Middle East Reporting

The Western media has been compromised.

Tomorrow will be Holocaust Remembrance day and the idea that the Jewish State is so often compared to the Nazi fiends who tormented us, and the idea that Palestinians are now undergoing some kind of holocaust is simply beyond outrageous.

The fact that the media is, so often a party to this libel is sad for us and for Western civilization.

For more info on accuracy or lack of in the media … check out my friends at CAMERA.

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How Shari’a-Compliant Financing Is Stealing Your Economic Freedom

How Shari’a-Compliant Financing Curtails Your Economic Freedom

The Editors

There has been much talk about Shari’a-compliant finance (SCF) in recent months, but many Americans are still in the dark about exactly what it is and what it portends for the American economy and the freedoms Americans enjoy.

This may be why the judge in the Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas last fall declared a mistrial and five of six defendants face a retrial (one was found not guilty of most of the charges against him). Terror expert Douglas Farah surmised at the time that part of the reason might have been because “perhaps the prosecution tried to cram too much information in with a group of jurors largely unfamiliar with anything to do with the case.” And Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism had a heated exchange with Alan Colmes of Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes about whether the mainstream news media had even managed to get the story right.

So what exactly is SCF?

Part of Shari’a Law

SCF is a part of Shari’a law (also known as Islamic law), and dates back to the 9th Century. Shari’a law encompasses every facet of one’s life, and those who seek to impose it upon Muslims – and the world – look to regulate everything from aspects of religious and social customs to political and military responsibilities. Shari’a law is, in fact, the law in countries like Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Iran. The Taliban also recognizes Shari’a law, and subjected all of Afghanistan to it before U.S. forces entered that country after 9/11.

Earlier this year, Britain’s Archbishop of Canterbury faced a firestorm after he suggested in a BBC interview that the adoption of Shari’a law in Britain “seems unavoidable and, as a matter of fact, certain conditions of Sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law, so it is not as if we are bringing in an alien and rival system.” While his seemingly willing acceptance of this might shock, UK Muslims on welfare are eligible to receive extra benefits if they have more than one wife – even though polygamy is considered illegal under British law. So, in essence, the Archbishop was correct when he said “certain conditions” of said Shari’a law are already recognized in today’s British society.

Here is a partial listing of the effects of Shari’a law:

• Women must obtain permission by their husbands or other male family members to do just about anything, including leaving the house – which she must do in the company of a male family member.
• Women and girls who are considered “disobedient” may be beaten into submission. (Mahmoud Salash, an imam in Lexington, Kentucky, said men “should beat them lightly” and it is acceptable because “it’s in the Koran.”)
• Those who dishonor the family are subject to “honor killings.” Typical reasons include a woman being raped or a woman dating/marrying a man against the will of her family. (Earlier this year, two girls in Irving, Texas were the victims of an alleged “honor killing” by their Muslim father, who is said to have disapproved of their American boyfriends and lifestyle.)
• Dhimmitude (inferior status) of non-Muslims.
• Death for those who slander Islam and for Muslims who leave the faith (apostates).

Risks involved with Shari’a-Compliant Finance (SCF)

Under SCF provisions, profits must not benefit from anything considered haram (forbidden) in Islam such as gambling, alcohol, entertainment, pork products, etc. As such, Western financial institutions wishing to obtain some of the billions of petrodollars from the Middle East are offering services that meet these requirements. Still, not all profits will meet these stringent constraints and so to “cleanse” or “purify” them, they are donated to Islamic charities. Charity sounds well and good until you stop to think that some of these charities support Islamic Jihad. In fact, the three largest Shari’a-compliant charities in the United States were closed down by the government for funding terrorist organizations: the aforementioned Holy Land Foundation, the Benevolence International Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation.

How many Americans would approve of SCF if they knew its full implications? Deroy Murdock makes an apt comparison:

Turn your clock back 70 years. Imagine that Wall Street banks and brokerage houses sold Nuremberg-compliant bonds and stock funds in 1938. American Nazi sympathizers bought financial instruments certified by Berlin-based advisors as free of “Jewish profits” from, say, Salomon Brothers and Bloomingdale’s.

In turn, a percentage of such funds’ gains underwrote pro-Nazi charities, like the German-American Bund, and similar organizations in the Fatherland, like the Hitler Youth.

And so by investing in SCF schemes, Western financial institutions not only give Shari’a law credence but also ultimately aid Islamists in their attempt to use our own financial system against us. As it is, the West is subject to the ups and downs in the Middle Eastern oil industry. Could SCF be the next sub-prime crisis in the making? Think about it: the more money that is invested in the Middle East, the greater ability for the Middle East to pipe the tune the West dances to.

Speaking Out

The Center for Security Policy has embarked on a national campaign to warn the public that U.S. financial institutions and businesses engaged in SCF pose a danger to American and Western freedoms.

Jimmy Carter Reality Check

Geoff Metcalf

“Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.” ~ Demosthenes

When I accused former President Jimmy Carter of a synthesis of “stupidity and vanity,” I understated his mendacity.

Carter has a history of revising facts in evidence to accommodate his own self interest that rivals Bill Clinton’s definition of the word “is.”

Once upon a time, despite Carter’s unbridled praise for his CIA chief Stansfield Turner, it was Turner who eviscerated the CIA, cutting some 820 human intelligence positions. It was that decision that forced Langley to rely on the intelligence agencies of foreign governments. That was the cause of all the post 9/11 angst over our lack of human Intel assets and overall crummy intelligence gathering.

On New Year’s Eve 1977, Carter toasted the Shah’s Iran as “an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world…[due] to the respect, admiration and love which your people give to you.”

However, a mere eight months later, the CIA issued a fatally flawed report in which Carter’s CIA surmised, “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a ‘pre-Revolutionary’ situation.” Whoops!

When things went rapidly from bad to worse, Carter withdrew U.S. support from the Shah, turning Iran into a refuge and nexus of hope for Jihadists around the world. Then, before accepting the exiled Shah to America, Carter accepted Iranian guarantees they could secure our embassy.  That, in and of itself, was one of the costliest miscalculations in the history of American foreign policy. Whoops again!

Please note this is the same myopic self promoter who now says Hamas is prepared to make nice with Israel, notwithstanding overwhelming historical and empirical evidence to the contrary.

(Please see “The Scorpion and the Frog.”)

The 14-month hostage crisis was Christmas, Easter, Purim and the Fourth of July for Jihad central. American reversals in Beirut and Somalia may have jazzed and emboldened al Qaeda, but it was the Iranian hostage crisis that poured gasoline on their fire.
Carter ultimately agreed to pay a ransom of $8 billion (of which, Iran netted $3 billion), although it was ultimately Ronald Reagan’s toughness and resolve that was the decisive cure to Carter’s incompetence that ended the crisis.

Despite Carter’s selective memory losses and revisionist rewrite of historical fact, without Carter’s policies:

• The Iran-Iraq war would not have raged for nearly a decade.
• The United States would not have had to form an unsavory alliance of convenience with Saddam Hussein, in order to mitigate the mullahs.
• Hezbollah would not receive $100-$200 million a year from Tehran’s coffers.
• Al Qaeda would not have received training in Iran in 1992.
• Iran’s nuclear ambitions, if they existed, would be of no consequence to the West whatsoever.

Thanks Jimmy…

The lowest point of American international prestige in modern history occurred under the squireship of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The bonehead mistakes he made during those crucial, precarious years watered the seeds of Jihadist dream quests and continue to threaten the United States and the West.

Contrary to convention of providing past presidents the courtesy and gravitas they assume for having resided in the Oval Office (notwithstanding performance) Carter has routinely and chronically abused his elder statesman status, and has earned the contempt and condemnation of his myriad critics.

It is an international embarrassment that anyone anywhere gives any credence to the ill informed, ego motivated ramblings of a sad old man still trying to polish his tarnished record into a glittering fiction. Then again, those same “anyones” seem intent on listening to Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson despite Tawana Bawley and the Duke Lacrosse embarrassments.

Jimmy Carter is a private citizen and enjoys the same protections under the First Amendment we all do. However, despite his ability to speak and act like a fool, we should not be compelled to provide him any credibility and “someone,” somewhere, should impose some appropriate restrictions to prevent his wanton violation of The Logan Act and simultaneously embarrassing the country, undermining diplomacy of the real professionals, and giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Carter’s defense of the indefensible is to call Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a liar. David Welch is the Foggy Bottom suit who actually spoke to Carter prior to his trip and he is in the unenviable position (even for a life long Foreign Service officer) of not wanting to have to call a former President a liar.

However, more than a week before Carter even left for the Middle East, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack publicly stated that State did not want Carter meeting with Hamas “because it is not in the interests of our policy or in the interests of peace to have such a meeting.”

# #

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Geoff Metcalf is an author and former nationally syndicated and major market radio talk show host. His background covers a wide spectrum of radio, television, magazine, and newspapers. A former Green Beret and retired Army officer, he is the author of ‘The Terrorist Killers’ (a novel) and ‘In The Arena’ (a collection of interviews). Visit Geoff’s Web Site: www.geoffmetcalf.com . E-mail: geoff@geoffmetcalf.com
read full author bio here

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Why Are the Iranians and the Americans Engaged in Indirect Conflict?

