Hackers leak emails proving Global Warming is a Fraud

Source: Associated Press
November 21, 2009

WSA Note: Well Awesome, they have just admitted to committing scientific fraud! Their system of control is beginning to crumble.

LONDON — Computer hackers have broken into a server at a well-respected climate change research center in Britain and posted hundreds of private e-mails and documents online — stoking debate over whether some scientists have overstated the case for man-made climate change.

The University of East Anglia, in eastern England, said in a statement Saturday that the hackers had entered the server and stolen data at its Climatic Research Unit, a leading global research center on climate change. The university said police are investigating the theft of the information, but could not confirm if all the materials posted online are genuine.

More than a decade of correspondence between leading British and U.S. scientists is included in about 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents posted on Web sites following the security breach last week.

Some climate change skeptics and bloggers claim the information shows scientists have overstated the case for global warming, and allege the documents contain proof that some researchers have attempted to manipulate data.

The furor over the leaked data comes weeks before the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, when 192 nations will seek to reach a binding treaty to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases worldwide. Many officials — including U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon — regard the prospects of a pact being sealed at the meeting as bleak.

In one leaked e-mail, the research center’s director, Phil Jones, writes to colleagues about graphs showing climate statistics over the last millennium. He alludes to a technique used by a fellow scientist to “hide the decline” in recent global temperatures. Some evidence appears to show a halt in a rise of global temperatures from about 1960, but is contradicted by other evidence which appears to show a rise in temperatures is continuing.

Jones wrote that, in compiling new data, he had “just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline,” according to a leaked e-mail, which the author confirmed was genuine.

One of the colleague referred to by Jones — Michael Mann, a professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University — did not immediately respond to requests for comment via telephone and e-mail.

The use of the word “trick” by Jones has been seized on by skeptics — who say his e-mail offers proof of collusion between scientists to distort evidence to support their assertion that human activity is influencing climate change.

“Words fail me,” Stephen McIntyre — a blogger whose climateaudit.org Web site challenges popular thinking on climate change — wrote on the site following the leak of the messages.

However, Jones denied manipulating evidence and insisted his comment had been taken out of context. “The word ‘trick’ was used here colloquially, as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward,” he said in a statement Saturday.

Jones did not indicate who “Keith” was in his e-mail.

Two other American scientists named in leaked e-mails — Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and Kevin Trenberth, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Colorado — did not immediately return requests for comment.

The University of East Anglica said that information published on the Internet had been selected deliberately to undermine “the strong consensus that human activity is affecting the world’s climate in ways that are potentially dangerous.”

“The selective publication of some stolen e-mails and other papers taken out of context is mischievous and cannot be considered a genuine attempt to engage with this issue in a responsible way,” the university said in a statement.

Ron Paul’s Amendment To Audit The Federal Reserve Approved

Source: Street Insider
November 19, 2009

A key House panel approved the Paul-Grayson Amendment by an overwhelming 43-26 Thursday afternoon, which will give watchdogs new authority to audit the Federal Reserve.

Here is a summary of the Paul-Grayson Amendment:

Dear Financial Services Committee Colleague:

It is encouraging to see the issue of Federal Reserve transparency receiving so much attention during this current markup. Today we plan to offer an amendment to the Financial Stability Improvement Act that expands on the many extant proposals to enhance Federal Reserve transparency. Our amendment is based on HR 1207, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, which has broad bipartisan and grassroots support. The bill is cosponsored by 309 Members of Congress, including all Financial Services Committee Republicans and 13 Financial Services Committee Democrats.

