This Can't Be Happening!

I went out today and checked on my palm tree. It’s a small thing: the trunk is only about a foot from the ground, with the palmate fronds spreading out from the upper part. New fronds appear as compressed blades sticking up from the center. They have a kind of fuzz on them, like the lanugo on a newborn baby. What makes my little palm unusual is it sits in my front yard in Maple Glen, Pennsylvania, about 10 miles north of the edge of Philadelphia. It’s clearly not a native species to this area, but it is doing surprisingly well. Although we’ve had a number of nights now when the temperature dropped below freezing, including two when it dropped to about 26 degrees, the fronds are still bright green, and the shoots have continued to grow.

While the palm is pretty, and striking in its own way, standing out against the backdrop of deciduous trees that have finally shed all their leaves for the winter, it is also a little disturbing — a harbinger of an enormous climate change that is taking place in front of my eyes.

I have good reason to believe that this little tree is going to survive our Philadelphia winter (which last year never went below 25 degrees, and then only for such short periods of time that the ground never froze below about an inch or two of soil), and that it will continue to grow where I planted it, perhaps becoming the first palm in Pennsylvania.

As I write this, negotiators are meeting in Doha, Qatar, supposedly to negotiate a treaty that will lead to serious efforts by the nations of the world to finally start reducing the release of more carbon into the earth’s already overloaded atmosphere. We hear from UN researchers that the global emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere have risen by 54% between 1990 and 2011, and that by the end of this year, that number will be 58%. They were supposed to be going down over that period.

Meanwhile, the evidence that all this carbon is starting to have a snowball effect on global warming. Ice caps in both the Arctic and the Antarctic are melting, and at a faster rate than anyone was predicting even five years ago. The oceans, both as a result of that melting, and thanks to the expansion of the water itself as it warms, are showing a measurable rise, which was one of the reasons for the extraordinary damage done to New York City and the surrounding shorelines by the recent late-season super-storm Hurricane Sandy. A similar superstorm, with winds up to almost 200 mph, located further south than ever recorded in the Pacific, just tore through Mindanao in the southern Philippines. (Both storms were powered by a historically unprecedented rise in ocean surface temperatures.)

Beautiful Palmetto palm, but a foreboding sight in Pennsylvania

Up on the planet Mars, there is a complex new rover named Curiosity that is driving around looking for evidence of possible life. Its every little finding is readily broadcast around the world, as was done today at a televised conference in California, to be analyzed by scientists in the US, in Europe, in China, and even in Iran.

The scientists and engineers who are managing that remarkable vehicle, as well as the fantastically successful Cassini probe orbiting Saturn, the Kepler satellite that is discovering all those planets orbiting distant stars, and all the other various satellites and space probes launched by NASA, however, are not as free as the space probes they are running.

Thanks to the zealous wackos at the Department of Homeland Security, back in 2007 during the latter part of the Bush administration an order went out that all workers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena–an organization that is run under contract to NASA by the California Institute of Technology, had to be vetted for high security clearance in order to continue doing their jobs. Never mind that not one of them was or is engaged in secret activities (NASA is a rigorously non-military, scientific agency which not only publishes all its findings, but which invites the active participation of scientists from around the world). In order to continue working at JPL, even scientists who had been with NASA for decades were told they would need a high-level security badge just to enter the premises. To be issued that badge, they were told they would need to agree undergo an intensive FBI check that would look into their prior life history, right back to college.

Not surprisingly, many scientists and engineers at JPL took umbrage at this extreme invasion of their private lives. Neighbors and old colleagues and acquaintances, ex-spouses, etc. were going to be interrogated about their drug-use history, their drinking habits, their juvenile arrest records, their sexual orientation-all those things that prying agents like to get into when doing a security clearance background check–as if they were applying for positions in the CIA or the Secret Service.

Crazed security check requirement is driving over 100 scientists to quit NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab

Jennifer Foster, a tourist from Florence, Arizona, was walking in Times Square on a cold night in November and came across a New York City police officer giving a barefoot homeless man a pair of all-weather boots he had purchased out of his own pocket. Moved, she took out her cell phone and snapped a picture.

