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  • Canberra flags shift on emissions

    Many options: There are many options to "price" carbon.

    Carbon tax ruled out: There is a carbon tax – which the Government has ruled out.

    Emissions trading getting mixed messages: There are emissions trading schemes, in which greenhouse gas emissions are capped and companies trade permits among themselves. The Government is sending mixed messages about whether it would accept emissions trading.

    Sequestration: Another option that would put a price on pollution is to make companies increasingly bear the costs of their emissions, by requiring investment and use of technology to make coal clean, or to capture emissions and bury them.

    Howard moving because voters alarmed: Greg Bourne had a long career as a petroleum executive for BP before joining environmental group WWF Australia as chief executive. Bourne says Howard is moving with alacrity on global warming because voters are genuinely alarmed at the doomsday scenarios.

    Business prepared to pay for its pollution: Australia will remain critically dependent on coal. Bourne says business is prepared to pick up at least some of the tab for its pollution, and is already "shadow pricing" – in plain terms, factoring the cost of a pollution price into its operations.

    Predicts "modest" carbon price: His prediction is the Government will unveil a "modest" carbon price, signal that it will take effect from a certain date, and call for submissions from business about the best way to design the system.

    Business willing to accept emissions trading: Business was also signalling that it is prepared to cop a global system of emissions trading.

  • Pareidolia

    pareidolia (payr.eye.DOH.lee.uh) n. The erroneous or fanciful perception of a pattern or meaning in something that is actually ambiguous or random.
    —pareidolic adj.

    So, says WordSpy. http://www.wordspy.com/words/pareidolia.asp

    “Not so fast”, says Jim Nutter of the NSW Northern Rivers.

    There is no doubt that we perceive patterns, or significance, in ambiguous, random phenomena. In fact, the whole of human knowledge is built on patterns that we have perceived in random phenomena. It is not just a human characteristic either. When animals hunt, they deduce the presence of their next meal in the movement of grass, or rustling in leaves.

    In fact, we train our perception to give significance to some patterns and not others. The notion that some patterns are meaningful and others erroneous, or fanciful is an arbitary construct that we place on our perception to make sense of it.

    Starting with the Barrow Point rock carvings, which he discovered and reported to the Australian Museum in the sixties, Jim has photographed a wide range of ambiguos and random phenomena which are clearly identifiable as human faces. He observes that once we begin to notice these seemingly coincidental “faces in the clouds” that the world becomes charged with meaning and significance, rather as it must have seemed to stone age people.

    He encourages you to submit your photographs of images of things that are not “really” there to compile a stock of photos of this phenomena.

    The kangaroo in the fig tree was shot by Peter King and published in the Echo newspaper. The face in the rock is from Jim’s collection. You will have to email your photos to us for the moment, while we work out how to use our image file upload thingy.

  • Is my Shampoo organic?

    Here is a typical list of ingredients from the back of an "organic" shampoo bottle. with an abbreviated explanation as to what is in them.

    Water (Aqua), Ammonium Lauryl Sulfate, Disodium Cocoamphodiacetate, Polyquaternium-39, Cocamine MEA, Stearic Acid, Dimethicone, Laureth-8, Succinoglycan, Glycol Distearate, Persea Gratissima (Avocado) Leaf Extract, Hydroxypropyl Guar, EDTA, Dimethlypabamidopropyl Lauryldimonium Tosylate, Propylene Glycol Stearate, Citric Acid, Fragrance (Parfum), DMDM Hydantoin. Not tested on animals.

    Shampoo is basically detergent that strips out grease and dirt combined with a series of compounds that deposit a film onto the hair to add shine and body.

    The detergents are the active component and raise the most health concerns. Detergent breaks up the bonds in water molecules so they dissolve the grease and dirt in your hair. Chemists describe such compounds as surfactants, because they reduce the surface tension of water. Add a drop of any detergent or shampoo to a drop of water and it will collapse. If mosquitoes try to land on water containing detergent they will fall through the surface of the water that they would normally walk on. Detergents have been used in the fight against malaria.

