This Blog is a Vampire

Sent to Draaaaaaain, Also, Avoid Mirrors

Saturn Watch
Yet more science from Saturn and its many moons. This time, it's Tethys, which may have had a liquid ocean once.

Tethys is a mid-sized satellite with a density close to that of pure ice.

But a large valley system visible today must have formed when the crust was being heated and under great strain.

The team thinks that tidal heating, followed by cooling which froze Tethys' ocean, could have formed the giant Ithaca Chasma rift.

Basically, I guess Tethys is a big snowball now, but once, it was a snowball with a yummy liquid center.

Source: The BBC

Our Own Giant Chasm
Also known as the Grand Canyon, is under threat from mining interests.

Flagstaff, Arizona - One of the great natural wonders of the world - the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River - is threatened by uranium exploration. Three conservation groups filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging the approval of up to 39 new uranium drilling sites within a few miles of Grand Canyon National Park.

In December, the Kaibab National Forest granted British firm Vane Minerals approval to conduct exploratory uranium drilling on national forest lands along the park's southern boundary with no public hearing and no environmental review. It is the first of five such projects slated for the area.

"Grand Canyon simply isn't the place for uranium development," said Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the plaintiff groups. "Our national treasures deserve better than the calamity of an adjacent industrial zone."

Filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club, and Grand Canyon Trust, the lawsuit claims that the U.S. Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act and two other laws when it approved the uranium exploration using a "categorical exclusion," the least rigorous analysis available to the agency.

The lawsuit claims that the Forest Service failed to consider the controversy surrounding uranium development, the significance of its proximity to the Grand Canyon, the overall cumulative impacts of four other future uranium exploration projects and the potential opening of Denison Corporation's Canyon Mine - all located in the same area.

Seriously folks. We only have one Grand Canyon. Can't you guys mine somewhere else?

Jerks.

Source: Truthout

Speaking of Nukes...
We seem to have a bit of a corporate betrayal of national security on our hands.

A US company and the Indian head of an international firm have admitted to violating laws on export of weapons technology and nuclear power testing equipment to India, the US Justice Department said Thursday.

Decade-long US sanctions over illegal Indian nuclear tests prohibit US-based companies from exporting certain goods and services to India.

Parthasarathy Sudarshan, the Indian CEO of Cirrus Electronics with offices in the United States, Singapore and India, pleaded guilty in Washington Thursday to a charge of shipping restricted weapons technology to the Indian government.

He admitted exporting controlled microprocessors and electronic components to Indian state entities involved in developing ballistic missiles, space launch vehicles and fighter jets.

...

In the second case, Minnesota company MTS Systems Corp. was fined 400,000 dollars after it pleaded guilty Wednesday in connection with submitting false US export license applications over proposed shipments to India, the Justice Department said.

The company admitted to two misdemeanor counts of "false certification or writing" by omitting critical information linked to test equipment for nuclear-power plants.

"In this case, the omission clearly was an attempt to disguise the end-use of testing structural components of nuclear-power plants," said Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Enforcement Darryl Jackson.

The CEO in the first case faces probation and a fine; the second company gets just a fine.

Amazing how seriously the Bush administration takes this issue, isn't it?

Source: Raw Story

Back to Space
ABC has some trivia about life in space and how, err, disgusting it really is.

Laundry: Astronauts never worry about doing laundry -- there is simply no way to wash clothes in space; water and resources are too scarce. So for 12 days, or however long the mission runs, they wear the same clothes over and over. Their T-shirts, socks and underwear have a special silver thread lining that absorbs odor and keeps items wearable longer. NASA recycles the astronauts' clothes for other missions, including the underwear.

There's other stuff too, seriously. Not just underwear triva.

Source: ABC News

Beery Science
So a Czech scientist crunched the numbers and it seems that the more beer you drink the less successful a scientist you are.

What is it that turns one scientist into more of a Darwin and another into more of a dud?

After years of argument over the roles of factors like genius, sex and dumb luck, a new study shows that something entirely unexpected and considerably sudsier may be at play in determining the success or failure of scientists — beer.

According to the study, published in February in Oikos, a highly respected scientific journal, the more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher, a measure of a paper’s quality and importance.

The results were not, however, a matter of a few scientists having had too many brews to be able to stumble back to the lab. Publication did not simply drop off among the heaviest drinkers. Instead, scientific performance steadily declined with increasing beer consumption across the board, from scientists who primly sip at two or three beers over a year to the sort who average knocking back more than two a day.

This is a tragic discovery indeed. Though there is an alternative explanation.

More important, as Dr. Grim pointed out, the study documents a correlation between beer drinking and scientific performance without explaining any correlation. That leaves open the possibility that it is not beer drinking that causes poor scientific performance, but just the opposite.

Or, as Dr. Mike Webster, an ornithologist and a beer enthusiast at Washington State University in Pullman, said, maybe “those with poor publication records are drowning their sorrows.”

Take that, lousy, depressed scientists.

Source: The New York Times

Virtual H2O
No, it's not in a videogame.

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A scientist who developed a way to calculate how much water is used in the production of anything from a cup of coffee to a hamburger was awarded the 2008 Stockholm Water Prize on Wednesday.


