Mood:  energetic

September 6, 2007

Posted by Joe Anybody at 11:05 AM PDT

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Mood:  chillin'

We've heard of stealth airplanes, but never a stealth airplane factory. What you're seeing above is a photo, circa World War II, of a Lockheed aircraft factory in Burbank, California. The US Army Corps of Engineers was given the task of hiding it--the whole darn thing--from air visibility, so Japanese bombers coming off the Pacific wouldn't spot it.

How did they pull it off? Click here to see how they disguised the entire factory as a suburb by wrapping it in camouflage netting, prop houses, and what has to be the largest trompe l'oeil ever made. It's Christo meets Carpaccio...meets G.I. Joe.

BEFORE

AFTER

+++ The pictures and article I found here +++

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/09/an_early_green.php

Posted by Joe Anybody at 7:06 PM PDT

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Mood:  bright

BEIJING

(Reuters news)

 http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyid=2007-08-26T105120Z_01_PEK274110_RTRUKOC_0_US-CHINA-ROBOTS.xml

A robot that can fly "like a mini-helicopter" and a second that can glide across ice will aid Chinese scientists during an Antarctic expedition slated for October, Xinhua news agency reported on Sunday.

The airborne robot can fly for an hour at speeds of 50 to 100 kilometers (30 to 60 miles) an hour and will be equipped with a camera and an infrared radiometer for observing ice on the sea.

The second robot can slide across ice crevasses and snowy slopes, the report said.

"The use of robots can reduce the risks and costs in scientific research," Xinhua quoted Qin Weijia, of the Polar Research Institute of China, as saying. "No matter how bad the weather is, they can still work normally."

The 200-strong expedition team will set up seismic stations in Antarctica to measure tremors and tectonic movements on the continent, the report said.

Posted by Joe Anybody at 11:53 AM PDT

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Mood:  celebratory

Free workshops

"learn media skills"

Is coming to Portland this weekend

I am participating in a Grassroots Media Camp this weekend in Portland Oregon

It will be all weekend with lots of cool “media type of stuff going on”

My workshop is going to be titled “how to upload a video to YouTube using a PC”

I have been preparing (slightly worrying, since this is a first time thing for me to do)

I do feel confidant that I can do this in a manner that will be understandable to the class, so I guess its just a little nerve racking due to the responsibility end of it all.

I have made just about 100 short video that are now on the Internet.

Most are on YouTube ….. about 25 on Google…… and then some other sites I have a few as well (My Space, Metacafe, etc)

The grassroots Media camp will be held at sites around Portland, my class is Saturday morning around 10am

The link on the Internet for the Media Workshops is here:

http://www.portlandmediacamp.blogspot.com/

The phone number to register or to assist in the workshops is here:

503-236-7916

Call now spaces are running out!

I posted a announcement on Portland Indy Media here:

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2007/08/363741.shtml

But all it really shows is that I made a short YouTube video of the “Camp Flyer”

You can see that 2 min video I made right here

(of course it is on YouTube)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IfTo4llXWE

I have been hanging up flyers all over town, and going to meetings with the organizers.

I have a “training for facilitators” class to take tomorrow evening after work

The weekend camp/event is going to have Music on Friday night, a dinner on Sat evening, and a special movie screening on Sunday ….plus more stuff that I don’t even know about

More info is coming out every day (stay tuned - check their website)

Join with me

Join with the Media Camp

You B the Media …… come and learn some media skills or share yours with others....... "GET ACTIVE"

PEACE

Posted by Joe Anybody at 1:14 PM PDT

Updated: Monday, 20 August 2007 1:16 PM PDT

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Mood:  irritated

THE PASSENGERS ON CONTINENTAL FLIGHT 1669Y WERE GUARDED BY AN ATTACK DOG

August 13, 2007 8:54 AM

BALTIMORE SUN reporter Meredith Cohn says:

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicsasusual/2007/08/the-passengers-.html

Continental Flight 1669Y from Venezuela to Newark. N.J. was diverted to Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall airport on JULY 29th due to stormy weather. But according to 72 of the 120 passengers aboard, the weather inside the plane which sat on the runway at BWI from 2pm until 6:30pm, was a lot less pleasant than anything outside the aircraft.