The amendment removes restrictions on GAO audits of the Federal Reserve, as HR 1207 does, but makes a few changes to take into account some of the concerns that the Fed has made known in public testimony. Specifically, the Paul/Grayson amendment:

* Exempts unreleased transcripts and minutes from meetings of the Board and FOMC to address the Fed’s concerns that free and open debate in their meetings would be stifled.
* Sets a 180-day time lag for release of details of market actions the Fed has undertaken, to address the Fed’s concerns that Congress or GAO is second-guessing its actions.
* Removes boilerplate language that allowed GAO to make recommendations on monetary policy and adds a section stating that nothing in the amendment shall be construed as interference in or dictation of monetary policy to the Fed.

Unlike proposals that target the Fed’s 13(3) facilities, the Paul/Grayson amendment opens up the entire $2 trillion Federal Reserve balance sheet to a GAO audit. The Fed’s recent purchases of nearly $800 billion in mortgage-backed securities (MBS) have occurred under the MBS Purchase Program, authorized under section 14(b) of the Federal Reserve Act. This program, which is expected to reach a size of $1.25 trillion, would remain exempt from audit even if all the current 13(3) audit proposals were to go into effect. Targeting facilities that are in the process of being drawn down and that are authorized under a specific subsection of the Federal Reserve while allowing other facilities to spring up in their place is counterproductive to true transparency. All purchases and loans that appear on the balance sheet should be subject to audit, without loopholes for the Fed to evade scrutiny.

More importantly, the Paul/Grayson amendment does not create any additional burdens. Some competing proposals, while making a good effort at expanding the number of 13(3) facilities open to audit, take a step backwards by imposing new restrictions on GAO that are more burdensome than the restrictions currently written into law. We cannot accept these new restrictions. Unlike competing proposals, this amendment amends existing restrictions on GAO audit authority, a necessary precondition for a complete audit. Competing proposals leave these restrictions in place, and even add new ones.

We also reject the false dichotomy between transparency and independence. The Paul/Grayson amendment would achieve the necessary transparency of the trillions of dollars of Fed interventions while keeping Congress from directly intervening in the decision-making process. Independence should not be synonymous with secrecy. We urge our colleagues to support the Paul/Grayson amendment.

Sincerely,

Ron Paul, Member of Congress
Alan Grayson, Member of Congress

How the U.S. funds the Taliban

Source: The Nation
November 11, 2009

WSA Note: I remember hearing similar stories coming from Iraq

On October 29, 2001, while the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan was under assault, the regime’s ambassador in Islamabad gave a chaotic press conference in front of several dozen reporters sitting on the grass. On the Taliban diplomat’s right sat his interpreter, Ahmad Rateb Popal, a man with an imposing presence. Like the ambassador, Popal wore a black turban, and he had a huge bushy beard. He had a black patch over his right eye socket, a prosthetic left arm and a deformed right hand, the result of injuries from an explosives mishap during an old operation against the Soviets in Kabul.

Taliban fighters in an undisclosed location in Afghanistan.

But Popal was more than just a former mujahedeen. In 1988, a year before the Soviets fled Afghanistan, Popal had been charged in the United States with conspiring to import more than a kilo of heroin. Court records show he was released from prison in 1997.

Flash forward to 2009, and Afghanistan is ruled by Popal’s cousin President Hamid Karzai. Popal has cut his huge beard down to a neatly trimmed one and has become an immensely wealthy businessman, along with his brother Rashid Popal, who in a separate case pleaded guilty to a heroin charge in 1996 in Brooklyn. The Popal brothers control the huge Watan Group in Afghanistan, a consortium engaged in telecommunications, logistics and, most important, security. Watan Risk Management, the Popals’ private military arm, is one of the few dozen private security companies in Afghanistan. One of Watan’s enterprises, key to the war effort, is protecting convoys of Afghan trucks heading from Kabul to Kandahar, carrying American supplies.

Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort.

In this grotesque carnival, the US military’s contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban. “It’s a big part of their income,” one of the top Afghan government security officials told The Nation in an interview. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts–hundreds of millions of dollars–consists of payments to insurgents.

