The 11 o'clock News

PEAK OIL: Hindsight is 2020

One doesn’t have to be Desmond on "LOST" or a prophet to predict the future when one can read the latest  International Energy Agency forecast:

 "In terms of the global picture, assuming that OPEC will invest in a timely manner, global conventional oil can still continue, but we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau as well, which is of course not good news from a global oil supply point of view."

Of course.  Better read that line again.  The nightmare scenario of peak oil  starts in 2020.

That's 11 years from now.

In preparation for its 2008 report, the IEA conducted a detailed study of depletion rates in 800 of the world's largest oil fields. Nobody had ever done such work before and what the IEA found caused the agency to revise its understanding of the world's energy future in a profound way.

Remember, this is the same IEA that always insisted peak oil was decades off.  Nothing to worry about. And so governments didn't.

Wait, there’s more:  The IEA  reports "current trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable," declared Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the IEA.

"Rising imports of oil and gas into OECD regions and developing Asia, together with the growing concentration of production in a small number of countries, would increase our susceptibility to supply disruptions and sharp price hikes. At the same time, greenhouse-gas emissions would be driven up inexorably, putting the world on track for an eventual global temperature increase of up to 6° C."

The U.S. Department of Energy commissioned a report by oil analyst Robert L. Hirsch on how long it would take for developed economies to mitigate the effects of peak oil. Hirsch concluded that even a worldwide emergency response launched 10 years before the crisis hit would still result in "a liquid fuels shortfall roughly a decade after the time that oil would have peaked."

In order to avoid this scenario, Hirsch advised, a massive mitigation program must begin at least 20 years before peak.

"We must have a "global energy revolution," says IEA's Fatih Birol.  "I think time is not on our side here."

Now THAT is prophetic.

“LOST” In a Sea of Global Warming

If you want to visit the Maldives and other soon-to-be "LOST" islands, a new report suggests you make it soon. 

A new study commissioned by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and issued this month expands on the 2007 findings of the United Nations Inter-government Panel on Climate Change.  Recent data indicates the “expert” global warming predictions of the rise in sea levels in the next hundred years of no more than 1.5 feet are way off.  The world's major ice sheets are melting much more rapidly than previously thought.   In light of recent ice sheet melting, global sea levels could rise as much as 4 feet by 2100.  The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are losing an average of 48 cubic miles of ice a year, equivalent to twice the amount of ice in the Alps.  

Looking at factors such as rapid sea ice loss in the Arctic and prolonged drought in the Southwest, the new assessment suggests that earlier projections may have underestimated the dynamics that scientists now understand about ice sheet melting,  among other things, a process of "lubrication," in which warmer ocean water gets underneath coastal ice sheets and accelerates melting.

Tom Armstrong, senior advisor for global change programs at the U.S. Geological Survey, said the report "shows how quickly the information is advancing" on potential climate shifts. The prospect of abrupt climate change, he said, "is one of those things that keeps people up at night, because it's a low-probability but high-risk scenario. It's unlikely to happen in our lifetimes, but if it were to occur, it would be life-changing."

Water, water everywhere but...

Scientists also looked at the prospect of prolonged drought over the next 100 years. They said it was impossible to determine yet whether human activity is responsible for the drought the Southwestern United States has experienced over the last decade, but every indication suggests the region will become consistently drier in the next several decades. Richard Seager, a senior research scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said that nearly all of the 24 computer models the group surveyed projected the same climatic conditions for the North American Southwest, which includes Mexico.

"If the models are correct, it will transition in the coming years and decades to a more arid climate, and that transition is already underway," Seager said, adding that such conditions would probably include prolonged droughts lasting more than a decade.

Armstrong said the need for "downscaled models" was one of the challenges facing the federal government. When it comes to abrupt climate shifts, he said, "we need to be prepared to deal with it in terms of policymaking. There are really no policies in place to deal with abrupt climate change.
Once you start melting there, you can't really take it back," he said.