There was NO FOOD, NO WATER, NO TOILET PAPER, and reporter Cohn says when the passengers who had spent "12 hours on a plane for a scheduled four-hour flight began clapping in protest, A FLIGHT ATTENDANT THREATENED ARREST AND POLICE WERE CALLED ON BOARD." In a letter to CONTINENTAL, passengers wrote "IT WASN'T ENOUGH TO NOT TREAT US WITH ANY DECENCY OR RESPECT AS CUSTOMERS OR HUMAN BEINGS, WE WERE NOW BEING TREATED AS CRIMINALS." The article says once inside the terminal the passengers claim they were yelled at, told to stay close to the wall and guarded by "OVERZEALOUS OFFICERS WITH AN ATTACK DOG."

The angry passengers have become among the newest members of the COALITION FOR AIRLINE PASSENGERS' BILL OF RIGHTS, a lobbying group started by Kate Hanna, herself an angry passenger, who wants CONGRESS to among many other things force the airlines to limit the length of time their passengers can sit on a stranded plane before being taken back to the airport terminal.

Posted by Joe Anybody at 4:10 PM PDT

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Mood:  loud

U.S. citizen wrongly deported

to Mexico three months ago

has been found

Posted by Joe Anybody at 11:41 AM PDT

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Mood:  mischievious

"I'm not comfortable suspending the constitution even temporarily," said Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), a member of the House intelligence committee.

"The countries we detest around the world are the ones that spy on their own people. Usually they say they do it for the sake of public safety and security."

House Approves

Wiretap Measure

_{By Ellen Nakashima and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 5, 2007; A01}

_{The Democratic-controlled House last night approved and sent to President Bush for his signature legislation written by his intelligence advisers to enhance their ability to intercept the electronic communications of foreigners without a court order.}

_{The 227 to 183 House vote capped a high-pressure campaign by the White House to change the nation's wiretap law, in which the administration capitalized on Democrats' fears of being branded weak on terrorism and on a general congressional desire to act on the measure before an August recess.}

_{The Senate had passed the legislation Friday night after House Democrats failed to win enough votes to pass a narrower revision of a statute known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The original statute was enacted after the revelation of CIA abuses in the 1970s, and it required judicial oversight for most federal wiretapping conducted in the United States.}

_{Privacy and civil liberties advocates, and many Democratic lawmakers, complained that the Bush administration's revisions of the law could breach constitutional protections against government intrusion. But the administration, aided by Republican congressional leaders, suggested that a failure to approve what intelligence officials sought could expose the country to a greater risk of terrorist attacks.}

_{Democrats facing reelection next year in conservative districts helped propel the bill to a quick approval. Adding to the pressures they felt were recent intelligence reports about threatening new al-Qaeda activity in Pakistan and the disclosure by House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) of a secret court ruling earlier this year that complicated the wiretapping of purely foreign communications that happen to pass through a communications node on U.S. soil.}

_{The bill would give the National Security Agency the right to collect such communications in the future without a warrant. But it goes further than that: It also would allow the interception and recording of electronic communications involving, at least in part, people "reasonably believed to be outside the United States" without a court's order or oversight.}

_{White House spokesman Tony Fratto emphasized that the bill is not meant to increase eavesdropping on Americans or "to affect in any way the legitimate privacy rights" of U.S. citizens. Data related to Americans in communications with foreigners who are the targets of a U.S. terrorism investigation could be monitored only if intelligence officials have a reasonable expectation of learning information relevant to that probe, a senior U.S. official said.}

_{"There are a lot of people who felt we had to pass something," said one angry Democratic lawmaker who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of caucus discussions. "It was tantamount to being railroaded."}

_{In a sole substantial concession to Democrats, the administration agreed to a provision allowing the legislation to be reconsidered in six months.}

