Bill Clinton, Battle of Thermopylae and the passengers on United 93 - Without a Telepromter

"The greatest public speaker of all time. You can't fake the sincerity"

An Arab Spring or a Western Fall?

Do you share in  the breathless excitement for the Arab Spring?

Are you awe struck by the nobility of a rising wave of democracy lifting the Islamic world? Or has the Neocon vision which predicted the inevitable democratic change been blinded by wishful thinking? I was amused yesterday for having been reminded that I am more angry than I used to be, as if I did not know that. I am angry. I am very angry at the optimistic stupidity that has commandeered US foreign policy.

Recall the optimism of Johnson and Viet Nam. We were always 50,000 troops closer to a glorious ending.  Reagan and Afghanistan and the glorious Mujaheddin, Clinton on Kosovo and the noble Albanian Muslims yearning to be free, All of them about a benign China, that would be lined up to greet American businessmen and buy everything being made in America.  Bush in Iraq, Bush in Afghanistan, All of them about Turkey, Obama about Egypt, Libya and now Syria. All of them from Johnson to Obama convinced that the spread of democracy was inevitable and would be an American triumph. All with the solid conviction that they were right, so right, so convicted.  Bush looked into Putin's soul and received confirmation of his righteousness.

Have they been right? Do events in Egypt and Turkey reassure you?

We are seeing the creative destruction of a fractured despotic Arab World. We are witnessing an Arab Spring for certain, but we will not be happy with the outcome, no more than we are with all those Chinese buying "Made in USA".

This Guy Says I Have it All Wrong:
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Country must get behind Arab Spring

Newsleader.com (of course)

You can't blame the American public for its indifference to the events in the Middle East and North Africa. Although the news from Egypt, Libya and Syria has been awe-inspiring and historic, it's no surprise that the Arab Spring scarcely registers on a typical American's radar. Our economic hangover, a result of our past profligacy and compounded by a venal Congress and an ineffective White House, has focused our attention on the problems in our own backyard. Despite this, however, what is happening in Cairo, Tripoli and Homs offers us a unique teaching moment regarding our relationship with the Arab World. Conflict is about competing narratives, needs and visions. 

Since the end of western colonialism, Arab nations have unsuccessfully wrestled with a variety political visions that have included Pan-Arab Nationalism, Soviet-inspired Socialism and Monarchism. The result has been a near universal rise of brutal autocracies often aided and abetted by a myopic U.S. foreign policy. The latest competing vision to arrive on the scene has been Wahhabi-inspired religious fundamentalism, of which al-Qaida is the most malignant example. Since the attacks of 9/11, we have convinced ourselves that the "Arab Street" and religious extremism are one of the same. In our quest for clarity at all costs, we have painted the Arab world with broad brush strokes. In doing so, we have neglected that region's intricate nuances whose rich diversity and history we barely understand. The Arab revolts, largely fought by educated, blue jeans-wearing and iPod-toting young people, debunks the stereotype that characterizes the region as backward, deeply anti-Western and religiously fanatical. 

The young protesters in Tahrir Square and the freedom fighters besieging Sirte have been motivated by neither the desire to establish a new Caliphate nor the need to destroy western civilization. The uprisings were motivated by those most human of desires: the right to self-determination, respect for civil rights and greater social and economic mobility. It is all straight out of the same enlightenment playbook that motivated our forefathers to resist British tyranny. Our national leadership's reaction to the revolts has been both dissonant and uninspired. Responses have ranged from Sen. John McCain's call for aggressive intervention (been there, done that in Iraq!) to the naïve isolationism of Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann. Somewhere in the middle was President Obama's often-frustrating policy of selective engagement. In Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, this appears to have succeeded and allowed the Arabs to take full ownership of their own liberation at no cost in U.S. lives. 

The administration, on the other hand, chose to ignore the call for freedom in Bahrain and Yemen where oil politics and global strategic concerns precluded any sympathetic intervention. The Arab revolts are still a work in progress. They could very well degenerate into chaos and the inevitable return to totalitarianism. What is encouraging, however, is that this was a grass roots uprising that categorically rejected the medieval insanity of religious extremism. The hope is that the Arab Spring will give way to a stable political culture dedicated to free expression, attentive governance and universal suffrage.

We need to encourage the rise to a new Arab enlightenment. It fosters healthier and mutually beneficial relationships across the globe.

Email local columnist Mike Radoiu at radoiu@hotmail.com.

Will Any Jobs Program Work While Banks and Households Are Reducing Their Debt?

The leading problem about new hiring, most often cited by small businesses, is poor sales. An economy, decreasing debt on its collective balance sheet, requires an alternative demand for its products and services. Energy infrastructure is the only thing that makes sense.