Jennifer Foster's cell phone image of Officer Lawrence DePrimo and a homeless man on Times Square

If this officer had, instead, decided to beat this homeless man with a baton, it’s likely Ms Foster would have been intimidated, harassed or even arrested for doing what she did. In this case, the laudable actions of Officer Lawrence DePrimo went viral and he‘s become a national hero with an appearance on Good Morning America and more. It was unplanned good PR based on authentic human compassion. The officer reportedly was not aware of the tourist with the cell phone camera. He was acting as “New York’s finest.”

Ms Foster reported on her Facebook page that Officer DePrimo told the man, “I have these size 12 boots for you, they are all-weather. Let’s put them on and take care of you.” He, then, helped the man put on his socks and the new warm boots.

President Barack Obama, a former professor of constitutional law, has just nominated to the Federal bench a lower court magistrate in Philadelphia who appears to be a legal bully with a dim understanding of the First Amendment and the Code of Conduct required of federal judges.

That Code of Conduct clearly forbids jurists from actions that undermine “public confidence” in the integrity of the judiciary, such as judges using their authority to harass people.

Some in the Philadelphia area feel a federal magistrate clearly broached that code’s requirements last year when he ordered U.S. Marshals to investigate a Delaware man who had sent him a short letter urging that magistrate to act fairly in a court proceeding.

The target of that investigation, military veteran Hampton Coleman, filed a complaint with federal judicial authorities claiming federal marshals, dispatched by that magistrate, harassed him, including threatening him with losing his house if he sent another letter to that magistrate.

President Barack Obama recently nominated that federal magistrate, Luis Felipe Restrepo, to fill a vacant U.S. District Court judgeship in Philadelphia. The nomination is supported by Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senators, Democrat Bob Casey and and Tea Party Republican Pat Toomey.

Coleman’s “Complaint of Misconduct” against Magistrate Judge Restrepo stated in part that Restrepo “made an intentionally inaccurate and false claim of a threat…and then employed the United States Marshals Service to retaliate, threaten and intimidate me for exercising” his First Amendment rights, which expressly include freedom of speech and the right to seek redress from authorities.

Flawed judicial pick? Federal Magistrate and district judge nominee L. Felipe Restrepo

It is amazing to watch politicians trying to weasel their way around their promises. President Obama is providing us with a good illustration of the art.

During the latest presidential campaign and in the final televised debates, both Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were unequivocal in asserting that the US would be leaving Afghanistan and ending the war in that country at the end of 2014–a goal most Americans profoundly want. Biden, in a heated debate with his Republican opponent Paul Ryan, said the US would “absolutely” be “out” of Afghanistan at the end of 2014. Obama, a week later, said, “By 2014, this process of transition will be complete and the Afghan people will be responsible for their own security.”

I’m reminded of President Clinton, a lawyer who, when pressed under oath by a special prosecutor hounding him over the details of whether he had had sex with a young White House intern, said that the answer hinged on “what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

This past weekend, it was reported that Obama and the generals at the Pentagon are planning on keeping at least 10,000 US troops stationed in Afghanistan indefinitely after that 2014 deadline for ending the war and withdrawing from that war-torn land.

Just to make it clear what we’re talking about here, 10,000 troops would represent an army half the size of the entire military of either the Netherlands or Denmark, two countries which currently have troops assigned to the NATO forces posted in Afghanistan as allies in the 12-year-long US war there.

US military 'trainers' deplaning in El Salvador during that country's civil war in 1982

What if the leaders of the United States — and by leaders I mean the generals in the Pentagon, the corporate executives of the country’s largest enterprises, and the top officials in government — have secretly concluded that while world-wide climate change is indeed going to be catastrophic, the US, or more broadly speaking, North America, is fortuitously situated to come out on top in the resulting global struggle for survival?

I’m not by nature a conspiracy theorist, but this horrifying thought came to me yesterday as I batted away yet another round of ignorant rants from people who insist against all logic that climate change is a gigantic fraud being perpetrated, variously, by a conspiracy of the oil companies who allegedly want to benefit from carbon credit trading, the scientific community, which allegedly is collectively selling out and participating in some world-wide system of omerta in order to get grants, or the world socialist conspiracy, which of course, is trying to destroy capitalism), or all the above. (God, whenever I write anything on climate change these people hit me with flame-mail like mayflies spattering a car windshield in mating season!)

