WHO SAYS WE NEED THE GOVERNMENT or corrupt corps TO DO ANYTHING??? What a laugh.
Vatic Note: Just received this email from a supporter/visitor from out east. Its great and I have included a copy of her email and the video. What this teaches us is that sometimes it takes truly evil people to teach us all critically important lessons. This is one of those times. I think now with all the evidence we have accumulated, we can safely assume until proven otherwise, that this was a false flag using WMD, and now look who is coming to the rescue??? Is it the Government? No. Is it the filthy corporations and bankers who did all this??? NO, Its "THE PEOPLE" and that is why we got ourselves in trouble by not realizing that we can work together to take care of ourselves to a greater degree than we had allowed ourselves to believe. WATCH THIS VIDEO and see who is coming up with a simple, cost effective way to clean up that oil??? These are the people that the bankers targeted years ago to get our food away from us locally and they are standing by us with this great way to solve the oil problem and it appears they are going to work on it for us.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ email text and video ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Vatic,
Just received this from a friend on Long Island....Blessings, *****
They start off shore with tug boats and barges spreading or blowing the hay over the oil.
If this works it will make Janet Neapolitan, or what ever her name is, and the EPA look silly.
Didn’t know if you had seen this. Farmers to the rescue.
Blessings, *****
Peace, Love, Harmony, Joy & Goodwill to All!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5SxX2EntEo
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
2010-05-12
Congress Refuses to Outlaw Insider Trading For Lawmakers
Congress Refuses to Outlaw Insider Trading For Lawmakers
Posted May 05, 2010 01:04pm EDT by Peter Gorenstein in Investing, Banking, Politics
Provided to Vatic by VK Durham
Even a cynic can find Washington's hypocrisy shocking at times. The Wall Street Journal reports today a House bill that would force lawmakers to make greater disclosures on financial transactions and disallow them from trading on nonpublic information is going nowhere fast.
That's right. Members of Congress are currently allowed to profit on insider trading!
The bill, which has been languishing in the House for four years, would require elected officials "to make their financial transactions public within 90 days of a purchase or sale" and "prohibit lawmakers from trading in financial markets based on nonpublic information they learn on the job," the WSJ reports.
It seems they're above the transparency they've been calling for on Wall Street.
This comes a day after the same newspaper reported several lawmakers profited by betting against the housing and stock market in 2008. And some did it using derivatives they've recently been railing against.
As our colleague Henry Blodget wrote Tuesday, "If you're going to complain about how awful short-selling is and how evil and venal people are for doing it, you should probably abstain from the practice yourself."
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
Posted May 05, 2010 01:04pm EDT by Peter Gorenstein in Investing, Banking, Politics
Provided to Vatic by VK Durham
Even a cynic can find Washington's hypocrisy shocking at times. The Wall Street Journal reports today a House bill that would force lawmakers to make greater disclosures on financial transactions and disallow them from trading on nonpublic information is going nowhere fast.
That's right. Members of Congress are currently allowed to profit on insider trading!
The bill, which has been languishing in the House for four years, would require elected officials "to make their financial transactions public within 90 days of a purchase or sale" and "prohibit lawmakers from trading in financial markets based on nonpublic information they learn on the job," the WSJ reports.
It seems they're above the transparency they've been calling for on Wall Street.
This comes a day after the same newspaper reported several lawmakers profited by betting against the housing and stock market in 2008. And some did it using derivatives they've recently been railing against.
As our colleague Henry Blodget wrote Tuesday, "If you're going to complain about how awful short-selling is and how evil and venal people are for doing it, you should probably abstain from the practice yourself."
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
Thanks for trying! It appears they did it in a rush with no notice. It did not pass.
Vatic Note: Now, check out how your senator voted, write it down, and never forget it. If he voted against it, then that is treason and he should not be returned to congress under any circumstances. Had he voted for the amendment, he would have driven a stake in the heart of the VAMPIRE where it hurts. They did not want us to see the size and scope of the theft and with that act, now comes civil disobedience in our pocket books. April 15, 2011 is the end, we never pay another cent again, and we never work a wage paying job with deductions withheld. We create our own jobs and work and never pay toward that theft, let those who enjoy slavery pay for it. That was the final straw that broke the camels back. Remember we do not have to aid and abet in a crime which paying any taxes at this point, does to us. This is why they wanted enemy combatants because when you civilly disobey, the jury would set you free, and this way they OWN you and they can prove it to you by doing anything they want to you.
SOLUTION: I suppose you can tell we are mad??? Now, figure out what your cost of gas would be per gallon without the tax and that is public information, then fill up your tank and pay by a designated credit card that you designate as the one you will use for everything that carries a fed tax on it. Put aside one credit just for buying items with federal tax items on it, like cigarettes if you smoke, gas, etc. Then at the end of the month only pay the part that is the actual product and leave the tax on to accumulate. Keep doing that each month until you do not have any reason to do it. What you are then doing is forcing the bank to pay your tax on all those items to the fed and you do not pay the tax. THEN NEVER PAY THAT TAX PORTION EVER. Now on April 15, that will become the ultimate proof whether we want to live like slaves or like freemen. Send them a promissory note to pay once you receive your share of the payback of the bailout since all your taxes since the bailout has gone to their theft, then when they pay it back, you will pay your taxes. That would be actually legal since its a debt for a debt. They owe us interest for the trillions in bail out each month and that interest should be applied to the interest we owe them since its less than what they owe us. Then deduct from what we owe them all the additional costs of false flags, actually successful false flags like 9-11 and the oil rig explosion etc. That is huge cost and they owe it for doing it. Its contract law. WE can get into it later. iF YOU GET A LETTER FROM THE IRS TO AUDIT YOU, REMIND THEM AUDITS ARE NOT LEGAL NOW THAT IT WAS LEGALLY STATED THAT THE FED DID NOT NEED TO BE AUDITED AND THUS WE DO NOT EITHER.
Ron Paul and Alan Grayson with Dylan Ratigan: Audit the Fed!
May 03, 2010 — MSNBC video
http://campaignforliberty.com/
Ron Paul and Alan Grayson talk about their efforts to ensure a proper audit of the Federal Reserve is included in any "reform" package.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ojbOd4HPVc&feature=related
SOLUTION: CALL YOUR CONGRESSMAN AND SENATOR AND THE WHITE HOUSE TO APPROVE ALL THESE BILLS AND AMENDMENTS THAT ARE IN OUR FAVOR. Tell them that
WE KNOW what is going on and we WANT IT STOPPED NOW. Mention words like "Treason", Fraud, Stealing, aiding and abetting a felony crime. I think those words would work very well. Be sure and write down the bill numbers and amendments wanted. Tell them THIS IS WHERE WE STOP ROTHSCHILD INTERNATIONAL BANKING MAFIA CARTEL. Its important they understand clearly that we know what they are doing, remind them of the refusal to pass the law on insider trading for congress and that we understand fully what that means. Tell them they are committing a crime if they refuse to pass these bills when they are already in violation of the insider trading laws. WE WANT FULL AUDIT OF THE FED. Where is our gold??? That will really torque them. Hit them with everything you have, all of it, and show them we KNOW everything such as Goldman Sachs shorting on the oil Rig company just before the explosions. WE KNOW!!!!!! Say it loud and clear. Its the only chance we have within the system and we must focus on clearly seeing all those bills pass and focus on our celebration at having won the battle. You go.
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
SOLUTION: I suppose you can tell we are mad??? Now, figure out what your cost of gas would be per gallon without the tax and that is public information, then fill up your tank and pay by a designated credit card that you designate as the one you will use for everything that carries a fed tax on it. Put aside one credit just for buying items with federal tax items on it, like cigarettes if you smoke, gas, etc. Then at the end of the month only pay the part that is the actual product and leave the tax on to accumulate. Keep doing that each month until you do not have any reason to do it. What you are then doing is forcing the bank to pay your tax on all those items to the fed and you do not pay the tax. THEN NEVER PAY THAT TAX PORTION EVER. Now on April 15, that will become the ultimate proof whether we want to live like slaves or like freemen. Send them a promissory note to pay once you receive your share of the payback of the bailout since all your taxes since the bailout has gone to their theft, then when they pay it back, you will pay your taxes. That would be actually legal since its a debt for a debt. They owe us interest for the trillions in bail out each month and that interest should be applied to the interest we owe them since its less than what they owe us. Then deduct from what we owe them all the additional costs of false flags, actually successful false flags like 9-11 and the oil rig explosion etc. That is huge cost and they owe it for doing it. Its contract law. WE can get into it later. iF YOU GET A LETTER FROM THE IRS TO AUDIT YOU, REMIND THEM AUDITS ARE NOT LEGAL NOW THAT IT WAS LEGALLY STATED THAT THE FED DID NOT NEED TO BE AUDITED AND THUS WE DO NOT EITHER.
Ron Paul and Alan Grayson with Dylan Ratigan: Audit the Fed!
May 03, 2010 — MSNBC video
http://campaignforliberty.com/
Ron Paul and Alan Grayson talk about their efforts to ensure a proper audit of the Federal Reserve is included in any "reform" package.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ojbOd4HPVc&feature=related
SOLUTION: CALL YOUR CONGRESSMAN AND SENATOR AND THE WHITE HOUSE TO APPROVE ALL THESE BILLS AND AMENDMENTS THAT ARE IN OUR FAVOR. Tell them that
WE KNOW what is going on and we WANT IT STOPPED NOW. Mention words like "Treason", Fraud, Stealing, aiding and abetting a felony crime. I think those words would work very well. Be sure and write down the bill numbers and amendments wanted. Tell them THIS IS WHERE WE STOP ROTHSCHILD INTERNATIONAL BANKING MAFIA CARTEL. Its important they understand clearly that we know what they are doing, remind them of the refusal to pass the law on insider trading for congress and that we understand fully what that means. Tell them they are committing a crime if they refuse to pass these bills when they are already in violation of the insider trading laws. WE WANT FULL AUDIT OF THE FED. Where is our gold??? That will really torque them. Hit them with everything you have, all of it, and show them we KNOW everything such as Goldman Sachs shorting on the oil Rig company just before the explosions. WE KNOW!!!!!! Say it loud and clear. Its the only chance we have within the system and we must focus on clearly seeing all those bills pass and focus on our celebration at having won the battle. You go.
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
2010-05-11
Coast Guard does "war games" training for oil rig exercise, 3 weeks before rig explosion.
Vatic Note: This makes 3 times that we know of where war games were played either during or just prior to the accident. Add to this coincident, the Halliburton purchase of an oil fire fighting company one week before the accident, and Goldman Sachs shorting the rigs owning company on the markets just hours before the accident in which they made a huge bundle of money, and you have a smell factor creeping in here, but you read it and see if you believe this is spin that Disney is promoting, or the truth.
Training Exercises Revealed Gaps in Preparedness for Major Oil Spill
http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=10616979
Provided to Vatic by CLG Newsletter, Lori Price Editor
Lack of Experience, Poor Communications and Conflicting Roles Cited
By JOHN SOLOMON, AARON MEHTA, MATTHEW MOSK and AVNI PATEL
CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY AND ABC NEWS
May 11, 2010—
Three weeks before the massive Gulf oil rig explosion, U.S Coast Guard officials led an elaborate exercise in which they practiced their response to a major oil spill one of four dry runs over the past decade that foreshadowed many of the weaknesses in coordination, communication, expertise and technology that are now hampering the federal response to the oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
Watch Brian Ross' full report tonight on World News with Diane Sawyer at 6:30pm and Nightline at 11:30pm.
According to interviews and after-action reports obtained in a joint investigation by ABC News and the Center for Public Integrity, the drills exposed flaws in the nation's readiness for what they termed an oil spill of national significance.
As early as 2002, the practice runs showed that oil companies not only lacked updated equipment to mount an effective response to a spill, but would need to be forced by the government to invest in better technology.
"Without requirements in place to require use of new response technologies they will not be developed and deployed adequately," said an after-action report from the summer 2002 drill that simulated an oil leak from a sunken rig in the Gulf of Mexico that was eerily similar to the current disaster. "There is little incentive for [oil companies] to invest in them and therefore, little incentive for technology companies to develop or refine these technologies further."
Those requirements were never forced on the companies and, as a result, the oil spill response underway in the Gulf is being mounted with booms and skimmers that some industry experts described as antiquated and of limited value.
Training Exercises Revealed Gaps in Preparedness for Major Oil Spill
http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=10616979
Provided to Vatic by CLG Newsletter, Lori Price Editor
Lack of Experience, Poor Communications and Conflicting Roles Cited
By JOHN SOLOMON, AARON MEHTA, MATTHEW MOSK and AVNI PATEL
CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY AND ABC NEWS
May 11, 2010—
Three weeks before the massive Gulf oil rig explosion, U.S Coast Guard officials led an elaborate exercise in which they practiced their response to a major oil spill one of four dry runs over the past decade that foreshadowed many of the weaknesses in coordination, communication, expertise and technology that are now hampering the federal response to the oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
Watch Brian Ross' full report tonight on World News with Diane Sawyer at 6:30pm and Nightline at 11:30pm.
According to interviews and after-action reports obtained in a joint investigation by ABC News and the Center for Public Integrity, the drills exposed flaws in the nation's readiness for what they termed an oil spill of national significance.
As early as 2002, the practice runs showed that oil companies not only lacked updated equipment to mount an effective response to a spill, but would need to be forced by the government to invest in better technology.
"Without requirements in place to require use of new response technologies they will not be developed and deployed adequately," said an after-action report from the summer 2002 drill that simulated an oil leak from a sunken rig in the Gulf of Mexico that was eerily similar to the current disaster. "There is little incentive for [oil companies] to invest in them and therefore, little incentive for technology companies to develop or refine these technologies further."
Those requirements were never forced on the companies and, as a result, the oil spill response underway in the Gulf is being mounted with booms and skimmers that some industry experts described as antiquated and of limited value.
Reframing the 9/11 Litmus Test
Commentary by Maxwell C. Bridges
April 18, 2010
"Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense."In chemistry, Litmus paper turns blue in a basic solution and red in an acidic solution. The 9/11 Litmus test metaphorically turns the face of public figures the patriotic blue or red of the America flag depending on whether they are coolly repeating elements of the government's 9/11 story in order to justify national security measures and military actions or they are hotly belittling alternative 9/11 views as crazy, nutty, loony, conspiracy theories.
~ Chapman Cohen (1868-1954)
Acting in this manner, our public figures have to date seemingly passed their 9/11 Litmus test and thereby continued to reap the rewards that maintain them in their public place as "respected" politician, news anchor, political columnist, professor, etc. Questioning any aspect of 9/11 and specifically the government has been tantamount to failing the 9/11 Litmus test with consequences that include political or professional discreditation and involuntary job loss.
Math- and science-challenged Americans ought well remember that white is the third color both of their patriotic flag lapel pins as well as of the simple chemistry Litmus test. Namely, when the Litmus paper remains white in a given solution, (a) the solution may be neither acidic nor basic, or (b) the solution may be known acidic or basic and the test paper isn't Litmus paper.
When over 1,100 architects and engineers sign a petition to call for a new, independent investigation into the destruction of the three World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, the 9/11 Litmus reaction in the corporate mainstream media was: white. Or white out, clear, blank, and silent. It wasn't meaningfully covered (and Tiger Woods was).
OH GOODY! SUPREME COURT NOMINEE HAS GOLDMAN SACHS TIES
OH GOODY! SUPREME COURT NOMINEE HAS GOLDMAN SACHS TIES
Posted By: food4thought, Rumormillnews
Kagan’s Goldman Ties Won’t Hurt Supreme Court Chances, White House Says [No sh!t! --F4T]
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=172957
Date: Monday, 10-May-2010
LAURA MECKLER
Wall St Journal
May 10, 2010
WASHINGTON—The White House said Friday that Elena Kagan’s membership on an advisory panel for the securities firm Goldman Sachs Group Inc. wouldn’t disqualify her for a position on the Supreme Court.
Ms. Kagan, the solicitor general, is considered a top contender to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. President Barack Obama is expected to announce his nomination next week. An announcement could come “at any moment,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Friday.