Employment is 2.4 million , or 2%, lower than when Obama took office and the unemployment rate, at 9.1%, is higher. Obama has woken up to the urgency of unemployment, primarily his own in 2012. Obama has found his inner urgency:

In his speech to Congress on Thursday night, President Barack Obama used plenty of repetition to get his point across. He employed the word "job" 45 times, in the context of the American Jobs Act, millions who are jobless, creating more jobs, etc. The word "tax" was heard 28 times, paired with words like "cut," "code" and "loophole."

"Pass this jobs bill." Obama used that phrase or similar ones 16 times in his speech:

"I am sending this Congress a plan that you should pass right away. … You should pass this jobs plan right away. … Pass this jobs bill. Pass this jobs bill. … Pass this jobs bill. … You should pass it right away. Pass this jobs bill, and we can put people to work rebuilding America. … You should pass it right away. … Pass this jobs bill. … Pass this bill. … Pass this jobs bill. … Pass this bill. … Pass this jobs bill. … Pass this jobs bill. … … You should pass this bill right away. … Regardless of the arguments we've had in the past, regardless of the arguments we'll have in the future, this plan is the right thing to do right now. You should pass it." -  Chicago Tribune

Celestial Gold

Meteorites delivered gold to Earth

By Leila Battison BBCScience reporter

A burst of meteorite impacts around 3.9 billion years ago delivered precious metals to Earth

Continue reading the main story

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Scientists have shown that the Earth's surface became enriched with precious metals by impacting meteorites.

The Earth's crust and mantle has considerably more gold than expected from favoured models of planetary formation.

A study from the University of Bristol looked at some of the oldest rocks on Earth, demonstrating that gold was delivered by meteorites long after their formation.

Their results are published in Nature.

While the Earth was forming, iron sank to the centre of the planet, forming the core.

Any precious metals in the planetary mix would have gone with this iron and concentrated in the core, leaving the mantle devoid of elements such as gold, platinum, and osmium.

But this is not what we observe. In fact, the silicate mantle has up to 1,000 times more gold than anticipated.

Several reasons for this enrichment were proposed in the past, including delivery by meteorites, although until now it has not been possible to prove.

By measuring isotopes in rocks that are nearly four billion years old from Greenland, the team has managed to date the gold delivery, and to relate it to an event known as the "terminal bombardment".

Impact theory

Earth formed by a snowball-effect known as accretion 4.55 billion years ago. The iron core with its accompanying mixture of precious metals formed very soon after that, within just a few million years.

A final impact of a Mars sized body with the Earth formed the Moon and finalised our planet's formation. By this time all gold would be locked up in the core.

A final burst of meteorite impacts around 3.9 billion years ago is known as the "terminal bombardment" and caused the cratering that we still see on the Moon.

Theories could not explain why there was so much gold on Earth's surface

It was during this last impact event that the gold which we can access in the crust was delivered.

"The proportions of gold and other precious metals are difficult to measure because they concentrate into nuggets, and we need to analyse a lot of rocks to get meaningful data." said lead researcher Dr Matthias Willbold.

They have therefore developed a way of telling this remarkable story of gold's extraterrestrial origin using a completely different element - tungsten.

Tungsten acts very similarly to precious metals like gold, but importantly it comes in different forms, or isotopes.The team have looked at the proportions of the different isotopes in modern rocks and in the most ancient rocks in Greenland.

They found a small but significant difference in the proportions, indicating that the modern rocks had received a dose of tungsten, and therefore also gold, from meteorites.

The Greenland rocks showed no such enrichment, giving a date to the input of gold. This date corresponds to the time of the terminal bombardment around 3.9 billion years ago.

During this time, the Earth would have been hit with 20 billion billion tonnes of asteroid material, although "it is not clear whether this would have come in the form of many small impacts, or just two or three mega-impacts", Dr Willbold said.

The research group at the University of Bristol are the first to successfully make such high-quality measurements of tungsten in ancient rocks, but so far have only analysed samples from Greenland.

"We hope to find more," said Dr Willbold, "and look at a time sequence for one billion years after the Greenland rocks, to see how the tungsten anomaly develops."

The Israeli Assault on the USS Liberty

 allen said...

When clowns actually read, say, 1/2 the data compiled by honorable military memebers numbering in the hundreds, they may have some right to question the results. Simply holding one's breath until one turns blue is not rational debate and it is not considered. Grow up

Israel 13

Nutters 0

Who are you going to believe, Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, Israeli politicians or American servicemen who were on the ship? Watch and You Decide.

NATO Disrupts LIbyan Missile Caches, Now in Hands of Who?

HAT TIP: ALLEN

U.S. Fears Missing Libyan Weapons Could Fall Into Wrong Hands

Published September 07, 2011

| Associated Press

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/09/07/us-fears-missing-libyan-weapons-could-fall-into-wrong-hands/#ixzz1XIxwSWY6

TRIPOLI, Libya – Crates of mortar shells sit unguarded and empty boxes for missiles to blow up tanks and bring down airplanes are strewn about arms depots around the Libyan capital.

