Congress seeks to shut down much needed clean energy supply

Fracking’s Future Attacked

Posted by Tait Trussell Bio ↓ on Oct 21st, 2011

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Wrangling between natural gas drilling and political fright-mongers is looming with the Oct. 17 announcement that pipeline giant Kinder Morgan will become the largest gas pipeline operator in the U.S. This means accelerated gas drilling using hydraulic fracturing, a technology developed by the company Halliburton.

The $21 billion deal for Kinder Morgan to buyEl Paso Corp. will create a new network of 67,000 miles of lines to serve the rapidly-growing technological drilling advance of hydraulic fracturing, informally called “fracking.” A potential 200-year supply of needed natural gas is at stake.

A bill, Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act, is pending in Congress to amend the Safe Drinking Water Act. This could slow hydraulic fracturing. The bill is sponsored by the usual suspects, including Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who probably has never seen a gas well, socialist Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who is plagued by fears of progress, and Diane Feinstein (D-CA), who has no environmental legislative responsibility.

Democrats like to call it the “Halliburton loophole.” Before he became George W. Bush’s vice president,Dick Cheney headed Halliburton. So, referencing Halliburton automatically rallies Democratic support.

An army of liberals also is instinctively opposed to drilling for gas because it’s a fossil fuel, even though it’s twice as clean as gasses discharged from burning coal or oil. The distaste is not like some people’s objection to, say, brussels sprouts. What gives eco-pros fits is the way the gas is obtained. Vast caches of natural gas trapped in deeply buried rock are now accessible by drilling by a proven and well regulated technology. Hydraulic fracking has unlocked enormous new supplies of clean-burning natural gas from dense deposits of shale.

According to Energytommorow.com, “Fracking has been used in more than one million U.S. wells and has safely produced more than seven billion barrels of oil and 600 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.”

Yet congressional Democrats charge that hundreds of millions of gallons of cancer-causing chemicals have been pumped into underground wells by the oil and gas industry.

The Natural Resources Defense Council complains that thousands of new wells in the Rocky Mountainregion and in the South have expanded to the 600-mile-long formation called the Marcellus shale. It stretches from West Virginia to western New York. What makes the environmentalists wring their hands is the fracking process in which “dangerous chemicals” are mixed with large quantities of water and sand and injected into the wells at high pressure, making it a “suspect in polluted drinking water.”As to water safety, the gas is thousands of feet below the water aquifer and separated by many layers of rock.

The expanded pipeline will reach into practically every major region where natural gas is produced, from eastern states to southern states, including Florida’s huge market for natural gas. The Interstate Natural Gas Association of America Foundation calculates that 35,600 miles of high-pressure natural gas pipelines will have to be constructed between now and 2035 to meet demands of the market.

Besides multiplying our domestic energy supplies, shale development has “irrefutable economic benefits.” Fracking in the Marcellus and Barnett (Texas) shale has boosted local incomes—with royalty payments to property owners, furnishing tax revenues to the government and creating high-paying jobs in construction, engineering, surveying, equipment manufacturing, and other areas.

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Second Cyber Attack on Iran?

Second Cyber Attack on Iran?

Posted by Ryan Mauro Bio ↓ on Oct 21st, 2011

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The Stuxnet cyber attack on Iran’s nuclear program was a defining moment in the history of war, and now, the “Son of Stuxnet” has been discovered. Cyber security experts say the creator of the original worm, widely believed to be Israel and probably the U.S., also designed this one and “there is nothing out there available to stop it.”

The Stuxnet cyber attack rendered thousands of Iran’s centrifuges, around a fifth of all of them, useless. Over 1,000 damaged units were replaced at the Natanz centrifuge farm, and damaged the steam turbine at the Bushehr nuclear reactor. In 2009, onlyhalf of Iran’s centrifuges were being used and some of those operating were only enriching half as much uranium as they should. The Iranians have to replaceall of the computers at Natanz, and it may take up to two years. It was later found out that Israel testedStuxnet on centrifuges identical to those used by Iran at its nuclear site in Dimona.

The Iranians later announced in April 2011 that a second cyber attack was discovered, which they called “Stars.” All that the regime said was that it was found on government computers and caused little damage. Iran soon replaced its centrifuges at Natanz and began manufacturing more sophisticated centrifuges that can significantly speed up the nuclear program. The centrifuges were moved to an underground site in the mountains near Qom. In February, experts determined that Iran had recovered from the damage wrought by Stuxnet. And now, the “Son of Stuxnet” has emerged.

