November 26, 2008 at 22:34:46 Permalink
Open Letter to Barack Obama re: Truth Embargo
Diary Entry by Stephen Bassett
This open letter is part of the Million Fax on Washington, the goal of which is to direct one million letters, faxes and emails to Barack Obama calling for the immediate end to the 61-year truth embargo on formal acknowledgement of the extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race. The Million Fax on Washington is a project of Paradigm Research Group.
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President Elect Barack Obama
[Note: this open letter is part of the Million Fax on Washington, a project of Paradigm Research Group.]
November 21, 2008
Dear Mr. President Elect:
On October 17, 2008 PRG published an open letter to the candidates callingfor them to make preparations to end the six-decade truth embargo regarding an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race. This letter reiterates that request. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO
Your staff is now aware that letters, faxes and emails are arriving at your former Senate office and the Washington, DC transition headquarters. In general this correspondence will ask of you the following:
1) demand a full briefing from your military services and intelligence agencies regarding what they know and what they are doing about extraterrestrial related phenomena. If you are told you do not have the proper clearance for this information, replace that person with someone who has read the Constitution.
2) press for open and comprehensive congressional hearings to take testimony from scores of government witnesses who have already come forward with extraordinary evidence and are prepared to testify under oath.
3) formally acknowledge the extraterrestrial presence and finally end the truth embargo after 61 years.
4) make available for open development technologies which have been secretly studied and reverse engineered for decades with unlimited black budget funding. These technologies are derived from extraterrestrial vehicles and are now essential to overcome the environmental, economic and societal challenges of our time.
PRG is well aware of your intention to launch a high technology “New Deal” code named “New Apollo Project” to restore America’s economy. This massive program to subsidize green technology development, create jobs, expand the manufacturing base and reverse the trade imbalance will be likely accompanied by legislation prohibiting overseas hiring and offshore manufacturing. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO
All well and good, but it will not be enough. The challenges are too great and the response to these challenges too long delayed. It is essential the paradigm breaking technologies hidden in unacknowledged special access programs and sequestered behind the extraterrestrial truth embargo be included.
If you are in need of counsel to assist you in these matters, you have but to turn to your transition co-chair, John Podesta. His efforts to end the truth embargo and release all relevant government documents date back to at least 1993 and the Rockefeller Initiative. PRG believes he is fully aware of the extraterrestrial presence and is committed to creating more open, transparent governance. In this he is in sync with the chief financial backer of his Center for American Progress think tank, George Soros.
Reach out to your party’s allies within the military services and intelligence agencies. When you take office conduct the necessary meetings with the cross agency committees managing the extraterrestrial presence issue. In the spring of 2009, before the truth embargo becomes your embargo, initiate the most profound event in human history and begin rebuilding the trust of the American people in their government and the standing of your country in the world.
Respectfully,
Stephen Bassett
Executive Director
Rockefeller Initiative: http://tinyurl.com/2o526u and www.presidentialufo.com/clinton.htm
New York Times: http://tinyurl.com/5mstsr
Coalition for Freedom of Information: www.freedomofinfo.org
Million Fax on Washington: www.faxonwashington.org
Paradigm Research Group: www.paradigmresearchgroup.org
Stephen Bassett is arguably the leading advocate in the nation for ending the 60-year government imposed truth embargo regarding an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race and the planet earth. He is a political activist, lobbyist, commentator, columnist and conference producer. He is the founder of the Paradigm Research Group, the Executive Director of the Extraterrestrial Phenomena Political Action Committee (X-PPAC), the creator of the Paradigm Clock and the executive producer of the X-Conference. His work has been covered internationally including the Washington Post, Washington Times, New York Times, Legal Times, Roll Call, Christian Science Monitor, National Journal, Pravda and the London Sunday Express. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO
Since 1996 Bassett has assisted many organizations and initiatives making the case for 1) an end to the government truth embargo, and 2) open congressional hearings to take the testimony of former military and agency employees witness to extraterrestrial-related events and evidence. He has appeared on hundreds of radio and television talk shows and in numerous documentaries delivering the message to millions of people of the likelihood and implications of "Disclosure" - the formal acknowledgement of the ET presence by the governments of the world.
