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2011-08-10T00:10:00.000-07:00

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2011-06-21T12:45:00.000-07:00

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Tritium leaks found at many nuke sites
By JEFF DONN - AP National Writer | AP – 1 hr 1 min ago

BRACEVILLE, Ill. (AP) — Radioactive tritium has leaked from three-quarters of U.S. commercial nuclear power sites, often into groundwater from corroded, buried piping, an Associated Press investigation shows.

The number and severity of the leaks has been escalating, even as federal regulators extend the licenses of more and more reactors across the nation.

Tritium, which is a radioactive form of hydrogen, has leaked from at least 48 of 65 sites, according to U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission records reviewed as part of the AP's yearlong examination of safety issues at aging nuclear power plants. Leaks from at least 37 of those facilities contained concentrations exceeding the federal drinking water standard — sometimes at hundreds of times the limit.

While most leaks have been found within plant boundaries, some have migrated offsite. But none is known to have reached public water supplies.

At three sites — two in Illinois and one in Minnesota — leaks have contaminated drinking wells of nearby homes, the records show, but not at levels violating the drinking water standard. At a fourth site, in New Jersey, tritium has leaked into an aquifer and a discharge canal feeding picturesque Barnegat Bay off the Atlantic Ocean.

In response to the AP's investigation, two congressman — Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Peter Welsh of Vermont, both Democrats — on Tuesday released a study by independent federal analysts who had identified problems with the regulation of underground piping.

The report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office noted that while the industry has a voluntary initiative to monitor leaks into underground water sources, the NRC hasn't evaluated how promptly that system detects such leaks. "Absent such an assessment, we continue to believe that NRC has no assurance that the Groundwater Protection Initiative will lead to prompt detection of underground piping system leaks as nuclear power plants age," the report's authors concluded.

Previously, the AP reported that regulators and industry have weakened safety standards for decades to keep the nation's commercial nuclear reactors operating within the rules. While NRC officials and plant operators argue that safety margins can be eased without peril, critics say these accommodations are inching the reactors closer to an accident.

Any exposure to radioactivity, no matter how slight, boosts cancer risk, according to the National Academy of Sciences. Federal regulators set a limit for how much tritium is allowed in drinking water. So far, federal and industry officials say, the tritium leaks pose no health threat.

But it's hard to know how far some leaks have traveled into groundwater. Tritium moves through soil quickly, and when it is detected it often indicates the presence of more powerful radioactive isotopes that are often spilled at the same time.

For example, cesium-137 turned up with tritium at the Fort Calhoun nuclear unit near Omaha, Neb., in 2007. Strontium-90 was discovered with tritium two years earlier at the Indian Point nuclear power complex, where two reactors operate 25 miles north of New York City.

The tritium leaks also have spurred doubts among independent engineers about the reliability of emergency safety systems at the 104 nuclear reactors situated on the 65 sites. That's partly because some of the leaky underground pipes carry water meant to cool a reactor in an emergency shutdown and to prevent a meltdown. More than a mile of piping, much of it encased in concrete, can lie beneath a reactor.

Tritium is relatively short-lived and penetrates the body weakly through the air compared to other radioactive contaminants. Each of the known releases has been less radioactive than a single X-ray.

The main health risk from tritium, though, would be in drinking water. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says tritium should measure no more than 20,000 picocuries per liter in drinking water. The agency estimates seven of 200,000 people who drink such water for decades would develop cancer.

Still, the NRC and industry consider the leaks a public relations problem, not a public health or accident threat, records and interviews show.

"The public health and safety impact of this is next to zero," said Tony Pietrangelo, chief nuclear officer of the industry's Nuclear Energy Institute. "This is a public confidence issue."

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LEAKS ARE PROLIFIC

Like rust under a car, corrosion has propagated for decades along the hard-to-reach, wet underbellies of the reactors — generally built in a burst of construction during the 1960s and 1970s. As part of an investigation of aging problems at the country's nuclear reactors, the AP uncovered evidence that despite government and industry programs to bring the causes of such leaks under control, breaches have become more frequent and widespread.

There were 38 leaks from underground piping between 2000 and 2009, according to an industry document presented at a tritium conference. Nearly two-thirds of the leaks were reported over the latest five years.

Here are some examples:

—At the three-unit Browns Ferry complex in Alabama, a valve was mistakenly left open in a storage tank during modifications over the years. When the tank was filled in April 2010 about 1,000 gallons of tritium-laden water poured onto the ground at a concentration of 2 million picocuries per liter. In drinking water, that would be 100 times higher than the EPA health standard.

—At the LaSalle site west of Chicago, tritium-laden water was accidentally released from a storage tank in July 2010 at a concentration of 715,000 picocuries per liter — 36 times the EPA standard.

—The year before, 123,000 picocuries per liter were detected in a well near the turbine building at Peach Bottom west of Philadelphia — six times the drinking water standard.

—And in 2008, 7.5 million picocuries per liter leaked from underground piping at Quad Cities in western Illinois — 375 times the EPA limit.

Subsurface water not only rusts underground pipes, it attacks other buried components, including electrical cables that carry signals to control operations. They too have been failing at high rates.

A 2008 NRC staff memo reported industry data showing 83 failed cables between 21 and 30 years of service — but only 40 within their first 10 years of service. Underground cabling set in concrete can be extraordinarily difficult to replace.

Under NRC rules, tiny concentrations of tritium and other contaminants are routinely released in monitored increments from nuclear plants; leaks from corroded pipes are not permitted.

The leaks sometimes go undiscovered for years, the AP found. Many of the pipes or tanks have been patched, and contaminated soil and water have been removed in some places. But leaks are often discovered later from other nearby piping, tanks or vaults. Mistakes and defective material have contributed to some leaks. However, corrosion — from decades of use and deterioration — is the main cause. And, safety engineers say, the rash of leaks suggest nuclear operators are hard put to maintain the decades-old systems.

Over the history of the U.S. industry, more than 400 known radioactive leaks of all kinds of substances have occurred, the activist Union of Concerned Scientists reported in September.

Several notable leaks above the EPA drinking-water limit for tritium happened five or more years ago, and from underground piping: 397,000 picocuries per liter at Tennessee's Watts Bar unit in 2005 — 20 times the EPA standard; four million at the two-reactor Hatch plant in Georgia in 2003 — 200 times the limit; 750,000 at Seabrook in New Hampshire in 1999 — nearly 38 times the standard; and 4.2 million at the three-unit Palo Verde facility in Arizona, in 1993 — 210 times the drinking-water limit.

Many safety experts worry about what the leaks suggest about the condition of miles of piping beneath the reactors. "Any leak is a problem because you have the leak itself — but it also says something about the piping," said Mario V. Bonaca, a former member of the NRC's Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards. "Evidently something has to be done."

However, even with the best probes, it is hard to pinpoint partial cracks or damage in skinny pipes or bends. The industry tends to inspect piping when it must be dug up for some other reason. Even when leaks are detected, repairs may be postponed for up to two years with the NRC's blessing.

"You got pipes that have been buried underground for 30 or 40 years, and they've never been inspected, and the NRC is looking the other way," said engineer Paul Blanch, who has worked for the industry and later became a whistleblower. "They could have corrosion all over the place."

Nuclear engineer Bill Corcoran, an industry consultant who has taught NRC personnel how to analyze the cause of accidents, said that since much of the piping is inaccessible and carries cooling water, the worry is if the pipes leak, there could be a meltdown.

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EAST COAST ISSUES

One of the highest known tritium readings was discovered in 2002 at the Salem nuclear plant in Lower Alloways Creek Township, N.J. Tritium leaks from the spent fuel pool contaminated groundwater under the facility — located on an island in Delaware Bay — at a concentration of 15 million picocuries per liter. That's 750 times the EPA drinking water limit. According to NRC records, the tritium readings last year still exceeded EPA drinking water standards.

And tritium found separately in an onsite storm drain system measured 1 million picocuries per liter in April 2010.

Also last year, the operator, PSEG Nuclear, discovered 680 feet of corroded, buried pipe that is supposed to carry cooling water to Salem Unit 1 in an accident, according to an NRC report. Some had worn down to a quarter of its minimum required thickness, though no leaks were found. The piping was dug up and replaced.

The operator had not visually inspected the piping — the surest way to find corrosion— since the reactor went on line in 1977, according to the NRC. PSEG Nuclear was found to be in violation of NRC rules because it hadn't even tested the piping since 1988.

Last year, the Vermont Senate was so troubled by tritium leaks as high as 2.5 million picocuries per liter at the Vermont Yankee reactor in southern Vermont (125 times the EPA drinking-water standard) that it voted to block relicensing — a power that the Legislature holds in that state.

Activists placed a bogus ad on the Web to sell Vermont Yankee, calling it a "quaint Vermont fixer-upper from the last millennium" with "tasty, pre-tritiated drinking water."

The gloating didn't last. In March, the NRC granted the plant a 20-year license extension, despite the state opposition. Weeks ago, operator Entergy sued Vermont in federal court, challenging its authority to force the plant to close.

At 41-year-old Oyster Creek in southern New Jersey, the country's oldest operating reactor, the latest tritium troubles started in April 2009, a week after it was relicensed for 20 more years. That's when plant workers discovered tritium by chance in about 3,000 gallons of water that had leaked into a concrete vault housing electrical lines.

Since then, workers have found leaking tritium three more times at concentrations up to 10.8 million picocuries per liter — 540 times the EPA's drinking water limit — according to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. None has been directly measured in drinking water, but it has been found in an aquifer and in a canal discharging into nearby Barnegat Bay, a popular spot for swimming, boating and fishing.

An earlier leak came from a network of pipes where rust was first discovered in 1991. Multiple holes were found, "indicating the potential for extensive corrosion," according to an analysis released to an environmental group by the NRC. Yet only patchwork repairs were done.

Tom Fote, who has fished in the bay near Oyster Creek, is unsettled by the leaks. "This was a plant that was up for renewal. It was up to them to make sure it was safe and it was not leaking anything," he said.

Added Richard Webster, an environmental lawyer who challenged relicensing at Oyster Creek: "It's symptomatic of the plants not having a handle on aging."

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EXELON'S PIPING PROBLEMS

To Exelon — the country's biggest nuclear operator, with 17 units — piping problems are just a fact of life. At a meeting with regulators in 2009, representatives of Exelon acknowledged that "100 percent verification of piping integrity is not practical," according to a copy of its presentation.

Of course, the company could dig up the pipes and check them out. But that would be costly.

"Excavations have significant impact on plant operations," the company said.

Exelon has had some major leaks. At the company's two-reactor Dresden site west of Chicago, tritium has leaked into the ground at up to 9 million picocuries per liter — 450 times the federal limit for drinking water.

At least four separate problems have been discovered at the 40-year-old site since 2004, when its two reactors were awarded licenses for 20 more years of operation. A leaking section of piping was fixed that year, but another leak sprang nearby within two years, a government inspection report says. The Dresden leaks developed in systems that help cool the reactor core in an emergency. Leaks also have contaminated offsite drinking water wells, but below the EPA drinking water limit.

There's also been contamination of offsite drinking water wells near the two-unit Prairie Island plant southeast of Minneapolis, then operated by Nuclear Management Co. and now by Xcel Energy, and at Exelon's two-unit Braidwood nuclear facility, 10 miles from Dresden. The offsite tritium concentrations from both facilities also were below the EPA level.

The Prairie Island leak was found in the well of a nearby home in 1989. It was traced to a canal where radioactive waste was discharged.

Braidwood has leaked more than six million gallons of tritium-laden water in repeated leaks dating back to the 1990s — but not publicly reported until 2005. The leaks were traced to pipes that carried limited, monitored discharges of tritium into the river.

"They weren't properly maintained, and some of them had corrosion," said Exelon spokeswoman Krista Lopykinski.

Last year, Exelon, which has acknowledged violating Illinois state groundwater standards, agreed to pay $1.2 million to settle state and county complaints over the tritium leaks at Braidwood and nearby Dresden and Byron sites. The NRC also sanctioned Exelon.

Tritium measuring 1,500 picocuries per liter turned up in an offsite drinking well at a home near Braidwood. Though company and industry officials did not view any of the Braidwood concentrations as dangerous, unnerved residents took to bottled water and sued over feared loss of property value. A consolidated lawsuit was dismissed, but Exelon ultimately bought some homes so residents could leave.

Exelon refused to say how much it paid, but a search of county real estate records shows it bought at least nine properties in the contaminated area near Braidwood since 2006 for a total of $6.1 million.

Exelon says it has almost finished cleaning up the contamination, but the cost persists for some neighbors.

Retirees Bob and Nancy Scamen live in a two-story house within a mile of the reactors on 18 bucolic acres they bought in 1988, when Braidwood opened. He had worked there, and in other nuclear plants, as a pipefitter and welder — even sometimes fixing corroded piping. For the longest time, he felt the plants were well-managed and safe.

His feelings have changed.

An outlet from Braidwood's leaky discharge pipe 300 feet from his property poured out three million gallons of water in 1998, according to an NRC inspection report. The couple didn't realize the discharge was radioactive.

The Scamens no longer intend to pass the property on to their grandchildren for fear of hurting their health. The couple just wants out. But the only offer so far is from a buyer who left a note on the front door saying he'd pay the fire-sale price of $10,000.

They say Exelon has refused to buy their home because it has found tritium directly behind, but not beneath, their property.

"They say our property is not contaminated, and if they buy property that is not contaminated, it will set a precedent, and they'll have to buy everybody's property," said Scamen.

Their neighbors, Tom and Judy Zimmer, are also hoping for an offer from Exelon for the land and home they built on it, spending $418,000 for both.

They had just moved into the house in November 2005, and were laying the tile in their new foyer when two Exelon representatives appeared at the door.

"They said, 'We're from Exelon, and we had a tritium spill. It's nothing to worry about,'" recalls Tom Zimmer. "I didn't know what tritium even meant."

But his wife says she understood right away that it was bad news — and they hadn't even emptied their moving boxes yet: "I thought, 'Oh, my God. We're not even in this place. What are we going to do?'"

They say they had an interested buyer who backed out when he learned of the tritium. No one has made an offer since.

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PUBLIC RELATIONS EFFORT

The NRC is certainly paying attention. How can it not when local residents fret over every new groundwater incident? But the agency's reports and actions suggest a preoccupation with image and perception.

An NRC task force on tritium leaks last year dismissed the danger to public health. Instead, its report called the leaks "a challenging issue from the perspective of communications around environmental protection." The task force noted ruefully that the rampant leaking had "impacted public confidence."

For sure, the industry also is trying to stop the leaks. For several years now, plant owners around the country have been drilling more monitoring wells and taking a more aggressive approach in replacing old piping when leaks are suspected or discovered.

For example, Exelon has been performing $14 million worth of work at Oyster Creek to give easier access to 2,000 feet of tritium-carrying piping, said site spokesman David Benson.

But such measures have yet to stop widespread leaking.

Meantime, the reactors keep getting older — 66 have been approved for 20-year extensions to their original 40-year licenses, with 16 more extensions pending. And, as the AP has been reporting in its ongoing series, Aging Nukes, regulators and industry have worked in concert to loosen safety standards to keep the plants operating.

In an initiative started last year, NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko asked his staff to examine regulations on buried piping to evaluate if stricter standards or more inspections were needed.

The staff report, issued in June, openly acknowledged that the NRC "has not placed an emphasis on preventing" the leaks.

The authors concluded there are no significant health threats or heightened risk of accidents.

And they predicted even more leaks in the future.

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2011-06-20T14:48:00.000-07:00

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US nuke regulators weaken safety rules
By JEFF DONN - AP National Writer

LACEY TOWNSHIP, N.J. (AP) — Federal regulators have been working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nation's aging reactors operating within safety standards by repeatedly weakening those standards, or simply failing to enforce them, an investigation by The Associated Press has found.

Time after time, officials at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission have decided that original regulations were too strict, arguing that safety margins could be eased without peril, according to records and interviews.

The result? Rising fears that these accommodations by the NRC are significantly undermining safety — and inching the reactors closer to an accident that could harm the public and jeopardize the future of nuclear power in the United States.

