Tuesday, April 16th, 2013
LUCY MORGAN EDWARDS , - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: It is estimated that if a true accounting were done it would show that we will have spent between 4 and 6 TRILLION dollars on the Afghan and Iraq wars. We got nothing in Iraq except anti-American hate, and the same is going to be true of Afghanistan. Generations of hate and civil war. And a generation of dead, devastated, and damaged young Americans. That's what the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Abrahams, Wolfowitz, and Pipes team of feckless incompetents bought with your money. And they left both countries in desperate straits. It goes without saying, of course, that I found this in the non-U.S. media.
This week the defence select committee published a report which concluded that civil war in Afghanistan is likely when international forces leave next year. If the predictions of Securing the Future of Afghanistan are correct, the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence share much of the blame.
When I returned to Kabul in January and asked an American journalist I’d known in 2001 his view of the situation, he said: ‘When you look at the facts on the ground, it is hard to believe that civil war is not inevitable.’
The facts on the ground include the militias the west has set up in the countryside in a desperate attempt to shore up the barely legitimate Karzai regime. Sadly, these militias, plus the many Afghan private security companies, have contributed to a proliferation of armed groups that will be roaming the country after 2014. Ironically, in the MPs’ report, the Foreign Office acknowledges the need to disarm the Taliban, yet omits to mention the problems of re-arming these groups, presumably because they are ‘the good guys’.
What is so tragic is that back in 2001, the west did have the opportunity to assist Afghanistan on its path to peace. But myopia, jealousy and […]
No Comments
Tuesday, April 16th, 2013
Stephan: The implications of this case can hardly be overstated. If the court rules that it is possible to patent life forms it will shift the whole course of world history.
Several Supreme Court justices seemed sympathetic to claims that genes themselves do not warrant patent protection during arguments Monday in a landmark intellectual property case that could determine whether genes should be in the public domain.
But during the arguments in Association for Molecular Pathology, et al. v. Myriad Genetics, the justices repeatedly took refuge in metaphors of baseball bats and chocolate-chip cookies rather than the hard science of DNA.
The case, which could have big implications throughout the biotech industry and the growing field of genomics, involves Myriad’s patents on two of the most famous human genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. Mutations in those genes have been linked to much a higher risk of breast and ovarian cancers. Scientists at Myriad were the first to isolate the genes. The company patented them in 1996 and has since enjoyed a monopoly on them as the only company that can provide a test for the mutations.
Most of the justices appeared comfortable with the idea of patenting methods for isolating genes, or applications of those genes, but much less so with the patenting of the genes themselves.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said she could create a new chocolate-chip cookie but expressed skepticism that she could patent the […]
No Comments
Tuesday, April 16th, 2013
TOM ENGELHARDT, - Firedoglake
Stephan: Here is a brilliant essay on the endless wars that enrich the few, and destroy the lives of many, and drain our treasury of the money we should be using to prepare our society for the world that is coming. We are destroying ourselves because we cannot mount the political will to demand life affirming change.
The communist enemy, with the ‘world’s fourth largest military,
No Comments
Tuesday, April 16th, 2013
MEG HANDLEY, Reporter - U.S. News & World Report
Stephan: Here is some good news about solar power generation. One can only wonder what might have been if we had made that transition out of carbon energy a priority 30 years ago, with the first gas embargo. Carter tried. If he had had another term maybe it would have happened. Instead we got conservative Republicans, who did what they could to undermine the transition, while Democrats dithered, thus preserving the obscene profits of companies like Exxon Mobil and BP.
Despite the buzz surrounding natural gas and its increased role in electricity generation, solar seems to be increasingly stealing the spotlight from the newly famous fossil fuel.
Thanks to new projects across the country, solar energy accounted for all new utility electricity generation capacity added to the grid for the first time in March, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) Energy Infrastructure Update. All other energy sources combined added no new generation capacity, the report noted.
Since 2008, the amount of solar energy powering U.S. homes, businesses and military bases has grown by more than 600 percent according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. In 2012 alone, the United States brought more new solar capacity online than in the three prior years combined, underscoring projections that solar will be the nation’s largest new source of energy over the next four years.
Momentum behind the development of more renewable energy is mounting, too. According to a recent poll conducted by Gallup, three-quarters of Americans support increased solar energy use and 71 percent favor pursuing more wind energy.
‘These new numbers from FERC support our forecast that solar will continue a pattern of growth in 2013,’ Rhone Resch, president and CEO of the Solar […]
No Comments
Stephan: Here is the latest on the the Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) trend. I continue to believe something is going to come out of this from one of these companies that is a game changer.
There has been steady progress in the world of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR), better known as Cold Fusion, in the last few months. The main commercial players have been quiet — although April is likely to be make-or-break for ‘Energy Catalyser’ (E-Cat) inventor Andrea Rossi — but the open-source Martin Fleishmann Memorial Project (MFMP) has made some big steps towards its goal of proving the reality of LENR to a skeptical world.
Bob Greenyer is one of the driving forces behind the MFMP. He’s a successful entrepreneur, having run a diverse portfolio of businesses in the fields of pharmaceuticals, finance, advertising and education. But now he’s in a business that costing him money rather than making it, and he loves it. Like the other MFMP team members, he has put in a lot of his own time and money because he believes in the cause.
While Rossi’s Leonardo Corp and rivals Defkalion are working in close secrecy with the aim of making money, the MFMP has no interest in intellectual property, says Greenyer. It wants to share it with the world.
One of the MFMP’s first aims is a cheap, simple apparatus that can be easily replicated and which shows that ‘new […]
No Comments