Understanding how this situation came to pass requires untangling two threads. The first is the insider dealing that determines who wins and who loses in Afghan business, and the second is the troubling mechanism by which “private security” ensures that the US supply convoys traveling these ancient trade routes aren’t ambushed by insurgents.

A good place to pick up the first thread is with a small firm awarded a US military logistics contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars: NCL Holdings. Like the Popals’ Watan Risk, NCL is a licensed security company in Afghanistan.

What NCL Holdings is most notorious for in Kabul contracting circles, though, is the identity of its chief principal, Hamed Wardak. He is the young American son of Afghanistan’s current defense minister, Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak, who was a leader of the mujahedeen against the Soviets. Hamed Wardak has plunged into business as well as policy. He was raised and schooled in the United States, graduating as valedictorian from Georgetown University in 1997. He earned a Rhodes scholarship and interned at the neoconservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. That internship was to play an important role in his life, for it was at AEI that he forged alliances with some of the premier figures in American conservative foreign policy circles, such as the late Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick.

Wardak incorporated NCL in the United States early in 2007, although the firm may have operated in Afghanistan before then. It made sense to set up shop in Washington, because of Wardak’s connections there. On NCL’s advisory board, for example, is Milton Bearden, a well-known former CIA officer. Bearden is an important voice on Afghanistan issues; in October he was a witness before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Senator John Kerry, the chair, introduced him as “a legendary former CIA case officer and a clearheaded thinker and writer.” It is not every defense contracting company that has such an influential adviser.

But the biggest deal that NCL got–the contract that brought it into Afghanistan’s major leagues–was Host Nation Trucking. Earlier this year the firm, with no apparent trucking experience, was named one of the six companies that would handle the bulk of US trucking in Afghanistan, bringing supplies to the web of bases and remote outposts scattered across the country.

At first the contract was large but not gargantuan. And then that suddenly changed, like an immense garden coming into bloom. Over the summer, citing the coming “surge” and a new doctrine, “Money as a Weapons System,” the US military expanded the contract 600 percent for NCL and the five other companies. The contract documentation warns of dire consequences if more is not spent: “service members will not get food, water, equipment, and ammunition they require.” Each of the military’s six trucking contracts was bumped up to $360 million, or a total of nearly $2.2 billion. Put it in this perspective: this single two-year effort to hire Afghan trucks and truckers was worth 10 percent of the annual Afghan gross domestic product. NCL, the firm run by the defense minister’s well-connected son, had struck pure contracting gold.

Full Story Here

Department Of Energy FOIA Records For Nano-Explosive Materials Development Circa 2001

Source: Aidan Monaghan / 911 Blogger
11/16/2009

The following are Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) records provided by the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) pertaining to nano-sized energetic materials research and development circa 2001. Along with various divisions of the U.S. Department of Defense, the DoE also developed nano-sized explosive materials circa 2001, similar to nano-sized explosive materials discovered in the dust created by the World Trade Center tower collapses on September 11, 2001 and reported by the 2009 study entitled Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe.

http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOCPJ.SGM

Federal Reserve Loses Court Case

Source: Bloomberg

November 17, 2009

The Federal Reserve must for the first time identify the companies in its emergency lending programs after losing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Manhattan Chief U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska ruled against the central bank yesterday, rejecting the argument that loan records aren’t covered by the law because their disclosure would harm borrowers’ competitive positions.

The Fed has refused to name the financial firms it lent to or disclose the amounts or the assets put up as collateral under 11 programs, most put in place during the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression, saying that doing so might set off a run by depositors and unsettle shareholders. Bloomberg LP, the New York-based company majority-owned by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, sued on Nov. 7 on behalf of its Bloomberg News unit.

“The Federal Reserve has to be accountable for the decisions that it makes,” said U.S. Representative Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, after Preska’s ruling. “It’s one thing to say that the Federal Reserve is an independent institution. It’s another thing to say that it can keep us all in the dark.”