Examples abound. When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed — up to 20 times the original limit. When rampant cracking caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of the tubes was devised, so plants could meet standards.

Failed cables. Busted seals. Broken nozzles, clogged screens, cracked concrete, dented containers, corroded metals and rusty underground pipes — all of these and thousands of other problems linked to aging were uncovered in the AP's yearlong investigation. And all of them could escalate dangers in the event of an accident.

Yet despite the many problems linked to aging, not a single official body in government or industry has studied the overall frequency and potential impact on safety of such breakdowns in recent years, even as the NRC has extended the licenses of dozens of reactors.

Industry and government officials defend their actions, and insist that no chances are being taken. But the AP investigation found that with billions of dollars and 19 percent of America's electricity supply at stake, a cozy relationship prevails between the industry and its regulator, the NRC.

Records show a recurring pattern: Reactor parts or systems fall out of compliance with the rules. Studies are conducted by the industry and government, and all agree that existing standards are "unnecessarily conservative."

Regulations are loosened, and the reactors are back in compliance.

"That's what they say for everything, whether that's the case or not," said Demetrios Basdekas, an engineer retired from the NRC. "Every time you turn around, they say 'We have all this built-in conservatism.'"

The ongoing crisis at the stricken, decades-old Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear facility in Japan has focused attention on the safety of plants elsewhere in the world; it prompted the NRC to look at U.S. reactors, and a report is due in July.

But the factor of aging goes far beyond the issues posed by the disaster at Fukushima.

Commercial nuclear reactors in the United States were designed and licensed for 40 years. When the first ones were being built in the 1960s and 1970s, it was expected that they would be replaced with improved models long before those licenses expired.

But that never happened. The 1979 accident at Three Mile Island, massive cost overruns, crushing debt and high interest rates ended new construction proposals for several decades.

Instead, 66 of the 104 operating units have been relicensed for 20 more years, mostly with scant public attention. Renewal applications are under review for 16 other reactors.

By the standards in place when they were built, these reactors are old and getting older. As of today, 82 reactors are more than 25 years old.

The AP found proof that aging reactors have been allowed to run less safely to prolong operations. As equipment has approached or violated safety limits, regulators and reactor operators have loosened or bent the rules.

Last year, the NRC weakened the safety margin for acceptable radiation damage to reactor vessels — for a second time. The standard is based on a measurement known as a reactor vessel's "reference temperature," which predicts when it will become dangerously brittle and vulnerable to failure. Over the years, many plants have violated or come close to violating the standard.

As a result, the minimum standard was relaxed first by raising the reference temperature 50 percent, and then 78 percent above the original — even though a broken vessel could spill its radioactive contents into the environment.

"We've seen the pattern," said nuclear safety scientist Dana Powers, who works for Sandia National Laboratories and also sits on an NRC advisory committee. "They're ... trying to get more and more out of these plants."

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SHARPENING THE PENCIL

The AP collected and analyzed government and industry documents — including some never-before released. The examination looked at both types of reactor designs: pressurized water units that keep radioactivity confined to the reactor building and the less common boiling water types like those at Fukushima, which send radioactive water away from the reactor to drive electricity-generating turbines.

Tens of thousands of pages of government and industry studies were examined, along with test results, inspection reports and regulatory policy statements filed over four decades. Interviews were conducted with scores of managers, regulators, engineers, scientists, whistleblowers, activists, and residents living near the reactors, which are located at 65 sites, mostly in the East and Midwest.

AP reporting teams toured some of the oldest reactors — the unit here at Oyster Creek, near the Atlantic coast 50 miles east of Philadelphia, and two units at Indian Point, 25 miles north of New York City along the Hudson River.

Called "Oyster Creak" by some critics because of its aging problems, this boiling water reactor began running in 1969 and ranks as the country's oldest operating commercial nuclear power plant. Its license was extended in 2009 until 2029, though utility officials announced in December that they'll shut the reactor 10 years earlier rather than build state-ordered cooling towers. Applications to extend the lives of pressurized water units 2 and 3 at Indian Point, each more than 36 years old, are under review by the NRC.

Unprompted, several nuclear engineers and former regulators used nearly identical terminology to describe how industry and government research has frequently justified loosening safety standards to keep aging reactors within operating rules. They call the approach "sharpening the pencil" or "pencil engineering" — the fudging of calculations and assumptions to yield answers that enable plants with deteriorating conditions to remain in compliance.

"Many utilities are doing that sort of thing," said engineer Richard T. Lahey Jr., who used to design nuclear safety systems for General Electric Co., which makes boiling water reactors. "I think we need nuclear power, but we can't compromise on safety. I think the vulnerability is on these older plants."

Added Paul Blanch, an engineer who left the industry over safety issues but later returned to work on solving them: "It's a philosophical position that (federal regulators) take that's driven by the industry and by the economics: What do we need to do to let those plants continue to operate? They somehow sharpen their pencil to either modify their interpretation of the regulations, or they modify their assumptions in the risk assessment."

In public pronouncements, industry and government say aging is well under control. "I see an effort on the part of this agency to always make sure that we're doing the right things for safety. I'm not sure that I see a pattern of staff simply doing things because there's an interest to reduce requirements — that's certainly not the case," NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko said in an interview at agency headquarters in Rockville, Md.

Neil Wilmshurst, director of plant technology for the industry's Electric Power Research Institute, acknowledged that the industry and NRC often collaborate on research that supports rule changes. But he maintained that there's "no kind of misplaced alliance ... to get the right answer."

Yet agency staff, plant operators, and consultants paint a different picture in little-known reports, where evidence of industry-wide problems is striking:

—The AP reviewed 226 preliminary notifications — alerts on emerging safety problems — issued by the NRC since 2005. Wear and tear in the form of clogged lines, cracked parts, leaky seals, rust and other deterioration contributed to at least 26 alerts over the past six years. Other notifications lack detail, but aging also was a probable factor in 113 additional alerts. That would constitute up to 62 percent in all. For example, the 39-year-old Palisades reactor in Michigan shut Jan. 22 when an electrical cable failed, a fuse blew, and a valve stuck shut, expelling steam with low levels of radioactive tritium into the air outside. And a one-inch crack in a valve weld aborted a restart in February at the LaSalle site west of Chicago.

—One 2008 NRC report blamed 70 percent of potentially serious safety problems on "degraded conditions." Some involve human factors, but many stem from equipment wear, including cracked nozzles, loose paint, electrical problems, or offline cooling components.

—Confronted with worn parts that need maintenance, the industry has repeatedly requested — and regulators have often allowed — inspections and repairs to be delayed for months until scheduled refueling outages. Again and again, problems worsened before they were fixed. Postponed inspections inside a steam generator at Indian Point allowed tubing to burst, leading to a radioactive release in 2000. Two years later, cracking was allowed to grow so bad in nozzles on the reactor vessel at the Davis-Besse plant near Toledo, Ohio, that it came within two months of a possible breach, the NRC acknowledged in a report. A hole in the vessel could release radiation into the environment, yet inspections failed to catch the same problem on the replacement vessel head until more nozzles were found to be cracked last year.

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TIME CRUMBLES THINGS

Nuclear plants are fundamentally no more immune to the incremental abuses of time than our cars or homes: Metals grow weak and rusty, concrete crumbles, paint peels, crud accumulates. Big components like 17-story-tall concrete containment buildings or 800-ton reactor vessels are all but impossible to replace. Smaller parts and systems can be swapped, but still pose risks as a result of weak maintenance and lax regulation or hard-to-predict failures. Even when things are fixed or replaced, the same parts or others nearby often fail later.

Even mundane deterioration at a reactor can carry harsh consequences.

For example, peeling paint and debris can be swept toward pumps that circulate cooling water in a reactor accident. A properly functioning containment building is needed to create air pressure that helps clear those pumps. The fact is, a containment building could fail in a severe accident. Yet the NRC has allowed operators to make safety calculations that assume containment buildings will hold.

In a 2009 letter, Mario V. Bonaca, then-chairman of the NRC's Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, warned that this approach represents "a decrease in the safety margin" and makes a fuel-melting accident more likely. At Fukushima, hydrogen explosions blew apart two of six containment buildings, allowing radiation to escape from overheated fuel in storage pools.

Many photos in NRC archives — some released in response to AP requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act — show rust accumulated in a thick crust or paint peeling in long sheets on untended equipment at nuclear plants. Other breakdowns can't be observed or predicted, even with sophisticated analytic methods — especially for buried, hidden or hard-to-reach parts.

Industry and government reports are packed with troubling evidence of unrelenting wear — and repeated regulatory compromises.

Four areas stand out:

BRITTLE VESSELS: For years, operators have rearranged fuel rods to limit gradual radiation damage to the steel vessels protecting the core and to keep them strong enough to meet safety standards.

It hasn't worked well enough.

Even with last year's weakening of the safety margins, engineers and metal scientists say some plants may be forced to close over these concerns before their licenses run out — unless, of course, new compromises with regulations are made. But the stakes are high: A vessel damaged by radiation becomes brittle and prone to cracking in certain accidents at pressurized water reactors, potentially releasing its radioactive contents into the environment.

LEAKY VALVES: Operators have repeatedly violated leakage standards for valves designed to bottle up radioactive steam in the event of earthquakes and other accidents at boiling water reactors.

Many plants have found they could not adhere to the general standard allowing each of these parts — known as main steam isolation valves — to leak at a rate of no more than 11.5 cubic feet per hour. In 1999, the NRC decided to permit individual plants to seek amendments of up to 200 cubic feet per hour for all four steam valves combined.

But plants keep violating even those higher limits. For example, in 2007, Hatch Unit 2, in Baxley, Ga., reported combined leakage of 574 cubic feet per hour.

CRACKED TUBING: The industry has long known of cracking in steel alloy tubing originally used in the steam generators of pressurized water reactors. Ruptures were rampant in these tubes containing radioactive coolant; in 1993 alone, there were seven. Even today, as many as 18 reactors are still running on old generators.

Problems can arise even in a newer metal alloy, according to a report of a 2008 industry-government workshop.

CORRODED PIPING: Nuclear operators have failed to stop an epidemic of leaks in pipes and other underground equipment in damp settings. The country's nuclear sites have suffered more than 400 accidental radioactive leaks during their history, the activist Union of Concerned Scientists reported in September.

Plant operators have been drilling monitoring wells and patching hidden or buried piping and other equipment for several years to control an escalating outbreak.

Here, too, they have failed. Between 2000 and 2009, the annual number of leaks from underground piping shot up fivefold, according to an internal industry document obtained and analyzed by the AP.

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CONCERNS OF LONG STANDING

Even as they reassured the public, regulators have been worrying about aging reactors since at least the 1980s, when the first ones were entering only their second decade of operation. A 1984 report for the NRC blamed wear, corrosion, crud and fatigue for more than a third of 3,098 failures of parts or systems within the first 12 years of industry operations; the authors believed the number was actually much higher.

A decade later, in 1994, the NRC reported to Congress that the critical shrouds lining reactor cores were cracked at a minimum of 11 units, including five with extensive damage. The NRC ordered more aggressive maintenance, but an agency report last year said cracking of internal core components — spurred by radiation — remains "a major concern" in boiling water reactors.

A 1995 study by Oak Ridge National Laboratory covering a seven-year period found that aging contributed to 19 percent of scenarios that could have ended in severe accidents.

In 2001, the Union of Concerned Scientists, which does not oppose nuclear power, told Congress that aging problems had shut reactors eight times within 13 months.

And an NRC presentation for an international workshop that same year warned of escalating wear at reactor buildings meant to bottle up radiation during accidents. A total of 66 cases of damage were cited in the presentation, with corrosion reported at a quarter of all containment buildings. In at least two cases — at the two-reactor North Anna site 40 miles northwest of Richmond, Va., and the two-unit Brunswick facility near Wilmington, N.C. — steel containment liners designed to shield the public had rusted through.

And in 2009, a one-third-inch hole was discovered in a liner at Beaver Valley Unit 1 in Shippingport, Pa.

Long-standing, unresolved problems persist with electrical cables, too.

In a 1993 report labeled "official use only," an NRC staffer warned that electrical parts throughout plants were subject to dangerous age-related breakdowns unforeseen by the agency. Almost a fifth of cables failed in testing that simulated the effects of 40 years of wear. The report warned that as a result, reactor core damage could occur much more often than expected.

Fifteen years later, the problem appeared to have worsened. An NRC report warned in 2008 that rising numbers of electrical cables are failing with age, prompting temporary shutdowns and degrading safety. Agency staff tallied 269 known failures over the life of the industry.

Two industry-funded reports obtained by the AP said that managers and regulators have worried increasingly about the reliability of sometimes wet, hard-to-reach underground cables over the past five-to-10 years. One of the reports last year acknowledged many electrical-related aging failures at plants around the country.

"Multiple cable circuits may fail when called on to perform functions affecting safety," the report warned.

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EATEN AWAY FROM WITHIN

Few aging problems have been more challenging than chemical corrosion from within.
In one of the industry's worst accidents, a corroded pipe burst at Virginia's Surry 2 reactor in 1986 and showered workers with scalding steam, killing four.

In summer 2001, the NRC was confronted with a new problem: Corrosive chemicals were cracking nozzles on reactors. But the NRC let operators delay inspections to coincide with scheduled outages. Inspection finally took place in February 2002 at the Davis-Besse unit in Ohio.

What workers found shocked the industry.

They discovered extensive cracking and a place where acidic boron had spurted from the reactor and eaten a gouge as big as a football. When the problem was found, just a fraction of an inch of inner lining remained. An NRC analysis determined that the vessel head could have burst within two months — what former NRC Commissioner Peter Bradford has called a "near rupture" which could have released large amounts of radiation into the environment.

In 2001-3 alone, at least 10 plants developed these cracks, according to an NRC analysis.

Industry defenders blame human failings at Davis-Besse. Owner FirstEnergy Corp. paid a $28 million fine, and courts convicted two plant employees of hiding the deterioration. NRC spokesman Scott Burnell declared that the agency "learned from the incident and improved resident inspector training and knowledge-sharing to ensure that such a situation is never repeated."

Yet on the same March day last year that Burnell's comments were released, Davis-Besse workers again found dried boron on the nozzles of a replacement vessel head, indicating more leaks. Inspecting further, they again found cracks in 24 of 69 nozzles.

"We were not expecting this issue," said plant spokesman Todd Schneider.

In August, the operator applied for a 20-year license extension. Under pressure from the NRC, the company has agreed to replace the replacement head in October.

As far back as the 1990s, the industry and NRC also were well aware that the steel-alloy tubing in many steam generators was subject to chemical corrosion. It could crack over time, releasing radioactive gases that can bypass the containment building. If too much spurts out, there may be too little water to cool down the reactor, prompting a core melt.

In 1993, NRC personnel reported seven outright ruptures inside the generators, several forced outages per year, and some complete replacements. Personnel at the Catawba plant near Charlotte, N.C., found more than 8,000 corroded tubes — more than half its total.

For plants with their original generators, "there is no end in sight to the steam generator tube degradation problems," a top agency manager declared. NRC staffers warned: "Crack depth is difficult to measure reliably and the crack growth rate is difficult to determine."

Yet no broad order was issued for shutdowns to inspect generators.

Instead, the staff began to talk to operators about how to deal with the standard that no cracks could go deeper than 40 percent through the tube wall.

In 1995, the NRC staff put out alternative criteria that let reactors keep running if they could reach positive results with remote checks known as "eddy-currents tests." The new test standard gave more breathing room to reactors.

According to a 2001 report by the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, the staff "acknowledged that there would be some possibility that cracks of objectionable depth might be overlooked and left in the steam generator for an additional operating cycle." The alternative, the report said, would be to repair or remove potentially many tubes from service.

NRC engineer Joe Hopenfeld, who had worked previously in the industry, challenged this approach at the time from within the agency. He warned that multiple ruptures in corroded tubing could release radiation. The NRC said radiation would be confined.

Hopenfeld now says this conclusion wasn't based on solid analysis but "wishful thinking" and research meant to reach a certain conclusion — another instance of "sharpening the pencil."

