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n2doc's JournalDid Donald Rumsfeld Counsel Obama To Lie So As To Create The Justification For Bombing Syria?
Every now and then, one sees something happen right before one’s eyes that defies the laws of time, space, reality and reason. Such a moment occurred yesterday during a truly remarkable appearance by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on Neil Cavuto’s Fox Business News program.
During the interview, Rumsfeld appeared to criticize the Obama Administration for failing to present a supportable argument as to why an attack on Syria is in our nation’s best interest.
“There really hasn’t been any indication from the administration as to what our national interest is with respect to this particular situation,” said Rumsfeld.
On the surface, it would appear that Rumsfeld’s criticism was meant to remind the President that—before tossing in those Tomahawk missiles—he needs to present the American people (who largely oppose any American involvement in Syria) with a solid explanation as to why it is in our nation’s best interest to become involved with the Syrian civil war.
...
However, I say that I agree with Rumsfeld’s remarks “on their face” because I find it nearly impossible to believe that the one time Secretary of Defense would dare to offer such a remark—given his own stunningly horrendous track record on the subject—unless he had another motive entirely in offering such advice to the President—a motive I would likely not agree with in any way whatsoever.
more
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/08/29/did-donald-rumsfeld-counsel-obama-to-lie-so-as-to-create-the-justification-for-bombing-syria/
USGS: Hydraulic Fracturing Fluids Likely Harmed Threatened Kentucky Fish Species
Hydraulic fracturing fluids are believed to be the cause of the widespread death or distress of aquatic species in Kentucky's Acorn Fork, after spilling from nearby natural gas well sites. These findings are the result of a joint study by the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The Acorn Fork, a small Appalachian creek, is habitat for the federally threatened Blackside dace, a small colorful minnow. The Acorn Fork is designated by Kentucky as an Outstanding State Resource Waters.
"Our study is a precautionary tale of how entire populations could be put at risk even with small-scale fluid spills," said USGS scientist Diana Papoulias, the study's lead author. "This is especially the case if the species is threatened or is only found in limited areas, like the Blackside dace is in the Cumberland."
The Blackside dace typically lives in small, semi-isolated groups, so harmful events run the risk of completely eliminating a local population. The species is primarily threatened with loss of habitat.
After the spill of hydraulic fracturing fluid, state and federal scientists observed a significant die-off of aquatic life in Acorn Fork including the Blackside dace as well as several more common species like the Creek chub and Green sunfish. They had been alerted by a local resident who witnessed the fish die-off. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Commonwealth of Kentucky are currently working towards restoration of the natural resources that were injured by the release.
To determine the cause of the fish die-off, the researchers collected water and fish samples immediately following the chemical release in 2007.
The samples analyses and results clearly showed that the hydraulic fracturing fluids degraded water quality in Acorn Fork, to the point that the fish developed gill lesions, and suffered liver and spleen damage as well.
"This is an example of how the smallest creatures can act as a canary in a coal mine," said Tony Velasco, Ecologist for the Fish and Wildlife office in Kentucky, who coauthored the study, and initiated a multi-agency response when it occurred in 2007. "These species use the same water as we do, so it is just as important to keep our waters clean for people and for wildlife."
The gill lesions were consistent with exposure to acidic water and toxic concentrations of heavy metals. These results matched water quality samples from Acorn Fork that were taken after the spill.
After the fracturing fluids entered Acorn Fork Creek, the water’s pH dropped from 7.5 to 5.6, and stream conductivity increased from 200 to 35,000 microsiemens per centimeter. A low pH number indicates that the creek had become more acidic, and the stream conductivity indicated that there were higher levels of dissolved elements including iron and aluminum.
Blackside dace are a species of ray-finned fish found only in the Cumberland River basin of Kentucky and Tennessee and the Powell River basin of Virginia. It has been listed as a federally-threatened species by the Service since 1987.
Hydraulic fracturing is the most common method for natural gas well-development in Kentucky.
The report is entitled "Histopathological Analysis of Fish from Acorn Fork Creek, Kentucky Exposed to Hydraulic Fracturing Fluid Releases," and is published in the scientific journal Southeastern Naturalist, in a special edition devoted to the Blackside dace.