_{Some House Democrats were still upset by what they saw as a deliberate scuttling by the White House of negotiations on a compromise bill. On Thursday, Democratic leaders reached what they believed was a deal with the government's chief intelligence official, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, only to be presented with a new list of conditions at the last minute. The White House and McConnell have denied that a deal had been reached.}

_{"I think the White House didn't want to take 'yes' for an answer from the Democrats," said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), an intelligence committee member.}

_{The administration said that its bill is aimed at bringing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 into step with advances in technology, primarily by restoring the government's power to gather without a warrant foreign intelligence on targets located overseas.}

_{Because the law has not kept up with advances in telecommunications, McConnell said in congressional testimony, the government "is significantly burdened in capturing overseas communications of foreign terrorists planning to conduct attacks inside the United States."}

_{Civil liberties and privacy advocates and a majority of Democrats said the bill could allow the monitoring of virtually any calls, e-mails or other communications going overseas that originate in the United States, without a court order, if the government deems the recipient to be the target of a U.S. probe.}

_{Last night, several Democrats said the bill would undermine the Fourth Amendment. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said lawmakers were being "stampeded by fearmongering and deception" into voting for the bill. Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) warned that the bill would lead to "potential unprecedented abuse of innocent Americans' privacy."}

_{Republicans and administration officials argued to the contrary that the distinctions in the present law -- between calls inside and outside the country -- are outmoded in an age of cellphones that work on multiple continents. What intelligence officials seek, a White House official said in an interview yesterday, is the ability to "surveil a target wherever the call [or other communication involving that target] comes from," and that the new legislation would provide that.}

_{In place of a court's approval -- which intelligence officials worried might come too slowly -- the NSA would institute a system of internal bureaucratic controls.}

_{A senior intelligence official said that in cases in which an overseas target is communicating with people in the United States not relevant to an investigation, their names are "minimized," or stripped from the transcript, before it is disseminated. "You won't see data mining in there," the official said. "You won't see vast drift net surveillance of Americans. . . . What we do not do is target people in the United States without a warrant."}

_{Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, said that the Democrats would introduce legislation on surveillance in the fall and would conduct oversight of the administration's surveillance program.}

_{A narrower Democratic alternative, which Democrats said they crafted partly in response to McConnell's concerns, won majority support but nonetheless failed because it did not collect the necessary two-thirds vote Friday night in the House. It failed after an emotional debate in which Republicans charged Democrats with being soft on terrorism and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) accused Republicans of not caring "about the truth."}

_{Under the administration's version of the bill, the director of national intelligence and the attorney general can authorize the surveillance of all communications involving foreign targets. Oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, composed of federal judges whose deliberations are secret, would be limited to examining whether the government's guidelines for targeting overseas suspects are appropriate. The court would not authorize the surveillance.}

_{The bill's six-month sunset clause did not assuage some critics.}

_{"I'm not comfortable suspending the constitution even temporarily," said Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), a member of the House intelligence committee. "The countries we detest around the world are the ones that spy on their own people. Usually they say they do it for the sake of public safety and security."}

Posted by Joe Anybody at 2:01 PM PDT

Updated: Sunday, 5 August 2007 2:08 PM PDT

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Mood:  incredulous

Pakistan warns US of Asia arms race

By Jo Johnson in New Delhi and Edward Luce in Washington

Pakistan on Thursday night warned that the groundbreaking civil nuclear co-operation agreement between the US and India risked triggering an arms race in south Asia, in a statement likely to inflame already tense relations with Washington. The country’s National Command Authority – a committee of top generals, government officials and nuclear scientists chaired by President Pervez Musharraf – warned that the deal would upset the strategic balance in the region.

The statement said that the US-India deal would have “implications on strategic stability” because it would “enable India to produce significant quantities of fissile material and nuclear weapons from unsafeguarded nuclear reactors”. “Strategic stability in south Asia and the global non-proliferation regime would have been better served if the US had considered a package approach for Pakistan and India . . . with a view to preventing a nuclear arms race in the region,” it added.US officials say Islamabad’s objections are based on a fundamental misreading of last week’s deal, which places India’s nuclear reprocessing facilities under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards.

