Nuclear Arms Talks Stalled

i-Newswire.com - Press Release And News Distribution - NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATY REVIEW CONFERENCE CONTINUES GENERAL DEBATE AT UN HEADQUARTERS

Canadian Scientists Prove Italians Are Smarter

Hand Gestures Linked To Better Speaking

The Outrageous Skies

It's bad enough that United Airlines asked to be relieved of its pension obligations to its employees, especially after years of convincing many to take early retirement in order to preserve their pensions, and asking, or demanding, other concessions that translated into hardships for workers, while management maybe had to leave St. Bart's a day early.

But what's worse is that a Bankruptcy Court in Chicago granted their request. What this means in terms of money is still unclear---technically it's a transfer to a government agency, but it's likely the benefits will be cut, though so far no one is saying by how much.

Apart from the rank injustice to the rank and file, those of us who depend on United, not as a matter of choice but of monopoly or damn close to it, are not looking forward to the next flight on the "friendly skies." What motivation do these folks have now?

That may sound selfish from those of us who have the choice of flying United or flapping our arms and jumping off a roof, but it goes directly to the logic of being unjust and oppressive to the people everyone depends on to keep things working. Things stop working.

Now that United has gotten away with this so far (we hope it's appealed, all the way up, and let the Supremes tell America what to do with their pensions, before their GOPer brethren get their teeth into Social Security), other troubled airlines won't be far behind. And American workers will find themselves joining the millions of workers in the rest of the world who are hard at work building the pyramids for the Bushfolk of the planet, all for the honor of being bamboozled, lied to, exploited, cheated and scorned.

United workers feel betrayed / Bankruptcy judge relieves airline of pension obligation

In Other New...

Douglas Adams, Beyond the Fringe, Dr. Who, Monty Python and the Beatles at Soul of Star Trek.

Hypocracy in America, Vol. 42,0056: Social Security Scam

Not content with further enriching the filthy rich, many of their fortunes coming at the expense of the future of all life on the planet, the Bushoids feel compelled to drive the hard pressed into an old age of poverty and suffering, for generations to come.

That's pretty much the Social Security plan Bush is offering. Paul Krugman does the math. Quotes from his New York Times column are in itals.

He asserts, as do many who don't fudge the numbers, that if the economy grows as it has, there is no crisis in Social Security for the next half century. The point isn't that there might not be, because if you ask the Dash brothers, and nobody does, it's likely that Social Security will be a comparatively minor crisis at mid century compared with everything else that's falling apart, or else it will already be part of a sensible and comprehensive support package for all, cradle to grave.

Anyway, we've got at least twenty-five years to keep tabs on Social Security before we have anything but fantasy to judge its solvency on. Assuming that government goes on as it has, which is to regularly rob the Social Security trust fund with a boldness that makes Bonnie and Clyde look like a couple of Hollywood actors.

The Bushoids now want to cut benefits for "the wealthy." So they've woken up to the inequity of their tax cut, and are trying in their admittedly stupid way to make amends? Not exactly. Here Krugman finds the exact analogy (which we praise because this is the first thing we thought of, the debates...):

In last fall's debates, Mr. Bush asserted that "most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans." Since most of the cuts went to the top 10 percent of the population and more than a third went to people making more than $200,000 a year, Mr. Bush's definition of middle income apparently reaches pretty high.

But defenders of Mr. Bush's Social Security plan now portray benefit cuts for anyone making more than $20,000 a year, cuts that will have their biggest percentage impact on the retirement income of people making about $60,000 a year, as cuts for the wealthy.

In case you're hazy on the US dollar, making 20 thou a year won't rent you an apartment in most of America, unless perhaps you forgo eating, and $60 thou is about the minimum for the middle class "ownership society" or at least a small home somewhere.

But simple cynicism in selling this apparently loopy proposal is just the tip of the melting iceberg. The proposal doesn't just penalize people who are barely making it but it continues to enrich the very rich, through the combination of tax cuts for the wealthy and Social Security benefit cuts for the poor. Here's Krugman's numbers:

Suppose you're earning $60,000 a year. On average, Mr. Bush cut taxes for workers like you by about $1,000 per year. But by 2045 the Bush Social Security plan would cut benefits for workers like you by about $6,500 per year. Not a very good deal.

