It seems too good to be true: a new source of near-limitless power that costs virtually nothing, uses tiny amounts of water as its fuel and produces next to no waste. If that does not sound radical enough, how about this: the principle behind the source turns modern physics on its head.

Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims to have built a prototype power source that generates up to 1,000 times more heat than conventional fuel. Independent scientists claim to have verified the experiments and Dr Mills says that his company, Blacklight Power, has tens of millions of dollars in investment lined up to bring the idea to market. And he claims to be just months away from unveiling his creation.

The problem is that according to the rules of quantum mechanics, the physics that governs the behaviour of atoms, the idea is theoretically impossible. “Physicists are quite conservative. It’s not easy to convince them to change a theory that is accepted for 50 to 60 years. I don’t think [Mills’s] theory should be supported,” said Jan Naudts, a theoretical physicist at the University of Antwerp.

What has much of the physics world up in arms is Dr Mills’s claim that he has produced a new form of hydrogen, the simplest of all the atoms, with just a single proton circled by one electron. In his “hydrino”, the electron sits a little closer to the proton than normal, and the formation of the new atoms from traditional hydrogen releases huge amounts of energy.

This is scientific heresy. According to quantum mechanics, electrons can only exist in an atom in strictly defined orbits, and the shortest distance allowed between the proton and electron in hydrogen is fixed. The two particles are simply not allowed to get any closer.
guardian.co.uk

by James Petras
11/04/05 “Counterpunch” — — The national debate, which the indictment of Irving Lewis Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice has aroused in the mass media, has failed to address the most basic questions concerning the deep structural context, which influenced his felonious behavior. The most superficial explanation was that Libby, by exposing Valerie Plame (a CIA employee), acted out of revenge to punish her husband Wilson for exposing the lies put forth by Bush about Iraq’s “importation” of uranium from Niger. Other journalists claim that Libby acted to cover up the fabrications to go to war. The assertion however raises a deeper question — who were the fabricators of war propaganda, who was Libby protecting? And not only the “fabricators of war”, but the strategic planners, speech-makers and architects of war who acted hand in hand with the propagandists and the journalists who disseminated the propaganda? What is the link between all these high- level functionaries, propagandists and journalists?

Equally important given the positions of power which this cabal occupied, and the influence they exercised in the mass media as well as in designing strategic policy, what forces were engaged in bringing criminal charges against a key operative of the cabal?

Libby’s rise to power was part and parcel of the ascendancy of the neo-conservatives to the summits of US policymaking. Libby was a student, protégé, and collaborator with Paul Wolfowitz for over 25 years. Libby along with Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Douglas Feith, Kagan, Cohen, Rubin, Pollack, Chertoff, Fleisher, Kristol, Marc Grossman, Shumsky and a host of other political operators were long term believers and aggressive proponents of a virulently militaristic tendency of Zionism linked with the rightwing Likud Party of Israel. Early in the 1980’s, Wolfowitz and Feith were charged with passing confidential documents to Israel, the latter temporarily losing his security clearance.

The ideologues begin their “Long March” through the institutions of the state. In some cases, advisers to rightwing pro-Israel congressmen, others in the lower levels of the Pentagon and State Department, in other cases as academics or leaders of conservative think tanks in Washington during the Reagan and Bush senior regimes. With the election of Bush in 2001, they moved into major strategic positions in the government, and as the principal ideologues and propagandists for a sequence of wars against Arab adversaries of the Israeli State. Leading neocons, like Libby, drew up a war strategy for the Likud government in 1996, and then recycled the document for the US war against Iraq before and immediately after 9/11/01. Along with their rise to the most influential positions of power in the Bush administration, the neocons attracted new recruits, like New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

What is striking about the operations of the ‘cabal’ is the very open and direct way in which they operated: former Director of the National Security Agency (under Reagan) Lt. General William Odom, retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (former chief of staff of Powell), retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, National Security Adviser to President George Bush (the First) Brent Scowcroft, and numerous disenchanted officials, including veterans of the intelligence agencies, high level observers, and former diplomats openly criticized the neocon takeover of US policy and the close relationship between them and Israeli officals.

In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Wolfowitz and Libby were the architects of the military strategy for Rumsfeld and Cheney, their bosses. Douglas Feith established the “Office of Special Planning” to fabricate the lies to justify the war. Judith Miller, David Frum and Ari Fleisher served to disseminate the lies and war propaganda through articles, interviews, press conferences, and speechwriting for President Bush.
informationclearinghouse.info

11/03/05 “Washington Post” — — Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Donald Rumsfeld are like two alcoholics drinking together, pathetically doing the only thing they know how to do, egged on by their presence at the bar.

