It's like a gathering of supervillians...

World News:

Neil Bush accompanies Moonies to meeting with Paraguayan

Asuncion, Feb 28 (EFE).- Neil Bush, the younger brother of U.S. President George W. Bush, and a delegation from the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Family Federation for World Peace and Unification met Thursday with Paraguayan President Nicanor Duarte.

Moon's various organizations and enterprises have large landholdings in northern Paraguay, on the border with Brazil, and the country's Supreme Court rejected in mid-2007 the expropriation of more than 52,000 hectares (128,395 acres) of Moonie-owned land ordered by Congress.

The high court's ruling was harshly criticized by Duarte because the expropriation was intended to help residents of the poor, remote town of Puerto Casado.

Neil Bush later went to the Senate to take part in an international seminar, "New Leadership Paradigms in Latin America and the Caribbean at a Time of Crisis on the Global Level," organized by the federation.

Bush, who became a poster boy for the $500 billion U.S. savings and loan debacle during the 1988-1992 presidency of his father, George H.W. Bush, said in brief remarks that he had a pleasant conversation with Duarte.

The Myth of the Surge

(I sheepishly apologize for leaving this titled "the Myth of the Sufge" for a week before I noticed the typo...)

The last part of a six-page article in Rolling Stone by NIR ROSEN:

"Before the war, it was just one party," Arkan tells me. "Now we have 100,000 parties. I have Sunni officer friends, but nobody lets them get back into service. First they take money, then they ask if you are Sunni or Shiite. If you are Shiite, good." He dreams of returning to the days when the Iraqi army served the entire country. "In Saddam's time, nobody knew what is Sunni and what is Shiite," he says. The Bush administration based its strategy in Iraq on the mistaken notion that, under Saddam, the Sunni minority ruled the Shiite majority. In fact, Iraq had no history of serious sectarian violence or civil war between the two groups until the Americans invaded. Most Iraqis viewed themselves as Iraqis first, with their religious sects having only personal importance. Intermarriage was widespread, and many Iraqi tribes included both Sunnis and Shiites. Under Saddam, both the ruling Baath Party and the Iraqi army were majority Shiite.

Arkan, in a sense, is a man in the middle. He believes that members of the Awakening have the right to join the Iraqi security forces, but he also knows that their ranks are filled with Al Qaeda and other insurgents. "Sahwa is the same people who used to be attacking us," he says. Yet he does not trust his own men in the INP. "Three-fourths of them are Mahdi Army," he tells me, locking his door before speaking. His own men pass information on him to the Shiite forces, which have threatened him for cooperating with the new Sunni militias. One day, Arkan was summoned to meet with the commander of his brigade's intelligence sector. When he arrived, he found a leader of the Mahdi Army named Wujud waiting for him.

"Arkan, be careful — we will kill you," Wujud told him. "I know where you live. My guys will put you in the trunk of a car."

I ask Arkan why he had not arrested Wujud. "They know us," he says. "I'm not scared for myself. I've had thirty-eight IEDs go off next to me. But I'm scared for my family."

Later I accompany Arkan to his home. As we approach an INP checkpoint, he grows nervous. Even though he is an INP officer, he does not want the police to know who he is, lest his own men inform the Mahdi Army about his attitude and the local INPs, who are loyal to the Mahdi Army, target him and his family. At his home, his two boys are watching television in the small living room. "I've decided to leave my job," Arkan tells me. "No one supports us." The Americans are threatening him if he doesn't pursue the Mahdi Army more aggressively, while his own superiors are seeking to fire him for the feeble attempts he has made to target the Mahdi Army.

On my final visit with Arkan, he picks me up in his van. For lack of anywhere safe to talk, we sit in the front seat as he nervously scans every man who walks by. He is not optimistic for the future. Arkan knows that the U.S. "surge" has succeeded only in exacerbating the tension among Iraq's warring parties and bickering politicians. The Iraqi government is still nonexistent outside the Green Zone. While U.S.-built walls have sealed off neighborhoods in Baghdad, Shiite militias are battling one another in the south over oil and control of the lucrative pilgrimage industry. Anbar Province is in the hands of Sunni militias who battle each other, and the north is the scene of a nascent civil war between Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen. The jobs promised to members of the Awakening have not materialized: An internal U.S. report concludes that "there is no coherent plan at this time" to employ them, and the U.S. Agency for International Development "is reluctant to accept any responsibility" for the jobs program because it has a "high likelihood of failure." Sunnis and even some Shiites have quit the government, which is unable to provide any services, and the prime minister has circumvented parliament to issue decrees and sign agreements with the Americans that parliament would have opposed.