From 2005 to 2008, Ms. Kagan was a paid member of the Research Advisory Council of Goldman Sachs Global Markets Institute, according to financial-disclosure reports she filed after being appointed to her current job. The form shows she was paid $10,000 in 2008, when she was dean of Harvard Law School.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has accused Goldman in a civil suit of failing to disclose to clients in a deal involving mortgage-related securities that a hedge fund betting on the mortgages to fail helped design the product. Goldman denies the charges.
Mr. Gibbs said the group Ms. Kagan advised had nothing to do with the activities in the SEC's case. "This is a panel that had absolutely nothing to do with the decisions that Goldman has made that they're now being investigated for," he said. Asked if there was a concern that this issue could be used against Ms. Kagan, should she be nominated, Mr. Gibbs said, "No."
Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said the Goldman advisory group met once a year for a day-long conference about public-policy issues. "The group wasn't involved in making any investment decisions for the company," she said.
Write to Laura Meckler at laura.meckler@wsj.com
Full article here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703338004575230602921084726.html
- - - - -
First Goldman Sachs gets grilled.
Then the markets tank.
Now this.
The timing kind of stinks here, don'tcha think?
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
Posted By: food4thought, Rumormillnews
Kagan’s Goldman Ties Won’t Hurt Supreme Court Chances, White House Says [No sh!t! --F4T]
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=172957
Date: Monday, 10-May-2010
LAURA MECKLER
Wall St Journal
May 10, 2010
WASHINGTON—The White House said Friday that Elena Kagan’s membership on an advisory panel for the securities firm Goldman Sachs Group Inc. wouldn’t disqualify her for a position on the Supreme Court.
Ms. Kagan, the solicitor general, is considered a top contender to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. President Barack Obama is expected to announce his nomination next week. An announcement could come “at any moment,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Friday.
From 2005 to 2008, Ms. Kagan was a paid member of the Research Advisory Council of Goldman Sachs Global Markets Institute, according to financial-disclosure reports she filed after being appointed to her current job. The form shows she was paid $10,000 in 2008, when she was dean of Harvard Law School.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has accused Goldman in a civil suit of failing to disclose to clients in a deal involving mortgage-related securities that a hedge fund betting on the mortgages to fail helped design the product. Goldman denies the charges.
Mr. Gibbs said the group Ms. Kagan advised had nothing to do with the activities in the SEC's case. "This is a panel that had absolutely nothing to do with the decisions that Goldman has made that they're now being investigated for," he said. Asked if there was a concern that this issue could be used against Ms. Kagan, should she be nominated, Mr. Gibbs said, "No."
Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said the Goldman advisory group met once a year for a day-long conference about public-policy issues. "The group wasn't involved in making any investment decisions for the company," she said.
Write to Laura Meckler at laura.meckler@wsj.com
Full article here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703338004575230602921084726.html
- - - - -
First Goldman Sachs gets grilled.
Then the markets tank.
Now this.
The timing kind of stinks here, don'tcha think?
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
2010-05-10
Bilderberg Manipulated Stock Market Crash
Vatic Note: Not much more needs to be said. They are now on the path to self indictment with the Justice dept players right behind them if they do not prosecute seriously these crimes and throw them in jail for decades.
Bilderberg Manipulated Stock Market Crash
http://www.infowars.com/bilderberg-manipulated-stock-market-crash/
NoWorldSystem
May 9, 2010
Many theories have sprung up in regards to what exactly happened on Thursday that would cause a 1,000 point drop in the DOW. Some say that it was a computer or human error that caused the trillion-dollar collapse, http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE6455ZG20100506 but few have theorized the possibility of an engineered collapse that would purposefully create more instability in the United States.
Bilderberg Manipulated Stock Market Crash
http://www.infowars.com/bilderberg-manipulated-stock-market-crash/
NoWorldSystem
May 9, 2010
Many theories have sprung up in regards to what exactly happened on Thursday that would cause a 1,000 point drop in the DOW. Some say that it was a computer or human error that caused the trillion-dollar collapse, http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE6455ZG20100506 but few have theorized the possibility of an engineered collapse that would purposefully create more instability in the United States.
Romania braces for austerity
Vatic Note: We have a regular on our blog from Romania and we wish our visitor well over there, it appears the IMF is in a hurry to bring down all these nations in order to globalize and I didn't realize Romania was on the list. That makes Greece, Spain, Portugal, the EU and and now Romania, along with others I am sure.
Romania braces for austerity http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/Money/Story/STIStory_523829.html
May 7, 2010, provided to Vatic by Gypsy, Australia
The Straights Times, a Singapore Holdings Inc. press
A romanian worker fixes communications cables on a pole downtown Bucharest. Romania will slash wages in the public sector by 25 percent and pensions by 15 percent in order to meet IMF deficit target. -- PHOTO: AFP
BUCHAREST - ROMANIA braced on Friday for a wave of protests after the president unveiled austerity cuts in public sector wages and pensions to meet a deficit target set by the IMF and avoid a Greek emergency scenario.
'This programme to cut public expenses was inevitable,' President Traian Basescu said during a press conference on Thursday after a meeting with IMF and European Union representatives in Bucharest.
Wages in the public sector are to be cut by 25 per cent, Mr Basescu said, adding that 'all salaries, including the minimum one, will be affected.' Pensions will be slashed by 15 per cent, just like unemployment benefits.
These cuts should help Romania 'avoid an extremely difficult situation, generated not so much by what is going on in its own economy, as by developments in the region,' he said, in a reference to the Greek crisis.
Romania last year pledged to trim the bloated civil service and freeze public wages and pensions in exchange of a 20-billion-euro aid package from the IMF, the European Union and the World Bank. But with reforms slower than expected, the deficit threatened to balloon beyond the 5.9 per cent target set by international lenders.
Moreover, the IMF has reduced Romania's growth forecast for 2010 from 1.3 per cent to 0.8 per cent. In 2009, its economy contracted by 7.1 per cent. Mr Basescu said the government had chosen the 'bitter pill' of slashing public spending instead of raising taxes. The cuts will be effective from June. -- REUTERS, AFP
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
Romania braces for austerity http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/Money/Story/STIStory_523829.html
May 7, 2010, provided to Vatic by Gypsy, Australia
The Straights Times, a Singapore Holdings Inc. press
A romanian worker fixes communications cables on a pole downtown Bucharest. Romania will slash wages in the public sector by 25 percent and pensions by 15 percent in order to meet IMF deficit target. -- PHOTO: AFP
BUCHAREST - ROMANIA braced on Friday for a wave of protests after the president unveiled austerity cuts in public sector wages and pensions to meet a deficit target set by the IMF and avoid a Greek emergency scenario.
'This programme to cut public expenses was inevitable,' President Traian Basescu said during a press conference on Thursday after a meeting with IMF and European Union representatives in Bucharest.
Wages in the public sector are to be cut by 25 per cent, Mr Basescu said, adding that 'all salaries, including the minimum one, will be affected.' Pensions will be slashed by 15 per cent, just like unemployment benefits.
These cuts should help Romania 'avoid an extremely difficult situation, generated not so much by what is going on in its own economy, as by developments in the region,' he said, in a reference to the Greek crisis.
Romania last year pledged to trim the bloated civil service and freeze public wages and pensions in exchange of a 20-billion-euro aid package from the IMF, the European Union and the World Bank. But with reforms slower than expected, the deficit threatened to balloon beyond the 5.9 per cent target set by international lenders.
Moreover, the IMF has reduced Romania's growth forecast for 2010 from 1.3 per cent to 0.8 per cent. In 2009, its economy contracted by 7.1 per cent. Mr Basescu said the government had chosen the 'bitter pill' of slashing public spending instead of raising taxes. The cuts will be effective from June. -- REUTERS, AFP
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
FDA WANTS TO CONTROL EVERYTHING YOUR FAMILY EATS
Vatic Master: I simply have no words. She does an excellent job of showing the arrogance and the future we have to look forward to under a non elected Globalized system. They are putting it in place as we speak, one step at a time. As she stated, if you didn't know better you would think this was a joke or something, but its not. It's heart attack serious.
FDA WANTS TO CONTROL EVERYTHING YOUR FAMILY EATS
http://www.newswithviews.com/Hannes/doreen103.htm
By Doreen Hannes
May 8, 2010
NewsWithViews.com
The Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund (FTCLDF) has achieved a tremendous coup in their suit against the FDA regarding the FDA's abuses over transport of privately owned fresh (unpasteurized) milk. In a brief the FDA filed requesting that the case against them be dismissed for lack of standing, the FDA has shown that they truly think we cannot decide what we want to eat or drink without their permission. It's amazing. One would think that we could not have possibly lived prior to the formation of the FDA just over one hundred years ago.
The legal brief by the FDA actually has the audacity to proclaim in the table of contents such things as:
There is No Right to Consume or Feed Children Any Particular Food (pg25)
There is No Generalized Right to Bodily and Physical Health. (pg26)
There is No Fundamental Right to Freedom of Contract (pg 27)
FDA’s Regulations Rationally Advance The Agency’s Public Health Mission (pg27)
Let's have a look at the first citation above… (emphasis added) beginning on page 25…
…… there is no “deeply rooted” historical tradition of unfettered access to food of all kinds….To the contrary, society’s long history of food regulation stretches back to the dietary laws of biblical times…. Modern food safety regulation in the United States has its roots in the early food laws of the American colonies, which themselves incorporated “the tradition of food regulation established in England.” …(-citing a Virginia statute passed in 1873, that “made it an offense . . . [to] knowingly, sell, supply, or bring to be manufactured . . . milk from which any cream has been taken; or milk commonly known as skimmed milk”). Comprehensive federal regulation of the food supply has been in effect at least since Congress enacted the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, and was strengthened by the passage of the FDCA in 1938. Thus, plaintiffs’ claim to a fundamental privacy interest in obtaining “foods of their own choice” for themselves and their families is without merit.
If this weren't so horribly serious it would be hilarious.
The FDA is fighting a case that builds on the desire and right to consume fresh (unpasteurized) milk, which the FDA maintains is a lethally dangerous practice, by citing a law that prohibits any change of the nature of fresh milk!
But wait, there's more….we haven't begun to scratch the surface yet:
There is No Generalized Right to Bodily and Physical Health.
Plaintiffs’ assertion of a “fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families” is similarly unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish. (Emphasis added)
I almost can not believe they were so overt in their complete and total disregard for the most fundamental human right of all, yet their own words convict them. If you cannot decide what food you wish to eat, you certainly cannot even entertain the idea that you are free! The FDA has seemingly vaunted itself to the level of parenthood over the entire nation simply by being created via an act of Congress. Like a parent telling a four year old, "Eat it! It's good for you!" Right…..Never mind the fact that the FDA has refused to do any real testing on genetically modified foods, or that they say aspartame is fine for you to drink when it becomes toxic at 85 degrees. Don't even mention that they have refused to regulate nanofoods (smaller than a molecule technologic creations) that your body cannot assimilate. Yet since you don't have any "generalized right to bodily and physical health" they can allow you to be poisoned with the continued blessing of Congress. And the likely passage of new powers to be given to the FDA will surely be helpful in giving us all "food safety" and healthful food. Right. Sorry, my sarcasm should be palpable.
According to the FDA, you don't have a right to bodily and physical health by deciding what you want to eat or don't want to eat. They know better than you, even better than God Almighty and don't you forget it. Just wait until they have expanded powers under S510 and HR2749. They will almost certainly extrapolate that authority to do home refrigerator checks on whomever they want.
In their final sentence under this section of the FDA's motion to dismiss, they really hit it out of the park:
Finally, even if such a right did exist, it would not render FDA’s regulations unconstitutional because prohibiting the interstate sale and distribution of unpasteurized milk promotes “bodily and physical health.”
So you don't have a right to it and they are promoting your non-right by their illustrious actions……Please. There are a myriad of studies attesting to the healthful benefits of fresh milk. Yes, there are concerns associated with it as well, and people should do the best they can to become educated on the subject before making a decision for themselves, but this hyperbolic 'public good' claim is farcical at the least. Particularly when the FDA has so miserably failed in their charge to inspect processing facilities and imports. A recent Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report revealed that the FDA has inspected less than 25% of the facilities they are charged with inspecting in five years. They inspect LESS than 1% of imports and allow the aforementioned biotech and nanotech foods to enter the food supply without the slightest flinch on their part. All the while they proclaim they are performing a public good.
The final affront to all that is decent in this FDA legal brief follows:
There is No Fundamental Right to Freedom of Contract
In arguing that FDA’s regulations violate substantive due process because they interfere with plaintiffs’ “contract rights” by “restricting the use of an agent to accomplish what the principal herself ought to be free to do,” plaintiffs ask this Court to resuscitate long-dead, Lochner-era jurisprudence. See Ferguson v. Skrupa, 372 U.S. 726, 729 (1963) (“There was a time when the Due Process Clause was used by this Court to strike down laws which were thought . . . incompatible with some particular economic or social philosophy,” but that doctrine “has long since been discarded). Plaintiffs anachronistic invitation should be rejected.
The excerpt above has deeper implications than one might realize at a glance. In my estimation it has a terrific amount to do with many of the obtuse rulings the state and federal courts have delivered. We are being told that we do not have the right to make agreements. Evidently, all agreements have been made for us by our superiors.
Historically, the only people without the right to contract are minors, felons and slaves. Obviously, we cannot be minors because we can never reach the age of majority wherein we are free to decide what we eat for ourselves. So we are either felons or slaves. Which category we have been relegated to is open for discussion, but we certainly are not free. To boldly state that we have no right to freedom of contract is an astonishing, and revealing, admission.
To boldly state any one of the cites above is astonishing. We have no right to decide what we eat or don't eat, we have no right to bodily and physical health, we have no right to contract, and the FDA is 'rational'. So saith the FDA…. in Case 5:10-cv-04018-MWB, Document 11-1 filed on 04/26/10.
The FDA believes that we are too stupid to swallow. Yet we are supposed to swallow that they are interested in securing a safe food supply for us, and that the FDA needs more power to regulate food on farms and we should give it to them by passing S510 or HR2749.
They'll take care of us…you betcha.
© 2010 Doreen Hannes - All Rights Reserved
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
FDA WANTS TO CONTROL EVERYTHING YOUR FAMILY EATS
http://www.newswithviews.com/Hannes/doreen103.htm
By Doreen Hannes
May 8, 2010
NewsWithViews.com
The Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund (FTCLDF) has achieved a tremendous coup in their suit against the FDA regarding the FDA's abuses over transport of privately owned fresh (unpasteurized) milk. In a brief the FDA filed requesting that the case against them be dismissed for lack of standing, the FDA has shown that they truly think we cannot decide what we want to eat or drink without their permission. It's amazing. One would think that we could not have possibly lived prior to the formation of the FDA just over one hundred years ago.
The legal brief by the FDA actually has the audacity to proclaim in the table of contents such things as:
There is No Right to Consume or Feed Children Any Particular Food (pg25)
There is No Generalized Right to Bodily and Physical Health. (pg26)
There is No Fundamental Right to Freedom of Contract (pg 27)
FDA’s Regulations Rationally Advance The Agency’s Public Health Mission (pg27)
Let's have a look at the first citation above… (emphasis added) beginning on page 25…
…… there is no “deeply rooted” historical tradition of unfettered access to food of all kinds….To the contrary, society’s long history of food regulation stretches back to the dietary laws of biblical times…. Modern food safety regulation in the United States has its roots in the early food laws of the American colonies, which themselves incorporated “the tradition of food regulation established in England.” …(-citing a Virginia statute passed in 1873, that “made it an offense . . . [to] knowingly, sell, supply, or bring to be manufactured . . . milk from which any cream has been taken; or milk commonly known as skimmed milk”). Comprehensive federal regulation of the food supply has been in effect at least since Congress enacted the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, and was strengthened by the passage of the FDCA in 1938. Thus, plaintiffs’ claim to a fundamental privacy interest in obtaining “foods of their own choice” for themselves and their families is without merit.
If this weren't so horribly serious it would be hilarious.
The FDA is fighting a case that builds on the desire and right to consume fresh (unpasteurized) milk, which the FDA maintains is a lethally dangerous practice, by citing a law that prohibits any change of the nature of fresh milk!
But wait, there's more….we haven't begun to scratch the surface yet:
There is No Generalized Right to Bodily and Physical Health.