Suppose, finally, that you're making $1 million a year. You received a tax cut worth about $50,000 per year. By 2045 the Bush plan would reduce benefits for people like you by about $9,400 per year. We have a winner!

So this is the Bush agenda. It's not enough to increase suffering for millions of people while he's in office, by ignoring the health care crisis, bleeding the states' ability to help their citizens, sending the young of lower income families to bleed and die for his vanity war in Iraq, etc., he is going to increase suffering for millions of people well into the future, not just with the effects of his record deficits, nor his refusal to deal with global heating and bungling of nuclear arms control, but by paying off the rich children and grandchildren of his obscene and obscenely rich friends, by stealing even more from the poor and middle class. Now that's vision. Praise the lords, and passeth all understanding.

The Final Insult - New York Times

In Other New...

The political message of Star Wars in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle.

They All Look Alike

The Bushies were crowing that they captured the #3 man in Al-Qaeda! Well, not them, the Pakistanis. And, as it turned out, not the #3 man, probably after all.

It turns out this is a guy nobody in European or U.S. intelligence heard of. He wasn't on the FBI Wanted list. My favorite part of the story below is the quote from the Bushie official who said he wasn't on the list because they didn't want him to know he was wanted.

But on the bright side he's now the 6th Al-Q. guy to be captured. That's like better than one a year since 9/11! Way to go Bushwarriors. No wonder things are going so well in Iraq, Iran, North Korea, etc.

Captured Al-Qaeda kingpin is case of ?mistaken identity? - Sunday Times - Times Online

we're watching

In Other New...

The definitive essay on Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is at
Soul of Star Trek...

Bush Fatigue and The Nuclear Madness Update

Yes, things continue to go to hell in Iraq, more death and chaos, and the American public no longer thinks it was such a good idea. And yes, the Brits have a memo that proves the U.S. was determined to invade Iraq and manufacture the reasons to do it.

So why no ranting and raving in your favorite ranting and raving rental on the net? Bush Fatigue has set in. It's brought on not only by endless bad news, but endless totally predicted bad news, bad news that isn't news to us. What would make it news is if anybody actually got held accountable for causing it. But that's what the last election was for, and we see how that turned out.

The U.S. has a corporate news media that is only astonishing in that it gets worse when you can't imagine how that could happen. It's all the same: the Brave New World Network.

Bush Fatigue.

So it is at the anti-proliferation treaty conference in New York. What you don't want to think about is that people can't even get upset about nuclear war anymore.

Here's the update anyway:

While the U.S. media ignores the non-proliferation conference in New York, many outside the U.S. and some in are castigating the Bush administration for threatening world peace and stability with their intransigence and bungling.

On Tuesday, the second day of the four week nuclear non- proliferation treaty conference in New York, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi spoke. U.S. media uniformly headlined the speech as Iran announcing it would resume nuclear related activities it suspended while in talks with European nations, asserting it had an "inalienable right" to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes.

Non-U.S. media, especially in the Third World, were more likely to report Kharrazi's strong condemnation of Washington for maintaining a huge nuclear arsenal, and demanding that the U.S. assure Iran it would not launch a nuclear strike on that country.

The New York Times did report this line from his speech, late in their story: "The continued existence of thousands of nuclear warheads in the nuclear weapon states' stockpile, which can destroy the entire globe many times over, are the major sources of threat to peace and security."

This is the stalemate that threatens to sink the conference before it starts. On the first day it was North Korea asserting itself, on the second it was Iran. Neither country was satisfied with what western countries offered in recent negotiations.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has pointedly criticized the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, while calling for a stronger non-proliferation treaty,that recognizes the rights of nations to pursue peaceful nuclear energy. The U.S. demands concessions---in fact, total abstinence-from non-nuclear countries, but is offering and giving up nothing.

What's behind the U.S. intransigence? In the Los Angeles Times in April, Robert Scheer suggested the relationship to America's ugly dependence on arms sales:

"Trying to follow the U.S. policy on the proliferation of nuclear weapons is like watching a three-card monte game on a city streetcorner. Except the stakes are higher.

The announcement last week that the United States is authorizing the sale to Pakistan of F-16 fighter jets capable of delivering nuclear warheads - and thereby escalating the region's nuclear arms race - is the latest example of how the most important issue on the planet is being bungled by the Bush administration."

Speaking of bungling, Guardian columnist Simon Tisdall went after none other than Dueling John Bolton, head of the rapidly dwindling Bolton gang, for his contribution to screwing things up with North Korea, and making the world a much less safer place.

