April 11, 2013

What's All The Hubbub, Bub?

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/ed-naha/48992/whats-all-the-hubbub-bub



What's All The Hubbub, Bub?
by Ed Naha | April 10, 2013 - 9:52am

I grew up on anarchic cartoons: Looney Tunes, Screwy Squirrel, Droopy dog, the whole nine yards. When theatrical cartoons were toned down and phased out decades ago, I was heartbroken. Where could I now go to see characters’ eyes bug out of their heads on stalks while ahooga horns blared, to witness apoplectic dorks blow steam out of their ears while train whistles hooted and, of course, to behold irate idiots shoot flames out of their butts with enough force to twirl them around like a spinning top?

Little did I know that, in my second childhood, the Great Cartoonist In the Sky would pencil in three- dimensional versions of these demented drawings courtesy of the Republican Party. These days, I can behold Looney Tunes action just by watching the news.

The big problem I have with today’s Loonies is that they don’t have the smarts of their cartoon counterparts. Wile E. Coyote always thought he’d succeed when he lit a stick of dynamite and hid it under a box marked “bird seed.” Today’s conservatives light the stick, hold it, have it blow up in their faces and, then, deny the dynamite ever existed, the explosion ever happened or that they had anything to do with lighting the fuse. Some people call this “magical thinking.” I call it “blissful mass destruction.”

These guys and gals imagine a reality and, then, set about to destroy anything and anyone that doesn’t fit in with their wishful thinking.

April 11, 2013

House Republicans push to give Keystone pipeline approval authority to Congress

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/04/10/188191/house-republicans-push-to-give.html

House Republicans push to give Keystone pipeline approval authority to Congress
By Sean Cockerham | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Wednesday, April 10, 2013

WASHINGTON — Promoters of the Keystone XL pipeline are agitating for its fast approval now that the State Department has downplayed the project’s impact on global warming. Energy leaders in the House of Representatives back a bill to force the government to approve it, and the premier of the Canadian province of Alberta is in Washington lobbying for the project.

Some Republican congressmen dismissed concerns at a hearing Wednesday on the Keystone bill that the jumbo pipeline to tap Canada’s greenhouse gas-intensive oil sands would warm the planet. Texas Rep. Joe Barton was skeptical of the linkage that scientists have made between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.

“If you’re a believer in the Bible, one would have to say the great flood is an example of climate change. That’s certainly not because mankind had overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy,” Barton said,

It’s up to President Barack Obama to decide whether to allow the 1,700-mile pipeline to bring oil from the Alberta oil sands to U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast. The bill, sponsored by Nebraska Republican Rep. Lee Terry, seeks to take that authority out of the president’s hands. TransCanada Corp. first applied to build the pipeline in 2008, and Alexander Pourbaix, the company’s president for energy and oil pipelines, called Wednesday for swift approval, saying it still might be “many months” before Obama decides.

April 11, 2013

US judge raises bar in Bradley Manning case

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2013/04/2013410183858785108.html



A judge has ruled a commando can testify that documents Manning leaked were in bin Laden's compound [EPA]

US judge raises bar in Bradley Manning case
Last Modified: 10 Apr 2013 20:43

A judge has ruled that the US government must prove that Bradley Manning knowingly helped al-Qaeda by leaking secret documents to the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks to convict him of aiding the enemy.

Judge Denise Lind's ruling at a preliminary hearing in a Baltimore, Maryland, court on Wednesday raises the bar for convicting Manning, a US army private, of the most serious charge he faces.

Manning, 25, has admitted leaking the documents but denies aiding the enemy.

Colonel Lind said the prosecution in the military tribunal must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Manning had "reason to believe such information could be used to the injury of the US", by an armed group like al-Qaeda or another nation.

April 11, 2013

Matt Gurney: U.S. Navy sets phasers to “defend”

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/04/10/matt-gurney-u-s-navy-sets-phasers-to-defend/



Matt Gurney: U.S. Navy sets phasers to “defend”
Matt Gurney | 13/04/10 | Last Updated: 13/04/10 10:14 AM ET

If all goes according to plan, the first warship to mount a directed energy weapon will arrive in the Persian Gulf by the summer of next year. The USS Ponce, modified to carry a prototype laser weapon, will join other U.S. ships in the region in keeping a careful watch on Iran.