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Monday, December 1, 2008
Sunday, November 23, 2008
spews 33.spe.1002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
As well as tailpipe emissions, cars and other vehicles throw off metal pollutants from wear on various parts. Despite European regulations requiring cleaner materials in vehicles, a study in Stockholm shows that tires are a significant source of cadmium, while brake pads emit a variety of other metals.
Bo Bergbäck and his colleagues at the University of Kalmar in Sweden analyzed metals in tires and brake-pad linings. http://LOUIS1J1SHEEHAN1ESQUIRE.US They used average wear and replacement patterns for the parts, along with national traffic data for 2005, to estimate the quantities of various metals dispersed into the environment. The team compared its findings with data obtained in the 1990s.
Besides being a well-studied city in terms of environmental impacts, Bergbäck says, Stockholm represents "an average city in many respects," making the data relevant to other urban areas.http://LOUIS1J1SHEEHAN1ESQUIRE.US
Tires contain zinc because of the zinc oxide used in the vulcanization process, which often has small but significant amounts of cadmium associated with it, Bergbäck says. Tires remain a major source of emissions of those two metals in Stockholm. Brake linings shed a significant amount of zinc and copper, he adds.
In general, lead and cadmium admissions decreased 90 percent between 1998 and 2005, while emissions for zinc and copper have declined more modestly, the researchers report in the Aug. 1 Environmental Science & Technology.http://LOUIS1J1SHEEHAN1ESQUIRE.US
Another group of researchers in Sweden is studying the bioavailability and biological impact of these metals. "We know that there are increased concentrations of these metals," Bergbäck says, "[but] we can't say anything about biological effects."
Bo Bergbäck and his colleagues at the University of Kalmar in Sweden analyzed metals in tires and brake-pad linings. http://LOUIS1J1SHEEHAN1ESQUIRE.US They used average wear and replacement patterns for the parts, along with national traffic data for 2005, to estimate the quantities of various metals dispersed into the environment. The team compared its findings with data obtained in the 1990s.
Besides being a well-studied city in terms of environmental impacts, Bergbäck says, Stockholm represents "an average city in many respects," making the data relevant to other urban areas.http://LOUIS1J1SHEEHAN1ESQUIRE.US
Tires contain zinc because of the zinc oxide used in the vulcanization process, which often has small but significant amounts of cadmium associated with it, Bergbäck says. Tires remain a major source of emissions of those two metals in Stockholm. Brake linings shed a significant amount of zinc and copper, he adds.
In general, lead and cadmium admissions decreased 90 percent between 1998 and 2005, while emissions for zinc and copper have declined more modestly, the researchers report in the Aug. 1 Environmental Science & Technology.http://LOUIS1J1SHEEHAN1ESQUIRE.US
Another group of researchers in Sweden is studying the bioavailability and biological impact of these metals. "We know that there are increased concentrations of these metals," Bergbäck says, "[but] we can't say anything about biological effects."
Monday, November 17, 2008
scrutiny 77.scr.11001 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
New antidepressant medications have gained widespread use in the past decade, and more await approval from the Food and Drug Administration following clinical trials. Much debate currently concerns whether it's ethical for physicians to give placebo pills to depressed volunteers in such studies, instead of providing either the drug being tested or an FDA-approved antidepressant.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
An analysis of the FDA's clinical-trial database on recently approved antidepressants now promises to enliven the controversy further. It finds that depressed patients assigned to 4 to 8 weeks of placebo treatment—typical clinical-trial lengths—exhibited no increased risk for suicide or suicide attempts and showed substantial symptom relief. Still, depression subsided to an even greater extent among those receiving antidepressants.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
Placebos pack enough therapeutic punch to calm ethical qualms about their use in antidepressant studies, conclude psychiatrist Arif Khan of the Northwest Clinical Research Center in Bellevue, Wash., and his coworkers.