By Howard Salter

With roots going back to the 1953 Operation Ajax Coup and with a religious distaste for empires and economic colonialism that culminated in the 1979 Islamist overthrowing of a pro-U.S. government, with American hostages taken for 444 days at the embassy in Tehran , the United States and Iran severed political and diplomatic ties. Without dialogue, the United States has worked to isolate the government of Tehran while Iran has worked to undermine the interests of the United States in the region.

Reasons for wanting to establish influence in this region are varied and diverse. Economically the nations of the world rely significantly on the oil from the Middle-East . America and its allies are dependant upon the hydrocarbons produced in this region to fuel the energy needs of their massive economic engines and consumption oriented societies. Iran has witnessed the birth and development of these oil resources in the region and has held a predominantly nationalist bias towards energy resources. It has done this by working with governments in the region to nationalize hydrocarbon resources and to shift from the use of American dollars in the exchange of these products on the global market.

The causation of this conflict isn’t exclusively economic either. The United States and Iran have significant social differences as well that inhibit these two countries from normalizing relations. Iran is predominantly a constitutional Islamic theocracy with a strong bias towards Shia Islam , and the United States is a pluralistic constitutional republic that generally works towards normalizing opportunities and in the protection of universal rights of all its citizens . Given this difference, it is acceptable the United States perceives theocratic states like as oppressive to minorities, children, and women within their cultures. Conversely, Iran views the United States pluralistic secular society as lacking in basic moral virtues inherent in a theocratic society that are evidenced by the high levels of violent crime, divorces and socially deviant behavior.

While these reasons for this conflict are not limited in scope to the earlier mentioned, they do provide explicative proof to suggest why a conflict would exist. The United States and Iran have had several instances of direct conflict since the Mullah’s took power in 1979. These incidents started with the capture of American citizens for 444 days at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979. During the Iran-Iraq war, in a sub-conflict, which became known as the Tanker-wars, the United States and Iran’s navies directly engaged in combat resulting in the sinking of several Iranian ships. Further evidence of direct conflict has come from The Iraqi-Iranian border skirmishes as coalition forces, and Iranians have engaged in small arms exchange.

Besides these isolated acts of political military expression, the conflict between Iran has been done via proxy. This segregation of influence has manifested itself in the projection of power by each state in the region through various indirect means. Most notably, the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Hamas has been proxy extensions of U.S. and Iranian policy with Israel commonly viewed as an agent of U.S. policy in the region while these sub-national interests working to completely subvert the Israeli state. Another example of this proxy projection of power has been in post-Saddam Iraq where in the formation of a new constitutional, secular, pluralistic government, Iran has been training terrorists organizations and exporting them back into Iraq to subvert the pro-American interests in Baghdad. A similar example of Iranian projection of power via proxy was proven in Saudi Arabia where Iran has threatened to bomb Saudi interests in the region if attacked by the United States.

For the United States, it has been attempting to deal with Iran indirectly through economic means and sanctions by using the world’s largest economy and money system to limit the financial influence of Iran. Also, the United States has attempted to use the governing body of the United Nations to limit the influence of the Iranian governments in these capacities through international sanction. The United States has also worked to bolster the regional powers that also are interested in limiting the influence of Iran. They have sold weapons and munitions to the Saudi’s and Kuwaiti’s who are also concerned about the power and influence of an Iranian regional hegemony .

From the realization the United States and Iran are engaged in a regional conflict for influence and power, it’s important to ask why these two governments are engaged in low intensity indirect military conflict instead of direct military intervention or diplomatic talks to normalize political objectives in the region. While this conflict is not limited to these three, specifically, the scope of this paper will address three hypotheses can be drawn from why this is a marginalized conflict of indirect use of force, economics as in these cases:
• Hypothesis One (Liberalism): As political pressures in the United States change to support the reduction of troop end strength in the theater of Iraq, direct confrontation with Iran will become less likely.
• Hypothesis Two (Realism): As economic pressures in Iran, such as record high inflation, large numbers of educated young people remaining unemployed, and decaying oil infrastructure, place pressures on the Mullah’s the Iranian government will be less likely to engage the world’s largest superpower military in a directly.
• Hypothesis Three (Marxism): Iranian ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons increase the likelihood that Iran will use the threat of direct force to gain further political and economic influence in the region.

Hypothesis One (Liberalism): As political pressures in the United States change to support the reduction of troop end strength in the theater of Iraq, direct confrontation with Iran will become less likely.

Our Master Politician

Yes, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has proven himself to be a master politician. First he secured his position as Prime Minister with coalition deals in the Knesset, and now he’s beginning to win grudging support from the Israeli public with headline-grabbing leaks and rumors.It’s clear now that Olmert is a captain who is willing to go down with the ship. The question is whether he’s in the process of sinking the ship, in order to remain its captain.And your answer would be? …

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Kyoto – A Perspective (Part 18)

ELECTRICITY PRODUCED BY NUCLEAR MEANS. (Part Four)

Let’s pretend that the bean counters, and the lawyers, and the banks, and the NRC, and the people who live in the area, and the politicians in office at the time all give final approval for a nuclear power plant to be built, the major problem is the lead time between turning the first sod, and running up the reactor to produce electrical power. This takes considerably longer than for the gas turbine plants or even for coal fired plants. It is most usually in the realm of five and seven years. Oddly enough, the problem with that time span is not the time itself, but servicing the huge debt at the front end, with nothing coming in for so long, so now you can see the point on that front.

However, once the plant is up and running, the cost of the produced electricity is cheaper than for coal fired methods, and considerably cheaper than for the gas turbine method, because both of these have the ongoing costs for the fuel itself, the coal and the LNG, both of which are increasing, and in the case of the LNG, then the cost for that is increasing dramatically.
So, the cost of electricity produced by nuclear means is minimal after the plant is up and running, so what that means is the cost is in the main, related directly to the cost of the plant and the accumulated debt.
See how electricity is more than an environmental thing now.

So then how much does it cost to build one of these things?
Most of the nuclear plants in the US are of the large base load type.

I mean, why not?

Build one huge plant instead of numerous small ones. I mentioned in the last piece figures from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission saying that there are 104 nuclear power plants within the US. However, only 65 of these are the very large base load plants, averaging out at around 2000 MW total producing capacity. For the costing, I’ll work on a plant the size of one of these large ones, 2000 MW.
The formula is not really complicated even though it might look that way. One side tells us the cost is ‘X’ amount of dollars, and another side tells us the cost is far greater at ‘Y’ dollars, (you guess which side is which) so what I’ll do is split the difference, which sounds like an incredible over simplification, but then, both sides will say that won’t they.
The average cost is around $3000 per KW. One MW is 1000 KW. Plant size in this case 2000 MW. So, multiply those three together and you get $6 Billion. Sorta just rolls off the tongue doesn’t it. Now perhaps you can see the problem servicing that debt at the front end.

Right then, why should we even consider nuclear power plants over other methods. I’ll do some rough costings for each of the upcoming methods, and you’ll see just how much of an attractive option this method really becomes.

Once constructed and operating, there are no emissions whatsoever. (Remember France) Detractors will tell you of the carbon footprint during the construction of the plant, but would that not also equally apply with the construction of other plants. See how the argument is again reduced to a psychological reasoning process by detractors with their own agendas.

As to the fuel itself, small pellets of enriched uranium are inserted into the hollow rods, stacking them one on top of the other, the rods then placed into bundles and bundles are inserted into the reactor.

In this photograph, the pellets are the tiny little things in the hand. They have been ceramicised and this is how they are inserted into the thin rods, typically less than half an inch across. Between 150 and 264 rods are in a typical bundle which is about 13 feet in length. As many as 190 bundles may be inside a typical Pressurised water reactor, from the diagram in the last piece.

As the fuel source is depleted, the rods are removed, stored within the container, replaced with new rods, and the process continues. Typically, one rod may only last six years before it needs to be replaced. The rod is kept onsite in the tank to cool, and this usually lasts for 5 years. Once cool enough to handle, the rods are removed. One of two things happens then. The rods can be removed to a storage facility. Even though they will remain radioactive for centuries, they will lose 99.9% of their radioactivity after 40 years. The used rods can also be reprocessed to recover the still enriched uranium for reuse. However, as part of the nuclear non proliferation treaty, reprocessing has ceased in the US and all the rods are now treated as nuclear waste, and stored.

(Say, just why is it that only the US has to stop reprocessing when the recovered fuel is still quite viable.)

People look upon the nuclear waste as the major problem.

Again, those with a different agenda will say that this stuff is highly dangerous for millions of years. That may be so, but surely the safety measures in place now have ensured that no incident of any sort, accident of any sort or disaster of any sort has occurred.
People regularly submit to x rays, catscans, petscans, MRI’s, treatment for cancers, nuclear medicine on large scale that we take for granted. There is background radiation in everyday life, and people are exposed to more background radiation every day than they would be around a nuclear power plant. Look at the guy holding those pellets above. Admitted he’s wearing a pretty hefty type of protective glove, and probably other protective gear as well, as is the guy holding the camera, but those guys are still okay. (Sarcastically speaking, ‘Here fella, I want you for a suicide mission. Just hold these highly radioactive enriched uranium pellets so we can get a good photograph of them.’)