Professor John Anthony Allan of the University of London in Britain won the award for introducing the concept of "virtual water," a calculation method that has changed the nature of trade policy and research.

...

"Behind that morning cup of coffee, there are 140 liters of water that was consumed to grow, produce, package and ship the beans."

That is about as much water as a person in England uses on average for all daily drinking and household needs.

"For a single hamburger, an estimated 2,400 liters of water are needed. In the USA, the average person consumes nearly 7,000 liters of virtual water every day." It said that was more than three times the average consumption of a Chinese person.

It makes me thirsty just to read that.

Source: Raw Story

Plasma Cooling
You can cool stuff with superheated plasma. Huh.

Boffins in the US have developed a microchip fan with no moving parts that operates silently and generates enough wind to cool a laptop computer..

The solid-state fan, developed with support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), is touted as the most powerful and energy efficient fan of its size.

The device produces three times the flow rate of a typical small mechanical fan and is one-fourth the size.

RSD5 is the culmination of six years of research by Dan Schlitz and Vishal Singhal of Thorrn Micro Technologies when they were NSF-supported graduate students at Purdue University.

...

He explained that RSD5 incorporates a series of live wires that generate a micro-scale plasma (an ion-rich gas that has free electrons that conduct electricity).

The wires lie within uncharged conducting plates that are contoured into half-cylindrical shapes to partially envelop the wires.

Within the intense electric field that results, ions push neutral air molecules from the wire to the plate, generating a wind. The phenomenon is called corona wind.

Even more surprising, something useful came out of Purdue.

Hehe.

Source: iTnews Australia

Project West Ford
From Tom Morris, mad scientist, came a link or two about a mad science project from the early space age.

Project West Ford (also known as Westford Needles and Project Needles) was a test carried out by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory on behalf of the United States military in 1961 and 1963 to create a ring of copper dipole antennas (2cm long needles) in orbit which would allow global radio communication. After a failed first attempt in 1961 (the needles failed to disperse), the project was eventually successful with the 1963 launch, with radio transmissions carried by the man-made ring. However, the technology was ultimately shelved, partially due to the development of the modern communications satellite and partially due to protests from other scientists.[1] The needles were placed in orbits between 3500 and 3800 km high at 96 and 87 degree inclinations and contributed to Earth's orbital debris.[2] British radio astronomers, together with optical astronomers and the Royal Astronomical Society, protested this action.[3][4] The international protest resulted in a consultation provision included in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.[3] As of 2006 several clumps of the needles are still in orbit,[5][6] and occasionally re-entering.[7]

Yeah, throw a huge number of needles into orbit. That couldn't possibly cause a problem.

The project itself was a virtually unqualified success. Though the first launch ended in failure, the second launch went without a hitch on May 10th, 1963. Inside the West Ford spacecraft, the needles were packed densely together in blocks made of a napthalene gel that would rapidly evaporate in space. This entire package of needles weighed only 20 kg. After being released, the hundreds of millions of copper needles gradually spread throughout their entire orbit over a period of two months. The final donut-shaped cloud was 15 km wide and 30 km thick and encircled the globe at an altitude of 3700 km.

...

Because of the great distance between the tiny needles, the West Ford belt was visible only in the first few days after launch when the spacing was much smaller. A denser belt intended for permanent communications would probably not have been visible except by very powerful optical telescopes. But, at radio and microwave frequencies, the final dipole clouds may have become scars on the night sky, forever obscuring the universe beyond.


...

Most of the West Ford dipoles re-entered Earth's atmosphere sometime around 1970, according to theoretical and observational evidence. The needles slowly drifted down to the Earth's surface, unscathed by re-entry because of their size. Some consideration was given to recovering one or more of the dipoles in order to learn more about the space environment. Calculations showed that as many as five dipoles would have landed per square kilometer in the high Arctic. But the exceptional cost of recovering these tiny needles from the haystack of billions of tons of Arctic snow killed off any practical attempts at recovery. Back in space, the failed 1971 1961 spacecraft and some larger clumps of the 1973 1963 dipoles remain in orbit like so many other pieces of space junk, silently carrying the long-dead hopes of this nearly forgotten experiment.

It's truly amazing the stupid things people can come up with. A ring of trash around the earth? Yeah, let's do that!

Source: Wikipedia
Damn Interesting

Evil of the Morning
Some truly evil people are working on a way to use blue LEDs to generate a color of light that resets your biological clock to think it's morning, and then put them inside cars.

The idea is to make people less sleepy while driving.

Those of us who are naturally sleepy in the morning, or who just don't want bright blue light in their eyes, are boned, I guess.

Source: Slashdot

More Water News
Good thing that guy came up with virtual water, so we can find out just how doomed we are.

By 2025, fully a third of the planet's growing population could find itself scavenging for safe drinking water, the United Nations has warned ahead of World Water Day on Saturday.

More than two million people in developing countries -- the vast majority children -- die every year from diseases associated with unsanitary water.

There are a number of interlocking causes for this scourge.

Global economic growth, population pressures and the rise of mega-cities have all driven water use to record levels.

