Friday, March 14, 2008

What We Need

There is a strange near silence on the
Democratic side of the current election campaign regarding the
destabilization of the Earth’s atmosphere or for that matter the
destabilization of the whole Earth. The increasingly fierce tides,
rising seas, floods, earthquakes and winds of change (forecast by
PROJECT EARTH for more than a quarter of a century) are bearing down
upon us.


The same corporate
oligarchy, which has laid waste to so much of our world would rather
not accurately report all the fires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes or
all the cities and towns ruined by weather exacerbated by climate
change. As too many of us know, these disasters are increasingly
ubiquitous and cannot be denied.


The
corporate boys would rather change the subject to the economy instead
but alas they have destroyed that too. We the People can’t ignore the
news about the environment or it’s stepchild, the economy. Every week
another town is laid to waste, another factory is closed, another ten
thousand mortgages are foreclosed, another bridge to the future
collapsed.


There were tornadoes in January
again this year. There will be more in February and March and on and
on… The firestorms in Southern California have been replaced by
flooding. Over twenty feet of snow has fallen in the Mountains of
Colorado this year until there is no place left to put it.. The Pacific
Northwest has spent weeks and now months fighting flood after flood and
snowstorm after snowstorm. The Hawaiian Islands are being repeatedly
flooded by un-named storms. Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas and parts of
Texas have been shut down for weeks at a time by ice and wind and an
inadequate infrastructure.


CitizenAlertIn
the weeks and months and years to come more and more of our homes will
be reduced to rubble and so will our neighbors’ homes down the street.
Many of us have now seen first hand how ill prepared our Federal, State
and local governments are for the systemic breakdown of global
environmental stability, which the global corporatocracy has created.
Project Earth has said for nearly thirty years now, “When the
environment of the Earth is bankrupt we will all be homeless. There
will be countless environmental refugees and fewer and fewer refuges.”


It
seems redundant to continue to say this. Then suddenly one day Global
Climate Destabilization comes to your town and you find that you don’t
have water to drink or to clean with (or to flush your toilets with)
and the lights are out and you have no heat or food. So pardon me for
continuing to bring up this sore point again and again but none of this
was necessary.


There have been solutions
available since Tesla. The problem is that all of the real solutions
have been systematically kept from us by compromising politicians and
politically correct “scientists” who, drunk with a false elitism, fear
that their corporate constituents/handlers would replace their sorry
asses with new ones if they ever actually told the truth.


Such
a man is Barrack Obama. His campaign ignores the Emergency on Earth. It
is strange that so many naïve souls seem to think that Barrack Obama is
imbued with some messianic mantle of authority. Unfortunately, a
careful examination of his record reveals that Barrack is large on
rhetoric but low on substance.


When I hear
the starry eyed members of the Barrack Obama cult singing the
jingoistic refrains of their new belief system, I have to say
something. I have to point out that their idol is the same Senator
Obama who bragged about a “Bill”
he introduced to “protect” his Illinois constituents from unreported
leaks of nuclear waste from several nuclear reactors in that state. The
problem with his story is that he allowed this “Bill” to become
meaningless drivel and even then it didn’t pass. Even so, Mr. Obama
implied to voters in Iowa and by proxy all other voters in our nation
that this “bill” did pass and that it had teeth. Curiouser and
Curiouser!


President George W. Bush and
seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President
Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the
two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security
threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.


As
much as Mr. Obama wishes to paint himself as a legendary legislative
super-hero, the story is just another fake cartoon scene out of the
Barrack Odrama. The truth is that the political Trojan horse named
Barrack Obama submitted himself and his legislation to his corporate
contributors and handlers at Excelon, who had leaked their nuclear waste into the Illinois water table along with their copious contributions to his campaigns.


Let’s
see, there does seem be a pattern here. I wish it were not so. I too
was once so taken with this candidate that I actually sent out an email
to many of you introducing him as a bright new hope. I was wrong.


I
truly believe that Barrack Obama is the cleverest of all the Trojan
horse candidates ever fielded in our nation’s history. At least he
seems clever until you get down to the radioactive the ground water
beneath his feet.


We do not need to
follow a false prophet into a growing wasteland of unfulfilled
promises. We have had enough lies to kill a planet. We don’t need more
false hope based on political hype.


We
actually need to implement the long withheld solutions of zero point
vacuum fluctuation and hydro-oxy gas based technologies. We need to
cast aside the jargon of mediocre candidates and the band-aids of
1970’s variety technologies.


We need to act
like loving, intelligent beings. We have to be politically, physically
and even spiritually assertive. If we do this, we can send a message to
the rest of the universe that there is intelligent life on Earth.
Perhaps we can even attract the help of more intelligent beings whose
presence frequently leaks across the corporate firewall of denial and
into our living rooms. When we will we have leadership that stops lying
about the fact that we live in a universe in which much more advanced
and intelligent life forms exist than the politicians who usurp our
attention on the evening news.