The laser, known as a LaWS (Laser Weapons System), is an early version of what one day may become a very useful part of the Navy’s arsenal. The version that will be sent aboard Ponce, herself an older ship that would not normally serve on the front lines, is not a fully developed weapon. The Navy hopes to one day deploy larger and more powerful versions, that will be capable of destroying incoming boats, missiles and planes. The version aboard Ponce will be effective only against smaller targets, such as a drone or very small boat.

And despite the fond hopes of sci-fi fans everywhere, the laser will hardly be an Imperial laser cannon or a Federation phaser array. Sci-fi has often treated energy weapons as massively devastating bolts of death — one hit and the enemy target, be it Rebel or Klingon, is destroyed in a massive explosion. The lasers that will be deployed aboard the Ponce, and presumably other U.S. Navy ships after that, will be far more limited. But still very useful.

Imagine the weapon that will be carried aboard the Ponce as a kind of long-range blowtorch. It will work by striking its target with a sustained point of intense heat. The heat will build up and eventually melt or cut its way through whatever it is hitting. That might sever important wires, or break off a wing or a tail section of a plane. It could theoretically burn into a full tank and cause an explosion. But this will take time — a glancing, momentary blow won’t cut it. How much time will depend on the power of the laser: more power, less time.

April 11, 2013

Keystone follies: Canadian oil sands not a major source of climate change (** pic heavy**)

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/04/08/keystone-follies-canadian-oil-sands-not-causing-climate-change/



Keystone follies: Canadian oil sands not a major source of climate change
Susan McArthur and Ian Macgregor
Special to Financial Post | 13/04/08 | Last Updated: 13/04/09 9:17 AM ET

Canada’s oil sands seem to attract lies, half truths and sheer nonsense from every corner, including from Canadians themselves. The current hullabaloo regarding the Keystone pipeline and Canadian oil sands is to climate change as a drop of water is to the ocean.

The scientific consensus is that CO2 is contributing to global warming which is bad for the planet and our children. If CO2 is the problem policy makers and pundits should focus the most offensive CO2 perpetrators. U.S. coal-fired power plants emit 2000 million tonnes of CO2 per year vs the oil sands which emit 40 million tonnes per year. U.S. coal-fired electricity plants emit 50 times more CO2 per year than oil produced from the Canadian oil sands. If you add China into the global warning equation we are talking about 100 times more CO2 per year as a result of Chinese coal fired plants than Canadian oil sands.

Canada’s boreal forest is a national treasure. The boreal forest stretches 10,000 kilometres across Canada, is an important absorber of the world’s CO2 and is home to more than 85 species of mammals, 130 species of fish, 300 species of birds and a whopping 32,000 species of insects. According to TreeHugger, Canada’s boreal forest is still 91% intact vs only 5% in Scandinavia. Quebec is Canada’s biggest Boreal offender having flooded 11,000 square kilometres when it built its massive hydro power facilities. Industry is often the beneficiary of cheap hydro power in Quebec. In contrast, the boreal footprint impacted by oil sands development is only 715 square kilometres or less than 10% of Quebec’s.

As for environmental rules and regulations which pertain to oil production, Canada is lily white compared to its global peers. For example, Canada began regulating sulphur emissions associated with producing oil and gas long before any other country and still leads the U.S. by a wide margin. Our oil sands bitumen has a lower environmental and CO2 impact than California heavy oil which emits 9% more CO2. And our environmental practices are head and shoulders above oil-producing countries like Venezuela which feed the U.S. Gulf Coast refineries.



unhappycamper comment: Nice pic for this apologist's article on the Alberta Tar Sands Project. Here's my pics:






















For more pics of the Alberta Tar Sands, google: alberta tar sands

April 11, 2013

CIA and Amazon Agreement to Record Social Network Data

http://watchingamerica.com/News/201729/cia-and-amazon-agreement-to-record-social-network-data/

