News Clips
1) The Vikings' Crystal Compass?... History/Interest
2) National Park Service e-mails about Occupy D.C.... OWS/Truth
3) World's Tiniest Chameleon Discovered... Nature/Interest
4) Obama's new budget will put America in the poor house... Obama/Economic Failure
5) The Global Warming Hoax is Now Killing People... Environmentalism/Anti Human
6) Obama OMB Admits Obamacare Penalties Are Not Taxes... Obama/Double Talk and Lies
7) Obama’s Youth Shaped His Nuclear-Free Vision... Obama/History
8) Mystery Solved: ‘Blue Faced’ Appalachian Family Caused by Rare Medical Condition... Biology/Interest
9) WI Elementary School Confiscates, Bans 2nd Grader’s Christian-Themed Valentines... Anti Religious Freedom/Progressive Schools
1) The Vikings' Crystal Compass?... History/Interest
http://www.archaeology.org/1203/trenches/vikings_iceland_spar_crystal_navigation.html
March/April 2012
A transparent calcite crystal found 30 years ago on a ship that sank in the English Channel in 1592 could help explain how Vikings were able to sail from Norway to North America 1,000 years ago without magnetic compasses.
The sailors likely relied on the sun and the stars as their guides. Now researchers from France's University of Rennes have demonstrated how a crystal called an Iceland spar (found in Iceland and Scandinavia, among other places), which was recovered from the shipwreck, could be used-even on a cloudy day-to ascertain the sun's position to within a few degrees.
When light passes through the crystal, it is double refracted-the light is split in two, creating an effect similar to a 3-D movie viewed without light-polarizing glasses. According to the authors, as a person holds up the crystal to the sun and rotates it, there's a particular angle at which the two beams of light appear equally bright. By holding the spar at the same orientation and scanning a cloudy sky for a point where the beams line up, Vikings could locate the sun through cloud cover. "Vikings could have exploited the high sensitivity of the human eye to small contrasts," the authors write in Proceedings of the Royal Society A.
2) National Park Service e-mails about Occupy D.C.... OWS/Truth
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/documents/occupy-dc-emails.html
National Park Service e-mails about Occupy D.C.
As Occupy activists set up camp in Washington, National Park Service officials exchanged e-mails about how best to handle the growing protests at McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza. This is a selection of those e-mails, obtained by The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act.
Richard Bradley To
A ..
10/19/2011 08:05 PM cc Rick Reinhard
Karyn LeBlanc
Subject RE: Occupy DC Update -- McPherson Square
Hi Bob,
We welcomed the chance to meet on Monday and get a chance to understand the present situation and
the context in which you are working, We expressed our frustration about the lack of communication
with us in advance of the emergence of these encampments in downtown. We have assumed we were
moving toward and improvement in at least this aspect of the situation. But Dave reached out to you
yesterday and I tried to reach Steve today. Is there a any way we can get this matter improved while we
hope we are moving toward a remedy for the present safety and sanitation concerns?
Rich
From: David Kamperin
Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2011 4:20 PM
Cc: Richard Bradley; Rick Reinharmi; Karyn LeBlanc
Subject: FW: Occupy DC Update -- McPherson Square
Superintendent Vogel
Please see attached the photos taken today of conditions at McPherson. Again troubling is the flammable
material being stored on site (notice close proximity of one of the generators to the sidewalk) and the
cooking. Also disturbing is the recent stacking of lumber and wood for either use for a bonfire or weapons
against law enforcement. The trash continues to pile up within the park and then are removed by the
occupants and dumped on the public sidewalks. Recent new rat infestation borrowing has been observed
in nearby tree box spaces. As the email below indicates the unhealthy and unsanitary conditions continue
as food is dumped as compost, dogs run free throughout the park and children (observed in one of the
photos) also play where they go to the bathroom,
We look forward to a more proactive response -- to include increased trash pick ups and enforcement of
these severe public safety issues.
. oa cc
Qlwict
TCW 1 tzso ri street. ww
Suite 1000
ti washington, DC 20005
David K. Karoperin
Pvb?? Space Marugmwvi
Preventing terrorism is everyb0dy's business.
00034968 NPS-NGR-B01-00002-000008 Page 1 ?r2
lf you SEE something, SAY something.
Call the Metropolitan Police Department at (202) 727-9099 or email at to report
suspicious activity or behavior that has already occurred.
Call 911 to report in--progress threats or emergencies.
To learn more, visit
From: Blake Holuh
Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2011 4:04 PM
T0: David Kamperin
Cc: Kenneth Gregory
Subject: Occupy DC Update McPherson Square
Dave.
As we had discussed earlier, Kenny and I visited the Occupy DC site today. We noted that the site had
expanded since Monday, roughly totaling 125-150 people with nearly 40 tents. The park grounds
themselves look to be in poor to dire condition due to all of the activity. Also, the demonstration has two
working generators which they seem to be rotating out. They also have a storage tent which looks like a
quasi-pantry for demonstrators to receive rations. Additionally, the smell was quite putrid when we
walked through the encampment which most likely stems from the lack of sanitary conditions and the
presence of dogs. Lastly, we noted around 15 or so trash bags stacked on the corner of and St. I
have also attached photos for your viewing.
Let me know if you have any questions or comments. Thanks!
Blake Hnlub, MPA
Quality Control Manager
Public Space Mamzgemcnt
Downtown DC BID
1250 Street, NW Suite 1000
Was/ainiton, DC 20005
000:14968 NPS-NCR-B01-00002-000008 Page 2 or 2
or email at to report
suspicious activity or behavior that has already occurred.
Call 911 to report in--progress threats or emergencies.
To learn more, visit
From: Blake Holuh
Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2011 4:04 PM
T0: David Kamperin
Cc: Kenneth Gregory
Subject: Occupy DC Update McPherson Square
Dave.
As we had discussed earlier, Kenny and I visited the Occupy DC site today. We noted that the site had
expanded since Monday, roughly totaling 125-150 people with nearly 40 tents. The park grounds
themselves look to be in poor to dire condition due to all of the activity. Also, the demonstration has two
working generators which they seem to be rotating out. They also have a storage tent which looks like a
quasi-pantry for demonstrators to receive rations. Additionally, the smell was quite putrid when we
walked through the encampment which most likely stems from the lack of sanitary conditions and the
presence of dogs. Lastly, we noted around 15 or so trash bags stacked on the corner of and St. I
have also attached photos for your viewing.
Let me know if you have any questions or comments. Thanks!
Blake Hnlub, MPA
Quality Control Manager
Public Space Mamzgemcnt
Downtown DC BID
1250 Street, NW Suite 1000
Was/ainiton, DC 20005
000:14968 NPS-NCR-B01-00002-000008 Page 2 or 2
Karen Cucurullo/NACC/NPS To Bob Vo NPS, "Robbin Owen"
PM
VVTV
it
Subject Re: Fwd: McPherson Park- 2 sani jons installed 11-4-1
Not that I am aware of.
From: Bob Vogel
Sent: 11/05/2011 03:26 PM EDT
To: Karen Cucurullo
Subject: Fw: Fwd: McPherson Park- 2 sanijons installed 11-4-1
We didn't install these did we'?
From: David K?mperin_
Sent: ll/05/20lI 03:01 AM GMT
To: Bob Vo=?cl? Steve Lorenzetti; Karen Cucurullo
Subject: Fwd: McPherson Park- 2 sani jons installed ll-4-ll
Superintendent Vogel
This is clearly disappointing and it appears that only response to this illegal activity is to
enable them and make their unlawful camping more comfortable, It also appears that NPS has
accepted this and will continue to promote this illegal activity instead of enforcing current laws.
Ironically the warning signs posted are still being ignored- generators are running, gas containers
with flammable liquids arc being stored near propane stoves--a potential grave risk to the public
safety ofthe residents, workers and visitors near the area- not to mention the obvious presence of
illegal narcotics (marijuana can readily be smelled throughout the encampment).
Finally, I am sure that if these protestors attempted their encampment on the National Mall with
ilarmnable liquids, potential projectiles and illegal drugs openly being used the response by NPS
would be substantially different. Sadly when activities are adversely impacting businesses and
the rights of workers and residents to enjoy the park occurs out of site of the White House, Dept
of Interior and NPS the response appears to be to make them more comfortable. When severe
cold weather arrives I imagine the staked pile of wood will be used for a bonfire to warm the
campers up.
I hope NPS has a "line inthe mud" at McPherson that when crossed by this group they take
action, and I hope this action is not reactive because of a grave or injurious incident to an
innocent victim.
Thank you-
David Kamperin
Downtown DC BID
00034968 Page 1 ori
Occupy D.C.: E-mails reveal National Park Service struggled over how to respond to protester camp
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/2012/02/13/gIQAFyWxDR_story.html
February 14 2012
As waves of Occupy protesters set up high-profile camps in two downtown parks this fall, the National Park Service juggled widespread public health concerns, turf scrapes with District officials and its own media spin, recently released documents show.
E-mails from senior Park Service officials reveal there was at times considerable confusion within the agency as leaders struggled with their message and response to sustained criticism while Occupy D.C. camps in McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza grew more permanent.
The more-than-400 pages of documents and e-mails reviewed by The Post offered only limited insight in how Park Service officials made their decisions, but they suggest that Park Police were constrained by outside concerns that were not evident within the pages.
The documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, show no indication that the decision to allow the protesters to stay in the parks was driven by high-ranking officials at the Obama White House or the Department of Interior, as Republican critics have alleged.
But in an e-mail on Nov. 1, U.S. Park Police Chief Teresa C. Chambers suggested that her agency had minimal input in macro decisions about the future of the camps.
“This is bigger than the USPP,” Chambers wrote to several police officials in response to a request from a spokesman about how to make public a reported assault at McPherson Square.
Sgt. David Schlosser, a Park Police spokesman, said Tuesday that the e-mail was designed to reinforce that the Occupy protest should not be treated differently “simply because of the media attention.”
For months, the Park Service said the protesters’ First Amendment right to conduct a 24-hour protest vigil outweighed broad concerns from downtown and District officials that the camps were a public health hazard.
But by late January, under pressure from congressional Republicans and local leaders, Park Service officials announced a new crackdown on camping in the parks. During a dramatic early-morning raid Feb. 4, Park Police swept through McPherson Square, taking down dozens of tents and removing piles of trash in what officials said was a “nuisance abatement” for rats and other hazards. A similar encampment at Freedom Plaza was swept the following day.
Dozens of e-mails to and from Steve Whitesell, the Park Service’s regional director, and Bob Vogel, superintendent of the National Mall and memorial parks, from October through mid-December show business leaders voiced grave concerns about health and safety soon after the protests began in early October. Downtown leaders raised questions about flammable materials, potential weapons, rats and illegal drugs.
“They are destroying McPherson,” Richard H. Bradley, Downtown DC Business Improvement District executive director, wrote in an e-mail to District and federal officials on Oct. 17, urging them to devise a “containment strategy” for the protests.
Park Police and Park Service officials acknowledged that the protests were escalating, but their reluctance to challenge the protesters resulted in small-scale turf battles with the District.