"It was a hard problem to solve, and they did not want to say it was a problem, because if they really said it was a problem, they would have to shut down a lot of reactors."

___
AGE IS NO ISSUE, SAYS INDUSTRY

With financial pressures mounting in the 1990s to extend the life of aging reactors, new NRC calculations using something called the "Master Curve" put questionable reactor vessels back into the safe zone.

A 1999 NRC review of the Master Curve, used to analyze metal toughness, noted that energy deregulation had put financial pressure on nuclear plants. It went on: "So utility executives are considering new operational scenarios, some of which were unheard of as little as five years ago: extending the licensed life of the plant beyond 40 years." As a result, it said, the industry and the NRC were considering "refinements" of embrittlement calculations "with an eye to reducing known over-conservatisms."

Asked about references to economic pressures, NRC spokesman Burnell said motivations are irrelevant if a technology works.

Former NRC commissioner Peter Lyons said, "There certainly is plenty of research ... to support a relaxation of the conservativisms that had been built in before. I don't see that as decreasing safety. I see that as an appropriate standard."

Though some parts are too big and too expensive to replace, industry defenders also point out that many others are routinely replaced over the years.

Tony Pietrangelo, chief nuclear officer of the industry's Nuclear Energy Institute, acknowledges that you'd expect to see a growing failure rate at some point — "if we didn't replace and do consistent maintenance."

In a sense, then, supporters of aging nukes say an old reactor is essentially a collection of new parts.

"When a plant gets to be 40 years old, about the only thing that's 40 years old is the ink on the license," said NRC chief spokesman Eliot Brenner. "Most, if not all of the major components, will have been changed out."

Oyster Creek spokesman David Benson said the reactor "is as safe today as when it was built."

Yet plant officials have been trying to arrest rust on its 100-foot-high, radiation-blocking steel drywell for decades. The problem was declared solved long ago, but a rust patch was found again in late 2008. Benson said the new rust was only the size of a dime, but acknowledged there was "some indication of water getting in."

In an effort to meet safety standards, aging reactors have been forced to come up with backfit on top of backfit.

As Ivan Selin, a retired NRC chairman, put it: "It's as if we were all driving Model T's today and trying to bring them up to current mileage standards."

For example, the state of New Jersey — not the NRC — had ordered Oyster Creek to build cooling towers to protect sea life in nearby Barnegat Bay. Owner Exelon Corp. said that would cost about $750 million and force it to close the reactor — 20-year license extension notwithstanding. Even with the announcement to close in 2019, Oyster Creek will have been in operation for 50 years.

Many of the safety changes have been justified by something called "risk-informed" analysis, which the industry has employed widely since the 1990s: Regulators set aside a strict check list applied to all systems and focus instead on features deemed to carry the highest risk.

But one flaw of risk-informed analysis is that it doesn't explicitly account for age. An older reactor is not viewed as inherently more unpredictable than a younger one. Ed Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, says risk-informed analysis has usually served "to weaken regulations, rather than strengthen them."

Even without the right research, the NRC has long reserved legal wiggle room to enforce procedures, rules and standards as it sees fit. A 2008 position paper by the industry group EPRI said the approach has brought "a more tractable enforcement process and a significant reduction in the number of cited violations."

But some safety experts call it "tombstone regulation," implying that problems fester until something goes very wrong. "Until there are tombstones, they don't regulate," said Blanch, the longtime industry engineer who became a whistleblower.

Barry Bendar, a database administrator who lives one mile from Oyster Creek, said representatives of Exelon were asked at a public meeting in 2009 if the plant had a specific life span.

"Their answer was, 'No, we can fix it, we can replace, we can patch,'" said Bendar. "To me, everything reaches an end of its life span."

.

2010-12-04T23:56:00.000-08:00

Viewing cable 09TELAVIV1098, ISRAEL, A PROMISED LAND FOR ORGANISED CRIME?

Reference ID - 09TELAVIV1098

Created - 2009-05-15 14:02

Released - 2010-12-01 21:09

Classification - UNCLASSIFIED

Origin -  Embassy Tel Aviv

Appears in http://www.spiegel.de

VZCZCXYZ0018
RR RUEHWEB

DE RUEHTV #1098/01 1351414
ZNR UUUUU ZZH (CCY AD66A605 MSI9229-632)
R 151414Z MAY 09 ZDS
FM AMEMBASSY TEL AVIV
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC 1845
INFO RUEHJM/AMCONSUL JERUSALEM 2041
RUCNFB/FBI WASHDC//INTD/CTD/CT WATCH//
RHMFIUU/US CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION WASHDC
RUEAHLC/HOMELAND SECURITY CENTER WASHDC 0068
RUEHRO/AMEMBASSY ROME 7509
 UNCLAS TEL AVIV 001098

C O R R E C T E D C O P Y (CORRECTED ADDEE)

DEPT FOR CA/VO/L/C; CA/VO/L/A; CA/FPP SARAH SEXTON; INR/TIPOFF; DS
OFAC
ROME FOR DHS/ICE

CA/FPP: PLEASE PASS TO DOJ LISA HOLTYN AND BRUCE OHR
SIPDIS

E.O. 12958:N/A
TAGS: CVIS SNAR CMGT KFRD KCOR KCRM KTIP PINR IS
SUBJECT: ISRAEL, A PROMISED LAND FOR ORGANISED CRIME?

Summary
---------

¶1. (SBU) Organized crime (OC) has longstanding roots in Israel, but
in recent years there has been a sharp increase in the reach and
impact of OC networks. In seeking a competitive advantage in such
lucrative trades as narcotics and prostitution, Israeli crime groups
have demonstrated their ability and willingness to engage in violent
attacks on each other with little regard for innocent bystanders.
The Israeli National Police (INP) and the courts have engaged in a
vigorous campaign against organized crime leaders, including the
creation of a new specialized anti-OC unit, but they remain unable
to cope with the full scope of the problem. Organized crime in
Israel now has global reach, with direct impact inside the United
States. Post is currently utilizing all available tools to deny
Israeli OC figures access to the United States in order to prevent
them from furthering their criminal activities on U.S. soil. End
Summary.

Crime War Hits the Streets of Israel
-------------------------------------

¶2. (SBU) In November 2008, Israeli crime boss Yaakov Alperon was
assassinated in broad daylight in a gruesome attack on the streets
of Tel Aviv, only about a mile away from the Embassy. According to
several media accounts, a motor scooter pulled up alongside
Alperon's car and the rider attached a sophisticated explosive
device with a remote detonator to the car door. The bomb killed
Alperon and his driver, and injured two innocent pedestrians. The
hit was the latest in a series of violent attacks and reprisals, and
indicated a widening crime war in Israel.

¶3. In July 2008, a 31-year-old Israeli woman was killed by a stray
bullet on the beach in Bat Yam in front of her husband and two
children during a failed assassination attempt on noted crime figure
Rami Amira. In a feud between the Abutbul and Shirazi clans, crime
boss Shalom "Charlie" Abutbul was shot by two gunmen in September
2008, an attack that also wounded three bystanders. In December
2008, Charlie Abutbul's son-in-law, Nati Ohayon, was gunned down in
his car in Netanya. Before the fatal bombing of his car, Alperon
himself had survived at least three previous attempts on his life
before his assassination, and was engaged in an ongoing feud with
the rival Abergil clan (although there are numerous suspects in
Alperon's murder). The day after Alperon's death, two members of
the Abergil syndicate were sentenced for conspiring to kill
Alperon's brother, Nissim, in May 2008.

¶4. (SBU) In response to rising concerns for public safety, former
Prime Minister Olmert convened an emergency meeting of top law
enforcement officials, cabinet members, and prosecutors in December
¶2008. He promised to add 1,000 officers to the INP and to allocate
approximately NIS 340 million (USD 81 million) to improve the INP's
technical capabilities. In general, the rise in OC-related violence
has led some public figures to call for emergency state powers to
attack criminal organizations, and OC became a minor but important
issue in the February 2009 Knesset elections. Former Labor Party MK
Ephraim Sneh publicly decried criminal extortion in his campaign
ads, only to have his car torched in apparent retaliation outside
his home in Herzliya.

Background
------------

¶5. (SBU) Organized criminal activity is not a new phenomenon in
Israel, and major crime families are well known to the Israeli
public (the Alperons even featured in a recent reality television
program). Five or six crime families have traditionally dominated
OC in Israel, although the names and makeup of these syndicates have
fluctuated in recent years. The Abergil, Abutbul, Alperon, and
Rosenstein organizations are among the most well known, but recent
arrests and assassinations have created a power vacuum at the top.
New names such as Mulner, Shirazi, Cohen and Domrani have moved
quickly to fill the gap. Other up-and-coming groups include the
Harari, Ohana, and Kdoshim families. There are also a number of
rival families active in the underworld of Israel's Arab sector.

¶6. (SBU) Traditional OC activities in Israel include illegal
neighborhood casinos, prostitution rings, extortion, and loan
sharking, with each family controlling a different geographic
region. The Alperon family, for instance, dominates the Sharon
region, while the Abutbul operation is based in the coastal city of
Netanya. The focus is largely on easy money guaranteed by the
limited use of violence. Criminal involvement in the recycling
business, for example, has been well covered in the press. OC

families collect bottles illegally from municipal recycling bins and
restaurants, return them at the collection centers claiming twice
the actual numbers, and pocket the change for millions in profits.

Not Your Grandfather's Mob
---------------------------

¶7. (SBU) Despite their notoriety, OC figures have generally been
viewed as a nuisance to be handled by local police. Law enforcement
resources were directed to more existential security threats from
terrorists and enemy states. In recent years, however, the rules of
the game have changed. According to xxxxx, the old school of Israel 
OC is giving way to a new, more violent, breed of crime. xxxxx told
conoffs that the new style of crime features knowledge of hi-tech 
explosives acquired from service in the Israeli Defense Forces, and
a willingness to use indiscriminate violence, at least against rival
gang leaders. New OC business also includes technology-related crimes,
such as stock market and credit card fraud, and operates on a global
scale.

¶8. (SBU) As the reach of Israeli OC has grown, so have the stakes.
Crime families are working further from home and exporting violence
abroad. Older gambling schemes have grown to include sprawling
casino franchises in Eastern Europe. The Abutbul family began its
gambling business in Romania over a decade ago, and now owns the
Europe-wide Casino Royale network. In 2002, Israeli OC turf wars
spilled into Europe when Yaakov Abergil and Felix Abutbul were
killed two months apart. Abutbul was gunned down in front of his
casino in Prague in a show of force by the Abergils as they
attempted to capture a portion of the European gambling market.

¶9. (SBU) Israeli OC now plays a significant role in the global drug
trade, providing both a local consumer market and an important
transit point to Europe and the United States. In 2004, Zeev
Rosenstein was arrested in Israel for possession of 700,000 ecstasy
tablets in his New York apartment, destined for distribution in the
U.S. market. He was ultimately extradited to the United States in
2006, where he is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence. Two
other crime figures, Meir Abergil and Israel Ozifa, are also facing
U.S. extradition charges on charges that include smuggling 100,000
ecstasy tablets into the United States.

¶10. (SBU) The prostitution business has also grown beyond the
neighborhood brothel. In March 2009, the INP arrested twelve
suspects in what is believed to be the largest Israeli-led human
trafficking network unearthed to date. Ring leader Rami Saban and
his associates were charged with smuggling thousands of women from
the former Soviet Union and forcing them to work as prostitutes in
Israel, Cyprus, Belgium, and Great Britain. Some women were flown
to Egypt and smuggled across the Sinai border by Bedouins.

Law Enforcement Steps up the Pressure
-------------------------------------

¶11. (SBU) After years of perceived inaction, in 2008 the INP
created a new unit called Lahav 433. The elite unit operates under
the direct command of the police commissioner, and is charged
specifically with infiltrating and eliminating Israel's major crime
syndicates. Lahav 433 also cooperates closely with district
investigative units to combat smaller criminal organizations, many
of which are aligned with the larger crime families.

¶12. (SBU) Following Alperon's assassination, the INP initiated a
series of raids that led to the arrests of a number of leading crime
figures. Among their targets were Aviv and Adam Abutbul, sons of
crime-family head Charlie Abutbul, both charged with possession of
illegal weapons. (A third brother, Francois, is already facing
murder charges for a nightclub killing in 2004.) Police also
arrested gangland figure Amir Mulner for weapons possession and
conspiracy to commit a crime. Mulner is known to be an explosives
expert by army training, and is a suspect in Yaakov Alperon's
murder. He is also believed to be managing affairs for Rosenstein
while the latter serves his sentence in the United States.

¶13. (SBU) Yaakov Alperon's brother Nissim was arrested with 18
others in December 2008, in what was reported to be a "mafia
meeting" in a Tel Aviv-area caf. According to the Jerusalem Post,
the group may have been planning a revenge attack for his brother's
recent assassination. Alperon's son Dror, recently dismissed from
his army service for disorderly behavior, also faces several counts
of assault and was convicted on extortion charges. Also in
December, police in Netanya launched several raids on illegal
gambling houses and the homes of suspected money launderers with
ties to the crime families. In Ashdod, brothers Roni and David
Harari were arrested on charges of extortion. Regional police stuck
a blow against the Jerusalem Gang, and convicted its leader Itzik
Bar Muha.

Skepticism Hovers Over GOI Efforts
----------------------------------

¶14. (SBU)xxxxx told conoffs that
"thousands of foot soldiers" remain active on the streets despite
these aggressive anti-OC operations. He noted that approximately
2,000 people attended Alperon's very public funeral. xxxxx
expressed skepticism that recent arrests will bear fruit in the long
term without a sustained commitment to enforcement. He noted that
many of the crime leaders remain active while in prison and their
operations are not hampered significantly even when they are
convicted and jailed.

¶15. (SBU) In December 2008, former Prime Minister Olmert himself
admitted that efforts to combat OC have long been diluted among
different agencies, and that INP technology lags far behind that
allocated to security services for counterterrorism. Given the
recent change in government and the current economic crisis, there
is public skepticism as to whether GOI promises to remedy the
situation will be fulfilled. In 2003, following a failed
assassination attempt on Rosenstein, then Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon made similar promises to commit manpower and resources to
combating the problem.

¶16. (SBU) It is not entirely clear to what extent OC elements have
penetrated the Israeli establishment and corrupted public officials.
The INP insists that such instances are rare, despite the
occasional revelation of crooked police officers in the press.
Nevertheless, there have been several dramatic revelations in recent
years that indicate a growing problem. In 2004, former government
minister Gonen Segev was arrested for trying to smuggle thousands of
ecstasy pills into Israel, a case that produced considerable
circumstantial evidence of his involvement in OC. The election of
Inbal Gavrieli to the Knesset in 2003 as a member of Likud raised
concerns about OC influence in the party's Central Committee.
Gavrieli is the daughter of a suspected crime boss, and she
attempted to use her parliamentary immunity to block investigations
into her father's business. (Gavrieli is no longer a member of the
Knesset.) Just last month, Israeli politicos and OC figures came
together for the funeral of Likud party activist Shlomi Oz, who
served time in prison in the 1990s for extortion on behalf of the
Alperon family. Among those in attendance was Omri Sharon, son of
former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who was himself convicted in
2006 on illegal fundraising charges unrelated to OC.

Courts Testing New Powers
--------------------------

¶17. (SBU) In 2003, the GOI passed anti-OC legislation that carries
a maximum sentence of 10 years imprisonment for heading a criminal
organization and three years for working in such an organization.
The law defines such a body as a group of people working in an
"organized, methodical and ongoing pattern to commit offenses that
are defined by the laws of Israel as crimes." The law also allows
for property forfeiture, both in the wake of conviction and in cases
where it is proven to belong to a criminal organization.

¶18. (SBU) Until recently, xxxxx, judges and lawyers have been
slow to make use of this authority, and are hampered by a lack of
resources, insufficient understanding of the tools at their
disposal, and reticence to mete out tough sentences. A witness
protection program for those who testify against OC is just now
getting off the ground, and is not backed by any specific
legislation. Nevertheless, on March 16th, a Tel Aviv district court
took the important step of sentencing 14 convicted criminals
belonging to two mob organizations in Ramle and Jaffa to up to 27
years in prison.