The announcement comes from the chief technology officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. The objective: to construct a dedicated information cloud to preserve phone calls, texts, emails, conversations and "likes" from Facebook and Twitter. The protection of the country is about connecting the dots

CIA and Amazon Agreement to Record Social Network Data
Il Fatto Quotidiano, Italy
By Marco Quarantelli
Translated By Micaela Bester
24 March 2013
Edited by Ketu­rah Hetrick

A giant black hole swallows and records phone calls, texts, emails, conversations and "likes" on Facebook, messages on Twitter, videos and every other type of information that millions and millions of users post every second on the network. The CIA wants to collect as much as possible and have it on hand "forever," allowing it to analyze it with the aim of guaranteeing the security of the United States. Chief Technology Officer of the CIA, Ira "Gus" Hunt, explained it in New York. The announcement, writes the Huffington Post, came two days after the news of the agreement with Amazon, which will provide the agency with the technology to construct a dedicated information cloud to preserve quantities of information never before imagined.

Big data are the present and future of intelligence, and the American secret services are gearing up to guarantee the possibility of computing "on all human generated information." The "all-source analysis" relates all the available information ("connecting the dots&quot and informs the president and the secretary of defense, explained Hunt on Wednesday at the GigaOM Structure : Data conference in New York.

"The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else which arrives at a future point in time.... we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it ‘forever.’" The word is "big data," large sets of information created by the dizzying development of digital media, especially social networks: "Roughly thirty-five percent of all the world's digital photography gets put onto Facebook," and "Twitter is about 124 billion tweets a year."

The scenarios are worrying: a global "Big Brother." "It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information,” says Hunt. Obviously, the declared intention is to protect the United States from enemies and international terrorism, avoiding the mistakes of the past. "We do want to stop the next 'underwear bomber,'" Hunt explained, referring to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who, in December 2009, managed to board Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit with a PETN explosive device hidden in his undergarments. "Though all of the information was available to all-source analysts at the CIA and the [National Counter Terrorism Center] prior to the attempted attack, the dots were never connected," reads a 2010 White House report. To guarantee the security of the U.S., "we need an environment in which to put all of our data," and that allows it to be matched easily with other information through "this funny little thing called the Cloud.”

April 10, 2013

The Elephant in the Room: Militarism

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/jeff-cohen/48983/the-elephant-in-the-room-militarism

The Elephant in the Room: Militarism
by Jeff Cohen | April 10, 2013 - 7:53am

~snip~

Today there’s an elephant in the room: a huge, yet ignored, issue that largely explains why Social Security is now on the chopping block. And why other industrialized countries have free college education and universal healthcare, but we don’t. It’s arguably our country’s biggest problem – a problem that Martin Luther King Jr. focused on before he was assassinated 45 years ago, and has only worsened since then (which was the height of the Vietnam War).

That problem is U.S. militarism and perpetual war.

In 1967, King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” – and said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Nowadays MSNBC hosts yell at Fox News hosts, and vice versa, about all sorts of issues – but when the Obama administration expanded the bloody war in Afghanistan, the shouting heads at both channels went almost silent. When Obama’s drone war expanded, there was little shouting. Not at MSNBC, not at Fox. Nor at CNN, CBS, ABC or so-called public broadcasting.

April 10, 2013

Glenn Hubbard—A Career that Street Hookers Wouldn’t Touch

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/mark-biskeborn/48981/glenn-hubbard-a-career-that-street-hookers-wouldn-t-touch

Glenn Hubbard—A Career that Street Hookers Wouldn’t Touch
by Mark Biskeborn | April 10, 2013 - 12:49am

Just last week, NPR interviewed Larry Summers.(1) Everyone had to bite their tongue during breakfast as America suffered a shock to think how that man was still not in a cage to stop him from carrying out financial terrorism at a global scale.

