Labels: firearms

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In the Arctic this week, researchers aboard the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy are mapping claims to the spoils of global warming. North of Alaska, the 23 scientists of the Healy are gathering the data legally required to extend national territories across vast reaches of the mineral-rich seafloor usually blocked by Arctic ice. Fathom by fathom, multibeam sonar sensors mounted on the Healy's hull chart a submerged plateau called the Chukchi Cap, in a region that may contain 25% of the world's reserves of oil and natural gas. [Healy in ice] North of Alaska, researchers aboard the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy are gathering the data legally required to extend national territories across vast reaches of the mineral-rich seafloor usually blocked by Arctic ice. In an era of climate change, these frozen assets are up for grabs, as melting ice allows detailed mapping and, one day perhaps, drilling.

By Wayne Madsen

Global Research, September 27, 2007
Wayne Madsen Report

B-52 Nukes Headed for Iran, Not For Decommissioning: Airforce Refused

Air Force refused to fly weapons to Middle East theater
By Wayne Madsen
Sept. 24, 2007
Author's website

WMR has learned from U.S. and foreign intelligence sources that the B-52 transporting six stealth AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missiles, each armed with a W-80-1 nuclear warhead, on August 30, were destined for the Middle East via Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.

However, elements of the Air Force, supported by U.S. intelligence agency personnel, successfully revealed the ultimate destination of the nuclear weapons and the mission was aborted due to internal opposition within the Air Force and U.S. Intelligence Community.

Yesterday, the Washington Post attempted to explain away the fact that America's nuclear command and control system broke down in an unprecedented manner by reporting that it was the result of "security failures at multiple levels." It is now apparent that the command and control breakdown, reported as a BENT SPEAR incident to the Secretary of Defense and White House, was not the result of a command and control chain-of-command "failures" but the result of a revolt and push back by various echelons within the Air Force and intelligence agencies against a planned U.S. attack on Iran using nuclear and conventional weapons.

The Washington Post story on BENT SPEAR may have actually been an effort in damage control by the Bush administration. WMR has been informed by a knowledgeable source that one of the six nuclear-armed cruise missiles was, and may still be, unaccounted for. In that case, the nuclear reporting incident would have gone far beyond BENT SPEAR to a National Command Authority alert known as EMPTY QUIVER, with the special classification of PINNACLE.

Just as this report was being prepared, Newsweek reported that Vice President Dick Cheney's recently-departed Middle East adviser, David Wurmser, told a small group of advisers some months ago that Cheney had considered asking Israel to launch a missile attack on the Iranian nuclear site at Natanz. Cheney reasoned that after an Iranian retaliatory strike, the United States would have ample reasons to launch its own massive attack on Iran. However, plans for Israel to attack Iran directly were altered to an Israeli attack on a supposed Syrian-Iranian-North Korean nuclear installation in northern Syria.

WMR has learned that a U.S. attack on Iran using nuclear and conventional weapons was scheduled to coincide with Israel's September 6 air attack on a reputed Syrian nuclear facility in Dayr az-Zwar, near the village of Tal Abyad, in northern Syria, near the Turkish border. Israel's attack, code named OPERATION ORCHARD, was to provide a reason for the U.S. to strike Iran. The neo-conservative propaganda onslaught was to cite the cooperation of the George Bush's three remaining "Axis of Evil" states -- Syria, Iran, and North Korea -- to justify a sustained Israeli attack on Syria and a massive U.S. military attack on Iran.

Labels: politics, watching the skies

Labels: San Pedro homestead

The leading Democratic White House hopefuls conceded Wednesday night they cannot guarantee to pull all U.S. combat troops from Iraq by the end of the next presidential term in 2013.

Labels: politics

Labels: stream of consciousness

Labels: politics

Allen, who is black, said O'Reilly "doesn't realize dinner can be a civilized affair and we do use table napkins."

Allen said she is always surprised when she invites students to her home and learns that it's the first time they have ever dined with a black person. 'We are not all screaming and singing rap music,' she said. 'It really is sort of pathetic.'

Labels: society and culture

Labels: politics

President Bush is quietly providing back-channel advice to Hillary Rodham Clinton, urging her to modulate her rhetoric so she can effectively prosecute the war in Iraq if elected president.