¶19. (SBU) Increased efforts by Israeli authorities to combat OC
have engendered retaliatory threats of violence. Recent press
reports indicate that as many as 10 Israeli judges are currently
receiving 24-hour protection by the police against the threat of
violence from members of crime organizations. Israeli OC appears to
be intent on intimidating judges personally, as a way of influencing
the legal process. Judges in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa have
been assigned police protection, underscoring the depth of the
problem.

Israeli Crime Reaches American Shores
--------------------------------------

¶20. (SBU) Israel's multi-ethnic population provides a deep well of
opportunity for Israeli OC to expand into new territory. Most
Israeli crime families trace their roots to North Africa or Eastern
Europe, and many of their Israeli operatives hold foreign passports
allowing them to move freely in European countries, most of which
participate in the visa waiver program with the United States.
Approximately one million Russians moved to Israel following the
dissolution of the Soviet Union, and Russian citizens no longer
require visas to enter Israel. Many Russian oligarchs of Jewish
origin and Jewish members of OC groups have received Israeli
citizenship, or at least maintain residences in the country. Little
is known about the full extent of Russian criminal activity in
Israel, but sources in the police estimate that Russian OC has
laundered as much as USD 10 billion through Israeli holdings. While
most Israeli OC families are native-born and the stereotype that
Russian immigrants tend to be mobsters is greatly overblown,
indigenous OC groups routinely employ "muscle" from the former
Soviet Union.

¶21. (SBU) The profit motive serves as a great unifier among
Israel's diverse demographic groups. According to xxxxx, some
Amsterdam-based Hasidic groups allegedly are implicated in
international drug smuggling through links to Israeli OC. Arab and
Jewish Israeli criminals routinely cooperate and form alliances to
expand control of lucrative drug, car theft and extortion rackets.
Even hostile and closed borders pose few obstacles to OC groups.
According to the INP, 43% of intercepted heroin in 2008 was smuggled
from Lebanon, 37% from Jordan, and 12% from Egypt.

Israeli OC Operating Freely in United States
---------------------------------------------

¶22. (SBU) Given the volume of travel and trade between the United
States and Israel, it is not surprising that Israeli OC has also
gained a foothold in America. Over the last decade, media reports
have detailed a number of high-profile cases involving Israeli OC,
ranging from large-scale drug deals to murder. The ongoing Central
District of California grand jury investigation against the Abergil
family, where a RICO conspiracy case was initiated in December 2007,
best demonstrates the full extent of such criminal activity.
Investigators have linked Yitzhak Abergil and his entire network to
crimes of "embezzlement, extortion, kidnapping, and money
laundering." Yitzhak Abergil is currently under arrest in Israel
and facing extradition for related charges linking him to the murder
of Israeli drug dealer Samy Attias on U.S. soil.

¶23. (SBU) As part of an ongoing effort to track Israeli OC through
media reports and police sources, Post so far has identified 16
families and 78 related individuals who are at the center of Israeli
organized criminal activity. The consular section has revoked
several visas for those who have been convicted of crimes in Israel,
but many OC figures have no prior criminal convictions and carry no
visa ineligibilities. As a result, many hold valid nonimmigrant
visas to the United States and have traveled freely or attempted to
travel for a variety of purposes.

¶24. (SBU) In March 2009, Post received information from law
enforcement authorities that convicted criminal and member of the
Abergil organization, Mordechai Yair Hasin, along with his pregnant
wife and child, was intending to flee Israel for Los Angeles on
valid tourist visas. Hasin's visa was revoked based on his
conviction, as were his family's visas after they were determined to
be intending immigrants.

¶25. (SBU) As in the Hasin case, Post is using every available tool
to limit OC travel to the United States, but such efforts are not
always successful. In June 2008, Post issued Adam Abitbul a valid
tourist visa. Abitbul had no prior criminal convictions, and
carried no visa ineligibilities. Several months later, Post
received information from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)
that he had traveled to the United States to carry out a hit.
Abitbul returned to Israel prematurely for his father's funeral, at
which time Post revoked his visa. (Post can only revoke the visas of
Israeli citizens while in country.) In a similar case, in October
2008 Post issued Moshe Bar Muha a tourist visa; he claimed to be
traveling for medical treatment. Post subsequently received
information from the LAPD that Bar Muha is in fact the brother of
Itzik Bar Muha of the Jerusalem Gang (see above) and a convicted
criminal.

¶26. (SBU) As recently as March 2009, Zvika Ben Shabat, Yaacov
Avitan, and Tzuri Rokah requested visas to attend a
"security-related convention" in Las Vegas. According to local
media reports, all three had involvement with OC. Post asked the
applicants to provide police reports for any criminal records in
Israel, but without such evidence there is no immediate
ineligibility for links to OC. Luckily, all three have so far
failed to return for continued adjudication of their applications.
Nevertheless, it is fair to assume that many known OC figures hold
valid tourist visas to the United States and travel freely.

Comment: Israeli OC Slipping Through the Consular Cracks
--------------------------------------------- ---------

¶27. (SBU) Given the growing reach and lethal methods of Israeli OC,
blocking the travel of known OC figures to the United States is a
matter of great concern to Post. Through collaboration with Israeli
and U.S. law enforcement authorities, Post has developed an
extensive database and placed lookouts for OC figures and their foot
soldiers. Nevertheless, the above visa cases demonstrate the
challenges that have arisen since the termination of the Visas Shark
in September 2008. Unlike OC groups from the former Soviet Union,
Italy, China, and Central America, application of INA
212(a)(3)(A)(ii) against Israeli OC is not specifically authorized
per Foreign Affairs Manual 40.31 N5.3. As such, Israelis who are
known to work for or belong to OC families are not automatically
ineligible for travel to the United States.

Cunningham

[Text of cable cited at n e u f n e u f....]

.

2010-10-06T19:35:00.000-07:00

.

[nine hours]

[eight hours]

.

2010-08-06T16:44:00.000-07:00

.

AP Exclusive: CIA flight carried secret from Gitmo
By MATT APUZZO and ADAM GOLDMAN, Associated Press Writers – Fri Aug 6, 3:23 pm ET

WASHINGTON – A white, unmarked Boeing 737 landed in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before dawn on a CIA mission so secretive, many in the nation's war on terrorism were kept in the dark.

Four of the nation's most highly valued terrorist prisoners were aboard.

They arrived at Guantanamo on Sept. 24, 2003, years earlier than the U.S. has ever disclosed. Then, months later, they were just as quietly whisked away before the Supreme Court could give them access to lawyers.

The transfer allowed the U.S. to interrogate the detainees in CIA "black sites" for two more years without allowing them to speak with attorneys or human rights observers or challenge their detention in U.S. courts. Had they remained at the Guantanamo Bay prison for just three more months, they would have been afforded those rights.

"This was all just a shell game to hide detainees from the courts," said Jonathan Hafetz, a Seton Hall University law professor who has represented several detainees.

Removing them from Guantanamo Bay underscores how worried President George W. Bush's administration was that the Supreme Court might lift the veil of secrecy on the detention program. It also shows how insistent the Bush administration was that terrorists must be held outside the U.S. court system.

Years later, the program's legacy continues to complicate President Barack Obama's efforts to prosecute the terrorists behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The arrival and speedy departure from Guantanamo were pieced together by The Associated Press using flight records and interviews with current and former U.S. officials and others familiar with the CIA's detention program. All spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the program.

Top officials at the White House, Justice Department, Pentagon and CIA consulted on the prisoner transfer, officials said.

"The so-called black sites and enhanced interrogation methods, which were administered on the basis of guidance from the Department of Justice, are a thing of the past," CIA spokesman George Little said.

The American Civil Liberties Union renewed its call for a broad criminal investigation into the detention program Friday.

"Secret detention constitutes a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, and the officials who authorized the CIA's secret prisons and torture program should be held accountable," Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU's deputy legal director said.

At least four admitted al-Qaida operatives, some of the CIA's biggest captures to date, were on the plane to Guantanamo: Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Nashiri, Ramzi Binalshibh and Mustafa al-Hawsawi.

Binalshibh and al-Hawsawi helped plan the 9/11 attacks. Al-Nashiri was the mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Zubaydah was an al-Qaida travel facilitator. They had spent months overseas enduring some of the harshest interrogation tactics in U.S. history.

By late summer 2003, the CIA believed the men had revealed their best secrets. The agency needed somewhere to hold them, but no longer needed to conduct prolonged interrogations.

The U.S. naval facility at Guantanamo Bay seemed a good fit. Bush had selected the first six people to face military tribunals there, and a federal appeals court unanimously ruled that detainees could not use U.S. courts to challenge their imprisonment.

And the CIA had just constructed a new facility, which would become known as Strawberry Fields, separate from the main prison at Guantanamo Bay.

The agency's overseas prison network, meanwhile, was in flux. A jail in Thailand known as Cat's Eye closed in December 2002, and in the fall of 2003 the CIA was preparing to shutter its facility in Poland and open a new one in Romania. Human rights investigators and journalists were asking questions. The CIA needed to reshuffle its prisoners.

The prisoner transfer flight, outlined in documents and interviews, visited five CIA prisons in Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, Morocco and Guantanamo Bay. The flight plan was so poorly thought out, some in the CIA derisively compared it to a five-card straight revealing the program to outsiders: Five stops, five secret facilities, all documented.

The flight logs were compiled by European authorities investigating the CIA program.

The flight started in Kabul, where the CIA picked up al-Hawsawi at the secret prison known as the Salt Pit. The Boeing 737 then flew to Szymany, Poland, where a CIA team picked up professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and took him to Bucharest, Romania, to the new prison, code-named Britelite.

Next it was on to Rabat, Morocco, where the Moroccans ran an interrogation facility used by the CIA.

At 8:10 p.m. on Sept. 23, 2003, the Boeing 737 took off from a runway in Rabat. On board were al-Hawsawi, al-Nashiri, Zubaydah and Binalshibh. At 1 a.m. the following day, the plane touched down at Guantanamo.

The existence of a CIA prison at Guantanamo was reported in 2004, but it has always been unclear who was there. Unlike the overseas black sites, there was no waterboarding or other harsh interrogation tactics at Strawberry Fields, officials said. It was a holding facility, a place for some of the key figures in the 9/11 attacks to await trial.

Not long after they arrived, things began unraveling. In November, over the administration's objections, the Supreme Court agreed to consider whether Guantanamo Bay detainees could sue in U.S. courts.

The administration had worried for several years that this might happen. In 2001, Justice Department lawyers Patrick Philbin and John Yoo wrote a memo saying courts were unlikely to grant detainees such rights. But if it happened, they warned, prisoners could argue that the U.S. had mistreated them and that the military tribunal system was unlawful.

"There was obviously a fear that everything that had been done to them might come out," said al-Nashiri's lawyer, Nancy Hollander.

Worse for the CIA, if the Supreme Court granted detainees rights, the entire covert program was at risk. Zubaydah and al-Nashiri could tell their lawyers about being waterboarded in Thailand. Al-Nashiri might discuss having a drill and an unloaded gun put to his head at a CIA prison in Poland.

"Anything that could expose these detainees to individuals outside the government was a nonstarter," one U.S. official familiar with the program said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the government's legal analysis.

In early March 2004, as the legal documents piled up at the Supreme Court, the high court announced that oral arguments would be held in April. After that, a ruling could come at any time, and everyone at the island prison — secretly or not — would be covered.

On March 27, just as the sun was setting on Guantanamo, a Gulfstream IV jet left Cuba. The plane landed in Rabat the next morning. By the time the Supreme Court ruled June 28 that detainees should have access to U.S. courts, the CIA had once again scattered Zubaydah, al-Nashiri and the others throughout the black sites.

Two years later, after The Washington Post revealed the existence of the program, Bush emptied the prison network. Fourteen men, including the four who had been at Guantanamo Bay years earlier, were moved to the island prison. They have remained there ever since.

The four men who were making their second journey to Guantanamo Bay received what they nearly obtained years earlier, before they were spirited away.

"The International Committee of the Red Cross is being advised of their detention and will have the opportunity to meet with them," Bush said in a White House speech Sept. 6, 2006. "Those charged with crimes will be given access to attorneys who will help them prepare their defense, and they will be presumed innocent."

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2010-08-05T16:52:00.000-07:00

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On Facebook, wife learns of husband's 2nd wedding
By MEGHAN BARR (AP) – 11 hours ago

CLEVELAND — Dread of the unknown hung in the air as Lynn France typed two words into the search box on Facebook: the name of the woman with whom she believed her husband was having an affair.

Click. And there it was, the stuff of nightmares for any spouse, cuckolded or not. Wedding photos. At Walt Disney World, no less, featuring her husband literally dressed as Prince Charming. His new wife, a pretty blonde, was a glowing Sleeping Beauty, surrounded by footmen.

"I was numb with shock, to tell you the truth," says France, an occupational therapist from Westlake, a Cleveland suburb. "There was like an album of 200 pictures on there. Their whole wedding."

The husband claimed Thursday that his marriage to Lynn France was never valid. He said she knew earlier about the other marriage and was making the Facebook claim as a publicity ploy.

Affairs were once shadowy matters, illicit encounters whispered about and often difficult to prove. But in the age of Facebook and Twitter and lightning-fast communication, the notion of privacy is fast becoming obsolete. From flirtatious text messages to incriminating e-mails, marital indiscretions are much easier to track — especially if potentially damaging photographic evidence is posted online.

"All of these things are just a trail of cyber breadcrumbs that are easily tracked by good divorce lawyers," says Parry Aftab, an expert on Internet safety and privacy laws.

France, 41, was not completely blindsided by her Facebook discovery, which happened in January 2009. That fall, she had grown suspicious when her husband began taking frequent business trips, even leaving the day the couple's newborn son came home from the hospital. Once, she found his passport at home when he was supposed to be in China for business.

In October, before leaving for another trip, her husband left a hotel website up on the couple's computer screen.

"So I actually went there with a girlfriend, just to see for myself for sure," France says. "He was there with this girlfriend. I said, `Hey, I'm his wife. We've got a baby.'"

The woman told France that she was engaged to France's husband.

"Sure enough, they were registered for a wedding at Target," France says.

A girlfriend recommended checking the woman's Facebook page, which was then open to the public, France says, but has since become private. There, France found evidence of an unfolding relationship that she still couldn't wrap her head around. Overwhelmed with two young children, she confronted her husband. She says he told her he wouldn't actually go through with the wedding.

It wasn't until she saw the wedding photos that she finally began divorce proceedings.

"People who engage in these sorts of behaviors now have the option of trying to keep things private or turning it into a spectacle and becoming their own reality show," says lawyer Andrew Zashin, a child custody expert who is representing Lynn France. "In this case, it seems, the spouse may have crossed the line and gotten married while he was still married."

Aftab, a lawyer who runs the online protection site WiredSafety.org, says the lesson to be learned from the Frances' case is that no form of communication is sacred anymore.

"It's like trying to catch a river in your hand," she says. "It will leak out eventually."

But Aftab doesn't recommend snooping around online. That can backfire in court if used inappropriately — such as when spouses log onto each other's Facebook pages without permission. If your spouse isn't trustworthy, she says, get a divorce and save yourself the trouble.

Lynn's husband, John France, does not deny that he has remarried. Rather, he simply is insisting that he was never married to Lynn in the first place.

"I don't think I was cheating," France said in an interview aired Thursday on NBC's "Today" show. "If you have a marriage that's not right from the beginning, it's not right at the end."

France said Lynn France's claim of finding out about the second wedding on Facebook was "absurd" and said she knew long before. He claimed she was "losing the court battle" for custody of their two sons and was using the Facebook story for attention.

His attorney, Gary Williams, issued a statement Tuesday saying his client is asking a family law court to declare that his marriage to Lynn was "void since its inception."

"While it appears that John and Lynda France were both under the impression, once upon a time, that they were married, the fact of the matter is that their marriage was never legally proper," Williams wrote, "and, therefore, it does not actually exist."