Chambers told two deputies via e-mail that “things are heating up” after she received a complaint from the business improvement group. Then, on Nov. 7, after three Occupy protesters were struck by vehicles at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Whitesell wrote in an e-mail to staff that the “natives” were “getting restless.”
In early November, Park Service officials told District police they did not want them to go into McPherson Square to issue fliers outlining city laws.
“We have indicated our preference that MPD not do this as we think it has potential to escalate the tenuous relationship between MPD and occupy,” Vogel wrote to Whitesell. ”We are not sure whether MPD will honor our request. I have asked that if anything goes wrong, not to call us in the middle of the movie tonight!”
Despite that request, two District political officials entered McPherson Square that night without incident to talk with protesters, according to a video recording of the meeting on YouTube.
Long before the public furor heated up, Park Service officials worked carefully on their “messaging” to defend their decision to the media and public, the documents show. On Oct. 11, chief agency spokesman David Barna sent other agency spokespeople “some thoughts” for them to keep in their “back pocket” when speaking about “First Amendment demonstrations” and why they were permitting the protesters to stay.
Barna also organized a conference call on “messaging” in late November at the request of Lisa Mendelson-Ielmini, a deputy regional director for the Capital region.
Even Jon Jarvis, the director of the Park Service, got involved in shaping the agency’s message. When the agency got an interview request from Washington Post columnist Robert McCartney in early December, Jarvis told agency and Interior Department officials it was a “a good opportunity to distinguish the work of NPS/USPP in Washington as the center of First Amendment experiences.”
“The focus by USPP on ‘quality of life’ ensures the safety of occupiers and visitors while respecting their rights to protest,” Jarvis wrote.
The documents also reveal the frustration of neighbors.
“Just spent 50 minutes being transferred from one national park department to the other - no one taking responsibility for this mess you all have created,” one neighbor, Laurie Carter DeWitt, wrote in an e-mail Nov. 22. “The grass is ruined, the trash is horrendous and the rat population has at least tripled. At night I get to listen to their parties. . . . I get to hear sex, see public urination and be subjected to early morning drums on my one day off - Saturday.”
Vogel, the superintendent of the Mall and memorial parks, wrote back that while the sudden appearance of the encampment “is disturbing to many,” court rulings that support “temporary structures” for First Amendment demonstrations are allowed. “Enforcement action in this area is limited and challenging,” he conceded.
After two portable toilets were delivered to McPherson Square in early November, Park Service officials appeared confused about who provided them, e-mails suggest.
In early December, after protesters built a two-story wooden structure in McPherson Square, officials struggled to identify what building codes apply to federal parks in the District, records show. It was later dismantled.
But Park Service officials closely monitored the protesters and their activities, e-mails show. Each day, for example, officials received a briefing paper of police calls to the park, planned marches and news clippings on Occupy Wall Street.
Still, Park Service officials showed tolerance for the protesters longer than Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D). He initially supported the protests but later demanded that they be moved from McPherson Square and that the federal government reimburse the city for the estimated $1.6 million costs.
“I think it’s time we plan together for a serious change in how we have been approaching them in DC,” Gray’s chief of staff, Christopher Murphy, wrote on Nov. 17. “We are increasingly concerned.”
3) World's Tiniest Chameleon Discovered... Nature/Interest
http://www.livescience.com/18481-world-tiniest-chameleon-discovered.html
14 February 2012
A juvenile of the tiniest chameleon species ever discovered perches on a researcher's fingertip.
A species of chameleon small enough to easily perch on a match head has been discovered on a tiny island off Madagascar, a group of scientists has announced.
In addition to the discovery of Brookesia micra, now the tiniest chameleon ever discovered, the researchers also announced the discovery of three additional tiny chameleon species.
Adult males of the B. micra species grow to only just over a half-inch (16 millimeters) from nose to bottom, making them one of the smallest vertebrates ever found on Earth.
From nose to tail, adults of both sexes grow to only 1 inch (30 mm) in length.
4) Obama's new budget will put America in the poor house... Obama/Economic Failure
http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/2012/02/obamas-new-budget-will-put-america-poor-house/269991#.Tzvnsb_0_ww.facebook
How credible is President Obama on taxes and spending? In recent days, he's repeatedly condemned the "fact" that billionaire investor Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than does his secretary. So in the 2013 budget proposal Obama unveiled yesterday, he proposes a new millionaires tax to make sure people like Buffett pay their "fair share." But guess what we find when we look a little closer at the president's tax proposals, as former New York Sun managing editor and current futureofcapitalism.com blogger Ira Stoll did? We find a bottom-line tax cut for Buffett's firm, Berkshire Hathaway Corp., worth an estimated $1.1 billion and of about $241 million for him personally.* Let there be no further denials that Obama is practicing precisely the demagoguery of a class warrior.
Then there is Obama's smug White House chief of staff, Jack Lew, who went on two different Sunday news shows to talk up the president's new budget. Twice he claimed Senate Democrats haven't passed a budget in more than 1,000 days because "you can't pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes and you can't get 60 votes without bipartisan support. So unless Republicans are willing to work with Democrats in the Senate, Harry Reid is not going to be able to get a budget passed." In fact, Senate rules only require a simple majority of 51 votes to approve a budget.
But wait, there's more to the Obama record of double-talk and misrepresentation about federal taxes and spending. Take his claim that his budget cuts the deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that most of Obama's deficit "savings" come either from spending cuts already enshrined in law or money that was never requested for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bottom line: Over the next decade, Obama's budget raises taxes by $1.9 trillion, raises spending $2.7 trillion, and increases the debt $3.6 trillion. Higher taxes, higher spending and more debt -- that is Obama's plan for the United States.
Less than a month after Obama was sworn into office, he hosted a "fiscal responsibility" summit at the White House where he pledged "to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office." And the first budget Obama produced projected he would do just that. It showed a $1.7 trillion deficit for 2009 and a $581 billion deficit for 2012. But then reality intervened. Obama's $757 billion economic stimulus program failed to get the economy growing again. His Obamacare is driving health care costs ever higher, even before it is fully implemented. And he just "doubled down" on throwing more tax dollars at failed green energy efforts like the Solyndra bankruptcy. The result? Now Obama asks Americans to accept a $1.33 trillion deficit in 2012 and deficits every year for the next decade averaging $1.4 trillion.
What this country needs is an honest leader who will tell the truth about our entitlement spending crisis and identify real reforms. But Obama's latest budget does none of that. Instead, he offers double doses of deficits, tax hikes and crony capitalism. America deserves better.
* This editorial originally appeared without making clear the $1.1 billion tax cut was for the Buffet firm, while his personal reduction was estimated at $241 million.
5) The Global Warming Hoax is Now Killing People... Environmentalism/Anti Human
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/44602?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=facebook
February 13, 2012
By Friday, February 10th, an estimated 500 Europeans had died from the freezing weather gripping the continent. This is the price they and British citizens are paying for embracing the global warming hoax, spending billions for wind power when they should have been building coal-fired and other sources of energy to heat their homes and businesses.
As the British daily, The Telegraph, reported on Friday, “Serbia has started implementing power cuts in a desperate bid to stave off the collapse of its national grid as the country suffers the effects of days of freezing temperatures.”
I and others have been warning for years that the Earth has been cooling since 1998 and that the planet is on the cusp of a new ice age because the average length of an interglacial period of warmth between such ages is now coming to an end after the passage of some 11,500 years.
All aspects of global warming legislation and spending programs must be utterly reversed if we are not going to see huge losses of life and the disruption of entire economies.
The Ottawa Citizen published an Agence France Presse article on Friday reporting that “Thick ice closed vast swaths of the Danube on Thursday, crippling shipping on Europe’s busiest waterway, as the death toll from bitter cold across the continent rose…as it has every day for nearly two weeks.” The report noted that “Navigation was impossible or restricted in Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria, as ice covered the river or formed dangerous floes in shipping lanes.”
No shipping means no delivery of coal and oil and no shipping of food and other necessities. Europe is freezing over as the United States has been experiencing an unusually mild winter thus far. That, too, is likely to yield to the increased cooling of the planet and then, maybe, Americans will realize the threat to their lives that the closing of coal-fired plants, instigated by the Environmental Protection Agency, really means.
In England, the Mail, reported on Sunday, February 12th, that large numbers of its elderly citizens are being “frozen to death as fuel bills soar: hypothermia cases among the elderly double in five years.” England, now gripped by foolish green notions of renewable energy, has covered itself with wind turbines, despoiling its countryside and coasts while proving unreliable and incapable of meeting its energy needs.
Figures showed that “1,876 patients were treated in hospital for hypothermia in 2010-2011, up from 950 in 2006-2007” reported the Mail. “Three-quarters of victims were pensioners, with cases soaring among the over-60s more than any other age group.”
In Europe, other news organizations reported that “Many of the dead were homeless people, who literally froze to death as the temperatures dropped to minus 50 degrees in some parts of the continent. Their bodies were found in the streets buried under snow, in rivers, and in doorways. Dozens of people were also killed in weather-related accidents.”
Writing in a Turkish newspaper, the Hurriyet Daily News, Sophie Quintin Adali, an analyst for a project of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, said, “As if the debt crisis weren’t bad enough news, the climate freeze sweeping across Europe is wreaking havoc by severely disrupting travel, business and people’s lives. Local authorities, indeed whole countries, are caught poorly prepared.” Turkey is experiencing record snowfall and low temperatures.
“The lack of readiness should come as no surprise because for decades the sensationalist message of global warming has dominated the public area,” said Ms. Adali.
“Politicians and decades of political environmentalism have a lot to answer for,” said Ms. Adali. “The man-made climate theory…is still supported by a mighty European Union bureaucracy and a green network addicted to public funds.” Even now, the Green Climate Fund “through which millions of taxpayer’s money will still be disbursed” is threatening the lives and the economy of people worldwide.
The current freeze is not just affecting Europe, but reaching across the Mediterranean to North African nations. And at some point America will feel it too.
We have not built a single new nuclear plant in America since 1978. EPA rules are forcing the closure of coal-fired plants throughout the nation. The national grid for the distribution of electricity is in need of upgrades.
The nation’s policies are controlled by the most environmentally insane administration in its history, wasting billions on so-called green energy. Its new budget raises taxes and proposes a trillion-dollar deficit without any significant effort to cut the spending that has left this and future generations in debt while the price of gas soars to new heights.
America and the rest of the world have been horribly deceived by the United Nations Intergovernmental Climate Change Panel that continues to drive the global warming hoax. The lying scientists who got on the global warming gravy train, the politicians that embraced it, and the media that misled millions are all culpable, all responsible.
They should be driven from office, defunded, and chased through the streets like villagers in pursuit of Frankenstein.
People are freezing to death in their homes and in the streets. What will it take to drive a stake into the heart of the global warming monster?
6) Obama OMB Admits Obamacare Penalties Are Not Taxes... Obama/Double Talk and Lies
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/291139/obama-omb-admits-obamacare-penalties-are-inoti-taxes-daniel-foster
February 15, 2012
Rep. Scott Garrett (R., N.J.) had a nice gambit just now in a hearing with President Obama’s acting OMB director Jeffrey Zients.