"Many damaging accusations have been levelled at John Bolton, President George Bush's controversial nominee as US ambassador to the UN.

But perhaps the most serious is that Mr Bolton, as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security since 200, bungled efforts to dissuade North Korea from developing nuclear weapons.

Mr Bolton helped to scrap the Clinton administration's 1994 "agreed framework" that froze North Korea's weapons-related plutonium reprocessing programme. The framework was imperfect - but nothing remotely adequate replaced it.

In 2002, President Bush denounced North Korea as part of the "axis of evil". In 2003, Pyongyang withdrew from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and traded insults with Mr Bolton. In February, it declared itself a nuclear weapons state.

And at the weekend, on the eve of the treaty review conference in New York, North Korea said stalled regional talks were effectively dead.

The Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency conceded last week that North Korea probably now has nuclear-armed missiles capable of hitting US soil. "

As awful as all that is, it is the actual work of the conference that is most endangered right now. This dispatch courtesy of the Institute for Public Accuracy:

"JOHN BURROUGHS, johnburroughs@lcnp.org, http://www.lcnp.org Burroughs, executive director of the New York-based Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy, is monitoring the Non-Proliferation Treaty conference in New York. Burroughs presented the paper "Building a Nuclear Weapons-Free Future" at the January meeting on the NPT at the Carter Center. He said today: "As the four-week NPT Review Conference opened this week, the U.S. is showing no flexibility about arms control steps like negotiation of a verifiable treaty banning production of fissile materials (plutonium and highly enriched uranium) for nuclear weapons. That is a treaty under which international inspectors would monitor U.S. facilities, a prospect not attractive to the Bush administration. In turn, non-nuclear countries are resisting non-proliferation measures like IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei's proposal for multilateral controls on the spread of technology to produce fissile materials for use in nuclear reactors but also potentially in nuclear weapons."

Translated, nobody is actually negotiating.

And of course, no one is paying attention. Instead we are obsessed with whatever smaller matters of momentary attention get the adrenalin going. Politics-as-usual is becoming the meth of public consciousness.

In Other New...

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy at Soul of Star Trek...

Anti-Nuke Time in New York City

Nuclear Option Continued

In the 1986 feature, Star Trek: The Voyage Home, the 23rd century Enterprise crew comes back through time to the mid 1980s. For a scene that has them peering at a newspaper, director Leonard Nimoy had to select a headline that would be characteristic but not too dated by the time the movie came out. He decided on "Nuclear Talks Stalled."

"It's a miracle these people got out of the 20th century," observed Doctor McCoy.

True enough, but the real miracle may be yet to come---getting out of the 21st. For one thing, it's 2005, the nuclear non-proliferation treaty talks are just starting in New York, and guess what? Stalled.

After weeks of partisan wrangling in Congress over something called the nuclear option, many Americans who follow politics may be surprised to learn that the real nuclear option is about to be discussed by representatives of 180 nations in New York City, beginning today.

There has been scant mention in the U.S. press of these formal discussions on the 1970 international nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Two events in the hours before it opens have provided some visibility: an earnest if unfocused demonstration in New York, but especially a short-range missile test by North Korea.

The U.S. would like to keep the attention on North Korea and Iran, but other nations are at least as interested in what the U.S. is and is not doing.

While insisting that other nations refrain from obtaining nuclear arms, the Bush administration has withdrawn pledges made by the U.S. at the last conference in 2000 to join the comprehensive test ban treaty, and sign a verifiable treaty banning production of fissile material for nuclear weapons. The Bush administration also has plans for new nuclear weapons systems, and is arguably already engaging in nuclear war in Iraq with depleted uranium weapons.

In addition, other nations believe the U.S. has not destroyed stockpiles of nuclear arms sufficiently nor aided the Soviet Union in destroying theirs. All of this first of all means that after months of preparation, the conference doesn't even have an agenda, because of the conflict between the U.S. and other nations.

"If one state begins to reject commitments it made at past review conferences, other states may start to reject prior commitments. The non-proliferation treaty will quickly erode," said Daryl Kimball, head of the independent Arms Control Association.