The Curious Cases of Laci (Rocha) Peterson and Evelyn Hernandez

( SF Chronicle) - Christmas Eve 2002, a vibrant, brown hair young woman -- pregnant in her third trimester with a baby boy -- vanishes. Police suspect foul play. Doubts swirl around the man she loves, whom police neither name nor rule out as a suspect. Finally, the grim discovery: A woman's remains are pulled from San Francisco Bay.

The saga of Laci Rocha Peterson captivated America's attention. The 27-year-old Modesto mother-to-be was reported missing on and became the subject of daily news reports capped by the arrest of her husband, Scott Peterson.

But it is also the story of 24-year-old Evelyn Hernandez of San Francisco, a vibrant, brown hair young woman who vanished  with her 5-year-old son, a week before she was to deliver a baby boy. Her torso was found in the bay three months later and identified, while her son remains missing. No arrests have been made.

Yet Hernandez's case barely registered in the community and in Bay Area television news shows and newspapers, while the eyes of the nation seemed to be fixed on the search for Laci Peterson.

There are many, sometimes subtle, reasons why some cases become major news stories -- while the vast majority languish in obscurity, according to law enforcement officials, relatives of the missing, journalists and citizens.

Peterson seemed to be the all-American girl next door, the most innocent of victims. She also has a vocal family advocating on her behalf, and the financial and public relations help of a well-connected crime victims group in Modesto, the Sund/Carrington Memorial Reward Foundation, formed during the search for the Yosemite murder victims in 1999.

"This girl (Laci), she's white, they have money, and there is a family behind her," said Twiggy Damy, a friend of Hernandez, a single mother who moved to San Francisco from El Salvador when she was 14. "Who cares about Evelyn?

"The first time I heard Laci's case, I got flashbacks from Evelyn, because it is the same case," Damy said. "That's very hard to see, why one gets more attention than the other."

VALUE OF PUBLICITY

Families of crime victims say the media spotlight keeps pressure on police to work quickly to solve the case, while police say publicity helps them enlist the help of citizens whose tips might lead to the recovery of a body, an arrest

She just looks like a warm, beautiful daughter," Hambrick said. "You see nothing but a big smile."

But advocates for other missing adults say that while they don't begrudge the attention Laci Peterson has received, they are devastated by the disparity.

About 200,000 adults are reported missing in the United States each year. The state attorney general's office reports that 35,142 adults were reported missing in California in 2001, some 4,346 of them under suspicious or unknown circumstances. Most have received scant attention.

While Evelyn Hernandez's story eerily mirrors Peterson's case, the disparity in media coverage also has been striking.

Even before the dramatic arrest of Scott Peterson, The Chronicle had written 32 stories since Laci Peterson was reported missing -- four of them on the front page. It published four about Evelyn Hernandez, none on the front page.

HERNANDEZ'S STORY

Laci Peterson often topped the newscasts of national cable news channels during a four-month investigation, while Evelyn Hernandez received scant coverage from Bay Area television stations -- even on the day her remains were found.

Described by friends as a devoted mother to her son Alex, Hernandez was a legal immigrant who had worked as a vocational nurse and in jobs at Costco and the Clift Hotel. She was reported missing by her baby's father, a 36-year-old married man named Herman Aguilera, Pera said.

Authorities had already suspected that Hernandez and her son Alex met with foul play when her wallet was found in South San Francisco, two blocks from where Aguilera worked at a limousine company, Pera said. Then, in late July, a portion of her torso -- still clad in maternity clothes -- washed up on the Embarcadero.

When her death was confirmed by DNA tests just after Labor Day, her small circle of friends and a sister who lives in the EastBay  planned a memorial service in San Francisco that drew 100 people. It was the same small community that had circulated flyers when she disappeared.

Aguilera's attorney, Robert Tayac, said at the time that his client had done everything he could to cooperate with police and was "deeply saddened by the news of the death of his close friend."