Mexico City, Jakarta and Bangkok, to name a few, have underground water sources -- some of them nonrenewable -- depleting at alarming rates.

...

"In the coming decades, water scarcity may be a watchword that prompts action ranging from wholesale population migration to war, unless new ways to supply clean water are found," comment a team of researchers in a review of water purification technology published Thursday in the British journal Nature.

But even as scientists and governments look for ways to satisfy a thirsty world, another threat looms on the horizon: global warming.

Rising sea levels are already forcing salt water into aquifers beneath megadeltas that are home to tens of millions, and changing weather patterns are set to intensify droughts in large swathes of Africa, southern Europe and Asia, according to UN's Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC).

...

Experts and policy makers point to three broad categories of initiatives to ease the shortage of clean, drinkable water, especially in the world's poorest regions: sanitation, purification, and water management.

"Poor sanitation combines with a lack of safe drinking water and inadequate hygiene to contribute to the terrible global death toll," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said earlier this month.

"Every 20 seconds, a child dies as a result of the abysmal sanitation conditions endured by some 2.6 billion people globally," he said in launching the International Year of Sanitation.

Less than half the households in major Asian cities are connected to sewers, which means that tonnes of raw sewage runs into rivers and oceans, according to the UN.

In Latin America and Africa that figure drops to 40 and 20 percent, respectively.

While governments attempt to improve sanitation infrastructure, scientists are developing new technology to purify the water available, said Mark Shannon, a professor at the University of Illinois and Director of the US government funded Center of Advanced Materials for the Purification of Water with Systems.

"Desalination with reverse osmosis is already the largest single growth area in terms of new water supplies," he told AFP in an interview.

New techniques of reverse osmosis use membranes with nanometer-size pores to filter out salt and other contaminants from water, and could for the first time pave the way for industrial-scale use.

Micro-filters are also used to decontaminate bodies of water increasingly laced with pesticides, arsenic, heavy metals, nitrates and pharmaceutical derivatives.

...

With worldwide food production set to expand 50 percent by 2030, scientists are also developing genetically modified grain plants that consume less water and can withstand harsh conditions.

Researchers in the US, for example, have developed genetically engineered rice with a higher tolerance for drought, salt and low temperatures, the three main causes of crop failure.

Expect a lot of resistance to the GM crop ideas from whackos, naturally. Though drought resistance is one of the things you have to be careful of in GM plants, to be fair. It provides a serious evolutionary advantage over plants that don't have it, so if you have a GM crop that can interbreed with a wild relative, you might end up with drought resistant superweeds via transgene escape.

The most obvious solution to that is to avoid planting GM crops near their wild relatives, of course.

Most food plants are not that great as evolutionary products, spending so much energy producing huge, and often sterile or semi-sterile fruits, so there's less risk of wild GM foods themselves running amok by far.

Source: Raw Story

Methane AND Water News
This time from far away.

An organic chemical that could be an indicator of extraterrestrial life has been identified on a distant planet.

Observations from the Hubble Space Telescope have shown that the atmosphere of a planet called HD 189733b contains methane, which can be a precursor of life or generated by living organisms.

HD 189733b is too hot to be anything but barren, and its methane must therefore come from a nonliving source, but the successful identification of the “marker” chemical gives scientists confidence that they may make similar discoveries on planets that are capable of supporting life.

...

The Hubble observations of HD 189733b have also confirmed that the planet, which lies 63 light years from Earth in the constellation Vulpecula (“the little fox”), has water vapour in its atmosphere.

The chemical signature of water was first picked up last year by the same team, using the Spitzer Space Telescope, which observes in the infra-red spectrum. “With this latest observation there is no question whether there is water or not,” Dr Swain said. “Water is present.”

Ahh, science. Lovely.

Source: The Times Online

Environmental News

Err, I need filler here.

UC Berkeley Estimates Cost of Ecocide
A study at UC Berkeley attempts to document the extent of yet another way that rich countries bone poorer ones.

UC Berkeley researchers report that environmental damage caused by rich nations affects poor nations so much, it costs them more than their combined foreign debt.

The study examined the impacts of the expansion of agriculture, deforestation, overfishing, loss of swamps and ozone completion from 1961 to 2000.

When all these impacts are added up, the portion of the footprint of high-income nations falling on low-income countries is greater than their entire financial debt, or about $1.8 trillion, according to lead researcher Thara Srinivasan.

Well, this is no big surprise. We raise the seas, they drown in them.

Source: NBC 11

Alaskans and Energy
Well, despite having enormous energy reserves and giving the Big Oil lobby everything they've ever asked for, Alaska is running out of natural gas.

Well, not actually. They still have tons. They just planned so poorly that they can't access it... and have no other way to heat their homes.

Kenai, Alaska - On the shore of Cook Inlet, site of Alaska's oldest oil- and gas-producing basin, the Agrium Inc. fertilizer plant for four decades produced a steady supply of urea and ammonia for international agricultural and industrial clients. Agrium's exports supported a prosperous petrochemical business, employing hundreds and bolstering local tax rolls.