Coal fired plants produce 100 times more radiation the nuclear power plants.
The waste is volatile yes, but handled correctly as it has been, and as it will be, then it can prove to be, and has already proved to be, a safe method of producing electrical power.
There are 65 large base load nuclear power plants producing electricity in the US currently.
Thousands of people work in these plants and have worked in them. They all have extended families, so tens of thousands of people are closely associated with actually being around highly radioactive Uranium.
Only one person who works in a nuclear plant glows in the dark, and that guy’s name is Homer Simpson, and then it’s only occasionally. Next episode he’s back eating doughnuts.
No. Nuclear power is safe.

The seven year lead time, and that enormously huge cost at the front end is the major problem that has to be confronted, but in a highly technological and wealthy country like the US, then electricity produced from Nuclear power should be an option more closely canvassed.

Jimmy Crack Corn, and I Don’t Care

Satire by Shawn Goodwin

Former President and three-time X-Games snowboarding champion Jimmy Carter has come under fire this week after meeting with the Palestinian militant organization Hamas. Carter, in an obvious attempt to erase four years of Presidential malaise, has made an effort to undermine American interests by doing everything from meeting with terrorists to putting ketchup on his hot dog.

And nobody puts ketchup on a hot dog.

So, when did Jimmy Carter become such a train wreck? The short answer is simple: it began when he started drinking Billy Beer. The long answer is a bit more complicated.

President Carter’s downward spiral did not happen overnight. In the years since leaving office, Carter embarked on many diplomatic missions. In 1994, he signed the Agreed Framework, which guaranteed that North Korea would cease its pursuit of nuclear weapons. A decade later, North Korea did the Neutron Dance by announcing that they now possessed a nuclear arsenal. Strike one. In 2004, Carter monitored the Venezuelan recall election of Hugo Chávez. After the defeat of the recall attempt, experts stated that the entire election was rife with fraud. Strike two. Finally, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, Carter was on hand for Princess Leia’s diplomatic mission to Alderaan. A few days later, the Death Star destroyed Alderaan; a move ordered by Grand Moff Tarkin. Strike three.

Embarrassed by his initial failures, the former President appeared to polish his tarnished image with some laudable humanitarian efforts. The creation of the Carter Center worked toward “advancing human rights and alleviating suffering.” Sadly, the genocide continues in Darfur, and American Idol is still on the air. Perhaps the Center could provide Simon Cowell with a one-way airline ticket to the Sudan?

A former peanut farmer and son of the soil, Carter still loves the great outdoors, and is utilizing its availability to carve out a more marketable legacy. Carter and his wife Rosalynn still volunteer their time by building homes for Habitat for Humanity. Of course, the former President files more nails than he hammers, but it is the thought that counts. Always unabashed self-promoters, the Carters are very excited about their newest Habitat project: building a 50-foot wall around their estate to keep the “little people” away. Unfortunately, when “Fence-Gate” was leaked to the media, the President suffered another major hit to his reputation.

Undeterred, Carter announced the creation of “The Elders,” a humanitarian group that claimed to utilize “1,000 years of collective experience.” Of course, that quote loses some of its impact when one realizes that Carter is approximately 924 years old. Ironically, the scandal-plagued (former) UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is also a member of the organization. What, was Marion Barry busy that day? Annan’s first brainstorm was the suggestion of an Oil-for-Peace Program, which Carter said will receive “due consideration.”

Amazingly, these are only a handful of the miserable failures perpetrated by our 39th President.  Many more were never exposed to the public for fear that they would cause a nationwide panic.  For instance:

During the energy crisis of 1979, President Carter spent one billion dollars on research into a peanut oil-based gasoline. Nut-oline was created to offset OPEC’s skyrocketing fossil fuel prices, but the product never gained popularity. Critics believed that consumers with peanut allergies would stay away from the pumps.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the next foible was even more damaging. The infamous “Malaise” speech of 1979 is one of history’s greatest blunders, although it didn’t have to be. Speechwriters Hendrik Hertzberg and Gordon Stewart misunderstood Carter’s instructions – an error blamed on the Georgia native’s heavy southern drawl. In reality, the President intended to give his “Mayonnaise” speech to the American people, exposing a crack team of scientists’ successful transformation of the delicious condiment into pure energy. The stockholders at Hellmann’s never forgave the mistake.

Nearly 30 years later, Jimmy Carter is still trying to right his many wrongs.

They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. James Earl Carter is chock full of good intentions, but his implementation of them is about as effective as putting perfume on a pig.  Every time the man tries to do something right, he gets kicked in the teeth for his trouble.  Carter’s epitaph could be the classic quote from the 1994 film Dumb and Dumber, “Man, you are one pathetic loser.”

Jimmy Carter has a knack for making lemonade out of lemons. Unfortunately for the former President, he immediately squeezes the acidic juice into his own eyes.

# #

FamilySecurityMatters.org’s official satirist, Shawn Goodwin, is a blogger and police detective from Philly.
read full author bio here

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A Second Pollard ?

Pollard and Rafi Eitan:

“Over the 18-month period that Pollard worked for Israel, he provided suitcases of documents to his handlers on a regular basis. Rafi Eitan, Israel’s master spy who served as Pollard’s chief handler from his position as head of the Office for Information Cooperation at the Israeli Embassy, told him that his information was discussed at cabinet meetings and Pollard understood that his main contractor was then Maj.-Gen. Ehud Barak, who then served as Commander of Military Intelligence. Yet, when Pollard was arrested, Israel did whatever it could to deny its connection to him. From the moment then prime minister Shimon Peres ordered embassy security officers to physically eject Pollard and his wife-at-the-time Anne from the embassy, Israel has done everything in its power to distance itself from Pollard.” -more from Caroline Glick

Kadish, Pollard, and Rafi Eitan:

“The link between Pollard and Kadish is a now-defunct Israeli intelligence agency enigmatically known as the Scientific Relations Office. The office was run by Rafi Eitan, a former officer of the Mossad spy agency who is now an octogenarian Israeli Cabinet minister in charge of pensioners’ affairs.” -more from the AP

Speculation (from the same AP piece):

“Shlomo Slonim, an expert on U.S.-Israel relations at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said the documents Kadish allegedly supplied were not top secret and could be found in a library.“Apparently somebody is trying to trump up something relatively minor and make it into a scandal of some sort,” he said.

Alon Pinkas, Israel’s former New York consul, went further, saying “anti-Israeli” elements in the CIA and Pentagon might have decided to release the charges to torpedo any possible release of Pollard.” – more

So is anti-Semitism and/or anti-Zionist politics behind the timing of the arrest? Your thoughts?

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Should The U.S. Boycott The Beijing Olympics?

In response to China’s crackdown on pro-Tibet sympathizers and its continued support of the Sudanese genocide in Darfur, pressure is mounting on the U.S. to boycott this summer’s Olympics in Beijing.

Read more at Parade Magazine and take their poll.

My question is WHY DID THOSE IDIOTS Choose China in the First Place?
The Olympic Committee Knew about China’s Human Rights Violations!

I Say NO to the Boycott because that will only hurt the Athletes.

But do encourage your athletes to make a short statement or wear a Tibetan, etc., patch on their headbands, etc.

All that boycotting will do is benefit the Greedy Politicians. They are worse than Ambulance chasing Lawyers, if that’s possible.

While you’re at it read Why Congress Ignores Your Retirement at the bottom of the same page at Parade.com. These Political Whores will get after ONLY 20 Years, $55,000 initial yearly pension, as well as 401(k) savings and Social Security benefits! They can’t understand why anyone after laboring 45+ years would have a problem when they are sitting pretty after only 20 years of goofing off!

And for what??? For screwing up this Country!?!? They shouldn’t get a penny! And they should be charged every time they screw up & cost us unnecessary money.

Read Social Security’s Fictitious Trust Fund by Brian Riedl and David John and
2008 Social Security Trustees Report Continues to Show the Urgent Need for Reform by David C. John

Al (Grumpy PO’d Old Man)

No ObamaNation Part 3: Another Marx Brother

Obama the Marxist

THE FOUNDATION

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” -John Adams

PATRIOT PERSPECTIVE

No ObamaNation Part 3: Another Marx brother

By Mark Alexander

After her Pennsylvania primary victory, Hillary Rodham Clinton is still swinging, but unless she can win 60 percent of delegates in the remaining primaries (unlikely) and turn more than half of the remaining superdelegates her way prior to the convention, her bid is done.

The Democrats are thus stuck with Obama, the handpicked protègè of UberLeftist Demo-gogues Jean-Francois Kerry and Teddy Kennedy.

Obama fever is now breaking among moderate Democrats, reducing the odds that he can beat John McCain in the general election, but if the Democrat National Committee takes action to derail his campaign, the party would implode.

At this point, the Demo elite are prepared to sacrifice the presidency knowing that their majorities in the House and Senate will still carry water for their constituencies of “useful idiots.” But given Obama’s mesmerizing effect on the proletariat, he may be down but certainly not out.

Barack Obama is the most radical Leftist to ever make it this far in a presidential primary. In Part 2 of this series, “Disciple of Hate,” I summarized the influence of his religious mentor for the last two decades, black supremacist Jeremiah Wright.