First he asked Zients if the Obama budget imposes any new taxes on Americans making less than $200,000. When Zients answered that it did not, Garrett followed up by asking if an individual making less than $200,000 a year opted not to carry health insurance, in contravention of the Affordable Care Act, is the fine associated with that decision a tax?
After some hemming and hawing, Zients answered that the fine did not constitute an tax. Which is a problem, considering the Obama administration’s entire case before the Supreme Court is premised on those fines being construed as taxes, not penalties.
7) Obama’s Youth Shaped His Nuclear-Free Vision... Obama/History
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/world/05nuclear.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
July 4, 2009
In the depths of the cold war, in 1983, a senior at Columbia University wrote in a campus newsmagazine, Sundial, about the vision of “a nuclear free world.” He railed against discussions of “first- versus second-strike capabilities” that “suit the military-industrial interests” with their “billion-dollar erector sets,” and agitated for the elimination of global arsenals holding tens of thousands of deadly warheads.
The student was Barack Obama, and he was clearly trying to sort out his thoughts. In the conclusion, he denounced “the twisted logic of which we are a part today” and praised student efforts to realize “the possibility of a decent world.” But his article, “Breaking the War Mentality,” which only recently has been rediscovered, said little about how to achieve the utopian dream.
Twenty-six years later, the author, in his new job as president of the United States, has begun pushing for new global rules, treaties and alliances that he insists can establish a nuclear-free world.
“I’m not naïve,” President Obama told a cheering throng in Prague this spring. “This goal will not be reached quickly - perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence.”
Yet no previous American president has set out a step-by-step agenda for the eventual elimination of nuclear arms. Mr. Obama is starting relatively small, using a visit to Russia that starts Monday to advance an intense negotiation, with a treaty deadline of the year’s end, to reduce the arsenals of the nuclear superpowers to roughly 1,500 warheads each, from about 2,200. In an interview on Saturday, Mr. Obama, conscious of his critics, stressed that “I’ve made clear that we will retain our deterrent capacity as long as there is a country with nuclear weapons.”
But reducing arsenals, he insisted, would be the first step toward giving the United States and a growing body of allies the power to remake the nuclear world. Among the goals: halting weapons programs in North Korea and Iran, discouraging states from abandoning the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and ending global production of fuel for nuclear arms, a step sure to upset Pakistan, India and Israel.
Even before those battles are joined, opposition is rising. “This is dangerous, wishful thinking,” Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, and Richard Perle, an architect of the Reagan-era nuclear buildup that appalled Mr. Obama as an undergraduate, wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal. They contend that Mr. Obama is, indeed, a naïf for assuming that “the nuclear ambitions of Kim Jong-il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be curtailed or abandoned in response to reductions in the American and Russian deterrent forces.”
In the interview, the president described his agenda as the best way to move forward in a turbulent world.
“It’s naïve for us to think,” he said, “that we can grow our nuclear stockpiles, the Russians continue to grow their nuclear stockpiles, and our allies grow their nuclear stockpiles, and that in that environment we’re going to be able to pressure countries like Iran and North Korea not to pursue nuclear weapons themselves.”
Realist or dreamer, Mr. Obama has an interest in global denuclearization that arises from what can best be described as a lost chapter of his life. Though he has written two memoirs, he has volunteered few details about his two years at Columbia.
“People assume he’s a novice,” said Michael L. Baron, who taught Mr. Obama in a Columbia seminar on international politics and American policy around the time he wrote the Sundial article. “He’s been thinking about these issues for a long time. It’s not like one of his advisers said, ‘Why don’t you throw this out?’ ”
In a paper for Dr. Baron, Mr. Obama analyzed how a president might go about negotiating nuclear arms reductions with the Russians - exactly what he is seeking to do this week.
At critical junctures of Mr. Obama’s career, the subject of nuclear disarmament has kept reappearing. Now both he and his agenda face the ultimate test: limiting nuclear arms at the very moment many experts fear the beginning of a second nuclear age and a rush of new weapons states - especially if Iran proves capable of making atomic warheads.
The Seminar
“I personally came of age,” Mr. Obama wrote in “The Audacity of Hope,” his second memoir, “during the Reagan presidency.”
It was a time when President Ronald Reagan began a trillion-dollar arms buildup, called the Soviet Union “an evil empire” and ordered scores of atomic detonations under the Nevada desert. Some Reagan aides talked of fighting and winning a nuclear war.
The popular response was the nuclear freeze movement. Dozens of books warned that Mr. Reagan’s policies threatened to end civilization and most life on Earth. In June 1982, a million protesters gathered in Central Park, their placards reading “Bread Not Bombs” and “Freeze or Burn.” The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops issued a pastoral letter denouncing nuclear war.
Many Columbia students campaigned for the freeze movement, which sought a halt to additional nuclear arms deployments. Mr. Obama explored going further.
In the interview, Mr. Obama noted that he was too young to “remember having to do drills under the desk.” But as a student “interested broadly in foreign policy,” he recalled, he focused on “a central question: how would the United States and the Soviet Union effectively manage these nuclear arsenals, and were there ways to dial down the dangers that humanity faced?”
In his senior year, he began Dr. Baron’s seminar on presidential decision-making in American foreign policy. The first semester, starting in fall 1982, covered such cold-war flashpoints as the Cuban missile crisis - a dramatic study in the decision-making style of President John F. Kennedy. In the second semester, students focused on particular topics, and Mr. Obama wrote a lengthy paper about how to negotiate with the Soviets to cut nuclear arsenals.
“His focus was the nature of the strategic talks and what kind of negotiating positions might be put forward,” Dr. Baron said. “It was not a polemical paper - not arguing that the U.S. should have this or that position. It was how to get from here to there and avoid misperception and conflict.
“He got an A,” recalled Dr. Baron, who now runs a digital media business. Later, he wrote Mr. Obama a recommendation for Harvard Law School.
It was during that seminar that Mr. Obama wrote his Sundial article, profiling two campus groups, Arms Race Alternatives and Students Against Militarism. Photographs with the March 1983 article showed students at an antiwar rally in front of Butler Library.
The Article
Mr. Obama’s journalistic voice was edgy with disdain for what he called “the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country” amid “the growing threat of war.” The two groups, he wrote, “visualizing the possibilities of destruction and grasping the tendencies of distorted national priorities, are throwing their weight into shifting America off the dead-end track.”
Despite Mr. Obama’s sympathetic portrayal of the two groups, the article seemed to question the popular goal of freezing nuclear arsenals rather than reducing them, the topic of his seminar paper. Mr. Obama wondered if the freeze movement “stems from young people’s penchant for the latest ‘happenings.’ ”
What clearly excited him was the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which would have ended the testing and development of new weapons, and thus, in the minds of arms controllers, the nuclear arms race.
The Reagan administration vehemently opposed the treaty. One Columbia activist, Mr. Obama wrote, argued that the United States should initiate the ban “as a powerful first step towards a nuclear free world.”
That phrase - a “nuclear free world,” which was Mr. Obama’s paraphrase - would re-emerge decades later as the signature item of his nuclear agenda.
The article was lost for years - some of Mr. Obama’s campaign advisers said they had heard of its existence and went looking for it, presumably to see if it contained anything that might prove embarrassing. It came to light on the Internet just before the inauguration, and some conservative bloggers called it naïve, anti-American and blind to the Soviet threat.
Precisely how the article found its way onto the Internet is unclear. But late last year, a Columbia alumni publication said it had learned of it from an alumnus, Stephen M. Brockmann, who also had an article in the same Sundial issue. Dr. Brockmann, now a professor of German at Carnegie Mellon University, said he found the issue “while rummaging through some old stuff.” When he saw the Obama article, he recalled, “I could hardly believe my eyes.”
The Senator
After the Sundial article, Mr. Obama went silent on nuclear issues for the next two decades. In Chicago, where he worked as a community organizer, topics like remaking the schools, the welfare system and health care seemed a lot more urgent. The cold war ended. So did the protests.
But in 2003 Mr. Obama began his unlikely campaign for the United States Senate and answered a detailed questionnaire from the Council for a Livable World, an advocacy organization in Washington that evaluates candidates on arms control issues.
“He opposes building a new generation of nuclear weapons,” the organization said in a fund-raising letter supporting Mr. Obama’s candidacy. At the time, the Bush administration had proposed developing nuclear arms that could shatter deeply buried enemy bunkers.
“The United States has far more nuclear weapons than it needs,” the organization quoted Mr. Obama as saying, “and any attempt by the U.S. government to develop or produce new nuclear weapons only undermines U.S. nonproliferation efforts around the world.”
The organization said Mr. Obama also supported an American-financed effort to secure Russian nuclear arms, as well as ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, still in limbo two decades after Mr. Obama wrote about it.
When he became a senator in January 2005, Mr. Obama zeroed in on arms control, an issue with little traction in the Republican-controlled Senate. Mark Lippert, now chief of staff of the National Security Council, recalled the senator’s seeking his nuclear views when he applied for a Senate staff job.
Mr. Obama found a mentor in Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a longtime star of nuclear nonproliferation efforts. Later that year, Mr. Obama asked to accompany his Republican colleague on a trip to monitor Russian efforts to scrap nuclear arms and secure atomic materials from theft or diversion.
“When we got there, he was clearly all business - a very careful listener and note taker and a serious student,” Mr. Lugar recalled.
During the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama seized a new opportunity, and political cover, by aligning himself with four of the biggest names in national security. They had decided to campaign for the elimination of the nuclear arsenals they had built up and managed as cold warriors.
There were two Republicans, Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Shultz, secretary of state under Mr. Reagan, and two Democrats, William J. Perry, secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton, and former Senator Sam Nunn, who has made fighting proliferation his life’s work.
In a 2007 opinion article in The Wall Street Journal, the four men argued that the time was right to seek “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” as the headline put it. President George W. Bush never invited them to the White House to make their case.
But Mr. Obama embraced the four wholeheartedly, echoing their message in campaign speeches in places like Chicago and Denver and in Berlin, where he spoke in July 2008 as the presumptive Democratic nominee.
“This is the moment,” he told cheering Berliners, to seek “the peace of a world without nuclear weapons.”
The President
The nuclear world Mr. Obama studied and wrote about at Columbia bears little resemblance to the one he faces today.
Russia in many ways is the least of his challenges. Both Washington and Moscow want to renew the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expires late this year, and both say they want to shrink their arsenals.
More complex are problems posed by the rise of new nuclear states, chiefly North Korea, which has now conducted two nuclear tests, and Iran, which experts say will be able to build a warhead soon, if it cannot already. Pakistan has the fastest-growing arsenal, India’s is improving, and Israel’s nuclear capacity has never been publicly discussed, much less dealt with, by the United States.
The threat, Mr. Obama added in the interview, has “only been heightened with the emergence of extremist organizations such as Al Qaeda.”
Mr. Obama and his aides say they want to address all these issues - though they have only recently begun to discuss strategy.
“We tried the unilateral way, in the Bush years, and it didn’t work,” a senior administration official said recently. “What we are trying is a fundamental change, a different view that says our security can be enhanced by arms control. There was a view for the past few years that treaties only constrained the good actors and not the bad actors.”
Beyond the first step - deep cuts in American and Russian arsenals - is an agenda that has already provoked stirrings of discontent at home and abroad.