    Detergents allow other chemicals to penetrate the skin more easily. Concerns have been expressed that because surfactants break down skin cells they can accelerate the ageing process. Some classes of surfactants – the nonylphenols – have been reported to interfere with the sexual development of wildlife.

    The surfactants in this shampoo include Ammonium Lauryl sulfate, Laureth-8, Disodium Cocoamphodiacetate, Cocamine MEA

    Cocoamphodiacetate is a surfactant derived from coconut oil with a very good toxilogical profile.

    MEA (monoethylamine) is considered responsible for creating carcinogenic compounds that are absorbed through the skin. It is considered less dangerous than DEA (diethylamine) which has been banned in the US but is prevalent in Australia.

    Other active chemicals that are not involved directly in the cleaning process include EDTA (ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid). It is used to soften the water by depositing mineral salts and locking them up in the shampoo foam. It also preserves the shampoo.

    DMDM Hydantoin is a preservative that works by releasing formaldehyde into the shampoo to prevent mold, fungus and bacteria growing in it. Formaldehyde is a known carcinogen.

    The second group of compounds are those left behind on the hair to replace the natural oils. These compounds are relatively inert, though their manufacture may cause industrial pollution.

    Stearic Acid is made from blasting animal fat or saturated vegetable oils with water at high temperature and pressure and is used to give body to the shampoo. Propylene Glycol Stearate and Glycol Distearate are related compounds.

    The addition of avacodo oil Persea Gratissima (Avocado) Leaf Extract into the mix does little to interfere with the underlying chemistry of the shampoo.

    This shampoo contains Polyquaternium-39 which is cellulose derived from cotton, the silicone based Dimethicone as well as Succinoglycan and Hydroxypropyl Guar. Dimethlypabamidopropyl Lauryldimonium Tosylate is included to protect it from ultra violet radiation.

    The third main group of compounds are used to add fragrance. This shampoo label simply labels that group as Fragrance. Over 4,000 chemicals are used to manufacture fragrances, 95 per cent of them derived from petroleum and 84 per cent which have never been tested for safety. Fragrances are considered trade secrets so do not have to be declared on product labels.

    This is just one shampoo product. Conditioners contain a similarly strange mix of chemicals, and hair-colouring products that use synthetic dyes are probably even worse. For example, they may contain coal tar colours, listed on labels as FD&C and D&C, and made from bituminous coal. Or, they may contain phenylenediamine, another cancer causing agent. Some even contain lead. This is not only bad for you, but also the environment.

  • ‘Stability First’: Newspeak for rape of Iraq

    In AD 750 the Abbasid Dynasty "de-Bedouinized" Islam by defeating the Ummayad Dynasty based in Damascus. The culture of the Abbasid court ceased being Arab-only and started to include Persia and the Turks. Islam turned into a universal religion, no more constrained by geography. "Baldach" – that’s what European travelers called Baghdad up to the late 18th century – was catapulted to the center of the world.

    From AD 786-809, under fabled Haroon al-Rashid – who established relations with Tang Dynasty China and the "illiterate emperor" Charlemagne – Baghdad gave the world astronomy, alchemy, hydraulics, diplomacy, fiscal administration and the postal service. Up to the early 12th century it remained the most important intellectual center in the world.

    Baghdad had been under siege by the Assyrians and later by Cyrus the Great from Persia. But it was only in 1258 that Baghdad was sacked for the first time by what was then the equivalent of Desert Storm – the Mongols riding their lightning-quick horses under the command of Hulagu, Genghis Khan’s grandson. Legend has it that he erected a pyramid of 700,000 skulls out of his victims.

    In 1401, another foreign invader, the Turco-Mongol Tamerlan ("Timur the Lame"), devastated Baghdad yet again. In 2003, after the devastation of "shock and awe", came the Christian armies of President George W Bush. From the beginning the comparisons with Hulagu and Tamerlan were vivid in the popular imagination. Over time, Baghdadis – Sunni or Shi’ite – were saying, we will dictate our rhythm and impose ourselves over the occupiers. This is already happening.