This week’s essay will provide insight into Obama’s political mentors, all protagonists of Marxist-inspired anti-American movements. If a man can be judged by the company he keeps, Obama should be judged harshly. He may be a “closet smoker,” but as more of his mentors are smoked out of his closet, it becomes increasingly clear that Obama is just another traitorous Leftist posing as an all-American.

For starters, consider Obama’s friends and neighbors, William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

Ayers and Dohrn were leaders of the Weather Underground, a violent group of radical Leftovers from the Revolutionary Youth Movement, a wing of Students for a Democratic Society. Ayers and Dohrn split from the Maoist RYM, insisting that a revolution against the United States and capitalists everywhere should commence immediately.

In 1969, Ayers and Dohrn were founding signatories of the Weathermen’s declaration of unification with the “Black Liberation Movement” and other “anti-colonial” vanguards, to ensure “the destruction of U.S. imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world Communism.”

In 1970 the Weather Underground issued a “Declaration of a State of War” against the United States and commenced a campaign of terror including bombings, jailbreaks, and the instigation of riots. Between 1969 and 1975, they bombed the U.S. Capitol twice, the Pentagon, the Department of State and several federal courthouses. They also attacked state and local government buildings and “capitalist targets” such as banks. The terrorist organization began to disband after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and the fall of Saigon, though one of their last acts of violence was a Brinks robbery in 1981, in which two police officers and a security guard were murdered during that robbery.

Ayers and Dohrn scurried underground in 1970, after a bomb being constructed in New York to kill Army officers at Fort Dix detonated prematurely, killing three fellow Weathermen. (In the jargon of bomb technicians and investigators, this is known as “self solving.”)

They surrendered to authorities a decade later but were never prosecuted because of “improper” FBI surveillance methods. Ayers is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Dohrn is an associate professor of law at Northwestern University. Isn’t that special.

Asked about his association with Ayers, Obama said, “This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood… who I know… He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.” So, he only exchanges ideas with him on an irregular basis?

Obama added the disclaimer that he was only eight years old when Ayers was bombing buildings. However, Obama was 40 when an unrepentant Ayers told The New York Times, “I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough.” (No small irony that interview was published on 11 September 2001.)

For her part, Dohrn once offered the following assessment of the Manson family murders: “Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into [pregnant actress Sharon Tate's] stomach! Wild!”

Nonetheless, Obama has maintained his association with Ayers and Dohrn, and the connection goes quite a bit deeper than just neighborhood proximity.

Ayers and Dohrn actually hosted the party to launch Obama’s successful 1996 Illinois State Senate campaign at their fashionable Hyde Park home, a campaign endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America. Incidentally, the DSA would later note in a newsletter that State Senator Obama gave the eulogy for socialist Saul Mendelson, a “champion” of the “democratic left.”

Obama and Ayers also served together on the Woods Fund board, which, incidentally, awarded $6,000 to Obama’s “pastor,” Jeremiah Wright, noting the grant was “in recognition of Barack Obama’s contributions to Woods Fund as a director.” This is the same board that supports such anti-Semitic organizations as the Arab-American Action Network.

A more in-depth look at Obama reveals he may indeed be a “hard-core academic Marxist” as accused by his 2004 Senate campaign opponent, and sacrificial lamb, Alan Keyes.

Obama admits to having attended “socialist conferences” as a “community organizer” in Chicago in the late 1980s, where he broke bread with Democratic Socialists of America lefties-also with full-circle connections to William Ayers.

But that is hardly the extent of Obama’s fascination with Marxist ideology.

According to my colleague, Cliff Kincaid, Accuracy in Media editor and president of the UN watchdog group America’s Survival, Obama was mentored for most of his formative years by black radical Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party USA member. Obama had “a close relationship, almost like a son, with Davis,” writes Kincaid.

In his book, Dreams from My Father, Obama refers to “Frank” repeatedly, and said that Davis “and his old Black Power dashiki self” was still mentoring him as late as 1979, when he was a student in California. Davis warned Obama that college would give him “an advanced degree in compromise” and not to “start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that s**t.”

Kincaid notes that a CPUSA devotee recently said of Obama’s political fortunes, “Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface. This is the old revolutionary ‘mole,’ not only showing his traces on the surface but also breaking through.”

Obama’s record speaks for itself. In 2006, Senator Obama campaigned for the re-election of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who openly lists his party affiliation as “Socialist.” Sanders applauded freshman Sen. Obama as “one of the great leaders of the United States Senate,” and understandably so. Last year, National Journal, which rates members of Congress strictly by their voting records, ranked Obama as the single most liberal member of the Senate-a remarkable “achievement,” given the Socialist bona fides of the aforementioned Sanders.

When questioned why he refuses to wear an American flag on his lapel, Obama said, “I won’t wear it on my chest. It’s a substitute for… true patriotism. You show your patriotism by being true to our values and ideals.”

No doubt, the true colors of Obama’s “values and ideals” are bright red.

(Part 1 of this series: “No ObamaNation: Barack who?”; Part 2 of this series: “No
ObamaNation: Disciple of Hate”)

Read more excellent articles here > The Patriot Post.US

Kyoto – A Perspective (Part 17)

ELECTRICITY PRODUCED BY NUCLEAR MEANS (Part Three)

Just how then does a Nuclear power plant generate electricity?
This explanation is highly simplified, and for this example, I’ll just deal with the light water reactors.
Remember the picture in the last post showing the blue water inside the reactor. You would have seen some long rods. These rods have the enriched material in them and are bundled together in assemblies and these assemblies are placed inside the Reactor vessel. These rods are in holders and for the reaction, the rods are moved from the holders, this process either removing from or inserting into the core of the reactor, allowing neutrons to be released from the rods to split further atoms of uranium. This process generates extreme heat. This heat then boils water to turn it into steam to drive the turbine which in turn drives the generator.

In simplified form here are the two main types of plants in operation. These diagrams are illustrated on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) website. You can see there the Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR), and the Boiling Water Reactor (BWR). Under each diagram is a tab that will animate the process when you press on it. You can see from this that the PWR would seem the better option because the Reactor is not open to all of the external water.

Remember how I mentioned an obscure fact that will become important as we discuss other methods. That obscure fact is the efficiency percentage. It may not mean much and detractors will tend to play it down, but it is a really important thing. Why it is important is the fact that a percentage efficiency factor dramatically effects whether or not a method of power production can be used as a base load form of power, and that comes down to the reliability factor, in other words, can the plant produce the power that is needed on a continuous basis to the consumers. The higher the efficiency, the higher the reliability, the better it can be used as base load power.
Where this comes into play is in respect of Wind Power, and Solar power. Let’s use just these three for now, Nuclear, Solar, and Wind methods, all having a maximum power rating of say 500 MW.
With respect to the wind power, the efficiency rating declines somewhat because the wind sometimes does not blow or blows at a variable rate. With respect to Solar power the sun goes down at night for an average of half the time, there are clouds, there’s the cold of winter when the Sun may only be up for limited hours. So at times when the wind is not blowing or the Sun is shining then Maximum power is not being produced. Whereas with nuclear, (along with coal, gas turbines and hydro as well) then the power is always there as long as the fuel source is there.
You might have methods of power that theoretically have the same end figure as maximum power, but if the efficiency factor is low, then it only stands to reason that it cannot be used as base load power.
The efficiency factor for Nuclear power generation approaches 90%, and what that means is that the plant can provide a CONSTANT supply of almost 90% of its maximum rated power all the time, so as a base load supply, it is eminently suitable, so much so that it is the highest efficiency of all methods of power production.

In the last piece I mentioned that there are 104 nuclear Power Plants in the US, but really, only 65 of these are large plants supplying base load electricity on a constant basis. This makes up nearly 20% of the total power generated within the US.

The NRC has safety regulations that make these plants safer than any other of the major plants that generate electricity. That combined with the fact that these plants are clean when they are up and running, and are known to have a long and relatively trouble free life, makes them a viable option, especially in the US.
Something not really mentioned, (an inconvenient truth for those who resist Nuclear Power) is that more radiation is released from coal fired power plants than from Nuclear power plants. You might think this would surely be marginal, if at all, but the ratio is such that coal releases more than 100 times more radiation than an equivalent rated nuclear plant releases.
In the year 1982 when the Three Mile Island incident occurred and radiation was released into the atmosphere, coal fired plants across the US released 150 times that amount into the atmosphere. So even in event of an accident, more radiation is released from coal fired plants overall.

This is a photograph of the Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Plant at Shippingport PA.

The most visible thing at a nuclear power plant are the large cooling towers. Sometimes emotive photographs are shown of these plants with white stuff pouring out the top of these funnels. When you see structures like this you think of chimneys and how smoke comes out of chimneys, and how smoke contains nasty pollution. The white stuff pouring out the top of these structures is nothing more than harmless, and non radioactive, water vapour. When you looked at the interactive pictures above of the two plant types, you would have seen that the turbine is driven by steam boiled by the reaction inside the containment vessel itself. The steam then goes to cooling ponds under these towers. As the steam cools back into water some vapour is given of and in the cool of winter, this vapour is even more visible. So it’s nothing more untoward than a convenient psychological play on your mind.
In the middle of the photograph, you’ll see two small, domed, reinforced concrete structures. These are where the containment vessels for each of the two large turbine/generators are situated, the reactor itself.