Plaintiffs’ assertion of a “fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families” is similarly unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish. (Emphasis added)
I almost can not believe they were so overt in their complete and total disregard for the most fundamental human right of all, yet their own words convict them. If you cannot decide what food you wish to eat, you certainly cannot even entertain the idea that you are free! The FDA has seemingly vaunted itself to the level of parenthood over the entire nation simply by being created via an act of Congress. Like a parent telling a four year old, "Eat it! It's good for you!" Right…..Never mind the fact that the FDA has refused to do any real testing on genetically modified foods, or that they say aspartame is fine for you to drink when it becomes toxic at 85 degrees. Don't even mention that they have refused to regulate nanofoods (smaller than a molecule technologic creations) that your body cannot assimilate. Yet since you don't have any "generalized right to bodily and physical health" they can allow you to be poisoned with the continued blessing of Congress. And the likely passage of new powers to be given to the FDA will surely be helpful in giving us all "food safety" and healthful food. Right. Sorry, my sarcasm should be palpable.
According to the FDA, you don't have a right to bodily and physical health by deciding what you want to eat or don't want to eat. They know better than you, even better than God Almighty and don't you forget it. Just wait until they have expanded powers under S510 and HR2749. They will almost certainly extrapolate that authority to do home refrigerator checks on whomever they want.
In their final sentence under this section of the FDA's motion to dismiss, they really hit it out of the park:
Finally, even if such a right did exist, it would not render FDA’s regulations unconstitutional because prohibiting the interstate sale and distribution of unpasteurized milk promotes “bodily and physical health.”
So you don't have a right to it and they are promoting your non-right by their illustrious actions……Please. There are a myriad of studies attesting to the healthful benefits of fresh milk. Yes, there are concerns associated with it as well, and people should do the best they can to become educated on the subject before making a decision for themselves, but this hyperbolic 'public good' claim is farcical at the least. Particularly when the FDA has so miserably failed in their charge to inspect processing facilities and imports. A recent Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report revealed that the FDA has inspected less than 25% of the facilities they are charged with inspecting in five years. They inspect LESS than 1% of imports and allow the aforementioned biotech and nanotech foods to enter the food supply without the slightest flinch on their part. All the while they proclaim they are performing a public good.
The final affront to all that is decent in this FDA legal brief follows:
There is No Fundamental Right to Freedom of Contract
In arguing that FDA’s regulations violate substantive due process because they interfere with plaintiffs’ “contract rights” by “restricting the use of an agent to accomplish what the principal herself ought to be free to do,” plaintiffs ask this Court to resuscitate long-dead, Lochner-era jurisprudence. See Ferguson v. Skrupa, 372 U.S. 726, 729 (1963) (“There was a time when the Due Process Clause was used by this Court to strike down laws which were thought . . . incompatible with some particular economic or social philosophy,” but that doctrine “has long since been discarded). Plaintiffs anachronistic invitation should be rejected.
The excerpt above has deeper implications than one might realize at a glance. In my estimation it has a terrific amount to do with many of the obtuse rulings the state and federal courts have delivered. We are being told that we do not have the right to make agreements. Evidently, all agreements have been made for us by our superiors.
Historically, the only people without the right to contract are minors, felons and slaves. Obviously, we cannot be minors because we can never reach the age of majority wherein we are free to decide what we eat for ourselves. So we are either felons or slaves. Which category we have been relegated to is open for discussion, but we certainly are not free. To boldly state that we have no right to freedom of contract is an astonishing, and revealing, admission.
To boldly state any one of the cites above is astonishing. We have no right to decide what we eat or don't eat, we have no right to bodily and physical health, we have no right to contract, and the FDA is 'rational'. So saith the FDA…. in Case 5:10-cv-04018-MWB, Document 11-1 filed on 04/26/10.
The FDA believes that we are too stupid to swallow. Yet we are supposed to swallow that they are interested in securing a safe food supply for us, and that the FDA needs more power to regulate food on farms and we should give it to them by passing S510 or HR2749.
They'll take care of us…you betcha.
© 2010 Doreen Hannes - All Rights Reserved
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
Federal Reserve opens credit line to Europe
Vatic Note: Can someone please point out where this was authorized by Congress??? Was this included in the TARP bill? I somehow missed the legal authorization for our fed to print money and dish it out to other foreign central private banks owned by Rothschild? This also looks like the Globalizing we were warned about by saying there was a crisis and the only way to fix it was for the globe to come together on the economic crisis, which then is another piece by piece globalizing different sectors. WHO for health, like the pandemic and vaccines, which turned out to be a disaster, and NATO, now fighting in afghanistan etc, and then Codex for natural remedies etc.
Federal Reserve opens credit line to Europe
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100510/ap_on_bi_ge/us_europe_financial_crisis_fed/print
By JEANNINE AVERSA, AP Economics Writer Jeannine Aversa, Ap Economics Writer 1 min ago
WASHINGTON – The Federal Reserve on Sunday opened a program to ship U.S. dollars to Europe in a move to head off a broader financial crisis on the continent.
Other central banks, including the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank, are also involved in the effort.
The action reopens a program put in place during the 2008 global financial crisis. Under the program, dollars are shipped overseas through the foreign central banks. In turn, these central banks can lend the dollars out to banks in their home countries that are in need of dollar funding to prevent the European crisis from spreading further.
The Fed said action is being taken "in response to the reemergence of strains in U.S. dollar short-term funding markets in Europe."
The debt crisis first erupted in Greece and there are fears that it could spread to Spain, Portugal and other European countries. The crisis has pushed up demand for the U.S. dollar and has weakened the value of the euro, the currency used by 16 European countries.
The Fed said the action was being taken to "prevent the spread of strains to other markets and financial centers."
The Bank of Japan will be considering similar action soon, the Fed said.
The so-called "swap" line with the Bank of Canada provides up to $30 billion. Figures weren't provided for the other central banks. The arrangements were authorized through January 2011.
The Fed had wound down these crisis-era programs with other central banks in February, along with other emergency programs to get lending flowing more freely again and return stability to financial markets.
Copyright © 2010 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
Federal Reserve opens credit line to Europe
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100510/ap_on_bi_ge/us_europe_financial_crisis_fed/print
By JEANNINE AVERSA, AP Economics Writer Jeannine Aversa, Ap Economics Writer 1 min ago
WASHINGTON – The Federal Reserve on Sunday opened a program to ship U.S. dollars to Europe in a move to head off a broader financial crisis on the continent.
Other central banks, including the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank, are also involved in the effort.
The action reopens a program put in place during the 2008 global financial crisis. Under the program, dollars are shipped overseas through the foreign central banks. In turn, these central banks can lend the dollars out to banks in their home countries that are in need of dollar funding to prevent the European crisis from spreading further.
The Fed said action is being taken "in response to the reemergence of strains in U.S. dollar short-term funding markets in Europe."
The debt crisis first erupted in Greece and there are fears that it could spread to Spain, Portugal and other European countries. The crisis has pushed up demand for the U.S. dollar and has weakened the value of the euro, the currency used by 16 European countries.
The Fed said the action was being taken to "prevent the spread of strains to other markets and financial centers."
The Bank of Japan will be considering similar action soon, the Fed said.
The so-called "swap" line with the Bank of Canada provides up to $30 billion. Figures weren't provided for the other central banks. The arrangements were authorized through January 2011.
The Fed had wound down these crisis-era programs with other central banks in February, along with other emergency programs to get lending flowing more freely again and return stability to financial markets.
Copyright © 2010 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
Israeli Prof To Create World's First Artificial Mind - Part II of the mind control series
Vatic Master: The control of such technology and the possibility this could be used to do evil instead of good, should be of major concern. In doing the research on this series I realized that somethings are better left undone due to the potential evil that can be wrought by such control over such creations. So far, we don't have to worry about it, but they believe they will do this by the end of the this next decade and that does give us time to deal with the ethics and potential consequences of this kind of power in the hands of a few. We have witnessed just such power in other areas of our lives globally and discovered just how perverse others can be who have no concept of morality, integrity and personal greed of unprecedented depth and breadth. If we have learned nothing else this past decade, its that we must be ahead of the curve on issues such as this one and deal with it well before it becomes our reality. I hate quoting Movies, but we have seen the fantasy futuristic movie called "The Matrix" and the digital beings in the matrix lacked any conscience whatsoever and humanity became the slave to the superior machines/minds. Notice he does not mention, that I saw, any indication of how a "conscience" was going to be programed into just such a brain. If nothing else, this was a fascinating read. There is more to this series on the Mind such as Project Blue Beam which we will cover in subsequent blogs. So stay tuned and follow this issue over the next few years.
Also remember that our DNA has a language and that has a reason for existing. I am curious how he intends to integrate all of that into this creature. I would want to know a lot more about it before taking such a risk. My own imagination is a pandora's box just thinking of all the ways mind control can be advanced with this technology. Imagine it!!!!!
Israeli Prof To Create World's First Artificial Mind
http://www.indiatvnews.com/news_print.php?id=214&smod=entertainment&mod=3
by Admin India TV News
South-African Israeli Professor Henry Markram, a doctor-turned-computer engineer has announced his team would create the world’s first artificial conscious and intelligent mind by 2018, reports The Mail.
His words staggered the erudite audience gathered at a technology conference in Oxford last summer.
On the shore of Lake Geneva, this brilliant, eccentric scientist is building an artificial mind. A Swiss - it could only be Swiss - precision- engineered mind, made of silicon, gold and copper.
The end result will be a creature, if we can call it that, which its maker believes within a decade may be able to think, feel and even fall in love.
Professor Markram's 'Blue Brain' project, must rank as one of the most extraordinary endeavours in scientific history.
If this 47-year-old South-African Israeli is successful, then the world will witness the first of the Frankensteins. The world will be on the verge of realising an age-old fantasy, one first imagined when an adolescent Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein, her tale of an artificial monster brought to life - a story written, quite coincidentally, just a few miles from where this extraordinary experiment is now taking place.
Success will bring with it philosophical, moral and ethical conundrums of the highest order, and may force us to confront what it means to be human.
But Professor Markram thinks his artificial mind will render vivisection obsolete, conquer insanity and even improve our intelligence and ability to learn.
What Markram's project amounts to is an audacious attempt to build a computerised copy of a brain - starting with a rat's brain, then progressing to a human brain - inside one of the world's most powerful computers.
This, it is hoped, will bring into being a sentient mind that will be able to think, reason, express will, lay down memories and perhaps even experience love, anger, sadness, pain and joy.
'We will do it by 2018,' says the professor confidently. 'We need a lot of money, but I am getting it. There are few scientists in the world with the resources I have at my disposal.'
There is, inevitably, scepticism. But even Markram's critics mostly accept that he is on to something and, most importantly, that he has the money.
Tens of millions of euros are flooding into his laboratory at the Brain Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne - paymasters include the Swiss government, the EU and private backers, including the computer giant IBM. Artificial minds are, it seems, big business.
The human brain is the most complex object in the universe. But Markram insists that the latest supercomputers will soon have its measure.
Professor Markram believes that if his 'Blue Brain' project is successful, it will render vivisection obsolete
At his glittering laboratories, it became clear that this is certainly no ordinary scientific endeavour. In fact, Markram's department looks like the interior of the Starship Enterprise, and is full of toys that would make James Bond's Q blush with envy.
But how on earth do you build a brain in a computer? And haven't scientists been trying to do that build an electronic brain for decades - without success?
To understand the sheer importance of what Blue Brain is, it is helpful to understand, first, what it is not.
Dr Markram is not trying to build the kind of clanking robot servant beloved of countless sci-fi movies.
Real robots may be able to walk and talk and are based around computers that are 'taught' to behave like humans, but they are, in the end, no more intelligent than dishwashers. Markram dismisses these toys as 'archaic'.
Instead, Markram is building what he hopes will be a real person, or at least the most important and complex part of a real person - its mind.
And so instead of trying to copy what a brain does, by teaching a computer to play chess, climb stairs and so on, he has started at the bottom, with the biological brain itself.
Our brains are full of nerve cells called neurons, which communicate with one another using minuscule electrical impulses.
The project literally takes apart actual brains cell by cell, using what amounts to extremely intricate dissecting techniques, analyses the billions of connections between the cells, and then plots these connections into a computer.
The upshot is, in effect, a blueprint or carbon copy of a brain, rendered in software rather than flesh and blood. The idea is that by building a model of a real brain, it might - just might - begin to behave like the real thing.
To demonstrate how he is achieving this, Markram shows me a machine that resembles an infernal torture engine; a wheel about 2ft across with a dozen ultra-fine glass 'spokes' aimed at the centre.
It is here that tiny slivers of rat brain are dissected, using tools finer than a human hair. Their interconnections are then mapped and turned into computer code.
Professor Markram is adamant the experiment will not result in a stereotypical Frankenstein, like the one seen here in 1970 film The Horror of Frankenstein
A bucket full of slop lies next to the gleaming high-techery. That's where the bits of old rat brain go - a gruesome reminder that amid this is a project based upon flesh and blood.
So far, Markram's supercomputer - an IBM Blue Gene - is able, using the information gleaned from the slivers of real brain tissue, to simulate the workings of about 10,000 neurones, amounting to a single rat's 'neocortical column' - the part of a brain believed to be the centre of conscious thought.
That, says Markram, is the hard part. To go further, he is going to need a bigger computer.
Using just 30 watts of electricity - enough to power a dim light bulb - our brains can outperform by a factor of a million or more even the mighty Blue Gene computer. But replicating a whole real brain is 'entirely impossible today', Markram says.
Even the next stage - a complete rat brain - needs a £200million, vastly more efficient supercomputer.
Then what? 'We need a billion-dollar machine, custom-built. That could do a human brain.'
But computing power is increasing exponentially and it is only a matter of time before suitable hardware is available.
'We will get there,' says Markram confidently.
In fact, he believes that he will have a computer sufficiently powerful to deal with all the data and simulate a human brain before the end of this decade.
The result? Perhaps a mind, a conscious, sentient being, able to learn and make autonomous decisions. It is a startling possibility.
When faced with such extraordinary claims, one must first ask the question: 'Is he mad?'
Markram is not mad, but he is certainly unsettling. He comes across like a combination of Victorian gentleman scientist and New Age guru.
'You have to understand physics, the structure of the universe and philosophy,' he says, theatrically.
He talks about humans 'not reaching their potential', and of his conviction that more of us have the capacity for genius than we think.
He believes his artificial mind could show us how to exploit the untapped potential in our own minds. If we create a being more intelligent than us, maybe it could teach us how to catch up.
The best evidence that Markram is not crazy is that he gets his hands dirty. He knows his way around his machines and knows one end of a brain cell from another.
The principles underlying his work are firmly rooted in the scientific mainstream.
He believes that the deepest and most fundamental properties of being human - thoughts, emotions, the mysterious feeling of self-awareness - arise from trillions of electrochemical interactions that take place in the lump of grey jelly in our heads.
He believes there is no mysterious 'soul' that gives rise to the feeling of self. On the contrary, he insists that this results from physical processes inside our skulls.
Of course, consciousness is one of the deepest scientific mysteries. How do millions of tiny electrical impulses in our heads give rise to the feeling of self, of pain, of love? No one knows.
But if Markram is right, this doesn't matter. He believes that consciousness is probably something that simply 'emerges' given a sufficient degree of organised complexity.
Imagine it this way: think of the marvellous patterns that emerge when a flock of starlings swoops in unison at dusk.
Thousands of birds are interacting to create a shape that resembles a single unified entity with a life of its own. Markram believes that this is how consciousness might emerge - from billions of separate brain cells combining to create a single sentient mind.
But what of the problems such an invention could generate? What if the machine makes demands? What if it begs you not to turn it off, or leave it alone at night?
'Maybe you will have to treat it like a child. Sometimes I will have to say to my child: "I have to go, sorry," ' he explains.
Indeed, the artificial brain would throw up a host of moral issues. Could you really use an artificial mind, which behaves like a real mind, to perform experiments on?
One of the key hopes for Markram's artificial mind is that it could be used for medical testing. But would it be right to cause a brain - even an artificial one - any 'pain'?
'If you accept that building a simulation is the same as building a real brain, then we have real problems,' he concedes.