A proposal to cut off money for military operations in Iraq fell far short in the Senate this afternoon, a day after Democrats lost their best chance of changing the course of the war.

Supporters of Mr. Bush’s war strategy declared victory, saying they had firmly beaten back legislative efforts to change course.

"It means that Congress will not intervene in the foreseeable future," said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the Independent who has voted with the Republicans on war issues. "The fact that it didn’t get enough votes says that Congress doesn’t have the votes to stop this strategy of success from going forward."

The Senate vote was a crucial test of the war plan that Mr. Bush put forward last week, calling for only gradual reductions in troop levels in Iraq from their current high, and leaving intact by next summer a main body of more than 130,000 troops, about the same number as last February.

I'm going to make a bold prediction today.

Those of you who voted Democrat in hopes of seeing a quick end to the US involvement in Iraq are going to be severely disappointed. I predict that we may see some adjustments and rearrangements, but no end to the occupation in the next two years. Your people will make a big show and much public bloviation about the supposed "crimes" of the Bush administration in prosecuting this war. And they will use the attacks on our homeland that will now surely come to great effect in 2008 against the Republican party candidates.

But after two or three years of your candidate being in the office of the president, you are going to be bitterly bitterly disappointed that, not only have we not withdrawn from Iraq, but that our military involvement in the regime has doubled or even tripled into a wider conflagration that has started under the dubious watch of the Democrats.

Of course by that time you will have been drawn into the lie and will be masking your disappointment with a vigorous defense of the policies of your party's presidente, blaming her predecessor for the mess she seems incapable of extracting us from. However the truth will be that the leaders of your party have always seen what is going on there, and has always supported the need to intervene vigorously. You will feel cheap and used, and you will be right.

And I will point and laugh sardonically, but take no real pleasure in this evil fate. Because the fallout of lost liberty will be upon us all.

Labels: health and lifestyle, spiritual

Labels: statism

Drowned out in the media by tales of O.J. and Brittney, it is probably news to the majority of Americans that as you are reading this, Russian strategic bombers are conducting a series of long-range training flights, complete with aerial refueling, simulating a full-fledged nuclear cruise missile strike on the Continental United States. These exercises, conducted in a time when world tensions continue to mount, are scheduled to continue through September 21st. Russian strategic bombers Tu-160, Tu-95 and Tu-22M3, and Il-78 aerial tankers are engaged in this exercise, which in all practicality, could "go live" at any time, and the U.S. would have precious little warning should the unthinkable occur. Accordingly, these Russian exercises can and should be viewed as 'Warning Order' exercises which could be executed against the Continental United States and our allies imminently -- even during the execution of the announced "exercises" themselves. In that case the exercise would no longer be an exercise, but a real-world pre-emptive nuclear strike by Russian cruise missiles.

Labels: politics, watching the skies

Labels: liberty, politics, statism

Labels: politics, security

Labels: San Pedro homestead

The nation's top anti-drug official said people need to overcome their 'reefer blindness' and see that illicit marijuana gardens are a terrorist threat to the public's health and safety, as well as to the environment. John P. Walters, President Bush's drug czar, said the people who plant and tend the gardens are terrorists who wouldn't hesitate to help other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties.

Labels: resources

Labels: preparedness, resources

12 September 2007: A man who was questioned by New Jersey State Police on Monday and then let go after he was found taking photos of the Delaware Water Gap bridge was later discovered to be on the FBI's national terrorist watch list.

The unidentified man, of Middle Eastern descent, claimed he was on vacation with his family after he was spotted on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River photographing the bridge, which connects Interstate 80 between New Jersey and Pennsylvania, said Monroe County District Attorney E. David Christine.

Labels: politics, watching the skies

Labels: watching the skies

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Judging by the sounds of the laughter of the other Republican candidates directed at their rival, Ron Paul has now reached the second of Mohandas K. Ghandi's four stages. It is still unlikely that he will win the nomination of a party which has proven it doesn't deserve him, but it is far less unlikely than it was back when Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and John McCain were still considered "electable" by most political observers. The candidates, never a particularly bright lot, may be laughing, but as the neocons and party leaders turn to Fred Thompson in desperation, more intelligent observers are not.