Yesterday, I wrote that “The Pentagon has begun contingency planning for potential military conflict with Venezuela as part of a broad post-Iraq evaluation of strategic threats to the United States.”

According to the Miami Herald, “Pentagon spokesmen Wednesday reacted with deep skepticism to [my report] … that the Department of Defense is drawing up plans for a potential military conflict with Venezuela’s leftist President Hugo Chavez.”

The Pentagon spokesman needs to do more work.

There is not a doubt that military planners are doing what military planners do: looking at the world through the prism of potential threat, fitting countries to their models of action and reaction, toiling away they think in secret, considering the “what ifs.” This is particularly the case after the failure of 9/11. It is particularly true now that the military is mentally moving on from Iraq, looking to the future.

The assumption of outsiders — including Chavez and many in Latin American — is that this uniquely American military process is purely imperial: Of course the United States is planning the take down Chavez, they say. It is the history of intervention. It is routine. No country escapes the American bulls-eye.

To insiders like Rumsfeld though, top secret eying of a hostile Venezuela is only prudent. As I said yesterday, Venezuela possesses everything that makes it “strategically” important: it has oil; it is leftist; it is critical of the United States; it is buying from (and threatening to sell to) the bad guys; it is in our own back yard. Strategic may be the most overused word in the international lexicon, but in this case strategically important is assumed to mean military. And military means either ally or threat.
informationclearinghouse.info

…JAMES PETRAS: Well, you have many years, not only under President Bush, but many years of pursuing this neo-liberal agenda of privatization of public enterprises, structural adjustment policies which reduce salaries and generate unemployment and cuts — vast cuts in social spending. There’s a whole series of issues: Promotion of agribusiness instead of small farmers; you have massive unemployment as a result of debt payments and the lack of public investment. There’s a whole gamut of problems, which have emerged from the Washington Consensus of applying this neo-liberal policies which have had the effect of polarizing society between 1% of billionaires and 50%, 60%, 70% of people who’ve been impoverished.

So the demonstrations here are a response to the causes of poverty and unemployment. The official conference is calling for tackling the problems of unemployment and poverty, and this, of course, is the problem that they have created. That is, the governments and particularly the United States. I should mention here very clearly that, contrary to the Financial Times and other media, this is not an anti-American movement. The — first of all, the Latin Americans are Americans in the broadest sense and, secondly, they are attacking a government, a policy, and an economic system. They are not attacking some abstraction called America. They’re really attacking U.S. imperialism, and not the U.S. People.
democracynow.org

The man at the bar is crooning enthusiastically if not exactly in tune.

His companion is hunched over that quintessential tango instrument, the bandoneon, squeezing out a song that tells of hope betrayed in a harsh, uncomprehending world.

Sitting next to me, Mario is intent on explaining how it is all George Bush’s fault.

According to my friend, who has lived all his life in Buenos Aires, every time Argentina achieves stability and economic success, the Yankees have to spoil it all.

They cannot, he says, stand the competition.

This was what happened four years ago, when the Argentine economy collapsed.

The pesos Mario had saved, each of which was then worth $1, suddenly lost two-thirds of their value as the peso plummeted.

And since then the dreaded International Monetary Fund has been trying to impose its stranglehold on the Argentine economy and force Argentines to comply with its recipe of cheap exports, firms being sold off to foreign investors and even Argentine beef being banned from the United States on the grounds that most people in Argentina say are spurious.
bbc.co.uk

As the subjects of Jeffrey Sachs and his economic “shock therapy”, Argentines’ anger is more than understandable. This article mocks them for blaming the Yankees. Their analysis is correct.

LE BLANC MESNIL, France (AP) – Bands of youths roaming Parisian suburbs burned more than 500 vehicles and hurled stones at police Friday, as the worst rioting in a decade entered its second week and spread elsewhere in France. The U.S. warned Americans against taking trains to the airport via strife-torn areas.

A savage assault on a bus passenger highlighted the dangers of travel in the impoverished outlying neighborhoods, where authorities were struggling to regain control.

Attackers doused the woman, in her 50s and on crutches, with an inflammable liquid and set her afire as she tried to get off a bus in the suburb of Sevran Wednesday, judicial officials said. The bus had been forced to stop because of burning objects in its path. She was rescued by the driver and hospitalized with severe burns.