'The process of building this is going to change society. We will have ethical problems that are unimaginable to us. If I saw signs of suffering I would stop,' Markram says.
But he also admits that his machines could be used for evil purposes - by the military, for instance, to create futuristic killing machines.
For this reason, in an extremely unusual move for a publicly funded scientist, he has decided to keep some of the computer coding for the Blue Brain project secret.
Markram's team is, in fact, not the only one trying to build an artificial brain, although he is probably in the lead. At the University of Manchester, the 'Brainbox' project is also attempting to model a human mind.
Dr David Lester, one of the project's lead scientists, says that they are effectively in a race with Markram, a race they will have to win with cunning rather than cash.
'We've got £4million,' Lester says. 'Blue Brain has serious funding from the Swiss government and IBM. Henry Markram is to be taken seriously.'
Manchester is hoping it is possible to simplify key elements of the brain and thus dramatically reduce the computation power needed to replicate them.
Others doubt Markham can ever succeed. Imperial College professor Igor Aleksander claims that while Markram can build a copy of a human brain, it will be 'like an empty bucket', incapable of consciousness.
And, as Dr Lester points out, 'a newly minted real human brain can't do very much except lie on the floor and gurgle'. Indeed, Professor Markram may end up creating the world's most expensive baby.
But if Markram turns his machine on in 2018, and it utters the famous declaration that underpins Western philosophy, 'I think, therefore I am', he will have confounded his critics.
And his ambition is by no means impossible. In the past year, models of a rat brain produced totally unexpected 'brainwave patterns' in the computer software. Is it possible that, for a few seconds maybe, a fleeting rat-like consciousness emerged?
'Perhaps,' Markram says. It is not much, but if a rat, then why not a man?
During my meeting I tried to avoid bringing up the name of the most famous (fictional) creator of artificial life, on the grounds of taste. But in the end, I had to mention him.
'Yes, well, Dr Frankenstein. People have made that point,' Markram says with a thin smile.
Frankenstein's experiment, of course, went rather horribly wrong. And that was one man, with his monster made from bits of old corpse.
A glittering machine brain, perhaps many times more intelligent than our own and created by one of the best-equipped laboratories in the world, carries, perhaps, even more potential for evil, as well as good.
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
Also remember that our DNA has a language and that has a reason for existing. I am curious how he intends to integrate all of that into this creature. I would want to know a lot more about it before taking such a risk. My own imagination is a pandora's box just thinking of all the ways mind control can be advanced with this technology. Imagine it!!!!!
Israeli Prof To Create World's First Artificial Mind
http://www.indiatvnews.com/news_print.php?id=214&smod=entertainment&mod=3
by Admin India TV News
South-African Israeli Professor Henry Markram, a doctor-turned-computer engineer has announced his team would create the world’s first artificial conscious and intelligent mind by 2018, reports The Mail.
His words staggered the erudite audience gathered at a technology conference in Oxford last summer.
On the shore of Lake Geneva, this brilliant, eccentric scientist is building an artificial mind. A Swiss - it could only be Swiss - precision- engineered mind, made of silicon, gold and copper.
The end result will be a creature, if we can call it that, which its maker believes within a decade may be able to think, feel and even fall in love.
Professor Markram's 'Blue Brain' project, must rank as one of the most extraordinary endeavours in scientific history.
If this 47-year-old South-African Israeli is successful, then the world will witness the first of the Frankensteins. The world will be on the verge of realising an age-old fantasy, one first imagined when an adolescent Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein, her tale of an artificial monster brought to life - a story written, quite coincidentally, just a few miles from where this extraordinary experiment is now taking place.
Success will bring with it philosophical, moral and ethical conundrums of the highest order, and may force us to confront what it means to be human.
But Professor Markram thinks his artificial mind will render vivisection obsolete, conquer insanity and even improve our intelligence and ability to learn.
What Markram's project amounts to is an audacious attempt to build a computerised copy of a brain - starting with a rat's brain, then progressing to a human brain - inside one of the world's most powerful computers.
This, it is hoped, will bring into being a sentient mind that will be able to think, reason, express will, lay down memories and perhaps even experience love, anger, sadness, pain and joy.
'We will do it by 2018,' says the professor confidently. 'We need a lot of money, but I am getting it. There are few scientists in the world with the resources I have at my disposal.'
There is, inevitably, scepticism. But even Markram's critics mostly accept that he is on to something and, most importantly, that he has the money.
Tens of millions of euros are flooding into his laboratory at the Brain Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne - paymasters include the Swiss government, the EU and private backers, including the computer giant IBM. Artificial minds are, it seems, big business.
The human brain is the most complex object in the universe. But Markram insists that the latest supercomputers will soon have its measure.
Professor Markram believes that if his 'Blue Brain' project is successful, it will render vivisection obsolete
At his glittering laboratories, it became clear that this is certainly no ordinary scientific endeavour. In fact, Markram's department looks like the interior of the Starship Enterprise, and is full of toys that would make James Bond's Q blush with envy.
But how on earth do you build a brain in a computer? And haven't scientists been trying to do that build an electronic brain for decades - without success?
To understand the sheer importance of what Blue Brain is, it is helpful to understand, first, what it is not.
Dr Markram is not trying to build the kind of clanking robot servant beloved of countless sci-fi movies.
Real robots may be able to walk and talk and are based around computers that are 'taught' to behave like humans, but they are, in the end, no more intelligent than dishwashers. Markram dismisses these toys as 'archaic'.
Instead, Markram is building what he hopes will be a real person, or at least the most important and complex part of a real person - its mind.
And so instead of trying to copy what a brain does, by teaching a computer to play chess, climb stairs and so on, he has started at the bottom, with the biological brain itself.
Our brains are full of nerve cells called neurons, which communicate with one another using minuscule electrical impulses.
The project literally takes apart actual brains cell by cell, using what amounts to extremely intricate dissecting techniques, analyses the billions of connections between the cells, and then plots these connections into a computer.
The upshot is, in effect, a blueprint or carbon copy of a brain, rendered in software rather than flesh and blood. The idea is that by building a model of a real brain, it might - just might - begin to behave like the real thing.
To demonstrate how he is achieving this, Markram shows me a machine that resembles an infernal torture engine; a wheel about 2ft across with a dozen ultra-fine glass 'spokes' aimed at the centre.
It is here that tiny slivers of rat brain are dissected, using tools finer than a human hair. Their interconnections are then mapped and turned into computer code.
Professor Markram is adamant the experiment will not result in a stereotypical Frankenstein, like the one seen here in 1970 film The Horror of Frankenstein
A bucket full of slop lies next to the gleaming high-techery. That's where the bits of old rat brain go - a gruesome reminder that amid this is a project based upon flesh and blood.
So far, Markram's supercomputer - an IBM Blue Gene - is able, using the information gleaned from the slivers of real brain tissue, to simulate the workings of about 10,000 neurones, amounting to a single rat's 'neocortical column' - the part of a brain believed to be the centre of conscious thought.
That, says Markram, is the hard part. To go further, he is going to need a bigger computer.
Using just 30 watts of electricity - enough to power a dim light bulb - our brains can outperform by a factor of a million or more even the mighty Blue Gene computer. But replicating a whole real brain is 'entirely impossible today', Markram says.
Even the next stage - a complete rat brain - needs a £200million, vastly more efficient supercomputer.
Then what? 'We need a billion-dollar machine, custom-built. That could do a human brain.'
But computing power is increasing exponentially and it is only a matter of time before suitable hardware is available.
'We will get there,' says Markram confidently.
In fact, he believes that he will have a computer sufficiently powerful to deal with all the data and simulate a human brain before the end of this decade.
The result? Perhaps a mind, a conscious, sentient being, able to learn and make autonomous decisions. It is a startling possibility.
When faced with such extraordinary claims, one must first ask the question: 'Is he mad?'
Markram is not mad, but he is certainly unsettling. He comes across like a combination of Victorian gentleman scientist and New Age guru.
'You have to understand physics, the structure of the universe and philosophy,' he says, theatrically.
He talks about humans 'not reaching their potential', and of his conviction that more of us have the capacity for genius than we think.
He believes his artificial mind could show us how to exploit the untapped potential in our own minds. If we create a being more intelligent than us, maybe it could teach us how to catch up.
The best evidence that Markram is not crazy is that he gets his hands dirty. He knows his way around his machines and knows one end of a brain cell from another.
The principles underlying his work are firmly rooted in the scientific mainstream.
He believes that the deepest and most fundamental properties of being human - thoughts, emotions, the mysterious feeling of self-awareness - arise from trillions of electrochemical interactions that take place in the lump of grey jelly in our heads.
He believes there is no mysterious 'soul' that gives rise to the feeling of self. On the contrary, he insists that this results from physical processes inside our skulls.
Of course, consciousness is one of the deepest scientific mysteries. How do millions of tiny electrical impulses in our heads give rise to the feeling of self, of pain, of love? No one knows.
But if Markram is right, this doesn't matter. He believes that consciousness is probably something that simply 'emerges' given a sufficient degree of organised complexity.
Imagine it this way: think of the marvellous patterns that emerge when a flock of starlings swoops in unison at dusk.
Thousands of birds are interacting to create a shape that resembles a single unified entity with a life of its own. Markram believes that this is how consciousness might emerge - from billions of separate brain cells combining to create a single sentient mind.
But what of the problems such an invention could generate? What if the machine makes demands? What if it begs you not to turn it off, or leave it alone at night?
'Maybe you will have to treat it like a child. Sometimes I will have to say to my child: "I have to go, sorry," ' he explains.
Indeed, the artificial brain would throw up a host of moral issues. Could you really use an artificial mind, which behaves like a real mind, to perform experiments on?
One of the key hopes for Markram's artificial mind is that it could be used for medical testing. But would it be right to cause a brain - even an artificial one - any 'pain'?
'If you accept that building a simulation is the same as building a real brain, then we have real problems,' he concedes.
'The process of building this is going to change society. We will have ethical problems that are unimaginable to us. If I saw signs of suffering I would stop,' Markram says.
But he also admits that his machines could be used for evil purposes - by the military, for instance, to create futuristic killing machines.
For this reason, in an extremely unusual move for a publicly funded scientist, he has decided to keep some of the computer coding for the Blue Brain project secret.
Markram's team is, in fact, not the only one trying to build an artificial brain, although he is probably in the lead. At the University of Manchester, the 'Brainbox' project is also attempting to model a human mind.
Dr David Lester, one of the project's lead scientists, says that they are effectively in a race with Markram, a race they will have to win with cunning rather than cash.
'We've got £4million,' Lester says. 'Blue Brain has serious funding from the Swiss government and IBM. Henry Markram is to be taken seriously.'
Manchester is hoping it is possible to simplify key elements of the brain and thus dramatically reduce the computation power needed to replicate them.
Others doubt Markham can ever succeed. Imperial College professor Igor Aleksander claims that while Markram can build a copy of a human brain, it will be 'like an empty bucket', incapable of consciousness.
And, as Dr Lester points out, 'a newly minted real human brain can't do very much except lie on the floor and gurgle'. Indeed, Professor Markram may end up creating the world's most expensive baby.
But if Markram turns his machine on in 2018, and it utters the famous declaration that underpins Western philosophy, 'I think, therefore I am', he will have confounded his critics.
And his ambition is by no means impossible. In the past year, models of a rat brain produced totally unexpected 'brainwave patterns' in the computer software. Is it possible that, for a few seconds maybe, a fleeting rat-like consciousness emerged?
'Perhaps,' Markram says. It is not much, but if a rat, then why not a man?
During my meeting I tried to avoid bringing up the name of the most famous (fictional) creator of artificial life, on the grounds of taste. But in the end, I had to mention him.
'Yes, well, Dr Frankenstein. People have made that point,' Markram says with a thin smile.
Frankenstein's experiment, of course, went rather horribly wrong. And that was one man, with his monster made from bits of old corpse.
A glittering machine brain, perhaps many times more intelligent than our own and created by one of the best-equipped laboratories in the world, carries, perhaps, even more potential for evil, as well as good.
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
2010-05-09
Depleted uranium is destroying life
Vatic Note: Pay special attention to what he is saying about how we here in the states are being affected by the same DU poisoning both in returning soldiers coming home, and in San Francisco by Bechtels (Nancy Pelosi's money machine) labs that are releasing fall out from Livermore labs and also Berkeley national labs. So whatever we (government) is doing elsewhere, its also beginning here. We need to face it and the only solution I can think of (your welcome to contribute to the "solutions" side of this equation) is to confront the truth of it, and decide which we want more.... fall out poisoning for us and our children and grandchildren, or clean air and no fall out? Once we decide, then its clear we have to act. Could that be what keeps us from truly "wanting to know"? This was an execellent write up on the issue with a lot more info from experts in the field and thus its very educational and can be passed around to your family, friends and neighbors.
Solution: First step is to pass this around to every home and registered voter in Nancy Pelosi's district and do so along with a petition to make them liable for all associated illnesses in her district and to demand she provide legislation to make the fall out results criminally illegal with jail time for violations. Then:
Identify the key management team of the labs in question and the bechtel management company and then send them an official notice, notorized with the signatures in the thousands of San francisco residents in Nancy Pelosi's district who signed that petition and request for criminalizing the release of said fallout. Its an official act of putting them on notice and giving them an opportunity to correct the problem, but also shows intent if they do not, which adds significantly to the penalty phase of award in any cases after that notification.
Depleted uranium is destroying life
http://www.rebelnews.org/opinion/war/211186-depleted-uranium-is-destroying-life
Thursday, 15 April 2010 00:02 Jerry Mazza, Rebel News
I have long heard sound-bites or seen passages about depleted uranium that sounded more than dire. But given my own cognitive dissonance, and the fact that I was writing about many other dire topics at the time, I filed depleted uranium in my cranium for future investigation, which, given the human aversion to bad news, could have been never.
But never was over in an exchange of emails about nuclear missiles in Israel's arsenal. I received some startling nuclear information from San Francisco Bay View writer, Bob Nichols. It was an illumination long-time coming.
I started at the end of Bob's article to find out who he was. His credits read "Bob Nichols is a Project Censored Award winning writer and a San Francisco Bay View correspondent. A former bomb maker in a U.S. government factory in rural Oklahoma, he reports on the two nuclear weapons labs in the Bay Area. He can be reached at duweapons@gmail.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ." His credentials were impressive and so was the article he sent, PTSD, infertility and other consequences of war.
In several, follow-up phone calls, Bob, in his gentle, mid-western drawl, filled me in on the picture of the imposing disasters caused by depleted uranium in Central Asia and in the Mid-East, in which hundreds of thousands of tons of depleted uranium had been dropped in the past 20 years.
Bob pointed out that San Francisco itself was receiving fallout from the Berkeley National [Nuclear Weapons] Lab, and from the Livermore Laboratory in the South Bay area, managed by San Francisco-based Bechtel, a nuclear-capable corporation, boosted by San Francisco's "Nuclear Nancy' Pelosi and her friends at Bechtel" as Bob commented. The University of California at Berkeley now earns more from weapons than from students.
The San Francisco facilities have been part of the Manhattan Project, operating from pre-1945, contributing a dangerous amount of radiation to the area with weapons testing and leakages of material into the Bay. It was for this reason, Nichols told me, that he still lives in Oklahoma, though he has a real love affair with San Francisco. Yet he fears for its human and natural safety due to poisoning by the nuclear projects.
In fact, he bemoaned the occasion of "Fleet Week," "the happy boys sent off to war by Mayor Gavin Newsom's Fleet Week - an event responsible for a big chunk of the enlistments in the US Navy and marines - who will probably come in deadly contact with another Bay Area product: depleted uranium, aka DU, and weaponized ceramic uranium oxide gas and aerosols, UO."
As he wrote, "Iraq and virtually all the rest of the Middle East and Central Asia have been continually dosed for almost 20 years with thousands of tons of weaponized ceramic uranium oxide gas, also known as 'depleted uranium.
"When used as directed, the depleted uranium bullets, shells and bombs become a lethal uranium gas or aerosol. The poison uranium oxide gas aerosols last for billions of years and never stop indiscriminately maiming and killing, which is a war crime in itself."