Lynn and John France were married in July 2005 in a seaside wedding on Italy's Amalfi Coast, having organized the event through Regency San Marino, which coordinates weddings for couples looking to get hitched in Italy. On the company's website, Lynn is still the first radiant bride whose portrait appears in a gauzy veil, the brilliant blue sea behind her.

If that wedding was a fraud, it was news to Lynn.

"If that were true, then he's lied to the IRS," Zashin says. "He's lied to insurance companies. Banks."

In June 2009, against the advice of her attorneys, Lynn France dropped divorce proceedings when her husband came home and persuaded her to reconcile.

"I just wanted to believe the good when he came to me and said, `Let's reconcile, I love you,'" she says. "You want to give somebody a second chance."

But three months ago, Lynn says she was cleaning the sink when her husband took the couple's 2-year-old son out of her arms and said he was going to give him some milk. Minutes later, she heard the car running.

"He threw them in, no car seats, no nothing, and took off," she says.

She hasn't seen her sons since. John France had taken them to Tampa, Fla., where he currently lives with his new wife and, according to his attorney, is seeking custody of their children.

Lynn France called 911, but as in most parental custody disputes, little could be done. She is in contact with the Center for Missing and Exploited Children and has a team of attorneys preparing for a court fight. Authorities have told her not to attempt to take back the children forcibly.

For Lynn, the only glimpse of her children now comes, ironically, from the same Facebook page where she found those fairy-tale wedding photos.

Until the day she can see her children again, Lynn France says she continues to text her husband, pleading with him to bring the children back to Ohio.

"The only way I've been able to see my children is on her Facebook page," she says. "It's stranger than fiction to watch this woman living my life."

John France denied he was keeping her from the children, saying during the interview Thursday that he offered to buy her plane tickets to come to Florida.

A message left Thursday for Lynn France's attorney was not immediately returned.

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2010-06-29T13:08:00.000-07:00

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I posted my approval of the Supremes' gun control decision yesterday, and I took a lot of flak for it in comments.

☛ Old Uncle Dave said... Can we now have AKs?

☛ 99 said... I'm furiously reading to find out about my hand-held rocket launcher....

☛ Blue! said... 99... Weapons won't save us.

Sorry but the key to liberty and freedom won't we won by firearms... the only thing a firearm will protect you against is your neighbor... the murderating fucks know that. That's why they want the streets saturated with guns.

☛ Blue! said... What that SCOTUS decision did was nullify the right of local and state government's to regulate firearms... and centralized that power to the Feds.

That's not a good thing....

☛ Blue! said... I mean we are supposed to be a civilized people (don't laugh)... any society that celebrates owning a piece of hardware whose sole purpose is to kill his fellow man is doomed to fail.

And if you think a Smith and Wesson will protect you against government troops then you're dreaming. The gubment has the people outgunned and outmaneuvered technologically... they can shut down a city or state even without a boot on the ground.

We need to be thinking higher....

☛ 99 said... I want them to be more reluctant to just pluck me from my business. I want to take some out before they take me out. I WANT THE CONSTITUTION. I don't care WHAT people do with their guns, including blow my ass out of the water. We need arms to fight tyranny.

Period.

No excuses.

All the bullcrap people use to excuse gun control is better dealt with by making a better society. If people don't have the balls to make that happen, they can't be taking away the means for the courageous, Blue. They CANNOT. There is no excuse.

And, dear, I so AM thinking higher. I'm looking for my rocket launcher.

☛ Blue! said... 99, the last time the people could even come close to matching the gubment with weapons was about 1976... since then technology has exploded and they have ALL the really good stuff. Rocket launchers and uzis are child's play to gubment-new world order forces. And don't tell me about what Afghanies and Iraqis did with IEDs and shit... those wars were meant to be sustained, not won.

Yours is a going out in a blaze of glory stuff...I'm thinking of beating these bastards. You can't beat 'em playing their game.

☛ Blue! said... And yes I'm for local and state gun regulation, not Federal government (SCOTUS) mandated gun proliferation.

If someone doesn't like their city or state's gun laws then they should move.

☛ 99 said... You can beat them. PHYSICALLY beat them. You can shoot them. You can get our country back or go out trying.

The "going out in a blaze of glory" language is JUST designed to make people who want America back feel like nut jobs. People who fear armed neighbors forget that they are selling their liberty for security and deserve neither.

I only mentioned "rocket launcher" as code for "nuke".

☛ 99 said... Listen to the story about the bird club guy being harassed by a cop at BP's direction. Do you suppose if the birder had been wearing a gun that the cop would have come over to "strongly advise" him to stop doing what is PERFECTLY legal and actually righteous? Maybe he would have set his taser on stun before he came to strongly advise the man then to stop doing what was 100% within his rights. If he can wear his uniform and his gun and use his cop car off duty, which he supposedly can because he is sworn to uphold the law, HE HAS TO UPHOLD THE LAW AND RESPECT OUR RIGHTS as well.

If cops can come into a house and kill a man who is exhibiting anger... because he was a big guy and they felt threatened... WHAT do you suppose is going to beat them?

If they can throw a grenade into your living room before you even know they're there, before THEY even know they have the right house, and even if it HAD BEEN the right house, IF THEY CAN THROW FUCKING GRENADES INTO YOUR HOUSE, what, what, what, what do you propose is going to beat them?

I'm on the phone to my friends in China....

Failing that, we better be able to AT LEAST worry them. The Constitution was written to make sure we did not have to be afraid of our government. Guess what? We're afraid. We're terrified. IT WON'T CHANGE UNTIL WE MAKE IT CHANGE.... as in FORCE... they do NOT heed petitions.

☛ 99 said... Or votes.

Don't you EVEN start with the votes thing.

☛ Blue! said... Apples and Oranges 99

What the SCOTUS did today was dis-empower local and state gubment as far as gun control goes... a city like Chicago should have the right to regulate guns... No one is disputing a person having a weapon or weapons at home to protect themselves and family. But these laws allowing someone to carry a concealed weapon in a crowded city are fuckin' crazy...

Dead grandmother watching tv....

The shooter in the above link was lawfully carrying a concealed weapon. Cities are not places for allowing anyone to carry a concealed weapon. You're being kneejerk here 99.

☛ Blue! said... And 99...the gubment and NWO are not worried about your lead hurlers...

☛ 99 said... And, Blue!, the lead hurlers of Chicago were not fazed by the gun control laws.

If enough lead hurlers start hurling in the right places the gubmint and the NWO will be pissing their pants.

☛ 99 said... And you are COMPLETELY avoiding my points about there not being lead flying when there is an equitable and decent society. The American People are ASKING for granny to get caught by a stray bullet FOR AS LONG AS WE WON'T DO WHAT IS NECESSARY TO FIX THE IMMISERATION OF MILLIONS FOR THE BENEFIT OF A VERY FEW.

It's up to us. We need the guns. And pitchforks.

☛ Blue! said... No 99... you're completely avoiding my point that when the gubment-NWO really decide to clamp down, your lead hurlers will be of no effect... you won't see a target to hurl lead at.

We're under their thumb 99... they want us to do each other in with our beloved lead hurlers... they'll come in and mop up the mess. They're fomenting a civil war as we speak... My point is that guns won't save us... and probably will be our doom. It's how the murderating fucks will win, the people will shoot each other up.

Technology trumps lead... all they have all the good stuff.

Keep praying at the altar of Colt...

☛ 99 said... They have already won if you don't think we can stop them from clamping down. If you don't like the idea of people taking them out before they can do that to us... or do... and persist in saying denigrating/snide things to people who'd get themselves killed to save you, then you are IN FACT doing your part to start the civil war you wish to cheat them of. Lead hurlers and Colt worshippers are your brothers and sisters... NOT idiots trying to get everyone killed. They could say you're the idiot trying to get everyone killed. We're talking everyone who will not be content to be a slave, here... and anti-American as you sound here, I don't think you can hang with that any better than most of the rest of us.

☛ Blue! said... I didn't say they couldn't be stopped... I'm saying our guns won't do it. Guns are only playing in their domain... it's what they would love. Some freedom fighting mook to rise up with with a rifle. They'll giggle as they zap him or her.

99 I'm surprised that your vision of this is so myopic.

☛ 99 said... Should I have been posting more about people getting thrown in the slammer for failing to pay their Visa bill? Do you not grok the implications of Obama throwing up his hands and leaving BP to kill people and sea creatures and point guns at them and shoot them AND JUST KEEP POISONING THE GULF TO HIDE THE MESS INSTEAD OF CLEAN IT UP? It means, yes, that people who have lost their jobs and suddenly can't pay their bills are going to be going to jail for it. And people are being dumped into the streets because the government bailed out Wall Street and not Main Street. I guess they're just being rounded up and sent somewhere on the QT or maybe more gun control nuts would be a little slower to give up what recourse they might yet have.

And what about all the grandmas in front of their tvs getting offed by UNARMED hungry young men for the contents of their pantries?

☛ 99 said...MYOPIC?

You're fucking kidding me, right?

YOU HAVEN'T TOLD ME HOW YOU PROPOSE TO BEAT THESE FASCISTS.

You just keep coming in with insults to people who would die for you.

FUCKING TYPICAL LIBERAL.

☛ Blue! said... 99... I'm gonna turn in... suffice it to say we'll agree to disagree.

People will die, they die everyday... I'm not for conceding our strength because we worship they same power they do. Violence is their domain... we shouldn't stoop to their low life.

And before I get called a coward or something... it's the non-violent man who possesses courage in the face of weapons... it's the short-sighted that try to match weapon for weapon and play a game they can't win.

Haven't we learned anything? I mean world history is fraught with guns ablazin'. I think the universe is calling for a new script.

I'm thinking it's little man in the loin cloth time... and I'll step up to be that as soon as I'm strong enough. I'm perfectly willing to be that change I want to see in the world.

Good night 99... Peace and Love

☛ 99 said... ALL we have against them is numbers. Or the Chinese. Preferably with guns.

☛ 99 said... I'm not agreeing to disagree with you! I WILL NOT AGREE TO THAT.

☛ 99 said... We do NOT have a Gandhi. People are NOT occupying the banks. There are no mobs in gas masks cleaning up the Gulf despite the bullets.

So fuck your cowardly nonviolence.

Killing in defense of life is not killing. It's defense of life.

Find me a Gandhi and I'll get with him. Failing that, VIOLENCE will HAVE to do.

☛ Blue! said... 99, there's anger and there's resolve... Anger is vulnerable to all kinds of emotional mistakes... Resolve doesn't concede until it wins.

Resolve is the answer... Gandhi threw off the Brits without a shot fired... people got hurt yes. But India kept it's spiritual integrity.

Bigger picture 99... bigger picture.

If you free yourself with a gun... you're gonna constantly need a gun to be free. Not the kind of life I would want anyway.

G'Night...

☛ 99 said... That is a platitude UNLESS you have a Gandhi. In case you haven't noticed, they've assassinated and suicided everyone with the power to move masses on that scale. In order to beat them without a shot, they have to be unwilling to keep being this shitty. THEY HAVE SHOWN THEY ARE GOING TO KEEP IT UP NO MATTER HOW FILTHY IT LOOKS. They don't give a rat's ass WHO reviles them. Quoth Fudd: "So?" Quoth Obama: "I don't have a crystal ball."

Quoth RFK Jr.: "I'll meet you on the barricades!"

Good morning.

☛ 99 said... Besides, that nonviolent resistance is for AFTER they've clamped down... not much good for stopping them before it's complete... and, lacking a Gandhi as we do, it will have to be individuals dying in open defiance and many, many, many, many of them before the masses rise up.

In ANY event, rising up is the ONLY way. If you channel Gandhi, I bet he would tell you: "No, no. THESE guys won't be stopped until you stop them." Gandhi was throwing off foreign occupiers, not standing down his own government and the global corporations who run it. It is remotely feasible we could accomplish more resignations of demoralized legislators Gandhi's way, but they have been at pains to show us over the last nearly ten years that upholding their oaths is the very last thing, literally, they would ever do.

Get real. We do NOT have a spiritual leader the entire country, or the entire world, reveres and will follow. The Pope is reviled as a Nazi and child molester. The Dalai Lama is just a funny guy in a dress. Russell Crowe is about as close to a leader of the masses as we have.

Shall we petition him to start the nonviolent global resistance?

The ancient masters cautioned that one must NEVER mistake what worked in one time, in one set of circumstances, for what will work in a new time and a new set of circumstances. And we've let them win the war before the battle has begun... unless the battle gets radically more massive than they expected. Surprise is ALL we have. I don't think we have a surprise Gandhi up our sleeve.... I don't think it would work if we did. An awful lot of nonviolent protest has been mowed down exactly as though it were rioters, too. They have that action pegged.

The burning cop cars and broken windows all over the world aren't fazing them either. They have their meetings behind huge physical barricades twenty blocks away nowadays. What would Gandhi do about that?

He'd send wave after wave of people to scale the barricades until they finally stopped shooting them... except they wouldn't stop shooting them even after the bodies were piled so high against the wall people could run up the pile to get over them.

The cops probably would stop after the first fifty or so, but the drone pilots probably would take a lot longer, and the private contractors would not stop at all.

As long as there are people as determined to harm others for profit as this, violence can NEVER be ruled out, even for lofty-sounding ends. If your loincloth idea would ever have worked in these straits, and I don't think it would, it would have to have begun for real in the spring of 2003 at the very latest.

If they can be ripped from their positions without violence, so much the better, but, I guarantee, they will not go peacefully. RESOLVE is making them go no matter what it takes.

It's stupid to keep fighting about it here because that's not the kind of resolve that cuts it. It's even stupid to talk about resolve. America, except the tea partiers, hasn't got it.

☛ Blue! said... Or we could be sane and find an alternative to violent resistance.

I don't know what that would be... all I know is that it exists and I'm mentally open to see it when it appears... maybe we don't need one Gandhi... we probably need millions of them.

Gandhi's and King's work shouldn't be in vain...

99 you're too committed to violent struggle, we can't win a violent struggle; we don't possess the neccesary hardware.

It's no lie that violence only begets more violence. I ask again... how many millennia does it take to learn that lesson. Blowing the bastards away only begets more bastards that have to be blown away, until some bastard blows you away.

New day... new tactic is all I'm sayin'.

☛ Blue! said... 99... why do you think local communities deciding about their gun issues is a bad thing ?

Let's look at urban America... when the bastards turn off the revenue stream, ship jobs overseas and generally debase the lifestyle of a city and it's inhabitants economic survivability and then the Feds allow guns to become as common as cell phones. What do you think the outcome will be?

The murderating bastards know that 99... That's how the operate... economically starve an area, then allow an influx of lead hurlers, let the ensuing mayhem work for a while... then and only then do they move in for the coup de' grace... when the population is totally fractured and unable to know up from down. The murderating bastards come in as 'saviors'...

Checkmate for us....

☛ 99 said...

[1] I hate guns and murderation, but I realize they are far kinder than other forms of violence in practice every day, i.e. the economic starvation, the kleptocracy, the vampiric suck of people's whole lives’ work, so they can buy yachts.

[2] I am a devoted meat eater, but thank the buddhas of the ten directions every bite that there are those out there not too squeamish to do the icky parts so I can eat.

[3] You don't seem to have any idea of just how much it took to be Gandhi. Martin studied him. One part you probably never heard of is the part where he insists that nonviolence is not nonaggression, where he says that you have to be willing to walk SMILINGLY into a hail of bullets to pull it off, AND, crucially, he says that if you are not able to do that, then you better fight and fight HARD. There's NO such thing as millions of Gandhis. We have ONLY what we have, and they're not Gandhis.

[4] And violence does not always beget violence, though it does in many instances. My father was beaten by his father, regularly and for drill. He took up boxing when young, but other than that he never hurt anyone. He never hit my mother, he hardly ever even argued with her. He never beat us, he didn't drink or swear or be harsh about anything.

BB2's father beat him. BB2 is a sweet old hippie who cries when his hamster dies and never stops being in the cause of peace.

I know all kinds of people with guns who wouldn't dream of using them offensively... all kinds of hunters who do it for food, not for trophies.

I can think of a thousand times when violence ENDED a completely insupportable situation where nothing else would. It didn't beget more violence. It ended it.