But such political maneuvers don't really matter in Iraq. Here, street politics trump any illusory laws passed in the safety of the Green Zone. As the Awakening gains power, Al Qaeda lies dormant throughout Baghdad, the Mahdi Army and other Shiite forces prepare for the next battle, and political assassinations and suicide bombings are an almost daily occurrence. The violence, Arkan says, is getting worse again.

"The situation won't get better," he says softly. An officer of the Iraqi National Police, a man charged with bringing peace to his country, he has been reduced to hiding in his van, unable to speak openly in the very neighborhood he patrols. Thanks to the surge, both the Shiites and the Sunnis now have weapons and legitimacy. And what can come of that, Arkan asks, except more fighting?

"Many people in Sahwa work for Al Qaeda," he says. "The national police are all loyal to the Mahdi Army." He shakes his head. "You work hard to build a house, and somebody blows up your house. Will they accept Sunnis back to Shiite areas and Shiites back to Sunni areas? If someone kills your brother, can you forget his killer?"

What would you rather be asked to do by a candidate? "Learn More"... or "Submit"?

Bob Harris:

Tuesday, 26 February 2008

This is absolutely no big deal. But sometimes little details can be telling. And there's a tiny but obvious difference between the front pages of the Obama and Clinton websites that seems almost emblematic of how the campaigns are increasingly perceived. What makes you feel more respected, really -- being asked to "Learn More"... ... or to "Submit"? Just saying.

an Eclipse and a new Guitar

Like the US, other oil producing countries are finding their own needs are reducing their ability to export oil

Case in point: Indonesia

The Oil Drum:

TOD has featured the Export Land Model (ELM) on several occasions (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3018 ). A summary can also be found in Wikipedia.

The concept is deceptively simple:
Oil producing countries service internal markets first, and then export their surplus. Observations of oil exporting countries show that their internal markets continue to grow rapidly even after the peak. So their exports are hit by 2 factors - declining production and increasing domestic consumption. As a result, their export capacity drops with unexpected rapidity.

Dick Gregory speaks

click here

Return of Volleyball!

Yes. The day that I feared would never come.

Sunday, February 10, I hesitantly ventured back onto the volleyball court and played for a couple of hours. Nothing broke. I tried again the next Wednesday. Again, other than some sore limbs, no ill effects.

This experiment has gone on now for two weeks, and everything's still working. So far so good. It sure is fun. It's been at least three years since I've played. I've missed it badly.

Chalmers Johnson explains the situation

TomDipatch.com via Commondreams.com:

Why the Debt Crisis Is Now the Greatest Threat to the American Republic

by Chalmers Johnson

The military adventurers of the Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups of men thought that they were the “smartest guys in the room,” the title of Alex Gibney’s prize-winning film on what went wrong at Enron. The neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.

As a result, going into 2008, the United States finds itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment. Its government no longer even attempts to reduce the ruinous expenses of maintaining huge standing armies, replacing the equipment that seven years of wars have destroyed or worn out, or preparing for a war in outer space against unknown adversaries. Instead, the Bush administration puts off these costs for future generations to pay — or repudiate. This utter fiscal irresponsibility has been disguised through many manipulative financial schemes (such as causing poorer countries to lend us unprecedented sums of money), but the time of reckoning is fast approaching.

There are three broad aspects to our debt crisis. First, in the current fiscal year (2008) we are spending insane amounts of money on “defense” projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States. Simultaneously, we are keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segments of the American population at strikingly low levels.

Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our manufacturing base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures — so-called “military Keynesianism,” which I discuss in detail in my book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. By military Keynesianism, I mean the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.

Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources), we are failing to invest in our social infrastructure and other requirements for the long-term health of our country. These are what economists call “opportunity costs,” things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have failed to provide health care to all our citizens and neglected our responsibilities as the world’s number one polluter. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs — an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than arms manufacturing. Let me discuss each of these.