‘Inadequate Search’

The judge said the central bank “improperly withheld agency records” by “conducting an inadequate search” after Bloomberg News reporters filed a request under the information act. She gave the Fed five days to turn over documents it told the reporters it located, including 231 pages of reports, and said it must look for more at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which runs most of the loan programs.

The central bank “essentially speculates on how a borrower might enter a downward spiral of financial instability if its participation in the Federal Reserve lending programs were to be disclosed,” Preska wrote. “Conjecture, without evidence of imminent harm, simply fails to meet the Board’s burden” of proof.

David Skidmore, a Fed spokesman who said the board’s staff was reviewing the 47-page ruling, declined to comment on whether the central bank would appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, who led the biggest expansion of the central bank’s power in its 95-year history, was nominated to a second term today by President Barack Obama.

Banks Worried

Obama promised a new era of government openness when he took office in January, issuing a statement telling agencies “to adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure” in responding to requests under FOIA.

Banks are worried that the disclosure of borrowers’ identities by the Fed, the lender of last resort, would cause customers to empty their bank accounts in a run on the bank, said Scott Talbott, vice president of governmental affairs at the Washington-based Financial Services Roundtable, a lobbying group.

“This issue is: ‘This bank borrowed X billion from the Fed, therefore they must be in trouble, therefore I’m going to pull my money out,” said Talbott. “That’s the type of danger that we’re worried about. That’s the risk.”

Bloomberg LP said in the suit that U.S. taxpayers need to know the terms of Fed lending because the public became an “involuntary investor” in the nation’s banks as the financial crisis deepened and the government began shoring up companies with capital injections and loans. Citigroup Inc. and American International Group Inc. are among those who have said they accepted Fed loans.

‘Unprecedented Ways’

“When an unprecedented amount of taxpayer dollars were lent to financial institutions in unprecedented ways and the Federal Reserve refused to make public any of the details of its extraordinary lending, Bloomberg News asked the court why U.S. citizens don’t have the right to know,” said Matthew Winkler, the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. “We’re gratified the court is defending the public’s right to know what is being done in the public interest.”

The Fed’s balance sheet about doubled after lending standards were relaxed in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. on Sept. 15, 2008. For the week ended Aug. 19, Fed assets rose 2.3 percent to $2.06 trillion as it continued to buy mortgage-backed securities under a program allowing the central bank to purchase non-government securities for the first time.

Fed Audits

The U.S. House may vote as soon as next month on a bill to require the Fed to submit to audits by the Government Accountability Office, said Representative Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican on the Financial Services Committee.

The judge’s ruling “is strikingly good news,” Garrett said. “This is what the American people have been asking for.”

The Freedom of Information Act obliges federal agencies to make government documents available to the press and public. The Bloomberg suit, filed in New York, didn’t seek money damages.

“The public deserves to know what’s being done with the money,” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Arlington, Virginia-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “This ought to be a wake-up call for the public that they need to be far more educated about this.”

The case is Bloomberg LP v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 08-CV-9595, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

To contact the reporter on this story: Mark Pittman in New York at mpittman@bloomberg.net

Bernanke Lobbying Hard for Status Quo Federal Reserve

Source: Campaign for Liberty
November 11, 2009

In today’s New York Times, reason enough for increased scrutiny of the Federal Reserve’s practices is illustrated.

In response to growing public and congressional support for H.R. 1207, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke did what the Fed seems to do so well– operate in secret to manipulate outcomes.

Fed officials say they were alarmed, but focused on making their case in private rather than in public. Mr. Bernanke met privately with dozens of House and Senate members, even taking calls at home on weekends, and won praise for his willingness to listen and answer their questions.

Bernanke comes off as an elitist who is simply apoplectic in reaction to the prospect of the Federal Reserve having to actualy answer to the people whose money it deals and degrades on a daily basis. So he smartly stopped defending the Fed in public, and began working the system as usual:

Last summer, the central bank hired an experienced Democratic hand and former lobbyist, Linda Robertson, to help deal with members of Congress. Mr. Bernanke alone has met privately with about 40 senators and many House members in the last few months, sometimes to dissect arcane policy issues and sometimes just to explain what he does in plain English.

