significantly at the same time, what would be your answer? Hymotion's Plug-in Hybrid system (PHEV) can provide Hybrid vehicles with 100+mpg fuel efficiency and fight climate change simultaneously. The advantages of Hymotion’s PHEV includes better fuel economy, fewer visits to gas station, lower fuel costs, less pollution and longer range in all-electric mode --- the solution for spiking gas prices, CO2 emissions and dependence on imported oil. What is in the system? No factory parts or components will be replaced or taken out of the vehicle, the plug-and-play PHEV system engineered by Hymotion can boost the electric capacity of a vehicle by 7 times, making the extra range for all electric “stealth” mode. And since the whole system, which includes the smart charger, power electronic and battery, is smaller and lighter than factory NiMh battery box. This is made possible by the special Lithium Ion Polymer battery technology that Hymotion employs in their plug-and-play PHEV system, one does not require a trunk full of batteries to achieve such efficiency and performance. Hymotion PHEV system is not only small and lightweight, but also powerful and long-lasting. The system charges from the engine, braking system and the power grid while the vehicle is parked and plugged in. One would plug in to a 120V outlet in the garage overnight and use the surplus electricity generated by power plants at night. The overnight charge will only cost an average of 75 cents for 50 extra miles. Hymotion currently have systems available for Toyota Prius, Ford Escape Hybrid and Mercury Mariner Hybrid. More systems are under development for Lexus RX400h, Toyota Highlander Hybrid and Toyota Camry Hybrid. Download technical specifications for L5 PHEV (Toyota Prius) or L12 PHEV (Ford Escape). (Adobe Acrobat Reader required) For Press Kit please email news@hymotion.com. Hymotion now has a network of installers across North America. We welcome fleet owners, government agencies or any individual who are interested in Plug-in hybrid to contact us at info@hymotion.com for more information.

Robert Greenwald reports from Iraq

from Truthout:

I also spoke with Shane Ratliff, a truck driver from Ruby, South Carolina. He saw Halliburton advertising a job for truck drivers in Iraq and he signed up. When Shane started telling me that empty trucks were being driven across dangerous stretches of desert, I assumed he was mistaken. Why would they do that? Then he explained that Halliburton got paid for the number of trips they took, regardless of whether they were carrying anything. These unnecessary trips where putting the lives of truckers at risk, exposing drivers and co-workers to attack. This was the result of cost-plus, no-bid contracts.

Another young Halliburton worker named James Logsdon told me about the burn pits. Burn pits are large dumps near military stations where they would burn equipment, trucks, trash, etc. If they ordered the wrong item, they'd throw it in the burn pit. If a tire blew on a piece of equipment, they'd throw the whole thing into the burn pit. The burn pits had so much equipment they even gave them a nickname: "Home Depot."

The trucker said he would get us some photos. And I naively asked, how big are they, the size of a backyard swimming pool? He laughed and referred to one that he had seen that was 15 football fields large and burned around the clock! It infuriated him to have to burn stuff rather then give it to the Iraqis or to the military. Yet Halliburton was being rewarded each time they billed the government for a new truck or new piece of equipment. With a cost-plus contract, the contractors receive a percentage of the money they spend. As Shane told me, "It's a legal way of stealing from the government or the taxpayers' money." These costs eat up the money that could be used for other supplies.

Cost-plus, no-bid contracts are hopelessly undermining our efforts and costing the taxpayers billions. They do not operate within a free-market system and have no competition, but instead create a Stalinist system of rewarding cronies. In a letter from Sgt. Jon Lacore talking about the enormous amount of waste, he said, "I just can't believe that no one at all is going to jail for this or even being fired or forced to resign."