"Patients who are assigned to placebo treatment in clinical trials are not untreated," Khan's team concludes in the April Archives of General Psychiatry. "The capsule they receive is pharmacologically inert, but hardly inert with respect to its symbolic value and its power as a conditioned stimulus."
Like other participants, placebo patients received physical examinations, attention and guidance from a physician, opportunities to talk about their condition, and other assistance that chipped away at their depression, the researchers assert. Psychotherapy of all theoretical stripes may work primarily because of a common emphasis on these types of interventions, they propose.
Khan's group obtained FDA clinical data for the seven antidepressants approved from 1987 through 1997. These drugs, which include fluoxetine (Prozac), sertraline (Zoloft), and paroxetine (Paxil), exert different effects on brain chemistry from those of antidepressants approved earlier.
Of the 45 studies, 23 compared a new drug with a placebo only. The rest compared a new drug with both an approved antidepressant and a placebo. In most cases, the 8,731 participants suffered from moderate depression and had no other serious physical or psychiatric conditions.
During the trials, 34 people killed themselves and 130 others tried to do so. Rates of suicide and attempted suicide were nearly the same for groups treated with placebo or with drugs, the team says.
Depression symptoms declined by 41 percent with new antidepressants, 42 percent with previously approved medications, and 31 percent with placebos.
Such findings will aid researchers and oversight boards struggling to determine the ethics of using placebos in antidepressant studies, Khan's group concludes. However, comments on the analysis, published in the same journal, offer varying interpretations of the results.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
Nothing in the report raises concerns about placebo use, holds psychiatrist Paul Leber of Neuro-Pharm Group in Potomac, Md., a private research firm. Some depressed patients respond at least as well to placebos as to antidepressants, making randomized placebo-controlled trials essential, Leber argues.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
Epidemiologist Karin B. Michels of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston disagrees. Antidepressants relieved symptoms better than placebos in the FDA trials, even if no disparity in suicides emerged, she says. A physician who knowingly uses placebos thus unethically deprives patients of effective treatment, in her view.
The FDA data don't adequately assess placebo effects on depressed patients, argues psychologist Helena Chmura Kraemer of Stanford University. For instance, the studies didn't test whether improvement on placebo exceeded that of depressed people given no treatment. Also, more patients dropped out of the trials than completed them, making it difficult to draw conclusions.
Studies of depression treatment lasting at least 6 months have found much higher relapse rates for placebo responders than for those who improve on antidepressants, say Frederic M. Quitkin and Donald F. Klein, both psychiatrists at Columbia University. The FDA review and some other reports (SN: 8/24/96, p. 123) underestimate antidepressants' effectiveness, they argue. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
An analysis of the FDA's clinical-trial database on recently approved antidepressants now promises to enliven the controversy further. It finds that depressed patients assigned to 4 to 8 weeks of placebo treatment—typical clinical-trial lengths—exhibited no increased risk for suicide or suicide attempts and showed substantial symptom relief. Still, depression subsided to an even greater extent among those receiving antidepressants.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
Placebos pack enough therapeutic punch to calm ethical qualms about their use in antidepressant studies, conclude psychiatrist Arif Khan of the Northwest Clinical Research Center in Bellevue, Wash., and his coworkers.
"Patients who are assigned to placebo treatment in clinical trials are not untreated," Khan's team concludes in the April Archives of General Psychiatry. "The capsule they receive is pharmacologically inert, but hardly inert with respect to its symbolic value and its power as a conditioned stimulus."
Like other participants, placebo patients received physical examinations, attention and guidance from a physician, opportunities to talk about their condition, and other assistance that chipped away at their depression, the researchers assert. Psychotherapy of all theoretical stripes may work primarily because of a common emphasis on these types of interventions, they propose.
Khan's group obtained FDA clinical data for the seven antidepressants approved from 1987 through 1997. These drugs, which include fluoxetine (Prozac), sertraline (Zoloft), and paroxetine (Paxil), exert different effects on brain chemistry from those of antidepressants approved earlier.