To learn more about this study and other contaminants research, please visit the USGS Environmental Health web page, the USGS Columbia Environmental Research Center, or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Environmental Contaminants web page.
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=3677
Angry crowd boos North Carolina lawmakers over voting restrictions
By David Edwards
North Carolina state lawmakers who voted to restrict voting rights faced an angry crowd in Charlotte on Wednesday.
At a Central Piedmont Community College Mecklenburg Legislators Forum sponsored by the Charlotte Observer, PNC Bank and WTVI, the four republicans on the panel reportedly “often found themselves on the defensive before a sometimes raucous audience.”
During the its last session, the Republican-controlled legislature put new restrictions on abortion clinics, loosened gun laws, rejected federal Medicaid funds, cut teacher benefits and enacted school vouchers.
But it was the the voting restrictions — which requires voters to have a government photo ID, cuts the number of early voting days and makes it more difficult for students to vote — that drew the angriest response from the crowd.
more
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/29/angry-crowd-boos-north-carolina-lawmakers-over-voting-restrictions/
Pat Robertson grinds on Miley Cyrus onstage!
By Tom Toles
Did you see the brief part of the VMA show when Pat Robertson crawled up on stage flashing a wink and a leer with his tongue curled out to one side and proceeded to grind on Miley Cyrus except he couldn’t keep up with her and ended up performing by himself? You may as well have. His recent answer to a question was every bit as preposterous.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/27/pat-robertson-aids-rings_n_3824401.html
He can assert in public that San Francisco gays deliberately spread the AIDS virus with special sharp rings when they shake hands, and we wonder whether MILEY has gone too far.
While the nation wheels it’s famously unserious head in the direction of Ms. Cyrus’s calculated (successfully calculated) attempt at notoriety, as we tsk tsk all the way to the magazine rack to pick up the next issue of People magazine where we can shake that head at shaking booty one more time, the true derangement of our political discourse goes largely unremarked. Dana Milbank yesterday wrote about how a large fraction of LOUISIANA Republicans blame Obama for the poor response to Katrina, when they have to KNOW he wasn’t president at the time, and this is just one more example of how we simply don’t take anything seriously, ever, anymore. Hey, but we all recently learned a new word, twerking! Yes we is learning. We is twerking our brains.
Now it’s Yosemite threatened by yet another record wildfire, and still we don’t talk about climate or alternative energy. The only alternative fuel we are interested in is running our democracy on is garbage.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tom-toles/post/pat-robertson-grinds-on-miley-cyrus-onstage/2013/08/28/7f556952-1007-11e3-85b6-d27422650fd5_blog.html
Rival campers who opened fire turn out to be sheriff's deputies
By Robert Faturechi
August 26, 2013, 10:42 p.m.
An apparent booze-fueled dispute over loud music between two groups at a Chino campground over the weekend escalated to the point where men from both sides drew guns and opened fire.
No one was hurt, but the two alleged gunmen have plenty to explain.
It turns out that the rival gun-toting campers were both Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies.
Authorities suspect the off-duty cops learned they were colleagues only after their campground showdown.
Chino police officers were called to Prado Regional Park early Sunday morning. They arrested the deputies — Dejay Barber, 44, and Matthew Rincon, 24 — on suspicion of negligent discharge of a firearm.
more
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-sheriff-shooting-20130827,0,303511.story
Scientists leave GOP due to attitudes toward science, say Utah educators
By Judy Fahys | The Salt Lake Tribune
Scientists used to be well represented among the nearly half of Americans who voted Republican. But that’s changed over the years, and one poll found that just 6 percent of scientists call themselves part of the GOP now.
What happened? There might not be textbook answers, but there are theories.
Barry Bickmore, a professor of geology at Brigham Young University and onetime Republican caucus delegate in crimson-red Utah County in the nation’s reddest state, has pondered the issue at length. He contends his party is increasingly ruled by zealots and a demand for "ideological purity" that turns off scientists.
He says most examples are in the environmental sciences. And he points to the time in 2009 when majority-party Republicans in the Utah Capitol put climate-science doubters on a pedestal — while rejecting the mainstream scientist view about the danger global warming poses and even taking a beef about a Utah State University physicist to the university president.