Ho Hum. Another Arrogant Bush Appointee Trying to Destroy America

From Loyola University Alumni Page:

ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT - November 2006

THE HONORABLE ROBERT WILKIE • L' 1988
Assistant Secretary of Defense

The Honorable Robert Wilkie is Assistant Secretary of Defense. He is a native of New Orleans. The son of an Army Artillery commander, he spent his youth at Fort Sill and Fort Bragg. He attended Tulane and Wake Forest Universities. He received his Juris Doctor degree from Loyola University School of Law (New Orleans), where he received honors in Latin American Law, International Law and Legislation He was also awarded a Master of Laws in International and Comparative Law from Georgetown University. He began his professional career on Capitol Hill as Counsel to Senator Jesse Helms, where he was the Senator's policy advisor for Armed Services, Nuclear Energy and Senate Rules and Procedure. He later served as Legislative Director for Congressman David Funderburk where he was assigned to the Committee on International Relations and the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. In 1997, he began service as the Counsel and Advisor on International Security Affairs to the Senate Majority Leader, the Honorable Trent Lott. In addition to his regular duties, he served on the staff of the 1992 and 1996 Republican National Conventions and was the principal staffer and editor of the national security section of the 2000 Republican Party Presidential Platform. From 2003-2005 Mr. Wilkie was Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and a Senior Director of the National Security Council. In this capacity he served as a senior policy advisor to the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs, Dr. Condoleezza Rice and to her successor, The Honorable Stephen Hadley. While at the NSC Mr. Wilkie developed strategic planning for the implementation of the Moscow Treaty, NATO Expansion, the Millennium Challenge Account; and Iraqi Reconstruction. Mr. Wilkie is an intelligence officer in the United States Navy Reserve. An honor graduate of the Reserve Intelligence Officer's Basic Course, he is currently a Division Officer in the Maritime Threat Targeting Department at the Office of Naval Intelligence. He was named the Office of Naval Intelligence Junior Intelligence Officer (Reserve) of the year in 2004. He previously served with Atlantic Intelligence Command, Joint Forces Intelligence Command, and Naval Special Warfare Group Two. He is a graduate of the College of Naval Command and Staff and in 2002 received a Masters in Strategic Studies from the United States Army War College. He is also a graduate of the Joint Forces Staff College. Mr. Wilkie is married to the former Julia Bullard of Fayetteville, North Carolina. They have two small children, Adam age six and Megan age four.
Publications: His articles have been published in The Naval War College Review, Parameters, and Proceedings. He contributed a chapter on European Defense to the recently published "Strategy for Empire: U .S. Regional Security Policy in the Post-Cold War Era".

Did you see the name of that chapter? Strategy for Empire? And how does he propose to promote and protect this new empire? Read on...

Boston Globe:

By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | May 10, 2007

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon has placed unprecedented restrictions on who can testify before Congress, reserving the right to bar lower-ranking officers, enlisted soldiers, and career bureaucrats from appearing before oversight committees or having their remarks transcribed, according to Defense Department documents.

Robert L. Wilkie , a former Bush administration national security official who left the White House to become assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs last year, has outlined a half-dozen guidelines that prohibit most officers below the rank of colonel from appearing in hearings, restricting testimony to high-ranking officers and civilians appointed by President Bush.

The guidelines, described in an April 19 memo to the staff director of the House Armed Services Committee, adds that all field-level officers and enlisted personnel must be "deemed appropriate" by the Department of Defense before they can participate in personal briefings for members of Congress or their staffs; in addition, according to the memo, the proceedings must not be recorded.

Wilkie's memo also stipulated that any officers who are allowed to testify must be accompanied by an official from the administration, such as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and his top-level aides.

Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress see the move as a blatant attempt to bog down investigations of the war. But veterans of the legislative process -- who say they have never heard of such guidelines before -- maintain that the Pentagon has no authority to set such ground rules.

The guidelines would not affect congressional subpoenas, which can compel anyone to appear before lawmakers. As a result, several lawmakers have pledged privately to use that power if the Pentagon's guidelines stymie their efforts to get information from specific sectors of the military.