Damy said friends and family tried repeatedly to get Hernandez's case featured on "America's Most Wanted" but were rejected because no warrant had been issued for suspect. But, Damy said, the show did a story on Laci Peterson although no suspects had been named in that case either.

Hernandez's friends and family are convinced that subtle factors -- from Hernandez's status as a Salvadoran immigrant to the fact that she was involved with a married man -- figured in the news media giving little notice to her case.

"It's embarrassing," said Pera, the San Francisco police inspector.

 

So What? You Don’t Know Dick

Vice President/War Criminal Dick Cheney has a parting message for Americans: “So what.”  And if Dick’s derisive tone of US is a surprise, then you don’t know Dick.

 Dick says we should quit whining about all the things he and President Bush did to undermine the rule of law, erode the balance of powers between the White House and Congress, abuse prisoners and spy illegally on Americans.

Instead think about Dick’s great sacrifice for US: He can’t visit Old or New Europe again, fearful of charges against him in the international court of justice at The Hague for war crimes for authorizing illegal treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and engaging in illegal rendition, to name a few. 

(Editor’s note:  For those of US still in the dark or denial about this dark stain on America’s national spirit, check out two recent documentaries,  Taxi to the Dark Side and Torturing Democracy.   (Kudos to the mediocre media: Taxi was to be aired on the Discovery Channel, but with Discovery Communications then in the process of going public and facing sensitive SEC clearances, executives apparently decided not to risk provoking the anger of the White House.    PBS said it had no network space for Torturing Democracy until January 20, 2009, the day the Bush Administration decamps from Washington.)

If you knew Dick, then you knew Dick would always have immoral certainty of his-story: 

·        According to Dick, the invasion of Iraq was exactly the right thing to do, not an unnecessary war that required misleading Americans.

·        The post-invasion period was not bungled to the point where Americans got shot up by an insurgency that the Bush team failed to see building.

·        The horrors at Abu Ghraib were not the result of the Pentagon’s decision to authorize abusive and illegal interrogation techniques, which Mr. Cheney endorsed..

·        In Mr. Cheney’s reality, the crippling budget deficit was caused mainly by fighting two wars and by essential programs like “enhancing the security of our shipping container business.”

·        The White House kept the Democratic and Republican Congressional leadership fully briefed on the domestic spy program starting in late 2001. He said he personally ran a meeting at which “they were unanimous, Republican and Democrat alike” that the program was essential and did not require further Congressional involvement.

So what?  Well, a new CNN-Opinion Research Corp. survey said 80 percent of Democrats called Cheney the worst VP ever, and 60 percent of independents agreed. 

So what? There is still 1 percent out there that believes he's the best vice president in U.S. history and the rest of US don’t know Dick.

Why We Need the Washington Post

--Dean Baker

“Imagine a major national newspaper that never saw an $8 trillion dollar housing bubble. Suppose its most often cited expert on the housing market was the chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, who also authored the 2006 bestseller : Why the Housing Boom Will Not Bust and How You Can Profit From It.

Yes, I'm talking about the Washington Post, which had the gall today to run a column by Jim Hoagland complaining about how "we" are passing on a bad world to our children. The "we" in the column is meant to refer to the generations currently in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, who he claims are leaving huge problems to our children.

He's right about the problems, but he's wrong about the "we."

The reality is that the Washington Post and the elite clique for which it is a mouth piece have badly failed us and our children. The housing bubble was easily recognizable. The economic disaster that we are now facing could have been easily avoided if the Washington Post and its elite friends (e.g. Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Henry Paulson) were not too incompetent or corrupt to see the evidence of problems everywhere. Needless to say, those of us who did try to issue warnings were ignored by this elite crew.

The Washington Post has whined endlessly about the long-term deficit problems facing the country. But how often has it told its readers that the long-term deficit problem is almost entirely the result of the broken U.S. health care system: a system that costs more than twice as much per person as the health care system in most of the countries who enjoy longer life expectancies than we do?