Whether
Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John McCain is the next President, the
United States Government has no right to deny the citizens of our
country or the rest of the world the benefit of very advanced and
pollution free energy technologies, which have been developed at our
expense but never used for our collective good. I know that these
technologies exist because I have actually, physically invented,
developed and worked with them. By grace, I have survived long enough
to tell you about and even physically demonstrate several technologies
before representatives of the corruption confiscated them.


Right
now, we are in an emergency and we cannot afford for our government to
withhold the truth about climate destabilization, zero point
technologies or more intelligent life forms any longer.


Through
our carelessness, we have created a world of extremes, a world of fire
and ice, of deluge and drought. We have created a world of imbalance.
We need to bring this world back into balance. We need to start now.
Charismatic leaders who say one thing and then do another just won’t
cut it in the twenty first century and that is all there is to it.





Nuclear Leaks and Response Tested Obama in Senate




Adam Trombly

Today's Must Read


By Paul Kiel - March 14, 2008, 9:46AM — If there's one thing EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson doesn't like to talk about, it's his conversations with the White House. When questioned about some decision that just happened to delight the White House, Johnson, the most disciplined adherent to talking points in recent memory, responds with a version of "the final decision was mine and mine alone" or "I have routine contacts with various officials on a wide range of issues. . . . I value the ability to have candid discussions that are part of good government."

But unfortunately, sometimes you just can't keep a lid on things. Earlier this week, the EPA issued a new rule on the allowable amount of smog-forming ozone in the air. It was a decision taken against the unanimous advice of EPA scientists, who advised a much lower standard than the one ultimately decided upon. That has come to be a sadly regular occurrence. But this time, the role of the White House -- and President Bush himself -- is clear. From The Washington Post:

EPA officials initially tried to set a lower seasonal limit on ozone to protect wildlife, parks and farmland, as required under the law. While their proposal was less restrictive than what the EPA's scientific advisers had proposed, Bush overruled EPA officials and on Tuesday ordered the agency to increase the limit, according to the documents.

"It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference for the president personally to override a decision that the Clean Air Act leaves exclusively to EPA's expert scientific judgment," said John Walke, clean-air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Full Story

Friday, February 22, 2008

UN's de Boer says investors tackling global warming while governments spar

The Associated Press
2/27/08

MONTE CARLO, Monaco:
Private companies will soon be investing more than governments in
cutting the production of greenhouse gases, the U.N.'s top climate
change official said Thursday.


Yvo de Boer said business efforts were good but also not enough —
and that only a binding international agreement on cutting carbon
emissions will make private sector efforts financially viable.


"Business is really beginning to take climate change into account,"
de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention for
Climate Change, told The Associated Press. "There's a momentum building
in the finance community."

READ STORY





Sunday, February 10, 2008

Grass Makes Better Ethanol than Corn Does

Midwestern farms prove switchgrass could be the right crop for producing ethanol to replace gasoline

By David Biello

Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass—a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland naturally—and proving that it can deliver more than five times more energy than it takes to grow it.

Working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the farmers tracked the seed used to establish the plant, fertilizer used to boost its growth, fuel used to farm it, overall rainfall and the amount of grass ultimately harvested for five years on fields ranging from seven to 23 acres in size (three to nine hectares).

Once established, the fields yielded from 5.2 to 11.1 metric tons of grass bales per hectare, depending on rainfall, says USDA plant scientist Ken Vogel. "It fluctuates with the timing of the precipitation,'' he says. "Switchgrass needs most of its moisture in spring and midsummer. If you get fall rains, it's not going to do that year's crops much good."

Full Article

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

False Pretenses

Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

By Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

Read Full Article >>

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Senate Takes Up Indian Health Care Measure Under Veto Threat

The Senate began its 2008 session Tuesday with legislation to reauthorize health care services for American Indians as the White House threatened a veto of the measure.

The White House, in a policy statement, demanded modifications to the bill, which would reauthorize funding for the Indian Health Service, and said President Bush would veto the bill if they were not made.

The veto threat could easily derail what was expected to be a noncontroversial bill. The administration’s main concern was a provision that would expand federal prevailing wage requirements to projects funded under the bill. The White House also objected to what it says are lax documentation requirements in the bill for enrolling patients in Medicaid and other government programs.

The bill would authorize spending for the Indian Health Service, which provides health care for 1.8 million American Indians and Alaska natives, through 2017. According to a Congressional Budget Office estimate, it would authorize discretionary spending of $16 billion over five years and $35 billion over 10 years.

