Wednesday, August 20, 2008

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Thursday, August 14, 2008

Martial Law in the USA-It will Never Happen

It is getting closer and the blame is being put not on the governmental screw ups and sick policies, it is starting in the helpless poor communities, This mayor is slick or is getting orders from the big boys.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH VIDEO

FCC Commissioner: Fairness Doctrine Could Lead To Government Regulation Of Web




McDowell says reinstated powers could be tagged on to net neutrality debate by leading Democrats
Paul Joseph Watson[1] Prison PlanetWednesday, August 13, 2008



FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell says that the potential re-introduction of the Fairness Doctrine under a Democratic administration could lead to “government dictating content policy” on the Internet.
The Fairness Doctrine was an FCC regulation mandating broadcasters afford time to opposing viewpoints. It was abolished in 1987 by the Supreme Court after it was found to be harmful to journalistic freedom and anathema to the First Amendment.
[2] Speaking to the Business and Media Institute, McDowell stated that the Fairness Doctrine could return under a different name and be tagged on to the net neutrality debate, opening the door for the government to regulate content on the Web.

McDowell said the net neutrality effort could win the support of “a few isolated conservatives” who may not fully realize the long-term effects of government regulation.
“I think the fear is that somehow large corporations will censor their content, their points of view, right,” McDowell said. “I think the bigger concern for them should be if you have government dictating content policy, which by the way would have a big First Amendment problem,” said McDowell.
“Then, whoever is in charge of government is going to determine what is fair, under a so-called ‘Fairness Doctrine,’ which won’t be called that – it’ll be called something else,” McDowell said. “So, will Web sites, will bloggers have to give equal time or equal space on their Web site to opposing views rather than letting the marketplace of ideas determine that?” he added.
The reinstitution of the Fairness Doctrine has strong support amongst top Democratic powerbrokers and an effort to push it through under a different name is expected should Barack Obama secure the presidency.
In June, [3] House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters that the Democratic caucus was interested in bringing back the Fairness Doctrine. Senators Richard Durbin and John Kerry have also publicly supported its return.
Neo-Con radio talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh have long railed against the Fairness Doctrine, but its impact would be felt by all alternative news outlets, who would be forced to devote some of their time to parroting government talking points while enduring constant harassment and threat of closure.

Double standards and cowardice still guide Western diplomacy

The Caucasus and the Palestine-Israel conflicts
Stuart Littlewood
August 12, 2008