What prompted me to this dark speculation about an American conspiracy of inaction was the seemingly incomprehensible failure of the US — in the face of overwhelming evidence that the Earth is heating up at an accelerating rate, and that we are in danger of soon reaching a point of no return where the process feeds itself — to do anything to reduce either this country’s annual production of more atmospheric CO2, or to promote some broader international agreement to slow the production of greenhouse gases.

It seems insane that this nation’s leaders, corporate and political, would even now still be deliberately refusing to take action to protect the Earth, which of course they and their children and grandchildren will also have to live on, and yet almost to a one they are on the side of the deniers or the delayers. The business leaders for example overwhelmingly provided campaign funding to the Republicans — a party that makes jokes about global warming and openly urges more burning of coal.

Could US leaders think maybe US could gain by letting the world cook?

During the Vietnam War, which US forces fought from 1960 through 1974, and which cost the lives of several million Southeast Asians and 58,000 Americans, eight American journalists died. Not one of them was killed by American fire.

In the Iraq War, 136 journalists were killed. At least 15 of them — about 11% of the total — were killed by US forces, sometimes apparently with deliberate intent. (Consider that if some 500,000 US troops rotated through Iraq over the course of the way and 4000 of them were killed, that meant soldiers had a 1:125 chance of being killed there. With 136 dead journalists, there would have had to be more than 14,000 journalists covering the war for them to have the same odds of getting killed.)

In Afghanistan, nine journalists have been killed, at least one by US forces, and in that case, the killing was deliberate, though it is unclear whether the victim was known to be a journalist.

One thing is clear: it is dangerous in the extreme to be a journalist covering America’s wars, at least beginning with Vietnam, and in Iraq it was more dangerous to be a journalist than to be a soldier.

Why this might be the case is hard to say, but it seems that an antipathy towards journalists within the military may have something to do with it.

Back in 1983, the US, in one of the more ludicrous military actions in its long history of war, invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, on the pretext that it feared Cubans were building a military airbase there (actually Cuba had sent construction workers to the impoverished isle to help the country build a better commercial airport so as to improve its tourism business). During that invasion, which was conducted with a total media blackout despite almost no opposition (the main “enemy” putting up any resistance was the Cuban construction workers! There were no Cuban troops there), a group of seven journalists, including a reporter from the New York Times, attempted to reach the island on a small boat. They were blocked by a US destroyer, which warned them over a loudspeaker to turn around or be “blown out of the water.” The journalists gave up and retreated.

That little “war,” which was conducted from beginning to end with no reporters allowed in the battle zone, marked the beginning of a new relationship between the Pentagon and the press — one where the military maintains complete control over access and information, both what is provided to the media, and what the public gets to learn.

Wikileaks released this video of a helicopter crew slaughtering civilians and two Reuters cameramen in Baghdad

Run a google search of “World Bank” and “climate change” and you’ll discover that this month the World Bank released a major study predicting a global “cataclysm” if world-wide temperatures increase by a predicted four degrees celsius (that’s roughly 8 degrees fahrenheit).

But the articles reporting that information, at least here in the US, will be almost entirely business magazines like Bloomberg/Businessweek, or Forbes. Check the New York Times, and you won’t find the story, at least so far, and it’s already at least four days old. The Washington Post had the story on Monday, but it was tucked away in its business section, which is how it was treated by most publications that bothered to report on it. The one exception to this covereage pattern is USA Today, which on Nov. 19 ran a short piece on the World Bank report in its news pages.

Is the news that the World Bank is predicting catastrophe for billions of people and for life on this entire planet a business story?

Certainly not!

Any idiot could tell you, speaking objectively, that the so-called “Fiscal Cliff,” an entirely political crisis in which Republicans in Congress have decided to threaten to crash the US economy by cutting $600 billion from the federal budget while raising taxes on everyone unless Democrats agree to cut Social Security and Medicare spending and to extend a decade of extraordinary tax cuts for the wealthy, is a minor story compared to a report that the earth is headed towards climate disaster this century unless dramatic action is taken to reduce the pace of global warming caused by the rapacious burning of fossil fuels. Yet it’s the “Fiscal Cliff” crisis that is getting page one play, and not just on one day, but every day.