But operations ceased in December. The reason? Lack of natural gas, the feedstock for Agrium's products. Despite its perch atop a petroleum basin, Agrium couldn't secure enough natural gas to stay in business.

Agrium's woes symbolize a larger energy dilemma: Raw resources are in the ground, but lack of infrastructure and poor economies of scale hinder access to them, putting Alaska in an energy crunch.

Of course, this lack of planning is being used as an excuse to give even more land to Big Oil... so they can misuse even MORE resources.

Natural gas at the North Slope – America's largest known but untapped conventional natural-gas supply – is 700 miles away and unavailable. There's no pipeline to convey North Slope natural gas to consumers, in or out of Alaska.

Boy, I'm glad the good citizens of Alaska have been so responsible with all that oil revenue their state has gotten over the years, building up a robust energy infrastructure and diversified economy for when the fossil fuels run out... oh wait.

Not so much.

Source: Christian Science Monitor

Nuclear Water Woes
Speaking of poor planning, remember how Republicans like to talk about nuclear power being green and eco-friendly, renewable power? A long-term solution?

Not so much. At least not the way America runs the show.

Nuclear reactors across the Southeast could be forced to throttle back or temporarily shut down later this year because drought is drying up the rivers and lakes that supply power plants with the awesome amounts of cooling water they need to operate.

...

An Associated Press analysis of the nation's 104 nuclear reactors found that 24 are in areas experiencing the most severe levels of drought. All but two are built on the shores of lakes and rivers and rely on submerged intake pipes to draw billions of gallons of water for use in cooling and condensing steam after it has turned the plants' turbines.

Because of the yearlong dry spell gripping the region, the water levels on those lakes and rivers are getting close to the minimums set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Over the next several months, the water could drop below the intake pipes altogether. Or the shallow water could become too hot under the sun to use as coolant.

Oops. Naturally many of these are in the South, of course.

An estimated 3 million customers of the four commercial utilities with reactors in the drought zone get their power from nuclear energy. Also, the quasi-governmental Tennessee Valley Authority, which sells electricity to 8.7 million people in seven states through a network of distributors, generates 30 percent of its power at nuclear plants.

While rain and some snow fell recently, water levels across the region are still well below normal. Most of the severely affected area would need more than a foot of rain in the next three months — an unusually large amount — to ease the drought and relieve pressure on the nuclear plants. And the long-term forecast calls for more dry weather.

Once again... oops.

Source: Raw Story

Gharials, or Indian Crocodiles
So it seems like the one clean river in India is still wiping out the local wildlife... as it's too close to one of the many, err, less clean ones.

LUCKNOW, India (AP) -- Conservationists and scientists scrambled Tuesday to determine what has killed at least 50 critically endangered crocodile-like reptiles in recent weeks in a river sanctuary in central India.

Conservationists believe there are only about 1,500 gharials left in the wild.

Everything from parasites to pollution has been blamed for the deaths of the gharials -- massive reptiles that look like their crocodile relatives, but with long slender snouts.

...

Others believe the gharials may have died after eating contaminated fish from the polluted Yamuna river, which joins the Chambal in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Pathological tests confirmed lead and cadmium in the bodies of the dead gharials, said Suman, the wildlife official.

So much for the theory that you can save one tiny piece of the environment, I suppose.

Source: CNN.com

Biofuels Toast the Environment
Already raising the cost of silly things like, you know, food, in the United States, biofuels are beginning to have a devastating toll on the developing world as well.

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) -- The world's rush to embrace biofuels is causing a spike in the price of corn and other crops and could worsen water shortages and force poor communities off their land, a U.N. official said Wednesday.

..

Foremost among the concerns is increased competition for agricultural land, which Suzuki warned has already caused a rise in corn prices in the United States and Mexico and could lead to food shortages in developing countries.

She also said China and India could face worsening water shortages because biofuels require large amounts of water, while forests in Indonesia and Malaysia could face threats from the expansion of palm oil plantations.

"Particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, land availability is a critical issue," Suzuki said. "There are clear comparative advantages for tropical and subtropical countries in growing biofuel feed stocks but it is often these same countries in which resource and land rights of vulnerable groups and protected forests are weakest."

Initially, biofuels were held up as a panacea for countries struggling to cope with the rising cost of oil or those looking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The European Union, for example, plans to replace 10 percent of transport fuel with biofuels made from energy crops such as sugar cane and rapeseed oil by 2020.

But in recent months, scientists, private agencies and even the British government have said biofuels could do more harm than good. Rather than protecting the environment, they say energy crops destroy natural forests that actually store carbon and thus are a key tool in the fight to reduce global warming.

Well, there you go. Water depletion, deforestation, pricier food.

This is of course due to the poro management as much as anything else. There are promising biofuel technologies, like cellulose-ethanol, but for the most part they're still some time off.

Source: CNN.com

Ecology and Trade
The United States is running into a bit of hassle advancing its agribusiness agenda in the EU, where they have their own ideas about things like GM food and climate-change.

US Trade Representative Susan Schwab warned Europe on Monday against using environmental issues as an excuse for protectionism amid disputes ranging from biotechnology to greenhouse gas emissions.