    Quagmire Iraq is not a 21st-century video game of Arabs playing extras in a slow-motion Armageddon. This is a wrenching story with rivers of real blood and a terrible accumulation of real corpses. The story was engineered in Washington – and the plot would not be advancing were it not for the United States. The US bears all the moral and legal responsibility for the destruction of the fabled former capital of the caliphate and the de facto Western flank of the Arab nation.

    It is in this context that the current avalanche of Iraq-related newspeak in the US should be placed.

    The recent bloody holy month of Ramadan in Iraq has reflected the hellish mechanism unleashed by the invasion and occupation – the daily, gruesome banquet of death provoked by state-sponsored terror, counterinsurgency, stoked by sectarian hatred or the total collapse of the social contract.

    This logic of extermination of a society and culture was inbuilt in the process since March 2003. In fact, the systematic annihilation of 2-3% of the entire Iraqi population, according to a study by The Lancet, not to mention the 1 million people displaced since March 2003, follow the more than 500,000 children who died during the 1990s as victims of United Nations sanctions. Iraq has been systematically destroyed for more than 15 years, non-stop.

    And it gets worse, because for the Bush administration all this death and destruction is just a minor detail in the "big picture".

    In a perverse replay of what happened in the Vietnamese jungles, the Pentagon lost the asymmetric guerrilla war raging in the Sunni belt. Sunni Arabs are totally alienated. Seventy percent are in favor of attacking the occupiers, no holds barred. No wonder Saddam Hussein is still popular. This month, about 500 Sunni Arab tribal chiefs and former Ba’ath Party officials in the police, army and intelligence got together in al-Hindiya, 25 kilometers west of Kirkuk, to pledge allegiance to Saddam, qualified as "supreme combatant and legitimate president".

    It’s true that Saddam’s regime had already started to disintegrate from the inside after the Gulf War of 1991 – a process coupled with the devastating effects of UN sanctions. The resulting loss of civic spirit accelerated the re-tribalization of Iraq. Even as tribal affiliation nowadays is the only way to solve any problem in Iraq, for the silent majority what really matters is security: nobody is troubled by perceived (by the West) Sunni and Shi’ite divisions; and most Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen share plenty of social, cultural and commercial interests. Contrary to Western-propagated myth, Iraqi civil society as a whole – apart from a few factions – abhors civil war.

    The coalition of the drilling
    World public opinion must switch to red alert. The real, not virtual, future of Iraq will be decided in December. The whole point is a new oil law – which is in fact a debt-for-oil program concocted and imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This is the point of the US invasion – a return on investment on the hundreds of billions of dollars of US taxpayers’ money spent. It’s not war as politics by other means; it’s war as free-market opening by other means – full US access to the epicenter of the energy wars and the perfect geostrategic location for "taming", in the near future, both Russia and China.

    Very few observers have detailed what’s at stake. In US corporate media the silence is stratospheric.

    US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman duly landed in Baghdad this past summer, insisting that Iraqis must "pass a hydrocarbon law under which foreign companies can invest". Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani was convinced, and said the law would be passed by the end of 2006, as promised to the IMF.

    No wonder: the Green Zone US Embassy colossus has always made sure that the US controls – via well-paid Iraqi servants – the Petroleum Ministry, as well as all key management posts in key Iraqi ministries. The draft hydrocarbon law was reviewed by the IMF, reviewed by Bodman and reviewed by Big Oil executives. It was not and it will not be reviewed by Iraqi civil society: that was left to the fractious Iraqi parliament – which can be largely bought for a fistful of dinars.

    The Bush administration needs somebody to sign the law. The nation of Iraq as it emerged out of British imperial design is an artificial construct that can only be "tamed" by a hardcore strongman a la Saddam. It has to be "our" strongman, of course: when Saddam started to act independently he was smashed. Insistent rumors of a US-engineered coup to replace the hapless current premier Nuri al-Maliki have surfaced of late. Poor Maliki, if he clings to a minimum of integrity, can’t possibly sign the oil law. Enter the Washington/Green Zone-backed strongman a la Saddam: a likely candidate is former interim premier Iyad Allawi, who ordered the destruction of Fallujah in late 2004.