In January, in the journal Foreign Affairs, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, the lone holdover from the Bush cabinet, called for financing a new generation of longer-lasting and more dependable nuclear arms.
He was immediately overruled. Mr. Obama’s first budget declared that “development work on the Reliable Replacement Warhead will cease.”
Another focus of activity early this year was the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. Its ratification faces a tough Senate fight. But his aides are already building a case that advanced technologies obviate the need to detonate weapons as tests of the American arsenal and can verify that other countries also refrain.
Critics argue that the North Koreas of the world will simply defy the ban - and that the international community will fail to punish offenders.
“If the implications were not so serious, the discrepancy between Mr. Obama’s plans and real-world conditions would be hilarious,” said Frank J. Gaffney Jr., a Reagan-era Pentagon official who directs the Center for Security Policy, a private group in Washington. “There is only one country on earth that Team Obama can absolutely, positively denuclearize: Ours.”
Even more ambitious, Mr. Obama wants a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, which would bar all nations that sign it from making fuel for their atom bombs. But when asked how Mr. Obama would sell the idea to America’s allies - primarily Pakistan, India and Israel - administration officials grow silent.
All this is supposed to culminate, next year, in an American effort to rewrite crucial provisions of the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Mr. Obama wants to strengthen inspection provisions and close the loophole that makes it easy for countries to drop out, as North Korea did in 2003.
Each of those steps would require building a global consensus. It would also mean persuading countries to give up the coveted freedom to make fuel for reactors - and instead, probably, buy it from an international fuel bank.
Most of all, Mr. Obama and like-minded leaders will have to establish a new global order that will truly restrain rogue states and terrorist groups from moving ahead with nuclear projects.
“I don’t think I was that unique at that time,” the president said of his Columbia days, “and I don’t think I’m that unique today in thinking that if we could put the genie back in the bottle, in some sense, that there would be less danger - not just to the United States but to people around the world.”
8) Mystery Solved: ‘Blue Faced’ Appalachian Family Caused by Rare Medical Condition... Biology/Interest
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/mystery-solved-blue-faced-appalachian-family-caused-by-rare-medical-condition/
February 16, 2012
The Daily Mail has posted a bizarre story about a family near the Blue Ridge Mountains that actually turned blue.
Here are the key elements of this mystery that persisted for decades:
Backwoods Kentucky family started producing blue-colored children sometime in the 1800s
Four of seven children were blue and they intermarried with a nearby family
Intermarriage led to insular gene pool that allowed replication of rare gene
That right, some members of this family of Appalachian Mountain folks turned blue because of a rare medical condition.
The isolated eastern Kentucky family- the Fugates- can trace their roots back to a French orphan who began producing the blue children.
As described in the Mail:
”It began when Martin Fugate, a French orphan, settled on the banks of eastern Kentucky’s Troublesome Creek to claim a land grant in the early 19th century. He married a red-haired American named Elizabeth Smith - who had a very pale complexion - and their union formed a genetic mutation that resulted in their descendants being born with blue skin.”
When you look at the portrait above, it appears to be a fake. Modern science, though, has an explanation, and it’s something of a scientific wonder.
The blue-faced condition comes from a “Genetic mutation that reduces individual’s ability to carry oxygen in blood.” The condition is called methemoglobinemia (generally referred to as met-H).
Think about the bluish veins visible in the wrist of of some people- and now extend that principle to an entire body. As a result, the blood of people with this condition is darker and more blue-hued than the color usually found running through the human body.
Thanks to this physical oddity, the Fugates became true Appalachian blue bloods.
According to the Mail, as a result of “a number of recessive recessive genes, intermarriage and inbreeding, members of the Fugate family were born with a rare condition that made them visibly discolored.”
The mystery, it appears, has been solved after all these years.
Because the rural Kentucky area in which the Fugates lived offered few opportunities to expand the gene pool, intermarriage allowed the rare met-H gene to come into contact with other carriers much more frequently.
In 1958, the Fugate family was discovered when one of the blue men, Luke Combs, took his wife to the University of Kentucky Hospital. Luke was apparently much more interesting to the doctors than his wife was.
Doctor Charles H. Behlen II said ‘Luke was just as blue as Lake Louise on a cool summer day,’ to the Tri-City Herald in 1974.
Eastern Kentucky
Other than the discoloration of skin, the Met-H condition poses no health risks or issues. There is even a cure of sorts for the condition that was discovered in 1980.
When a person who has turned blue from Met-H drinks a chemical-filled solution that is also blue, the Met-H carrier’s blood turns to a ‘normal’ red hue, which then is reflected in the coloration of the skin and facial complexion.
The solution only lasts for 24 hours at a time, so to stay rosy red, a Met-H carrier has to drink one glass of blue goo a day.
Today eastern Kentucky has a vastly larger population, and the condition has for all intents and purposes disappeared.
The recessive met-H gene continues on, however, unknown to its carriers and could perhaps one day result in another blue blood family somewhere else in the world.
For more details on the history of the Fugate’s and their rare condition, the Daily Mail has more here.
Talk about blue in the face... Extraordinary story of Appalachia's 'Blue Family' whose bodies were discoloured after generations of inbreeding
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2101911/Talk-blue-face-The-extraordinary-tale-Blue-Family-Appalacia.html
Isolated family in Kentucky started producing blue children in 1800s
French orphan Martin Fugate married pale American Elizabeth Smith
Had seven children, four were blue; they intermarried with local family
Genetic mutation reduces individual’s ability to carry oxygen in blood
Intermarriage led to 'pure' gene pool which often met 'met-H' gene
In the Appalachian Mountains rests a medical oddity so unusual that it at first seems a massive hoax.
Dating back to the early 1800s, an isolated family in eastern Kentucky - who can trace their roots back to a French orphan - started producing children who were blue.
As a result of a coincidental meeting of recessive genes, intermarriage and inbreeding, members of the Fugate family were born with a rare condition that made them visibly discoloured.
Due to inbreeding and inter-marriage, a rural family developed a rare blue discolouration
Feeling blue: Due to inbreeding and inter-marriage, a rural family developed a rare skin discolouration
The mystery behind the astonishing picture of the Fugates, which has been baffling people for years, appears to have finally been solved.
It began when Martin Fugate, a French orphan, settled on the banks of eastern Kentucky's Troublesome Creek to claim a land grant in the early 19th century.
Relations: A photo of Lorenzo 'Blue Anze' Dow Fugate and Eleanor Fugate, taken around 1915
Called methaemoglobinaemia (commonly known as met-H), the condition reduces the individual’s ability to carry oxygen in their blood. As a result, their blood is darker than the colour typically found running through people’s veins.
HOW 'MET-H' DARKENS BLOOD
The methaemoglobinaemia condition, or ‘met-H’, reduces someone’s ability to carry oxygen in the blood, leaving it darker than the colour typically found in veins.
The Fugate family intermarried with a neighbouring family for generations, which led to a relatively ‘pure’ gene pool, often including the met-H gene.
But as Kentucky became more populated and more genes came into the Fugate family tree, there were far fewer children born blue.
The gene is still around today but has now become statistically insignificant and there are no serious medical problems associated with it.
Because the Fugate family lived in such an isolated part of the Kentucky, they intermarried with a neighbouring family for generations which led to a relatively ‘pure’ gene pool where the met-H gene appeared much more frequently.
The family was first discovered in 1958 when one of the blue men, Luke Combs, who was a descendant of another branch of the Fugate family, took his white wife to the University of Kentucky Hospital and doctors paid more attention to him than his wife.
‘Luke was just as blue as Lake Louise on a cool summer day,’ doctor Charles H. Behlen II told the Tri-City Herald in 1974.
Aside from the stark discoloration of the carrier’s skin, there are no serious problems associated with the disease.
In 1980, a counter-intuitive solution was discovered where the blue person drinks a chemical-filled solution that is itself blue. This then turns the carrier’s blood into a ‘normal’ red hue which is then reflected in a change in skin tone.
Methaemoglobinaemia (commonly known as met-H) is a recessive gene (shown by the small r) so only produces 'blue' people in very rare circumstances
Because of the dispersion of fluids, the solution only lasts for about a day so the carrier would have to drink a serving every day.
'They weren’t sick; it was just the way they look. They’re normal people - they’re good people'
Nurse Ruth Pendergrass
As eastern Kentucky has become vastly more populated than the early 19th century, and as more genes are married into the Fugate family tree, there were far fewer children born with the condition.
That said, the recessive met-H gene lingers to this day, but it is statistically insignificant now.
‘They weren’t sick; it was just the way they look,’ said nurse Ruth Pendergrass in the Tri-City Herald article. 'They’re normal people - they’re good people.’
9) WI Elementary School Confiscates, Bans 2nd Grader’s Christian-Themed Valentines... Anti Religious Freedom/Progressive Schools
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/wi-elementary-school-confiscates-bans-2nd-graders-christian-themed-valentines/
February 16, 2012
Dexter Thielhelm, a second-grader at James Madison Elementary School in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, had a simple message for his classmates: “Jesus loves you.” The young boy had worked diligently with his mother and siblings to create candy and notes for his friends at school, as he filled empty water bottles with candy and a rolled-up a Bible verse (John 3:16) to share with his classmates. But earlier this week, to the surprise of the boy and his family, school officials confiscated the valentines before they could be handed out.
Apparently, it is district policy that Christian valentines not be distributed - a message that Melissa Wolf, Dexter’s mother, received when she met with principal Matthew Driscoll this week. The verse, ”For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life,” was apparently too religious in nature for the school to allow to be disseminated.
Wolf, 30, who has spoken out to media outlets, says that she’s not happy with the way in which the principal handled the situation. Driscoll, however, declined to comment to media on Wednesday.
“He wishes I would have asked him for permission to hand out this questionable material,” Wolf explained, describing her interaction with the principal. “I did not get an apology. I got an apology that he didn’t call me; I didn’t get an apology for taking this away from my children. He sat and listened to me kindly, and heard the things that made me upset.”
Here’s the really intriguing element to the story. Wolf has two other children at the same school. Both of whom are autistic and nonverbal. These children made similar valentines and they, too, were confiscated. But one of her other children who attends a different school - a local charter institution - handed his notes out without a hitch, the Wausau Daily Herald reports.
While Wolf is clearly frustrated by the situation, the district’s assistant superintendent, Mark Holzman, addressed the issues and attempted to explain the rationale behind the confiscation. The district doesn‘t have a specific policy that bans religious verses being handed out on Valentine’s Day, he said, but the young age of the children was one of the primary reasons he cited (i.e. the students aren’t old enough to understand the religious message)
The district also had concerns that the Christian content could lead others with negative messages to also distribute to fellow classmates. After all, once one person is allowed to hand out a message, any individual can then tout his or her values, Holzman argued.
“Otherwise we would be allowing anybody to give out personal messages or values,” Holzman explained. “If somebody wanted to put anti-Semitism in there … people would be outraged by that. If kids have a choice, it’s a different scenario. But in this case we’re talking about handing it out to everyone in the class, and they don’t have a choice.”
Wolf says that, though the school attempted to explain to Dexter why the valentines couldn’t be handed out, he was embarrassed and confused by the incident.