"Scientists just don’t get those people," he says of Republicans who adhere to party orthodoxy about scientific questions on climate change, evolution and other hot-button issues. "They [in the GOP] are driving us away, people like me."
more
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/56795477-90/science-scientists-gop-http.html.csp?page=1
Nearly 20 Percent Of Scientists Contemplate Moving Overseas Due In Part To Sequestration
Sam Stein
WASHINGTON -- New data compiled by a coalition of top scientific and medical research groups show that a large majority of scientists are receiving less federal help than they were three years ago, despite spending far more time writing grants in search of it. Nearly one-fifth of scientists are considering going overseas to continue their research because of the poor funding climate in America.
The study, which was spearheaded by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) and will be formally released next week, is the latest to highlight the extent to which years of stagnant or declining budgets, made worse by sequestration, have damaged the world of science.
More than 3,700 scientists from all 50 states participated in the study, offering online responses in June and July 2013. They offered sobering assessments of the state of their profession. Eighty percent said they were spending more of their time writing grants now than in 2010, while 67 percent said they were receiving less grant money now than they were back then. Only two percent of respondents said they had received money from their employers -- predominantly academic institutions -- to make up for the loss of federal funds.
The drying up of resources has had a damaging effect on the research being conducted, forcing scientists to curtail their projects or trim their staffs.
According to the survey, 68 percent of respondents said they do not have the funds to expand their research operations; 55 percent said they have a colleague who has lost a job or expects to soon; and 18 percent of respondents said they were considering continuing their careers in another country.
more
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/29/sequestration-scientists_n_3825128.html?ncid=txtlnkushpmg00000037
Neocons Push Obama to Go Beyond a Punitive Strike in Syria
—By David Corn
The drums of war are beating, as various news reports state that President Barack Obama and his European allies are close to launching some sort of military attack against Syria. But one question is how big the bang will be. The White House has signaled that whatever comes will be strictly a punitive strike in retaliation for the Assad regime's presumed use of chemical weapons against civilians. It will not be an action aimed at toppling Bashar al-Assad or changing the overall strategic dynamic of the ongoing civil war in Syria. The supposed goal is to deter Assad from resorting to chemical weapons again. Foreign policy experts disagree—of course—on whether any assault of this nature would achieve that end, and such an action could have unintended consequences (say, a host of dead civilians) that might render it not a clear-cut success. But the band of neocons that led the United States into the Iraq War have quickly moved to seize on the administration's inclination to mount a punitive strike in order to draw the nation further into the conflict in Syria.
On Wednesday, the Foreign Policy Initiative—which was started by Bill Kristol, Dan Senor, Robert Kagan, and other hawkish-minded policy wonks—sent a letter to Obama, urging him to slam Assad in response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria: "At a minimum, the United States, along with willing allies and partners, should use standoff weapons and airpower to target the Syrian dictatorship’s military units that were involved in the recent large-scale use of chemical weapons."
But the letter—which was signed by Elliott Abrams, Fouad Ajami, Max Boot, Ellen Bork, Eliot Cohen, Douglas Feith, Joseph Lieberman, Clifford May, Joshua Muravchik, Danielle Pletka, Karl Rove, Randy Scheunemann, Kristol, Kagan, Senor, and dozens of others—demands that Obama go further. It calls on the president to provide "vetted moderate elements of Syria's armed opposition" with the military support necessary to strike regime units armed with chemical weapons. That is, the neocons and their allies have CW-ized their pre-existing demand for the United States to arm the rebels.