Of the 45 studies, 23 compared a new drug with a placebo only. The rest compared a new drug with both an approved antidepressant and a placebo. In most cases, the 8,731 participants suffered from moderate depression and had no other serious physical or psychiatric conditions.
During the trials, 34 people killed themselves and 130 others tried to do so. Rates of suicide and attempted suicide were nearly the same for groups treated with placebo or with drugs, the team says.
Depression symptoms declined by 41 percent with new antidepressants, 42 percent with previously approved medications, and 31 percent with placebos.
Such findings will aid researchers and oversight boards struggling to determine the ethics of using placebos in antidepressant studies, Khan's group concludes. However, comments on the analysis, published in the same journal, offer varying interpretations of the results.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
Nothing in the report raises concerns about placebo use, holds psychiatrist Paul Leber of Neuro-Pharm Group in Potomac, Md., a private research firm. Some depressed patients respond at least as well to placebos as to antidepressants, making randomized placebo-controlled trials essential, Leber argues.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
Epidemiologist Karin B. Michels of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston disagrees. Antidepressants relieved symptoms better than placebos in the FDA trials, even if no disparity in suicides emerged, she says. A physician who knowingly uses placebos thus unethically deprives patients of effective treatment, in her view.
The FDA data don't adequately assess placebo effects on depressed patients, argues psychologist Helena Chmura Kraemer of Stanford University. For instance, the studies didn't test whether improvement on placebo exceeded that of depressed people given no treatment. Also, more patients dropped out of the trials than completed them, making it difficult to draw conclusions.
Studies of depression treatment lasting at least 6 months have found much higher relapse rates for placebo responders than for those who improve on antidepressants, say Frederic M. Quitkin and Donald F. Klein, both psychiatrists at Columbia University. The FDA review and some other reports (SN: 8/24/96, p. 123) underestimate antidepressants' effectiveness, they argue. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Thursday, November 13, 2008
commission 773.com.e333 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Since 2003, fish biologist Arthur Devries of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign has not caught a single adult Antarctic toothfish—a species sometimes sold at grocery stores as Chilean sea bass. In the 1970s Devries would catch as many as 500 adults in a season as part of his research into the proteins that keep their blood from freezing.
Or so Devries and David Ainley of the environmental consulting firm H. T. Harvey Associates reported this year to the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. The Commission, established in 1982 and tasked with regulating the fisheries governed by the 1959 Antarctic Treaty (which protects all the territory below 60 degrees south latitude and oceans south of the Polar Front), had a meeting of the Ecosystem Monitoring and Management working group in Moscow in July. In advance of that meeting, more than two dozen "concerned Ross Sea researchers" joined Ainley and Devries in a formal letter demanding a moratorium on fishing over the Ross Sea continental shelf and a reduction in quotas along the continental slope. http://louis-j-sheehan.com
The Commission, scientists complain, has failed to live up to its name. http://louis-j-sheehan.com Ainley says that the decline of this large, slow-growing, bottom-dwelling fish has knocked the Antarctic ecosystem out of whack and resulted in killer whales dropping in numbers, whereas silverfish have increased in abundance to compete with penguins and whales for crystal krill. Quite simply, he says, "The Southern Ocean is a mess."
Meanwhile, conservationists and policymakers have begun to voice concern about the future of the Antarctic Treaty in an oil-challenged world. The agreement set aside preexisting territorial claims of seven countries and reserved the continent for science and environmental protection, barring nations from rushing to drill for oil there. But pirate fishing boats have long been wreaking havoc on the southern oceans, and reduced sea ice has eased coastal access and stripped wildlife of their last refuge. Antarctica is headed down the path of becoming a free-market free-for-all.
Antarctica is already big business for tour operators. In the past decade the number of tourists in the area has jumped to 40,000 a year with little regulatory oversight. In 2007 one rickety Liberian-flagged tourist vessel sank off the Antarctic Peninsula and 154 passengers and crew members had to be rescued by a Norwegian cruise ship. Late last year, Britain and Australia submitted extensions to their claims of the seabed around Antarctic territories—reasserting their rights just in case the ban on drilling is one day lifted. Oil prices were at an all-time high last summer, and many observers wonder how long the Ross and the Weddell Seas—which hold some 50 billion barrels of oil—will remain the world's most pristine oceans.