2) National Park Service e-mails about Occupy D.C.... OWS/Truth
3) World's Tiniest Chameleon Discovered... Nature/Interest
4) Obama's new budget will put America in the poor house... Obama/Economic Failure
5) The Global Warming Hoax is Now Killing People... Environmentalism/Anti Human
6) Obama OMB Admits Obamacare Penalties Are Not Taxes... Obama/Double Talk and Lies
7) Obama’s Youth Shaped His Nuclear-Free Vision... Obama/History
8) Mystery Solved: ‘Blue Faced’ Appalachian Family Caused by Rare Medical Condition... Biology/Interest
9) WI Elementary School Confiscates, Bans 2nd Grader’s Christian-Themed Valentines... Anti Religious Freedom/Progressive Schools
1) The Vikings' Crystal Compass?... History/Interest
http://www.archaeology.org/1203/trenches/vikings_iceland_spar_crystal_navigation.html
March/April 2012
A transparent calcite crystal found 30 years ago on a ship that sank in the English Channel in 1592 could help explain how Vikings were able to sail from Norway to North America 1,000 years ago without magnetic compasses.
The sailors likely relied on the sun and the stars as their guides. Now researchers from France's University of Rennes have demonstrated how a crystal called an Iceland spar (found in Iceland and Scandinavia, among other places), which was recovered from the shipwreck, could be used-even on a cloudy day-to ascertain the sun's position to within a few degrees.
When light passes through the crystal, it is double refracted-the light is split in two, creating an effect similar to a 3-D movie viewed without light-polarizing glasses. According to the authors, as a person holds up the crystal to the sun and rotates it, there's a particular angle at which the two beams of light appear equally bright. By holding the spar at the same orientation and scanning a cloudy sky for a point where the beams line up, Vikings could locate the sun through cloud cover. "Vikings could have exploited the high sensitivity of the human eye to small contrasts," the authors write in Proceedings of the Royal Society A.
2) National Park Service e-mails about Occupy D.C.... OWS/Truth
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/documents/occupy-dc-emails.html
National Park Service e-mails about Occupy D.C.
As Occupy activists set up camp in Washington, National Park Service officials exchanged e-mails about how best to handle the growing protests at McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza. This is a selection of those e-mails, obtained by The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act.
Richard Bradley To
A ..
10/19/2011 08:05 PM cc Rick Reinhard
Karyn LeBlanc
Subject RE: Occupy DC Update -- McPherson Square
Hi Bob,
We welcomed the chance to meet on Monday and get a chance to understand the present situation and
the context in which you are working, We expressed our frustration about the lack of communication
with us in advance of the emergence of these encampments in downtown. We have assumed we were
moving toward and improvement in at least this aspect of the situation. But Dave reached out to you
yesterday and I tried to reach Steve today. Is there a any way we can get this matter improved while we
hope we are moving toward a remedy for the present safety and sanitation concerns?
Rich
From: David Kamperin
Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2011 4:20 PM
Cc: Richard Bradley; Rick Reinharmi; Karyn LeBlanc
Subject: FW: Occupy DC Update -- McPherson Square
Superintendent Vogel
Please see attached the photos taken today of conditions at McPherson. Again troubling is the flammable
material being stored on site (notice close proximity of one of the generators to the sidewalk) and the
cooking. Also disturbing is the recent stacking of lumber and wood for either use for a bonfire or weapons
against law enforcement. The trash continues to pile up within the park and then are removed by the
occupants and dumped on the public sidewalks. Recent new rat infestation borrowing has been observed
in nearby tree box spaces. As the email below indicates the unhealthy and unsanitary conditions continue
as food is dumped as compost, dogs run free throughout the park and children (observed in one of the
photos) also play where they go to the bathroom,
We look forward to a more proactive response -- to include increased trash pick ups and enforcement of
these severe public safety issues.
. oa cc
Qlwict
TCW 1 tzso ri street. ww
Suite 1000
ti washington, DC 20005
David K. Karoperin
Pvb?? Space Marugmwvi
Preventing terrorism is everyb0dy's business.
00034968 NPS-NGR-B01-00002-000008 Page 1 ?r2
lf you SEE something, SAY something.
Call the Metropolitan Police Department at (202) 727-9099 or email at to report
suspicious activity or behavior that has already occurred.
Call 911 to report in--progress threats or emergencies.
To learn more, visit
From: Blake Holuh
Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2011 4:04 PM
T0: David Kamperin
Cc: Kenneth Gregory
Subject: Occupy DC Update McPherson Square
Dave.
As we had discussed earlier, Kenny and I visited the Occupy DC site today. We noted that the site had
expanded since Monday, roughly totaling 125-150 people with nearly 40 tents. The park grounds
themselves look to be in poor to dire condition due to all of the activity. Also, the demonstration has two
working generators which they seem to be rotating out. They also have a storage tent which looks like a
quasi-pantry for demonstrators to receive rations. Additionally, the smell was quite putrid when we
walked through the encampment which most likely stems from the lack of sanitary conditions and the
presence of dogs. Lastly, we noted around 15 or so trash bags stacked on the corner of and St. I
have also attached photos for your viewing.
Let me know if you have any questions or comments. Thanks!
Blake Hnlub, MPA
Quality Control Manager
Public Space Mamzgemcnt
Downtown DC BID
1250 Street, NW Suite 1000
Was/ainiton, DC 20005
000:14968 NPS-NCR-B01-00002-000008 Page 2 or 2
or email at to report
suspicious activity or behavior that has already occurred.
Call 911 to report in--progress threats or emergencies.
To learn more, visit
From: Blake Holuh
Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2011 4:04 PM
T0: David Kamperin
Cc: Kenneth Gregory
Subject: Occupy DC Update McPherson Square
Dave.
As we had discussed earlier, Kenny and I visited the Occupy DC site today. We noted that the site had
expanded since Monday, roughly totaling 125-150 people with nearly 40 tents. The park grounds
themselves look to be in poor to dire condition due to all of the activity. Also, the demonstration has two
working generators which they seem to be rotating out. They also have a storage tent which looks like a
quasi-pantry for demonstrators to receive rations. Additionally, the smell was quite putrid when we
walked through the encampment which most likely stems from the lack of sanitary conditions and the
presence of dogs. Lastly, we noted around 15 or so trash bags stacked on the corner of and St. I
have also attached photos for your viewing.
Let me know if you have any questions or comments. Thanks!
Blake Hnlub, MPA
Quality Control Manager
Public Space Mamzgemcnt
Downtown DC BID
1250 Street, NW Suite 1000
Was/ainiton, DC 20005
000:14968 NPS-NCR-B01-00002-000008 Page 2 or 2
Karen Cucurullo/NACC/NPS To Bob Vo NPS, "Robbin Owen"
PM
VVTV
it
Subject Re: Fwd: McPherson Park- 2 sani jons installed 11-4-1
Not that I am aware of.
From: Bob Vogel
Sent: 11/05/2011 03:26 PM EDT
To: Karen Cucurullo
Subject: Fw: Fwd: McPherson Park- 2 sanijons installed 11-4-1
We didn't install these did we'?
From: David K?mperin_
Sent: ll/05/20lI 03:01 AM GMT
To: Bob Vo=?cl? Steve Lorenzetti; Karen Cucurullo
Subject: Fwd: McPherson Park- 2 sani jons installed ll-4-ll
Superintendent Vogel
This is clearly disappointing and it appears that only response to this illegal activity is to
enable them and make their unlawful camping more comfortable, It also appears that NPS has
accepted this and will continue to promote this illegal activity instead of enforcing current laws.
Ironically the warning signs posted are still being ignored- generators are running, gas containers
with flammable liquids arc being stored near propane stoves--a potential grave risk to the public
safety ofthe residents, workers and visitors near the area- not to mention the obvious presence of
illegal narcotics (marijuana can readily be smelled throughout the encampment).
Finally, I am sure that if these protestors attempted their encampment on the National Mall with
ilarmnable liquids, potential projectiles and illegal drugs openly being used the response by NPS
would be substantially different. Sadly when activities are adversely impacting businesses and
the rights of workers and residents to enjoy the park occurs out of site of the White House, Dept
of Interior and NPS the response appears to be to make them more comfortable. When severe
cold weather arrives I imagine the staked pile of wood will be used for a bonfire to warm the
campers up.
I hope NPS has a "line inthe mud" at McPherson that when crossed by this group they take
action, and I hope this action is not reactive because of a grave or injurious incident to an
innocent victim.
Thank you-
David Kamperin
Downtown DC BID
00034968 Page 1 ori
Occupy D.C.: E-mails reveal National Park Service struggled over how to respond to protester camp
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/2012/02/13/gIQAFyWxDR_story.html
February 14 2012
As waves of Occupy protesters set up high-profile camps in two downtown parks this fall, the National Park Service juggled widespread public health concerns, turf scrapes with District officials and its own media spin, recently released documents show.
E-mails from senior Park Service officials reveal there was at times considerable confusion within the agency as leaders struggled with their message and response to sustained criticism while Occupy D.C. camps in McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza grew more permanent.
The more-than-400 pages of documents and e-mails reviewed by The Post offered only limited insight in how Park Service officials made their decisions, but they suggest that Park Police were constrained by outside concerns that were not evident within the pages.
The documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, show no indication that the decision to allow the protesters to stay in the parks was driven by high-ranking officials at the Obama White House or the Department of Interior, as Republican critics have alleged.
But in an e-mail on Nov. 1, U.S. Park Police Chief Teresa C. Chambers suggested that her agency had minimal input in macro decisions about the future of the camps.
“This is bigger than the USPP,” Chambers wrote to several police officials in response to a request from a spokesman about how to make public a reported assault at McPherson Square.
Sgt. David Schlosser, a Park Police spokesman, said Tuesday that the e-mail was designed to reinforce that the Occupy protest should not be treated differently “simply because of the media attention.”
For months, the Park Service said the protesters’ First Amendment right to conduct a 24-hour protest vigil outweighed broad concerns from downtown and District officials that the camps were a public health hazard.
But by late January, under pressure from congressional Republicans and local leaders, Park Service officials announced a new crackdown on camping in the parks. During a dramatic early-morning raid Feb. 4, Park Police swept through McPherson Square, taking down dozens of tents and removing piles of trash in what officials said was a “nuisance abatement” for rats and other hazards. A similar encampment at Freedom Plaza was swept the following day.
Dozens of e-mails to and from Steve Whitesell, the Park Service’s regional director, and Bob Vogel, superintendent of the National Mall and memorial parks, from October through mid-December show business leaders voiced grave concerns about health and safety soon after the protests began in early October. Downtown leaders raised questions about flammable materials, potential weapons, rats and illegal drugs.
“They are destroying McPherson,” Richard H. Bradley, Downtown DC Business Improvement District executive director, wrote in an e-mail to District and federal officials on Oct. 17, urging them to devise a “containment strategy” for the protests.
Park Police and Park Service officials acknowledged that the protests were escalating, but their reluctance to challenge the protesters resulted in small-scale turf battles with the District.