...

Washington and Brussels have frequently clashed over environmentally related issues ranging from hormones in US beef to proposed EU quotas on air transport emissions.

Adding fuel to the fire, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called in October for a European levy on imports from countries outside the Kyoto Protocol, which include the United States.

...

Among the recent environmental thorns in their trade relations, the EU and the United states are struggling to overcome differences over genetically modified organisms.

While the United States has suspended its World Trade Organisation right to retaliate in a WTO case against the EU over GMOs, Schwab attacked European resistance to such products as being scientifically unfounded.

Because god knows the Bush administration always uses sound science.

Source: Raw Story http://rawstory.com/news/afp/US_warns_EU_against_using_environme_01212008.html

Pot Calling Kettle

The Scottish Government is considering asking the United States to rethink its ban on haggis imports.

Imports of Scotland's iconic dish were banned by the US in 1989 in the wake of the BSE scare because it contains offal ingredients such as sheep lungs.

...

A spokesman for the US Department of Agriculture said: "We do not allow importation because of the UK's BSE status."

Nevermind that the US has its own serious mad-cow problem.

Source: BBC News

Miami Ecosystem
So Miami seems to be having a bit of an issue with a literal mountain of trash.

COCONUT CREEK - City leaders are protesting Waste Management's request to make an unsavory tower of refuse even higher.

The company wants to extend the landfill commonly dubbed Mount Trashmore from 225 feet to 280 feet. Its application is pending before Broward County officials, but if politicians in nearby cities have their way, Waste Management's plan will go nowhere.

Complaining about bad smells and eyesores in MIAMI?

Man, you'd think they'd be used to it by now.

Source: Sun Sentinel

Legal News Edition

If I never see the good old days shining in the sun...

I'll be doin' fine, and then some.

American Libel
So a group of DEA agents are suing American Gangster, the Russel Crowe/Denzel Washington buddy pic/crime drama for defamation.

ABC News has learned that a group of former federal drug enforcement agents has filed a class-action lawsuit against NBC Universal today, asserting they were defamed by the blockbuster flick "American Gangster."

Well, ok. Surely the movie wouldn't have been so stupid as to libel a bunch of federal cops, though--

As the final credits roll on the flick starring Denzel Washington as Harlem drug thug Frank Lucas, a screen appears that states three-quarters of the drug enforcement agents assigned to New York were convicted as a result of Lucas' cooperation with "outcast cop" Richie Roberts, portrayed by Russell Crowe in the movie.

There were no such convictions, Drug Enforcement Administration officials told ABC News

Oops. Oh well. At least this one should be over pretty fast.

Source: ABC News/The Blotter

Nuisance Suits from One Big Nuisance
Speaking of lawsuits, the 'Church' of Scientology is threatening a big one against the author of a new unauthorized bio of Tom Cruise, and threatening websites that have clips promoting the book and making Tom look silly.

Man I hate those crazy idiots.

Source: Gawker

Lawsuit Waiting to Happen
Here's a doozy. The FBI, it seems, may have been employing an infamous Neo-Nazi hatemonger and radio demagogue, even as he incited violence against other Feds:

New Jersey radio host Hal Turner is well known as one of the most vicious neo-Nazis in America, a man who routinely suggests killing his enemies.

Railing against President Bush, he told his audience last June that “a well-placed bullet can solve a lot of problems.” He has written that “we need to start SHOOTING AND KILLING Mexicans as they cross the border” and argued that killing certain federal judges “may be illegal, but it wouldn’t be wrong.” In 2006, after he published an attack on New Jersey Supreme Court justices that also included several of their home addresses, state police massively beefed up security for the members of the court, checking on one justice’s house more than 200 times.

Hal Turner is one serious extremist. He may also be on the FBI payroll.

What follows is so far-fetched that if it were a movie I'd probably be laughing, but it seems to be the real deal:

On Jan. 1, unidentified hackers electronically confronted Turner in the forum of his website for “The Hal Turner Show.” After a heated exchange, they told Turner that they had successfully hacked into his server and found correspondence with an FBI agent who is apparently Turner’s handler. Then they posted an alleged July 7 E-mail to the agent in which Turner hands over a message from someone who sent in a death threat against Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.). “Once again,” Turner writes to his handler, “my fierce rhetoric has served to flush out a possible crazy.” In what is allegedly a portion of another E-mail, Turner discusses the money he is paid.

On Thursday, as the E-mail exchange was heatedly discussed on a major neo-Nazi website, Turner suddenly announced he was quitting political work. “I hereby separate from the ‘pro-White’ movement,” he said, adding that he was ending his radio show immediately. “I will no longer involve myself in any aspect of it.”

The FBI declined comment. “Longstanding FBI policy prohibits disclosing who may or may not provide information,” Agent Richard Kolko of the agency’s press unit said. Reached in New Jersey, Turner also declined all comment.

Wowser. But of course, it gets worse... this guy is all tied up in the murder of a Federal Judge's family.

A self-described "white racialist" Internet author is soliciting the addresses of three judges who ruled against white supremacist Matthew Hale, one week after the family of a federal judge was murdered.

