apparently, former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has been under a gag order for five years because she discovered that neocons have been selling US nuclear secrets to Turkey so the Turks can pass them on to the Pakis, Osama, or whoever….not unlike the Italian secret police in the 70’s who planted bombs and blamed it on the leftwing students, or Columbian military personnel who have done the same thing lately, they figure that if there isn’t a crisis that demands authoritarian rule to deal with it, they’ll create one….

Stranger still, this story is all over the world except, so far, in the US, where us bloggers are on it but the MSM is leaving it alone….

Heinberg writes:

It’s becoming increasingly clear that 2008 will be a catastrophic year for the US economy, and therefore probably for that of the world as a whole. The reasons boil down to two: continuing and snowballing fallout from the subprime mortgage fiasco (exacerbated by an orgy of debt-leveraging), and record-high, continuously advancing oil prices.

as i comment in the post below, some developers in Maine obviously don’t get it, and 14,000 acres of Maine woods may have to pay the price

Is there really still a market for these places?  Undoubtedly they’re intended as “second homes”–even with climate change, the northwest corner of Maine is a tough place to spend the winter.

New test for developers in Maine: climate change

Huge development around Moosehead Lake would create 500,000 tons of CO2 over 50 years, environmentalists say.

 

A plan to build thousands of new homes next to a lake in Maine’s north woods faces an environmental test that may one day challenge developers nationwide: What’s the carbon footprint of a new subdivision or land development?

….

At issue is not just the size of a development but the amount of driving it encourages. By being so far from major cities and accessible only by car, the Plum Creek project would produce, conservatively speaking, an additional 9,500 tons of emissions annually, according to the Environment Northeast study. That’s the equivalent of putting an extra 1,850 vehicles on the road.

“It’s our belief that we can’t meet the nation’s transportation goals for climate change just by improving automobile technology,” says Alan Caron, president of GrowSmart Maine, an antisprawl group that lobbies for compact urban planning and public transportation systems and helped sponsor the Plum Creek study. “You have to pay attention to where things are located.”

from the Christian Science Monitor:

Can Europe cut carbon without cutting growth?

Radical goals for 2020 boost renewable energy and cut emissions sharply.

 

London - Europe unveiled a “road map” to a low-carbon future Wednesday – one of the most radical packages the European Union has ever produced – in an effort to position the bloc at the vanguard of global efforts on climate change.

A clump of legislative proposals and directives provided for steep increases in wind and solar power, improved energy efficiency, and higher costs for polluters to meet a challenge outlined last year and dubbed “triple 20.”

The aim is to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 percent, boost renewable energy to 20 percent of supply, and improve energy efficiency by 20 percent – all by 2020.

Amy Goodman interviews Robert Kutner and Robert Weisman:

AMY GOODMAN:  The solutions now—the Fed interest-rate cut, the stimulus package—is this enough, Robert Kuttner?

ROBERT KUTTNER: No, it’s not the beginning of enough. And I think the place to start is to recognize why this recession is different from all other recessions. This began and is continuing with a collapse in credit markets, and the collapse in credit markets is, in turn, the result of deregulation gone nuts. And it’s a repeat of a lot of things that happened in the 1920s, where there was too much speculation with too much borrowed money and a complete lack of transparency. The regulators, the public had no idea of what these bonds that had been created out of subprime mortgages really contained, what they were worth. The people who packaged them were not subject to any kind of regulatory scrutiny.

And when it turned out that a lot of these loans were never going to be paid back, the layer upon layer upon layer of bonds and then securities based on the bonds—you know, if you can picture the World Trade Center collapsing floor by floor or you can picture the collapse of the Ponzi schemes of the 1920s, that’s a good—or horrible—analogy. And when you have a credit contraction, it means that banks have less capital against which to make loans, and lowering interest rates doesn’t fix that.

Bless their hearts for keeping score!  This just in from the Center for Public Integrity:

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.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration’s case for war.

And the capper is that it’s looking more and more like Hillary Clinton, who has been in on the fix from the getgo, is going to be the Democratic candidate….some democracy, huh?  Like I say, it’s a choice between the good cop and the bad cop….not only should impeachment be on the table, treason should be on the table…but since both Dims and Repugs are the criminals, who could hold the trial?

Some people are willing to do anything to hold on to what they have….

Pre-emptive nuclear strike a key option, Nato told

Ian Traynor in Brussels
Tuesday January 22, 2008
The Guardian

A British Trident missile. Photograph: AP

The west must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the “imminent” spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, according to a radical manifesto for a new Nato by five of the west’s most senior military officers and strategists.

and these stories, from Democracy Now, have absolutely nothing to do with the preceeding story….