To re-translate in plain-er English: Bernanke hired a former Enron lobbyist to grease the wheels in Congress so that Americans can continued to be screwed by an unbeholden, unaccountable,unelected central bank.

The problem is, Bernanke still has not made a plausible case against a Fed audit. He and the other Fed supporters go on about nightmare scenarios where an audit:

“…could lead to a Congressional “takeover” of monetary policy that would be “highly destructive to the stability of the financial system, the dollar and our national economic situation.”

Hold on, isn’t that what has already happened–with the Fed at the helm! I don’t believe you Mr. Bernanke, but maybe I am not as sophisticated as your little club that has secret meetings, maybe I am not privy to the same information that you are. Audit The Fed-now.

Fort Hood shooting: Texas army killer linked to September 11 terrorists

Source: Telegraph.co.uk
November 7, 2009

Hasan, the sole suspect in the massacre of 13 fellow US soldiers in Texas, attended the controversial Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Great Falls, Virginia, in 2001 at the same time as two of the September 11 terrorists, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt. His mother’s funeral was held there in May that year.

The preacher at the time was Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Yemeni scholar who was banned from addressing a meeting in London by video link in August because he is accused of supporting attacks on British troops and backing terrorist organisations.

Hasan’s eyes “lit up” when he mentioned his deep respect for al-Awlaki’s teachings, according to a fellow Muslim officer at the Fort Hood base in Texas, the scene of Thursday’s horrific shooting spree.

As investigators look at Hasan’s motives and mindset, his attendance at the mosque could be an important piece of the jigsaw. Al-Awlaki moved to Dar al-Hijrah as imam in January, 2001, from the west coast, and three months later the September 11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hamzi and Hani Hanjour began attending his services. A third hijacker attended his services in California.

Hasan was praying at Dar al-Hijrah at about the same time, and the FBI will now want to investigate whether he met the two terrorists.

Charles Allen, a former under-secretary for intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security, has described al-Awlaki, who now lives in Yemen, as an “al-Qaeda supporter, and former spiritual leader to three of the September 11 hijackers… who targets US Muslims with radical online lectures encouraging terrorist attacks from his new home in Yemen”.

Last night Hasan remained in a coma under guard at a military hospital in San Antonio, Texas, and was said to be in a “stable” condition. Born in America to a Palestinian family, Hasan, 39, was an army psychiatrist who had chosen to sign up for the US military against his parents’ wishes.

But he turned into an angry critic of the wars America was waging in Iraq and Afghanistan and had tried in vain to negotiate his discharge.

He counselled soldiers returning from the front line and told relatives that he was horrified at the prospect of a deployment to Afghanistan later this year – his first time in a combat zone.

Whether due to his personal convictions, his stress over his deployment or other reasons, Hasan is alleged to have snapped and gone on a murderous rampage with a powerful semi-automatic handgun after shouting “Allahu Akhbar” (“God is great”), according to survivors. He had earlier given away copies of the Koran to neighbours.

Investigators at this stage have no indication that he planned the attacks with anyone else. But they are trawling through his phone records, paperwork and computers he used before the attack during an apparently sleepless night.

Five of the 13 victims were fellow mental health professionals from three units of the army’s Combat Stress Control Detachment, it was disclosed yesterday.

It is understood that Hasan had been due to be deployed with members of those units in coming months. Whether he deliberately singled out other combat stress counsellors is another key question.

What does seem clear is that the army missed an increasing number of red flags that Hasan was a troubled and brooding individual within its ranks.