One week ago, federal judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow's husband and mother were found murdered in her home. Lefkow is now under federal protection. There have been more than 600 tips to a special police hot line on the Lefkow case, while there have been more than 30 calls to "America's Most Wanted" television show, which featured the case this weekend.

On his Web site, Hal Turner makes references to all three 7th Circuit judges who ruled against Hale in a trademark solicitation case, NBC5's Phil Rogers reported. He then asks readers to provide their home addresses. Turner said he wanted the judges' addresses to apply pressure to them through protests, mail or other external means for their rulings.

"I can understand why people might think that's something to be concerned about," Turner said. "But certainly, I have no malicious intent -- I do not intend to hurt the judges or incite any harm to the judges, but have you to have faith in the American people."

The FBI is investigating Turner, Rogers reported, and paid a visit to him last week.

Turner's Web site is loaded with references to other judges who have been the subject of violence. Turner's Web site has posted a photo of Lefkow with the caption "Gotcha." Turner said he has the judges' addresses, but doesn't know if he will post him on the Web site.

Looks like that investigation led to a JOB INTERVIEW instead.

They really know how to pick our allies lately, don't they? As I said in the title, this is one big, fat class action suit waiting to happen. Employing NEO-NAZIS? You've got to be kidding me, FBI.

Sources: Southern Poverty Law Center
Pam's House Blend

Sue Over Tasty Brains
So I wrote before about a mysterious disease outbreak in Minnesota among slaughterhouse workers who used air hoses to blast out the brains of pig skulls, right?

Well, either it's spreading, or this was a bad idea to start with:

Ill workers at an Indiana slaughterhouse where compressed air was used to remove pig brains have symptoms similar to those involved in an earlier outbreak in Minnesota, federal health officials said Wednesday.

The employees who became ill worked on the killing floors' "head tables," where the animals' heads are processed, Centers for Disease Control spokeswoman Lola Russell said. Both plants shoot compressed air into the skulls until the pigs' brains come spilling out.

"It may be associated with this particular technique of using high-pressure air to remove the pig's brain," Russell said.

Once again, who could ever have guessed that INHALING NEUROLOGICAL TISSUE FROM RANDOM ANIMALS would be a health risk.

Geebus.

Source: Raw Story

More Contempt of Congress
So the Bush administration is blocking California and 15 other states from implementing meaningful emission controls because Big Auto doesn't like the idea of actually competing with Toyota and Honda on cleaner cars; they'd rather continue the Ethanol/Hydrogen/Fuel Cell fantasies.

Sen. Boxer, of California, is demanding to know why the Environmental Protection Agency is opposed to Environmental Protection.. but she's not getting any answers:

Invoking executive privilege, the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday refused to provide lawmakers with a full explanation of why it rejected California's greenhouse gas regulations.

The EPA informed Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., that many of the documents she had requested contained internal deliberations or attorney-client communications that would not be shared now with Congress.

You can't see our super-secret plans! That's why we label them 'super-secret'! Also, we're rubber, you're glue!

In denying California's waiver last month, EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson told Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that the federal government is implementing its own national fuel efficiency standard.

Johnson's decision spurred several congressional investigations and a legal appeal earlier this month by California and 15 other states.

Boxer and Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., for weeks have asked the agency for more information about why it denied California's plan.

She called the agency's failure to comply with a legitimate congressional request "an insult to the American people and a dereliction of duty."

Scandal Number 51 for Olbermann to track, I suppose. At least he keeps busy.

Source: Raw Story

Pretty Women News

Blowing out the candles.....


I Should Really Work On This Myself
So China is working on their geometrically increasing use of plastic bags, and are considering regulating or banning the ultra thin ones that get used in copious amounts in their (and our) grocery stores, in order to reduce the waste that piles up, unburied, around Chinese cities.

Probably a good idea, though honestly they might want to worry about their industrial sources first. I mean, the air in Beijing is almost completely unbreathable, and that's with the draconian crackdown on cars; I can't imagine how the Olympics are going to go anything but poorly there.

*shrug*

Still, maybe after they deal with the bags, they can deal with the people putting lead on childrens' toys and hormones in fish and such.

Also, the idea of creating massive trash burning power plants is hilarious.

Many of China's cities are in the middle of building huge "waste-to-energy" plants that will convert the vast bulk of their rubbish into electricity, but plans to build such a plant in Beijing last year led to protests amid fears it could fire lethal dioxins into the atmosphere as a consequence of burning plastics.

Who'd have guessed giant TRASH FIRES would pose an air quality problem, lolz.

Plus, imagine the perverse incentive; if your power is generated by trash burning, then you can't very well work too hard to cut back on trash, or you'll just run out of juice. It's setting you up on a course to environmental suicide; either you run out of trash, breathable air, or both.

Source: Guardian Unlimited

Boy Scouts Actually Do Things In Other Countries?
Here they just kick out gay kids and atheists, but in the Maldives a Boy Scout stopped an assassination attempt.

Before you get too worked up with enthusiasm, it should be noted the attempt was against an unelected dictator who has ruled the country for thirty years. So not as black and white as the Press might indicate.