Again, just today, it felt like Ground Hog Day. NPR interviewed Glenn Hubbard. (2) Like Summers, Glenn Hubbard is one of the highest paid cheerleaders for the new world order of free-market ideology. It is the nonsense that made the Gilded Age possible and during the roaring 1920s resulting in the Great Depression. These neoconservatives began making big money by pushing catastrophic policies even before Ronald Reagan, filling that president’s empty noggin with hack economists like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

It is difficult to determine which of the two men is viler. Glenn Hubbard, like Larry Summers, has built his career on whoring out his Ivy League sheep skin to Big Business for all the wrong reasons. These men are respected as leading academics, at least in the eye of the elitist cabal. They are both professors at Ivy League Universities and, for the right amount of money, they say whatever Big Business wants to hear.

It just goes to show that a guy can pass the SAT exams and enter into a university of the super rich but still end up with scum-bag careers that would make street pimps feel dirty to touch.

April 10, 2013

Boykin’s Muslim-Bashing Bombast

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/bill-berkowitz/48986/boykin-s-muslim-bashing-bombast

Boykin’s Muslim-Bashing Bombast
by Bill Berkowitz | April 10, 2013 - 8:52am

You wouldn’t recognize William “Jerry” Boykin if you were sharing a pole with him on the subway or sitting next to him on a bus. While he isn’t one of the brightest stars in the conservative Christian right’s constellation, he has certainly tried – and in some cases succeeded – to raise his profile. For Boykin, now executive vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council, the path to right wing stardom has revolved around a protracted and vicious anti-Muslim campaign: Shtick that he’s been purveying for more than a decade.

In February, Boykin, one of the original members of the US Army's Delta Force and a former United States Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, appeared on a panel, led by radio talk show host Janet Parshall, at the National Religious Broadcasters convention. According to People for the American Way’s Brian Tashman, Boykin, the co-author of Sharia, the Threat to America railed against the so-called Sharia threat, and “cited a report from Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy that claims that judges in fifty court cases have used Islamic law in making their decisions and that Sharia ‘has been insinuated into our legal system.’”

The ACLU has pointed out that “the CSP report consists mostly of 50 judicial opinions, which the authors copied and pasted word-for-word simply because they mention Islam or involve claims brought by Muslims, contending that these cases serve as evidence of the so-called ‘Sharia threat.’” The CSP “report doesn’t even attempt to prove that Sharia law is being used in courts, but merely finds that there are some court cases which ‘happen to involve Islam or Muslims.’”

Tashman noted that “Boykin went on to cite Oklahoma’s unconstitutional Sharia ban and insisted that the media is refusing to reveal ‘the true nature of Islam.’”



unhappycamper comment: This is the nutbag who was shitcanned (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2003/10/21/warring_with_god/) in 2003 touting "I KNEW that my God was bigger than his," Lieutenant General William G. Boykin said of his Muslim opponent. "I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol."

April 10, 2013

Big Boeing Targets Small Satellite Market; Not ORS, But Much Faster Than Usual

http://defense.aol.com/2013/04/08/big-boeing-targets-small-satellite-market-not-ors-but-much-fas/

Big Boeing Targets Small Satellite Market; Not ORS, But Much Faster Than Usual
By Colin Clark
Published: April 8, 2013

COLORADO SPRINGS, NATIONAL SPACE SYMPOSIUM: The Boeing Company, better known for building big satellites in clean rooms and charging big prices for them, has spotted what it thinks may be a sweet spot in the satellite market and plans to build prototypes of three small satellites to show the market what it can do.

The "key" reason for building smaller satellites very quickly is to avoid being left behind by Moore's Law, which says that computer processing power doubles every 18 months, Bruce Chesley, director for advanced space and intelligence systems at Boeing said. "It's taking advantage of smaller cheaper components and taking advantage of Boeing's quality control and procedures."

The new satellites will share "a common architecture, flight software and simplified payload integration options" (also known as plug and play). The likeliest types of sensors, said Boeing officials: weather.

Why weather? The Air Force, the Department of Commerce (NOAA), and the rest of the federal government (not to mention Northrop Grumman) completely botched the requirements and design of what were supposed to be the nation's bedrock weather satellites, known as NPOESS. Thus the hunger for smaller, simpler, faster and cheaper weather satellites. Alex Lopez, vice president for advanced network and space systems, said the market over 10 years would be in the billions, but he declined to be more specific. (Eds. note: Corrected Alex's last name. 5:18 pm)