[5] It's like the determination not to spank kids, "because violence always begets violence," and little sociopaths are born of it, many not maturing out of it.

[6] Violence in defense of life is sometimes MANDATORY. Sociopathically-greedy people make that 100%. There is no end to violence without sweeping and impossible reforms, complete overhauls of our cultures, and THOSE are impossible without completely eradicating the current power structure.

[7] The thing that fixes urban America is that equitable and just society I keep mentioning. Nothing short of that will fix it. Gun violence hasn't even slowed in most places where gun control has been in effect.

[8] The Constitution should have MANDATED arms, because the provision is in there for the sole purpose of insuring the People can overthrow tyranny. It doesn't say "guns". It says "arms". I WANT MY HEAT-SEEKING MISSILES AND MY ACTIVE DENIAL SYSTEMS!

[9] Every cell in my body is about saving all sentient beings. For real, not just in the abstract. I assure you, you have to work with what you've got. You have to be able to SEE actuality and work with what you've got.

☛ 99 said... Too, there were some very famous studies of rats living in overcrowded conditions, emulating cities, back in the late sixties or early seventies. The rats became violent, cannibalistic, and HOMOSEXUAL in response to it.

It is well known that cities are supremely unsustainable environments, that too many resources have to be brought in from elsewhere to sustain them and it is wiping out the planet. People should be making new towns and tearing down or scaling back the cities. People should live where they can make a balance with their environment. Indian tribes lived in one place for thousands of years without depleting the resources. WE have to do that, or murderation IN FACT turns into THE mercy to all living things.

☛ 99 said... NATURE is violent! There are places and times and situations where violence is the ONLY alternative.

Gandhi did the nonviolence because he could see that it would MITIGATE the death toll of throwing off the Brits. The situation in Palestine would work best with a Gandhian approach for the same reason. The ONLY reason it would work is because of the huge public opinion AGAINST the evil Israeli oppression.

It isn't the same situation AT ALL with the NWO guys. They don't give a fuck and only pockets of people around the world who can't be hypnotized know to resist them, to fight them. There IS no group of nations whose disapproval is of the smallest part of a concern to the NWO guys. Gandhi's whole plan falls FLAT in the face of that.

OBVIOUSLY.

☛ 99 said... And as for the people killing each other in the cities, it is a great deal like the workers going postal over the illegal immigrants. People tend to direct their ire at something more their own size. The government is oceanic and they don't feel they can FIGHT that. So they fight each other or they fight the poor starving saps being lured by the plutocrats to drive wages down into the slave zone.

There isn't anything FOR this, Blue!, short of all out war... against the RIGHT enemy.

☛ 99 said... WE NEED MALCOLM AND WE NEED HIM BADLY.

☛ 99 said... We need Crazy Horse and Spotted Eagle and Sitting Bull and Chief Joseph DESPERATELY.

☛ 99 said... Nobody seems to GET why I keep posting images of heroes.

☛ Blue! said... 99, those heroes were great for their time. Malcolm in 1962 was very different from Malcolm in 1965. Crazy Horse, Spotted Eagle, Sitting Bull etc. were great men... but ultimately their efforts failed.

I haven't read all of your replies yet, I'm sort of working from the bottom up. I need to say though that I'm speaking of a new paradigm... something that hasn't been tried before. Peace and Love as a tactic... and no I'm not talking about giving a plutocrat a hug.

I'm speaking of melding with others of like mind, others pursuing peace and love and becoming an irresistible force a new thought force... There have never ever been times such as these for us, desperate times call for desperate measures, not measures that have been used for centuries. Violent struggle isn't the only way to true freedom and liberty... it's all I'm saying. You can give me hundreds of examples of violent struggle, but that doesn't mean that's what called for today.

new thought = new results

I enjoy reading your site 99... you put outstanding information out there. But our exchange here has done nothing but demonstrate to me that action with anger as its basis is doomed to fail. We need well thought out, cool as the other side of the pillow, calculated ways to express peaceful revolution. There is more than one way to be in this world, more than one way to win.

The violent struggles you reference were dramatic and mythical... but guess what... they still led us to this present moment. Maybe a revolution of peace will make the present circumstances unthinkable for human beings ever again. It's about breaking our mental chains 99 as much as it's about breaking the physical chains.

I have seen the enemy and he is us... (Pogo comic strip circa mid-60s)

Let's break the reciprocal nature of violent struggle... and start reciprocating some love... for ourselves and our enemies.

Call me crazy if you want... but I'm that desperate to live another way. Sorry I won't be joining a rifle toting freedom movements, I won't because succeed or fail my son, nephews and those of my friends will have to do the same at some time or another. I'd rather leave a new of struggle... overcoming the inner fears and standing strong in peace and love.

I'll be here as long as you will have me 99... and I'll be talking peace and love principles. I believe wholeheartedly in them... and soon when I'm stronger I will trust them implicitly.

"To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." —Sun Tzu, the Art of War

Peace 99... and I mean that....

☛ 99 said... You are welcome here, always.

You do NOT seem to be able to get to that higher thought level you keep mentioning. You do NOT seem to realize that I want what you want, that I want to make a world where this is not necessary. You do NOT seem to grok that you're just talking pie in the sky, UNLESS you mean you are fully willing to have most of the world population ground to pulp under the plutocratic boot heel while you are developing this mystical victory of love over fear and greed. And I keep TRYING to tell you that the fascists HAVE ALREADY CONQUERED OUR RESISTANCE WITHOUT FIGHTING! It's somewhere hereinabove. Which MEANS that OUR only choice is to massively overcome their supreme excellence.

I'm well conversant with the Art of War... PRECISELY because I revile it and want it to stop forever. Why do you think I held out so long trying to turn the sick mentalities of so many putzes yonder?

You don't seem to grok that I am radically well-versed in nonviolence and can tell at a glance when it is true nonviolence and when it is pusillanimity CALLING itself nonviolence. TRUE nonviolence does not avoid violence, and it does not sit back an pontificate about it while the planet burns down around its ears!

IT IS FAR TOO LATE FOR YOUR COSMIC SHIFT IN HUMAN AFFAIRS! That takes many, many generations AND WE DON'T HAVE THEM!

WE HAVE TO WORK WITH WHAT WE'VE GOT!

Nobody wants instability and blood in the streets, but HOW MANY WILL RUE THE LACK OF THEM while being cut down by storm troopers for being homeless, or trying to escape a natural disaster, or TRYING TO EAT?

WE ARE GOING INTO AGONIES THAT WILL MAKE THE GREAT DEPRESSION LOOK LIKE A PARTY.

There isn't any doubt about that anymore. Everything I've been saying and linking should be telling you that.

☛ 99 said... AND IT DOESN'T MATTER THAT THE INDIANS LOST!

THEY FOUGHT!

They would have won if it were JUST wasichu, but there were hundreds of thousands of invading settlers, all under the sway of the death cult wasichu, which gave wasichu the unbeatable advantage.

Those chiefs knew all this and they knew the odds and they fought for LIFE and LIVING THINGS anyway.

AND THEY ARE THE ONES WE REVERE TODAY. The pigs who mowed them down are written down in ignominy forever. THE INDIANS FOUGHT, EVEN WITH THE ODDS STACKED AGAINST THEM, BECAUSE THE ONLY WAY TO KEEP TRUE HUMANITY ALIVE ON INTO THE FUTURE IS TO NEVER KNUCKLE UNDER TO WASICHU.

The Lakotah Nation is LITERALLY starving RIGHT NOW and YET they do not cede it to wasichu. Drunk and demoralized as they have become, the indians are STILL the paragons of true humanity in America.

You need to drop yer brainwashing!

☛ Blue! said... 99, in a nutshell all I'm saying is why fight a battle we can't win? Isn't that insane?

Using a different mindset with a different focus maybe, just maybe we'll have a different outcome. Focus on each other... take care of each other and it matters not what plutocrats do.

Disengage from the plutocrats by not needing what they offer and we'll begin to starve them. Plutocrats will transform out of need. How could that happen? ...well I read that only 11% need to disengage from the present system to bring it to it's knees...
But again I say... going out in a blaze of glory serves what purpose if it ultimately changes nothing?

While confounding the present system with actions they're unprepared for or can't intellectually understand will be our strength... They think we need them, let's show them that we don't need them... that we're perfectly willing to care for and feed each other outside of their fascist system.

11% is our critical mass... if 11% isn't enough then we'll go for 15%... then 20%. Whatever it takes to bring this system to its knees.

New thoughts open up new vistas...

Grabbing a rifle and taking to the streets is so 20th century...

☛ 99 said... You must have been making this comment while I was posting my last one.

Do you realize how many platitudes you are using in your comments? How many prefab excuses?

I don't think you realize that we can't get the system to its knees by starving them. They have starved us. They have control of every means we might have used to keep them from starving us. Even the wealthy can be immediately stripped to nothing and thrown out if they cross them. People are SO desperate for work, for any kind of paycheck, any way to keep themselves and their families happening, the NWO can work them like marionettes.

If people don't stand up and fight, EVEN IF WE LOSE, there won't be any stopping these fucks for centuries, maybe millennia, maybe not until humans are extinct.

☛ 99 said... I know you THINK you are advocating for peace and love, but I'm telling you that you need to open yer mind wider to see REAL peace and love, or you are only fiddling while Rome burns.

☛ Blue! said... 99... this is where I spent last weekend.

HERE

...I do presentations and workshops regularly exposing the thieving banking cartels and military industrial complex to people who otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to such information.

I'm hardly fiddling 99... Actually you know very little about me or what I'm doing... and I find it highly presumptuous of you to believe that unless one is rifle ready cannon fodder then it's meaningless.

Seems you're the one stuck in a box 99...let's lay off the value judgements and talk ideas...

K ?

☛ 99 said... I'm heavily in favor of taking care of each other, and we better be catching the ones dropping before they get cleared from the face of the earth. No way to starve the plutocrats unless people are willing to abandon their cars and homes and internet and cell phones and go out and make their own hunter/gatherer and farming communities... RIGHT NOW. Eight by ten color glossy of that action, oh yeah. I wish.

And, I'm glad to learn you go out into the world and spread the word! That is WAY hip. But not very effective thus far, whot? I should better have put it that it AMOUNTS to fiddling while Rome burns... and especially now you've told me you actually get OUT there with this stuff. That is great.... just not enough to save the world from this.

Yer a fine one to talk about keeping to ideas when you do shit like call me "myopic" and a worshipper at the alter of guns, etc. Are you using all these slogans in your talks?

And where do I elevate "rifle ready cannon fodder"?

Have you ever read Dōgen's Do Not Do Anything Evil essay? You can find it in Rational Zen, translated by Thomas Cleary. If you read this carefully enough, often enough, deeply enough, you come to realize the true meaning of the command:

Stop doing and perform!

Blogging and speaking tours fall under the category of "doing"... at least except insofar as some illumination of fundamental reality or essential performance may be occurring. I don't flatter myself that my blogging is a drop in that ocean, but it's definitely half of one.

And no. Not K. If you're going to continue to use all these low debate tricks on me—maybe on yourself too, and probably on your audiences as well—I'm not going to stop beating you over the head to try to crack open your skull. My only purpose here is that.

The old Zen dudes called it lopping off the head, but I feel like calling it cracking open skulls in this instance.

☛ Blue! said... 99, I'm what we call in the African community an elder; which means I should be teaching. Your seeming maniacal focus on armed resistance and terming anything else as impotent and trivial does suggests myopia... at my age picking up a rifle and taking to the streets is screwball insanity, for one I know better than that now and secondly it's suicidal.

I don't know or care about 'debating tricks' you need to knock off the ad hominem stuff (okay that trick I'm aware of).

The glory and drama of armed struggle against unwinnable odds is Hollywood shit; this isn't 300... it's real life... real life where the conscious among us can effect real change. What you're speaking of isn't change at all... it's same old, same old human endeavor that's centuries old.

At the risk of being numbingly repetitive... new ideas and new actions bring about new results. The old ways led us to this present moment.

I'm done 99... we've danced around this maypole too long... I'm committed to my way and you yours...

☛ 99 said... I guess the "anger" is on the other foot and the "resolve" has also traded places.

The indian wars were not Hollywood. I have been at pains to present that.

And, while they indeed lost those wars, they won many battles by hacking at wasichu's hubris.

The bottom line does NOT change. Your new thinking is PERFECT for a society that wishes to support it, to train it into their children and enforce it over the mass media.

The mass media belongs to wasichu. They will halt this effort before it gets out of the church basements and school gyms. And the people committed to this effort—barring leadership by a Gandhi or a King WHO CAN STAY ALIVE—won't stop having to drive their cars, won't stop wanting to live in their houses with heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer. They won't stop buying clothes. They won't stop eating corporate food. THEY WON'T DO IT!

THEY CAN'T. There's no support system for it. No feasible alternative for most of them. They CAN'T starve the NWO. What shards of what used to be known as "middle class" there are left are too terrified of losing their jobs to help starve the beast.

And I'm not advocating shootouts in the streets unless masses can be gotten to do it... ALL over the world. But I think intelligent targeting could work quite nicely, especially if armed. I'm not EVEN advocating that so much as I am advocating for the Constitution and for everyone's right to make their government as afraid of them as possible. PLUS, screaming my head off for the JUDGMENTAL peaceniks—in direct contrast with real peaceniks—to STFU about their gun and misspelled sign toting brothers and sisters. THEY HAVE NO RIGHT AND NO GROUNDS.

There's a freight train bearing down on you and you're acting as though we have generations to turn this around. We could have only weeks. Once the clamp is all the way down, you are a productive corporate slave or you are in a camp or dead. They aren't going to let the starving hordes gather to turn back the genocidal greed with love.

You have to learn the difference between what you are convinced you are doing, and what you are doing; between your convictions and their workability in the conditions. OR you can join Kevin Zeese's gravy train of nonprofits for "activists" [aka people whose conviction is, at bottom, making a living at activism theater], join in with other utterly pointless GREAT ideas about making changes inside a culture that won't even BE this culture over the long haul it would take to get there.

You do NOT seem to get that America isn't America anymore, and it is on the cusp of not even SEEMING Americanish anymore. This NWO is about bringing back feudalism for real, AND YOU KNOW DAMN WELL PEOPLE'S STOMACHS WILL PREVENT THEM FROM FIGHTING IT.

I don't think you know damn well that all this wonderful stuff you advocate will have no platform, no society in which to grow into what you seek. It might already be gone... but it CERTAINLY will be gone LONG before it can take hold.

It's true that if EVERYBODY just ignores them, right now, stops paying taxes, stops submitting to their PATRIOT Act crap, mows down the TSA at airports, stops paying traffic fines, takes all their money out of banks, start importing doctors and drugs, the works, that would set them back a looooong way, but not stop them. IF WE ABOLISH MONEY, THEY'RE FINISHED. But, Blue, all that has to happen IMMEDIATELY.

☛ Blue! said... There is a story circulating that back in the late 90's a Venezuelan indigenous jungle tribe was granted sovereign autonomy by the Venezuelan government...reporters rushed out to the jungle to get the tribe's reaction.

When asked what they thought about Venezuela granting them their autonomy the tribal elder asked..."What's a Venezuela"?

They had no idea that a Venezuela even existed... they didn't win their autonomy by armed conflict or any conflict at all... they simply grooved along doing their thing and taking care of their own.

That's just one example...

99 you're accusing me of anger when I'm not angry...you're making up and assigning me positions I never stated or took. You're not being fair or rational here. But it's fitting for one whose sole idea about the times we live in is grab your guns.

I'll walk my walk... you'll walk yours... I think mine will be a more pleasant stroll, dare I say more meaningful.

☛ Bluebear2 said... Wow....

☛ 99 said... 99 said... LOL

☛ 99 said... Oh! You nailed me here: "one whose sole idea about the times we live in is grab your guns".... I better run right off, get naked, paint my face and pretend I never heard of America....

☛ Bluebear2 said... Sounds like fun....

☛ 99 said... You know what! I was thinking the SAME thing while I was writing it!