And he does.

A more telling comparison that reveals just how much worse we’re doing can be found among the “current accounts” of various nations. The current account measures the net trade surplus or deficit of a country plus cross-border payments of interest, royalties, dividends, capital gains, foreign aid, and other income. For example, in order for Japan to manufacture anything, it must import all required raw materials. Even after this incredible expense is met, it still has an $88 billion per year trade surplus with the United States and enjoys the world’s second highest current account balance. (China is number one.) The United States, by contrast, is number 163 — dead last on the list, worse than countries like Australia and the United Kingdom that also have large trade deficits. Its 2006 current account deficit was $811.5 billion; second worst was Spain at $106.4 billion. This is what is unsustainable.
[. . .]

By 1990, the value of the weapons, equipment, and factories devoted to the Department of Defense was 83% of the value of all plants and equipment in American manufacturing. From 1947 to 1990, the combined U.S. military budgets amounted to $8.7 trillion. Even though the Soviet Union no longer exists, U.S. reliance on military Keynesianism has, if anything, ratcheted up, thanks to the massive vested interests that have become entrenched around the military establishment. Over time, a commitment to both guns and butter has proven an unstable configuration. Military industries crowd out the civilian economy and lead to severe economic weaknesses. Devotion to military Keynesianism is, in fact, a form of slow economic suicide.

On May 1, 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research of Washington, D.C., released a study prepared by the global forecasting company Global Insight on the long-term economic impact of increased military spending. Guided by economist Dean Baker, this research showed that, after an initial demand stimulus, by about the sixth year the effect of increased military spending turns negative. Needless to say, the U.S. economy has had to cope with growing defense spending for more than 60 years. He found that, after 10 years of higher defense spending, there would be 464,000 fewer jobs than in a baseline scenario that involved lower defense spending.

Baker concluded:

“It is often believed that wars and military spending increases are good for the economy. In fact, most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment.”

[. . .]

Nuclear weapons furnish a striking illustration of these anomalies. Between the 1940s and 1996, the United States spent at least $5.8 trillion on the development, testing, and construction of nuclear bombs. By 1967, the peak year of its nuclear stockpile, the United States possessed some 32,500 deliverable atomic and hydrogen bombs, none of which, thankfully, was ever used. They perfectly illustrate the Keynesian principle that the government can provide make-work jobs to keep people employed. Nuclear weapons were not just America’s secret weapon, but also its secret economic weapon. As of 2006, we still had 9,960 of them. There is today no sane use for them, while the trillions spent on them could have been used to solve the problems of social security and health care, quality education and access to higher education for all, not to speak of the retention of highly skilled jobs within the American economy.

The pioneer in analyzing what has been lost as a result of military Keynesianism was the late Seymour Melman (1917-2004), a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University. His 1970 book, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War, was a prescient analysis of the unintended consequences of the American preoccupation with its armed forces and their weaponry since the onset of the Cold War. Melman wrote (pp. 2-3):

“From 1946 to 1969, the United States government spent over $1,000 billion on the military, more than half of this under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations — the period during which the [Pentagon-dominated] state management was established as a formal institution. This sum of staggering size (try to visualize a billion of something) does not express the cost of the military establishment to the nation as a whole. The true cost is measured by what has been foregone, by the accumulated deterioration in many facets of life by the inability to alleviate human wretchedness of long duration.”

In an important exegesis on Melman’s relevance to the current American economic situation, Thomas Woods writes:

“According to the U.S. Department of Defense, during the four decades from 1947 through 1987 it used (in 1982 dollars) $7.62 trillion in capital resources. In 1985, the Department of Commerce estimated the value of the nation’s plant and equipment, and infrastructure, at just over $7.29 trillion. In other words, the amount spent over that period could have doubled the American capital stock or modernized and replaced its existing stock.”

The fact that we did not modernize or replace our capital assets is one of the main reasons why, by the turn of the twenty-first century, our manufacturing base had all but evaporated. Machine tools — an industry on which Melman was an authority — are a particularly important symptom. In November 1968, a five-year inventory disclosed (p. 186) “that 64 percent of the metalworking machine tools used in U.S. industry were ten years old or older. The age of this industrial equipment (drills, lathes, etc.) marks the United States’ machine tool stock as the oldest among all major industrial nations, and it marks the continuation of a deterioration process that began with the end of the Second World War. This deterioration at the base of the industrial system certifies to the continuous debilitating and depleting effect that the military use of capital and research and development talent has had on American industry.”

