Rocket Science Holds Up START II

Latest:The United States and Russia have reportedly reached agreement on a new strategic arms reduction treaty on Tuesday.  Officials are in Geneva to finalize the agreement in formal language after an agreement in principle was reached during a telephone conversation between the two presidents last week. The process could take as long as two months. The treaty is the first to establish strict limits on warheads with verification measures in place.

Update:  Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov put an upbeat spin on the status of the stalled START II treaty negotiations on Friday.  Minister Lavrov said the talks between Russia and the United States will resume in early February and will soon result in a significant treaty further reducing each county's nuclear arsenal. National Security Advisor James Jones and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen were in Moscow this week to further progress.  Both sides would like to have an accomplishment to boast about at the upcoming Global Nuclear Security Summit in April and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Review Conference in May.  Presidents Medvedev and Obama agreed during their Kremlin meeting in July that the treaty should reduce nuclear warheads to between 1,500 and 1,675 for each country and reduce the number of delivery vehicles to between 500 and 1100.  These levels are about 30% reductions in the size of the arsenals.  A finished treaty would greatly enhance bilateral relations between the leading nuclear powers which reached a nadir after Russia's brief border war with Georgia. It would also lay the foundation for even further reductions which President Obama desires to perhaps as low as 100 strategic nuclear systems each.

{First post 1.14.09}The START II negotiations between the US and Russia are still stalled. The sticking point apparently is, well, rocket science--telemetry to be exact. The previous strategic weapons agreement which expired in December contained language that allowed the other side access to real time data about missile tests. According to US sources, the Russians are balking at including similar language in START II. Technically most of the same information is now available through advance tracking and verification technology, but the lack of such telemetry access language could set off the hardliners in Congress thereby making ratification more difficult. The Russians abhor anything that smacks of American intrusiveness or overreaching. They want to link telemetry access to defensive missiles as well; a goal pushed by the man in charge, Mr. Putin.   The administration wants to complete a treaty by the time of the Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference which begins in May.  The State Department has attempted to downplay the impasse in press conference, but has also implied that the US would not give up defensive missile telemetry by saying that the agreement on the table is about strategic offensive systems, not defensive systems.  It seems to this writer that both sides should spend the extra dime to achieve mutual security and peace to replace mutual destruction.

Desparate Tiger Numbers In The Greater Mekong

The Greater Mekong River drainage covering five South Asian countries--Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam--contains fewer tigers than ever. In the last year of the Tiger, 1998, the regional tiger population was estimated at 1200. It is now down to about 350. Asian ministers from countries in the tiger's range recently met in Thailand to discuss what can be done to save the wild tiger. If decisive action is not taken, Panthera tigris will be extinct in the Mekong region by 2022 according to WWF. Sufficient forested habitat about the size of France still exists to support a healthy tiger population, but the demand for tiger parts used in Chinese folk medicine and unsustainable regional development is driving the decline. There are no more than 30 tigers each in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. The remaining Asian tigers are found in the mountainous boarder between Thailand and Myanmar. In fact there are more tigers in captivity in China (estimated at 5,000) than are still living in the wild.  These majestic cats are doomed to a life of suffering in inhumane conditions while destined to be chopped into parts [photo] for the bizarre potions trade.  The ministerial meeting is part of a worldwide process to galvanize political support to save the tiger in the wild. These efforts will culminate in a "Tiger Summit" in Vladivostok hosted by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin this September.

[photo: savethetigerfund.org]

Good Luck With That

Members of Congress Donna Edwards (D-MD) and John Conyers (D-MI) have proposed a constitutional amendment to counter the anti-democratic implications (ask yourself who has the deepest pockets) of the recent decision by the Supreme Court overturning restrictions on political spending by corporations:

‘‘SECTION 1. The sovereign right of the people to govern being essential to a free democracy, Congress and the States may regulate the expenditure of funds for political speech by any corporation, limited liability company, or other corporate entity.
‘‘SECTION 2. Nothing contained in this Article shall be construed to abridge the freedom of the press.’’.

An amendment is the only legislation that can possibly undue 112 years of legal precedent establishing the free speech rights of juridical persons. Giving business entities, which already enjoy legal privileges not according humans, the same political rights as citizens is a fundamental flaw in our system of governance. But the amendment will not be the first good idea to go nowhere because the procedure for approving a constitutional amendment is so difficult and tedious that is unlikely to ever be made law.

Pants Still on Fire!

Safe, clean, nuclear energy? Obama's pre-conditions expressed in this campaign appearence--safety, storage and no subsidies--for supporting nuclear power have not been met. He needs to be reminded.

Global Warming E-Mail Leak Could be Espionage

Update:  Former chief scientist for the British Government, Sir David King said the theft of a thousand e-mails and two thousand documents that caused a wave of skepticism to flood the Copenhagen climate summit was the sophisticated work of a foreign intelligence agency.  In an interview with the Independent newspaper the scientist dismissed the idea that the leaks were run of the mill hacking.  He also considers the timing of the leaks not mere coincident.  Sir David said, "The e-mails date to 1996, so someone was collecting the data over many years."  Dr. Gavin Schmidt of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies foiled the hackers who had penetrated the RealClimate website on November 17th and attempted to load the e-mails onto the site.  Later the stolen information appeared on the TomCity server in Tomsk, Russia.  Dr. Schmidt agrees that the hack was sophisticated and required considerable skill and knowledge not usually possessed by a casual hacker.