☛ 99 said... Canadians have more guns per capita than we do, and radically lower gun violence. Switzerland MANDATES a gun for every citizen, including training in how to properly use it. Go find Michael Moore's excellent documentary on guns... Bowling for Columbine. He covers extensively how the availability of guns thing has no correlation with gun violence. And, if I am not mistaken, even Naomi Klein admits that the prelude to closing down a society is disarming its citizens.

So. In the matter of guns, for all the reasons I have stated, and all the work that has been done on the matter, I have had to grow a pair, had to open my slammed-shut mind to allow as how that old saw about guns not killing people is DIRT TRUE, and even more lives and quantum agony can be saved by the use of them by decent people, true humans AND in such a world where fatsos and thugs can take everything away from you at whim, I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO RIGHT TELLING PEOPLE THEY CAN'T HAVE WHATEVER MEANS OF SELF-DEFENSE THEY DEEM APPROPRIATE.

You asked earlier why I don't want cities being able to pass gun control laws. It's not right and it's unconstitutional and it's a fucking fascists-in-denial idea of liberalism. I hate always to be asking you to cut out so much time to learn about things, but you REALLY should take out a couple hours to listen carefully to Derrick Jensen.

☛ Blue! said... 99, Bluebear's reaction has shown that this convo has careened off the rails...

My simple statement that I repeated several times here is that any local government or state even HAS THE RIGHT TO REGULATE GUNS as they see fit... The government (SCOTUS) has taken that right from localities... that can't be a good thing.

I've also agreed that guns for anything more than home protection are useless. Again you've seemed to have assigned to me a position that I never stated or taken.

You seem to think our guns will be protection against a government domestic or foreign that decides to come against us, I wholehearted disagree because those entities have much more technological hardware than we could even imagine... I feel there are other options besides that, I've spelled those out here.

I understand the necessity to protect one's family and home... I however don't understand or agree with the notion that our guns are our sole protection against a government that doesn't need troops on the ground to subdue it's population... in that case guns will only be effective in civil war (against one's neighbor's). That's what the soulless plutocrats know and are creating as we speak. Citizen vs citizen...deconstruct the economy, ruin the currency let the citizens war with each other and when the time is right they'll swoop in and clean up the mess and declare they're saviors who averted a disaster.

Yes I believe your position is short sighted, you seem to focus on fighting them in a game they've rigged... My focus is on higher values... If we were to take a stance they haven't prepared for and can't comprehend, disengage from their system and confound them. I think humanity will have learned a new thing in the process and rise higher in it's existence... Yours will only continue the same old paradigm and we'll be fighting for our freedom again down the road. A neverending cycle.

Anyone that chooses to read back this thread will see I've been consistent in my position... you 99 have railed all over the place with ridicule and derision of what I think.

Guns won't save us... it's that simple. I'm done again. Although I will check back to see if you've twisted my position into something ridiculous. Deal with what I say 99... not how you can turned into something ludicrous.

Peace

☛ 99 said... One by one:

My simple statement that I repeated several times here is that any local government or state even HAS THE RIGHT TO REGULATE GUNS as they see fit...The government (SCOTUS) has taken that right from localities...that can't be a good thing.

The CONSTITUTION states that! Because some have twisted THAT to get rid of guns, doesn't make it a lawful right in the United States. For some reason I'm thinking of that Clint Eastwood blockbuster, "Unforgiven", where he and his buddy are gunfighters and they come to a town where no guns are allowed.

I understand the necessity to protect one's family and home...I however don't understand or agree with the notion that our guns are our sole protection against a government that doesn't need troops on the ground to subdue it's population...

It happens that guns have been just about our sole protection, but the Constitution gives us the lawful right to bear ARMS... so it's conceivable we could do better balance-of-power-wise, but even if not, insofar as they don't use their drones and they come to your door, you are, or can be about evenly matched... which is probably why they're so into lobbing grenades ahead of themselves now... but, since no one is leaping up to PROSECUTE them for it... we're stuck needing to grenade-proof our homes.

in that case guns will only be effective in civil war (against one's neighbor's).

I agree that the Democratic Fascists and the Republican Fascists are trying pretty hard to start a Civil War. One of their MAIN tools is this bottomless fight by the "left" [what a laugh] to unwrite the 2nd Amendment, and, worse, to insult the living snot out of anyone who sees the wisdom in it, whether or not they personally choose to bear arms.

That's also a BIG leap to say this makes them ONLY good for civil war. When a population is so disadvantaged against their government, they have only numbers and/or strategy on their side, and I can't explain to you where the guns are so important to the strategists without it sounding like I'm some kind of terrorist. You have a good head, use it.

That's what the soulless plutocrats know and are creating as we speak. Citizen vs citizen...deconstruct the economy, ruin the currency let the citizens war with each other and when the time is right they'll swope in and clean up the mess and declare they're saviors who averted a disaster.

WHY DO YOU THINK I SCREAM AT PEOPLE'S DIVISIVE LANGUAGE? WHY DO YOU THINK I HAVE BEGGED THE JACKASSES OF BLOGISTAN TO QUIT SENSATIONALIZING THE LIVING SNOT OUT OF EVERY WEDGE ISSUE? WHY DO YOU THINK I QUIT HELPING BRAD FRIEDMAN?

It is precisely because of THIS.

But you are loaded for bear on THIS wedge issue, Blue! If this civil war scenario is what you wish to PREVENT, you will shut yer insulting yap about it. Man up! Drop yer mental conditioning. Lose the lifetime of agonizing over the senseless deaths from gun violence. Quit avoiding the REAL killers, the humans doing the killing and the society that brings them to it.

WE make this world. WE have let sociopaths take it over because we didn't want to be bothered with that stuff. It has turned the inner cities into places of such violence and subhumanity that decent people have dreamt of shooting them off world, but each one of those bullet holes was really aimed at everyone. I don't say that means there's no personal responsibility, but I do understand.

NOT GOOD ENOUGH! And since no one woke up to use resolve where it would do the most good, NOW it's going to take FORCE. The only good thing about this OBSCENE state of affairs is there is a glimmer of a possibility it will FINALLY wake people up to the real enemy, and give them the determination to USE that force. [And don't give me the "new" peace and love paradigm, I stuck daisies in too many gun barrels decades ago. THEY BUY OFF PEACE AND LOVE. Works like a charm. Been there, done that, the t-shirt has disintegrated.]

Yes I believe your position is short sighted

You're wrong.

you seem to focus on fighting them in a game they've rigged...

You have to use the materials at hand. Not my fault we've let them rig it, while wasting ALL this time fighting people more our own size on the streets and on the tubes INSTEAD of the enemy. It isn't as though I haven't been bellowing about this to everyone for a very long time.

My focus is on higher values...

Bully. So is mine. So are a lot of people's. We have to drag our focus from that to WHAT IS ACTUAL.

If we were to take a stance they haven't prepared for and can't comprehend, disengage from their system and confound them. I think humanity will have learned a new thing in the process and rise higher in it's existence...

They are NOT prepared for massive, MASSIVE, uprising, no matter how well-equipped to put it down they are. It would bring their whole thing to a halt instanter if they did put it down.

"The smartest thing the Nazi's did was to make it so that every step of the way they made it so it was in the Jews' rational best interest to not resist. ... I'll tell you something very interesting, which is that the Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had a higher rate of survival than those who went along. The Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had a higher rate of survival than those who went along. The Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had a higher rate of survival than those who went along." [quoth Derrick Jensen]

Yours will only continue the same old paradigm and we'll be fighting for our freedom again down the road. A neverending cycle.

Fallacy. NOTHING about what I advocate continues the dominant paradigm. We may or may NOT be fighting again down the line... IF there is a down the line for any living things. This never ending cycle business is EVIDENCE you do NOT grok the imperatives.

Again, I beseech you to listen to to that Derrick Jensen lecture. Not only does he make mincemeat of your position, but he's SUPREMELY clear on why you should be GIDDY with love to learn how wrong you are.

Anyone that chooses to read back this thread will see I've been consistent in my position... you 99 have railed all over the place with ridicule and derision of what I think.

I have been mirroring your insults, hoping to shock you into realizing they ARE insults, thinking my expression of love and solidarity with you before would help you see that I'm not some harridan who's gone native on you here, but someone staying consistent with her solidarity, trying to drag you out of a DANGEROUS mind set. It is dangerous because it won't ever address the threat to all life blooming right now... might if this threat would wait some generations... and dangerous because you are furiously fueling the civil war you so wish to avoid.

Guns won't save us...it's that simple.

Just EXACTLY like guns don't kill people. People kill people. And if people are killing massive numbers of people AND the planet, they MUST be stopped. Not generations from now. NOW. Anyone who loves humanity, loves living things, loves the earth, loves their family and friends, will do what it takes to stop them NOW. A truly nonviolent person would NEVER brook this destruction while still living and breathing. They would get straight to the heart of the matter and make it stop. If the perps make it so force has to be used, force is used. If the perps make it so that force must be violent, that force is violent.

Nonviolence is HALTING the violence, is self-defense, EVEN when it has to go out from its home to snuff the violence, even when the violence requires violence to halt it.

A nonviolent guy breaking up a fight to the death rarely can just say "halt!" to be effective. He has to, at the least, manhandle combatants, and he DOES it, BECAUSE he's nonviolent.

☛ Blue! said... 2nd Amendment: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

Seems state and local governments are the "well regulated" part of that amendment. The SCOTUS just trumped state and local government's "well regulating" firearms.

In 1919 the 18th amendment was repealed (prohibition) yet there are 100's of dry counties in America. Seems Chicago or any other city should be able to ban HANDGUN ownership if they deem it necessary for the common peace. Chicago didn't ban firearms...they banned HANDGUNS which have killed thousands, no 10's of thousands over the years in that city.

As for the rest of your screed 99...you're still assigning to me positions I never took, using loaded language to antagonize (like I'm agonizing over this) and stuff like that. If there's any agony 99 it's me agonizingly trying to convey a point without you becoming defensive and unglued Jeesus!

My main points...

1. states and cities should be able to regulate HANDGUNS as they see fit, your Clint Eastwood Unforgiven example is a movie 99, not real world. Movies are those things where one "suspends disbelief"...you need to remember that.

2. Guns won't save us from government tyranny, not anymore. They only serve to give people a false sense of security that they're on guard against a rampaging government. The government can now subdue this country from a bunker buried in a mountain somewhere...Hell they could just destroy the dollar and let all of you gun nuts go at it... and then vacuum up the mess when it's all over. Your gun won't stop a government intent on fascist dictatorship.

99 this is your wedge issue not mine... I stated my opinion and you've been hopping mad about that ever since... earth to 99... we don't agree about this... let it the hell go.

And for the record I NEVER said I was 'non-violent. I work for peace, I'm not a pacifist. I know what kind of world we live in...and I'm working to raise it's consciousness before I leave. You seem to feel that everyone should think like you do or something is wrong with them.

Everything else you wrote bears little resemblance to anything I wrote or said...

I'm probably done commenting on your blog 99...Seems you only want people to mirror your thoughts and feelings...not actually express what they're really thinking.

Have a nice life Agent 99.

☛ Blue! said... Also...

99 you accused me of "insulting" you. That was the last straw with me. Just because I said something you didn't like doesn't mean it's an insult.

That's why I'm done here...either someone falls in line with 99's program or she's "insulted".

This is hardly a place for the free exchange and critique of ideas...Not if your ideas don't match the host's.

☛ 99 said... Any time you want to come back, you are welcome.

Seems Blue! is taking advantage of the supposed ambiguity of the wording of the 2nd Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Maybe you will pardon me for stating that if someone with no bias in any direction looks at this amendment, the meaning is crystal clear. Before we had a standing army, it was felt that citizens should bear arms and drill together to keep in shape for the defense of the nation, but they also injected the word "free" in the security of the State, showing that a free State was the imperative. People argue over the commas. It is obvious that the framers intended to keep both the ability to defend the State and for it to remain a free one, and it was written before we had every government agency armed to the teeth and militarized police forces and the megalithic military we have today. STILL, these militate toward an unfree State, and so the blessing of this wording, commas and all, is that our right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Blue! has idiotically let his idea of the terms shift a bit to back himself up. "State" means the entirety of the United States, and "well regulated" means ORGANIZED, some semblance of a command structure in the militia, not government permits and regulations. Duh. That is PLAIN. Had they not put "free" into that sentence, and the entirety of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and everything they stood for hadn't been ABOUT freedom, then, yes, we could read it Blue!'s way.

Blue! wouldn't be reading it this way if he were not committed to infringing the right of the people to keep and bear arms. It's as simple as that. You can't read anything through the filter of your own biases or you can't READ... or HEAR. Stuff that seemingly makes no sense suddenly is clear as a bell when you stop trying to make of it what you make of it and just read it or just hear it. This is the entire problem with trying to keep the Constitution happening. People, including Justices, use their bias-filtered "understanding" to change its meaning to their advantage.

As I mentioned in our exchange, I'm thinking Blue! must be seriously elder or he'd remember we did the peace and love antidote to war pigs back in the sixties... remember shoving daisies down gun barrels aimed at us... before they bought most of us off.

I'm thinking he must be that seriously elder also, because I have taken the brunt of old guys' knee-jerk reactions to certain stimuli, and shock that you should be offended by being patronized and your points being called seriousness-diminishing things. He seems genuinely vexed that I would take offense at his words and tone and oft-repeated insistence that he's thinking on a higher plane than I am, or the people who keep and bear arms do. He seems to be utterly disregarding our freedom. I'm thinking "progressivism" is just about turning us into well-regulated, in HIS sense of the term, androids.

But most of all I'm thinking it because he seems so sure there's anything approximating the kind of time left to accomplish these darling ends... like Bill Moyers with an old friend groping for reasons to be optimistic about the prospects of liberalism. I want them too. But I am unwilling to sit around and dream up preposterous excuses to make do as reasons for optimism. That is suicidal. That is GENOCIDAL. Look around. I know we better fucking well have King Arthur ruling the world by next week or there will be NO chance of real reasons for optimism for a minimum of many generations, IF even we have that long left on earth.

I would feel outright depression over my friend seeming so sure I'm "committed to armed struggle"... not having the insight to see where HE is projecting stuff onto me and that I am mirroring him FOR him... if there were time to be depressed... if this whole long, dead serious, SILLY thread would do ANYTHING to turn things around. I would feel depressed over the apparent loss of a friend from having chosen to uphold the real for his sake over abandoning it for the sake of maintaining agreeable interaction. He has shown in the past a willingness to consider that he is wrong, or given lip service to it, anyway, and so maybe he will cool off and proceed more thoughtfully whenever he comes up against this wedge issue again.

I know he stated it isn't one, but that's just silly. "Guns, God and Gays" is a damn slogan EVERYONE has heard, even if they don't use it. So. He's not a dope. He's just mad.

.

2010-06-28T13:48:00.000-07:00

.

I would have frustrated the living snot out of Hobbes, even as I agree with him about the absolute monarch part. That is the best, the sanest, form of government. Yes, yes, of course, it is blaringly apparent that the monarch has to be King Arthur at the very least, but that does NOT distract from the point. If you don't have that, you have THIS. No matter what.

In the prisoner's dilemma, I wouldn't confess, wouldn't rat out my partner. And neither would my partner, or he/she wouldn't have been my partner. We both would rather die than break the vow to save all sentient beings. Besides, people forget that the cops didn't have a case to start, and if nobody opens their mouth, that's an end to it.

You know that old saw about absolute power corrupting absolutely?

It's hogwash.

Not if you've picked the right monarch. You say the right monarch can and will be corrupted at some point? Easy. Take him or her out. If the people have means of training and testing their young, the right ones naturally rise to the top. There would be the perfect replacement for such an UNLIKELY eventuality.

Did it ever occur to you that the absolute power hogwash has been used by the corrupt to insure their corruption can keep on being sanctioned by the powerful? I bet not. Democracy does not prevent corruption. It enables it. Think about the pinheads out there doing their Hatfield and McCoy acts like there's no tomorrow. Babies... with candy... but not for long... and every time they get more it's also not for long. That is democracy. The only reason to have it is to enable oligarchy.