Stuart Littlewood contrasts the West’s condemnation of Russia’s intervention in Georgia with its silence over Israeli breaches of international law and crimes against humanity.While the fragile "freedom" boats and their courageous volunteer crews steer a course for Palestinian territorial waters in an effort to break Israel’s illegal siege of the Gaza Strip, our Western leaders are once again tripping over their double standards. "X has invaded a sovereign neighbouring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people," lectures Bush. "Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century. X's government must respect Y's territorial integrity and sovereignty."On cue, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown chips in. X's military action in Y "threatens the stability of the entire region and risks a humanitarian catastrophe", he chirps. "We are committed to working ... to ensure a peaceful and speedy resolution ... which maintains Y's territorial and political integrity." UK Conservative leader and Prime-Minister-in-waiting David Cameron brands X a "dangerous bully" and urges the international community to stand up and condemn its action. He tells the BBC:
The only language that bullies understand is when someone stands up to them... What X has done here is used massive and disproportionate force. It's breached international law and it has violated Y's territorial integrity... It has acted as a massive and dangerous bully and we can't allow this to go ahead without it being challenged.
These statesmen, the great white hopes of the Western world, must be talking about Israel’s military boot on Palestine’s throat, right? Wrong. They are ticking off Russia for stamping on Georgia while too cowardly to criticize Israel for similar breaches of international law and crimes against humanity. The US-Israel axis and its UK dogsbody are not noted for concern about other people's democratically-elected governments. They stick their nose into Georgia because oil and gas pipelines run through it and Israel has a number of sweet arms deals on the go, including the supply of remote-piloted vehicles (RPVs, or drones), other advanced weaponry and training for the Georgian army's infantry forces. Apparently, Georgia's military is modelled on the Israeli armed forces, so heaven help it's neighbours. And now there are reports that the US is re-routing arms and ammunition intended for Iraq to Georgia.Thanks to Georgia and wall-to-wall coverage of the Beijing Olympics, I almost forgot that the "freedom" boats left Cyprus for Palestinian territorial waters 24 hours ago and I haven’t seen or heard anything about their voyage in our mainstream media. Is there another blackout against any news that might focus on the devastating injustice of the situation? What have Bush, Brown and Cameron to say about this small but significant attempt to dent the siege and help bring to an end the humanitarian crisis imposed by Israel? Doesn’t it warrant their attention? Where is Bush's concern for Palestine's democratic government – the one he and his chums tried to destroy but whose remnants are now holed up in Gaza and running the show there? Where is Brown's concern for Palestine's territorial integrity and sovereignty? And where is Cameron's concern for the disproportionate force used against Palestinian civilians? Have these three heroes ever challenged the "dangerous bully" Israel in the only language it understands? The freedom boats, such easy prey to Israel’s vast array of death-dealing military hardware, are determined to call the bully’s bluff. They make up for what Bush, Brown, Cameron and Western media bosses lack. Whether or not they succeed in their mission to reach Gaza, let's salute them for upholding the honour and decency of millions in the civilized world, east and west, who do not have their hands on the levers of power and are unable, for the moment, to kick out the lunatics that do.
Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. For further information please visit http://www.radiofreepalestine.co.uk/.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Flexible Nanoantenna Arrays Capture Solar Energy

August 12, 2008

by Roberta Kwok, Idaho National Laboratory
Florida, United States [RenewableEnergyWorld.com]
Researchers have devised an inexpensive way to produce plastic sheets containing billions of nanoantennas that collect heat energy generated by the sun and other sources. The researchers say that the technology, developed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory (INL), is the first step toward a solar energy collector that could be mass-produced on flexible materials.
While methods to convert the energy into usable electricity still need to be developed, it is envisioned that the sheets could one day be manufactured as lightweight "skins" that power products such as hybrid cars or iPods with potentially higher efficiency than traditional solar cells. The nanoantennas also have the potential to act as cooling devices that draw waste heat from buildings or electronics without using electricity.
The nanoantennas target mid-infrared rays, which the Earth continuously radiates as heat after absorbing energy from the sun during the day. In contrast, traditional solar cells can only use visible light, rendering them idle after dark. Infrared radiation is an especially rich energy source because it also is generated by industrial processes such as coal-fired plants.
"Every process in our industrial world creates waste heat," says INL physicist Steven Novack. "It's energy that we just throw away." Novack led the research team, which included INL engineer Dale Kotter, W. Dennis Slafer of MicroContinuum Inc. and Patrick Pinhero, now at the University of Missouri.
The nanoantennas are tiny gold squares or spirals set in a specially treated form of polyethylene, a material used in plastic bags. While others have successfully invented antennas that collect energy from lower-frequency regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, such as microwaves, infrared rays have proven more elusive. Part of the reason is that materials' properties change drastically at high-frequency wavelengths, Kotter says.
The researchers studied the behavior of various materials — including gold, manganese and copper — under infrared rays and used the resulting data to build computer models of nanoantennas. They found that with the right materials, shape and size, the simulated nanoantennas could harvest up to 92 percent of the energy at infrared wavelengths.
The team then created real-life prototypes to test their computer models. First, they used conventional production methods to etch a silicon wafer with the nanoantenna pattern. The silicon-based nanoantennas matched the computer simulations, absorbing more than 80 percent of the energy over the intended wavelength range. Next, they used a stamp-and-repeat process to emboss the nanoantennas on thin sheets of plastic. While the plastic prototype is still being tested, initial experiments suggest that it also captures energy at the expected infrared wavelengths.
The nanoantennas' ability to absorb infrared radiation makes them promising cooling devices. Since objects give off heat as infrared rays, the nanoantennas could collect those rays and re-emit the energy at harmless wavelengths. Such a system could cool down buildings and computers without the external power source required by air-conditioners and fans.
More technological advances are needed before the nanoantennas can funnel their energy into usable electricity. The infrared rays create alternating currents in the nanoantennas that oscillate trillions of times per second, requiring a component called a rectifier to convert the alternating current to direct current. Today's rectifiers can't handle such high frequencies.
"We need to design nanorectifiers that go with our nanoantennas," says Kotter, noting that a nanoscale rectifier would need to be about 1,000 times smaller than current commercial devices and will require new manufacturing methods. Another possibility is to develop electrical circuitry that might slow down the current to usable frequencies.
If these technical hurdles can be overcome, nanoantennas have the potential to be efficient harvesters of solar energy. Because they can be tweaked to pick up specific wavelengths depending on their shape and size, it may be possible to create double-sided nanoantenna sheets that harvest energy from different parts of the sun's spectrum, Novack says.
The team's stamp-and-repeat process could also be extended to large-scale roll-to-roll manufacturing techniques that could print the arrays at a rate of several yards per minute.
The researchers will be reporting their findings on August 13 at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 2008 2nd International Conference on Energy Sustainability in Jacksonville, Florida.
Roberta Kwok is a Research Communications Fellow at Idaho National Laboratory.