That was shocking to hear. So I did a bit of research to corroborate Bob's claims and came upon a number of YouTube pieces, one particularly powerful ten-minute piece called Depleted Uranium - The Ultimate Dirty Bomb. http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/15.html
It features Dr. Doug Rokke, US Army Health Physicist and Nuclear Medicine Sciences Officer as well as the internationally known Geological Scientist and International Radiation Expert Leuren Moret. Please take ten minutes to listen to it.
Dr. Rokke explains that as far back as 1973 [the Yom Kippur War], radioactive materials carpeted Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. He mentions too that DU radioactive contamination makes food and water unusable. He explains how the huge jolts of electrical energy in a small amount of depleted uranium can destroy human cells.
Most notably, Dr. Rooke estimates that from October/November 1991 in Gulf War 1, 160,000 US soldiers were permanently disabled by US use of some 340 tons of depleted uranium. Ten years later that number had climbed to 221,000 and left 10,000 dead. Dr. Rooke, a victim himself of the lack of proper post-battle examinations for DU poisoning, spoke with a tempered but deliberate anger and frustration at the damage done to all, including civilian populations, combatants, and himself.
Lauren Moret pointed out that as far back as 1943 depleted uranium usage, aka "poison gas warfare" was encouraged in a government memo shown on screen. She also tells us that the UN Human Rights Commission declared depleted uranium as illegal. The ultimate irony she points out is that in 2003 we attacked Iraq and Saddam Hussein for possessing Weapons of Mass Destruction, which turned out not to be true. Yet when we attacked Iraq in 2003, we dropped between 1000 to 2000 tons of depleted uranium, a known Weapon of Mass Nuclear Destruction in a three-week period. This is a war crime unto itself.
This all jibed with Bob Nichol's writings, especially the fact that the damage of depleted uranium is forever, lasting billions of years in the atmosphere, the earth and water, as it lasts on clothing, the skin, the human body, destroying vital organs, causing birth defects of all kinds, cancers, infertility, "damage to the bones, brains, testicles and ovaries, which applies to civilians and animals as well.
As Nichols writes, "Uranium munitions, containing weaponized uranium oxide gas and aerosols, are used by presidential order in US war zones. Privates and corporals do not decide to use these poisonous uranium gas weapons on their own. No, that order comes from the American president."
"Uranium oxide gas weapons are called 'genocidal weapons.' They maim and kill millions of people, their animals and their land. The actual targets by the US Expeditionary Forces are the populations of Central Asia and the Middle East, about a billion people." Remember that US forces themselves are the victims as well of these weapons, the worst imaginable blowback.
In fact, Nichols points us towards a "Middle Eastern country that requires all 18-year olds to join national service for several years. This country even has a roughly comparable health care system to America for a population of 7,233,701, according to the CIA World Factbook. This country is Israel."
Bob sent along an article from the noted Israeli paper, Haaretz, dated 3/21/2010: Study: Quality of Israeli sperm down 40% in past decade. http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/study-quality-of-israeli-sperm-down-40-in-past-decade-1.275772 Bob claimed the number was fudged somewhat because from 2004-2008 there was a 10 million sperm a year drop-off. Taken to 2015, all of the nation would be infertile. The motility of the tested sperm also indicated a drop-off. These samples were taken from healthy young people who do not smoke.
"In Israel, too," Haaretz writes, a study was published about a year ago, showing an increase of about 30 percent in defects in the male reproductive system. In addition, in the past decade, the number of cases of testicular cancer has doubled."
Haaretz goes on to attribute the sperm drop to "chemicals in the ground and in drinking water...as impacting hormone levels and secondary sexual characteristics." The paragraph concludes with "Studies published in Britain have highlighted a clear connection between continual decline in sperm counts and chemicals in the environment."
In the next to last paragraph of Bob Nichols' article, he writes of the Israeli situation, "Since 20 percent live sperm is considered to be the beginning of infertility, Israel will be sterile in less than 10 years at this rate of decline. The estimated 7 million Israeli Jews will have no more children after that. This catastrophic development has already occasioned legislative hearings in Israel's Knesset... Israeli sperm concentration is just an example of what is happening to human sperm all over the Middle East and Central Asia, by the choice and force of will of successive US presidents."
The 800-pound gorilla in the room here is that young people tested (both men and women) are performing in the Israeli Defense Forces, and face massive amounts of depleted uranium in the US manufactured weaponry being used in the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians. The land, animals, and those involved in the conflict on both sides must be, by definition, poisoned by these toxic weapons of nuclear destruction. That's the real story. The Israelis have performed a service in a way just by conducting a bona fide scientific analysis of the situation.
In nearby Iraq, three-headed babies are turning up and a virtual Pandora's Box of birth defects that you can find on here. Caution: these are not pretty pictures , but they are true pictures of what the future could be as the present.
Again, please read the entire Haaretz article and view the YouTube piece. Or check the more conservative Wikipedia for the 38-page article (which includes 13 pages of footnotes) linked here on Depleted Uranium. You can verify the information presented above and find more information as well. In fact, the first DU, which uses radioactive isotope-238 was "manufactured in the 1940's when the US and USSR began their nuclear weapons and nuclear power programs." P.S. Depleted uranium bombs were also used on Serbia in the Bosnian War by President Clinton.
The total world inventory of depleted uranium stands at 1,188,273 tonnes as of 2002. That is enough to wipe out life on the planet for billions of years.
The United States leads the pack with 480,000 tonnes; Russia closely follow with 460,000 million tonnes; France, 190,000 tonnes; United Kingdom, 30,000 tonnes, etcetera.
As to the Legal Status of DU, Wiki reports, "In 1996 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Court_of_Justice gave an advisory opinion on the "legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons".[29] This made it clear, in paragraphs 54, 55 and 56, that international law on poisonous weapons-the Second Hague Declaration of 29 July 1899, Hague Convention IV of 18 October 1907 and the Geneva Protocol of 17 June 1925-did not cover nuclear weapons, because their prime or exclusive use was not to poison or asphyxiate. This ICJ opinion was about nuclear weapons, but the sentence "The terms have been understood, in the practice of States, in their ordinary sense as covering weapons whose prime, or even exclusive, effect is to poison or asphyxiate," also removes depleted uranium weaponry from coverage by the same treaties as their primary use is not to poison or asphyxiate, but to destroy material and kill soldiers through kinetic energy.
The deadly irony here is that depleted uranium, through the use of a perverse legalese, is classified here not as the awful poison and asphyxiate it is, but as a destructor of material and killer of solders through kinetic energy. Never has there been such a torturous misuse of language. Obviously, the people at the top are not thinking clearly. But we down here, the everyday people, must think clearly and protest the use of depleted uranium in any form, as a deadly poison and as a destructor of material, soldiers, civilians, animals, soil, water and air. Otherwise, we're committing suicide, the universe's ultimate punishment for our poisoning the planet.
This includes poisoning as well in non-warfare situations like the one in Naples, Italy (home of my forefathers) where the crime organization, the Camorra, is poisoning the Mediterranean, as Bob Nichols tells me, with the continual exploding of forty foot barges of nuclear waste, including depleted uranium. These gangsters are killing the sea that feeds that nation, the sea that runs into the Red Sea, in which Israelis swim. The Med is being poisoned for profit by criminals as the bought-off police turn their heads. Evil has many heads, like DU misconceived child itself.
But let me conclude this piece, with Bob Nichols' last line, "The American war machine has consequences. PTSD is just one of them. The poison gas cannot be contained, undone or recalled. There is no antidote; there is no cure. There is no escape." But I will add that there is consciousness and the actions of conscious people to stop the situation from worsening. Let's use it.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. His book "State Of Shock - Poems from 9/11 on" is available at www.jerrymazza.com, Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
Solution: First step is to pass this around to every home and registered voter in Nancy Pelosi's district and do so along with a petition to make them liable for all associated illnesses in her district and to demand she provide legislation to make the fall out results criminally illegal with jail time for violations. Then:
Identify the key management team of the labs in question and the bechtel management company and then send them an official notice, notorized with the signatures in the thousands of San francisco residents in Nancy Pelosi's district who signed that petition and request for criminalizing the release of said fallout. Its an official act of putting them on notice and giving them an opportunity to correct the problem, but also shows intent if they do not, which adds significantly to the penalty phase of award in any cases after that notification.
Depleted uranium is destroying life
http://www.rebelnews.org/opinion/war/211186-depleted-uranium-is-destroying-life
Thursday, 15 April 2010 00:02 Jerry Mazza, Rebel News
I have long heard sound-bites or seen passages about depleted uranium that sounded more than dire. But given my own cognitive dissonance, and the fact that I was writing about many other dire topics at the time, I filed depleted uranium in my cranium for future investigation, which, given the human aversion to bad news, could have been never.
But never was over in an exchange of emails about nuclear missiles in Israel's arsenal. I received some startling nuclear information from San Francisco Bay View writer, Bob Nichols. It was an illumination long-time coming.
I started at the end of Bob's article to find out who he was. His credits read "Bob Nichols is a Project Censored Award winning writer and a San Francisco Bay View correspondent. A former bomb maker in a U.S. government factory in rural Oklahoma, he reports on the two nuclear weapons labs in the Bay Area. He can be reached at duweapons@gmail.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ." His credentials were impressive and so was the article he sent, PTSD, infertility and other consequences of war.
In several, follow-up phone calls, Bob, in his gentle, mid-western drawl, filled me in on the picture of the imposing disasters caused by depleted uranium in Central Asia and in the Mid-East, in which hundreds of thousands of tons of depleted uranium had been dropped in the past 20 years.
Bob pointed out that San Francisco itself was receiving fallout from the Berkeley National [Nuclear Weapons] Lab, and from the Livermore Laboratory in the South Bay area, managed by San Francisco-based Bechtel, a nuclear-capable corporation, boosted by San Francisco's "Nuclear Nancy' Pelosi and her friends at Bechtel" as Bob commented. The University of California at Berkeley now earns more from weapons than from students.
The San Francisco facilities have been part of the Manhattan Project, operating from pre-1945, contributing a dangerous amount of radiation to the area with weapons testing and leakages of material into the Bay. It was for this reason, Nichols told me, that he still lives in Oklahoma, though he has a real love affair with San Francisco. Yet he fears for its human and natural safety due to poisoning by the nuclear projects.
In fact, he bemoaned the occasion of "Fleet Week," "the happy boys sent off to war by Mayor Gavin Newsom's Fleet Week - an event responsible for a big chunk of the enlistments in the US Navy and marines - who will probably come in deadly contact with another Bay Area product: depleted uranium, aka DU, and weaponized ceramic uranium oxide gas and aerosols, UO."
As he wrote, "Iraq and virtually all the rest of the Middle East and Central Asia have been continually dosed for almost 20 years with thousands of tons of weaponized ceramic uranium oxide gas, also known as 'depleted uranium.
"When used as directed, the depleted uranium bullets, shells and bombs become a lethal uranium gas or aerosol. The poison uranium oxide gas aerosols last for billions of years and never stop indiscriminately maiming and killing, which is a war crime in itself."
That was shocking to hear. So I did a bit of research to corroborate Bob's claims and came upon a number of YouTube pieces, one particularly powerful ten-minute piece called Depleted Uranium - The Ultimate Dirty Bomb. http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/15.html
It features Dr. Doug Rokke, US Army Health Physicist and Nuclear Medicine Sciences Officer as well as the internationally known Geological Scientist and International Radiation Expert Leuren Moret. Please take ten minutes to listen to it.
Dr. Rokke explains that as far back as 1973 [the Yom Kippur War], radioactive materials carpeted Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. He mentions too that DU radioactive contamination makes food and water unusable. He explains how the huge jolts of electrical energy in a small amount of depleted uranium can destroy human cells.
Most notably, Dr. Rooke estimates that from October/November 1991 in Gulf War 1, 160,000 US soldiers were permanently disabled by US use of some 340 tons of depleted uranium. Ten years later that number had climbed to 221,000 and left 10,000 dead. Dr. Rooke, a victim himself of the lack of proper post-battle examinations for DU poisoning, spoke with a tempered but deliberate anger and frustration at the damage done to all, including civilian populations, combatants, and himself.
Lauren Moret pointed out that as far back as 1943 depleted uranium usage, aka "poison gas warfare" was encouraged in a government memo shown on screen. She also tells us that the UN Human Rights Commission declared depleted uranium as illegal. The ultimate irony she points out is that in 2003 we attacked Iraq and Saddam Hussein for possessing Weapons of Mass Destruction, which turned out not to be true. Yet when we attacked Iraq in 2003, we dropped between 1000 to 2000 tons of depleted uranium, a known Weapon of Mass Nuclear Destruction in a three-week period. This is a war crime unto itself.
This all jibed with Bob Nichol's writings, especially the fact that the damage of depleted uranium is forever, lasting billions of years in the atmosphere, the earth and water, as it lasts on clothing, the skin, the human body, destroying vital organs, causing birth defects of all kinds, cancers, infertility, "damage to the bones, brains, testicles and ovaries, which applies to civilians and animals as well.
As Nichols writes, "Uranium munitions, containing weaponized uranium oxide gas and aerosols, are used by presidential order in US war zones. Privates and corporals do not decide to use these poisonous uranium gas weapons on their own. No, that order comes from the American president."
"Uranium oxide gas weapons are called 'genocidal weapons.' They maim and kill millions of people, their animals and their land. The actual targets by the US Expeditionary Forces are the populations of Central Asia and the Middle East, about a billion people." Remember that US forces themselves are the victims as well of these weapons, the worst imaginable blowback.
In fact, Nichols points us towards a "Middle Eastern country that requires all 18-year olds to join national service for several years. This country even has a roughly comparable health care system to America for a population of 7,233,701, according to the CIA World Factbook. This country is Israel."
Bob sent along an article from the noted Israeli paper, Haaretz, dated 3/21/2010: Study: Quality of Israeli sperm down 40% in past decade. http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/study-quality-of-israeli-sperm-down-40-in-past-decade-1.275772 Bob claimed the number was fudged somewhat because from 2004-2008 there was a 10 million sperm a year drop-off. Taken to 2015, all of the nation would be infertile. The motility of the tested sperm also indicated a drop-off. These samples were taken from healthy young people who do not smoke.
"In Israel, too," Haaretz writes, a study was published about a year ago, showing an increase of about 30 percent in defects in the male reproductive system. In addition, in the past decade, the number of cases of testicular cancer has doubled."
Haaretz goes on to attribute the sperm drop to "chemicals in the ground and in drinking water...as impacting hormone levels and secondary sexual characteristics." The paragraph concludes with "Studies published in Britain have highlighted a clear connection between continual decline in sperm counts and chemicals in the environment."
In the next to last paragraph of Bob Nichols' article, he writes of the Israeli situation, "Since 20 percent live sperm is considered to be the beginning of infertility, Israel will be sterile in less than 10 years at this rate of decline. The estimated 7 million Israeli Jews will have no more children after that. This catastrophic development has already occasioned legislative hearings in Israel's Knesset... Israeli sperm concentration is just an example of what is happening to human sperm all over the Middle East and Central Asia, by the choice and force of will of successive US presidents."
The 800-pound gorilla in the room here is that young people tested (both men and women) are performing in the Israeli Defense Forces, and face massive amounts of depleted uranium in the US manufactured weaponry being used in the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians. The land, animals, and those involved in the conflict on both sides must be, by definition, poisoned by these toxic weapons of nuclear destruction. That's the real story. The Israelis have performed a service in a way just by conducting a bona fide scientific analysis of the situation.
In nearby Iraq, three-headed babies are turning up and a virtual Pandora's Box of birth defects that you can find on here. Caution: these are not pretty pictures , but they are true pictures of what the future could be as the present.
Again, please read the entire Haaretz article and view the YouTube piece. Or check the more conservative Wikipedia for the 38-page article (which includes 13 pages of footnotes) linked here on Depleted Uranium. You can verify the information presented above and find more information as well. In fact, the first DU, which uses radioactive isotope-238 was "manufactured in the 1940's when the US and USSR began their nuclear weapons and nuclear power programs." P.S. Depleted uranium bombs were also used on Serbia in the Bosnian War by President Clinton.
The total world inventory of depleted uranium stands at 1,188,273 tonnes as of 2002. That is enough to wipe out life on the planet for billions of years.