Justice Minister Pascal Clement deplored the incident, saying it caused him “great emotion.”

With the unrest growing beyond the French capital, gangs burned five cars in the eastern city of Dijon and 11 in the southern city of Marseille.
Violence continued into the evening for the ninth night in a row with troublemakers firing bullets into a vandalized bus and setting a warehouse ablaze in the Paris area. In Meaux, east of Paris, police said youths prevented firefighters from evacuating a sick person from an apartment building, pelting them with stones and torching the awaiting ambulance.

Some 30 mayors from the Seine-Saint-Denis region where the unrest started Oct. 27 met Friday to make a joint call for calm. Claude Pernes, mayor of Rosny-sous-Bois, denounced a “veritable guerrilla situation, urban insurrection” that has taken hold.

A national police spokesman, Patrick Hamon, said there appeared to be no coordination among gangs in different areas. But he said youths in individual neighborhoods were communicating by cell phone text messages or e-mails – arranging meetings and warning each other about police operations.

The violence started Oct. 27 after the accidental electrocution of two teenagers who believed police were chasing them in the Seine-Saint-Denis region, dominated by low-income housing projects.

Since then riots have swelled into a broader challenge against the French state and its security forces. The violence has exposed deep discontent in neighborhoods where African and Muslim immigrants and their French-born children are trapped by poverty, unemployment, racial discrimination, crime, poor education and housing.
apnews.myway.com

Nov. 3: Rioting in French suburbs ‘well organized’

French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said Thursday that the riots in several Paris suburbs over the previous night were “not spontaneous” but rather “well organized.”

“What we saw in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis overnight was not spontaneous, it was perfectly organized. We are looking into by whom and how,” Sarkozy told French news channel i-tele.

The interior minister also said the government would not allow “troublemakers, a bunch of hoodlums, think they can do whatever they want” in the country.

A force of 1,000 police were assigned late Thursday to Seine-Saint-Denis, following the previous night of violence which affected about half of the 40 towns in the department, mostly communities of immigrants from Africa, officials said.

Maj Gen Jim Dutton, who commands a multi-national force in south-eastern Iraq, said the know-how for advanced bombs was coming “across that border”.

He said it was unclear in which country the devices were being assembled, or if the Iranian government was involved.

Iran denied similar claims when they were first made in October, after an increase in British casualties in Iraq.
bbc.co.uk

Just keep saying it, Jim. Play your part.

Several thousand US and Iraqi troops have begun a new operation on Iraq’s Syrian border against militants from the al-Qaeda in Iraq group.
Some 2,500 American marines and other troops, as well as about 1,000 Iraqi government soldiers, are deployed around Husayba, the US military said.

It is the first time Iraqi troops have been used on a major scale, it added.

Operation Steel Curtain comes after two offensives against militants last month in the same province, Anbar.

Its aim is to “restore security along the Iraqi-Syrian border and destroy the al-Qaeda in Iraq terrorist network operating throughout Husayba”, the US military said in its statement.
bbc.co.uk

“Its aim” is to provoke a pretext for war.

An auditing board sponsored by the United Nations recommended yesterday that the United States repay as much as $208 million to the Iraqi government for contracting work in 2003 and 2004 assigned to Kellogg, Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary.

The work was paid for with Iraqi oil proceeds, but the board said it was either carried out at inflated prices or done poorly. The board did not, however, give examples of poor work.
nytimes.com

WASHINGTON, Nov. 4 – Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the head of the federal agency that oversees most government broadcasts to foreign countries, including the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, is the subject of an inquiry into accusations of misuse of federal money and the use of phantom or unqualified employees, officials involved in that examination said on Friday.

Mr. Tomlinson was ousted from the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting on Thursday after its inspector general concluded an investigation that was critical of him. That examination looked at his efforts as chairman of the corporation to seek more conservative programs on public radio and television.

But Mr. Tomlinson remains an important official as the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. The board, whose members include the secretary of state, plays a central role in public diplomacy. It supervises the government’s foreign broadcasting operations, including Radio Martí, Radio Sawa and al-Hurra; transmits programs in 61 languages; and says it has more than 100 million listeners each week.

The board has been troubled lately over deep internal divisions and criticism of its Middle East broadcasts. Members of the Arab news media have said its broadcasts are American propaganda.

People involved in the inquiry said that investigators had already interviewed a significant number of officials at the agency and that, if the accusations were substantiated, they could involve criminal violations.
nytimes.com

What a week. These mobsters are dropping like flies.