Since a 1992 reauthorization expired in 2001, the health service has continued operating under old guidelines through annual appropriations. Spending in fiscal 2008 totaled $3 billion.

CQ TODAY MIDDAY UPDATE
Jan. 22, 2008

The lowdown on topsoil: It's disappearing

Disappearing dirt rivals global warming as an environmental threat

By TOM PAULSON
P-I REPORTER

The planet is getting skinned.

While many worry about the potential consequences of atmospheric warming, a few experts are trying to call attention to another global crisis quietly taking place under our feet.Call it the thin brown line. Dirt. On average, the planet is covered with little more than 3 feet of topsoil -- the shallow skin of nutrient-rich matter that sustains most of our food and appears to play a critical role in supporting life on Earth.

"We're losing more and more of it every day," said David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington. "The estimate is that we are now losing about 1 percent of our topsoil every year to erosion, most of this caused by agriculture."

"It's just crazy," fumed John Aeschliman, a fifth-generation farmer who grows wheat and other grains on the Palouse near the tiny town of Almota, just west of Pullman.

"We're tearing up the soil and watching tons of it wash away every year," Aeschliman said. He's one of a growing number of farmers trying to persuade others to adopt "no-till" methods, which involve not tilling the land between plantings, leaving crop stubble to reduce erosion and planting new seeds between the stubble rows.

Read Full Article >>

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Petraeus Is Undecided About Deeper Troop Cuts

Army Chief Of Staff: "The Surge Has Sucked All Of The Flexibility Out Of The System"

By Gina Chon and Yochi J. Dreazen

Wall Street Journal | January 17, 2008 02:41 PM

WASIT PROVINCE, Iraq -- The top American commander in Iraq said that 30,000 American troops would leave the country by July but that he had yet to make up his mind about whether to recommend any additional reductions.

In an interview, Gen. David Petraeus said he was working to finalize an assessment of security conditions in Iraq and the wisdom of further military withdrawals in advance of a high-profile appearance before Congress in March.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said he hopes to see the U.S. military presence fall below 130,000 by the end of 2008, a position shared by many senior Pentagon commanders who worry the high troop levels in Iraq are causing growing manpower strains on the army.

"The surge has sucked all of the flexibility out of the system," Army Chief of Staff George Casey said in an interview this week. "And we need to find a way of getting back into balance."

But President Bush made clear this week that additional troop withdrawals were far from a sure thing. After a meeting in Kuwait with Gen. Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Mr. Bush said he was open to slowing or stopping the withdrawal of troops to avoid jeopardizing recent security gains in Iraq. "My attitude is, if he didn't want to continue the drawdown, that's fine with me in order to make sure we succeed," Mr. Bush said, referring to Gen. Petraeus.


Read the rest on the Wall Street Journal.

'Darkest ever' material created

by Helen Briggs
BBC News science reporter

The "darkest ever" substance known to science has been made in a US laboratory.

The material was created from carbon nanotubes - sheets of carbon just one atom thick rolled up into cylinders.

Researchers say it is the closest thing yet to the ideal black material, which absorbs light perfectly at all angles and over all wavelengths.

The discovery is expected to have applications in the fields of electronics and solar energy.

Theoretical clues

An ideal black object absorbs all the colours of light and reflects none of them. In theory, it should be possible to make something that approaches the "perfect absorber".

MORE >>

Saturday, October 6, 2007

World moves into the ecological red

By Jeremy Lovell




LONDON (Reuters) - The world moved into 'ecological overdraft' on
Saturday, the point at which human consumption exceeds the ability of
the earth to sustain it in any year and goes into the red, the New
Economics Foundation think-tank said.




Ecological Debt Day this year is three days earlier than in 2006
which itself was three days earlier than in 2005. NEF said the date had
moved steadily backwards every year since humanity began living beyond
its environmental means in the 1980s.




"As the world creeps closer to irreversible global warming and goes
deeper into ecological debt, why on earth, say, would the UK export 20
tonnes of mineral water to Australia and then re-import 21 tonnes,"
said NEF director Andrew Simms.




"And why would that wasteful trade be more the rule than the exception," he added.




Not only was there a massive gulf between rich and poor but there
were deep variations in environmental profligacy between the rich
countries, NEF said.




If everyone in the world had the same consumption rates as in the
United States it would take 5.3 planet earths to support them, NEF
said, noting that the figure was 3.1 for France and Britain, 3.0 for
Spain, 2.5 for Germany and 2.4 for Japan.




But if everyone emulated China, which is building a coal-fired power
station every five days to feed its booming economy, it would take only
0.9 of a planet.




The NEF report comes as diplomatic momentum builds for UN
environment ministers meeting in December on the Indonesian island of
Bali to agree to start talks on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol on
curbing climate change that expires in 2012.