The United States leads the pack with 480,000 tonnes; Russia closely follow with 460,000 million tonnes; France, 190,000 tonnes; United Kingdom, 30,000 tonnes, etcetera.
As to the Legal Status of DU, Wiki reports, "In 1996 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Court_of_Justice gave an advisory opinion on the "legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons".[29] This made it clear, in paragraphs 54, 55 and 56, that international law on poisonous weapons-the Second Hague Declaration of 29 July 1899, Hague Convention IV of 18 October 1907 and the Geneva Protocol of 17 June 1925-did not cover nuclear weapons, because their prime or exclusive use was not to poison or asphyxiate. This ICJ opinion was about nuclear weapons, but the sentence "The terms have been understood, in the practice of States, in their ordinary sense as covering weapons whose prime, or even exclusive, effect is to poison or asphyxiate," also removes depleted uranium weaponry from coverage by the same treaties as their primary use is not to poison or asphyxiate, but to destroy material and kill soldiers through kinetic energy.
The deadly irony here is that depleted uranium, through the use of a perverse legalese, is classified here not as the awful poison and asphyxiate it is, but as a destructor of material and killer of solders through kinetic energy. Never has there been such a torturous misuse of language. Obviously, the people at the top are not thinking clearly. But we down here, the everyday people, must think clearly and protest the use of depleted uranium in any form, as a deadly poison and as a destructor of material, soldiers, civilians, animals, soil, water and air. Otherwise, we're committing suicide, the universe's ultimate punishment for our poisoning the planet.
This includes poisoning as well in non-warfare situations like the one in Naples, Italy (home of my forefathers) where the crime organization, the Camorra, is poisoning the Mediterranean, as Bob Nichols tells me, with the continual exploding of forty foot barges of nuclear waste, including depleted uranium. These gangsters are killing the sea that feeds that nation, the sea that runs into the Red Sea, in which Israelis swim. The Med is being poisoned for profit by criminals as the bought-off police turn their heads. Evil has many heads, like DU misconceived child itself.
But let me conclude this piece, with Bob Nichols' last line, "The American war machine has consequences. PTSD is just one of them. The poison gas cannot be contained, undone or recalled. There is no antidote; there is no cure. There is no escape." But I will add that there is consciousness and the actions of conscious people to stop the situation from worsening. Let's use it.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. His book "State Of Shock - Poems from 9/11 on" is available at www.jerrymazza.com, Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
Fluoride Poisons Children in Jharkhand, India
Vatic Note: Between Monsanto and now this, India has certainly been under attack. Depopulation again??? I don't know, but somehow we need to get these studies of the eugenics meetings and depopulation meetings of the billionaires. Then we will know their method they want for achieving the objective.
Solution: Each of us write a letter to the authorities in that area and tell them some of us have taken fluoride out of the water here and are doing much better health wise and it would save them much money and lives.
Fluoride Poisons Children in Jharkhand, India
http://atomicnewsreview.org/
April 13, 2010
Ntdworldnews, Atomic News Review
Fluoride poisoning from groundwater in India’s eastern state of Jharkhand is causing serious health problems for villagers.
In Chukru village the people are suffering from acute dental and skeletal disorders, and it’s been that way for a long time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdAeqoiEb7Q&feature=player_embedded
Yellowed teeth and bone deformities develop as soon as children reach the age of five.
Ten-year-old Babulal Ram has severe limb deformities.
[Babulal Ram, Child Poisoned by Fluoride]: Hindi male
“Due to the contaminated water here we are suffering a lot We want that clean drinking water should be provided to us so that we stay healthy.” Most villagers have discolored teeth and suffer acute joint pain, particularly in the knees. There’s a growing number of physically deformed children being born in the village.
[Sushil Kumar Singh, Villager]: Hindi
“For a long time we have been suffering because of fluorosis This problem is just increasing day by day. We want something done about it but nothing is happening.”
Fluorosis is also causing cataracts, premature ageing, calcified spinal ligaments, softened bones, and other degenerative conditions, such as spinal stenosis.
The Chukru village district administration says they’ve put in a pipeline to the Koel River to supply clearner drinking water.
[Amlendu Kumar, Executive Engineer]: Hindi male
“The whole village has been affected by fluoride. That is why in Chukru village a pipeline is connected to the river. The river has less amount of fluoride. The pipeline works almost all the time as long as there is electricity.”
The fluoride concentration of water samples from Palamu district ranges up to 600% higher than normal levels.
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
Solution: Each of us write a letter to the authorities in that area and tell them some of us have taken fluoride out of the water here and are doing much better health wise and it would save them much money and lives.
Fluoride Poisons Children in Jharkhand, India
http://atomicnewsreview.org/
April 13, 2010
Ntdworldnews, Atomic News Review
Fluoride poisoning from groundwater in India’s eastern state of Jharkhand is causing serious health problems for villagers.
In Chukru village the people are suffering from acute dental and skeletal disorders, and it’s been that way for a long time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdAeqoiEb7Q&feature=player_embedded
Yellowed teeth and bone deformities develop as soon as children reach the age of five.
Ten-year-old Babulal Ram has severe limb deformities.
[Babulal Ram, Child Poisoned by Fluoride]: Hindi male
“Due to the contaminated water here we are suffering a lot We want that clean drinking water should be provided to us so that we stay healthy.” Most villagers have discolored teeth and suffer acute joint pain, particularly in the knees. There’s a growing number of physically deformed children being born in the village.
[Sushil Kumar Singh, Villager]: Hindi
“For a long time we have been suffering because of fluorosis This problem is just increasing day by day. We want something done about it but nothing is happening.”
Fluorosis is also causing cataracts, premature ageing, calcified spinal ligaments, softened bones, and other degenerative conditions, such as spinal stenosis.
The Chukru village district administration says they’ve put in a pipeline to the Koel River to supply clearner drinking water.
[Amlendu Kumar, Executive Engineer]: Hindi male
“The whole village has been affected by fluoride. That is why in Chukru village a pipeline is connected to the river. The river has less amount of fluoride. The pipeline works almost all the time as long as there is electricity.”
The fluoride concentration of water samples from Palamu district ranges up to 600% higher than normal levels.
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
Halliburton buys Oil Fire Fighting company on April 12th for $240 Million
Vatic Note: Solution: Maybe this is the time to begin our citizen grand juries if we are not going to get investigations into these types of actions and stock buying or shorts, and let the people bring justice back into the equation once again.
Halliburton buys Oil Fire Fighting company on April 12th for $240 Million
http://snardfarker.ning.com/profiles/blogs/halliburton-buys-oil-fire...
by KLC provided by Dick Eastman
Halliburton Inc. says it finished a cementing operation 20 hours before a Gulf of Mexico rig went up in flames.
Although no cause has been determined, oil services contractor Halliburton Inc. says it finished a cementing operation 20 hours before a Gulf of Mexico rig went up in flames.
Halliburton is named as a defendant in most of the more than two dozen lawsuits filed by Gulf Coast people and businesses claiming the oil spill could ruin them financially. In one lawsuit, two Louisiana shrimpers claim cementing contributed to the explosion.
Halliburton said Friday it had four workers stationed on the rig, performing several tasks, including cementing — a process of applying cement and water to a pipe used to prevent the wall of the hole from caving in during drilling.
According to a 2007 study by Minerals Management Service, cementing was a factor 18 of 39 rig blowouts in the gulf between 1992 and 2006.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/04/30/financi...
Halliburton buys Oil Fire Fighting company on April 12th for $240 Million
In 1978, Edward "Coots" Matthews and Asger "Boots" Hansen founded Boots & Coots (WEL). Both were veteran oil-well firefighters. In fact, they provided inspiration for a 1968 film called Hellfighters, starring John Wayne.
But the days of independence have come to an end for Boots & Coots as the company has agreed to sell out to Halliburton (HAL) for $240.4 million. Shareholders will get $1.73 in cash and $1.27 in Halliburton stock for every share of Boots & Coots.
The company certainly has a distinguished history. It has been critical in dealing with many well fires, including those from Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. But given its relatively small size, Boots & Coots has been at a disadvantage. As a result, the stock price has been mostly lackluster over the years.
A Perilous Business
Boots & Coots has two core businesses. First, there is Pressure Control, which involves prevention and risk-control services for oil- and gas-well fires and blowouts. A key to this area was the acquisition of John Wright, which developed sophisticated technologies to measure well integrity.
Next, Boots & Coots has a Well Intervention division, which helps enhance production for oil and gas operators. This business is likely to benefit nicely from the trend toward unconventional resource plays (such as extracting energy from shale). Boots & Coots greatly expanded this division with the acquisitions of Oil States International and StassCo.
Despite all this, the company is still at the whim of volatile energy markets, as well as unpredictable government-owned oil companies. For example, last year Boots & Coots saw a 7% fall in revenues to $195.1 million, with net income down from $21.8 million to $6 million. Keep in mind that during this period, there was nearly a 50% drop in domestic rig counts.
But as part of Halliburton, Boots & Coots will have more leverage to expand its platform, especially in areas like Africa and even Southeast Asia, which should provide significant growth opportunities.
Feeling Left Out?
According to its latest earnings report, Halliburton is upbeat about the prospects for 2010. Actually, it looks like there will be a rebound in North America because of increased demand and rig counts. At the same time, it appears that Halliburton is gaining more market share from its struggling rivals.
But when it comes to M&A, Halliburton has been timid. Just look at Schlumberger (SLB), which recently agreed to shell out $11 billion for Smith International (SII) and $1.07 billion for Geoservices. Of course, there is also the $5.5 billion merger of Baker Hughes (BHI) and BJ Services (BJ).
So, will Halliburton try for a major deal, too? Perhaps. The company has $3.4 billion in the bank and easy access to financing. Yet, the oil services industry has undergone lots of consolidation, and few major targets are left. And a deal could ultimately suffer from antitrust pressure.
In other words, Halliburton may focus its dealmaking on small companies that fill out niches, like
http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/investing/halliburton-snaps-up-bo...
=====================================
According to Transocean Ltd., the operator of the drilling rig, Halliburton had finished cementing the 18,000-foot well shortly before the explosion.
James wrote:
An oil-drilling procedure called cementing is coming under scrutiny as a possible cause of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico that has led to one of the biggest oil spills in U.S. history, drilling experts said Thursday.
The process is supposed to prevent oil and natural gas from escaping by filling gaps between the outside of the well pipe and the inside of the hole bored into the ocean floor. Cement, pumped down the well from the drilling rig, is also used to plug wells after they have been abandoned or when drilling has finished but production hasn't begun.
In the case of the Deepwater Horizon, workers had finished pumping cement to fill the space between the pipe and the sides of the hole and had begun temporarily plugging the well with cement; it isn't known whether they had completed the plugging process before the blast.
Regulators have previously identified problems in the cementing process as a leading cause of well blowouts, in which oil and natural gas surge out of a well with explosive force. When cement develops cracks or doesn't set properly, oil and gas can escape, ultimately flowing out of control. The gas is highly combustible and prone to ignite, as it appears to have done aboard the Deepwater Horizon, which was leased by BP PLC, the British oil giant.
Concerns about the cementing process—and about whether rigs have enough safeguards to prevent blowouts—raise questions about whether the industry can safely drill in deep water and whether regulators are up to the task of monitoring them.
The scrutiny on cementing will focus attention on Halliburton Co., the oilfield-services firm that was handling the cementing process on the rig, which burned and sank last week. The disaster, which killed 11, has left a gusher of oil streaming into the Gulf from a mile under the surface.
Federal officials declined to comment on their investigation, and Halliburton didn't respond to questions from The Wall Street Journal.
According to Transocean Ltd., the operator of the drilling rig, Halliburton had finished cementing the 18,000-foot well shortly before the explosion. Houston-based Halliburton is the largest company in the global cementing business, which accounted for $1.7 billion, or about 11%, of the company's revenue in 2009, according to consultant Spears & Associates.
Growing worries about potential lawsuits and other costs of the oil spill in the wake of its rapid spread led investors to clobber stocks of companies involved in the Deepwater Horizon well Thursday.
Halliburton fell 5.3% to $31.60 and Cameron International Corp., which built the blowout-prevention equipment that didn't stop the explosion, dropped 13% to $38.70, both at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading.
The timing of the cementing in relation to the blast—and the procedure's history of causing problems—point to it as a possible culprit in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, experts said.
"The initial likely cause of gas coming to the surface had something to do with the cement," said Robert MacKenzie, managing director of energy and natural resources at FBR Capital Markets and a former cementing engineer in the oil industry.
Several other drilling experts agreed, though they cautioned that the investigation into what went wrong at the Deepwater Horizon site is still in its preliminary stages.
The problem could have been a faulty cement plug at the bottom of the well, he said. Another possibility would be that cement between the pipe and well walls didn't harden properly and allowed gas to pass through it.
A 2007 study by three U.S. Minerals Management Service officials found that cementing was a factor in 18 of 39 well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over a 14-year period. That was the single largest factor, ahead of equipment failure and pipe failure.
The Halliburton cementers would have sought approval for their plans—the type of cement and how much would be used—from a BP official on board the rig before carrying out their job. Scott Dean, a BP spokesman, said it was premature to speculate on the role cement might have played in the disaster.
Halliburton also was the cementer on a well that suffered a big blowout last August in the Timor Sea, off Australia. The rig there caught fire and a well leaked tens of thousands of barrels of oil over 10 weeks before it was shut down. The investigation is continuing; Halliburton declined to comment on it.
Elmer P. Danenberger, who had recently retired as head of regulatory affairs for the U.S. Minerals Management Service, told the Australian commission looking into the blowout that a poor cement job was probably the reason oil and natural gas gushed out of control.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703572504575214593564769072.html
Write to Russell Gold at russell.gold@wsj.com and Ben Casselman at ben.casselman@wsj.com
First victims (apart from the men on the rig) of Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster are sea life
Comment by KLC on May 1, 2010
I agree diana..something is definately fishy about this whole story!!!! Last night someone posted an article that North Korea may be to blame for this latest oil rig explosion because of South Koreas involvement with it (and their friendship with USA) so who knows what the heck is going on anymore.
and....I can also totally see Obama's team false flagging this oil explosion...just to create that "destructive to the environment" propaganda! thanks for replying!
Comment by Diana on May 1, 2010
I remember about a month ago when Obama announced he would approve offshore drilling and wondering what the back story was to that seemingly incongruent statement. Now it all makes sense. With the great oil spill in the Gulf, he can now say, “Gee, I really wanted to, but you can see that such a thing is just too dangerous, too destructive to the environment.”
It took me a long, long, long, long time to come to the conclusion that the global bankers were behind 911. I did not want to think such a thing was possible. But after I faced facts and came to see that this was indeed the case, I have had to reexamine many events that have transpired in the past and look skeptically at any new events. This one smells very fishy. Thank you for this story and I look forward to any new information that comes forward to explain what really happened. We must expose them for the evil criminals they are!
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
Halliburton buys Oil Fire Fighting company on April 12th for $240 Million
http://snardfarker.ning.com/profiles/blogs/halliburton-buys-oil-fire...
by KLC provided by Dick Eastman
Halliburton Inc. says it finished a cementing operation 20 hours before a Gulf of Mexico rig went up in flames.
Although no cause has been determined, oil services contractor Halliburton Inc. says it finished a cementing operation 20 hours before a Gulf of Mexico rig went up in flames.
Halliburton is named as a defendant in most of the more than two dozen lawsuits filed by Gulf Coast people and businesses claiming the oil spill could ruin them financially. In one lawsuit, two Louisiana shrimpers claim cementing contributed to the explosion.
Halliburton said Friday it had four workers stationed on the rig, performing several tasks, including cementing — a process of applying cement and water to a pipe used to prevent the wall of the hole from caving in during drilling.
According to a 2007 study by Minerals Management Service, cementing was a factor 18 of 39 rig blowouts in the gulf between 1992 and 2006.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/04/30/financi...
Halliburton buys Oil Fire Fighting company on April 12th for $240 Million
In 1978, Edward "Coots" Matthews and Asger "Boots" Hansen founded Boots & Coots (WEL). Both were veteran oil-well firefighters. In fact, they provided inspiration for a 1968 film called Hellfighters, starring John Wayne.