The only reason to have a monetary system is to enable oligarchy—wasichu kind of oligarchy, not oligarchy made purely of true merit. Everyone I've ever told about this wants to know what would motivate people to go to work if there was no money in it. Self respect. Most humans don't like themselves if they are not contributing somehow. Inevitably next they want to know who'd pick up the garbage and man the sewage treatment plants. People who wish to ensure people don't get sick from dread diseases and people who don't want to live in a garbage patch. And, besides, as the Zeitgeist people insist—and they are not wrong—technology already is capable of handling all that for us. It's only capitalism—and communism and socialism—dictating we continue to do almost everything ourselves... for pay, for a personal return. We don't need money where self-respect is more than enough to cover it.

You should not have to pay to live your life, and neither should those who are too lazy, or too weird, or too whatever to work. They will always be with us, only much less so if they don't have to pay to survive as comfortably as possible, and it could in fact be that they would contribute stuff then that is impossible for them now. Everyone could... only nothing would be stopping them. What business is it of yours to starve the unlucky or the lazy or the unlikeable? 99% of the crime in the world is about the dog-eat-dog nature of our societies. Without this money bullshit there would be seriously few prisoner's dilemmas to work out. There would be no more resenting the living snot out of people who aren't, or can't be, killing themselves to make a buck... OR people resenting the living snot out of people LUCKY enough to have jobs at all.

Nobody would have to sell dope to have a decent standard of living.

There would be no more G20 meetings to protest.

There would be no more wars to keep the dollar from crashing, even though it rightfully should have crashed long ago. The energy barons would immediately cease ruining everyone's lives and the planet's. There would be no more impediment to using the full physics to provide limitless energy that doesn't harm a thing to maintain.

What elite we might have then would be made up of people who love living things, whose hearts are filled with the love of justice and equity, whose courage—physical and moral and spiritual—would be so immense that their power, the oligarchy that would form around them, couldn't be anything but beneficial and happy for everyone.

All that is required is a people who insist on it... to the point of physically making it impossible for things to be otherwise. If everyone in the world would rise up against anyone or any group seeking to subjugate or otherwise harm us, all these agonies we lie to ourselves are but human nature would disappear forever.

One duty of an absolute monarch would be population control. While it is certain that people would automatically stop reproducing so insanely in such an environment, there still would be a need to ensure the human population does not outstrip the planet's ability to support us. That would mean in the beginning that many would have to be sterilized. Maybe something like China's one kid rule, only both parents are sterilized after the birth of the one kid. And later everyone gets sterilized after two. Whatever. When there is no monetary system, no one, anywhere, needs to make a huge brood to try to optimize their ability to survive. It's already optimized.

Another would be to cut down any packs of greedheads, beta males, seeking to subjugate others and return us to a mess like we have now. I don't know if a problem with this would persist past a few generations, but the male ego is a tricky thing and does not always want to adhere to the good teachings, prefers to bounce off them instead of embrace them. In native American societies this was pretty much handled by the loss of standing it cost, and would be in a global society too, but there would not be much to stop a gang of them from trying to topple the social structure instead of trying to live up to the demands of good character. So there might always be a need to have a means to dispose of this action.

Otherwise, we might not need ANY governing at all.

We certainly could work toward that. Even better than absolute monarchy... a world where everybody knows the right way to deal with everything and does.

Maybe I want to buy one of Scott Horton's "nonarchist" bumper stickers....

BTW, these notions have been in my head, pretty much whole, for about fifty years, and no one has ever managed to train them out of me... though too many to count have tried.

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2010-06-27T22:47:00.000-07:00

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Day before yesterday, we were busy over on n e u f n e u f trying to discern the veracity of a man claiming to be working on bringing us scalar technology for free energy, and I don't know why it didn't occur to me at the time to bring up Steven Greer, let alone go look to see what he had to say about all this, but it turns out it's a lot....

I think the most important point to make about this is, since Dr. Greer really is a kind of boy scout about these things, do you believe Obama would have the moral courage to do this? And do you think Whistle Smoke wouldn't have had the moral courage to do it?

I'm not kidding, man. You have to start thinking about these things SERIOUSLY. The physics is serious. The technology is serious. The "planeticide" is serious.

Neither wasichu nor victims will EVER change the murder of our planet.

All science, all economics, all history, has been sat on, obfuscated, denied, covered-up, HIDDEN from ALL of us, EVEN AT THE DOCTORAL LEVEL AT OUR FINEST UNIVERSITIES, for over a hundred years. You think our advancement has been so dazzling over the course of the last century? It's SO stunted and evil and oppressive it's the universal extremity of despicability incarnate.

I'M TELLING YOU THE TRUTH.

True humans could recognize it at a glance.

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2010-06-26T23:56:00.000-07:00

2010-06-26T23:38:00.001-07:00

2010-05-13T15:26:00.000-07:00

2010-04-12T14:41:00.000-07:00

2009-12-31T21:27:00.001-08:00

Ya know, some of these right wing complainers really have a point about the instant resort to name calling thing on the left. I wish I were as good a whisperer to the superiority complexations that have resulted from drinking this polemical brew, but, evidently, no such luck. And I'd so hoped that quoting Ḥaḍrat 'Alī might spark open the synapse, the passageway to clarity.... Silly, silly me.

Truly, though, it isn't the name-calling that upsets me. It's the stupidity, the dangerous stupidity of self-congratulation sucking all the air out of our ability to make manifest progress. Laughing and pointing at dumbasses while the house is burning down around you isn't putting out the fire... or even saving yourself from it, let alone others.

All this gleeful, or irascible, or gleefully irascible, them-bashing only makes an us of them-bashers. That's all. It's not the least bit progressive. It's actually regressive as hell. A lot of people are very, very pissed off about those of us choosing this ceaseless self-congratulation at everyone's expense, and are just as exasperated by relentless resort to cleverisms—by people who should otherwise be relied upon to stop doing this crap and perform—as you are by all the circus acts on the right.

And, again, for maybe the millionth time, or it sure feels like it, the real villains are laughing all the way to their rooms full of gold while you continue to go for this brand of "activism".

Man, I wish this shit were not so fucking deadly.

I think the very first metaphor my teacher used to express this basic form of cognitive dissonance was to state that it's like the not wealthy housewife wanting the perfect dress for the New Year's Eve party. She goes to her closet and there are two cocktail dresses in there. A green one and a blue one. She puts one on and then the other. She tries them with different shoes and different purses. She frets and she fusses until she comes up with the blue one with such-and-such shoes and such-and-such purse, deciding that this is the perfect dress. When all the time a little black dress was the perfect dress for this party. But it wasn't in her closet! She didn't own it and couldn't buy it, so the blue get-up had to become perfect instead. All that fussing after the perfect dress and she still feels like a schlub at the party.

It doesn't do any good to rummage around in your closet when what's in there doesn't cut it. It's just cognitive dissonance. Just cognitive dissonance you did to yourself, your conditioning let you end up doing to yourself. It doesn't work. It doesn't fix things. Actuality is not fazed by it. It barely even works in your own head. It simply perpetuates itself. It simply makes you feel need to think-something-into-perfection harder, or try even more shoes, or add bangles, or get your husband to lie to you that you were the most impeccably-dressed woman at the party, anything you can possibly think up to keep that dread feeling of schlub-at-the-New-Year's-Eve-party at bay.

This is actually identical to continually finding your progressive candidates letting you down once in office... continually finding your progressiveness has not produced progress.

You could have gone and traded the blue dress for a little black one with that uppity bitch down the street, except then you might have to be civil to her, or gone to the consignment store to do a trade, except someone might think you're poor if you're seen, or borrowed one from someone, even at the risk of owing a favor... all kinds of things... but, no—that's putting yourself out there, risking discomfort—far less dangerous to just make the blue dress the dress... right up to the moment you feel the schlubbiness....

Then, of course, you end up resolving to go with the green dress next year, whereupon the same process will start over again, and you will be badgering your husband yet again until he succeeds in convincing you that you look totally beautiful and picked the perfect dress for the party.

Every year you will experience the schlubbitude anew—that manifest lack of progress—but you won't get out of that damn closet, won't ever let yourself see that you can't fix it while locked in there... even when people's lives are at stake. The best it gets from you is a more energetic afternoon before the party of throwing new combinations together in front of the mirror, steaming about the lives depending on it.

You might well go your entire life without ever doing what it took to get that little black cocktail dress, feeling like a goddam schlub every goddam year—and who knows how many dying of it?—until, on your death bed, you realize how futile it was to be so prideful and self-limiting and other-annoying for all those years. That's usually the time when people finally let down their head trips to get a peep at the waste of all this closet rummaging, all this self-imposed cognitive dissonance, that prevented them ever manifesting their positive intent, ever making progress....

OR

One night, Nazrudin was on his hands and knees searching for his key in a well lit area. Some of his neighbors came to see why Nazrudin was on his hands and knees.

“What are you looking for, Nazrudin?" enquired one of the neighbors. “My door key.” Came the reply.

The helpful neighbors dropped to their hands and knees and joined Nasrudin in his search for the lost key.

After a long unsuccessful search, one of the neighbors asked: “We’ve looked everywhere. Are you sure you dropped it here?”
Nazrudin answered: “Of course I didn’t drop it here, I dropped it outside my door.”

“Then, why are you looking for it here!”

“Because there’s more light here," responded Nazrudin.

I'm just sick of everybody looking for the lost key only where the light is.

2009-06-05T23:11:00.001-07:00

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2009-05-02T23:26:00.000-07:00

2009-04-05T16:03:00.000-07:00

2009-01-10T20:49:00.000-08:00

2008-07-05T16:34:00.000-07:00

2008-05-26T14:57:00.000-07:00

2008-05-25T16:05:00.001-07:00

2008-05-23T13:24:00.000-07:00

I don't like how easy Tibetans make it on the wealthy.

2008-05-18T15:08:00.000-07:00

Yipes, my right wrist is hurting as badly as if someone tried to twist my hand off. I think it is due to the ultimate punitude of my latest Mighty Mouse. It is mighty in its elegance, but not in terms of strength. It is better called a Flimsy Mouse on that score. Believe it or not I had trained myself to use a light touch on this mouse. It was actually restful. I think, though, that its sudden unwillingness to scroll down, forcing me to keep my finger down on scroll bars over the last 36 hours, has blown out my wrist. I'm loath to gripe to Steve Jobs, but, well, this is turning into a damn personal injury cause of action!

2008-05-15T19:07:00.000-07:00

2008-04-23T21:16:00.000-07:00

I love Minister Farrakhan. Listen to him speak at Rosa's funeral.

Don't let anybody tell you he's bad. It's a lie. Take it from a couple of his buddies, if you don't believe me.

2008-04-05T15:45:00.001-07:00

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading--treading--till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through--

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum--
Kept beating--beating--till I thought
My Mind was going numb--

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space--began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here--

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down--
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing--then--

-- Emily Dickinson

2008-03-23T21:45:00.001-07:00

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2008-02-17T17:03:00.000-08:00

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2008-02-12T01:00:00.000-08:00

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2008-01-29T12:23:00.000-08:00

This made me so queasy it isn't even funny:

Would someone tell me, please, what would make the Kennedys compare Obama to JFK? Have I missed something? Isn't this the same bozo who was going to abandon Teddy on the Alito nomination until thousands and thousands of us called and wrote for his backing? Has Obama given us one reason to believe he would be a real president and break the criminals' hold on that office? Would Obama stop trying to be unobjectionable long enough to even piss them off? I don't think so.

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2008-01-12T16:27:00.000-08:00

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2007-12-23T01:42:00.000-08:00

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2007-12-11T15:37:00.000-08:00

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[click image]

I've been watching tv the last few nights and I'm about to pop an aneurysm! The mind control and the propaganda is everywhere across the dial.

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2007-12-08T23:15:00.000-08:00

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[click image]

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2007-11-22T14:50:00.000-08:00

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2007-11-10T16:08:00.000-08:00

Part 1 [17 minutes]

Part 2 [16 minutes]

Part 3 [16 minutes]

Part 4 [31 minutes]

2007-10-23T15:16:00.000-07:00

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2007-10-12T15:27:00.000-07:00

Over a year ago:

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2007-09-22T15:20:00.000-07:00

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Now check out just how far out of phase with the visuals here the police report is.

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2007-09-17T20:23:00.000-07:00

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2007-09-15T13:49:00.001-07:00

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George Saunders is a goddam godlike writer. Buy everything of his you can find.

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2007-08-31T22:13:00.000-07:00

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Part 1

Part 2

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2007-08-29T21:40:00.000-07:00

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2007-08-24T22:51:00.000-07:00

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Aaron Russo is dead and I am crestfallen.
You are the universe now, Aaron, and that peace is deserved.
In case you have no feeling, one way or the other, about this loss, Aaron Russo also brought us bikini underwear and Led Zepellin, besides being a very active and outspoken advocate for the Constitution and for truth wherever it can be found. The fact that he willingly gave up his social status, said no to a direct overture from the tyranny, and repeatedly ignored his own safety and his own gain precisely to live up to the truths we once held to be self-evident makes him unforgettable in my book.

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2007-08-18T23:12:00.000-07:00

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2007-08-05T15:46:00.000-07:00

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Spent a great deal of yesterday listening to Minnesota Public Radio on iTunes. I heard just about everything there is to hear as of now about the bridge collapse. One thing that really stuck was the statements from those who’d been involved in the tragedy. They were all reporting about how nobody got out and ran, nobody tried to seek safety before they had gone to the people in the cars around them to help them get out. At any moment, all your fellow motorists could instantly cease being assholes trying to kill you for a few yards’ advantage in the traffic and turn into your brothers and sisters making sure you are safe before they even know if they are safe. This is so. I’ve been in enough emergencies to know. And your skin color has NOTHING to do with whether you provide this help or receive it. Neither does your political party. When the chips are down, all living things matter more to us than what we think.

I have a friend who, ever since reading Childhood’s End (a science fiction novel about aliens who come and hover over Earth and subdue all our tyrannies by making clear their ability to annihilate us if we keep it up), can’t stop wishing for those aliens to show up. He looks to the sky and yells for them to hurry up. In the novel it turns out that these saviors of humanity are doing it for some nefarious reason or other (so that they could keep us as livestock, if I remember correctly) but not even this is enough to make him change his mind about wishing on the sky for the all-powerful aliens to fix this unholy mess. I try to convince him this is just colorful illustration of a determination to remain helpless. How could he prefer this to action? Does colorfully capitulating make the capitulation any less? Does it distract anyone from realizing your capitulation? Is that substantively different than the legions who decide to capitulate by avidly agreeing with the tyrants? I sure don’t think so.

It should be stated that Americans are acting just like Germans in the 1930s right now. We made them pay for that.

Wow, did we ever.

Bill Moyers had Clive James on the other night. I was happy to see James lauding the heroism of Sophie Scholl. As he pointed out, her heroism was possibly even more important than that of her compatriots in the White Rose, a German resistance group against the Nazis, because she could have avoided execution by renouncing the others, rejoining the enabling masses of German society. She would not. One very young lady understood that Germany was a bridge collapse and acted accordingly. If sufficiently more people had been unable to talk themselves out of the true nature of the emergency, Sophie would not have been executed, nor her compatriots. If any executing at all had to take place, it would have been Nazis beheaded instead.

Maybe it would be good for you to read their leaflets and contemplate how much better things would have been if the population had been awakened by their efforts.

You must know by now that Congress has extended wiretapping privileges to the administration, on top of the entirely too many other concessions against their oaths to the Constitution. What in the hell makes you believe this is any different than during the rise of Nazism in Germany? We have a million Iraqis dead already. Does calling the occupation a war confuse you? Is it that they aren't being rounded up to go die confusing you? What in the hell makes you think this is any different than the bridge collapsing in Minnesota? Is this all on too grand a scale for you? Is it only the clear and present danger of utter catastrophe that lets you SEE through your benighting conditioning? Do you think because you WRITE blog posts that dis the tyrants that you are helping your fellow motorists get to safety?

Blogging is not doing.

SNAP OUT OF IT... FOR CRAPSAKES SNAP OUT OF IT!

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