Nothing has been done in the period since 1968 to reverse these trends and it shows today in our massive imports of equipment — from medical machines like proton accelerators for radiological therapy (made primarily in Belgium, Germany, and Japan) to cars and trucks.

Our short tenure as the world’s “lone superpower” has come to an end. As Harvard economics professor Benjamin Friedman has written:

“Again and again it has always been the world’s leading lending country that has been the premier country in terms of political influence, diplomatic influence, and cultural influence. It’s no accident that we took over the role from the British at the same time that we took over… the job of being the world’s leading lending country. Today we are no longer the world’s leading lending country. In fact we are now the world’s biggest debtor country, and we are continuing to wield influence on the basis of military prowess alone.”

Some of the damage done can never be rectified. There are, however, some steps that this country urgently needs to take. These include reversing Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthy, beginning to liquidate our global empire of over 800 military bases, cutting from the defense budget all projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States, and ceasing to use the defense budget as a Keynesian jobs program. If we do these things we have a chance of squeaking by. If we don’t, we face probable national insolvency and a long depression.

Chalmers Johnson is the author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, just published in paperback. It is the final volume of his Blowback Trilogy, which also includes Blowback (2000) and The Sorrows of Empire (2004).

[Note: For those interested, click here to view a clip from a new film, “Chalmers Johnson on American Hegemony,” in Cinema Libre Studios’ Speaking Freely series in which he discusses “military Keynesianism” and imperial bankruptcy. For sources on global military spending, please see: (1) Global Security Organization, “World Wide Military Expenditures” as well as Glenn Greenwald, “The bipartisan consensus on U.S. military spending”; (2) Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “Report: China biggest Asian military spender.”]

12 Steps to US Financial Meltdown

(and eight reasons why the Fed cannot head it off...)

Via: the Cryptogon:

Business Spectator / Financial Times:

Martin Wolf, Financial Times

Twelve steps to meltdown

“I would tell audiences that we were facing not a bubble but a froth – lots of small, local bubbles that never grew to a scale that could threaten the health of the overall economy.” So wrote Alan Greenspan in The Age of Turbulence.

That used to be Mr Greenspan’s view of the US housing bubble. He was wrong, alas. So how bad might this downturn get? To answer this question we should ask a true bear. My favourite one is Nouriel Roubini of New York University’s Stern School of Business, founder of RGE Monitor.

Recently, Professor Roubini’s scenarios have been dire enough to make the flesh creep. But his thinking deserves to be taken seriously. He first predicted a US recession in July 2006. At that time, his view was extremely controversial. It is so no longer. Now he states that there is “a rising probability of a ‘catastrophic’ financial and economic outcome”. The characteristics of this scenario are, he argues: “A vicious circle where a deep recession makes the financial losses more severe and where, in turn, large and growing financial losses and a financial meltdown make the recession even more severe.”

Prof Roubini is even fonder of lists than I am. Here are his 12 – yes, 12 – steps to financial disaster.

Step one is the worst housing recession in US history. House prices will, he says, fall by 20 to 30 per cent from their peak, which would wipe out between $4,000 billion and $6,000 billion in household wealth. Ten million households will end up with negative equity and so with a huge incentive to put the house keys in the post and depart for greener fields. Many more home-builders will be bankrupted.

Step two would be further losses, beyond the $250 billion-$300 billion now estimated, for sub-prime mortgages. About 60 per cent of all mortgage origination between 2005 and 2007 had “reckless or toxic features”, argues Roubini. Goldman Sachs estimates mortgage losses at $400 billion. But if home prices fell by more than 20 per cent, losses would be bigger. That would further impair the banks’ ability to offer credit.

Step three would be big losses on unsecured consumer debt: credit cards, auto loans, student loans and so forth. The “credit crunch” would then spread from mortgages to a wide range of consumer credit.

Step four would be the downgrading of the monoline insurers, which do not deserve the AAA rating on which their business depends. A further $150 billion writedown of asset-backed securities would then ensue.