The new virus, also called Stuxnet 2.0 and Duqu, is broader in scope. It opens up a back door in the compromised computer systems for 36 days, and then disappears. It has been doing this as far back as last December, though the victims have not been publicly identified. The virus allows the creator to hijack the controlling computer systems, permitting the attacker to direct their operations or to even self-destruct. It also records keystrokes and sends back critical information about system vulnerabilities. The back doors have not been exploited, leading experts to conclude that a cyber attack is on its way.

“The attackers are looking for information such as design documents that could help them mount a future attack on an industrial control facility,” Symanetec said in its announcement of the discovery. It called it a “precursor to a future Stuxnet-like attack.”

“It’s my personal belief that the guys who wrote Stuxnet knew exactly what they were doing, and if you thought they were good guys then, you probably don’t have anything more to worry about now. But if you didn’t, you probably have a lot to worry about,” saidVikrum Thakur of Symantec.

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The Pathology of Double Standards

The Pathology of Double Standards

Posted by Bruce Thornton Bio ↓ on Oct 21st, 2011

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The surreal moral idiocy that characterizes hatred of Israel is illustrated daily by states whose actions are shrugged away by the international media. Consider the recent Turkish invasion of northern Iraq in pursuit of Kurdish militants who killed 24 soldiers at military posts near the border. Turkish special forces crossed the border, and the air force bombed targets in Iraq. Some speculate a ground invasion in force is in the works. Since the U.S. supplies much of the military hardware used in the attack, along with intelligence gathered by drones, unsurprisingly the White House “strongly condemn[ed]” the “outrageous terrorist attack against Turkey,” and promised to “continue our strong cooperation” to help Turkey defeat the Kurdish militant separatists.

Apologists for Turkey would argue that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is a terrorist organization, as designated by both the E.U. and the U.S., one that since the beginning of its armed struggle in 1984 has killed 12,000 Turks. Thus Turkey is within its rights under international law to cross into another sovereign nation in order to punish and deter further attacks. Leaving aside the accuracy of deeming Kurdish separatists to be terrorists, the behavior of the Turks raises a more interesting question: why isn’t this same consideration given to Turkey afforded to Israel?

Comparison with Israel’s struggle against Arab terrorism reveals the extent of the malignant double standards applied to Israel. In fact, the Kurdish people have a much stronger case for independence than do the Arabs called Palestinians. The 30 million Kurds in the Middle East have a documented 2400-year presence in their homeland, a region that now includes parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. They also have a distinct language and customs. The only thing they lack to be a formal nation is their own country, a consequence of the way the British carved up the Ottoman Empire after World War I, a process that served England’s imperial interests rather than the historically justified claims of peoples to national self-determination.

The less than 2 million Palestinians in the so-called West Bank, on the other hand, are ethnically, linguistically, and culturally similar to the Arabs of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. There is no historical record of a distinct Palestinian people, nor was Palestine ever an Arab “homeland.” This is why in 1948 and 1967, Arab armies attacked Israel not to establish an independent Palestinian state, but to destroy Israel and divide its territory among the victors. Arabs ended up in Palestine by the same process that brought them to North Africa, Egypt, and Iraq––as the descendants of conquerors, occupiers, colonists, and immigrants. Palestinian “national aspirations” insofar as they are sincere are a result of military failure, institutionalized victimization, and betrayal by their fellow Arabs, who have found in the displaced Palestinian “refugees” a useful public relations weapon for marginalizing Israel and questioning her legitimacy.

Given the weaker foundations for Palestinian statehood, not to mention the ghoulish carnage wreaked worldwide by decades of Palestinian terrorism, one would think that when it comes to international support for “national aspirations,” the Kurds would near the top of the list while the Palestinians wouldn’t even qualify. Yet global support for the Palestinians, and its attendant hatred of Israel, dwarfs any sympathy for the national aspirations of the Kurds. The West has sent billions in aid to the Palestinians, has anxiously brokered summits, conferences, and other negotiations in an attempt to solve the crisis; the U.N. has demonized, ostracized, and criticized Israel, and her own allies have demanded more and more suicidal concessions. Meanwhile the PKK is condemned as a villainous terrorist organization, and the legitimate complaints of the Kurds––including the suppression of their culture and language, the serial violation of their human rights, the destruction by some estimates of 8,000 Kurdish villages, the deaths of over 30,000 Kurds, and the creation of 3-4 million refugees––are ignored by the same international media and institutions that vilify Israel’s legitimate attempts to defend her citizens.

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