And there's more: "the United States and other willing nations should consider direct military strikes against the pillars of the Assad regime. The objectives should be not only to ensure that Assad's chemical weapons no longer threaten America, our allies in the region or the Syrian people, but also to deter or destroy the Assad regime's airpower and other conventional military means of committing atrocities against civilian non-combatants." Plus, Obama should not only aid the rebels to thwart additional chem weapons attacks; he should arm "moderate elements" of the opposition so that they can "prevail against" the Assad regime and the rebel factions affiliated with Al Qaeda or other Islamic extremists. In other words, get in whole hog.
more
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/08/neocons-push-obama-go-beyond-punitive-strike-syria
With Enemies Like This, Who Needs Friends?
by KEVIN CARSON
The U.S. government’s persecution of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning (who came out publicly as a transgender woman after sentencing) is the latest example of a general rule: In the transitional struggle between networks and hierarchies, sometimes networks’ most powerful weapons are the hierarchies themselves. You spend a few thousand bucks to yank a network’s chain just right, and it’ll respond by doing something stupid that costs itself millions.
The bad networks do this, obviously. Al Qaeda has followed a consistent business model of goading Uncle Sam into doing utterly stupid things — a business model that never fails. AQ spent a relatively minor amount preparing and carrying out the 9/11 hijackings. In response, the United States became bogged down in two regional wars in South Asia and the Middle East that alienated public sentiment in the Islamic world, and embarked on a general policy of permanent war, torture and police statism that did irreparable damage to its reputation around the world. Entirely through its own responses to 9/11, the U.S. government has run up $1.5 trillion dollars in war debt and turned its civil aviation system into a comically totalitarian nightmare straight out of the movie “Brazil.”
Since then, Al Qaeda’s rope-a-dope policy has repeatedly paid off. Every time an AQ agent attempts another airline attack, the TSA implements a cumbersome, inconvenient and incredibly stupid policy to prevent that same tactic from ever being used again. Hijacking with box cutters? Make everybody empty their pockets of potentially lethal weapons like nail clippers. Shoe bomber? Make everybody take off their shoes. Underwear bomber? Invasive and demeaning pat-downs and body scans.
Al Qaeda has explicitly declared its strategy is no longer to maximize casualties, but to maximize Return on Investment by provoking the U.S. to impose the maximum possible cost on itself through its own stupidity. An “unsuccessful” attack is plenty successful, just so long as Uncle Stupid comes through as expected. It’s only a matter of time till some smart AQ operative figures out he can shut down the U.S. aviation system with body cavity searches by smuggling explosives in his rectum.
more
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/29/with-enemies-like-this-who-needs-friends/
Why a Medieval Peasant Got More Vacation Time Than You
By Lynn Parramore
Life for the medieval peasant was certainly no picnic. His life was shadowed by fear of famine, disease and bursts of warfare. His diet and personal hygiene left much to be desired. But despite his reputation as a miserable wretch, you might envy him one thing: his vacations.
Plowing and harvesting were backbreaking toil, but the peasant enjoyed anywhere from eight weeks to half the year off. The Church, mindful of how to keep a population from rebelling, enforced frequent mandatory holidays. Weddings, wakes and births might mean a week off quaffing ale to celebrate, and when wandering jugglers or sporting events came to town, the peasant expected time off for entertainment. There were labor-free Sundays, and when the plowing and harvesting seasons were over, the peasant got time to rest, too. In fact, economist Juliet Shor found that during periods of particularly high wages, such as 14th-century England, peasants might put in no more than 150 days a year.
As for the modern American worker? After a year on the job, she gets an average of eight vacation days annually.
It wasn't supposed to turn out this way: John Maynard Keynes, one of the founders of modern economics, made a famous prediction that by 2030, advanced societies would be wealthy enough that leisure time, rather than work, would characterize national lifestyles. So far, that forecast is not looking good.
What happened? Some cite the victory of the modern eight-hour a day, 40-hour workweek over the punishing 70 or 80 hours a 19th century worker spent toiling as proof that we're moving in the right direction. But Americans have long since kissed the 40-hour workweek goodbye, and Shor's examination of work patterns reveals that the 19th century was an aberration in the history of human labor. When workers fought for the eight-hour workday, they weren't trying to get something radical and new, but rather to restore what their ancestors had enjoyed before industrial capitalists and the electric lightbulb came on the scene. Go back 200, 300 or 400 years and you find that most people did not work very long hours at all. In addition to relaxing during long holidays, the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze. "The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed," notes Shor. "Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure."
more
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/08/29/why-a-medieval-peasant-got-more-vacation-time-than-you/
(edit to provide working link)
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