Wilkie declined to be interviewed for this story, but a Pentagon spokesman confirmed that the guidelines are new. "The memo was a way to establish guidelines on how junior officers and the enlisted be contacted on their participation in the aforementioned briefings," Army Lieutenant Colonel Brian Maka said in a statement yesterday.

Even so, the guidelines, a copy of which was provided to the Globe by a Democratic aide, have already set off one highly unusual confrontation between Pentagon lawyers and the newly created House oversight and investigations subcommittee, according to several congressional officials who witnessed the exchange.

[. . .]

Before the Senate confirmed him last fall, Wilkie -- an aide to former GOP senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina -- was a senior director of the National Security Council in the White House from 2003 to 2005.

Wilkie was also the "principal staffer and editor of the national security section of the 2000 Republican Party Presidential Platform," according to his official biography. Wilkie is currently responsible for providing "guidance for centralized direction, integration, and control of DoD legislative affairs and liaison activities with the US Congress," according to a September 2006 Pentagon job description.

Several congressional officials accused him of attempting to muzzle the military's lower ranks, which are more likely to give Congress an unvarnished opinion compared with the top-level Pentagon brass, who typically seek to further the Bush administration's policies.

Wilkie's guidelines stipulate, for example, that "junior officers" -- any officer at or below the rank of colonel, as well as noncommissioned officers -- "may provide support to briefers and witnesses, but shall not be asked or required to have their names entered into the record or speak on the record," according to the memo, which was sent to Erin Conaton , the armed services panel staff director.

The guidelines claim the right to provide Congress only with witnesses who are Bush administration appointees -- as opposed to longtime senior government officials who do not owe their jobs to the current administration -- to provide sworn testimony.

This is insane.

Garments treated with metallic nanoparticles prevent colds and flu

Also from Physorg.com:

Design student Olivia Ong '07 hugs two garments, treated with metallic nanoparticles through acollaboration with fiber scientists Juan Hinestroza and Hong Dong, that she designed as part of her fashion line, "Glitterati." Credit: Cornell University

Fashion designers and fiber scientists at Cornell have taken "functional clothing" to a whole new level. They have designed a garment that can prevent colds and flu and never needs washing, and another that destroys harmful gases and protects the wearer from smog and air pollution.

The two-toned gold dress and metallic denim jacket, featured at the April 21 Cornell Design League fashion show, contain cotton fabrics coated with nanoparticles that give them functional qualities never before seen in the fashion world.

Designed by Olivia Ong '07 in the College of Human Ecology's Department of Fiber Science and Apparel Design, the garments were infused with their unusual qualities by fiber science assistant professor Juan Hinestroza and his postdoctoral researcher Hong Dong. Apparel design assistant professor Van Dyke Lewis launched the collaboration by introducing Ong to Hinestroza several months ago.

"We think this is one of the first times that nanotechnology has entered the fashion world," Hinestroza said. He noted one drawback may be the garments' price: one square yard of nano-treated cotton would cost about $10,000.

Ong's dress and jacket, part of her original fashion line called "Glitterati," look innocently hip. But closer inspection -- with a microscope, that is -- shows an army of electrostatically charged nanoparticles creating a protective shield around the cotton fibers in the top part of the dress, and the sleeves, hood and pockets of the jacket.

"It's something really moving toward the future, and really advanced," said Ong, who graduates in December and aspires to design school. "I thought this could potentially be what fashion is moving toward."

Dong explained that the fabrics were created by dipping them in solutions containing nanoparticles synthesized in Hinestroza's lab. The resultant colors are not the product of dyes, but rather, reflections of manipulation of particle size or arrangement.

The upper portion of the dress contains cotton coated with silver nanoparticles. Dong first created positively charged cotton fibers using ammonium- and epoxy-based reactions, inducing positive ionization. The silver particles, about 10-20 nanometers across (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter) were synthesized in citric acid, which prevented nanoparticle agglomeration.