Perhaps the Post does not choose to share this information because it identifies with the wealthy people who run the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies, and the highly paid medical specialists, all of whom get rich off the waste in our health care system. (Perhaps the fact that these industries advertise heavily in the Post also affects its willingness to print pieces exposing the enormous waste in the U.S. health care system.)

The Post also has been a big proponent of a trade policy that is based on selective protectionism. The Post's trade policy subjects less educated workers (those without college degrees) to competition with low-paid workers in the developing world, while leaving the most highly educated workers largely protected from such competition.

Since the vast majority of the workforce falls into this unprotected category, most of our children will see lower standards of living because of the Post's trade policy as it redistributes income to its elite friends. The Post even applies the euphemism "free trade" to its policy of selective protectionism to make it more palatable.

I could go on at considerable length. The list of the failings of the Post and its elite friends is long -- lying to get us into the war in Iraq would be the next obvious item on the list.

The point is that the Post and it crew of cronies have badly failed the world in a large number of ways and continue to do so. The Post and Hoagland's efforts to attribute the blame to the rest of us for the trouble caused by the greed and incompetence of their elite clique deserve nothing but contempt and ridicule.”

 But we still need the Post...for something.

John Locke's Wheel Chair = "Clean Slate" Roller Coaster

Assuming John Locke is really dead and Ben is finally telling the truth that "they ALL have to go back" to the island to rescue the Losties, how will the OC 6 move Locke's body and maintain the chain? 

Perhaps a wheel chair will figure prominently again in this stratospheric roller coaster ride.  It would not be surprising if John Locke and his wheel chair are resurrected on the island in a "clean slate."  

If the OC 6 break the chain, then perhaps all their futures will be "LOST" in a "Flash Before Your Eyes."

 

American Hero: Mark "Deep Throat" Felt

American hero Mark Felt would have saluted Thomas Tamm, the ex-DOJ official who also alerted a newspaper reporter about crimes committed by the White House.   

Felt, known as "Deep Throat" in the 1972 Watergate scandal that toppled Richard Nixon's presidency, has died in Santa Rosa, California. He was 95.

Felt provided tips and information that guided Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they wrote stories stemming from the bungled burglary of the Democratic Party National Committee headquarters in 1972. President Nixon ultimately resigned as a consequence of the White House role in the scandal and in the cover-up that followed.

"Because of his position virtually atop the chief investigative agency, his words and guidance had immense, at times even staggering, authority," Woodward said in an article in the Washington Post on June 2, 2005.

William Mark Felt was born Aug. 17, 1913, in Twin Falls, Idaho. The son of a building contractor, he was educated at the University of Idaho, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1935 before heading to Washington. There he worked for U.S. Senator James Pope, a Democrat and lawyer from Idaho who served only one term.  After Pope lost office, Felt worked for his successor, David Clark, and studied law at George Washington University in the evenings. He graduated in 1940 with a law degree and was admitted to the bar the following year.

Felt's next job was at the Federal Trade Commission, though he found the work tedious after interviewing hundreds of people in a case on toilet-paper brands. He applied at the FBI in 1941 and began work there in January 1942.

Entering the bureau headed by J. Edgar Hoover, Felt completed training in Virginia and Washington before receiving his first posting in Texas as a field officer for six months.

Returning to Washington, he was assigned to the espionage desk of the domestic-intelligence unit during World War II. There he learned the cloak-and-dagger methods of counter- surveillance that Woodward later used to avoid detection before secret meetings with Felt.

In 1971, Felt was promoted to deputy associate director and was asked to restrict the spying that William Sullivan, head of FBI domestic intelligence, was conducting for the White House in secret. After Hoover's death the following year, Gray was appointed by Nixon to head the bureau, prompting the resignation of Clyde Tolson, Hoover's right-hand man. Felt became associate director, the No. 2 job at the FBI, and assumed effective control as Gray was increasingly absent from headquarters and suffered from ill health.