"As we begin to run out of oil and gas, there's going to be increased exploration for areas where it is not being extracted," says Hugh Ducklow a biologist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. "The treaty is going to be vulnerable."
But would the demise of the Treaty really be such a bad thing for environmental conservation in Antarctica? The Commission has proved toothless when it comes to the toothfish. Last week in response to the scientists' demands, CCAMLR made a small step in banning bottom trawling in two 150 square mile areas, but it has skirted the issue of designating marine protected areas that would make the most sensitive regions off limits to all forms of fishing. Considering that some treaty signatories will continue to operate fishing vessels under flags of convenience and poachers are unabashedly nabbing krill and fish, establishing national ownership of Antarctic waters may be a better route to engender sustainability.
Martin Pratt, an expert on maritime boundaries at Durham University in England, says that the only environmental protection afforded under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea relates to so-called Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) in waters within a territory extending 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) from a country's coastline. "In Antarctica," he says, "there's this problem where states have claims, but those claims are frozen and the question is whether establishing an EEZ represents a violation of the treaty."
The current debate about the treaty's stability began in October 2007 when the U.K. announced that it would file a claim under the Law of the Sea extending the seabed boundaries of their Antarctic territory based on the extent of the continental shelf. The British claim already overlaps with Argentina and Chile, heightening the potential for a territorial dispute.
Argentineans are still fuming over their defeat in 1982 when they tried to reclaim South Georgia Island and the Falkland Islands from the U.K.—the closest thing we've had to an Antarctic war. Although Britain insists it will not contravene restrictions against oil, gas and mineral exploration in Antarctica, Robin Churchill, an expert in international law at the University of Dundee in England, says the move has the potential to be "quite destabilizing." That would be shame, he says, because "the Treaty has promoted scientific research by opening Antarctica up for any scientist to go anywhere, fostering a spirit of cooperation."
In February, Australia—with U.N. approval—expanded its seabed borders along the Kerguelen Plateau around Heard and McDonald islands, pushing into the Antarctic Treaty jurisdiction. Although Australia says that mineral and petroleum exploration is out of the question, some fear that this move could open the door to trawling on the seabed and bioprospecting in the region.
"Legally, it may be defensible," says Alan Hemmings, a specialist on Antarctic governance at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. "Politically, it's more problematic."
Ironically, Australia's move may serve to strengthen rather than weaken environmental protection. Back in 2002, an Australian research boat sent a Japanese whaling vessel scurrying back to its mother ship after it was spotted inside Australia's EEZ near Prydz Bay. Last December, Australia sent the Ocean Viking to monitor Japan's whaling fleet in Antarctica and by late January, an Australian federal court had ruled that it was illegal for Japanese to whale within 200 nautical (230 statute) miles of their Antarctic territory. Pratt says it is still a "tricky legal problem" and "an issue [that will] presumably [be] tested in court somewhere, sometime."
Farther north, in the southern Indian Ocean, Australia runs regular patrols around Heard Island, France patrols the Kerguelen Islands, and South Africa has a marine-protected area around its Prince Edward Islands, which are right along the northern boundary of the treaty area. Ainley says that patrolling these sovereign territories—which partially overlap with the treaty regime—is the only enforcement of fishing regulations in the region.
The Antarctic Treaty has provided a model for conservation of the terrestrial environment, but biologists agree that the marine environment has suffered under Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).
