leviathan

welly, welly, well then, looks like the isaelis gots themselves some gas mejor.  just the other day, Noble Energy -- no shit -- announced the discovery of 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

The rally at Ratio is thanks to the company's 15% stake in a giant offshore gas field called Leviathan, operated by Houston-based Noble Energy Inc.

On Wednesday, the frenzy got fresh fuel: Noble confirmed its earlier estimates that the field contains 16 trillion cubic feet of gas—making it the world's biggest deepwater gas find in a decade, with enough reserves to supply Israel's gas needs for 100 years.

It's still early days, and getting all that gas out of the seabed may be more difficult than it seems today. But Noble and its partners think the field could hold enough gas to transform Israel, a country precariously dependent on others for energy, into a net-energy exporter.

ya know, the iranians and the ruskies have been yakkin' 'bout an "opec-like" natural gas cartel. bahrain has said, shit, buds, we're in! ben doin' it for awhile now, if i recall.

welly, welly, well, then. how's 'bout a new partner, neighbours? can you imagine israel teaming up with iran and the russians on an opec-like global gas cartel?

we can put aside our rancid, racist, irrational bigotry, informing the brunt of our world view, to team up in a cooperative effort to control global gas supplies, screw the world, and make a fucking fortune doing it.

sounds like it could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

lawless rare earths area

did you know there existed such wondrous places, these "lawless rare earths" areas?  the wild wild rare earths area.  bit wordy. they're in northern Guangdong.  wild wild guangdong. uh. wild wild rare earth west. that's not bad.

anyway, beloved ol' nyt is happily ladlin' up another woe are the prospers of china story.  they be damned for their monopoly o' those luscious rare earths, those marvelous elements of the modern must have age, by bands of rapacious buccaneers, mining their own rare earth loot in wild wild guandong, absconding with thence toward vietnam, where japanese business yops hover, scooping up the contraband, banging it off to nippon, thereby subverting china's embargo of rare earths to japan.

that won't do.

What is new are efforts by China’s national and provincial governments to crack down on the illegal mines, to which local authorities have long turned a blind eye. The efforts coincide with a decision by Beijing to reduce legal exports as well, including an announcement by China’s commerce ministry on Tuesday that export quotas for all rare earth metals will be 35 percent lower in the early months of next year than in the first half of this year.

the problem? CHIGOV only has control of half of it.

Rogue operations in southern China produce an estimated half of the world’s supply of heavy rare earths, which are the most valuable kinds of rare earth metals.
...
China mines 99 percent of the global supply of heavy rare earths, with legal, state-owned mines mainly accounting for the rest of China’s output. That means the Chinese government’s only effective competitors in producing these valuable commodities are the crime rings within the country’s borders.

just how competitive are these rare earth rivals?

Someone abducted the general manager of Pacific Ores, Constant Li. The kidnappers brought Mr. Li to Mr. Crawley’s Hong Kong office one night, bound him to a chair with duct tape, gagged and blindfolded him and ripped open his throat with box cutters.

lawless rare earths area.

out of iraq ... ish

the lede begins with a bold statement by Maliki:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ruled out the presence of any U.S. troops in Iraq after the end of 2011."

whew, potent stuff, which receives a quote from the PM himself.

"The last American soldier will leave Iraq" as agreed,  ... "This agreement is not subject to extension, not subject to alteration. It is sealed."

sealed! says the pm. and so definitive!  the very essence of definitive.  sealed with a kiss.  us troops out!  every last one, by the end of 2011.  finally.

or          not

But Mr. Maliki said the only way for any of the remaining 50,000 or so American soldiers to stay beyond 2011 would be for the two nations to negotiate—with the approval of Iraq's Parliament—a new Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA, similar to the one concluded in 2008.

ah, yes, just like then. we remember fondly those busheoise days of the panic attack SOFA and Maliki's bold, firm statements of the ultimate fate, the scrabbling and haggling, threats! oh, it was a juicy time for awhile. immunity! we must have immunity for this and for that.  dates!  a date for withdrawal is a must.  naw.  hate them dates.  gives the damnable terrorists a timeline to terror! generals back pedaling and tsk-tsking the need for realism and "conditions on the ground."  glorious stuff.

 oh well, well, oh my, we'll just have to have a lookie at what's goin' on when it's goin' on, see what happens then.