Step five would be the meltdown of the commercial property market, while step six would be bankruptcy of a large regional or national bank.

Step seven would be big losses on reckless leveraged buy-outs. Hundreds of billions of dollars of such loans are now stuck on the balance sheets of financial institutions.

Step eight would be a wave of corporate defaults. On average, US companies are in decent shape, but a “fat tail” of companies has low profitability and heavy debt. Such defaults would spread losses in “credit default swaps”, which insure such debt. The losses could be $250 billion. Some insurers might go bankrupt.

Step nine would be a meltdown in the “shadow financial system”. Dealing with the distress of hedge funds, special investment vehicles and so forth will be made more difficult by the fact that they have no direct access to lending from central banks.

Step 10 would be a further collapse in stock prices. Failures of hedge funds, margin calls and shorting could lead to cascading falls in prices.

Step 11 would be a drying-up of liquidity in a range of financial markets, including interbank and money markets. Behind this would be a jump in concerns about solvency.

Step 12 would be “a vicious circle of losses, capital reduction, credit contraction, forced liquidation and fire sales of assets at below fundamental prices”.

These, then, are 12 steps to meltdown. In all, argues Roubini: “Total losses in the financial system will add up to more than $1,000 billion and the economic recession will become deeper more protracted and severe.” This, he suggests, is the “nightmare scenario” keeping Ben Bernanke and colleagues at the US Federal Reserve awake. It explains why, having failed to appreciate the dangers for so long, the Fed has lowered rates by 200 basis points this year. This is insurance against a financial meltdown.

Is this kind of scenario at least plausible? It is. Furthermore, we can be confident that it would, if it came to pass, end all stories about “decoupling”. If it lasts six quarters, as Roubini warns, offsetting policy action in the rest of the world would be too little, too late.

Can the Fed head this danger off? In a subsequent piece, Roubini gives eight reasons why it cannot. (He really loves lists!) These are, in brief: US monetary easing is constrained by risks to the dollar and inflation; aggressive easing deals only with illiquidity, not insolvency; the monoline insurers will lose their credit ratings, with dire consequences; overall losses will be too large for sovereign wealth funds to deal with; public intervention is too small to stabilise housing losses; the Fed cannot address the problems of the shadow financial system; regulators cannot find a good middle way between transparency over losses and regulatory forbearance, both of which are needed; and, finally, the transactions-oriented financial system is itself in deep crisis.

The risks are indeed high and the ability of the authorities to deal with them more limited than most people hope. This is not to suggest that there are no ways out. Unfortunately, they are poisonous ones. In the last resort, governments resolve financial crises. This is an iron law. Rescues can occur via overt government assumption of bad debt, inflation, or both. Japan chose the first, much to the distaste of its ministry of finance. But Japan is a creditor country whose savers have complete confidence in the solvency of their government. The US, however, is a debtor. It must keep the trust of foreigners. Should it fail to do so, the inflationary solution becomes probable. This is quite enough to explain why gold costs $920 an ounce.

The connection between the bursting of the housing bubble and the fragility of the financial system has created huge dangers, for the US and the rest of the world. The US public sector is now coming to the rescue, led by the Fed. In the end, they will succeed. But the journey is likely to be wretchedly uncomfortable.

Chris Floyd. Read his Blog

A wealth of riches:

Mission Accomplished

Written by Chris Floyd

Wednesday, 20 February 2008

Oil Closes Over $100 for 1st Time (Washington Post) Exxon Mobil Profit Hits $40.6 Billion (Bloomberg) The Million Year War (TomDispatch.com)

other posts on the page:

Pakistanis Reject Tyranny, Terrorists and the "Terror War"

Hundred-Year Hangover: Betrayal and Blindness in the Making of the Modern World

The Courtier's Choice: Arthur Schlesinger and the Willing Executioners of Democracy

Let Us Now Praise Judge Scalia, Who Gives Us Hope in This Dark Hour
If the Republic Had Not Died a Long Time Ago, This Indeed Would be the Death of the Republic

A Blast from the Past

tomdispatch.com:

The Lost Kristol Tapes

What the New York Times Bought
By Jonathan Schwarz

Imagine that there were a Beatles record only a few people knew existed. And imagine you got the chance to listen to it, and as you did, your excitement grew, note by note. You realized it wasn't merely as good as Rubber Soul, or Revolver, or Sgt. Pepper's. It was much, much better. And now, imagine how badly you'd want to tell other Beatles fans all about it.