Former rebels say they took some ammunition for the fight against Muammar Qaddafi, but U.S. officials and others have expressed fears Libya's weapons could fall into the wrong hands.

The six-month civil war that ended Qaddafi's 42-year rule and sent him into hiding also threw open the gates to his regime's extensive armories. The country's new leaders, who are struggling to establish a government, have failed to secure many of the caches, making them free game for looters, former rebel fighters or anyone with a truck to carry them away.

Since Qaddafi's fall last month, American and U.N. officials have warned that the failure to control Libya's weapons could destabilize the whole of North Africa.
Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called on Libya's new leaders to secure the ousted regime's weapons. "They still have a huge hill to climb," Clinton said. "But they are working with the international community to secure both chemical weapons stockpiles as well as conventional weapons."
However, visits by The Associated Press to weapons caches around Tripoli show that many remain poorly guarded and have already been heavily looted. About a dozen rebels wandered around one site the AP visited on Wednesday, where a large hangar was strewn with the boxes of missing weapons. Rebels at another site were leaving with a load of tank shells they said they were taking to a safe place for storage. They acknowledged, however, that they'd found the site unguarded.

It remains unclear how many weapons have been uncovered in Tripoli since Qaddafi's fall, said Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch, who has been searching the city for them.

Lots of munitions appear to have been hidden in civilian buildings to avoid airstrikes by NATO, which bombed regime military targets under a United Nations mandate to protect civilians.

At one unguarded site, Bouckaert said he found 100,000 anti-tank and anti-personnel mines. Elsewhere, he found weapons caches hidden under fruit trees.
"The problem is that the locals usually find out first and by the time we arrive and we can get some guards there, a lot of the most dangerous weapons have already been taken away," he said.

A green sign at the entrance of a site the AP visited Wednesday said the facility belonged to the Libyan Education Ministry. The large hangar was strewn with hundreds of crates of mortars and tank shells.

Empty boxes of rifle ammunition and the anti-aircraft guns the former rebels fixed to the backs of trucks to fight Qaddafi's soldiers were scattered on the floor. Among them were dozens of long skinny boxes for missiles -- all of them empty.
Numbered codes on the boxes and packing slips inside indicated some were Russian-made anti-tank missiles. Others held shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles designed to bring down airplanes, helicopters or drones.

Salim Badi, a rebel who said his brigade came the day before to secure the site, said he'd been there 10 days earlier and found many more weapons.
He guessed the rebel fighters had taken the rifle and anti-aircraft ammunition, but doubted they'd taken the missiles.

"None of the rebels would take this stuff," he said, standing over an open box of tank shells. "These here, we don't even know what to do with them."
Bouckaert said the missing missiles could be used to down airplanes.
"If these weapons start flooding around, it's an absolute disaster for commercial flights in this region," he said.

Neither of the warehouses the AP visited had traces of chemical weapons, and Bouckaert said he'd seen no evidence of chemical weapons in his search. The U.N. chief weapons watchdog said Wednesday that Libya's remaining chemical weapon stockpiles are believed to be secure.

Ahmet Uzumcu, director general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, said his inspectors left the country in February when the anti-Qaddafi uprisings started and will return "when the conditions allow us."

Uzumcu said Wednesday he had heard from sources that the "remaining stockpiles of chemical weapons are secured." He did not identify his sources.
In 2004, Qaddafi agreed to dismantle his weapons of mass destruction, and his regime underscored its commitment by using bulldozers to crush 3,300 unloaded bombs that could have been used to deliver chemical weapons.

But more common munitions, like mortars and tank shells, could be used to make roadside or car bombs by anyone wishing to fight Libya's new government.
"If people want to mount an insurgency against the new rebel government ... all they have to do is drive some trucks into some of these buildings and they can remove enough to fight an insurgency for years," he said.

Rebels were leaving a second site the AP visited Wednesday with a large truck full of crates of mortars. Fighter Abdel-Hamid al-Koti, 30, said his group would cart the munitions back to their hometown of Misrata for safekeeping.

Inside, a hangar with four large storerooms stood behind a row of building supplies stores and next to a house with grapevines growing over the entryway.
One room held hundreds of crates of tank shells. Another was full to the ceiling with mortars. Yet another contained thousands of land mines.
The remains of hundreds of empty munitions boxes littered some of the rooms and the sandy alley outside.

Al-Koti said he didn't know how many munitions had been taken from the site before his group arrived or who took them.

"When we came today, this is how it looked," he said, gesturing at the empty weapons crates. "We didn't find anyone here."


FOX NEWS:

Clueless!

WASHINGTON (AP) — The economy weak and the public seething, President Barack Obama is expected to propose $300 billion in tax cuts and federal spending Thursday night to get Americans working again. Republicans offered Tuesday to compromise with him on jobs — but also assailed his plans in advance of his prime-time speech.

I'd Like to Have an Argument Please.