The Commission (created by the CCAMLR) provides licenses to vessels fishing in the Southern Ocean and requires licensed boats to have an observer on board to monitor catch levels. It also has the ability to set up marine protected areas in the Southern Ocean, such as one proposed for the Ross Sea. But it has yet to do so and, in general, adoption of fishing regulations proposed in the Commission's scientific working groups has moved at a glacial pace in the face of opposition from the powerful fishing industry. http://louis-j-sheehan.com
Hemmings says that proposals for Marine Protected Areas in Antarctica are "lost in a sandpit of discussion or whittled away by Russia, Japan, South Korea, and a number of other fishing states." Ainley says the newly designated vulnerable marine ecosystems are "relative pin-pricks" and it's not clear if this represents progress in establishing the marine protected areas that Antarctica desperately needs. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Thursday, September 25, 2008
सेंस ९००२२० लुईस जे. Sheehan
Ecuador Goes Animist in a Good Way
Ecuadorian voters are considering bestowing the basic rights widely granted to humans upon natural entities. This means rivers, air, tropical forests, islands, and so on, will have an inalienable right to not be abused or destroyed or treated purely as property। http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
The new law on the table is actually a new constitution–not the kind of thing we generally go in for up here in the states, but so far polls show the Ecuadorians are into it, 56% to 23%. While this might initially sound like the latest in Latin American radicalism, a lawyer from the US, Thomas Linzey, is behind the proposal. He says the upshot will be that it will be possible to sue for damages to an ecosystem if the ecosystem isn’t on your property.
Not only is this non-anthropocentric, which isn’t that new (PETA is non-anthropocentric), it’s non-animal-centric. Actually, non-life-centric.
Image: flickr/pingnews
MacArthur Highlights Day
Two green MacArthur recipients were named yesterday. (A MacArthur Fellowship, or “genius grant,” is $500,000 you can spend however you want, disbursed over the course of five years.) I keep wondering if there will be a news story about a MacArthur Fellow found floating in a pool in The Bellagio, but this never seems to happen, so they must have some kind of vetting process. Will Allen–a pro ball player turned urban farmer–is the obviously green one this year. But I think John Oschendorf counts too.
He has this group or program or something at MIT devoted to masonry. Old stone stuff. How to keep it around, what you can learn from it about making buildings sustainable. If you understand green architecture as building new, more sustainable dwellings, you’re missing a fundamental point: it’s generally greener to figure out how to modify and preserve old structures. Any young hotshot architect whose powers of invention are focused on making flying buttresses new again deserves as much attention from the green movement as an urban farmer, no matter how amazing Allen’s baby swiss chard may be.
Image: flickr/Phillie Casablanca
Burying CO2 Might Help Asia Not Destroy Us
As pessimists on climate change are fond of reminding us, China and India are catastrophically prolific builders of coal-fired power plants these days. While we’re busy greening the Emmy Awards, they are quietly doing what they feel they need to do to provide energy for their expanding economies, more than compensating for all of the West’s cute anti-warming efforts by increasing the gadrillions of tons of carbon they release into our shared atmosphere. But new carbon burying tech might help them not be so destructive.
The consulting firm McKinsey & Co has just issued a report saying that even without government funding, the technology for trapping the carbon emitted by coal plants and burying it might pay for itself by 2030. China and India probably won’t throw themselves into the new tech whole-heartedly at first, because it looks like it will add about a billion euros to the initial cost of building each new plant. But the EU has stepped up by ordering a slew of trial models built by 2015.
Of course, there’s the small problem of the rich West having already created a horrendous climate situation. Not the best dynamic for pressuring an ascendant China into good stewardship. We’re basically the parent that just got thrown out of Betty Ford trying to get junior to put down the vodka. I think that might have been what happened in Postcards from the Edge.
Image: flickr/thewritingzone
GM Chairman Loses Mind on Colbert; RIP P.E. Clapp
Last night The Colbert Report gave us one of those episodes that pivot in the middle from comedy to that transcendent, swooning, oh-my-god-real-life-is-more-absurd feeling. This took place when GM Chariman Bob Lutz (pictured below) informed Colbert’s fictional persona that 32,000 respected scientists shared his view that climate change is caused by “sunspot activity.”