These plants are so regulated that safety is of utmost importance.
Besides that, they produce cheap power, and produce no greenhouse gases.

Pennsylvania itself produces around 35% of its total power from nuclear sources, well ahead of the National average of around 20%. Only Illinois produces a greater percentage of power from nuclear sources.
This link shows the Nuclear Power Plants currently in operation in Pennsylvania.

For so long nuclear power has suffered because of that one word, NUCLEAR. In the main people who haven’t bothered to check out just how reliable and how safe it really is have used scare tactics of perceived near misses for an agenda that is not supported by the facts themselves.

For such a technologically advanced Country as the US is, then this option is one that needs to be seriously considered.

Birth of a Nation (Part 2)

A NATION BECOMES AUSTRALIA (Part Two)

It’s been mentioned to me that the title of the ANZAC article might have raised some questions, so as a form of clarification, I’ll explain why I worded it in that manner.
I used it as a sort of play on words, but one that goes directly to the heart of the matter.

Australia was settled by the English as a penal colony in 1788, and each year we celebrate that exact date on the 26th January, Australia Day, our National Day

That first fleet took eight and a half months to get here in 11 ships, mostly containing 780 male and female convicts. Also in that fleet were their guards, officers, and men to set up the penal colony, (who also brought their families with them) and the ships crews, led by Arthur Phillip, an English Naval Captain, who was also the first Governor of Australia.
It took a number of years before settlers actually sailed out from England, and nearly all the convicts were sentenced to one of three terms, 7 years imprisonment, 14 years imprisonment or transportation for the term of their natural lives. In all reality, every prisoner who came here stayed here, because it wasn’t like at the end of your term, you just hopped a ship and sailed back to England, so they all either stayed here as convicts or settled here when they were released.

Australia stayed as an outpost colony of England, mostly as a penal colony, because convicts were transported right up until 1868.

Australia officially became a nation, and no longer a colony, when the 6 States Federated into one nation. We were still part of the British Commonwealth and still are to this day, but we officially became the Commonwealth of Australia on January 1st 1901.

So even though at the time of that first ANZAC landing at Gallipoli, Australia as a country was 14 years old, it was the first time an Army had been raised under the heading of Australia, as before that, we were always just the colony of six States, and our units served under the British. Australia has a proud military history in the tribal wars in Africa in the middle years of the 1850’s/60’s, and then the Boer War in South Africa around the last years of the 1890’s.

[Click on Image to enlarge ^ in a separate window]
Gallipoli in Turkey from space. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli

However, at Gallipoli, instead of being an adjunct of the British Army, we served under our own Officers as Australia. When news got out of the landing, it was not just English forces landing at Helles and on the Peninsula, but the English landing at Helles, and the headlines were all about the Australians at Gallipoli, and the bravery of that (comparatively) small force against such huge odds.

So at ANZAC Cove, a former convict penal colony of Britain became the nation of Australia, when we stood on our own two feet as Australians and not just British subjects.
It is often misunderstood why a Nation would even want to commemorate what was in all reality a huge failure, but that is missing the whole point. People pointed to the campaign at Gallipoli and noticed how Australians were doing such a valiant job. Not how the battles were going badly for the English forces, but looking at Australia as a separate entity.
Australians finally had something to be proud of. Proud of the fact that they were being recognised as AUSTRALIA.

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This is the scene from the service at ANZAC Cove Gallipoli at 4.30 AM Friday (Local time)

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This is the scene from the 4.30 AM (Local Time) service at Villers Bretonneux France, the first Australian dawn service held here at one of the sites of the numerous significant Australian battles during the Western Front campaign on the Somme from 1916 to 1918.

The following two photo galleries are courtesy of the ABC Australia Network. The gallery can be paused on individual photographs by using the arrow buttons, and for the text to each photograph, hover the mouse over the photograph and the text will display at the bottom of the photo.

This picture gallery shows images form the remembrance services in Australia.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/photos/2008/04/25/2227198.htm

Here’s also a picture gallery of photographs from that original first landing.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/photos/2008/04/22/2224268.htm

And You Thought You Were Having A Bad Day

Guy at a bar

There was this guy at a bar, just looking at his drink. He stays like that for half of an hour.

Then, this big trouble-making truck driver steps next to him, takes the drink from the guy, and just drinks it all down. The poor man starts crying. The truck driver says, “Come on man, I was just joking. Here, I’ll buy you another drink. I just can’t stand to see a man cry.”

“No, it’s not that. This day is the worst of my life. First, I fall asleep, and I go late to my office. My boss, outrageous, fires me. When I leave the building, to my car, I found out it was stolen. The police said that they can do nothing. I get a cab to return home, and when I leave it, I remember I left my wallet and credit cards there. The cab driver just drives away.”

“I go home, and when I get there, I find my wife in bed with the gardener. I leave home, and come to this bar. And just when I was thinking about putting an end to my life, you show up and drink my poison.”

The New Pyramid Builders

The New Pyramid Builders

Edward Cline

A mile-high tower will rise in a desert port town, and Americans will be helping to finance its £5 billion construction cost. It will rise in the town Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, halfway up the length of the Red Sea.

At 5,250 feet, it will be twice the height of another tower being erected in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on the Persian Gulf. A few miles north up the Sea from Jeddah is Rabigh, where about 40,000 workers are constructing the world’s largest petrochemical plant as part of King Abdullah Economic City, itself part of a $500 billion plan to turn Saudi Arabia into a “powerhouse” industrial giant. Other massive construction projects are underway in Kuwait and other Persian Gulf countries.

“By the end of the year,” reported The New York Times in an article, “The Construction Site Called Saudi Arabia,” on January 20,

“this massive city of steel at the edge of the Red Sea will take its place as a cog of globalization: plastics produced here will be used to make televisions in Japan, cellphones in China and thousands of other products to be sold in the United States and Europe. Construction costs at the plant, which spreads over eight square miles, have doubled to $10 billion because of shortages in materials and labor. The amount of steel being used is 10 times the weight of the Eiffel Tower.”

The Times article also reports that,

“Abu Dhabi is planning to spend close to $1 billion for a new museum with the help of the Louvre, in Paris. Dubai’s latest grandiose idea is to build a small-scale replica of the French city of Lyon, complete with residential housing, a museum, a culinary school and a soccer club.”

Americans will be helping to finance these and other massive projects in Saudi Arabia and in the Persian Gulf fiefdoms through their gas and heating oil prices. One important thing to remember about these projects is that they are not strictly “private” undertakings; every one of them is a government project. Strictly speaking, neither Saudi Arabia nor any of the other medieval kingdoms or satrapies in the Mideast has a “government,” representative or otherwise.

Their legislative bodies are purely artificial fictions beholden to ruling families. The only persons who have billions to invest in these new pyramids are those related or closely connected to those ruling families. Michael Corleone’s Mafia crime family pales in comparison to these Middle East oil oligarchies, which have their own tribal codes of loyalty, justice and silence, a morality that boasts its own “whacking” policy against Muslims who “rat” on Mohammed or take Allah’s name in vain, or who abandon the tribe completely, and an inbred contempt for and mistrust of all non-Muslim outsiders.

A similar arrangement exists in Mainland China, in which most of the cadres of the ruling Communist Party own and control the “private enterprises” behind China’s own economic boom. That arrangement is by definition fascist, and accounts for the censorship, brutal repression, and absence of any civil liberties there. In Saudi Arabia and its Islamic neighbors, the arrangement is much more primitive, and intractably religious.

Such as Prince al-Walid bin Talal, planner of the mile-high tower, who bought the prestigious Savoy Hotel in London for £1.25 billion in 2005, reports the London Daily Mail of March 31. Bin Talal is the Saudi who offered former Mayor Rudy Giuliani a $10 million check after the World Trade Center was destroyed by fellow Saudis in 2001. Giuliani promptly returned the check. Bin Talal also is an enabler of Islam in the West, building dozens of mosques in it every year and giving $20 million to Harvard and Georgetown Universities to establish schools of “Islamic studies.”

One can imagine bin Talal’s mile-high tower is his extravagant way of giving a Bronx cheer to the U.S., the World Trade Center, and all those who died in the attack. Two British firms, Hyder Consulting and Arup, will tackle the tower project in a joint venture with bin Talal’s firm, Kingdom Holdings. One supposes that is a kind of reward to the British for wanting to de-emphasize the Holocaust and the Crusades, or not teach the subjects at all, in history lessons in the presence of British Muslim students, for allowing Islamic Sharia law to creep up to equivalence with British secular law, and for many other concessions to Muslim “sensibilities.”

Saudi Arabia is the world’s biggest oil exporter. “The Persian Gulf countries reaped “$1.5 trillion in oil revenue from 2002 to 2006,” reports the Times article. Saudi Arabia and its religious/political rival, Iran, another oil exporter, together are the chief enablers of Islamic jihad against the West.