Study: Rich Nations Causing More than $1.8 Trillion in Environmental Damage in Third World

A new study is claiming to have totaled the first monetary estimate of the cost of global environmental damage caused by the world’s richest countries. According to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, the environmental damage wreaked on poorer countries amounts to more than the entire third world debt of $1.8 trillion dollars. The study used data from the World Bank and UN to estimate the unpaid costs of greenhouse gas emissions, ozone layer depletion, agriculture, deforestation, overfishing and shrimp farming.

Corporations Reaping Millions as Congo Suffers Deadliest Conflict Since World War II

A new mortality report from the International Rescue Committee says that as many as 5.4 million people have died from war-related causes in the Congo since 1998. A staggering 45,000 people continue to die each month, both from the conflict and the related humanitarian crisis. Amidst the deadliest conflict since World War II, hundreds of international corporations have reaped enormous profits from extracting and processing Congolese minerals.

with Watergate, we had 17 minutes of suspiciously blank tape….and, according to Democracy Now, a strangely similar deletion has occurred:

New Questions Raised Over Missing White House Emails

New information has come to light about the growing controversy over the millions of missing White House emails. Last week Congressman Henry Waxman revealed the White House had failed to preserve emails for at least 473 days. In addition Vice President Cheney’s office show no electronic messages preserved on 16 separate days. The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has analyzed the 16 days when Cheney’s office claims it has no email archives. One of the days is Sept. 30, 2003 – the same day the Justice Department and FBI announced they were investigating who outed former CIA agent Valerie Plame. Cheney’s office is also missing e-mails from Oct. 4, 2003 – the day the Justice Department demanded that the White House turn over “all documents that relate in any way” to the leak of Plame’s identity.

Is this what “the garden of Eden” recalls?   Is this what humans would be like if we weren’t so neurotic?

Bonobo Society: Amicable, Amorous and Run by Females

By NATALIE ANGIER

ature’s raucous bestiary rarely serves up good role models for human behavior, unless you happen to work on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. But there is one creature that stands out from the chest-thumping masses as an example of amicability, sensitivity and, well, humaneness: a little-known ape called the bonobo, or, less accurately, the pygmy chimpanzee.

Before bonobos can be fully appreciated, however, two human prejudices must be overcome. The first is, fellows, the female bonobo is the dominant sex, though the dominance is so mild and unobnoxious that some researchers view bonobo society as a matter of “co-dominance,” or equality between the sexes. Fancy that.

The second hurdle is human squeamishness about what in the 80s were called PDAs, or public displays of affection, in this case very graphic ones. Bonobos lubricate the gears of social harmony with sex, in all possible permutations and combinations: males with females, males with males, females with females, and even infants with adults. The sexual acts include intercourse, genital-to-genital rubbing, oral sex, mutual masturbation and even a practice that people once thought they had a patent on: French kissing.

more

Coal Industry Plugs Into the Campaign

 

By Steven Mufson

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 18, 2008; Page D01

A group backed by the coal industry and its utility allies is waging a $35 million campaign in primary and caucus states to rally public support for coal-fired electricity and to fuel opposition to legislation that Congress is crafting to slow climate change.

The group, called Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, has spent $1.3 million on billboard, newspaper, television and radio ads in Iowa, NevadaSouth Carolina. and

One of its television ads shows a power cord being plugged into a lump of coal, which it calls “an American resource that will help us with vital energy security” and “the fuel that powers our way of life.” The ads note that half of U.S. electricity comes from coal-fired plants.

Yes, and as Uberfuhrer Cheney has proclaimed, “the American way of life is not negotiable,” even if it means keeping our hobnailed boot on the neck of a bunch of ignorant ragheads and darkies no matter how much they bitch and moan and plot our demise…. we will live as we please until we choke on it…private cars, fast food, big-screen tv, central heat and air…build me ever more pretentious mcmansions, oh beelzebub….in the Bible that all these so-called Christians profess to elevate above all other books in wisdom, the pagan god Baal was reviled for demanding the sacrifice of small children….but what are we doing with the non-negotiable Amerikan way of life but demanding the sacrifice of small children–Bill (and Hillary’s) Iraq boycott back in the good ol’days killed thousands of Iraqi children, and the Bush-Cheney junta’s war for oil has killed thousands more…who do they worship?

music:  Leonard Cohen, “The Story of Isaac”