That's how I feel for my fellow William Kristol fans. You loved it when Bill said invading Iraq was going to have "terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East"? You have the original recording of him explaining the war would make us "respected around the world" and his classic statement that there's "almost no evidence" of Iraq experiencing Sunni-Shia conflict? Well, I've got something that will blow your mind!

I'm talking about Kristol's two-hour appearance on C-Span's Washington Journal on March 28, 2003, just nine days after the President launched his invasion of Iraq. No one remembers it today. You can't even fish it out of LexisNexis. It's not there. Yet it's a masterpiece, a double album of smarm, horrifying ignorance, and bald-faced deceit. While you've heard him play those instruments before, he never again reached such heights. It's a performance for the history books -- particularly that chapter about how the American Empire collapsed.

And a Happy Valentine's Day to You, too

(CNN) -- Saudi Arabia has asked florists and gift shops to remove all red items until after Valentine's Day, calling the celebration of such a holiday a sin, local media reported Monday.

With a ban on red gift items over Valentine's Day in Saudi Arabia, a black market in red roses has flowered.

"As Muslims we shouldn't celebrate a non-Muslim celebration, especially this one that encourages immoral relations between unmarried men and women, " Sheikh Khaled Al-Dossari, a scholar in Islamic studies, told the Saudi Gazette, an English-language newspaper.

Every year, officials with the conservative Muslim kingdom's Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice clamp down on shops a few days before February 14, instructing them to remove red roses, red wrapping paper, gift boxes and teddy bears. On the eve of the holiday, they raid stores and seize symbols of love.

The virtue and vice squad is a police force of several thousand charged with, among other things, enforcing dress codes and segregating the sexes. Saudi Arabia, which follows a strict interpretation of Islam called Wahhabism, punishes unrelated women and men who mingle in public.

911 nostalgia

Ever wonder why someone hasn't done a simple physical analysis to settle, once and for all, how structures like the World Trade Center buildings could fall at virtually free-fall speed? Someone trained in such things?

Someone, it turns out, has.

MIT Study of Geothermal Energy Potential

How could I have missed this one...?

from the Cryptogon:

Geothermal Power Could Meet World’s Annual Energy Needs 250,000 Times Over

August 6th, 2007

Amount of taxpayer money that the U.S. Government has allocated to this deep, “hot rock” geothermal research: $2 million.

Amount of taxpayer money flushed down the toilet of U.S. military operations in Iraq PER DAY: $200 million.

Via: Yahoo / AP:

Scientists say this geothermal energy, clean, quiet and virtually inexhaustible, could fill the world’s annual needs 250,000 times over with nearly zero impact on the climate or the environment.

A study released this year by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said if 40 percent of the heat under the United States could be tapped, it would meet demand 56,000 times over. It said an investment of $800 million to $1 billion [Or the costs associated with fighting the Iraq war for five days—Kevin] could produce more than 100 gigawatts of electricity by 2050, equaling the combined output of all 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S.

“The resource base for geothermal is enormous,” Professor Jefferson Tester, the study’s lead author, told The Associated Press.

But there are drawbacks — not just earthquakes but cost. A so-called hot rock well three miles deep in the United States would cost $7 million to $8 million, according to the MIT study. The average cost of drilling an oil well in the U.S. in 2004 was $1.44 million, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

…

The United States led the way in demonstrating the concept with the Los Alamos geothermal project at Fenton Hill, N.M. The project begun in the 1970s demonstrated that drilling 15,000 feet deep was possible and that energy could then be extracted.

But the project came to a halt in 2000 when it ran out of funds. Meanwhile, the MIT report said, problems encountered in testing have been solved or can be managed — such as controlling how the water flows underground or limiting earthquakes and chemical interactions between water and rock.

Backers in the United States hope government funding will increase as oil and gas prices rise. But Steve Chalk, deputy assistant secretary for renewable energy, said the Department of Energy won’t spend more money beyond the $2 million it has already allocated to hot rock technology.

However, he said the MIT study, which was funded by the Department of Energy, serves as a basis for studying the idea further.