"Deep Throat" earned his place in U.S. history in 1972 when five men broke into the Watergate Hotel in Washington on the night of June 16 to fix wiretaps in the Democratic National Committee's headquarters. The burglars were arrested by police, who were notified by security guard Frank Wills.

The break-in aroused suspicion when the name of Howard Hunt, who had worked for the White House, appeared in the notebook of one of the burglars, James McCord, a security chief on the Committee to Re-elect the President and a former Central Intelligence Agency employee.

Woodward, who was in the Navy when he first met Felt to deliver some documents to the White House in 1970, delved into Hunt's history with the CIA. Bernstein located a local prosecutor in Miami who had evidence of payments made to one of the burglars, Bernard Barker. Those funds were tied to campaign money earmarked for Nixon's re-election effort.

After Woodward visited Felt at his Virginia home to make sense of the information he had, he was told that they would have to meet in secret and avoid any contact by phone.

They agreed to signal each other in one of two ways whenever a meeting was urgent: Woodward was to place an empty flowerpot with a red flag on his apartment balcony; and Felt would arrange to have Woodward's copy of the New York Times marked with a circle on page 20 and the hands of a clock at the bottom to indicate a rendezvous time. They would then meet on the same night at about 2 a.m. in an underground garage in Rosslyn, Virginia.

"Felt believed he was protecting the bureau by finding a way, clandestine as it was, to push some of the information from the FBI interviews and files out to the public, to help build public and political pressure to make Nixon and his people answerable," Woodward said in the Washington Post.

 "Deep Throat" helped set an investigative process in motion. The burglars were convicted in January 1973 and McCord, to avert a 30-year prison sentence, revealed the role of the committee in the burglary.

Hunt and Gordon Liddy, both of whom worked in the White House's special-investigations unit known as "the Plumbers," had supervised the break-in at the behest of the committee. Nixon's role in the affair was examined and questioned throughout the investigation.

After a Senate inquiry during which White House Counsel Dean testified against Nixon, secret tape recordings of Oval Office conversations were revealed. Special prosecutor Archibald Cox refused to drop his subpoena of the tapes, leading to his dismissal and worsening Nixon's predicament.  The Supreme Court ultimately ordered the release of the recordings, and seven Nixon aides were indicted.

Nixon's fate was finally sealed by a taped conversation of him and H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, the chief of staff at the White House who would later go to prison for his role in the affair, talking about how to foil the FBI's investigation of Watergate.

Back to the future:  Today another Republican administration stands accused of illegal activities, but this time the taped conversations are yours.  This time the FBI Director threatened to resign rather than go along with the crooks. All because an American hero thought about his country first instead of his career. 

Mark Felt would have saluted Thomas Tamm.

It's a Mad, Mad Mad-off World

The Madoff-Ponzi scheme isn't some Internet bubble or housing bubble, blowing up in everybody's face at the same time as a collective grasp for easy money turns against the crowd.  At its source was a familiar refrain:  Greed is good for business but not for US.  Greed won and we lost as our  government was bought and paid to look the other way. The  goal of the conservative movement was to remove federal controls from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace. The Securities and Exchange Commission didn't see it coming because it wasn't looking.

The real news is --shock and awe-ful - that the SEC  might itself be mired in personal conflicts tied to the case.  Defunding agencies such as the SEC was one way to stop the killer bureaucrats; another was to stuff them full of business-friendly personnel who would go easy on regulated. The signature conservative regulatory idea became "voluntary enforcement", because everyone now knew that efficient markets regulated themselves. Bad practices or tainted products drove away consumers; therefore firms had an incentive to behave, an incentive far more powerful than some top-down scheme in which big brother told them what to do.

But it is only now, as we watch the financial system crumble around us, that we can really see the devastating consequences of this folly. It turns out the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which was responsible for regulating investment banks, did a significant part of its job through a voluntary program which firms could participate in or not as they saw fit. This system had--of course--been pushed for by the investment banks themselves, who wanted it in order to avoid the stricter rules from European governments that they would otherwise have had to obey.