The Guardian has a full story here:

Nuclear weapons are not metaphors left over from the Cold War. They exist in quantity, and they are still dangerous. The threats of terrorists with dirty bombs or "rogue nations" with a few true nukes are vaguely recognized. But those huge thermonuclear arsenals have not disappeared. A RAND study says that accidental nuclear arms attack between the U.S. and Russia is not only still possible, it is more likely than it was during the Cold War.

There are numerous very serious problems involved in the existence of aging weapons, of so much fissile material and nuclear waste that will be lethal for thousands of years.

But the Bush administration has stopped addressing these problems, and is moving towards nuclear rearmament, breaking the actual and implied promises the U.S. made in order to get other nations to pledge not to become nuclear powers. Now with the U.S. bullying smaller nations, they have more incentive than ever to acquire nuclear arms.

The North Korea situation is increasingly volatile. According to U.S. defense intelligence, North Korea will soon have missiles capable of reaching the West Coast of the U.S. Others, like former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, claim they have missiles with that range already. It's also believed that North Korea is set to conduct nuclear weapons tests, and again, some believe they already have nuclear capability.

These facts, McNamara says, mean that the U.S. has no military options to deal with North Korea. Yet the Bush administration continues to engage in more recriminations and name calling than negotiation.

Two quotes from another Guardian story:

Last Thursday George Bush labelled the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, a "dangerous person" and a "tyrant".

A day later the official North Korean news agency quoted the North Korean foreign ministry as calling Mr Bush a "hooligan, bereft of any personality as a human being, to say nothing of stature as president of a country. He is a half-baked man in terms of morality, and a philistine whom we can never deal with."

The history of the Bomb in America (reported for example in a new book by Gerard DeGroot: THE BOMB, A LIFE) has been characterized by public silence and private dread. Government lies and secrecy, plus the active policy of considering questions about nuclear weapons to be unpatriotic, joined with the natural inability to deal with the enormity of nuclear weapons, to create a sense of political denial for much of time since 1945. Meanwhile, unconscious fears and distrust of government and science found expression in the arts and popular entertainment, from Dr. Strangelove and The Day After to the "bug-eyed monster movies," the alien invasion and post-apocalyptic future genres of science fiction.

President Kennedy's eloquent pursuit of a partial test-ban brought these emotions into public, and for a decade or so, the impetus was on the side of ending the threat of nuclear weapons.

But under the radar and outside the public eye, the momentum may have reversed. It is up to us to pay attention to this conference, as a sign that we still want a world without nuclear weapons.

It's not like we don't have problems enough without them.

Guardian Unlimited Special reports Deadlock looms over spread of nuclear arms

tell me about it

Fuel for Fossils

""""Climate scientists armed with new data from deep in the ocean and far into space have found that Earth is absorbing much more heat than it is giving off, a conclusion they say validates projections of global warming.

Lead scientist James Hansen, a prominent NASA climatologist, described the findings on the planet's out-of-balance energy exchange as a "smoking gun" that should dispel doubts about forecasts of climate change."""""

So who's going to explain this to the President? The same guy or gal who gets to explain to him that coal is a fossil fuel?

Experts: New Data Show Global Warming

When the First Amendment No Longer Applies-

One of the advantages of not making any money from this blog is the freedom to not have to comment on every damn thing that happens, like Bush's idiotic press conference---as if Bush giving an idiotic press conference could be NEWS--or even Tony Blair's current unpleasantness.

But freedom is as freedom does, and apparently, it ain't doing much in the big world.

Here's this innocuous story about Apple Computers in a snit over a book on its CEO Steve Jobs, the Aged Boy Genuis (Second Class), to the extent of not only pulling that book off the shelves of its retail stories (gee, they have retail stores?) but all the books by that publisher. ALL of them. Including those computers for dummies books.

So are the dummies revolting? It's hard to tell. Here's the story I read in the SF Chronicle:

Apple yanks book on Jobs / Company bans all of publisher's books because of the one

Apple of course is the company that relaunched itself with TV ads showing them smashing the dictatorship of (presumably) Aged Boy Genius (First Class,) and standing tall for FREEDOM!
That's got to be the lead for this story, right? But possibly no one at the paper was born yet when that commercial ran.

So there's the author quoted in the second graph. Is he OUTRAGED? Is he screaming about freedom and the chilling effect, corporations acting like Orwellian governments and Steve Jobs like a tin dictator? Sure, he's got to be tickled pink, he couldn't buy the publicity he'll get, but...isn't there something else at stake here? Let's hear this clarion call, this defense of the author's right to write...