 'member that?

well, who knows whether Maliki will retain resolve?  he is feeling a tad kingly these days.

hugo hitlerez

readers no doubt will have already surmised, had to readjust the take on the whole winkinglinks thing.  'cause buddy these damnable state cabes have been a hoot, a genuine one.  quite apart from the media dick spin on chosen features. ("hey, all our oppressive dynastic arab leaders want to hit iran!  that must be the right thing to do then!")  not the kind one gets from slomo psyops, but a genuine ass-baring hoot.  makin' all kinna of dumdums look like, well, just what you'd expect. us embassy in honduras: we got us a coo day taah down here! white house: nahh.

gotta say though, doesn't look like manning's imagining that hillary would take a hit came to much.  whiff.  dna grabs and iris scans; barely fluffed her hair.

gotta luv michael freakin moore bustin' a state cable sayin' that cuba had banned Sicko.  Imagine what the exact opposite of a state banning something would be, and that's what actually happened in Cuba.  Cuba honoured Moore, played the film everywhere, even broadcast it on national television.

here's the relevant part of the cable:

XXXXXXXXXXXX stated that Cuban authorities have banned Michael Moore's documentary, "Sicko," as being subversive. Although the film's intent is to discredit the U.S. healthcare system by highlighting the excellence of the Cuban system, he said the regime knows the film is a myth and does not want to risk a popular backlash by showing to Cubans facilities that are clearly not available to the vast majority of them.

that's what winds its inglorious way to washington. some state dept goober hears from who knows what bimbo pouring the noxious liquor of us interests into his ear that cuba banned moore's lefty anti-american healthcare movie when cuba not only did no such thing, cuba honoured moore and the film.  thur's yur state department classified intelligence.  guess walking to the local cinema required a bit too much diggin'.

actual good stuff is popping out here and there.  not that you'd know from the bastions of merkin media, but faves have been learnin' of coercing Spain and Germany over investigations of war crimes.  the spanish jerk was obvious, wide open.  The Germans?  well, that appears to have been handled a little more discretely.  'til that dag blasted wikifukinleaks came along.  spoilt the good germans' name, it did.  actually, all the exposure did do was make us realize that the us are strong-armin' their way around all the time.  luv that ohfukinbama is strong-arming nations to protect bush et al.  didn't know he had it in 'im.  dink.  manages to get all tuff protecting yet another criminal gop dynasty, goes all gushy doing anything else 'cept ampin' up the wars.  head of the snake!  cut it off!  the Great Satan and the snake at each other's throats.  marvelous.  shouldn't you two be gettin' along better than this?  aren't satan and the snake kinna the same thing?  can't we all just get along, brothers?

anyway, 'nother bunch of cabes have been looked at, turns up a whole lotta stuff 'bout tryin' to whack chavez. yeah, shocker. turns out at some point, some surely more perceptive state goober than the one in cuba is yakkin' wit ol' death squad uribe, who apparently tells our man in bogatá, along with a buncha faithfully attentive us congressmen who came to hear what they wanted to hear, just what they wanted to hear:

Uribe "likened the threat Chavez poses to Latin America to that posed by Hitler in Europe."

zipptydooda, jus' what we wanted to hear. got ourselves another hitler!

murder inc.

ya wonder what that dubya is in the george dubya bush?  yuve heard sum shit about "walker" as in the ol' Harriman george herbert, dealin' up wit his own son-in-law, and fellow Harriman chum, grandaddy prescott, double dealin' and helpin' keep the nazi dream alive.  uh uh.

if ya didn't know it by now, the dubya stands for wrong.

"The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder.”

-- George W. Bush

"Former Canadian Prime Minister Adviser Calls for Assassination of WikiLeaks Founder Assange"

"Fox News Calls For Assassination Of Julian Assange"

"WikiLeaks: guilty parties 'should face death penalty'"

one assumes the lower court there all think they love and adore 'democratic values.'  couldn't live without 'em, they'd surely say.

not just bad ... islamabad

"...several US media outlets did not name Banks, citing national security concerns."

and they didn't, howling away mostly 'bout those dastardly pak isi fucks, outin' thur man in the 'bad.  brits didn't care though. hell, brits splash the cos' name all over the freakin' headlines.  beautiful.

CIA chief in Pakistan leaves after drone trial blows his cover

Jonathan Banks, station chief In Islamabad, back in US after calls for him to be charged with murder over drone attack.

... with little or no resistance

doncha love how easily the repub/obama "tax deal" whizzed through congress?  amazing, really, given the howling we heard the tired demos unleashing about it and how it will not stand.  just a week ago, ol' bernie was doin' his song and senate dance, pledging to do everything he could to the stop the tax deal.  guess that wasn't much.  didn't hear 'bout any filibuster.  you know, like the repubs use on every freakin' bill?  didn't see that happen.

nope.

so there is the courageous dem stand against continued tax breaks for the two percenters.  one eight hour speech.

king nouri

in back to iraq 4.0, OR,

it's good to be king!

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki sat in a gilded chair Tuesday at the start of the three-day Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha, the festival of sacrifice.