Major energy companies, including Chevron Corp., Exxon Mobil Corp. and American Electric Power, told the AP they are following the research but not investing in it.

“This is an interesting technology for Chevron and we are currently evaluating its potential,” said spokesman Alexander Yelland.

an alternate explanation

How many times have you heard someone comment on the ethnic killings in Iraq and say something like, "Isn't it horrible, people who lived together for years, now killing each other? What would make someone do something like that?"

From an Iraqi blog, a somewhat different outlook on the situation.

Lethal Agreements in Baghdad.

Layla Anwar, The Arab Woman Newsbytes

February 2, 2008

Oh, please listen to this puppet with his three day unshaved beard and his silver ring from Qum. Listen to what the puppet has to say about "Al-Qaeda."

"It is time to launch a decisive battle against terrorism.The battle that our armed forces will launch will destroy terrorism and the criminal gangs and outlaws in Nineveh." And he adds ""so we can get rid of terrorism and the remnants of the former (Saddam Hussein) regime..."

In another statement, the puppet said "I swear on the blood (of the victims), we will achieve all our goals in securing a stable Iraq. We will continue to ... crush the terrorists and target their strongholds..."

May I remind the reader, that a high ranking official in the U.S army proudly stated that "75% of Al-Qaeda has been finished off." Today, that same official cries that Al-Qaeda is still a very serious threat...

And by sheer coincidence, I received this e.mail from Baghdad. Someone who has been following my blog. And this is what MJ had to say about "Al-Qaeda", in response to my last post "Birds & Bombs"

"...In Baghdad airport, there resides a group of murderers, about 400 of them under the command of the CIA (with Israeli advisers), most of them come from South America, Colombians, Brazilians...etc, they call them the "dirty brigade". They along with Blackwater are responsible for most of the mayhem in the past four years !
A Mossad agent recently has admitted that the Mossad was responsible for killing over 300 physicians, doctors, scientists, university lecturers, pilots and even politicians. When asked if they used Mossad agent to do the killing, he replied : No, we kill them with their own people!
He said : 200 dollars per assasination were the normal price to hire a gun in Baghdad and the highest payment were 500 dollars !

Back to the dirty ones . As I mentioned, they work under the command of the CIA and the planting of IEDs VBIEDs (most are manufactured in north Iraq and under the Mossad supervision) are done at night, along with kidnapping and casual murder of civilians, to spread fear and animosity amongst the Iraqi people, as a divine and conquer rule which many Iraqis seem to ignore!

The funny thing is that there is full cooperation between the Americans and the Iranians on the intelligence front! Which only means that the sectarian killings and ethnic cleansing of Sunnis from Baghdad and now Musil can not be achieved without a full cooperation between the two parties involved : Americans and Iranians! How ironic !

Layla, you know what some American units did in Anbar province (thraa3 dijla) ? They were stopping buses loaded with passengers and then separate them on their ethnical background, and blindfold and handcuff them, and then through waiting agents they hand the Sunnis to the awaiting Shiaa killing squads and hand the Shiaas to fighters in falluja...a story impossible to believe, I know, but take it from me Layla because my experience is very wide in this field and I am not getting any credit for telling you this.

The explosion yesterday in the markets has nothing but the smell and the fowl taste of those dirty bastards who are located in BAGHDAD airport and do their dirty work from there, with car bombs or even mentally handikapped iraqis..."

And he adds in conclusion

" The airport is controlled completely by the Americans.....the militias work under their command! But the airport facilitate the biggest CIA HQ in the Middle East and perhaps in the world. They took control of the VVIP buildings of the airport....
The militias working for the CIA are foreign...the Shiaa militias work under their own agenda, but take permission from the Americans...the Shiaa militias of course, work for Iran, but still cooperate with the USA in certain areas...such as sectarian cleansing...."

I have to thank M.J. for giving us all a short synopsis on who
"Al-Qaeda" in Iraq really is.

P.S: For more on American and Iranian operatives,(like Quds Brigades), please read "Bits & Pieces from the Iraqi coffin."

Sundowner Towns, USA

At the blog Orincus I read part seven of David Neiwert's ten-part series about Eliminationism in America, and read about a book—Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James W. Loewen, sociologist and educator and author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America. Sundown towns, it turns out, are those where it was forbidden for minorities of one sort or another to spend the night.