But the days of independence have come to an end for Boots & Coots as the company has agreed to sell out to Halliburton (HAL) for $240.4 million. Shareholders will get $1.73 in cash and $1.27 in Halliburton stock for every share of Boots & Coots.
The company certainly has a distinguished history. It has been critical in dealing with many well fires, including those from Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. But given its relatively small size, Boots & Coots has been at a disadvantage. As a result, the stock price has been mostly lackluster over the years.
A Perilous Business
Boots & Coots has two core businesses. First, there is Pressure Control, which involves prevention and risk-control services for oil- and gas-well fires and blowouts. A key to this area was the acquisition of John Wright, which developed sophisticated technologies to measure well integrity.
Next, Boots & Coots has a Well Intervention division, which helps enhance production for oil and gas operators. This business is likely to benefit nicely from the trend toward unconventional resource plays (such as extracting energy from shale). Boots & Coots greatly expanded this division with the acquisitions of Oil States International and StassCo.
Despite all this, the company is still at the whim of volatile energy markets, as well as unpredictable government-owned oil companies. For example, last year Boots & Coots saw a 7% fall in revenues to $195.1 million, with net income down from $21.8 million to $6 million. Keep in mind that during this period, there was nearly a 50% drop in domestic rig counts.
But as part of Halliburton, Boots & Coots will have more leverage to expand its platform, especially in areas like Africa and even Southeast Asia, which should provide significant growth opportunities.
Feeling Left Out?
According to its latest earnings report, Halliburton is upbeat about the prospects for 2010. Actually, it looks like there will be a rebound in North America because of increased demand and rig counts. At the same time, it appears that Halliburton is gaining more market share from its struggling rivals.
But when it comes to M&A, Halliburton has been timid. Just look at Schlumberger (SLB), which recently agreed to shell out $11 billion for Smith International (SII) and $1.07 billion for Geoservices. Of course, there is also the $5.5 billion merger of Baker Hughes (BHI) and BJ Services (BJ).
So, will Halliburton try for a major deal, too? Perhaps. The company has $3.4 billion in the bank and easy access to financing. Yet, the oil services industry has undergone lots of consolidation, and few major targets are left. And a deal could ultimately suffer from antitrust pressure.
In other words, Halliburton may focus its dealmaking on small companies that fill out niches, like
http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/investing/halliburton-snaps-up-bo...
=====================================
According to Transocean Ltd., the operator of the drilling rig, Halliburton had finished cementing the 18,000-foot well shortly before the explosion.
James wrote:
An oil-drilling procedure called cementing is coming under scrutiny as a possible cause of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico that has led to one of the biggest oil spills in U.S. history, drilling experts said Thursday.
The process is supposed to prevent oil and natural gas from escaping by filling gaps between the outside of the well pipe and the inside of the hole bored into the ocean floor. Cement, pumped down the well from the drilling rig, is also used to plug wells after they have been abandoned or when drilling has finished but production hasn't begun.
In the case of the Deepwater Horizon, workers had finished pumping cement to fill the space between the pipe and the sides of the hole and had begun temporarily plugging the well with cement; it isn't known whether they had completed the plugging process before the blast.
Regulators have previously identified problems in the cementing process as a leading cause of well blowouts, in which oil and natural gas surge out of a well with explosive force. When cement develops cracks or doesn't set properly, oil and gas can escape, ultimately flowing out of control. The gas is highly combustible and prone to ignite, as it appears to have done aboard the Deepwater Horizon, which was leased by BP PLC, the British oil giant.
Concerns about the cementing process—and about whether rigs have enough safeguards to prevent blowouts—raise questions about whether the industry can safely drill in deep water and whether regulators are up to the task of monitoring them.
The scrutiny on cementing will focus attention on Halliburton Co., the oilfield-services firm that was handling the cementing process on the rig, which burned and sank last week. The disaster, which killed 11, has left a gusher of oil streaming into the Gulf from a mile under the surface.
Federal officials declined to comment on their investigation, and Halliburton didn't respond to questions from The Wall Street Journal.
According to Transocean Ltd., the operator of the drilling rig, Halliburton had finished cementing the 18,000-foot well shortly before the explosion. Houston-based Halliburton is the largest company in the global cementing business, which accounted for $1.7 billion, or about 11%, of the company's revenue in 2009, according to consultant Spears & Associates.
Growing worries about potential lawsuits and other costs of the oil spill in the wake of its rapid spread led investors to clobber stocks of companies involved in the Deepwater Horizon well Thursday.
Halliburton fell 5.3% to $31.60 and Cameron International Corp., which built the blowout-prevention equipment that didn't stop the explosion, dropped 13% to $38.70, both at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading.
The timing of the cementing in relation to the blast—and the procedure's history of causing problems—point to it as a possible culprit in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, experts said.
"The initial likely cause of gas coming to the surface had something to do with the cement," said Robert MacKenzie, managing director of energy and natural resources at FBR Capital Markets and a former cementing engineer in the oil industry.
Several other drilling experts agreed, though they cautioned that the investigation into what went wrong at the Deepwater Horizon site is still in its preliminary stages.
The problem could have been a faulty cement plug at the bottom of the well, he said. Another possibility would be that cement between the pipe and well walls didn't harden properly and allowed gas to pass through it.
A 2007 study by three U.S. Minerals Management Service officials found that cementing was a factor in 18 of 39 well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over a 14-year period. That was the single largest factor, ahead of equipment failure and pipe failure.
The Halliburton cementers would have sought approval for their plans—the type of cement and how much would be used—from a BP official on board the rig before carrying out their job. Scott Dean, a BP spokesman, said it was premature to speculate on the role cement might have played in the disaster.
Halliburton also was the cementer on a well that suffered a big blowout last August in the Timor Sea, off Australia. The rig there caught fire and a well leaked tens of thousands of barrels of oil over 10 weeks before it was shut down. The investigation is continuing; Halliburton declined to comment on it.
Elmer P. Danenberger, who had recently retired as head of regulatory affairs for the U.S. Minerals Management Service, told the Australian commission looking into the blowout that a poor cement job was probably the reason oil and natural gas gushed out of control.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703572504575214593564769072.html
Write to Russell Gold at russell.gold@wsj.com and Ben Casselman at ben.casselman@wsj.com
First victims (apart from the men on the rig) of Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster are sea life
Comment by KLC on May 1, 2010
I agree diana..something is definately fishy about this whole story!!!! Last night someone posted an article that North Korea may be to blame for this latest oil rig explosion because of South Koreas involvement with it (and their friendship with USA) so who knows what the heck is going on anymore.
and....I can also totally see Obama's team false flagging this oil explosion...just to create that "destructive to the environment" propaganda! thanks for replying!
Comment by Diana on May 1, 2010
I remember about a month ago when Obama announced he would approve offshore drilling and wondering what the back story was to that seemingly incongruent statement. Now it all makes sense. With the great oil spill in the Gulf, he can now say, “Gee, I really wanted to, but you can see that such a thing is just too dangerous, too destructive to the environment.”
It took me a long, long, long, long time to come to the conclusion that the global bankers were behind 911. I did not want to think such a thing was possible. But after I faced facts and came to see that this was indeed the case, I have had to reexamine many events that have transpired in the past and look skeptically at any new events. This one smells very fishy. Thank you for this story and I look forward to any new information that comes forward to explain what really happened. We must expose them for the evil criminals they are!
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
More Evidence: HD TV is a Set Up for Mind Control - Part I (Mind control series)
Vatic Note: This is a beginning of a whole series on mind control. Its indirectly related to the Satanism and Pedophilia series we just completed a week or so ago. Remember, Mind control isn't just about tracking you, what you think and what your intentions are, but also about "brainwashing" you into thinking and behaving in a manner acceptable to the powers that be. Also remember our series on Tavistock and this research over the past many years and the institutes and research grants funded by the Ford foundation and partnered with the US CIA as we covered in the previous series.
Remind yourselves about the use of pedophilia in the mind control business as well as the blackmail business for control of those at the highest levels of government, business and banking. This series will begin with the expansion of mind control from a few experimental subjects that the powers that be have worked on to including the general population. This MKL Ultra has been designed and expanded and experimented on since the late fortys and early 50's through the present and is ongoing. But now its going to be used on a mass level in conjunction with the drug industry and from some sources, also using HAARP which can also affect a persons "moral compass" which surprised me tremendously. So we must pay attention to how we feel normally compared to how we feel and see our world once we have converted to the digital signal. The 60 minutes segment below show us how far along they have come. Remember, through books, videos, movies, the elite always tell us what they intend to do to us in some form of science fiction or futuristic movie or book. Watch the video and then rent the movie "Minority Report".
Solution: Stop taking any psychotropic drugs and make sure your children are not on them. Also begin a journal of your known beliefs and morals and then record and date any changes you notice or see. Ask your family to do the same and to feedback to you any change in attitude or behavior. Also take natural remedies for keeping the brain healthy. Visit a naturopath and get suggestions for brain health that can fight this. Also remember you are the master of your body and its condition so use strategy one above constantly to see yourself as unaffected by any attempts to change or mess with your mind. Try to also notice while watching the digital TV if anything is different when you have finished. Here is a good article on how to avoid it happening and how to overcome if it has. Also consider quitting a job that requires you to do a brain scan for any kind of probing into your mind or your life as that 60 minute segment shows they can now do. Taking a serious stand against these actions is going to be the only way to fight it on an individual level.
Also actually get rid of the TV as I have done and do things we used to do with our friends and families before the beast came into our homes. Remember when they made it mandatory to convert your analogue TV by obtaining the digital transformer box? Or if you bought a new skinny digital TV, that is applicable here as is the converter box. I noticed on my analogue TV that when I play videos I get serious static, so they are pulsng out the signal which means nothing by itself, but it doesn't work on the analogue TV. If I watch a DVD, that is different, then there is no static so its an interesting observation to see the differences and realize why they had to get rid of the analogue system.
More Evidence: HD TV is a Set Up for Mind Control
http://www.wariscrime.com/2009/01/30/video/more-evidence-hd-tv-is-a-set-up-for-mind-control/
A. True Ott, PhD
Educate Yourself.org 19,532 views
January 30, 2009
To begin with, take 10 minutes and watch this 60 Minutes video:
(Well, then I guess we better watch this since now it doesn't work, hehehe, go here)
http://www.cnettv.com/9742-1_53-50004855.html
Leslie Stahl makes some very interesting comments on the morality and ethics of mind-control.
Here are mine:
1. The technology called FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance) is old and archaic actually. Mengele and others were “reading” brain waves via magnetic resonance graphing in the early 70’s. Boston-Logan Airport is already using new light-wave beams to scan and read air traveler’s intentions before they board the planes.
2. The German individual Stahl interviewed was very hesitant to reveal exactly who had the mind-reading technology today. Again, just look at the U.S. Patents issued in the last decade to realize the height and breadth of the mind-control explosion — and keep in mind that patents are usually applied for after the technology has been proven to be commercially viable via working models.
3. The FMRI “computer” that “reads the mind” is just one side of the coin. It is much, much easier to produce emotions and impulses into the brain than to actually read the brain via computer programs.
4. This technology needs much more bandwidth space than is currently provided by analog signals in order to be implemented. Thus, the need to switch to digital signals exclusively.
5. This technology, in the wrong hands, is a bigger threat to individual freedom than any standing army.
6. Is Homeland Security the “wrong hands”? Why is this just now beginning to be reported by such news programs as “60 Minutes”?
Read this patent abstract, and then read my exposé on digital TV once again in the context of Stahl’s report.
USP # 6,488,617 (December 3, 2002)
Title: Nervous System Manipulation by EM Fields from Monitors.
Issued to: Loos, Hendricus.
Abstract: Physiological effects have been observed in a human subject in response to stimulation of the skin with weak electromagnetic fields that are pulsed with certain frequencies near 1/2 Hz or 2.4 Hz, such as to excite a sensory resonance.
Many computer monitors and HD TV screens, when displaying pulsed images, emit pulsed electromagnetic fields of sufficient amplitudes to cause such excitation. It is therefore possible to manipulate the nervous system of a subject by pulsing images displayed on a nearby computer monitor or DIGITAL TV set. For the latter, the image pulsing may be embedded in the program material, or it may be overlaid by modulating a video stream, either as an RF signal or as a video signal.
The image displayed on a computer monitor may be pulsed effectively by a simple computer program.
For certain monitors, pulsed electromagnetic fields capable of exciting sensory resonances in nearby subjects may be generated even as the displayed images are pulsed with subliminal intensity.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Related article: Digital TV: Mind Control by the Sound of Silence
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
Remind yourselves about the use of pedophilia in the mind control business as well as the blackmail business for control of those at the highest levels of government, business and banking. This series will begin with the expansion of mind control from a few experimental subjects that the powers that be have worked on to including the general population. This MKL Ultra has been designed and expanded and experimented on since the late fortys and early 50's through the present and is ongoing. But now its going to be used on a mass level in conjunction with the drug industry and from some sources, also using HAARP which can also affect a persons "moral compass" which surprised me tremendously. So we must pay attention to how we feel normally compared to how we feel and see our world once we have converted to the digital signal. The 60 minutes segment below show us how far along they have come. Remember, through books, videos, movies, the elite always tell us what they intend to do to us in some form of science fiction or futuristic movie or book. Watch the video and then rent the movie "Minority Report".
Solution: Stop taking any psychotropic drugs and make sure your children are not on them. Also begin a journal of your known beliefs and morals and then record and date any changes you notice or see. Ask your family to do the same and to feedback to you any change in attitude or behavior. Also take natural remedies for keeping the brain healthy. Visit a naturopath and get suggestions for brain health that can fight this. Also remember you are the master of your body and its condition so use strategy one above constantly to see yourself as unaffected by any attempts to change or mess with your mind. Try to also notice while watching the digital TV if anything is different when you have finished. Here is a good article on how to avoid it happening and how to overcome if it has. Also consider quitting a job that requires you to do a brain scan for any kind of probing into your mind or your life as that 60 minute segment shows they can now do. Taking a serious stand against these actions is going to be the only way to fight it on an individual level.
Also actually get rid of the TV as I have done and do things we used to do with our friends and families before the beast came into our homes. Remember when they made it mandatory to convert your analogue TV by obtaining the digital transformer box? Or if you bought a new skinny digital TV, that is applicable here as is the converter box. I noticed on my analogue TV that when I play videos I get serious static, so they are pulsng out the signal which means nothing by itself, but it doesn't work on the analogue TV. If I watch a DVD, that is different, then there is no static so its an interesting observation to see the differences and realize why they had to get rid of the analogue system.
More Evidence: HD TV is a Set Up for Mind Control
http://www.wariscrime.com/2009/01/30/video/more-evidence-hd-tv-is-a-set-up-for-mind-control/
A. True Ott, PhD
Educate Yourself.org 19,532 views
January 30, 2009
To begin with, take 10 minutes and watch this 60 Minutes video:
(Well, then I guess we better watch this since now it doesn't work, hehehe, go here)
http://www.cnettv.com/9742-1_53-50004855.html
Leslie Stahl makes some very interesting comments on the morality and ethics of mind-control.
Here are mine:
1. The technology called FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance) is old and archaic actually. Mengele and others were “reading” brain waves via magnetic resonance graphing in the early 70’s. Boston-Logan Airport is already using new light-wave beams to scan and read air traveler’s intentions before they board the planes.
2. The German individual Stahl interviewed was very hesitant to reveal exactly who had the mind-reading technology today. Again, just look at the U.S. Patents issued in the last decade to realize the height and breadth of the mind-control explosion — and keep in mind that patents are usually applied for after the technology has been proven to be commercially viable via working models.
3. The FMRI “computer” that “reads the mind” is just one side of the coin. It is much, much easier to produce emotions and impulses into the brain than to actually read the brain via computer programs.
4. This technology needs much more bandwidth space than is currently provided by analog signals in order to be implemented. Thus, the need to switch to digital signals exclusively.
5. This technology, in the wrong hands, is a bigger threat to individual freedom than any standing army.
6. Is Homeland Security the “wrong hands”? Why is this just now beginning to be reported by such news programs as “60 Minutes”?
Read this patent abstract, and then read my exposé on digital TV once again in the context of Stahl’s report.
USP # 6,488,617 (December 3, 2002)
Title: Nervous System Manipulation by EM Fields from Monitors.