Source: AZcentral.com

Super Soaker Science
Did you know the creator of the Super Soaker was a nuclear engineer who used to work for NASA (including on the Galileo mission, of which I am a huge fan)? How about that he's taken the millions he earned from the water gun industry and rolled it into research into battery technology? No?

Well, now, already holding 100 patents to his name, he's come up with a novel heat engine that can, theoretically, harvest heat into electricity with 60% efficiency; his idea is to use it in combination with solar plants that concentrate light to boil water to increase their electricity generation (they are currently about 30% efficient, so that'd double their capacity).

This is all apparently for real and above the board stuff, so it's quite exciting; plus the technology isn't limited to solar energy, so it might one day be used to make electricity from all sorts of waste heat, including cars, and even people.

Oh no... THE MATRIX! THIS IS HOW IT STARTS!

Source: Popular Mechanics

Ok, I Have to Ask
How do you 'gleam' a cube? What does that even mean?

Source: Wikipedia

Free to Eat Ramen
So there's a new anime miniseries out that is apparently very interesting. Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira fame does the character and mechanical designs, so you know it has a pedigree; apparently the animation is top notch, the show is film quality, and the story is novel and interesting.

It's getting a somewhat sporadic DVD release in the US on some very pricey HD-hybrid discs, and so far there's no word on whether the last episodes will come out. That's too bad.

Here's the weird part though: this big budget, arty, cerebral space-drama... is actually an ad campaign. For instant noodles.

And for those wondering about the prominent “Cup Noodles” product placements throughout the series? The series is actually a promotion project for Nissin Cup Noodles' 35th anniversary, so expect to see more of them in the future.

I've been going over this in my head, and I can't decide whether this is a horrible abomination, or an interesting way to harnass the foul wickedness of advertising for a positive purpose.

Source: Anime News Network

Huge Sundry News Post

I'm going to get around to a big post about the Bhutto assassination, but the story over there seems to be changing by the hour, so there's not a lot of point. I had just finished my post on Afghanistan when she was killed and I saw the rumors floating down the newsie sites to that effect, but the same rumors came out a month ago at the last attempt on her life, so I just sort of shrugged and went ahead.

Oops. At any rate, have some regular news in the meantime.

Those Scientists are Real Good at Fightin', Tuggah!
So a couple of researchers at one of our Antarctic bases got drunk and into a brawl. One of them was hurt badly enough that he had to be flown to New Zealand for treatment with badly busted jaw.

Fellows, honestly, it might be a good idea to keep your tempers in check if the nearest hospital is on another continent. Just a hint.

Source: The Guardian

Uruguay Is Ahead of Us in Civil Rights
It's nice when South America joins the civilized world in making us look bad on gay rights. In this case, Uruguay has passed a national civil union law, which is a good first step.

Personally I think the government should be out of the idiot marriage business entirely, but if you're going to give tax breaks to one set of couples it's not fair to deny them to others.

Source: Page One Q

Huckabee Makes Some Hay
Bhutto's dead, so he thinks we have to clamp down the border against all those 'unusual' Pakistanis that must be headed here to assassinate OUR Pakistani politicians.

Which we have an abundance of.

This thinly veiled call for pointless racist profiling comes along with a statement about how much he respected the late politician for, well, being a woman and not a religious crazy.

Huckabee called Bhutto's death is a tragedy, but he suggested she had been a threat to Islamic fundamentalists. "An educated, sophisticated, strong, capable woman leader -- that does pose a threat to those who don't believe that women should be given that platform and that level of equality," Huckabee said.

Hmm, people who don't believe women should be given an equal platform in life... I wonder...

In August of 1998, Huckabee was one of 131 signatories to a full page USA Today Ad which declared: "I affirm the statement on the family issued by the 1998 Southern Baptist Convention." What was in the family statement from the SBC? "A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ

Wow. Pot, meet Kettle.

Sources: Radio Iowa (for the Huckabee haymaking)
The Daily Kos (for the woman-hating)

Cost of War in Iraq
This Firedoglake entry is a handy rundown of how your money is being spent, and how the death is being distributed. Short answer: 15 billion a month, and there's a handy geographical breakdown of the Lancet study showing the way we've killed 650k Iraqis in this war.

Fifteen billion per month. More dead in Iraq than died from our Civil War.

Great job, El Presidente!

Source: Firedoglake

Kucinich Mad Over Pizza Ad
His supporters are tired of him being made fun of for believing in UFOs, or refusing to say he doesn't.

Guys, seriously. I know he's got solid positions on most of the issues, but the man is a flake. Nobody's going to stop making fun of his flakiness.

Source: Plain Dealer Blog

Bush Cronies Everywhere
So there's a big kerfluffle at the Fish and Wildlife service because their top political appointee for a while was, err, sabotaging her agency's work in favor of big business. Since she got shitcanned for improperly influencing a decision to remove an animal from the Threatened species list (said animal happened to live on land she owned), they've had to reverse a ton of similarly tainted rulings, and the whole institution is in a humiliating state. Wildlife groups are now suing the administration to get records of just how corrupt she was and asesss the damage.