And now, as a consequence, the SEC has almost no industry left to regulate. Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley: All of them are gone or restructured. At business's urging, business was left up to its own devices; its own devices turned out to be precisely the things that our grandparents set up regulatory agencies to guard against: euphoria that leads to panic; perverse incentives that lead to fraud; boom that leads to bust.

As you watch your 401k crumble, remember this bit of irony: Over the last three decades, business has got virtually everything it wanted, and its doomsday scenario from the 1970s has come true because of it. The regulators have indeed killed the regulated--not by intrusive meddling but by doing nothing, by taking a nap while the financial sector puffed up the bubble and blew itself to pieces.

It's a mad, mad, Mad-off world.   As Johnny Winters said: "businessmen  cheat and steal everyday."  But Johnny was also wrong ... they don't even pay taxes.  The basic concept of faith in the U.S. financial system, eroded by the spread of the credit crisis, has been brought to its knees by Madoff.  Turns out that pretty much anybody could be a crook.

What this means for capitalism and the return of some balance to the global financial markets will be debated for months, if not years to come.  An editor for The Daily Telegraph in London was asked some years ago why the British national newspaper rarely wrote obituaries for corporate and financial icons in The City of London when they passed away, preferring instead to focus on retired generals, scientists, artists, authors, or even athletes.

"Because a life spent grubbing for money isn't worth writing about." 

“LOST” LUGGAGE NUKES: TABULA RASA is “CLEAN SLATE”

Tabula Rasa:  The third episode of “LOST” had US thinking there was a con-nection with the philosophical thesis developed by the 17th century philosopher John Locke. Locke meant that the mind of the individual was born "blank" (CLEAN SLATE), and emphasized the individual's freedom to author his or her own soul.   But perhaps the “CLEAN SLATE” that JJ and the gang referred to was part of Operation Roller Coaster, a series of THREE NUKE TESTS conducted at the Nevada Test Site in 1963.

Name	Date	Size
CLEAN SLATE I	May 25	0 yield
CLEAN SLATE II	May 31	0 yield
CLEAN SLATE III	June 9	0 yield

And if the CLEAN SLATE nuke was a small one, something that could be transported in a suitcase too,  perhaps the “TABULA RASA” script provides US a clue:

 [Shot of Charlie sitting down on the beach while Claire struggles with a piece of luggage. Charlie gets up to help her.]

CHARLIE: Whoa, hey, I got it. I got it.

CLAIRE: Thanks.

[They put the luggage on the wheelchair.]

CHARLIE: Well, look on the bright side. Whoever's this was is probably better off than we are. I got it.

[Shot of Sun with a suitcase.]

SUN

: 여기… 당신 가방 찾은 것 같아요!

[Subtitle:] I think I found your bag.

JIN: 그래? 보자. 아니야.

[Subtitle:] Really? Let's see. No, this isn't it.

SUN

: 그럼 계속 찾아볼게요.

[Subtitle:] Then I'll keep looking.

But do it quickly...the clock is ticking.

"LOST" Nukes - “316” or “3 – 8+8”

According to the “LOST” Dynamic Duo, the episode title “316” has several meanings (which Damon pronounces as “three-sixteen.”)  As “LOST” appears to have several con-nections to mini-nukes and making a last STAND, perhaps so does this episode.  Remember the Alamo? 

Operation Sunbeam tested the M-388 Davy Crockett,  a tactical nuke named after American folk hero Davy Crockett,  who died defending the Alamo.   One of the smallest nuclear weapons ever built, the Davy Crockett was developed in the late 1950s for use against Soviet troops had war broken out in Europe. The M-388 round used a version of the W54 warhead,. The Mk-54 weighed about 23 kg, with a selectable yield of 10 or 20 tons.

The warhead was tested on July 7, 1962 in the Little Feller II weapons effects test shot, and again in an actual firing of the Davy Crockett from distance of 1.7 miles  in the Little Feller I test shot on July 17. This was the last atmospheric test detonation at the Nevada Test Site.