“I was shocked but not surprised by news of Thursday’s attack,” said Dr Val Finnell, a fellow student on a public health course in 2007-08 who heard Hasan equate the war on terrorism to a war on Islam. Another student had warned military officials that Hasan was a “ticking time bomb” after he reportedly gave a presentation defending suicide bombers.

Kamran Pasha, the author of Mother of the Believers, a new novel relating the story of Islam from the perspective of Aisha, Prophet Mohammed’s wife, was told of the al-Awlaki connection from a Muslim friend who is also an officer at Fort Hood. Using the name Richard, the recent convert to Islam described how he frequently prayed with Hasan at the town mosque after Hasan was deployed to Fort Hood in July. They last worshipped together at predawn prayers on the day of the massacre when Hasan “appeared relaxed and not in any way troubled or nervous”.

But Richard had previously argued with Hasan when he said that he felt the “war on terror” was really a war against Islam, expressed anti-Jewish sentiments and defended suicide bombings.

“I asked Richard whether he believed that Hasan was motivated by religious radicalism in his murderous actions,” Mr Pasha said.

“Richard, with great sadness, said that he believed this was true. He also believed that psychological factors from Hasan’s job as an army psychiatrist added to his pathos. The news that he would be deployed overseas, to a war that he rejected, may have pushed him over the edge.

“But Richard does not excuse Hasan. As a Muslim, he finds Hasan’s religious perspectives to be fundamentally misguided. And as a soldier, he finds Hasan’s actions cowardly and evil.”

Fellow Muslims in the US armed forces have also been quick to denounce Hasan’s actions and insist that they were the product of a lone individual rather than of Islamic teachings. Osman Danquah, the co-founder of the Islamic Community of Greater Killeen, said Hasan never expressed anger toward the army or indicated any plans for violence.

But he said that, at their second meeting, Hasan seemed almost incoherent.

“I told him, ‘There’s something wrong with you’. I didn’t get the feeling he was talking for himself, but something just didn’t seem right.”

He was sufficiently troubled that he recommended the centre reject Hasan’s request to become a lay Muslim leader at Fort Hood.

Hasan had, in fact, already come to the attention of the authorities before Thursday’s massacre. He was suspected of being the author of internet postings that compared suicide bombers with soldiers who throw themselves on grenades to save others and had also reportedly been warned about proselytising to patients.

At Fort Hood, he told a colleague, Col Terry Lee, that he believed Muslims should rise up against American “aggressors”. He made no attempt to hide his desire to end his military service early or his mortification at the prospect of deployment to Afghanistan. “He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over there,” said his cousin, Nader Hasan.

Yet away from his strident attacks on US foreign policy, he came across as subdued and reclusive – not hostile or threatening. Soldiers he counselled at the Walter Reed hospital in Washington praised him, while at Fort Hood, Kimberly Kesling, the deputy commander of clinical services, remarked: “Up to this point, I would consider him an asset.”

Relatives said that the death of Hasan’s parents, in 1998 and 2001, turned him more devout. “After he lost his parents he tried to replace their love by reading a lot of books, including the Koran,” his uncle Rafiq Hamad said.

“He didn’t have a girlfriend, he didn’t dance, he didn’t go to bars.”

His failed search for a wife seemed to haunt Hasan. At the Muslim Community Centre in the Washington suburb of Silver Spring, he signed up for an Islamic matchmaking service, specifying that he wanted a bride who wore the hijab and prayed five times a day.

Adnan Haider, a retired professor of statistics, recalled how at their first meeting last year, a casual introduction after Friday prayers, Hasan immediately asked the academic if he knew “a nice Muslim girl” he could marry.

“It was a strange thing to ask someone you have met two seconds before. It was clear to me he was under pressure, you could just see it in his face,” said Prof Haider, 74, who used to work at Georgetown University in Washington. “You could see he was lonely and didn’t have friends.

“He is working with psychiatric people and I ask why the people around him didn’t spot that something was wrong? When I heard what had happened I actually wasn’t that surprised.”