US officials are also careful to distinguish between the nuclear non-proliferation record of India, which they consider to be good, and Pakistan, which is seen as one of the worst proliferators.“We are not anticipating in any way, shape or form a similar deal for any other country,” Nick Burns, the US undersecretary of state, who led the US negotiations with India, said after the deal was announced last Friday. “Obviously Pakistan has a past in terms of nuclear proliferation which, with the AQ Khan network, was very troubling. India has a very different past.”The US remains concerned over the extent of the operation overseen by Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan’s one-time chief nuclear scientist, who in 2004 publicly admitted that he had traded nuclear technology with Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Pakistan has consistently objected to being excluded from the special deal that Washington is offering India, but never warned so starkly of a renewed arms race between the two nuclear powers, who have fought three wars since 1947.

The deal promises to end more than three decades of isolation for the Indian nuclear programme, notwithstanding New Delhi’s longstanding refusal to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT).

The US has refused to extend the same nuclear co-operation to Pakistan. US President George W. Bush said during his visit to south Asia in March 2006 that the two countries had “different needs and different histories”.Both India and Pakistan developed their nuclear weapons as non-signatories to the NPT, which recognised as nuclear weapons states only the five countries that had detonated devices before 1967.

Washington is seeking to persuade the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the 44-country body that regulates trade in nuclear commerce, to make an exception to the NPT by allowing the sale of fissile fuel and technology to India under IAEA safeguards.

Pakistan argues that India will be free to allocate more of its scarce indigenous fissile fuel to its strategic weapons programme once the majority of its civilian or electricity-producing nuclear reactors are able to import uranium from overseas.

Analysts expect the burgeoning Indo-US relationship to push Pakistan into seeking even closer ties with China. Khurshid Kasuri, foreign minister, told the FT following Mr Bush’s visit that Pakistanis regarded China as a more reliable ally than the US.Experts believe Pakistan will seek assistance from China, which has already helped with the development of the nuclear facility at Chashma in the Pakistani province of Punjab.

ORIGINAL STORY AND CREDIT GOES HERE:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/287d8882-4121-11dc-8f37-0000779fd2ac.html

Posted by Joe Anybody at 12:54 AM PDT

Updated: Saturday, 4 August 2007 12:59 AM PDT

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Mood:  loud

http://bravenewfilms.org/blog/8855-chevron-reports-4-35-billion-in-profits-it-s-like-they-were-printing-money

Cheveron Record Profits

Chevron's record profit's amazingly couldn’t satisfy Wall Street’s expectation’s as their just reported $4.35 billion second quarter earnings sent shares tumbling. I suppose profits 18% higher than last quarter which capped off the most profitable three-month period in Chevron’s 127 year history just doesn’t cut it in this hyper-active greed cycle energy investors are in. Revenues for this period were $53.5 billion.

"It was still like they were printing money. They just weren’t printing as much as everybody thought,” said industry analyst Fadel Gheit of Oppenheimer and Company".

I doubt Chevron CEO David J. O'Reilly care’s very much about the temporary drop in Chevron’s shares, since he made $8.8 million last year bringing his six-year compensation total to $37.39. I’m sure he thinks the future is bright indeed as he oversees Chevron’s insatiable thirst for massive amounts of profits no matter what the cost, including their involvement in the exploitation of oil in Iraq.

"Chevron and the other major oil companies profited greatly from failure. Long outages at refineries, aging equipment and lack of new capacity," said Judy Dugan, research director of OilWatchdog.org and FTCR".

"Chevron's refinery production in the first six months of this year was at the lowest level since Hurricane Katrina, yet it boosted profit to a new record as consumers paid outrageous prices at the pump."

Also, in March of 2007, the Iraqi parliament prodded by U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, passed a law that privatized Iraq’s oil. Chevron stands to make huge profits from this law. Before the war, U.S. oil companies were excluded from profiting from Iraqi oil. With the passage of this new law and after the war, they will be in charge of it.

Posted by Joe Anybody at 12:55 AM PDT

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