Aside from the all too typical Bush administration story here, you have a bit of life's unintentional humor.

"This is a lawsuit we've been forced to file to receive documents that we're entitled to that demonstrate the severity of Julie MacDonald's involvement in overturning endangered species and habitat decisions," said William Snape, the group's senior counsel. Snape filed the suit under the Freedom of Information Act.

When a guy named Snape says you're overdoing the villainy, you might want to listen.

Source: Raw Story

What a Great Venue
Beijing's legendary air pollution is still astoundingly bad, despite their draconian efforts to clear the air.

Beijingers were warned to stay indoors on Thursday as pollution levels across the capital hit the top of the scale, despite repeated assurances by the government that air quality was improving.

"This is as bad as it can get," a spokeswoman for the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau told AFP.

This isn't a fluke either, by any means.

Beijing's air quality is routinely rated among the worst in the world by international agencies such as the United Nations and the World Bank, with rampant coal burning, regular dust storms and a growing number of cars cited as the main reasons.

Heckuva job, whoever made the call to hold the Olympics there, lol.

Source: Raw Story

You Don't Need Health Care If You're Old, You Just Need A Tar Pit To Jump In
New ruling says that once you're eligible for what's left of Medicare, your employer can reneg on your health benefits and leave you out in the cold.

What a wonderful country we live in.

Source: The New York Times

"Terrorist" Walks
So there was once a guy named David Hicks. Still is, if you want to get technical. The US's mercenary allies, the drug-dealing Northern Alliance, picked him up in Afghanistan. The military said he was aiding Al-Queda, and after a sham trial, 'proved' it. He was sentenced to a long term, but allowed to serve only 9 months of it, the last of which he could serve in his home country of Australia. He's about to go free.

You have to read between the lines on this one, but if you do, the real story is readily apparent.

Hicks became the first person convicted at a U.S. war-crimes trial since World War II when he pleaded guilty in March to providing material support to al-Qaida.

The former Outback cowboy was captured in December 2001 by the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, where he had been fighting with the Taliban. A month later, he was sent to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he spent more than five years without trial.

A U.S. military tribunal sentenced Hicks — a Muslim convert who has since renounced the faith — to seven years in prison, with all but nine months being suspended, after he confessed to aiding al-Qaida during the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan following Sept. 11, 2001.

Under a plea bargain, Hicks was allowed to serve the remainder of his sentence at Yatala prison in his hometown of Adelaide in South Australia state, but was ordered to remain silent about any alleged abuse he suffered while in custody.

So, here's how it goes. This man was picked up in Afghanistan by the NA at a time we offered bounties on anyone from Al-Queda. We didn't check those claims very carefully, or at all, because the more we caught, the better it looked on paper. We sent this guy around our world tour of torture sites and did some monstrously heinous things to him, things so bad that they're still terrified he'll talk. Having not actually done anything or been a terrorist, after they beat a confession out of the man and broke him, they sent him home, to live out the rest of his days as a shell of a human being.

This is life in the American Empire, folks. Don't turn your backs.

Source: Raw Story

Wall Street Weighs In On Writer's Strike
Bear Sterns, a large investment firm, has concluded that if the writers were given absolutely everything they want it would amount to less than 1% of the annual revenue of the major studios.

Basically, the big institutional investors are starting to get pissy about how badly the studios are handling this, and I imagine this is the first in a slew of leaks designed to pressure them to settle already, before the bottom falls out of the market.

Source: Firedoglake

Denturist: A Non-Dentist Who Makes Dentures
The things you learn reading about the appalling state of dental care in Kentucky and West Virginia.

A sickening article in some respects; in others, well... if you lose all your teeth because you do meth or chew tobacco, I feel less sympathetic.

Also, the evil bastard in me can't help but joke: People in Kentucky have teeth?

Source: The New York Times

Think About This When You See One of Those Annoying Whopper Commercials
In an article about the appalling and inhuman slavery that fuels our fresh fruit industry in the US, it's nice to know that some people will go the extra mile to be dicks. Burger King is fighting an effort to slightly increase the pay given to tomato pickers because it won't 'solve' the problem. No shit. But doing nothing is better? Meanwhile, Whole Foods has been getting their tasty yuppie tomatoes from some of the more notorious slaver operations.

Ahh, corporate greed. Is there nothing they won't do for a dollar?

Jimmy Carter has been doing his usual exemplary work, trying to help these poor people. He may have been a week chief executive, but honestly, he has to have been the best human being to serve in the White House in the last century.

Source: The Independent

Lit Majors Need Help
A short article about how I Am Legend is supposedly some kind of grand symbol for the War on Terror era.

Riiight. Or, alternately, and this is just a theory: it's a shitty mediocre action movie based on a mediocre action movie based on a Vincent Price scare-flick based on a mediocre Matheson story. Written almost a half century ago. Having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.

Source: NPR

Stop or the Rainforest Gets It

In an amusing sign of things to come, perhaps, Ecuador is threatening to allow oil drilling in an incredibly valuable rainforest environment.... unless it gets a ransom of 350 million dollars. A year.

Seriously. They're holding a forest for ransom.

Source: USA Today