Philippe Starck is tilting toward windmills

By Alice Rawsthorn
Friday, August 1, 2008
LONDON: There's no point in arguing with Philippe Starck, because it generally goes like this: 1. The world's most famous designer makes a well-meaning and sincere, but slightly preposterous claim. 2. You feel obliged to question the preposterous bit. 3. He comes across all hurt and boyish. 4. You feel mean.
Take Starck's claim to have "invented a concept called Democratic Design," which, he says, gives everyone high quality products at affordable prices. Sounds great, but didn't the modern movement try to do that for most of the 20th century? And how can he claim to have "won the battle" by designing "a chair that sells for less than €100," or $157, when that's still too expensive for most people? Let alone the 90 percent of the world's population who are too poor to afford the basics? What has Democratic Design done for them? "Oh please, I'm not God," pleads Starck. "I'm just a designer, and I'm doing my best."
Luckily for the underprivileged 90 percent, other designers are trying to help them. Starck is battling on another front - developing cheap, attractive, energy-saving products to "introduce everybody to ecology." The first of his Democratic Ecology products is to be launched this fall, a miniature roof-top windmill, priced between €500 and €800, which will produce up to 80 percent of a home's energy. "Imagine a Saturday afternoon, and a guy going stupidly to the supermarket to buy a useless gadget," enthused Starck. "He sees a really sexy object. 'Oh my God, it's beautiful. How much does it cost? €500? That's almost what I'd spend on a useless gadget.' He brings the windmill home, goes to his roof and 15 minutes later he sees it turning and producing energy. Wow!"
Starck's windmill is one of dozens of alternative energy sources to be coming on to the market, but there are sound reasons for taking his product seriously. One is that it's deftly designed, not least because the blades are made of transparent plastic, which will be virtually invisible up on the roof. Another is that it's designed by him, and Starck has been so successful at persuading people to buy visually seductive, but often pointless objects - plastic Louis XV chairs, gun-shaped lamps, garden gnome stools and so on - that he may well be able to do the same for something which is actually useful.
That said, it's been a long time since the design world felt that it had to take Starck seriously. He's a gentle giant, who bears a distinct resemblance to Desperate Dan, the mal barbu cowboy in the British comic "The Dandy." Now 59, he rose to fame in his native France during the 1980s, when his flair for reinventing everyday objects by casting them as something else - a lemon squeezer as a lobster, and plastic chairs as ornate Louis XV ones - was hailed as a playful, and very commercial take on then-fashionable postmodernism.
Starck has since sold hundreds of thousands of his lobster-like lemon squeezers, and nearly a million of just one of his "antique" plastic chairs, Louis Ghost. For better or worse, he has also given us the designer hotel - aided and abetted by the New York hotelier Ian Schrager - and the showstopping restrooms that now pop up in every other bar. Starck cast himself as a media star by spouting his design philosophy in "franglais" soundbites, and bragging about being able to design a chair in the time it took for an aircraft seatbelt sign to go on and off. No other designer could beat him for chutzpah and bankability, but by the mid-1990s Starck was grouching about being bored by design.
Commercially, he's still a colossus, who bags plum jobs, like the creative directorship of Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space venture, and is shooting a reality TV show for the BBC. But at times he seems like design's equivalent of a dinosaur rocker. Starck's confession this year that he was "ashamed" that "everything I designed is unnecessary" drew derisory roars in the blogosphere. Does he still feel like that? "I regret that my job is design," he admitted. "Design stupidly produces more things, and for years I've spoken about the importance of living with fewer things. But my position is a little ambiguous."
Indeed it is. To his credit, Starck was advocating environmentalism long before it became fashionable, but he hasn't embraced it fully in his work. Nor does he seem to see the irony in rattling off a list of eco-responsible activities - organic diet, solar-powered oyster farm and so forth - ending with "the least polluting plane on the market," his private jet. Now he's hoping to redress the balance with Democratic Ecology.
The windmill is an encouraging start. Made from the same transparent plastic as his best-selling Louis Ghost chairs, Starck developed it and the other Democratic Ecology products in collaboration with Pramac, the Italian industrial group. The timing is propitious with oil prices rocketing and everyone from General Electric to the veteran oilman T. Boone Pickens investing in alternative energy. Lots of homes already sport metal wind turbines on their roofs, so why not transparent plastic ones?
Next up is a solar panel, a film that covers existing windows. Starck is also designing a prefabricated eco-house with glass walls that can be changed from clear or opaque at the push of a button. The prototype is being built for him and his family on the plot of their old home outside Paris.
An electric car is under development too, and an eco-moped. Starck has nearly finished work on a solar and hydrogen-powered boat, the first of which is to be delivered to Hotel Bauer in Venice next spring. "We're seizing every opportunity to create affordable, high-technology ecology products," he said. "It's very, very important that they're beautiful, because ecology should be a pleasure, not a punishment. One of the most beautiful boats in the world is the Venetian taxi, and our boat will be even more beautiful."