Issued to: Loos, Hendricus.
Abstract: Physiological effects have been observed in a human subject in response to stimulation of the skin with weak electromagnetic fields that are pulsed with certain frequencies near 1/2 Hz or 2.4 Hz, such as to excite a sensory resonance.
Many computer monitors and HD TV screens, when displaying pulsed images, emit pulsed electromagnetic fields of sufficient amplitudes to cause such excitation. It is therefore possible to manipulate the nervous system of a subject by pulsing images displayed on a nearby computer monitor or DIGITAL TV set. For the latter, the image pulsing may be embedded in the program material, or it may be overlaid by modulating a video stream, either as an RF signal or as a video signal.
The image displayed on a computer monitor may be pulsed effectively by a simple computer program.
For certain monitors, pulsed electromagnetic fields capable of exciting sensory resonances in nearby subjects may be generated even as the displayed images are pulsed with subliminal intensity.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Related article: Digital TV: Mind Control by the Sound of Silence
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
2010-05-08
Farmers Cope With Roundup-Resistant Weeds
Vatic Note: This is part of the Eugenics and depopulation program going on since the 20's. In case you forgot, let me just remind you. http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-population-reduction-agenda-for-dummies.html , http://www.theoneclickgroup.co.uk/news.php?start=3260&end=3280&view=yes&id=4385#newspost, http://www.eugenics-watch.com/roots/chap12.html,
(Note from Jim McNulty of "Ban Genetically Engineered Food") What is even more amazing about this article, is that it is posted on a very pro biotech list that I have been watching/reading for many years.
eg 1: “You’re having to add another product with the Roundup to kill your weeds,” said Steve Doster, a corn and soybean farmer in Barnum, Iowa. “So then why are we buying the Roundup Ready product?”
eg2: "the problem has spread, with 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of
acres, predominantly soybeans, cotton and corn".
Note: From Gypsy -
''Darwinian evolution on fast-forward..........''
Deeper and deeper into the neurotoxic mire.
Solutions: Our town has petitioned the county council for two grow domes, one at each end of town, (SMALL TOWN) then everyone has begun buying heritage seeds and regular non monsanto hybrids for growing the towns food with each person contributing to the care, weeding watering etc of the produce, with protected exposure from the monsanto products. It appears to be one solution on the short term while we fight this on the long term The county council approved the project and funded it. This is what you all need to do in each of your towns. ACT LOCAL, THINK GLOBAL. YOU MUST CALL YOUR SENATOR AND CONGRESSMAN TO VOTE AGAINST SB 510 AND THE ACCOMPANYING BILL ON THE HOUSE SIDE THAT HAS ALREADY PASSED THE HOUSE AND IS NOW IN HTE SENATE.
Farmers Cope With Roundup-Resistant Weeds
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/business/energy-environment/04weed.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
provided to vatic project by Gypsy from Australia, and Jim McNulty
By WILLIAM NEUMAN and ANDREW POLLACK, NY Times
DYERSBURG, Tenn. — For 15 years, Eddie Anderson, a farmer, has been a strict adherent of no-till agriculture, an environmentally friendly technique that all but eliminates plowing to curb erosion and the harmful runoff of fertilizers and pesticides.
But not this year.
On a recent afternoon here, Mr. Anderson watched as tractors crisscrossed a rolling field — plowing and mixing herbicides into the soil to kill weeds where soybeans will soon be planted.
Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.
To fight them, Mr. Anderson and farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing.
“We’re back to where we were 20 years ago,” said Mr. Anderson, who will plow about one-third of his 3,000 acres of soybean fields this spring, more than he has in years. “We’re trying to find out what works.”
Farm experts say that such efforts could lead to higher food prices, lower crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution of land and water.
“It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.
The first resistant species to pose a serious threat to agriculture was spotted in a Delaware soybean field in 2000. Since then, the problem has spread, with 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of acres, predominantly soybeans, cotton and corn.
The superweeds could temper American agriculture’s enthusiasm for some genetically modified crops. Soybeans, corn and cotton that are engineered to survive spraying with Roundup have become standard in American fields. However, if Roundup doesn’t kill the weeds, farmers have little incentive to spend the extra money for the special seeds.
Roundup — originally made by Monsanto but now also sold by others under the generic name glyphosate — has been little short of a miracle chemical for farmers. It kills a broad spectrum of weeds, is easy and safe to work with, and breaks down quickly, reducing its environmental impact.
Sales took off in the late 1990s, after Monsanto created its brand of Roundup Ready crops that were genetically modified to tolerate the chemical, allowing farmers to spray their fields to kill the weeds while leaving the crop unharmed. Today, Roundup Ready crops account for about 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of the corn and cotton grown in the United States.
But farmers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said.
Now, Roundup-resistant weeds like horseweed and giant ragweed are forcing farmers to go back to more expensive techniques that they had long ago abandoned.
Mr. Anderson, the farmer, is wrestling with a particularly tenacious species of glyphosate-resistant pest called Palmer amaranth, or pigweed, whose resistant form began seriously infesting farms in western Tennessee only last year.
Pigweed can grow three inches a day and reach seven feet or more, choking out crops; it is so sturdy that it can damage harvesting equipment. In an attempt to kill the pest before it becomes that big, Mr. Anderson and his neighbors are plowing their fields and mixing herbicides into the soil.
That threatens to reverse one of the agricultural advances bolstered by the Roundup revolution: minimum-till farming. By combining Roundup and Roundup Ready crops, farmers did not have to plow under the weeds to control them. That reduced erosion, the runoff of chemicals into waterways and the use of fuel for tractors.
frequent plowing becomes necessary again, “that is certainly a major concern for our environment,” Ken Smith, a weed scientist at the University of Arkansas, said. In addition, some critics of genetically engineered crops say that the use of extra herbicides, including some old ones that are less environmentally tolerable than Roundup, belies the claims made by the biotechnology industry that its crops would be better for the environment.
“The biotech industry is taking us into a more pesticide-dependent agriculture when they’ve always promised, and we need to be going in, the opposite direction,” said Bill Freese, a science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety in Washington.
So far, weed scientists estimate that the total amount of United States farmland afflicted by Roundup-resistant weeds is relatively small — seven million to 10 million acres, according to Ian Heap, director of the International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds, which is financed by the agricultural chemical industry. There are roughly 170 million acres planted with corn, soybeans and cotton, the crops most affected.
Roundup-resistant weeds are also found in several other countries, including Australia, China and Brazil, according to the survey.
Monsanto, which once argued that resistance would not become a major problem, now cautions against exaggerating its impact. “It’s a serious issue, but it’s manageable,” said Rick Cole, who manages weed resistance issues in the United States for the company.
Of course, Monsanto stands to lose a lot of business if farmers use less Roundup and Roundup Ready seeds.
“You’re having to add another product with the Roundup to kill your weeds,” said Steve Doster, a corn and soybean farmer in Barnum, Iowa. “So then why are we buying the Roundup Ready product?”
Monsanto argues that Roundup still controls hundreds of weeds. But the company is concerned enough about the problem that it is taking the extraordinary step of subsidizing cotton farmers’ purchases of competing herbicides to supplement Roundup.
Monsanto and other agricultural biotech companies are also developing genetically engineered crops resistant to other herbicides.
Bayer is already selling cotton and soybeans resistant to glufosinate, another weedkiller. Monsanto’s newest corn is tolerant of both glyphosate and glufosinate, and the company is developing crops resistant to dicamba, an older pesticide. Syngenta is developing soybeans tolerant of its Callisto product. And Dow Chemical is developing corn and soybeans resistant to 2,4-D, a component of Agent Orange, the defoliant used in the Vietnam War.
Still, scientists and farmers say that glyphosate is a once-in-a-century discovery, and steps need to be taken to preserve its effectiveness.
Glyphosate “is as important for reliable global food production as penicillin is for battling disease,” Stephen B. Powles, an Australian weed expert, wrote in a commentary in January in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The National Research Council, which advises the federal government on scientific matters, sounded its own warning last month, saying that the emergence of resistant weeds jeopardized the substantial benefits that genetically engineered crops were providing to farmers and the environment.
Weed scientists are urging farmers to alternate glyphosate with other herbicides. But the price of glyphosate has been falling as competition increases from generic versions, encouraging farmers to keep relying on it.
Something needs to be done, said Louie Perry Jr., a cotton grower whose great-great-grandfather started his farm in Moultrie, Ga., in 1830.
Georgia has been one of the states hit hardest by Roundup-resistant pigweed, and Mr. Perry said the pest could pose as big a threat to cotton farming in the South as the beetle that devastated the industry in the early 20th century.
“If we don’t whip this thing, it’s going to be like the boll weevil did to cotton,” said Mr. Perry, who is also chairman of the Georgia Cotton Commission. “It will take it away.”
William Neuman reported from Dyersburg, Tenn., and Andrew Pollack from Los Angeles.
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
(Note from Jim McNulty of "Ban Genetically Engineered Food") What is even more amazing about this article, is that it is posted on a very pro biotech list that I have been watching/reading for many years.
eg 1: “You’re having to add another product with the Roundup to kill your weeds,” said Steve Doster, a corn and soybean farmer in Barnum, Iowa. “So then why are we buying the Roundup Ready product?”
eg2: "the problem has spread, with 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of
acres, predominantly soybeans, cotton and corn".
Note: From Gypsy -
''Darwinian evolution on fast-forward..........''
Deeper and deeper into the neurotoxic mire.
Solutions: Our town has petitioned the county council for two grow domes, one at each end of town, (SMALL TOWN) then everyone has begun buying heritage seeds and regular non monsanto hybrids for growing the towns food with each person contributing to the care, weeding watering etc of the produce, with protected exposure from the monsanto products. It appears to be one solution on the short term while we fight this on the long term The county council approved the project and funded it. This is what you all need to do in each of your towns. ACT LOCAL, THINK GLOBAL. YOU MUST CALL YOUR SENATOR AND CONGRESSMAN TO VOTE AGAINST SB 510 AND THE ACCOMPANYING BILL ON THE HOUSE SIDE THAT HAS ALREADY PASSED THE HOUSE AND IS NOW IN HTE SENATE.
Farmers Cope With Roundup-Resistant Weeds
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/business/energy-environment/04weed.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
provided to vatic project by Gypsy from Australia, and Jim McNulty
By WILLIAM NEUMAN and ANDREW POLLACK, NY Times
DYERSBURG, Tenn. — For 15 years, Eddie Anderson, a farmer, has been a strict adherent of no-till agriculture, an environmentally friendly technique that all but eliminates plowing to curb erosion and the harmful runoff of fertilizers and pesticides.
But not this year.
On a recent afternoon here, Mr. Anderson watched as tractors crisscrossed a rolling field — plowing and mixing herbicides into the soil to kill weeds where soybeans will soon be planted.
Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.
To fight them, Mr. Anderson and farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing.
“We’re back to where we were 20 years ago,” said Mr. Anderson, who will plow about one-third of his 3,000 acres of soybean fields this spring, more than he has in years. “We’re trying to find out what works.”
Farm experts say that such efforts could lead to higher food prices, lower crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution of land and water.
“It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.
The first resistant species to pose a serious threat to agriculture was spotted in a Delaware soybean field in 2000. Since then, the problem has spread, with 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of acres, predominantly soybeans, cotton and corn.
The superweeds could temper American agriculture’s enthusiasm for some genetically modified crops. Soybeans, corn and cotton that are engineered to survive spraying with Roundup have become standard in American fields. However, if Roundup doesn’t kill the weeds, farmers have little incentive to spend the extra money for the special seeds.
Roundup — originally made by Monsanto but now also sold by others under the generic name glyphosate — has been little short of a miracle chemical for farmers. It kills a broad spectrum of weeds, is easy and safe to work with, and breaks down quickly, reducing its environmental impact.
Sales took off in the late 1990s, after Monsanto created its brand of Roundup Ready crops that were genetically modified to tolerate the chemical, allowing farmers to spray their fields to kill the weeds while leaving the crop unharmed. Today, Roundup Ready crops account for about 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of the corn and cotton grown in the United States.
But farmers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said.
Now, Roundup-resistant weeds like horseweed and giant ragweed are forcing farmers to go back to more expensive techniques that they had long ago abandoned.
Mr. Anderson, the farmer, is wrestling with a particularly tenacious species of glyphosate-resistant pest called Palmer amaranth, or pigweed, whose resistant form began seriously infesting farms in western Tennessee only last year.
Pigweed can grow three inches a day and reach seven feet or more, choking out crops; it is so sturdy that it can damage harvesting equipment. In an attempt to kill the pest before it becomes that big, Mr. Anderson and his neighbors are plowing their fields and mixing herbicides into the soil.
That threatens to reverse one of the agricultural advances bolstered by the Roundup revolution: minimum-till farming. By combining Roundup and Roundup Ready crops, farmers did not have to plow under the weeds to control them. That reduced erosion, the runoff of chemicals into waterways and the use of fuel for tractors.
frequent plowing becomes necessary again, “that is certainly a major concern for our environment,” Ken Smith, a weed scientist at the University of Arkansas, said. In addition, some critics of genetically engineered crops say that the use of extra herbicides, including some old ones that are less environmentally tolerable than Roundup, belies the claims made by the biotechnology industry that its crops would be better for the environment.
“The biotech industry is taking us into a more pesticide-dependent agriculture when they’ve always promised, and we need to be going in, the opposite direction,” said Bill Freese, a science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety in Washington.
So far, weed scientists estimate that the total amount of United States farmland afflicted by Roundup-resistant weeds is relatively small — seven million to 10 million acres, according to Ian Heap, director of the International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds, which is financed by the agricultural chemical industry. There are roughly 170 million acres planted with corn, soybeans and cotton, the crops most affected.
Roundup-resistant weeds are also found in several other countries, including Australia, China and Brazil, according to the survey.
Monsanto, which once argued that resistance would not become a major problem, now cautions against exaggerating its impact. “It’s a serious issue, but it’s manageable,” said Rick Cole, who manages weed resistance issues in the United States for the company.
Of course, Monsanto stands to lose a lot of business if farmers use less Roundup and Roundup Ready seeds.
“You’re having to add another product with the Roundup to kill your weeds,” said Steve Doster, a corn and soybean farmer in Barnum, Iowa. “So then why are we buying the Roundup Ready product?”
Monsanto argues that Roundup still controls hundreds of weeds. But the company is concerned enough about the problem that it is taking the extraordinary step of subsidizing cotton farmers’ purchases of competing herbicides to supplement Roundup.
Monsanto and other agricultural biotech companies are also developing genetically engineered crops resistant to other herbicides.
Bayer is already selling cotton and soybeans resistant to glufosinate, another weedkiller. Monsanto’s newest corn is tolerant of both glyphosate and glufosinate, and the company is developing crops resistant to dicamba, an older pesticide. Syngenta is developing soybeans tolerant of its Callisto product. And Dow Chemical is developing corn and soybeans resistant to 2,4-D, a component of Agent Orange, the defoliant used in the Vietnam War.
Still, scientists and farmers say that glyphosate is a once-in-a-century discovery, and steps need to be taken to preserve its effectiveness.
Glyphosate “is as important for reliable global food production as penicillin is for battling disease,” Stephen B. Powles, an Australian weed expert, wrote in a commentary in January in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The National Research Council, which advises the federal government on scientific matters, sounded its own warning last month, saying that the emergence of resistant weeds jeopardized the substantial benefits that genetically engineered crops were providing to farmers and the environment.
Weed scientists are urging farmers to alternate glyphosate with other herbicides. But the price of glyphosate has been falling as competition increases from generic versions, encouraging farmers to keep relying on it.
Something needs to be done, said Louie Perry Jr., a cotton grower whose great-great-grandfather started his farm in Moultrie, Ga., in 1830.
Georgia has been one of the states hit hardest by Roundup-resistant pigweed, and Mr. Perry said the pest could pose as big a threat to cotton farming in the South as the beetle that devastated the industry in the early 20th century.
“If we don’t whip this thing, it’s going to be like the boll weevil did to cotton,” said Mr. Perry, who is also chairman of the Georgia Cotton Commission. “It will take it away.”
William Neuman reported from Dyersburg, Tenn., and Andrew Pollack from Los Angeles.
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
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