{first post 12.7.09}The leaked e-mails of senior climate scientists discussing how to manipulate and hide unhelpful data has caused a sensation among right-wing bloggers. But The Independent reports an even more sensational allegation has surfaced. A member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the computer hack gaining access to 13 years of data was not an amateur job. The leaked e-mails originally appeared on a server at the firm Tomcity located in the Siberian city of Tomsk [photo: The Independent]. The firm has a history of issuing statements praising hackers for efforts to disrupt perceived anti-Russian statements on the Web. The FSB also has a record of paying friendly hackers, as well as running coordinated cyber attacks against websites it considers unfriendly. Of course suspicious coincidence does not make a case, but as the head of the Climate Change Panel said, the hacks will fuel more skepticism about global warming and make agreement on action even more difficult. Russia has an ambivalent attitude towards making reductions in carbon levels for good reasons. The oil and gas industry is a major contributor to its GDP. Putting the immense Siberian natural resources off limits to development will cost the country billions as would modernizing its creaking industrial infrastructure to meet tougher emission standards. On the other side of the balance is the catastrophic potential of melting the vast northern permafrost on which railroads and entire cities like Yakutsk are built. If that is not bad enough, the permafrost caps huge deposits of methane gas which, if released into the atmosphere by melting, would drastically increase global temperatures perhaps to the level of another extinction event*.

*there have been at least five extinction events in geologic time. The two most well known are the Permian (largest in terms of genera lost) and the Cretaceous extinctions (Earth's most successful terrestrial animal order--dinosaurs--killed off). Climate change is thought to have played a significant role in both, although there is disagreement over the triggering event. The EPA has, bless its heart, declared greenhouse gas emissions hazardous to human health which will allow CO2 levels to be regulated as an air pollutant in the United States.

Badges?; We Doin' Need Stinkin' Badges

Update:  Baltazar Garzon, the Spanish judge who prosecuted Argentina's dictator, Augusto Pinochet, will begin an investigation of torture at Guantanamo Bay according to Spanish media on Saturday.  Garzon is operating under the concept of universal jurisdiction recently amended by new legislation restricting court jurisdiction to cases were torture is committed against Spaniards or where the perpetrators are in Spain.  A Spanish citizen Ahmed Abderraman Hamed and three others with significant connections to Spain were among the detainees at Guantanamo.  A Spanish court convicted Ahmed of associating with Al Qaeda and sentenced him to six years in prison in 2005.

Garzon also requested the investigation of the Regime lawyers responsible for the "torture memos" including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo and David Addington, but the case was reassigned to another judge a month after the request was made.  Yoo and John Bybee were recently cleared by an internal investigation at the US Department of Justice of professional misconduct.  Yoo is a tenured law professor at University of California, Berkeley and Bybee is a federal appeals court judge.  A finding of misconduct would probably have resulted in disbarment proceedings against Yoo, and impeachment proceedings against Bybee.

{first post 1.28.10}US Person was tempted to file this one in the "oldie but goodie" folder, but he wants you to know his opinions are backed by experts.  The Iraq invasion was  Charlatan & the Neocons' pet project fulfilling his desire to be a "war president", and which he hoped would accomplish two objectives: removing former ally Sadam Hussein while securing the oil fields under the boot heel of the US military.  He got the excuse he needed to act when the jihadists struck in the United States.  Aggression against Iraq, which was technically at peace with the United States despite years of deadly embargo, was clearly a violation of the UN Charter and international law.  The former chief legal advisor for the British Foreign Office told the Iraq Inquiry Committee (Chilcot Inquiry) that he advised the invasion was illegal.  The fundamental rule of international law said Michael Wood in his memorandum to the Tony Blair government is, "...governments must refrain from using force or threat of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state".  The invasion did not qualify as self or collective defense.  A threat to security must be imminent as there are no concepts of "preventive attack" or "regime change" in international law. These are concepts used by neo-conservative policy wonks to justify an aggressive war--a crime lodged against the Nazis at Nuremberg and Japan's militarists at Tokyo.  Then Attorney-General Peter Goldsmith told the British Defense Minister essentially the same thing: the invasion of Iraq was illegal under accepted principles of international law.  Needless to say, the good legal advice was ignored.

Chart of the Week: House Market Still Down

These charts from Calculated Risk gives us a good idea of the state of the housing market in the United States. The twenty cities in the widely followed Schiller Price Index show price drops from the peak. Only five cities show improvement over last year.

The stock market may be up and business slowly recovering, but the real estate market is not responding nearly as fast, and it is where the bulk of consumer wealth is concentrated, and the equity in the mortgage backed securities plaguing bank balance sheets.  Nine banks have gone under in the first month of this year. The second chart shows the cliff that new home prices went over in 2007.  The small blip at the right shows the only 4% improvement over the bottom in January.

The lack of jobs is also showing up in the increasing number of delinquencies shown in the last chart.  According to real estate market experts, about 95% of the new home loans are being underwritten by the US government. That is another huge government expenditure that cannot go on forever.