Chambers told two deputies via e-mail that “things are heating up” after she received a complaint from the business improvement group. Then, on Nov. 7, after three Occupy protesters were struck by vehicles at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Whitesell wrote in an e-mail to staff that the “natives” were “getting restless.”
In early November, Park Service officials told District police they did not want them to go into McPherson Square to issue fliers outlining city laws.
“We have indicated our preference that MPD not do this as we think it has potential to escalate the tenuous relationship between MPD and occupy,” Vogel wrote to Whitesell. ”We are not sure whether MPD will honor our request. I have asked that if anything goes wrong, not to call us in the middle of the movie tonight!”
Despite that request, two District political officials entered McPherson Square that night without incident to talk with protesters, according to a video recording of the meeting on YouTube.
Long before the public furor heated up, Park Service officials worked carefully on their “messaging” to defend their decision to the media and public, the documents show. On Oct. 11, chief agency spokesman David Barna sent other agency spokespeople “some thoughts” for them to keep in their “back pocket” when speaking about “First Amendment demonstrations” and why they were permitting the protesters to stay.
Barna also organized a conference call on “messaging” in late November at the request of Lisa Mendelson-Ielmini, a deputy regional director for the Capital region.
Even Jon Jarvis, the director of the Park Service, got involved in shaping the agency’s message. When the agency got an interview request from Washington Post columnist Robert McCartney in early December, Jarvis told agency and Interior Department officials it was a “a good opportunity to distinguish the work of NPS/USPP in Washington as the center of First Amendment experiences.”
“The focus by USPP on ‘quality of life’ ensures the safety of occupiers and visitors while respecting their rights to protest,” Jarvis wrote.
The documents also reveal the frustration of neighbors.
“Just spent 50 minutes being transferred from one national park department to the other - no one taking responsibility for this mess you all have created,” one neighbor, Laurie Carter DeWitt, wrote in an e-mail Nov. 22. “The grass is ruined, the trash is horrendous and the rat population has at least tripled. At night I get to listen to their parties. . . . I get to hear sex, see public urination and be subjected to early morning drums on my one day off - Saturday.”
Vogel, the superintendent of the Mall and memorial parks, wrote back that while the sudden appearance of the encampment “is disturbing to many,” court rulings that support “temporary structures” for First Amendment demonstrations are allowed. “Enforcement action in this area is limited and challenging,” he conceded.
After two portable toilets were delivered to McPherson Square in early November, Park Service officials appeared confused about who provided them, e-mails suggest.
In early December, after protesters built a two-story wooden structure in McPherson Square, officials struggled to identify what building codes apply to federal parks in the District, records show. It was later dismantled.
But Park Service officials closely monitored the protesters and their activities, e-mails show. Each day, for example, officials received a briefing paper of police calls to the park, planned marches and news clippings on Occupy Wall Street.
Still, Park Service officials showed tolerance for the protesters longer than Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D). He initially supported the protests but later demanded that they be moved from McPherson Square and that the federal government reimburse the city for the estimated $1.6 million costs.
“I think it’s time we plan together for a serious change in how we have been approaching them in DC,” Gray’s chief of staff, Christopher Murphy, wrote on Nov. 17. “We are increasingly concerned.”
3) World's Tiniest Chameleon Discovered... Nature/Interest
http://www.livescience.com/18481-world-tiniest-chameleon-discovered.html
14 February 2012
A juvenile of the tiniest chameleon species ever discovered perches on a researcher's fingertip.
A species of chameleon small enough to easily perch on a match head has been discovered on a tiny island off Madagascar, a group of scientists has announced.
In addition to the discovery of Brookesia micra, now the tiniest chameleon ever discovered, the researchers also announced the discovery of three additional tiny chameleon species.
Adult males of the B. micra species grow to only just over a half-inch (16 millimeters) from nose to bottom, making them one of the smallest vertebrates ever found on Earth.
From nose to tail, adults of both sexes grow to only 1 inch (30 mm) in length.
4) Obama's new budget will put America in the poor house... Obama/Economic Failure
http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/2012/02/obamas-new-budget-will-put-america-poor-house/269991#.Tzvnsb_0_ww.facebook
How credible is President Obama on taxes and spending? In recent days, he's repeatedly condemned the "fact" that billionaire investor Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than does his secretary. So in the 2013 budget proposal Obama unveiled yesterday, he proposes a new millionaires tax to make sure people like Buffett pay their "fair share." But guess what we find when we look a little closer at the president's tax proposals, as former New York Sun managing editor and current futureofcapitalism.com blogger Ira Stoll did? We find a bottom-line tax cut for Buffett's firm, Berkshire Hathaway Corp., worth an estimated $1.1 billion and of about $241 million for him personally.* Let there be no further denials that Obama is practicing precisely the demagoguery of a class warrior.
Then there is Obama's smug White House chief of staff, Jack Lew, who went on two different Sunday news shows to talk up the president's new budget. Twice he claimed Senate Democrats haven't passed a budget in more than 1,000 days because "you can't pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes and you can't get 60 votes without bipartisan support. So unless Republicans are willing to work with Democrats in the Senate, Harry Reid is not going to be able to get a budget passed." In fact, Senate rules only require a simple majority of 51 votes to approve a budget.
But wait, there's more to the Obama record of double-talk and misrepresentation about federal taxes and spending. Take his claim that his budget cuts the deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that most of Obama's deficit "savings" come either from spending cuts already enshrined in law or money that was never requested for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bottom line: Over the next decade, Obama's budget raises taxes by $1.9 trillion, raises spending $2.7 trillion, and increases the debt $3.6 trillion. Higher taxes, higher spending and more debt -- that is Obama's plan for the United States.
Less than a month after Obama was sworn into office, he hosted a "fiscal responsibility" summit at the White House where he pledged "to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office." And the first budget Obama produced projected he would do just that. It showed a $1.7 trillion deficit for 2009 and a $581 billion deficit for 2012. But then reality intervened. Obama's $757 billion economic stimulus program failed to get the economy growing again. His Obamacare is driving health care costs ever higher, even before it is fully implemented. And he just "doubled down" on throwing more tax dollars at failed green energy efforts like the Solyndra bankruptcy. The result? Now Obama asks Americans to accept a $1.33 trillion deficit in 2012 and deficits every year for the next decade averaging $1.4 trillion.
What this country needs is an honest leader who will tell the truth about our entitlement spending crisis and identify real reforms. But Obama's latest budget does none of that. Instead, he offers double doses of deficits, tax hikes and crony capitalism. America deserves better.
* This editorial originally appeared without making clear the $1.1 billion tax cut was for the Buffet firm, while his personal reduction was estimated at $241 million.
5) The Global Warming Hoax is Now Killing People... Environmentalism/Anti Human
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/44602?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=facebook
February 13, 2012
By Friday, February 10th, an estimated 500 Europeans had died from the freezing weather gripping the continent. This is the price they and British citizens are paying for embracing the global warming hoax, spending billions for wind power when they should have been building coal-fired and other sources of energy to heat their homes and businesses.
As the British daily, The Telegraph, reported on Friday, “Serbia has started implementing power cuts in a desperate bid to stave off the collapse of its national grid as the country suffers the effects of days of freezing temperatures.”
I and others have been warning for years that the Earth has been cooling since 1998 and that the planet is on the cusp of a new ice age because the average length of an interglacial period of warmth between such ages is now coming to an end after the passage of some 11,500 years.
All aspects of global warming legislation and spending programs must be utterly reversed if we are not going to see huge losses of life and the disruption of entire economies.
The Ottawa Citizen published an Agence France Presse article on Friday reporting that “Thick ice closed vast swaths of the Danube on Thursday, crippling shipping on Europe’s busiest waterway, as the death toll from bitter cold across the continent rose…as it has every day for nearly two weeks.” The report noted that “Navigation was impossible or restricted in Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria, as ice covered the river or formed dangerous floes in shipping lanes.”
No shipping means no delivery of coal and oil and no shipping of food and other necessities. Europe is freezing over as the United States has been experiencing an unusually mild winter thus far. That, too, is likely to yield to the increased cooling of the planet and then, maybe, Americans will realize the threat to their lives that the closing of coal-fired plants, instigated by the Environmental Protection Agency, really means.
In England, the Mail, reported on Sunday, February 12th, that large numbers of its elderly citizens are being “frozen to death as fuel bills soar: hypothermia cases among the elderly double in five years.” England, now gripped by foolish green notions of renewable energy, has covered itself with wind turbines, despoiling its countryside and coasts while proving unreliable and incapable of meeting its energy needs.
Figures showed that “1,876 patients were treated in hospital for hypothermia in 2010-2011, up from 950 in 2006-2007” reported the Mail. “Three-quarters of victims were pensioners, with cases soaring among the over-60s more than any other age group.”
In Europe, other news organizations reported that “Many of the dead were homeless people, who literally froze to death as the temperatures dropped to minus 50 degrees in some parts of the continent. Their bodies were found in the streets buried under snow, in rivers, and in doorways. Dozens of people were also killed in weather-related accidents.”
Writing in a Turkish newspaper, the Hurriyet Daily News, Sophie Quintin Adali, an analyst for a project of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, said, “As if the debt crisis weren’t bad enough news, the climate freeze sweeping across Europe is wreaking havoc by severely disrupting travel, business and people’s lives. Local authorities, indeed whole countries, are caught poorly prepared.” Turkey is experiencing record snowfall and low temperatures.
“The lack of readiness should come as no surprise because for decades the sensationalist message of global warming has dominated the public area,” said Ms. Adali.
“Politicians and decades of political environmentalism have a lot to answer for,” said Ms. Adali. “The man-made climate theory…is still supported by a mighty European Union bureaucracy and a green network addicted to public funds.” Even now, the Green Climate Fund “through which millions of taxpayer’s money will still be disbursed” is threatening the lives and the economy of people worldwide.
The current freeze is not just affecting Europe, but reaching across the Mediterranean to North African nations. And at some point America will feel it too.
We have not built a single new nuclear plant in America since 1978. EPA rules are forcing the closure of coal-fired plants throughout the nation. The national grid for the distribution of electricity is in need of upgrades.
The nation’s policies are controlled by the most environmentally insane administration in its history, wasting billions on so-called green energy. Its new budget raises taxes and proposes a trillion-dollar deficit without any significant effort to cut the spending that has left this and future generations in debt while the price of gas soars to new heights.
America and the rest of the world have been horribly deceived by the United Nations Intergovernmental Climate Change Panel that continues to drive the global warming hoax. The lying scientists who got on the global warming gravy train, the politicians that embraced it, and the media that misled millions are all culpable, all responsible.
They should be driven from office, defunded, and chased through the streets like villagers in pursuit of Frankenstein.
People are freezing to death in their homes and in the streets. What will it take to drive a stake into the heart of the global warming monster?
6) Obama OMB Admits Obamacare Penalties Are Not Taxes... Obama/Double Talk and Lies
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/291139/obama-omb-admits-obamacare-penalties-are-inoti-taxes-daniel-foster
February 15, 2012
Rep. Scott Garrett (R., N.J.) had a nice gambit just now in a hearing with President Obama’s acting OMB director Jeffrey Zients.