Why is there so much cheering for Ron Paul?
– Andy McCarthy, National Review, Sept. 5, 2007

The reason there is so much cheering for Ron Paul is that he is the only Republican who has staked out popular positions on the two most significant issues of the 2008 election cycle. He is anti-occupation and pro-border control. No amount of Bush administration spin is going to change the fact that "the surge" is strategically irrelevant, that the neocon's Democratic World Revolution is a total failure and that Mexico is being allowed to invade the United States. In short, Ron Paul is the only Republican whose positions on the two primary issues are different than Hillary Clinton's stance on them, and, more importantly, are more credible and more popular than Hillary Clinton's. He is the only Republican whose nomination can realistically be considered a potential impediment to what otherwise looks like a Democratic landslide.

The Gay Old Party's leadership, which is far more interested in propositioning interns and policemen than the Constitution, hates Ron Paul and quite rightly feels threatened by him. But their incessant spreading of fear, uncertainty and doubt regarding his candidacy is no more believable than a Microsoft treatise on Linux. In fact, I surmise that most of the top Republicans would prefer a Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton presidency to a Paul one. This may be why they have drafted the sluggish, uncharismatic Thompson; Giuliani, Romney and McCain are so obviously unelectable that none of them can even manage to put themselves in a position to get run over by Hillary in November.

When a thousand Republicans are in a room and one man of the eight...continue

Labels: politics

A new report says a SCUD-type missile launched from a small ship 200 miles from the coast of the United States could unleash a nuclear-generated electromagnetic pulse over Washington, D.C., that would leave behind $771 billion in damage.
...
Experts have predicted the EMP attack essentially would destroy any electronics within range of its impact, leaving technology comparable to that available in the 1800s.

EMP attacks are generated when a nuclear weapon is detonated anywhere from 10 miles above the Earth's surface to hundreds of miles. The explosion, of even a small nuclear warhead, would produce a set of electromagnetic pulses that interact with the Earth's atmosphere and the Earth's magnetic field.

Labels: baby

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved implanting microchips in humans, the manufacturer said it would save lives, letting doctors scan the tiny transponders to access patients' medical records almost instantly. The FDA found 'reasonable assurance' the device was safe, and a sub-agency even called it one of 2005's top 'innovative technologies.' But neither the company nor the regulators publicly mentioned this: A series of veterinary and toxicology studies, dating to the mid-1990s, stated that chip implants had 'induced' malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats. 'The transponders were the cause of the tumors,' said Keith Johnson, a retired toxicologic pathologist, explaining in a phone interview the findings of a 1996 study he led at the Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Mich.

...

Published in veterinary and toxicology journals between 1996 and 2006, the studies found that lab mice and rats injected with microchips sometimes developed subcutaneous "sarcomas" — malignant tumors, most of them encasing the implants.

_ A 1998 study in Ridgefield, Conn., of 177 mice reported cancer incidence to be slightly higher than 10 percent — a result the researchers described as "surprising."

_ A 2006 study in France detected tumors in 4.1 percent of 1,260 microchipped mice. This was one of six studies in which the scientists did not set out to find microchip-induced cancer but noticed the growths incidentally. They were testing compounds on behalf of chemical and pharmaceutical companies; but they ruled out the compounds as the tumors' cause. Because researchers only noted the most obvious tumors, the French study said, "These incidences may therefore slightly underestimate the true occurrence" of cancer.

_ In 1997, a study in Germany found cancers in 1 percent of 4,279 chipped mice. The tumors "are clearly due to the implanted microchips," the authors wrote.

...

In humans, sarcomas, which strike connective tissues, can range from the highly curable to "tumors that are incredibly aggressive and can kill people in three to six months," he said.

Labels: baby

Labels: baby

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Labels: blogospheric navel-gazing

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Labels: felicity and jocularity, politics

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The rules:

1. You have to post these rules before you give the facts.

2. Players, you must list one fact that is somehow relevant to your life for each letter of your middle name.

3. If you don’t have a middle name, use the middle name you would have liked to have had.

4. When you are tagged you need to write your own blog-post containing your own middle name game facts. At the end of your blog-post, you need to choose one person for each letter of your middle name to tag.

5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.