He rose to greet his guests in a newly furbished palace, built under the late dictator Saddam Hussein.

Politicians came in their elegant dark suits; sheiks approached in their brown robes; generals marched in crisp uniforms, emblazoned with swords and epaulets. All kissed him twice on both cheeks. And Maliki smiled and whispered into their ears, or chuckled.

On previous holidays, he received guests at his office. But his government has completed renovation of one of Hussein's palaces in central Baghdad, so this holiday he greeted dignitaries in a giant reception room, with calligraphy etched on wood partitions.

Maliki sat by a member of his Islamic Dawa Party, who had been tortured under Hussein's regime. The elderly man watched proudly as his successors occupied one of their vanished oppressor's ornate residences, renamed the General Command Palace.

school's out

so, what's got ol Sec Ed Arne Duncan all riled up 'bout the education of amerjca's children, and therefore, the future of america?.  arrrrggghhh!! those godamCHIneeze!  them and their smarts and schoolin' 'n all.  somethin' like that.

“We have to see this as a wake-up call.”

his "wake-up call" was an international standardized test, one in which the chinese would debut. shanghai went to the plate and nutted it outta there! the us dithering in the teenths, if not lower.

that's the secretary of education's wake up call that something is amiss  in american education. chinese test scores.  not the crumbling urban schools, leaks and no heat, not the rising damp of grinding poverty and want that make an education susceptible to the daily crises poverty inflicts, and certainly not the education gap between rich and poor schools. not the toxic political environment doled out to teachers in the us. cuts and jabs from the establishment, constantly -- mostly 'cause teach has some unions around still, and they just hate that.  as long as teachers have unions, they're just like jimmy hoffa.  best just whack 'em.  the solution to the education problem in america is seen as canning all the teachers!  that'll fix it.

so, no, none of that is a problem, let alone a wake up call.  but the blasted chinese, making us look bad -- really bad -- again!  launch forth Arne! an american educational jihad against chinese test scores.  of course, in the real world, this would not translate into grandly more money and resources going to education.  in all likelihood what would happen is that chinese test taking students would be assassinated or detained by jsoc hunter-killer squads, their violation, of course: undermining the interests of the United States.

gordon's gin

funniest headline in awhile. intro a michael gordon story, natch.

Meddling Neighbors Undercut Iraq Stability

 meddlers! buggering up iraq stability like they do.

the firm

amblin' along some days ago, started wondrin' 'bout the bona fides of this assange "rape"  accuser.  which means, of course, what's the shit goin' on there?  actually, it started out wondering if the whole ridiculous rape charge was all just a set-up.  and then it was onto the who the hell is Anna Ardin track.  like that.

well, sure 'nuff, a rekindle is tossin' about, reminding us of some minor news that the swedish accuser, Anna Ardin, has got all kinna ties to CIA funded, anti-castro organisations in ... sweden, ferfucksakes. do swedes care about castro that much?

Anna Ardin (the official complainant) is often described by the media as a “leftist”. She has ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups. She published her anti-Castro diatribes (see here and here) in the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by Misceláneas de Cuba. From Oslo, Professor Michael Seltzer points out that this periodical is the product of a well-financed anti-Castro organization in Sweden. He further notes that the group is connected with Union Liberal Cubana led by Carlos Alberto Montaner whose CIA ties were exposed here. Note that Ardin was deported from Cuba for subversive activities. In Cuba she interacted with the feminist anti-Castro group Las damas de blanco (the Ladies in White). This group receives US government funds and the convicted anti-communist terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is a friend and supporter.

she also appears to have another charming characteristic.

Anna Ardin apparently indulges in her favorite sport of male-bashing. A Swedish forum reports that she is an expert on sexual harassment and the male “master suppression techniques”. Once, as she was lecturing, a male student in the audience looked at his notes instead of staring at her. Anna Ardin reported him for sexual harassment because he discriminated against her for being a woman and because she claimed he made use of the male “master suppression technique” in trying to make her feel invisible. As soon as the student learned about her complaint, he contacted her to apologize and explain himself. Anna Ardin’s response was to once again report him for sexual harassment, again because he was using the “master suppression technique”, this time to belittle her feelings.

a keepah!

kirk james murphy offers up a summary.

chargin' the angler

now, who ain't bustin' a gut 'bout those freakin' nigerians sayin' , what was it? oh yeah, "We are filing charges against Cheney"?  sweet mother.  that just sounds grand, even though i didn't actually hear anything, just imagined a haughty African official proudly declaring that dick freakin' cheney was to be charged!  who cares with what?  somethin'.  fuck, the guy's got his plump soft hands everywhere.  anyway, just sayin', lovin' it!  while it lasts.

which ain't long at all, one expects.  but let us rejoice in a summary of the story so far, and try to ignore the phrase, "Nigerian anti-corruption police."