But vertical pyramids and other vanity projects are not the sole means employed by billionaire Arabs to engineer a hostile takeover of the West. The Times article reports that,

“Last year…a fund controlled by the government of Abu Dhabi bought a stake in Citigroup for $7.5 billion, while another run by Dubai’s ruler bought a large share in Sony, the Japanese consumer electronics giant. Sabie, a major Saudi petrochemical company, bought the plastics division of General Electric for $11.6 billion, and the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation bought half of Dow Chemical’s commodity-plastics unit for $9.5 billion….  In recent weeks, other big banks plagued by losses from the mortgage crisis, like Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, have raised tens of billions of dollars from a variety of Middle Eastern and Asian funds, including ones from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.”

The American Congress for Truth reports an April 1st Human Events article, in “America for Sale to Sharia Sovereign Wealth Funds,” that

Jimmy Carter’s Mideast Mission

Everyone seems to be trying to figure out what Jimmy One Term is up to and why he is meeting with the Islamic/Palestinian terrorists at this time. Most experts figure it’s Carter just “doing it again”. Here’s a rundown of opinion from CAMERA

* * *

But hey! There’s a major political battle going on in the Democrat Party. Clearly a Palestinian “flare-up” at this moment would put support of Israel and the War On Terror front and center in the U.S. primary battle. And that, one could argue, would put Obama on the hot seat. Could it be that the former President is actually on a diplomatic mission on behalf of the Obama candidacy? Sort of “cooperate now and we’ll take care of you later” deal?

So is the off screen voice in today’s cartoon being astute or “completely paranoid”?
What do you think?

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Read More Dry Bones by Yaakov Kirschen

Kyoto – A Perspective (Part 16)

ELECTRICITY PRODUCED BY NUCLEAR MEANS. (Part Two)

How long has the nuclear process been used for the generation of electricity?

It was perceived quite early that the process itself probably had more uses in a civilian setting than as a weapon. The military had an urgency from the start, not for ulterior motives but from the necessity as a vision that the shock of actually seeing the devastation it could cause, might in itself bring about an end to a war that was developing into a long and drawn out attritional stalemate, an end that did justify the means, but in the process, forever tainting the thoughts of every person in a manner that has proved to be negative to this day.
After that first use as a weapon, the branches of the nuclear tree started to spread. True, weapons proliferated, but those other branches saw the process being used to power firstly submarines, and then large capital ships. (Continues below the text for the photo)

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This view looks down on the fuel rods at Penn State’s Breazeale Reactor. The reactor is a TRIGA model manufactured by General Atomics. The blue light surrounding the fuel is known as Cherenkov radiation, produced when charged particles travel through matter (in this case, water) at speeds greater than light. Penn State University is the site of the first licensed reactor.
Sources: the Penn State Radiation Science and Engineering Center.

This is the oldest reactor still in current service in the US. It only produces 1.1 MW of power. Located at Penn State University, the Breazeale reactor, a TRIGA model, it was commissioned on July 8th 1955.

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Use for the production of electrical power also started not long after the war as the three major powers of the time, The US, the UK, and Russia, developed their own versions of power plants. The Russians were first, in 1954. However it was a small plant, tiny really, producing a maximum of only 5 megawatts (MW) mostly for research purposes to test the long term viability of the process.

The British came next with their first plant at Sellafield in 1956. It was used for military purposes, but had the commercial Calder Hall plant, and then Windscale. It started conservatively, producing 40 MW, which later rose to 200 MW, this plant remaining in constant use until 2003 for 47 years.
The first plant to use the produced power on a commercial basis, and not just experimentally, and also the largest at the time producing 60 MW of power that was actually used, was the Shippingport plant in Beaver County Pennsylvania, and this plant stayed in constant production for 25 years until it was decommissioned in 1982.
Currently in use in the US there are 104 Plants producing electricity. This shows quite obviously that the process must be relatively safe one, and if you add together the years that these plants have been running, you’re looking at close on 2000 years in total of virtually trouble free operation, and that is just in the US.
When compared with other processes, the Nuclear option is probably a quantum level safer than those others, because of the inherent safety measures included.

What I would like you to take into account is this.
Consider the legal process, and how litigious we have become over the years. If the Nuclear process was so bad, legal proceedings would be so endemic as to virtually cease production of power by these nuclear means.
Why?
Those companies setting up to construct a plant would weigh the possible legal costs against the recovered profit and bean counters would advise that it was just not worth it to even consider construction in the first place.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires safety measures on a scale that accidents are almost unheard of, and if anything were to happen, then safety measures that are standard would ensure that the accident does not become a disaster.
True there have been accidents and the worst of these Chernobyl, near Kiev in the former Soviet Republic of Ukraine, which comes immediately to mind, where brave men unthinkingly did outstanding things with no fear for their personal safety to ensure the disaster did not become worse than it actually was.
Three Mile Island is also one that comes to mind, but I want you to think about this.

On the scale where the highest level accident is 7, only one, Chernobyl has been classed as a 7. Three Mile Island rates as a 5 on that scale. Even though there was a partial meltdown of the core, the reactor vessel and the containment building were not breached, and very little radiation was released into the atmosphere.
Keeping that in mind, the reactor vessel itself has been removed from the site and that turbine and generator also removed. The site was cleaned up and all that remains are the cooling towers. If the site was so badly contaminated, would people still be working at the plant in the numbers that they do. The second reactor, turbine and generator still effectively produce electricity quite safely to this day, and will for a long time to come.
People still stop their cars alongside the road across the River from the plant to take photographs, barely 100 yards from the site. If it was so bad, would the authorities allow this, knowing the propensity for the legal system to act on things like this.
No, the process is a relatively safe one.

The drawback is the waste itself, but this waste has been stored at underground sites within the US for up to 50 years now. The waste has been removed from the sites, transported, and then safely buried. If this removal of waste was so dangerous, would it even be considered to be allowed to happen.
I will point out something that detractors will point to and use as an accusation.
The Greenpeace Organisation points an accusing finger at the industry and says that since the US has started to produce electricity using the nuclear process, there have been more than 200 near misses.

See the point here. They use psychology to infer something that would surely arouse fear on a large scale, engendering that fear to raise their own profile.
Does it not then stand to reason that those awful 200 near misses are in actual facts startling examples of just how well the safety measures work.
Using that same example, why is Greenpeace itself not protesting against the Automotive industry because contrary to near misses, cars have been actually known to have killed people.
Again, psychology is used by one side, (or even the other side) to enhance their own point.
There are drawbacks, true, but life is full of drawbacks.

I will however point in the direction of France, and ask you to look at these facts, not as a psychological point, but as a little known TRUTH. In France, nearly 80% of the country’s electricity is produced by the nuclear process. France is one of the most densely populated counties on the Planet. Yet France has the cleanest air of ANY industrialised nation on Earth.
That is testament itself to how clean the process is. There is no fear in France with respect to Nuclear power. As a secondary thing, France has the cheapest cost for electricity of any nation across the whole European Continent, and actually has more power than it needs, exporting power to neighbouring countries.

These are not psychological Swords of Damocles poised over our heads. These are incontrovertible facts.

Maybe this is an inconvenient truth in itself.

No, what is happening here is that people with different agendas are driving public opinion with scare tactics, labelling safety measures that actually work as near misses.

In the next piece, I’ll detail the process, and explain why, for the US especially, the nuclear process is actually a viable, and a clean alternative.

The Birth Of A Nation

A NATION BECOMES AUSTRALIA

The nets were dropped over the sides of the ships as the large rowing boats pulled alongside.
In the dark, fully laden soldiers went over the side and moved down the nets into those boats.
It was around 3 AM, and it was a Sunday morning.
The boats were towed a short way by motorised launches, each launch towing four or five boats full of troops, the boats in line astern. They made their way slowly towards the shadowy peaks on the horizon. The slow, motorised launches could not venture too close, so the boats were cast adrift and strong hands manned the oars for the remainder of the journey. The landing was timed for 4.15 AM, around dawn. Strong currents caused some boats to drift away from the intended landing place, beaches with flat ground in front of them.
At 4.15 AM the first boats rolled ashore, and as the soldiers dropped onto the sand and some into the water, they were faced by steep cliffs, some right up to the edge of the narrow beach. The large numbers of boats had become separated over a few miles of shoreline. Luckily the opposing side thought the landing was going to be in a different place and had massed their forces there. The cliffs above the beaches were sporadically defended, but they had the advantage of the high ground.
Still in the lightening dawn, soldiers with rifles on a beach were cut down in droves by machine guns fired from the high ground.

The date. April 25th 1915.
The place. An insignificant little Turkish place called Ari Burnu on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey, now forever known as ANZAC Cove.
The tiny nation of Australia grew up on that day.

A small force of Australian and New Zealanders, untried in combat took on the seasoned might of the Turkish Army under guidance from a small outpost of German Field Officers.

In England, a young Winston Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty. With his First Sea Lord, they developed a plan to secure the Dardanelles, a narrow sea lane from the Aegean Sea (off the Mediterranean Sea) and on to Constantinople (now called Istanbul) the Capital of Turkey, and thus securing the sea lanes as a route to supply a closer land bridge to Germany.
The Naval exercise ended in disaster as numerous capital ships were lost in that narrow sea passage, shredded by shore mounted fortifications firing down on them in the Narrows.
So, a plan was developed to land an Army on the peninsula to cross to other side, meet up with the force from the South. and then take out those fortifications protecting that sea lane.