Indeed, many of the characteristics attributed to Hasan by acquaintances – withdrawn, unassuming, brooding, socially awkward and never known to have had a girlfriend – have also applied to other mass murderers.

Hasan was born and brought up in Virginia to parents who ran restaurants after emigrating to America from the West Bank. He graduated from Virginia Tech university – coincidentally, the scene of the worst mass shooting in US history in 2007 – with a degree in biochemistry and then joined the army, which trained him as a psychiatrist.

Relatives said that he was subjected to increasingly ugly taunts about his religion and ethnicity from other soldiers after the September 11 attacks. But his uncle insisted yesterday that Hasan would not have been driven to mass murder by revenge or religion.

Speaking in the West Bank town of al-Bireh, Mr Hamad said his nephew “loved America” and could only have been caused to snap by an as yet unexplained factor. “He always said there was no country in the world like America,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “Something big happened to him in Texas. If he did it – and until now I am in denial – it had to have been something huge because revenge was not in his nature.”

IEA warns carbon price must double

Source: Financial Times
November 11, 2009

WSA Note: This is nearly laughable. Of course guess who stands to make a ton of money off the price of Carbon Credits doubling? I wonder if he has any influence with the IEA?

The International Energy Agency has warned that the price of carbon credits will have to more than double from the levels they now trade at in Europe to make high-tech solutions to climate change economically attractive.

In its annual World Energy Outlook report released on Tuesday, the rich countries’ watchdog also warns that the world’s use of fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – will have to peak by the early 2020s.

Fatih Birol, the IEA’s chief economist, argues the world needs a “revolution” in the energy and vehicle industries.

“We need a deal in Copenhagen [at the climate talks]. We need a signal for the energy industry. Without that, nothing will move,” he says.

In industrialised countries the price of a permit to emit a tonne of carbon dioxide will need to reach $50 by 2020 and $110 by 2030. In developing countries the price would need to reach $30 a tonne by 2020 and $50 by 2030.

Carbon permits now trade at $21 a tonne in the European Union. In the US a carbon trading scheme is still being negotiated. The Senate, which is unlikely to pass any bill before next year, has set $48 as the maximum that carbon prices would be allowed to rise to by 2020. By 2030 that ceiling increases to about $90.

But the IEA argues that important technology, such as carbon capture and storage, and widespread use of electric and hybrid cars would be economic only if a high price for carbon penalised those extracting and using dirtier energy sources, such as coal and petrol.

Mr Birol says the IEA’s recommendation “is much higher than the current EU price and higher than the discussions taking place in the US and elsewhere. But to encourage the investment and make the substantial change that is necessary, we need this price”.

Better energy efficiency, especially in power use, rapid growth in renewable energy, and increased use of nuclear power will also be critical to move the world away from fossil fuels, the IEA believes. Second-generation biofuel, which uses plant waste rather than crops, will only make a small contribution, it says.

The greatest responsibility to reduce emissions and help others to do so lies with the US, the IEA says. But China has the largest potential to make an impact. If it meets its own targets, China will be responsible for more than a quarter of the emissions reductions the IEA says are needed to avoid the worst climate change risk.

The IEA warns that a quick rebound in global economic growth could again lead to an energy supply crunch similar to the one that helped tip the world into recession in July last year, as supply is constrained by political barriers and the recent drop in investment.

Mr Birol is optimistic that the world will pass energy legislation that will keep atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases at 450 parts per million – the level that scientists believe gives the world a 50 per cent chance of keeping the increase in global temperatures within limits thought to be safe.

Revolutionary rapper talks 9/11 conspiracy

Source: Russia Today
November 11, 2009

American rapper and political activist “Immortal Technique” doesn’t sign multi-million contracts with famous record-labels. Instead, he goes to North Africa, Columbia and Afghanistan trying to help people.