Dipping the positively charged cotton into the negatively charged silver nanoparticle solution resulted in the particles clinging to the cotton fibers.

Silver possesses natural antibacterial qualities that are strengthened at the nanoscale, thus giving Ong's dress the ability to deactivate many harmful bacteria and viruses. The silver infusion also reduces the need to wash the garment, since it destroys bacteria, and the small size of the particles prevents soiling and stains.

The denim jacket includes a hood, sleeves and pockets with soft, gray tweed cotton embedded with palladium nanoparticles, about 5-10 nanometers in length. To create the material, Dong placed negatively charged palladium crystals onto positively charged cotton fibers.

Ong, though strictly a designer, was drawn especially to the science behind creating the anti-smog jacket.

"I thought it would be cool if [wearers] could wipe their hands on their sleeves or pockets," Ong said.

Ong incorporated the resultant cotton fiber into a jacket with the ability to oxidize smog. Such properties would be useful for someone with allergies, or for protecting themselves from harmful gases in the contaminated air, such as in a crowded or polluted city.

Source: Cornell Chronicle/Cornell University

Coffee or a Nap?

More Physorg.com:

Some of her most striking research looks at napping compared to drinking caffeine. In one study, Mednick had one group of subjects nap for 90 minutes, while another drank 200 mg of caffeine. She also set up a control group, who took a placebo. Then she tested her subjects on several tasks, including typing and spatial skills, such as remembering the layout of a room or a map. On both tasks, coffee drinkers performed much worse than the placebo group, Mednick said. “Of course, this is a bummer for Starbucks,” she added.

Mednick started looking into napping when she was a self-described sleep-deprived graduate student at Harvard. She was inspired by stories of great, smart nappers, such as Bill Clinton and Leonardo da Vinci. At the time, there wasn’t much research about the cognitive benefits of napping. So Mednick set out to test subjects’ cognitive abilities with and without a nap. She found that her subjects’ performance increased if they napped and decreased if they didn’t.

Finally, one day, she decided to take her own advice. She went into a colleague’s office and took a nap on his couch. She woke up an hour later, feeling wonderful. Soon, her entire lab started using the couch, much to her colleague’s annoyance. It was finally moved to a windowless room and members of Mednick’s lab started napping in shifts, including pregnant women, a young father and a night owl who liked to work late into the night. “Everyone knew about the results and felt well defended that they needed to nap,” the researcher said.

That’s not to say that all naps are created equal. It all depends on which stages of sleep you’re going through, Mednick explained. The three most important stages are Stage 1, known as rapid-eye movement, or REM, and Stages 3 and 4, known as slow-wave sleep, when the brain is moving at a slower pace. Mednick and her colleagues set out to study how the different stages of sleep impacted subjects’ performance on tests after a nap. When they only got slow-wave sleep, their performance remained stable. But when their naps included REM and slow-wave sleep, it improved. A nap that includes equal parts of slow-wave sleep and REM sleep is the perfect nap, she added.

“The more you nap and the better you sleep, the better you do,” Mednick said.

Making waste into fuel

Physorg.com:

“Atmospheric pressure plasma-enhanced soft hydrolysis” invented by students as North Carolina State University.

Waste materials from hog lagoons, fed into Orbit’s high solids anaerobic digester, produce a ratio of 67 percent methane to 33 percent carbon dioxide, which turns out to be the ideal ratio for making methanol from AP plasma. “We are in our second design of the system,” said W. Patrick Davis, doctoral student in materials science and engineering. “We know how much methane and carbon dioxide we are putting in. We soon will be able to calculate our efficiency in terms of how much we are converting into methanol.” With the help of Dr. H. Henry Lamb, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, the team will have the ability to identify each chemical produced by this process.

“The key here,” said Christopher J. Oldham, doctoral student in materials science, “is that, as a greenhouse gas, methane is 20 times more harmful to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, and people don’t really talk about that. We’re taking that methane and making valuable alcohols and chemicals.”

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