Stone Cupid Real

I swooped over to see what he saw on the cover page of the New York Times online. Sarah Palin. The only similarity to Hillary is that she's a woman.
Unbelievable. Both the screaming bear AND the King Crab. Please God help us stop these people!

Tuesday 12 August 2008
by: Steve Weissman,t r u t h o u t | Perspective

During the hottest days of the Cold War, Gen. Thomas Power headed the Strategic Air Command, whose nuclear-armed B-52s were meant to deter the Soviet Union. General Power, like many of the Air Force brass at the time, believed that nuclear war with the Soviets was inevitable. He thought the United States would do better to fight that war sooner rather than later and believed we could emerge victorious. "At the end of the war," he argued in 1960, "if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!"

Listening to John McCain talk about Iraq and Iran, I keep thinking of Power. Counter-insurgency and nuclear obliteration are poles apart, I know. But McCain's insistence on "winning in Iraq," remaining there "until Iraq is secure," and "bomb-bomb-bombing Iran" reveal the same mindset that made General Power so dangerous. Caught up in his fear that a military failure would encourage America's enemies, McCain can see no alternative to military victory, no matter what the cost. This might be a laudable spirit to drum into raw military recruits, but could prove extremely self-destructive in a commander in chief.

The question, if only Obama would ask, is simple: What in McCain's mind would a military victory in Iraq look like? One of the key instigators of the US invasion, McCain has suggested different answers over the years.

As president of the New Citizenship Project, founded in 1994, he helped create and raise funding for the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which neo-conservatives such as William Kristol, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz used to push their plans for a pre-emptive war against Iraq. McCain also gave early support to Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who widely fabricated and skillfully publicized deliberate disinformation to scare Americans into believing that Saddam Hussein had links to al-Qaeda and active weapons of mass destruction. McCain has recently tried to play down his relationship with the still-active Chalabi, especially since the CIA and others accused the Iraqi of secretly working with Iran.

A top Republican on the Senate Armed Forces Committee, McCain began publicly urging the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein as early as 1997, calling on the Clinton administration to set up an Iraqi government in exile. The following year, he joined with Senator Joe Lieberman and others to introduce the "Iraq Liberation Act of 1998," committing Washington to fund Chalabi and other anti-Saddam opposition groups.

In the run-up to the invasion in 2002 and early 2003, McCain continued to join with his neo-conservative allies in parroting Chalabi's scare stories about terrorist links and WMD and in publicly promoting Chalabi as "a patriot with the interest of Iraq at heart." McCain also competed with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in telling Americans how easy the war would be, how few troops we would need, how the Iraqis would welcome us as their liberators, and how the example of regime change in Iraq would lead to a new wave of democracy throughout the region.

McCain was wrong on every count, and the image of victory he projected - our friend Chalabi leading a peaceful, democratic Iraq that would welcome American military bases for as long as 100 years - now seems, at best, quaint. In fact, the single Iraqi issue on which McCain can conceivably claim to have made a sound judgment was his support for the so-called "surge," last year's escalation of American forces that many observers credit with a relative decrease in violence. Other observers point to two factors that McCain doesn't want to discuss - the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad's neighborhoods, which forcibly separated feuding Shi'a and Sunnis, and the Pentagon's effort to win over Sunni tribesmen and former insurgents, often by putting them on the US payroll.

Read the rest at t r u t h o u t |

"Major Discovery" From MIT Primed to Unleash Solar Revolution
Thursday 31 July 2008

by: Anne Trafton, MIT News
Thanks to Truthout.

MIT's Professor Daniel G. Nocera has discovered a way to do large-scale solar power generation. (Photo: Donna Coveney)
Scientists mimic essence of plants' energy storage system.
In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn't shine.

Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today's announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.

Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. "This is the nirvana of what we've been talking about for years," said MIT's Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science. "Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon."

Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera's lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun's energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.

The key component in Nocera and Kanan's new process is a new catalyst that produces oxygen gas from water; another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas. The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. When electricity - whether from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source - runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.

Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis.

The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and it's easy to set up, Nocera said. "That's why I know this is going to work. It's so easy to implement," he said.

"Giant Leap" for Clean Energy

Sunlight has the greatest potential of any power source to solve the world's energy problems, said Nocera. In one hour, enough sunlight strikes the Earth to provide the entire planet's energy needs for one year.

James Barber, a leader in the study of photosynthesis who was not involved in this research, called the discovery by Nocera and Kanan a "giant leap" toward generating clean, carbon-free energy on a massive scale.

"This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind," said Barber, the Ernst Chain Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College London. "The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production thus reducing our dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem."

"Just the Beginning"

Currently available electrolyzers, which split water with electricity and are often used industrially, are not suited for artificial photosynthesis because they are very expensive and require a highly basic (non-benign) environment that has little to do with the conditions under which photosynthesis operates.

More engineering work needs to be done to integrate the new scientific discovery into existing photovoltaic systems, but Nocera said he is confident that such systems will become a reality.

"This is just the beginning," said Nocera, principal investigator for the Solar Revolution Project funded by the Chesonis Family Foundation and co-Director of the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Center. "The scientific community is really going to run with this."

Nocera hopes that within 10 years, homeowners will be able to power their homes in daylight through photovoltaic cells, while using excess solar energy to produce hydrogen and oxygen to power their own household fuel cell. Electricity-by-wire from a central source could be a thing of the past.

The project is part of the MIT Energy Initiative, a program designed to help transform the global energy system to meet the needs of the future and to help build a bridge to that future by improving today's energy systems. MITEI Director Ernest Moniz, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems, noted that "this discovery in the Nocera lab demonstrates that moving up the transformation of our energy supply system to one based on renewables will depend heavily on frontier basic science."

The success of the Nocera lab shows the impact of a mixture of funding sources - governments, philanthropy, and industry. This project was funded by the National Science Foundation and by the Chesonis Family Foundation, which gave MIT $10 million this spring to launch the Solar Revolution Project, with a goal to make the large scale deployment of solar energy within 10 years.

Also read the comments at Truthout.