    No matter what happens in the US mid-term elections next month, this is the post-December scenario: Iraq enslaved by the IMF; Big Oil signing mega-lucrative production sharing agreements (PSAs); "partial" troop withdrawal; relentless guerrilla warfare; further disintegration; open road to partition.

    Vast swaths of the US electorate have now understood how the whole Iraqi adventure has been built on lies: lies about the causes of war, lies about the methodology of war, lies about the terrible consequences of war. Inevitably, the current media-targeted avalanche of Iraq-related newspeak had to be also meaningless. This includes "phased withdrawal", "empowering" the Iraqi government, "putting security ahead of democracy" and "partitioning Iraq". Surrealism in international relations would reach new highs (or lows) with the US ordering by decree that a sovereign nation must dismember itself. Compared with it, the current carnage in Baghdad – which is already divided anyway – would be a Disney flick.

    There’s more: the Shakespearean despair over "Redeploy and Contain" or "Stability First" – newspeak coined by Bush family consegliere James Baker’s Iraq Study Group, staffed with plenty of pro-war neo-conservatives. A notorious casualty of the newspeak war seems to be "stay the course" – replaced, according to Press Secretary Tony Snow, by "a study in constant motion". Anyway, the winner – after the mid-term elections – will be "Stability First", which is basically a remix, with a horn section, of "stay the course".

    How can Americans – and world public opinion – be engaged in serious, meaningful debate when the Iraq tragedy is reduced to a mere catch phrase? This incoherent whirlwind, this "study in constant motion", is the travesty that passes for Iraqi policy debate among educated elites.

    Another reading is more ominous. It spells the Bush administration and its attached elites losing control – of everything. And that’s how they can become even more dangerous. On October 19, Vice President Dick Cheney once again stated that the only way out in Iraq was "total victory". A recent historical parallel is nothing but gloomy. When the US was confronted with defeat in Vietnam, it did not "Redeploy and Contain": on the contrary, death and destruction were extended to Laos and Cambodia. Baker’s "Stability First" might contain undisclosed subtexts.

    "Total victory", in Cheney’s world view, means that the Bush administration was not, is not and will never be interested in Iraqi, or Middle Eastern, "democracy". What matters is control of the lightest, sweetest, most profitable crude oil on the planet, 112 billion barrels of it in proven reserves plus 220 billion barrels still to be exploited, at a cost as low as US$1 a barrel; a cluster of sprawling military bases; the largest embassy/fortress-by-the-Tigris in the world; and the indispensable client regime.

    In sum: a "Coalition of the Drilling" secured by the Pentagon’s Long War apparatus. It’s up to ancient and proud Baghdad to spoil the party. Baghdad survived and buried Hulagu. Baghdad survived and buried Tamerlan. Baghdad may as well survive and bury George W Bush.

  • Emanuel’s War Plan for Democrats

    In 2006, no matter which party controls the House, a majority will be committed to pursuing the war on Iraq–despite the fact that the Democratic rank and file and the general voting public oppose the war by large margins. (I hasten to add that this state of affairs can be reversed even after the sham election between the two War Parties.)

    What are Emanuel’s views on war and peace? Emanuel has just supplied the answer in the form of a scrawny book co-authored with Bruce Reed, modestly entitled: The Plan: Big Ideas for America. The authors obligingly boil each of the eight parts of "The Plan" down to a single paragraph. The section which embraces all of foreign policy is entitled "A New Strategy to End the War on Terror," a heading revealing in itself since "war on terror" is the way the neocons and the Israeli Lobby currently like to frame the discussion of foreign policy. Here is the book’s summary paragraph with my comments in parentheses:

