Giordano Bruno: Kurds & Whey,Chicago cold Siberian Heat, Topol-m

Last Chance Texaco...

tompaine. "I hate to say, 'Game over,'" says Wayne White, who led the State Department's intelligence effort on Iraq until last spring. "But we've lost it." There is no mechanism for the Sunnis now to restore a modicum of balance in Iraq, and the Shiite religious parties have no incentive to make significant concessions either to the Sunnis or to the resistance, White says.
Most worrying is the fact that centrist elements in Iraq—ranging from the CIA's favorite candidate, Iyad Allawi, to the Pentagon's chosen vehicle, Ahmed Chalabi—got blown away.
- Texaco's only chance now is to negotiate with the Sunni resistance. The guys who are currently putting shaped charges up the anus of Texaco troops. The Kurds will sell 'their' oil to Euros for Euros. The Shia take orders from Iran. Texaco murderous simpletons have achieved the perfect fuckup. Best for all of us if they stay for a while and get more troops macerated.

guerrillanews
Kurds plan to invade South..Kurdish leaders have systematically placed their own militiamen (known as the Peshmerga) into Iraqi army divisions in northern Iraq, which is similar to what the Shiite Arabs in southern Arab. This coincides with reports of ex-Israeli commandos training Kurds in northern Iraq.

guerrillanewsChicago Turns Down Discounted Venezuelan Oil
Venezuala offers discounted oil for the poor of Chicago (USA) but their offer was turned down by those who can not admit that the market system doesn’t work.

Zapatista Composting Toilet..
gnn
EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) might resume active military engagements. However, tensions diffused, and in November I accompanied two friends to Chiapas as they resumed work in the field.
One of five EZLN model communities – curiously called caracoles, or snails – the town of Roberto Barrios (near Palenque) shows few signs of having once been a major conflict zone. .. A peace camp for human rights observers was constructed in Roberto in 1995, and thousands of international supporters have passed through to act as witnesses and as a buffer against potential violence. During my stay, the shift of observers consisted of a dozen chain-smoking Catalan anarchists, who busied themselves with women’s literacy classes and tackling an overdue cleanup of the popular, well-stocked library.
Serenaded before dawn by the majestic roar of howler monkeys, we awoke to find that three participants had magically appeared for our workshop. After a breakfast of beans and hot handmade tortillas, our crew set to work clearing brush, trimming lumber, and building cement molds for the compost chamber doors

nybooks.. 2005 has been the hottest year on record.."..we are reaching a tipping point or threshold beyond which sea ice will not recover." ..
—In the tundra of Siberia..In some places last winter, the methane bubbled up so steadily that puddles of standing water couldn't freeze even in the depths of the Russian winter.
..six thousand soil borings across the UK.. microbial activity had increased dramatically in the soil.. much of the carbon long stored in the soil was now being released into the atmosphere. ..large enough to negate all the work that Britain had done to switch away from coal
...one of the best books yet published on climate change—is Mark Bowen's Thin Ice

sinodaily
Chinese claim to be going for 'efficient' cars... but..
.. 80 Chinese cities, including Beijing, currently impose road restrictions on small cars, banning them from entering main roads and motorways in many places.
The NDRC is looking into scrapping these restrictions across China, the report quoted Liu as saying.
The number of privately-owned cars in China is expected to reach 17 million by the end of this year, up nearly three times from 6.25 million in 2000,
...Fact is, there is no efficient way for a chariot to do 100kph. The carbon thing is insoluable, because every Chinaman wants to do 100kph in his own chariot. Anyway, cars are less than 20% of the problem. Modern life has carbon hissing out of every pore.

tompaine
Has Congress given the president a thumbs-up to spy on Americans? Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said “yes” this week ..
Gonzalez has Congress unwittingly writing itself out of the decision-making process, leaving the executive branch free reign to ignore the law and cherished civil liberties.
..Gonzalez was referring to the four-year-old “Authorization for the Use of Military Force,” or AUMF, enacted the week after the 9/11 attacks..Congress at that time gave the President power to use “all necessary and appropriate force,” but only against those who had “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 9/11 attacks.
..a belief that Congress has signed off on an “anything goes” approach to counterterrorism.

Now the choice for the American Establishment is clear, and inescapable: do you hold for the Republic, or for autocracy?

buzzflashOn Christmas Eve, the Russian army activated a new fleet of Topol-M missiles that can fit a nuclear warhead and travel 6,000 miles, changing trajectory to foil any enemy interception device.
The accompanying hawkish rhetoric of the Russian military commanders and the frenetic response of the US navy have stoked concern that the former Cold War adversaries have quietly resumed the arms race.
General Nikolai Solovtsov, commander of the Russian missile forces, has mobilised a new battalion for the Topol-M missiles, which have a capacity for a one megatonne impact - 75 times the power of the 1945 Hiroshima bomb.
Gen Solovtsov, a critic of US anti- missile defence technology, said the Topol-M missile "is capable of piercing any missile defence system" and is immune to electromagnetic blasts used by current US anti-missile systems.