Friday, August 1, 2008

The wave of “Capitol Crimes” continues

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
Online Journal Guest Writers

Aug 1, 2008, 00:29

Like the largesse he spread so bountifully to members of Congress and the White House staff -- countless fancy meals, skybox tickets to basketball games and U2 concerts, golfing sprees in Scotland -- Jack Abramoff is the gift that keeps on giving.

The notorious lobbyist and his cohorts (including conservatives Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed) shook down Native American tribal councils and other clients for tens of millions of dollars, buying influence via a coalition of equally corrupt government officials and cronies dedicated to dismantling government by selling it off, making massive profits as they tore the principles of a representative democracy to shreds.

A report earlier this summer from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform builds on an earlier committee investigation that detailed some 485 contacts between Abramoff and the Bush administration. According to the new report, “Senior White House officials told the Committee that White House officials held Mr. Abramoff and members of his lobbying team in high regard and solicited recommendations from Mr. Abramoff and his colleagues on policy matters.”

Now Abramoff’s doing time in Maryland, at a minimum security Federal prison, serving five years and ten months for unrelated, fraudulent business practices involving a fake wire transfer he and a partner fabricated to secure a loan to buy SunCruz Casinos, a line of Florida cruise ships that ferried high and low rollers into international waters to gamble (its original owner, Konstantinos “Gus” Boulis, was gunned down, Mafia-style, in February 2001). But come September, Abramoff will be sentenced for his larger-than-life role in one of the biggest scandals in American history, a collection of outrages that has already sent one member of Congress to jail, others into retirement and dozens of accomplices running for cover.