"I have a lot of admiration for the guy." That's the quote. The author is puzzled because the biography, though unauthorized, is admiring. His feelings are hurt, I guess. Maybe because Steve's feelings are hurt. Can this obsequious-sounding, awfully toady looking relationship be saved?

Well, then the publisher must be up in arms, issuing withering press releases denouncing this abuse of corporate power, this attempt at intimidation and censorship. Dispatching fleets of lawyers, readying their Supreme Court briefs. Surely.

The publisher acknowledged getting "a call" from Apple objecting to the book. So did they tell them, tough harddrive buddy, this is America, nobody gets to tell us what to print? Not exactly. They offered to "consider changes."

But having deballed their author, they weren't silly enough to give in to Apple's sole demand, which was to not publish the book. They couldn't pay for this publicity, etc. Still, when it came to this act of ridding the Apple shelves of ALL their books, they stepped up with this bold pronouncement: "We think it's an unfortunate situation."

It takes another ten paragraphs of the story before the author allows that this might be "chilling." In between, Apple is criticized not for being a corporate bully but for a stupid public relations move (by a "branding expert"), and a professor of marketing, who allows that while corporations should defend themselves, they "have to be careful not to appear too heavy-handed."

Yes, that's sound advice. It's okay to be heavy-handed, as long as you don't appear to be, too much.

Perhaps it's time for the Dash brothers to send over a book proposal to the publisher (who doesn't deserve to be named). We'll call it FIRST AMENDMENT FREEDOMS FOR DUMMIES.

They won't even have to publish it. They just have to read it.

remember me? I remember you...

The Nuclear Option

While Democrats and Republicans argue over who first referred to the nullification of the Senate filibuster rule as "the nuclear option" (it was Republicans, of course, who now deny it, even though they're on videotape claiming credit for it, and of course the media buys their version), practically no one is paying attention to the actual nuclear options that will be discussed at the international conference on the non-proliferation treaty, which begins in New York on May 1.

The news report below says the conference doesn't even have an agenda yet, because, as usual, the Bushcorps are throwing the U.S. weight around to distort an international conference to serve its own political ends. John Bolton, who stepped out of an Eagles song to become the controversial nominee, likely dead in the water now, for UN ambassador, is a prime suspect in the U.S. attempt to subvert the conference.

The Bushies want to talk about Iran, the rest of the world wants to talk about the failure of the U.S. and other western nations to live up to their responsibilities in the treaty. While the U.S. expects all other nations to forgo nuclear weapons, it is doing nothing to reduce its own stockpile (which was the basis for the agreement), and is even planning on adding a new generation of nuclear weapons.

Even in selecting Iran as its target, the Bushies show how clueless and gutless they are. North Korea is a much greater threat, but bluster and bombing won't help there, because Korea has missiles that can hit San Francisco, with or without nukes in the nosecone.

As for news of the conference itself---what a joke! Search Google news for "nuclear proliferation" and see how many U.S. news sources come up. England, India, Canada, Australia, Russia, etc. are well represented. But the U.S. media has more important topics to cover, like the Michael Jackson trial.

Portsmouth Herald World/National News: 'Cascade of nuclear proliferation'

This Could Be A Day to Remember

and the pun is intended: researchers at UC San Diego announced that genetically altered cells injected into the human brain "appear to nourish ailing nuerons and may slow the cognitive decline in patients with Alzheimer's disease." Here's the news story:
Quad-City Times Newspaper Online - the Quad-Cities Home Page

and the BBC has more details. The potential for this research is enormous, partly because of the similiarity of Alzheimer's to several other devastating diseases involving neuron function, such as ALS. And of course, it has social and political significance also because of the onrushing baby boomer population, getting into Alzheimer range.

This is apparently not a practical treatment yet except in special cases (at the moment, meaning very rich people who can afford the surgery) but if it does become practical, it's going to shake up the health care system once again, on issues of costs, availability and who gets the treatment. The words "stem cells" haven't been mentioned in these early stories, but if they do appear, yet another dimension will be added to the erupting debate. Keep an eye on this one. It could be big.

UPDATE: Monday's New York Times story takes a more skeptical view. They indicate the research was done for a private gene therapy company, so the results (they imply) are self-serving. And all other gene therapies have failed, even when initial results were promising, as this one. Their report was on the business page.