    "A New Strategy to Win the War on Terror" ("War on Terror," as George Soros points out, is a false metaphor used by those who would drag us into military adventures not in our interest or that of humanity.)
    "We need to use all the roots of American power to make our country safe. (He begins by playing on fear.) America must lead the world’s fight against the spread of evil and totalitarianism, but we must stop trying to win that battle on our own. (Messianic imperialism.) We should reform and strengthen multilateral institutions for the twenty-first century, not walk away from them. We need to fortify the military’s "thin green line" around the world by adding to the U.S. Special Forces and the Marines, and by expanding the U.S. army by 100,000 more troops. (An even bigger military for the world’s most powerful armed forces, a very militaristic view of the way to handle the conflicts among nations. What uses does Emanuel have in mind for those troops?) We should give our troops a new GI Bill to come home to. (More material incentives to induce the financially strapped to sign up as cannon fodder.) Finally we must protect our homeland and civil liberties by creating a new domestic counterterrorism force like Britain’s MI5. (A new domestic spying operation is an obvious threat to our civil liberties; MI5 holds secret files on one in 160 adults in Britain along with files on 53,000 organizations.)

    There it is straight from the horse’s mouth.(2)

    How does Emanuel, the man who has screened and chosen the 2006 Democratic candidates for Congress, feel specifically about the war on Iraq, the number one issue on voters’ minds. Emanuel and Reed do not so much as mention Iraq in their book except in terms of the "war on terror." Nor does Emanuel mention Iraq on his web site as among the important issues facing us, quite amazing omission and one shared by Chuck Schumer who is his equivalent of the Senate side, chairing the DSCC (Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee). However a very recent profile in Fortune (9/25/2006), "Rahm Emanuel, Pitbull Politician," by Washington Bureau chief Nina Easton notes: "On Iraq, Emanuel has steered clear of the withdraw-now crowd, preferring to criticize Bush for military failures since the 2003 invasion. ‘The war never had to turn out this way,’ he told me at one of his campaign stops. In January 2005, when asked by Meet the Press’s Tim Russert whether he would have voted to authorize the war-‘knowing that there are no weapons of mass destruction’-Emanuel answered yes. (He didn’t take office until after the vote.) ‘I still believe that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do, okay?’ he added."(3)

    When Jack Murtha made his proposal for withdrawal from Iraq, Emanuel quickly declared that "Jack Murtha went out and spoke for Jack Murtha." As for Iraq policy, Emanuel added: "At the right time, we will have a position." That was November, 2005. In June, 2006, it was obviously time, and Emanuel finally revealed his policy in a statement on the floor of the House during debate over Iraq, thus: "The debate today is about whether the American people want to stay the course with an administration and a Congress that has walked away from its obligations or pursue a real strategy for success in the war on terror. We cannot achieve the end of victory and continue to sit and watch, stand pat, stay put, status quo and that is the Republican policy. Democrats are determined to take the fight to the enemy." The refrain is familiar; more troops are the means and victory in Iraq is the goal.

    The war on Iraq benefited Israel by laying waste a country seen to be one of its major adversaries. Emanuel’s commitment to Israel (4) and his Congressional service to it are not in doubt. The most recent evidence was his attack on the U.S. puppet Prime Minister of Iraq, Nouri al Maliki, because Maliki had labeled Israel’s attack on Lebanon as an act of "aggression." Emanuel called on Maliki to cancel his address to Congress; and he was joined by his close friend and DSCC counterpart, Sen. Chuck Schumer, who asked; "Which side is he (Maliki) on when it comes to the war on terror?" In terms of retired Senator Fritz Holling’s statement that Congress is Israeli occupied territory, Rahm Emanuel must be considered one of the occupying troops. And he certainly is a major cog in the Israel Lobby as defined by Mearsheimer and Walt. Nor is the idea that the Lobby exists and has tremendous influence on Middle East policy any longer a taboo in the minds of the general populace. According to a poll just carried out by Zogby International for CNI (5), 39% of the American public "agree" or "somewhat agree" that "the work of the Israel lobby on Congress and the Bush administration has been a key factor for going to war in Iraq and now confronting Iran." A similar number, 40%, "strongly disagreed" or "somewhat disagreed" with this position. Some 20% of the public were not sure.