World Bank warns climate change will occur rapidly, and without quick action, irreversibly

… [Dr. Ann Kristin] Neuhaus wishes that she’d skipped the hearing.
 

“[Assistant Kansas Attorney General] Maxwell lied to me,” she says. “That’s how he got the records. And that’s how the charges were filed. And that’s how the trial happened. And that’s how Dr. Tiller got killed. That whole sequence of events was predicated on criminal behavior on the part of the [AG’s] office. Perjury is criminal. A lawyer is not allowed to lie at any time. He said to me, ‘I’m not going to take your records.’ When I walk in the door, he says, ‘I’m taking your records.’ And what choice do I have? I can take my box and try to run. Or I can go to jail. And if I go to jail, they still have my records. They literally cornered me and they avoided due process, and nobody’s done a fucking thing about it.”
 

— Justin Kendall
The state of Kansas is still chasing one of the last links to Dr. Tiller
The Pitch, 29 Nov. 2011

UPDATE: At the hearing, Judge Theis ruled that Neuhaus did not have to pay the extortionate court costs. He reached that decision after the attorney for the Board of Healing Arts conceded that the board had never levied such a penalty in the past and had never required posting of the amount in advance of an appeal of its decisions in the past, and after the judge himself said he had never in his decades on the bench seen such a thing done. However, Neuhaus was required to sign a promise to pay the $93,000 in full if she loses the appeal — a draconian action that was the same as voluntarily signing herself and her family into bankruptcy. Anyone who wants to stand in support of Dr. Neuhause, Mike Caddell and their principled fight against the Kansas witch hunters, should send a check to the address at the end of this article. — Dave Lindorff, TCHB!
 

Thursday, 15 Nov. 2012, former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline will be appearing before the Kansas Supreme Court in Topeka, to make arguments for keeping his state law license. Pro-choice organizations have largely remained silent as the large “pro-life” forces howl against the judges. Five judges of the highest court in Kansas have recused themselves from hearing the proceeding.

Friday, 16 Nov., 2012, attorneys for Dr. Ann Kristin Neuhaus will appear at the Shawnee County District Court before Hon. Franklin Theis to argue that due process for the doctor be given and an onerous $93,000 cash bond be waived. The Kansas State Board of Healing Arts having stripped her of the state license to practice medicine, now demands payment of the fee, in full, before the judge hears her defense attorneys. Four of the nine practicing physicians on the board recused themselves from taking her medical license, this fact that has not been reported in the Kansas news.

More than twenty years ago I obtained a secret recording from an anonymous source of a meeting at a Johnson County restaurant, where known members of the “pro-life” movement debated the Army of God instructions to kidnap abortion providers and cut off their thumbs.

Dr. Ann Kristin Neuhaus, targeted by anti-abortion zealots for helping to keep abortion safe and available in Kansas

 
Using one of those overarching dramatic titles we have come to expect in mainstream media news coverage, John Stewart summed up the Petraeus story as “Band of Boners.” It’s the sort of thing that may be inevitable when so much power is given so much free rein by so much secrecy.

The nature of military and spy craft — Sun Tzu and Clausewitz would agree — is that it’s never what it seems. As this unfolding clusterfuck makes clear, an institution devoted to the use of violence and an obsession with secrecy can literally be caught with its pants down by the most ridiculous of petards that even its huge public relations machine can’t save it from.

Paula Broadwell and her spy, General David Petraeus

By now everybody knows the story. A female West Point graduate with a lithe, athletic body pumps up a PhD thesis on General Petraeus into a book, amazingly titled All In. She gets intimate with the general, then sends anonymous threatening emails to a sexy socialite camp-follower at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. The second woman, she feels, is moving in on her general.

It’s appropriate, here, to recall that Henry Kissinger said the greatest aphrodisiac is Power. Henry would know.

The MacDill camp-follower then emails her favorite FBI agent, a bulldog known for vigorously hunting terrorist suspects and for fatally shooting a man near a gate at MacDill under strange circumstances. When the agent’s suspicions are not adequately addressed, he contacts right-wing Congressman Eric Cantor. Something fishy is going on, he tells Cantor. It may be some kind of political cover-up. Maybe the anonymous caller is a terrorist agent from Kenya.