First he asked Zients if the Obama budget imposes any new taxes on Americans making less than $200,000. When Zients answered that it did not, Garrett followed up by asking if an individual making less than $200,000 a year opted not to carry health insurance, in contravention of the Affordable Care Act, is the fine associated with that decision a tax?
After some hemming and hawing, Zients answered that the fine did not constitute an tax. Which is a problem, considering the Obama administration’s entire case before the Supreme Court is premised on those fines being construed as taxes, not penalties.
7) Obama’s Youth Shaped His Nuclear-Free Vision... Obama/History
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/world/05nuclear.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
July 4, 2009
In the depths of the cold war, in 1983, a senior at Columbia University wrote in a campus newsmagazine, Sundial, about the vision of “a nuclear free world.” He railed against discussions of “first- versus second-strike capabilities” that “suit the military-industrial interests” with their “billion-dollar erector sets,” and agitated for the elimination of global arsenals holding tens of thousands of deadly warheads.
The student was Barack Obama, and he was clearly trying to sort out his thoughts. In the conclusion, he denounced “the twisted logic of which we are a part today” and praised student efforts to realize “the possibility of a decent world.” But his article, “Breaking the War Mentality,” which only recently has been rediscovered, said little about how to achieve the utopian dream.
Twenty-six years later, the author, in his new job as president of the United States, has begun pushing for new global rules, treaties and alliances that he insists can establish a nuclear-free world.
“I’m not naïve,” President Obama told a cheering throng in Prague this spring. “This goal will not be reached quickly - perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence.”
Yet no previous American president has set out a step-by-step agenda for the eventual elimination of nuclear arms. Mr. Obama is starting relatively small, using a visit to Russia that starts Monday to advance an intense negotiation, with a treaty deadline of the year’s end, to reduce the arsenals of the nuclear superpowers to roughly 1,500 warheads each, from about 2,200. In an interview on Saturday, Mr. Obama, conscious of his critics, stressed that “I’ve made clear that we will retain our deterrent capacity as long as there is a country with nuclear weapons.”
But reducing arsenals, he insisted, would be the first step toward giving the United States and a growing body of allies the power to remake the nuclear world. Among the goals: halting weapons programs in North Korea and Iran, discouraging states from abandoning the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and ending global production of fuel for nuclear arms, a step sure to upset Pakistan, India and Israel.
Even before those battles are joined, opposition is rising. “This is dangerous, wishful thinking,” Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, and Richard Perle, an architect of the Reagan-era nuclear buildup that appalled Mr. Obama as an undergraduate, wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal. They contend that Mr. Obama is, indeed, a naïf for assuming that “the nuclear ambitions of Kim Jong-il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be curtailed or abandoned in response to reductions in the American and Russian deterrent forces.”
In the interview, the president described his agenda as the best way to move forward in a turbulent world.
“It’s naïve for us to think,” he said, “that we can grow our nuclear stockpiles, the Russians continue to grow their nuclear stockpiles, and our allies grow their nuclear stockpiles, and that in that environment we’re going to be able to pressure countries like Iran and North Korea not to pursue nuclear weapons themselves.”
Realist or dreamer, Mr. Obama has an interest in global denuclearization that arises from what can best be described as a lost chapter of his life. Though he has written two memoirs, he has volunteered few details about his two years at Columbia.
“People assume he’s a novice,” said Michael L. Baron, who taught Mr. Obama in a Columbia seminar on international politics and American policy around the time he wrote the Sundial article. “He’s been thinking about these issues for a long time. It’s not like one of his advisers said, ‘Why don’t you throw this out?’ ”
In a paper for Dr. Baron, Mr. Obama analyzed how a president might go about negotiating nuclear arms reductions with the Russians - exactly what he is seeking to do this week.
At critical junctures of Mr. Obama’s career, the subject of nuclear disarmament has kept reappearing. Now both he and his agenda face the ultimate test: limiting nuclear arms at the very moment many experts fear the beginning of a second nuclear age and a rush of new weapons states - especially if Iran proves capable of making atomic warheads.
The Seminar
“I personally came of age,” Mr. Obama wrote in “The Audacity of Hope,” his second memoir, “during the Reagan presidency.”
It was a time when President Ronald Reagan began a trillion-dollar arms buildup, called the Soviet Union “an evil empire” and ordered scores of atomic detonations under the Nevada desert. Some Reagan aides talked of fighting and winning a nuclear war.
The popular response was the nuclear freeze movement. Dozens of books warned that Mr. Reagan’s policies threatened to end civilization and most life on Earth. In June 1982, a million protesters gathered in Central Park, their placards reading “Bread Not Bombs” and “Freeze or Burn.” The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops issued a pastoral letter denouncing nuclear war.
Many Columbia students campaigned for the freeze movement, which sought a halt to additional nuclear arms deployments. Mr. Obama explored going further.
In the interview, Mr. Obama noted that he was too young to “remember having to do drills under the desk.” But as a student “interested broadly in foreign policy,” he recalled, he focused on “a central question: how would the United States and the Soviet Union effectively manage these nuclear arsenals, and were there ways to dial down the dangers that humanity faced?”
In his senior year, he began Dr. Baron’s seminar on presidential decision-making in American foreign policy. The first semester, starting in fall 1982, covered such cold-war flashpoints as the Cuban missile crisis - a dramatic study in the decision-making style of President John F. Kennedy. In the second semester, students focused on particular topics, and Mr. Obama wrote a lengthy paper about how to negotiate with the Soviets to cut nuclear arsenals.
“His focus was the nature of the strategic talks and what kind of negotiating positions might be put forward,” Dr. Baron said. “It was not a polemical paper - not arguing that the U.S. should have this or that position. It was how to get from here to there and avoid misperception and conflict.
“He got an A,” recalled Dr. Baron, who now runs a digital media business. Later, he wrote Mr. Obama a recommendation for Harvard Law School.
It was during that seminar that Mr. Obama wrote his Sundial article, profiling two campus groups, Arms Race Alternatives and Students Against Militarism. Photographs with the March 1983 article showed students at an antiwar rally in front of Butler Library.
The Article
Mr. Obama’s journalistic voice was edgy with disdain for what he called “the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country” amid “the growing threat of war.” The two groups, he wrote, “visualizing the possibilities of destruction and grasping the tendencies of distorted national priorities, are throwing their weight into shifting America off the dead-end track.”
Despite Mr. Obama’s sympathetic portrayal of the two groups, the article seemed to question the popular goal of freezing nuclear arsenals rather than reducing them, the topic of his seminar paper. Mr. Obama wondered if the freeze movement “stems from young people’s penchant for the latest ‘happenings.’ ”
What clearly excited him was the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which would have ended the testing and development of new weapons, and thus, in the minds of arms controllers, the nuclear arms race.
The Reagan administration vehemently opposed the treaty. One Columbia activist, Mr. Obama wrote, argued that the United States should initiate the ban “as a powerful first step towards a nuclear free world.”
That phrase - a “nuclear free world,” which was Mr. Obama’s paraphrase - would re-emerge decades later as the signature item of his nuclear agenda.
The article was lost for years - some of Mr. Obama’s campaign advisers said they had heard of its existence and went looking for it, presumably to see if it contained anything that might prove embarrassing. It came to light on the Internet just before the inauguration, and some conservative bloggers called it naïve, anti-American and blind to the Soviet threat.
Precisely how the article found its way onto the Internet is unclear. But late last year, a Columbia alumni publication said it had learned of it from an alumnus, Stephen M. Brockmann, who also had an article in the same Sundial issue. Dr. Brockmann, now a professor of German at Carnegie Mellon University, said he found the issue “while rummaging through some old stuff.” When he saw the Obama article, he recalled, “I could hardly believe my eyes.”
The Senator
After the Sundial article, Mr. Obama went silent on nuclear issues for the next two decades. In Chicago, where he worked as a community organizer, topics like remaking the schools, the welfare system and health care seemed a lot more urgent. The cold war ended. So did the protests.
But in 2003 Mr. Obama began his unlikely campaign for the United States Senate and answered a detailed questionnaire from the Council for a Livable World, an advocacy organization in Washington that evaluates candidates on arms control issues.
“He opposes building a new generation of nuclear weapons,” the organization said in a fund-raising letter supporting Mr. Obama’s candidacy. At the time, the Bush administration had proposed developing nuclear arms that could shatter deeply buried enemy bunkers.
“The United States has far more nuclear weapons than it needs,” the organization quoted Mr. Obama as saying, “and any attempt by the U.S. government to develop or produce new nuclear weapons only undermines U.S. nonproliferation efforts around the world.”
The organization said Mr. Obama also supported an American-financed effort to secure Russian nuclear arms, as well as ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, still in limbo two decades after Mr. Obama wrote about it.
When he became a senator in January 2005, Mr. Obama zeroed in on arms control, an issue with little traction in the Republican-controlled Senate. Mark Lippert, now chief of staff of the National Security Council, recalled the senator’s seeking his nuclear views when he applied for a Senate staff job.
Mr. Obama found a mentor in Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a longtime star of nuclear nonproliferation efforts. Later that year, Mr. Obama asked to accompany his Republican colleague on a trip to monitor Russian efforts to scrap nuclear arms and secure atomic materials from theft or diversion.
“When we got there, he was clearly all business - a very careful listener and note taker and a serious student,” Mr. Lugar recalled.
During the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama seized a new opportunity, and political cover, by aligning himself with four of the biggest names in national security. They had decided to campaign for the elimination of the nuclear arsenals they had built up and managed as cold warriors.
There were two Republicans, Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Shultz, secretary of state under Mr. Reagan, and two Democrats, William J. Perry, secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton, and former Senator Sam Nunn, who has made fighting proliferation his life’s work.
In a 2007 opinion article in The Wall Street Journal, the four men argued that the time was right to seek “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” as the headline put it. President George W. Bush never invited them to the White House to make their case.
But Mr. Obama embraced the four wholeheartedly, echoing their message in campaign speeches in places like Chicago and Denver and in Berlin, where he spoke in July 2008 as the presumptive Democratic nominee.
“This is the moment,” he told cheering Berliners, to seek “the peace of a world without nuclear weapons.”
The President
The nuclear world Mr. Obama studied and wrote about at Columbia bears little resemblance to the one he faces today.
Russia in many ways is the least of his challenges. Both Washington and Moscow want to renew the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expires late this year, and both say they want to shrink their arsenals.
More complex are problems posed by the rise of new nuclear states, chiefly North Korea, which has now conducted two nuclear tests, and Iran, which experts say will be able to build a warhead soon, if it cannot already. Pakistan has the fastest-growing arsenal, India’s is improving, and Israel’s nuclear capacity has never been publicly discussed, much less dealt with, by the United States.
The threat, Mr. Obama added in the interview, has “only been heightened with the emergence of extremist organizations such as Al Qaeda.”
Mr. Obama and his aides say they want to address all these issues - though they have only recently begun to discuss strategy.
“We tried the unilateral way, in the Bush years, and it didn’t work,” a senior administration official said recently. “What we are trying is a fundamental change, a different view that says our security can be enhanced by arms control. There was a view for the past few years that treaties only constrained the good actors and not the bad actors.”
Beyond the first step - deep cuts in American and Russian arsenals - is an agenda that has already provoked stirrings of discontent at home and abroad.