“I was born a revolutionary and will be that till the day that I die,” he says.

he rapper thinks 9/11 was “a crime with a motive” and that the government’s version about 9/11 is “definitely not true”, saying:

“They could not even tell the truth about the air to breathe after that occurred. They said that it was safe, but when the people developed those respiratory illnesses, and a lot of the first responders got very sick, some of them died, they went into full deniability mode. Somebody who cannot even tell me the truth about the air I breathe, it really makes me question what else they said. When I talk about it having a motive, I think that it was used as a catalyst to justify several other actions, or a countless number of actions actually.”

Read more
“We are not really speaking their language,” says Immortal Technique, regarding the government. “Their language is money. And what they do over and over is that they take action that occurs outside of this country. While the public is completely focused on that, [the government] begins to reorganize what’s happening here, in America, with the Patriot Act, what with going after people who have some sort of criticism, with discrediting individuals, who would even question the smallest concern, that they have in terms of what the government is doing behind closed doors.”

Video Here

Crystalline Fructose, the new High Fructose Corn Syrup

Source: The Golden Spiral
January 27, 2009

The body doesn’t handle large amounts of fructose well. You can maintain life with intravenous glucose, but not with intravenous fructose; severe derangement of liver function results. There’s also evidence that a high intake of fructose elevates levels of circulating fats (serum triglycerides), increasing the risk of heart disease. I never use fructose in my home. dr. andrew weil

So, there is a new criminal in town. Seems to be the next generation of high fructose corn syrup. But this guy is even more devious placing himself in “healthy” drinks.

I am referring to crystalline fructose. It is produced by allowing HFCS to crystallize. It is then dried and milled into the desired particle size for packaging. As a result, it is 100% fructose.

Fructose is not the best thing for your body. Fructose exists in foods as either a monosaccharide (free fructose) or as a disaccharide (sucrose). Free fructose does not undergo digestion; however when fructose is consumed in the form of sucrose, digestion occurs entirely in the upper small intestine. As sucrose comes into contact with the membrane of the small intestine, the enzyme sucrase catalyzes the cleavage of sucrose to yield one glucose and fructose unit. Fructose, passes through the small intestine, virtually unchanged, then enters the portal vein and is directed toward the liver.

I know that is a lot of information, so lets see if I can make it a bit more understandable. When fructose is in the presence of sucrose, your body has a better chance of understanding what to do with it in terms of breaking it down and processing it. When it stands alone, your body does not know how to metabolize the molecule, so it sends it right to your liver. This results in the fattening of the liver, or cirrhosis. So, why is this important. Well, HFCS is a blend of 45% sucrose and 55% fructose. Therefore, to an extent your body knows what to do in its presence. In contrast, crystalline fructose is 100% fructose. This means you have an even higher chance of developing fatty liver.

(edit. note.: I do not want this to be used as justification for allowing consumption of HFCS. HFCS has its own list of harmful reasons to stop ingesting it. In this example, I am just focusing on the metabolism of the fructose molecule.)

Here is another reason to avoid crystalline fructose…. arsenic. Yes. The processing of this molecule allows for acceptable levels of arsenic, heavy metals, lead and chloride. Again, these are toxic chemicals that your body is unable to process. The impact on your health is immeasurable. While, a simple serving of the drink might not be bad, over time the build up of any one of these components can lead to death.

The biggest reason this particular molecule is so bad is because of the products it is being placed in: health drinks. Vitamin Water seems to be the most popular of the beverages, but other examples are FUZE, Mistic, SoBe, Snapple and W20 for Women.

There is an entire category of beverage, marketed as healthful for you and your body, most commonly encouraged to drink after your work-out. In reality, you would be better off drinking a Coke after a hard exercise routine, as compared to Vitamin Water.

This is just another example of how the food industry and the corn industry have managed to get a toxic substance into the food you eat. As people get away from HFCS, there is something to easily replace it. And as people become more aware of CF, there will be another substitution. This is an ongoing process that is damaging the health of Americans.