If you’re done mourning David Foster Wallace, a literary ally of environmentalism, you might consider getting started on mourning Philip Clapp, who spent his career refuting ridiculousness of the Bob Lutz variety. The United States does not have an environmental lobby the same way it has a tobacco lobby, but Clapp’s National Environmental Trust was the closest thing. As its director, he pressured Clinton, Bush, and even Gore, to take serious action on climate change, advocating in vain for the Kyoto treaty. He later moved to the Pew Charitable Trusts, where he lampooned Bush’s weak, late, concession to some form of American involvement in an international treaty on emissions. Let’s take a moment to remember that environmentalism needs pinstriped Capitol Hill operators with integrity, as well as the rumpled journalists/artists/farmer types.
Image: flickr/Rockershirt
GOP Attacks Dem Drilling Bill
Everything that happens in congress now is assumed to bear on the crazily tight presidential race। So it makes sense that the House Dems just smashed through a compromise off-shore drilling bill, thus undermining a GOP line of attack. And it makes sense that the GOP lampooned it as a “figment of the imagination” (Rep. Don Young, Republican of Alaska). Louis
Also predictable: Bush just vowed to veto it। Harder to predict is whether Senate Republicans will filibuster. They’ve been shouting “Drill baby drill” at conventions. Will they be able to get away with reading from a telephone book on the floor to block a bill that enables oil companies to do just that? http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
Image: flickr/PhillipC
Volt: Jesus, Finally
The first plug-in electric American car, the Chevy Volt, is going on the market in 2010. It doesn’t look like the phallus some gearheads want it to look like (they were into the old car-show model, shown here), and this is causing lamentation in the blogosphere. Pay no attention; this is very good news.
Basically, the Volt can go 40 miles without using any gasoline, and plugs into any old home socket. It takes a few hours to recharge. Only when you’re taking long trips do you need to use gas; the gas motor kicks in after 40 miles and takes you another 300. It uses less electricity a year than a fridge.
The only problem: It’s not really viable as a mass-market business proposition yet. It’ll probably cost about $40,000, and GM doesn’t expect to make a significant profit, even with that hefty price. So while in my wildest dreams it becomes illegal to make any other kind of family car in 2011, that’s not going to happen without destroying the American economy.
Image: flickr/jurvetson
Off-Shore Drilling: Resistance Looks Futile
The Democrats have been gradually retreating from their anti-off-shore-drilling stance ever since polls started to indicate that drilling is a winning issue for the GOP. Now they’re transitioning into all-out surrender. The bipartisan “Gang of 10″ congresspeople pushing for an energy bill that includes off-shore drilling has become the Gang of At Minimum 20. Even Pelosi has said she’ll let the oil companies drill near the southeastern US (far from her own California).
Pelosi has also been trying to find a way to partially salvage this apparently FUBAR piece of legislation. And she is being appropriately sneaky in her proposed compromise. Which is: in return for the ability to excavate for oil off-shore, oil companies have to contribute billions to the development of non-oil energy sources (wind, solar, etc). That allows America to try to fuel itself insofar as possible, but still forces Big Oil to contribute to its own obsolesence.
And the GOP can’t really oppose that aspect of a bill without looking completely in the pocket of Big Oil. Has that ever stopped them? Not that I know of. But it will at least force them to take the bait and lose face.
Image: flickr/barbwire55
Palin Discovers Climate Change
I can appreciate the tragedy of her situation. She denied man-made climate change quite explicitly twice. Part of her whole thing is that she’s not a duplicitous Washington type. And she’s an unconventionally-educated woman of the people. So why not stay with the ill-informed thing? But there’s only so far you can go in that direction with the moderate wing of her party, and with independents.
I feel like the Obama campaign’s fate will rest partly on whether they can knock Palin off her pedestal in the coming weeks. This should give them something to work with.
Image: flickr/zieak
Reclaiming the Segway from Toolness
I should admit here I have not been a Segway believer. Ever since I saw Will Arnett straddle one on Arrested Development I have not been able to understand any possible use of the machine other than comic prop. I realize now that this was slightly unfair.
A British MP just defied possible arrest to lead a charge of Segwayists through London, trying to get the Department of Transportation in England to clarify whether they’re legal to drive on roads or not. He points out that in a dense urban area, they go faster than the average speed cars are able to move in traffic, and emit virtually nothing.