    But in some respects, Emanuel is a mysterious fellow, as evidenced by his biography, which is readily available on Wikipedia and in the piece in Fortune (3). But there are a few things missing or not fully explained. First, as is often pointed out, Emanuel’s physician father was an Israeli émigré; but, according to Leon Hadar, he also worked during the 1940s with the notorious Irgun, which was labeled as a terrorist organization by the British authorities.(6) Perhaps Rahm’s current interest in terrorism was first kindled at his father’s Irgun knee.

    Second, during the 1991 Gulf War, Emanuel was a civilian volunteer in Israel, "rust-proofing brakes on an army base in northern Israel." (Wikipedia, New Republic). This is peculiar on two counts. Here the U.S. goes to war with Iraq, but Emanuel, a U.S. citizen, volunteers not for his country, but for Israel. Moreover, here is a well-connected Illinois political figure with a father who had been in the Irgun, but he is assigned to "rust-proof brakes" on "an army base." Maybe.

    Third, immediately upon his return from his desert sojourn, Emanuel at once became a major figure in the Clinton campaign "who wowed the team from the start, opening a spigot on needed campaign funds."(3) How did he do that after being isolated overseas, and with no experience in national politics? Fourth, after leaving the Clinton White House, he decided that he needed some accumulated wealth and "security" if he were to stay in politics. So he went to work for Bruce Wasserstein, a major Democratic donor and Wall Street financier.

    According to Easton, "Over a 2 1/2-year period he helped broker deals-often using political connections-for Wasserstein Perella. According to congressional financial disclosures, he earned more than $18 million during that period. His deals included Unicom’s merger with Peco Energy and venture fund GTCR Golder Rauner’s purchase of SBC subsidiary SecurityLink. But friends say his compensation also benefited from two sales of the Wasserstein firm itself, first to Dresdner Bank and then to Allianz AG." Again for a newcomer to haul in $18 million in two years is almost miraculous. How did he do it? Next Emanuel won a seat in Congress in 2002, and by 2006 he was chair of the DCCC. Another near miraculous rise.

    But Emanuel and his fellow hawks may yet fail to get their way. Major figures among the rulers of U.S. empire, and their well-compensated advisors, from James Baker to Jimmy Carter to Zbigniew Brzezinski to Mearsheimer and Walt, see disaster looming unless the neocons of both War Parties with their dual loyalties to the U.S. and Israel are brought to heel. Second and more important, the people are fed up with the war on Iraq and wary of other wars the hawks like Emanuel have planned for us. The politicians who win office, whether Rove’s Republicans or Emanuel’s Democrats, will have to deal with this rising tide of anger or risk losing their sinecures. That risk is offset by the machinations of Emanuel and others to guarantee that there is no genuine opposition party or movement. And that lack of a real opposition is a problem we must solve.

    John Walsh can be reached at john.endwar@gmail.com.

    (1) http://www.counterpunch.com/walsh10142006.html

    (2) Emanuel and Reed also refer approvingly to Peter Beinart, the neocon warrior theoretician for the Democrats, warehoused at Marty Peretz’s The New Republic, thus: "In his recent book, The Good Fight, Peter Beinart, explains why a tough new national security policy is as essential to the future of of progressive politics as a united front against totalitarianism and communism was to the New Deal and the Great Society." (This chapter of The Plan is titled: "Who Sunk My Battleship." Needless to say, the battleship in question is not the USS Liberty.) Emanuel and Reed also like Anne-Marie Slaughter’s proposal for "a new division of labor in which the United Nations takes on economic and social assistance and an expanded (!) NATO takes over the burden of collective security." In other words the UN can do the charity work while the US-dominated NATO is policeman to the world. Quite a vision. And their call for more troops is shared by the Republican neocons, with William Kristol’s Weekly Standard calling for 250,000 more for the army this past week.

    (3) http://money.cnn.com/2006/09/17/

    (4) http://www.radioislam.org/islam/english/jewishp/usa/rahmzion.htm

    (5) http://www.cnionline.org/learn/polls/czandlobby/index2.htm

    (6) J. Palestine Studies, 23: 84(1994).

  • Drought-hit cattle saved for precious genetic lines