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Sunday, September 23, 2007

Rising Seas Likely to Flood U.S. History

SETH BORENSTEIN | September 22, 2007 10:32 PM EST |

Ultimately, rising seas will likely swamp the first American
settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch pad that
sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are
predicting.

In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be slowly erased.


Global warming _ through a combination of melting glaciers,
disappearing ice sheets and warmer waters expanding _ is expected to
cause oceans to rise by one meter, or about 39 inches. It will happen
regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several
leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation.


Rising waters will lap at the foundations of old money Wall Street
and the new money towers of Silicon Valley. They will swamp the
locations of big city airports and major interstate highways.

Storm surges worsened by sea level rise will flood the waterfront
getaways of rich politicians _ the Bushes' Kennebunkport and John
Edwards' place on the Outer Banks. And gone will be many of the beaches
in Texas and Florida favored by budget-conscious students on Spring
Break.


That's the troubling outlook projected by coastal maps reviewed by
The Associated Press. The maps, created by scientists at the University
of Arizona, are based on data from the U.S. Geological Survey.


Few of the more than two dozen climate experts interviewed disagree
with the one-meter projection. Some believe it could happen in 50
years, others say 100, and still others say 150.


Sea level rise is "the thing that I'm most concerned about as a
scientist," says Benjamin Santer, a climate physicist at the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in California.


"We're going to get a meter and there's nothing we can do about it,"
said University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author
of the February report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change in Paris. "It's going to happen no matter what _ the question is
when."


Sea level rise "has consequences about where people live and what
they care about," said Donald Boesch, a University of Maryland
scientist who has studied the issue. "We're going to be into this big
national debate about what we protect and at what cost."


This week, beginning with a meeting at the United Nations on Monday,
world leaders will convene to talk about fighting global warming. At
week's end, leaders will gather in Washington with President Bush.


Experts say that protecting America's coastlines would run well into the billions and not all spots could be saved.


And it's not just a rising ocean that is the problem. With it comes
an even greater danger of storm surge, from hurricanes, winter storms
and regular coastal storms, Boesch said. Sea level rise means higher
and more frequent flooding from these extreme events, he said.


All told, one meter of sea level rise in just the lower 48 states
would put about 25,000 square miles under water, according to Jonathan
Overpeck, director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at
the University of Arizona. That's an area the size of West Virginia.


The amount of lost land is even greater when Hawaii and Alaska are included, Overpeck said.


The Environmental Protection Agency's calculation projects a land
loss of about 22,000 square miles. The EPA, which studied only the
Eastern and Gulf coasts, found that Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina,
Texas and South Carolina would lose the most land. But even inland
areas like Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia also have slivers
of at-risk land, according to the EPA.


This past summer's flooding of subways in New York could become far
more regular, even an everyday occurrence, with the projected sea rise,
other scientists said. And New Orleans' Katrina experience and the
daily loss of Louisiana wetlands _ which serve as a barrier that
weakens hurricanes _ are previews of what's to come there.


Florida faces a serious public health risk from rising salt water
tainting drinking water wells, said Joel Scheraga, the EPA's director
of global change research. And the farm-rich San Joaquin Delta in
California faces serious salt water flooding problems, other experts
said.


"Sea level rise is going to have more general impact to the
population and the infrastructure than almost anything else that I can
think of," said S. Jeffress Williams, a U.S. Geological Survey coastal
geologist in Woods Hole, Mass.


Even John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a
scientist often quoted by global warming skeptics, said he figures the
seas will rise at least 16 inches by the end of the century. But he
tells people to prepare for a rise of about three feet just in case.


Williams says it's "not unreasonable at all" to expect that much in
100 years. "We've had a third of a meter in the last century."


The change will be a gradual process, one that is so slow it will be easy to ignore for a while.


"It's like sticking your finger in a pot of water on a burner and
you turn the heat on, Williams said. "You kind of get used to it."




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Thursday, August 16, 2007

Could Time Travel Actually Be Possible?

Scientists claim to have broken the ultimate speed record - by making photons travel faster than light.

Exceeding the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, is supposed to be completely impossible.

According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would take
an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object through the light
barrier.

Travelling faster than light also turns back time with bizarre consequences.

An astronaut moving beyond light speed would theoretically arrive at his destination before leaving.

But
two German physicists now claim to have forced light to overcome its
own speed limit using the strange phenomenon known as quantum
tunnelling.

The research, published in the new Scientist
magazine, involved an experiment in which microwave photons, energetic
packets of light, appeared to travel "instantaneously" between two
prisms forming the halves of a cube placed a metre apart.

When the prisms were placed together, photons fired at one edge passed straight through them, as expected.




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