Lowewn has done extensive research into the history of towns across America. In fact, you can even look up your home town to see what he's found out, or what folks have posted about it.

I did just that and found the experience both enlightening and astonishing. I knew my hometown seemed to be virtually all white, while 15 miles down the road was a town that was mysteriously about half black. I didn't hear until I was in my 20s that this condition was not a fluke of nature, but rather a carefully orchestrated result of realtors.

The very neighborhood where I grew up turned out to have a restrictive covenant, part of which says:

"No part of said property or any buildings erected thereon shall be occupied or resided upon by any peson not wholly of the Caucasian race. Domestic servants who are members of a race other than the white or Caucasian race may live on or occupy the premises where their employer resides."

Browsing through the state's towns I was startled (though I shouldn't have been surprised) to find story after story about many, many Chinatowns being burned down in 1886, or blacks kept out into the 60s, or Indians eliminated altogether.

Check out your own hometown. You may be surprised. Or not...

Failure to impeach Bush will haunt Democrats and the country

Weldon Berger in BTCNews:

Nearly a decade of investigations, a lurid final report and a concerted campaign for impeachment left Bill Clinton among the more popular American presidents, with the majority of Americans unconvinced of any need to impeach or remove him from office. Nearly a decade of no investigations, with no coherent summary of misdeeds and no institutional effort to impeach, has left George Bush among the most unpopular of all presidents with a large minority, possibly a plurality, of Americans believing he deserves impeachment.

Clinton was impeached for personal reasons, on both sides of the equation: it was his personal behavior that provided whatever basis for the charges existed, and the desire to impeach him was intensely personal as well. However much impeachment proponents dislike Bush and Cheney—often considerably—the rationale for impeaching them is their official behavior. Consequently, any indictment of the two, whether for repeatedly breaking the law with respect to warrantless surveillance, or violating the Geneva conventions, or politicizing the Department of Justice or any of a number of other crimes, would constitute an indictment of their Congressional enablers as well.

No doubt that’s among the reasons some Democrats in Congress are dead set against the idea, since many of them can be counted among the enablers. But in the long run, Democrats are missing an opportunity to methodically expose the scofflaw nature of the Republican party and to decertify it as a legitimate participant in governing the country until it reconstitutes itself in a more palatable form (or until Democrats implode, whichever happens first).

Nancy Pelosi recently restated her opposition to impeachment, saying that it would be divisive. As I noted at the time, she’s absolutely right. On one side of the divide would be those who support the Constitution and the rule of law, and on the other, whether from party loyalty or personal philosophy, those who don’t. It’s a division that, were it to be explicitly drawn, would benefit the country and those Democrats who stand on the better side of it even if impeachment were to fail, which is possible, or if impeachment succeeded and the Senate voted, as is all but certain, to acquit.

Should the next president be a Democrat, he or she would benefit considerably from serving with a Congress in which Republicans were stigmatized by having been forced to side with Bush and Cheney against the Constitution and Democrats were clearly identified as standing with it. A Republican president would be constrained by the same circumstances.

But, Our Meat Supply is Safe!

...or so I've been told by people who should know better...

the Cosmic Iguana:

January 30, 2008

SICK COWS FED TO SCHOOL KIDS, AND TORTURED TO BOOT

Yet another example of atrocities you couldn't make up during the age of Bush. RAW STORY:

The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) has released footage taken by an undercover investigator which reveals horrifying abuse of cows at a California slaughterhouse which reportedly supplies meat to American school lunch programs.

Cows too sick or lame to walk are shown being shocked, prodded, shoved with forklifts, and even blasted with hoses in what the head of the HSUS describes as "torture ... right out of the waterboarding manual." Such "downer" animals normally would not be led to slaughter out of fear of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (i.e., "mad cow" disease) entering the food supply.... [*]

Two years ago, as posted here, BushCo eliminated most Mad Cow testing [*]. The obvious reason was fear of finding any, since they also forbid ranchers to test their own [*].

So the net result will probably be a Mad Cow epidemic here in about another ten years. But, hey, since it's gonna happen anyway why not squeeze out a little extra profit by feeding it to school kids? After all, they're probably juvenile delinquents anyway.