The main landing was to be at Cape Helles the ‘point’ of the peninsula, and this was where the vast bulk of the defending Turks were gathered. This landing force was to be English troops in their tens of thousands.
A small diversionary force was to land further up the peninsula and cross over, hooking up with the successful huge British force, and then on to take the forts.
The English were cut down in their thousands and barely advanced more than a couple of miles.
The diversionary force was named ANZAC, an acronym for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, a hastily raised force of green and untried men thrown into uniform and given rifles and rudimentary training.

They landed along the peninsula and the fighting ensued.
Ironically, the furthest distance gained in the whole campaign was made on that very first day by a small group of men, but because of their size, could go no further.

The Turks were led by a young Mustafa Kemal Pasha, later to become Kemal Ataturk, father of modern Turkey, a Turkish Officer willing to go against what the German Officers told him, and thus he did everything he could to protect what was, after all, his own Country.

The ANZAC force fought bravely under terrible conditions along ridges and in deeply wooded and steep valleys.
They never did get across Chunuk Bair, the big mountain, and stayed virtually where they were, but did prove themselves to everyone who could see that they were something to be reckoned with as a military force. Legends were made, and a Country was born.

You may wonder why Australian soldiers were known by the affectionate name of ‘Diggers’.
That started here at Gallipoli when the Australian officers exhorted their men to dig trenches and foxholes at every opportunity, so they would not be exposed. Whenever groups of Australians were to be found, there were always groups of men digging with the obligatory small shovel, as much part of every soldiers equipment as their rifle.

At Cape Helles, it was an absolute unmitigated disaster. The battle there was fierce, with both sides suffering enormous casualties. Both sides became bogged down, with no one going anywhere.

In August, a new ‘push’ was planned. Tens of thousands of English soldiers landed at Suvla bay, to the Northwest of the ANZAC encampments, and the Australians mounted a ‘feint’ and were directed to Lone Pine where the fiercest fighting of the campaign took place.
At Suvla Bay, the English were decimated barely moving a mile. Some elements of the New Zealand force actually made it a long way inland and were actually at one of the high points of the peninsula looking down on the fortifications but they were only a very small group of men.
At Lone Pine, brutal hand to hand fighting ensued and over the three day time frame of the battle, seven Australians were awarded the Victoria Cross, to add to the two others already awarded, one before and one after this Lone Pine battle. The VC is the highest award for bravery, similar to your Congressional Medal of Honour.

So then, the campaign wore on into the Winter, and neither side could gain any advantage, a classic stalemate.

So, what of an exit plan then.
For the Australian part of it, a couple of Australians dreamed it up, and it was put into place in January of 1916, eight and a half months after the initial landing.

Be Careful What You Wish For: A Review of Ibrahim Warde’s ‘The Price of Fear’

Jeffrey Breinholt

Here is something you do not often hear: countries that have joined the UN Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Financing (sponsored by France) have an obligation under international law to prosecute terrorist financing they uncover in their territories. That means that every U.S. terrorist financing prosecution is compelled by our multilateral commitments. In other words, these cases cannot be explained as a function of an ideological Executive Branch or wrong-headed American unilateralism. Terrorist financing prosecutions will occur irrespective of which party is in the White House, assuming the incumbent takes international commitments seriously. Currently, in terms of terrorist financing-related international obligations, we are the most compliant country in the world. If you are a multilateralist, you should not complain.

There’s also this little fact: enforcing the legal consequences of economic sanctions is an example of “soft power.” It is an excellent alternative to military action, since it does not result in body bags. Why should targeted economic sanctions not be considered an option of first resort? Relatively speaking, they are humane. It seems strange that some of the most outspoken critics of American terrorist financing efforts are people who most aggressively oppose the U.S. military. These critics should be careful about what they wish for. If we scrap economic sanctions, military operations will be more likely, for the U.S. would be deprived of tools that are soft and non-lethal in nature. Imagine if the opponents of the U.S. invasion of Iraq did not have sanctions to promote as an alternative.

Unfortunately, book-length attacks on soft power by multilateralists have apparently become an annual rite of passage. This time last year, I wrote a review of R.T. Naylor’s Satanic Purses, in which I argued that if his allegations were even partially accurate, my Department of Justice colleagues and I should almost certainly be disbarred. I welcomed this scrutiny, published my State Bar of California license number, and invited the misconduct inquiry. Naylor never responded to my challenge, which is probably not surprising. After all, he believes that al Qaeda was not responsible for 9/11, and is a figment of American prosecutors’ imagination, just like the Italian Mafia was a fictitious creation of our professional predecessors. Naylor has apparently never watched The Sopranos. Perhaps the History Channel remains unavailable in Canada. Osama bin Laden and John Gotti, it seems, are Santa Claus.

Now comes Ibrahim Warde’s The Price of Fear: The Truth Behind The Financial War on Terror (University of California Press, 2007). It is not as bizarre as Naylor’s book, but that’s small solace. It is rather disturbing that credible academic publishers are willing to roll out such error-laden analysis.

Warde is very proud of himself. In an “aha” moment early in The Price of Fear, he argues that money laundering is a different phenomenon from terrorist financing. He writes in the Introduction:

The mistake of financial warriors is to look at terrorist financing as a subfield of criminology – a self-contained, free-standing field insulated from politics. They like to consider the financial war as a technical matter, best left to experts, where official proclamations are taken at face value: frozen amounts are to be subtracted from the terrorists’ stash of money, and the terrorist threat is assumed to be reduced accordingly. In their parallel universe, the principal building block is the money laundering template, which grew out of the law enforcement agencies’ battle against organized crime and drug trafficking. Although money laundering is fundamentally different from terrorist financing, the two have become virtually indistinguishable following the September 11 attacks. Money laundering is about ‘hiding and legitimizing proceeds derived from illegal activities.’ Terrorist financing, in contrast, is not driven be a crime-for-profit logic and has seldom anything to do with dirty money.

Warde does not recognize that this is a classic distinction without a difference. Treating terrorist financing as a type of money laundering allows our banks to get into the game of ferreting out suspected terrorism-related crimes and reporting them to the government, which is the big advantage for everyone. Warde views this is a useless exercise, because terrorism is not based on greed and does not involve high dollar amount like the proceeds of narcotics trafficking, and is therefore is not subject to much Bank Secrecy Act reporting. Of course, Elliot Spitzer’s conduct was uncovered by alert bank officials. Was it based on greed?

The Price of Fear is essentially a regurgitation of the 9/11 Commission Monograph on Terrorist Financing, while reaching the exact opposite of the Commission’s bottom line. Warde does not credit the fact that this aspect of the U.S. counterterrorism was the only one the Commission awarded an outstanding grade. He mentions it, only to argue it was wrong. He does accept the Commission’s factual finding, however. Bin Laden, we now know, did not have access to his family wealth, and much of al Qaeda’s pre-9/11 funding came from Persian Gulf charities. That means charities are worthy of scrutiny, rather than not, as Warde maintains.

This is exactly what has happened. Every U.S. charity that has been designated as terrorist-affiliated (like Holy Land Foundation, Benevolence International Foundation, Global Relief, Islamic American Relief Agency, al Haramain) have challenged their designations in American judicial proceedings. That means that they sort of had the right to challenge it, under a procedure we built into the law. How many have succeeded? Zero. In these cases, the United States is batting 1.000.

PA Election Reflection

By Tim Potts

Election Reflection

Turnout
Democratic voters set a record by a huge margin yesterday. Capitolwire’s Pete DeCoursey reports that yesterday’s Democratic vote total of nearly 2.3 million voters shattered the old record of 1.53 million in 1980. Only 710,000 Republicans voted but produced an interesting result (below).

President
It’s widely, and wrongly, reported that Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama by 10 points.¹ The actual margin of victory was more like 8.6 points with a handful of precincts still out. Click here to see for yourself. Apart from making the news reports 14 percent wrong, those 1.4 points deny Clinton the double-digit victory that would be most impressive to super-delegates. Remember that Clinton led Obama by a roughly 20-point margin when the eyes of the nation turned to PA. It’s hard to turn a victory like that into positive momentum, but the Clinton camp is working on it.

Perhaps the most interesting results were on the Republican side. GOP nominee John McCain, who locked up the nomination months ago, nevertheless saw 27.3 percent of Republicans vote for Ron Paul or Mike Huckabee. What does this mean? Will these voters stay home in the fall? Will the Paul supporters vote for the Democrat in November because both Obama and Clinton share Paul’s commitment to ending the Iraq War? Will the Huckabee voters stay home because McCain is too inconstant and not conservative enough in their eyes to be trusted? Were these voters asking McCain to consider Paul and Huckabee as vice presidential candidates? Or does it mean that a lot of mainstream Republicans just stayed home to avoid the hordes of Democrats at the polls?

PA Legislature
Going into Election Day, voters were sure to replace at least 25 incumbents who decided not to run again after replacing 56 incumbents in 2006. Coming out, there will be at least 28 new members of the legislature next January. This means that voters will replace at least one-third of the General Assembly in just two election cycles.