I guess my confusion is still this: They go 12 mph. Doesn’t a bicycle go that fast? But I guess if you don’t want to get your suit sweaty… I forget that people still go to offices in suits.
Image: flickr/RobotSkirts
New iPod Nano Cleaner, But Still a New iPod
This is nice, and represents part of Apple’s response to Greenpeace’s longstanding complaints against its mediocre enviro record. (This is one of their anti-Apple posters). But it does raise a couple questions: first of all, isn’t the most impactful thing about iPods that they keep coming out with new models? So that you don’t hold on to your expensive piece of electronics for more than a year?
Second, containing “easily recyclable materials” isn’t the same as “recyclable।” I don’t know about the recycling chart in your city, but in mine, chrome things don’t appear to go into the blue bin. Somewhere at MIT, consciencious students may be disassembling iPods before they throw them out, dividing their components into tiny recyclable and non-recyclable piles. But I bet most of those easily recyclable materials aren’t getting recycled. Unless they’re being passed on to parents, homeless people, etc when a new model comes out. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
Image: Greenpeace
Friday, September 19, 2008
http://louis-j-sheehan.info
Our sun, which lies 26,000 light years from the center of the the Milky Way, may have been born in a different part of the galaxy and later migrated to its current position, about halfway towards the galaxy’s outer edge. A new study defies the conventional wisdom that stars spend their entire lifespans in the same galactic region, and calls into question astronomers’ theory that galaxies have certain fixed “habitable zones” where life is more likely to evolve.
“Our view of the extent of the habitable zone is based in part on the idea that certain chemical elements necessary for life are available in some parts of a galaxy’s disk but not others,” said [lead researcher] Rok Roskar…. “If stars migrate, then that zone can’t be a stationary place” [Astrobiology Magazine].
Astronomers simulated the formation of the Milky Way starting 10 billion years ago, when gas and dark matter from the Big Bang (about 4 billion years before) had begun to condense. By about nine billion years ago, the material for the galactic disk had mostly come together, but the actual disk formation hadn’t started. Scientists simulated the formation and evolution of the galaxy from that point [Scientific American]. As the simulated galaxy evolved on its own, researchers saw that the orbit of some stars around the galactic center changed drastically.
The migrations were a result of individual stars’ interactions with the bulk of the galaxy’s spiral arms. A star trailing close behind a spiral arm will feel an extra pull from the arm’s intense gravity. This will boost the speed of the star, sending it into orbit farther from the galactic centre. Conversely, a star moving in front of an armful of stars will get dragged backwards, prompting it to slow and move closer to the centre of the galaxy [New Scientist].
The study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters [subscription required], suggests that as many of 50 percent of stars near our Sun could have originated elsewhere. Migrating stars also help explain a long-standing problem in the chemical mix of stars in the neighborhood of our solar system, which has long been known to be more mixed and diluted than would be expected if stars spent their entire lives where they were born. By bringing in stars from very different starting locations, the sun’s neighborhood has become a more diverse and interesting place, the researcher सैद।dwarf
The last remnants of a dwarf galaxy circle the spiral galaxy that tore it apart. Two rivers of stars—and possibly dark matter—are all that remain of the low-mass dwarf after it was unraveled by the gravity of the much larger spiral, NGC 5907. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com
Astronomers have noted that such streams of stars are relatively common in the outer regions of spiral galaxies, a phenomenon that has been observed on the outskirts of the Milky Way as well as around the nearby Andromeda galaxy. This image, taken by accomplished astrophotographer R. Jay Gabany in collaboration with David Martinez-Delgado from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and his international team, shows for the first time in intricate detail the aftermath of a large galaxy destroying and consuming its dwarf neighbor.
Astronomers have noted that such streams of stars are relatively common in the outer regions of spiral galaxies, a phenomenon that has been observed on the outskirts of the Milky Way as well as around the nearby Andromeda galaxy. This image, taken by accomplished astrophotographer R. Jay Gabany in collaboration with David Martinez-Delgado from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and his international team, shows for the first time in intricate detail the aftermath of a large galaxy destroying and consuming its dwarf neighbor.
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