Nigerian anti-corruption police said today that they will charge former US vice-president Dick Cheney over a $180m bribery case involving energy firm Halliburton.The announcement follows a probe into the construction of a liquefied natural gas plant in the conflict-ridden Niger Delta.

Halliburton's top official in Nigeria has been summoned and 10 of its Nigerian and expat staff detained for questioning after a raid on the company's office in Lagos. Cheney was head of Halliburton before becoming George W Bush's vice-president in 2001.

"We are filing charges against Cheney," said Femi Babafemi, a spokesman for the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), adding that the charges were likely to be brought next week. He declined to give any further details on what the charges were or where they would be filed.

Houston-based engineering firm KBR, a former Halliburton unit, pleaded guilty last year to US charges that it paid $180m in bribes between 1994 and 2004 to Nigerian officials to secure $6bn in contracts for the Bonny Island Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project in the Niger Delta.KBR and Halliburton reached a $579m settlement in America but Nigeria, France and Switzerland have conducted their own investigations into the case.

turns out, those halliburton lunks think that they're suffering a hit in a covert corporate proxy war  where bought and paid for officials remain the currency of the realm.

Halliburton said last year it had "reason to believe" payments may have been made to Nigerian officials by agents of its TSKJ consortium, which built the Bonny Island facility.

and this is great. as usual, it all comes down to local politics. nigerian local politics. and apparently the cheney-halliburton guilt cow just keeps on getting milked in nigeria, squirting out a somewhat substantive political nectar that keeps an incumbent well nourished.

Nigeria will hold presidential elections in April and some analysts have suggested the sudden revival of interest in the Halliburton case is no coincidence.  Incumbent Goodluck Jonathan faces a challenge for the ruling party nomination from former vice-president Atiku Abubakar, who was in office between 1999 and 2007. Abubakar's opponents have in the past tried to link him to the Halliburton case,

well, goodluck jonathan. we'll see how the cheney angle plays out.

dontcha love how dick cheney is being used as a pawn and framed as a political liability in the presidential elections in nigeria?  i know i do.  i hope goodluck jonathan manages to arrest the prick and toss 'im in the can.  and then, amidst much rejoicing, win the election.  if that is what it takes, by god, do it, man.  just do it.

the edukator

diane ravitch is over thur, pounding away on bill gates' sniffing and facetious "questions" about her opposition to his and other edu-privateers plans t' do nuthin' but test test test.  the questions are remarkable for what they show about gates, that he is basically an intellectual adolescent.  does he think these are serious questions?  if he does, and i see no reason not to believe he does (i can freaking hear that nasally whinge in my head), then bill gates ought to be kept out of the public sphere by his handlers.   at least when he's writing anything.  he comes off as a petulant buffoon.

in a huff to the first in a series of unserious jabs, ravitch makes these observations:

"I don't hear any of [the corporate reformers] worried that a generation will grow up ignorant of history and the workings of government."

no.  no, diane, dear. they don't worry about that. in fact, they'll be more than happy with that putative "side effect."

she keeps railing: where's the "$100 million to make sure that every child has the chance to learn to play a musical instrument"? ibid.

face it, diane. the "corporate reformers," are in this for two things: more public money shunted to private corporations, and, most importantly,  corporate control over education pretty much ensures a certainly even less uncomfortable future for america's corporate titans and all their attendant lamprey.

this is but probably beyond the ken of bill gates, a man who became the richest person in the world by buying, stealing, and acquiring, by means both lawful and unlawful, other peoples' stuff, jamming it together with some ungodly glue, also, by the way, other people's stuff, and selling it to lots of people as his own.  good at, apparently.  but as an education reformer, probably not someone from whom you would want take advice.  all a guy like gates sees is automatons, toiling without complaint, chips building chips.  that's what gates sees.  he's said it.  it's basically the message behind the glowing a good education leads to good jobs! malarky.

without knowing it at all, in his last "question" to ravitch, gates drops the bomb on his privateering test-mania education reform buddies

"If there’s some other magic way to reduce the dropout rate, we’re all ears."

so, gates thinks he and corpoChums are "all ears" for "some other magic way" to fix the schools. are they not entirely convinced by their magic way? perhaps there are several magic ways to defraud, deceive, and further de-educate the dyspeptic american public.

actually, there is a way to dramatically improve education outcomes.

Mr. Gates, why don't you address the root causes of low academic achievement, which is not 'bad teachers,' but poverty."[?]

Dear Diane,


Hate to break this to you, but the fixing poverty thing is pretty much a no go.  No magic there.

Nope.


We'll stick to our plan.


Thanks Diane.


Love, Bill.