Two incumbents, Frank Andrews Shimkus * (D-Lackawanna) and Thomas Blackwell (D-Phila.) were thrown off the ballot because of defective nominating petitions. Neither was able to mount a successful write-in campaign.

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* Election Correction

Contrary to our earlier report, incumbent Rep. Frank Andrews Skimkus, D-Lackawanna, won his write-in campaign.He now will appear on the fall ballot as a Republican. Click here for the full story from the Scranton Times-Tribune.

Apologies to all, especially Rep. Shimkus, and thanks to DR Fan Tim Grier for setting us straight.

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Only one incumbent, 20-year veteran Harold James (D-Phila.) lost yesterday. Kenyatta Johnson, a former aide to Sen. Anthony Williams (D-Phila.), beat James 65.5 percent to34.5 percent. Apparently James never saw it coming. Another incumbent, Ron Buxton (D-Dauphin), escaped defeat by 127 votes over challenger Karl Singleton.

If, as expected, Attorney General Tom Corbett (who won an uncontested Republican primary for a second term) gets indictments of lawmakers in the “Bonusgate” scandal, there could be more incumbents falling in the fall. And if Sen. Bob Regola (R-Westmoreland) is convicted of perjury this summer, that could become another open seat. A conviction would require him to leave the Senate.

Half of the House incumbents and three-fourths of the Senate incumbents will have to work at losing, though. That’s how many legislative seats have no contests (102 out of 203 in the House and 19 out of 25 in the Senate) as of today.

Plurality Victors
There were several winners who didn’t get a majority of the vote yesterday. The highest-profile race was the Democratic primary for State Treasurer. Rob McCord, a finance professional from Montgomery County, placed first in a four-way race with 43.5 percent of the vote.

There were other contests, particularly among races for the House and Senate, where an open seat drew out multiple candidates. Cumberland County’s 88th House district, for example, saw seven Republicans on the ballot. The winner, Sheryl Delozier, received just 26.5 percent of the vote but is virtually guaranteed a victory in November in a very heavily Republican district.

Such results beg the question of whether to continue a system in which someone wins despite most voters choosing someone else. Instant Runoff Voting is one way to deal with this problem without making voters return to the polls for another election.

Not only does IRV ensure that the winner is the candidate most voters want, it prevents the divide-and-conquer strategy in which incumbents get straw candidates to take votes away from challengers. It may be that most voters don’t want the incumbent, but because their votes are divided between challengers, the incumbent wins anyway.

Look for a discussion of this at Pennsylvania’s Constitution Convention, whenever it happens.

¹The New Math
As the day goes on, you may want to continue checking with the Elections Bureau for the Clinton-Obama numbers. Click here . As of now with some precincts still not in, Clinton’s lead is 9.2 points.

Curiously, this turns into a double-digit lead because of rounding:

Clinton = 54.6, which rounds to 55
Obama = 45.4, which rounds to 45

So rounding turns 9.2 into 10. If you think rounding should turn 9.2 into 9, you obviously didn’t learn the new math.

Democracy Rising Pennsylvania P.O. Box 618, Carlisle, PA 17013

Kyoto – A Perspective (Part 15)

ELECTRICITY PRODUCED USING THE NUCLEAR PROCESS. (Part One)

I might guess some of you have been waiting to see how I might tiptoe around this subject, probably leaving it until the last and then only giving it a cursory mention.
Contrary to tiptoeing, I might just stomp around yelling about it, and there might even be the possibility that I might include two and maybe even three pieces on just this method.

See the long subtitle. I purposely did that rather than just say Nuclear Power, because electricity produced by this means suffers from that one word, NUCLEAR.
You say the word nuclear and the only thing people think of is a mushroom cloud. That may just have been the biggest mistake coming out of the Manhattan Project all those years ago.
It did however serve a purpose, and that was to stop a terrible war.
Incidentally, one small and possibly quirky thing about that and I won’t dwell upon it. Only one man in all of history has authorised the use of thermo nuclear weapons to be used against an opposing force, and for all you doves out there, it was a President from the Democratic Party, Harry S Truman. For all you keen history buffs out there, just what did the S stand for in Harry S Truman’s name?

Not long after the war, that nuclear reaction was developed for peaceful purposes, but because of what happened on that Monday August 6th 1945, nuclear power means only one thing.

So then, before we actually discuss electricity from Nuclear means, let’s look at the process and how it is being used.

It was feverishly being worked upon by people in three Countries after the war, the Russians, the English and the Americans.
It is used for US Naval vessels, the submarine fleet in particular and some of the larger surface vessels.
USS Nautilus was the first to use a nuclear reactor to generate steam to drive the turbine to drive the boats screw. This boat operated from 1955 for 25 years without a problem. The nuclear process was so safe that after she was decommissioned, she became the US Navy’s submarine museum. The reactor was removed and besides the huge numbers of people who crewed the boat over the years, 250,000 people visit the boat every year, so the nuclear process must be relatively harmless, even considering the reactor having been removed.
The Big E, USS Enterprise has eight second generation Westinghouse reactors that power the four steam turbines on board. Enterprise first sailed in 1962 and is not scheduled to be taken out of commission until 2014/15, after a trouble free history of more than fifty years. With a complement including the air wing at close to 4,800, it’s quite conceivable that around 100,000 and more will have served on her. Incidentally, there are more fighter aircraft on the Enterprise than in the Royal Australian Air Force.

Soon, the tenth ship in the Nimitz class of carriers will be launched. Each have two fourth generation reactors from Westinghouse with a 25 year lifespan, and as each comes in for major overhaul, they are upgraded, and the lifespan for the ships increased out to around 50 years.
There have been literally hundreds of years total service for Navy ships powered by nuclear reactors and hundreds of thousands of men and women who have served in them.
Tragically, two nuclear powered submarines, the Scorpion and the Thresher lay on the bottom of the Atlantic, neither accident caused by the reactor, but the reactors are benign and inoperative where those boats lie on the ocean floor.

The same safety record applies for using Nuclear reactors in a civilian capacity for the production of electricity, and I’ll go into that in the second piece.

However, there is a lot of misinformation out there regarding Nuclear power generation. There’s not enough space here for me to clear that up, but I will however mention something that has always been misunderstood regarding the use of nuclear energy for this purpose, and it relates directly back to that one word at the top of this piece, NUCLEAR.
People have always associated the two things, nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons. They are about as similar as a pushbike is to a Rolls Royce, and therein lies the rub.

Nuclear power generation for electricity requires nuclear material to be enriched to a level between 4 and 7 percent, and some may even be as high as 9 percent, but that might be the exception rather than the rule.
Weapons grade material however must be enriched beyond 95 percent and most is up around 97/98 percent.
Okay you say, I can see that now, but the process is immensely more difficult than that. It’s not like a steak being cooked rare, so it stands to reason that if you wanted that steak cooked well done, then you’d just leave it on the grill for a longer period of time. So then, why not just continue the enriching process until the level is reached.

There are a reasonable amount of countries which have the ability, and more importantly the equipment and the facility to enrich uranium to the minute level where it can be used for the generation of electricity, or for that matter how it is most commonly used even, in the form of nuclear medicine, that no one seems to mind all that much, and you’ll never see people out demonstrating against nuclear medicine, just proving that the word nuclear can be used in a good manner.

However, to enrich uranium to the level for use in nuclear weapons requires something else indeed.
I’ll again use the pushbike and Rolls Royce analogy. To make a pushbike you would need relatively rudimentary equipment and the end product could be rolled out in a short time. For the Rolls Royce however, specialised equipment is needed and it will take a thousand times longer. The cost of the equipment itself is also quite large, and that equipment is not readily available.
To enrich uranium to weapons grade level requires immensely expensive equipment that is only available from certain places, and that equipment can only be used for one purpose, that being to enrich uranium to that level. Hence any time that piece of equipment is detected then it is patently obvious what is happening, and it’s not like that equipment is small and easily moved around in an undetected manner, because it is quite easily able to be traced.

So when a rogue State places its hand on its heart and says in all innocence, ‘stop picking on us, we’re only enriching uranium for the production of electricity’, what they are relying on is the innocence of the public not knowing what is happening, because those who know are fully aware of exactly what IS happening.

A reverse situation applies also. Weapons grade uranium is absolutely useless for electrical power generation, and electricity reactor grade uranium is absolutely useless for weapons. Also just getting hold of reactor grade uranium and further enriching it is also useless as an option, as it is impossible, and the materials are totally different.

People have the impression that one equals the other, and the truth of the matter is at opposite ends of the spectrum.
So, what I needed to do before just blandly detailing how the Nuclear reaction is used in the production of electricity, was to explain the difference in uses of enriched Uranium, and really, just how safe it can be with all the regulations that are in place.

In that next piece I’ll detail how Nuclear power has been used for the production of electricity, and how the thought of using it as a viable alternative to coal fired power should not be just discarded out of hand, especially in a technologically advanced and wealthy nation as the US is.

Regarding the link I included to the USS Nautilus Submarine museum. If you take the link I urge you to look around by following the menu tabs at the left of the text, most especially the virtual tour of the boat.

Oh! By the way, the S in President Harry S Truman. It doesn’t stand for anything at all. His parents just gave him the initial S instead of a second name.