Over the last couple of years he has been singing to the authorities, which is why he has been kept in a detention facility close to DC and the reason his sentencing for tax evasion, the defrauding of Indians and the bribing of Washington officials has been delayed -- the FBI is thought to be using Abramoff’s testimony to build an ever-expanding case that may continue to shake those who live within the Beltway bubble for months and years to come.

Bill Moyers Journal is airing an updated edition of “Capitol Crimes,” a special that was first produced for public television two years ago, relating the entire sordid story of the Abramoff scandals. Produced by Sherry Jones, the rebroadcast comes at a moment of renewed interest, with not only Abramoff’s sentencing imminent, but the most important national elections in decades little more than three months away and continuing, seemingly daily revelations of further, profligate abuses of power.

Monday saw the publication of a 140-page report from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility, confirming that, as the Washington Post recounted, “For nearly two years, a young political aide sought to cultivate a ‘farm system’ for Republicans at the Justice Department, hiring scores of prosecutors and immigration judges who espoused conservative priorities and Christian lifestyle choices.

“That aide, Monica M. Goodling, exercised what amounted to veto power over a wide range of critical jobs, asking candidates for their views on abortion and same-sex marriage and maneuvering around senior officials who outranked her, including the department’s second-in-command . . . [The report] concluded yesterday that Goodling and others had broken civil service laws, run afoul of department policy and engaged in ‘misconduct,’ a finding that could expose them to further scrutiny and sanctions.”

With the next day’s sunrise came the indictment of Alaskan Republican Ted Stevens, the first sitting US senator to face criminal charges in 15 years. Apparently, the senator was playing the home version of “The Price Is Right,” for among the gifts a grand jury says were illegally rewarded him by the oil company VECO were a Viking gas grill, tool cabinet and a wraparound deck for his mountainside house in Anchorage. In fact, VECO allegedly gave the place an entire new first floor, with two bedrooms and a bath. How neighborly.

(By the way, just to round the circle, Senator Stevens received $1,000 in campaign contributions from Jack Abramoff directly, which subsequently he donated to the Alaskan chapter of the Red Cross, and $16,500 from Native American tribes and others represented by Abramoff, which Stevens gave to other charities.)

Coincidentally, this week also marks the publication of a new book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, written by Thomas Frank, the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? In an essay in the August issue of Harper’s magazine, adapted from the book, Frank adroitly weaves the actions of Abramoff and his pals into a vastly larger ideological framework.

“Fantastic misgovernment is not an accident,” he writes, “nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, what follows from that: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we’ve come to expect from Washington.

“ . . . The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school. Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action.”

Have we the stamina, commitment -- or even the attention span -- to take such action? Abramoff may be cooling his heels in minimum security but his pals DeLay, Norquist and Reed appear on television and radio whose hosts treat them as political savants with nary a nod to their past nefarious association with Abramoff. Few in the audience seem to notice or care. Former House Majority Leader Delay’s awaiting trial on money laundering charges, and the incorrigible Ralph Reed, who played Christian pastors in Texas for suckers in enlisting their unwitting help for Abramoff’s gambling clients, even has a political potboiler of a novel out -- Dark Horse, the story of a failed Democratic presidential candidate who finds God, then runs as an independent, funded, presumably, by the supreme being’s political action committee.

“Do we Americans really want good government?” That’s a question asked, not by Thomas Frank, but the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, writing more than a century ago in his book, The Shame of the Cities. He wrote, “We are a free and sovereign people, we govern ourselves and the government is ours. But that is the point. We are responsible, not our leaders, since we follow them. We let them divert our loyalty from the United States to some ‘party;’ we let them boss the party and turn our municipal democracies into autocracies and our republican nation into a plutocracy. We cheat our government and we let our leaders loot it, and we let them wheedle and bribe our sovereignty from us.”

From more than a hundred years’ distance, Steffens would recognize Abramoff & company for what they are. And we for who we are; a nation too easily distracted and looking the other way as everything rightfully ours is taken.

Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog.

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