In January, in the journal Foreign Affairs, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, the lone holdover from the Bush cabinet, called for financing a new generation of longer-lasting and more dependable nuclear arms.
He was immediately overruled. Mr. Obama’s first budget declared that “development work on the Reliable Replacement Warhead will cease.”
Another focus of activity early this year was the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. Its ratification faces a tough Senate fight. But his aides are already building a case that advanced technologies obviate the need to detonate weapons as tests of the American arsenal and can verify that other countries also refrain.
Critics argue that the North Koreas of the world will simply defy the ban - and that the international community will fail to punish offenders.
“If the implications were not so serious, the discrepancy between Mr. Obama’s plans and real-world conditions would be hilarious,” said Frank J. Gaffney Jr., a Reagan-era Pentagon official who directs the Center for Security Policy, a private group in Washington. “There is only one country on earth that Team Obama can absolutely, positively denuclearize: Ours.”
Even more ambitious, Mr. Obama wants a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, which would bar all nations that sign it from making fuel for their atom bombs. But when asked how Mr. Obama would sell the idea to America’s allies - primarily Pakistan, India and Israel - administration officials grow silent.
All this is supposed to culminate, next year, in an American effort to rewrite crucial provisions of the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Mr. Obama wants to strengthen inspection provisions and close the loophole that makes it easy for countries to drop out, as North Korea did in 2003.
Each of those steps would require building a global consensus. It would also mean persuading countries to give up the coveted freedom to make fuel for reactors - and instead, probably, buy it from an international fuel bank.
Most of all, Mr. Obama and like-minded leaders will have to establish a new global order that will truly restrain rogue states and terrorist groups from moving ahead with nuclear projects.
“I don’t think I was that unique at that time,” the president said of his Columbia days, “and I don’t think I’m that unique today in thinking that if we could put the genie back in the bottle, in some sense, that there would be less danger - not just to the United States but to people around the world.”
8) Mystery Solved: ‘Blue Faced’ Appalachian Family Caused by Rare Medical Condition... Biology/Interest
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/mystery-solved-blue-faced-appalachian-family-caused-by-rare-medical-condition/
February 16, 2012
The Daily Mail has posted a bizarre story about a family near the Blue Ridge Mountains that actually turned blue.
Here are the key elements of this mystery that persisted for decades:
Backwoods Kentucky family started producing blue-colored children sometime in the 1800s
Four of seven children were blue and they intermarried with a nearby family
Intermarriage led to insular gene pool that allowed replication of rare gene
That right, some members of this family of Appalachian Mountain folks turned blue because of a rare medical condition.
The isolated eastern Kentucky family- the Fugates- can trace their roots back to a French orphan who began producing the blue children.
As described in the Mail:
”It began when Martin Fugate, a French orphan, settled on the banks of eastern Kentucky’s Troublesome Creek to claim a land grant in the early 19th century. He married a red-haired American named Elizabeth Smith - who had a very pale complexion - and their union formed a genetic mutation that resulted in their descendants being born with blue skin.”
When you look at the portrait above, it appears to be a fake. Modern science, though, has an explanation, and it’s something of a scientific wonder.
The blue-faced condition comes from a “Genetic mutation that reduces individual’s ability to carry oxygen in blood.” The condition is called methemoglobinemia (generally referred to as met-H).
Think about the bluish veins visible in the wrist of of some people- and now extend that principle to an entire body. As a result, the blood of people with this condition is darker and more blue-hued than the color usually found running through the human body.
Thanks to this physical oddity, the Fugates became true Appalachian blue bloods.
According to the Mail, as a result of “a number of recessive recessive genes, intermarriage and inbreeding, members of the Fugate family were born with a rare condition that made them visibly discolored.”
The mystery, it appears, has been solved after all these years.
Because the rural Kentucky area in which the Fugates lived offered few opportunities to expand the gene pool, intermarriage allowed the rare met-H gene to come into contact with other carriers much more frequently.
In 1958, the Fugate family was discovered when one of the blue men, Luke Combs, took his wife to the University of Kentucky Hospital. Luke was apparently much more interesting to the doctors than his wife was.
Doctor Charles H. Behlen II said ‘Luke was just as blue as Lake Louise on a cool summer day,’ to the Tri-City Herald in 1974.
Eastern Kentucky
Other than the discoloration of skin, the Met-H condition poses no health risks or issues. There is even a cure of sorts for the condition that was discovered in 1980.
When a person who has turned blue from Met-H drinks a chemical-filled solution that is also blue, the Met-H carrier’s blood turns to a ‘normal’ red hue, which then is reflected in the coloration of the skin and facial complexion.
The solution only lasts for 24 hours at a time, so to stay rosy red, a Met-H carrier has to drink one glass of blue goo a day.
Today eastern Kentucky has a vastly larger population, and the condition has for all intents and purposes disappeared.
The recessive met-H gene continues on, however, unknown to its carriers and could perhaps one day result in another blue blood family somewhere else in the world.
For more details on the history of the Fugate’s and their rare condition, the Daily Mail has more here.
Talk about blue in the face... Extraordinary story of Appalachia's 'Blue Family' whose bodies were discoloured after generations of inbreeding
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2101911/Talk-blue-face-The-extraordinary-tale-Blue-Family-Appalacia.html
Isolated family in Kentucky started producing blue children in 1800s
French orphan Martin Fugate married pale American Elizabeth Smith
Had seven children, four were blue; they intermarried with local family
Genetic mutation reduces individual’s ability to carry oxygen in blood
Intermarriage led to 'pure' gene pool which often met 'met-H' gene
In the Appalachian Mountains rests a medical oddity so unusual that it at first seems a massive hoax.
Dating back to the early 1800s, an isolated family in eastern Kentucky - who can trace their roots back to a French orphan - started producing children who were blue.
As a result of a coincidental meeting of recessive genes, intermarriage and inbreeding, members of the Fugate family were born with a rare condition that made them visibly discoloured.
Due to inbreeding and inter-marriage, a rural family developed a rare blue discolouration
Feeling blue: Due to inbreeding and inter-marriage, a rural family developed a rare skin discolouration
The mystery behind the astonishing picture of the Fugates, which has been baffling people for years, appears to have finally been solved.
It began when Martin Fugate, a French orphan, settled on the banks of eastern Kentucky's Troublesome Creek to claim a land grant in the early 19th century.
Relations: A photo of Lorenzo 'Blue Anze' Dow Fugate and Eleanor Fugate, taken around 1915
Called methaemoglobinaemia (commonly known as met-H), the condition reduces the individual’s ability to carry oxygen in their blood. As a result, their blood is darker than the colour typically found running through people’s veins.
HOW 'MET-H' DARKENS BLOOD
The methaemoglobinaemia condition, or ‘met-H’, reduces someone’s ability to carry oxygen in the blood, leaving it darker than the colour typically found in veins.
The Fugate family intermarried with a neighbouring family for generations, which led to a relatively ‘pure’ gene pool, often including the met-H gene.
But as Kentucky became more populated and more genes came into the Fugate family tree, there were far fewer children born blue.
The gene is still around today but has now become statistically insignificant and there are no serious medical problems associated with it.
Because the Fugate family lived in such an isolated part of the Kentucky, they intermarried with a neighbouring family for generations which led to a relatively ‘pure’ gene pool where the met-H gene appeared much more frequently.
The family was first discovered in 1958 when one of the blue men, Luke Combs, who was a descendant of another branch of the Fugate family, took his white wife to the University of Kentucky Hospital and doctors paid more attention to him than his wife.
‘Luke was just as blue as Lake Louise on a cool summer day,’ doctor Charles H. Behlen II told the Tri-City Herald in 1974.
Aside from the stark discoloration of the carrier’s skin, there are no serious problems associated with the disease.
In 1980, a counter-intuitive solution was discovered where the blue person drinks a chemical-filled solution that is itself blue. This then turns the carrier’s blood into a ‘normal’ red hue which is then reflected in a change in skin tone.
Methaemoglobinaemia (commonly known as met-H) is a recessive gene (shown by the small r) so only produces 'blue' people in very rare circumstances
Because of the dispersion of fluids, the solution only lasts for about a day so the carrier would have to drink a serving every day.
'They weren’t sick; it was just the way they look. They’re normal people - they’re good people'
Nurse Ruth Pendergrass
As eastern Kentucky has become vastly more populated than the early 19th century, and as more genes are married into the Fugate family tree, there were far fewer children born with the condition.
That said, the recessive met-H gene lingers to this day, but it is statistically insignificant now.
‘They weren’t sick; it was just the way they look,’ said nurse Ruth Pendergrass in the Tri-City Herald article. 'They’re normal people - they’re good people.’
9) WI Elementary School Confiscates, Bans 2nd Grader’s Christian-Themed Valentines... Anti Religious Freedom/Progressive Schools
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/wi-elementary-school-confiscates-bans-2nd-graders-christian-themed-valentines/
February 16, 2012
Dexter Thielhelm, a second-grader at James Madison Elementary School in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, had a simple message for his classmates: “Jesus loves you.” The young boy had worked diligently with his mother and siblings to create candy and notes for his friends at school, as he filled empty water bottles with candy and a rolled-up a Bible verse (John 3:16) to share with his classmates. But earlier this week, to the surprise of the boy and his family, school officials confiscated the valentines before they could be handed out.
Apparently, it is district policy that Christian valentines not be distributed - a message that Melissa Wolf, Dexter’s mother, received when she met with principal Matthew Driscoll this week. The verse, ”For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life,” was apparently too religious in nature for the school to allow to be disseminated.
Wolf, 30, who has spoken out to media outlets, says that she’s not happy with the way in which the principal handled the situation. Driscoll, however, declined to comment to media on Wednesday.
“He wishes I would have asked him for permission to hand out this questionable material,” Wolf explained, describing her interaction with the principal. “I did not get an apology. I got an apology that he didn’t call me; I didn’t get an apology for taking this away from my children. He sat and listened to me kindly, and heard the things that made me upset.”
Here’s the really intriguing element to the story. Wolf has two other children at the same school. Both of whom are autistic and nonverbal. These children made similar valentines and they, too, were confiscated. But one of her other children who attends a different school - a local charter institution - handed his notes out without a hitch, the Wausau Daily Herald reports.
While Wolf is clearly frustrated by the situation, the district’s assistant superintendent, Mark Holzman, addressed the issues and attempted to explain the rationale behind the confiscation. The district doesn‘t have a specific policy that bans religious verses being handed out on Valentine’s Day, he said, but the young age of the children was one of the primary reasons he cited (i.e. the students aren’t old enough to understand the religious message)
The district also had concerns that the Christian content could lead others with negative messages to also distribute to fellow classmates. After all, once one person is allowed to hand out a message, any individual can then tout his or her values, Holzman argued.
“Otherwise we would be allowing anybody to give out personal messages or values,” Holzman explained. “If somebody wanted to put anti-Semitism in there … people would be outraged by that. If kids have a choice, it’s a different scenario. But in this case we’re talking about handing it out to everyone in the class, and they don’t have a choice.”
Wolf says that, though the school attempted to explain to Dexter why the valentines couldn’t be handed out, he was embarrassed and confused by the incident.