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A Flash of Insight: LCROSS Mission Update

August 11, 2008: There are places on the Moon where the sun hasn’t shined for millions of years. Dark polar craters too deep for sunlight to penetrate are luna incognita, the realm of the unknown, and in their inky depths, researchers believe, may lie a treasure of great value.
NASA is about to light one up.

Sometime between May and August 2009, depending on launch dates, the booster stage for NASA’s LCROSS probe will deliberately crash into a permanently-shadowed lunar crater at 9,000 km/hr, producing an explosion equivalent to about 2,000 pounds of TNT (6.5 billion joules). The blast will jettison material out of the crater into broad daylight where astronomers can search the debris for signs of lunar water.

Water is the treasure. NASA plans to send people back to the Moon by 2020 and eventually set up a lunar outpost. Water would be an invaluable resource for astronauts living and working on the Moon. Not only could people drink it, but water could be used to grow plants for food, or it could be split into hydrogen for rocket fuel and oxygen to replenish the outpost’s air. It even could shield astronauts from dangerous space radiation.

Hence the kamikaze mission, called the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), to search for H2O on the Moon. “If LCROSS’s booster stage hits a patch of lunar regolith that contains at least 0.5 percent water ice, water should be detectable in the plume of ejecta,” explains Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator for LCROSS at NASA’s Ames Research Center.

READ ON

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Bush Will Issue a Mass Pardon

By Brent Budowsky

27/07/08 “Smirking Chimp” — – Jul 26 2008 — Before leaving office George W. Bush will issue a mass pardon, the largest collection of presidential pardons in American history. Bush will pardon himself, Vice President Cheney, and a long list of officials involved in torture, eavesdropping, destruction of evidence, the CIA leak case and a range of potential crimes.

As George Bush signs the pardons and boards the helicopter to depart Washington as his presidency finally ends, even then, he and those pardoned will worry about the statute of limitations.

There is an important point to this, often not recognized in official Washington during the Bush years, where the unthinkable becomes a way of life, and acts have been done that have never been done by an American president or administration.

READ ON HERE

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Sami al Arian

You can read about the Al-Arian case here

Sami Al-Arian Subjected to Worst Prison Conditions since Florida
Despite grant of bail, government continues to hold him
Dr. Al-Arian handcuffed

Hanover, VA – July 27, 2008 –

More than two weeks after being granted bond by a federal judge, Sami Al-Arian is still being held in prison. In fact, Dr. Al-Arian is now being subjected to the worst treatment by prison officials since his stay in Coleman Federal Penitentiary in Florida three years ago.

On July 12th, Judge Leonie Brinkema pronounced that Dr. Al-Arian was not a danger to the community nor a flight risk, and accordingly granted him bail before his scheduled August 13th trial.
Nevertheless, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) invoked the jurisdiction it has held over Dr. Al-Arian since his official sentence ended last April to keep him from leaving prison.
The ICE is ostensibly holding Dr. Al-Arian to complete deportation procedures but, given that Dr. Al-Arian’s trial will take place in less than three weeks, it would seem somewhat unlikely that the ICE will follow through with such procedures in the near future.

Not content to merely keep Dr. Al-Arian from enjoying even a very limited stint of freedom, the government is using all available means to try to psychologically break him.
Instead of keeping him in a prison close to the Washington DC area where his two oldest children live, the ICE has moved him to Pamunkey Regional Jail in Hanover, VA, more than one hundred miles from the capital. Regardless, even when Dr. Al-Arian was relatively close to his children, they were repeatedly denied visitation requests.

More critically, this distance makes it extremely difficult for Dr. Al-Arian to meet with his attorneys in the final weeks before his upcoming trial. This is the same tactic employed by the government in 2005 to try to prevent Dr. Al-Arian from being able to prepare a full defense.

Pamunkey Regional Jail has imposed a 23-hour lock-down on Dr. Al-Arian and has placed him in complete isolation, despite promises from the ICE that he would be kept with the general inmate population. Furthermore, the guards who transported him were abusive, shackling and handcuffing him behind his back for the 2.5-hour drive, callously disregarding the fact that his wrist had been badly injured only a few days ago.
Although he was in great pain throughout the trip, guards refused to loosen the handcuffs.

At the very moment when Dr. Al-Arian should be enjoying a brief interlude of freedom after five grueling years of imprisonment, the government has once again brazenly manipulated the justice system to deliver this cruel slap in the face of not only Dr. Al-Arian, but of all people of conscience.

Make a Difference! Call Today!

Call Now!

Last April, your calls to the Hampton Roads Regional Jail pressured prison officials to stop their abuse of Dr. Al-Arian after only a few days.

Friends, we are asking you to make a difference again by calling:

Pamunkey Regional Jail: (804) 365-6400 (press 4 then 3001 to speak to the administration, then ask to leave a message for the superintendent; after working hours, press 0). Ask why Dr. Al-Arian has been put under a 23-hour lockdown, despite the fact that a federal judge has clearly and unambiguously pronounced that he is not a danger to anyone and that, on the contrary, he should be allowed bail before his trial.

– If you do not reach the superintendent personally, leave a message on the answering machine. Call back every day until you do speak to the superintendent directly.
– Be polite but firm.

– After calling, click here to let us know you called.

Don’t forget: your calls DO make a difference.
See original article with the links here

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US terror watchlist

Al Jazeera Inside Story – US terror watchlist – 15 Jul 08 here

John William Anderson, who was born on July 4, 2001, is on TSA's watch list. He was first stopped in 2004 when his mother and grandmother took him on his first plane ride to Disney World
John William Anderson, who was born on July 4, 2001, is on TSA’s watch list. He was first stopped in 2004 when his mother and grandmother took him on his first plane ride to Disney World

From article here

He was first stopped at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in 2004, when his family took him for his first airplane ride to Disney World. “We checked in at the ticket counter, and the woman said in a stern voice, ‘Who is John Anderson?’ ” says his mother, Christine Anderson. “I pointed to my stroller.”

Her son is allowed to fly. But because his name is flagged, his family cannot print out a boarding pass for him online and he must check in at the ticket counter so an airline official can see that he’s a child.

Christine Anderson says she has tried repeatedly to get her child’s name cleared, but she can’t find the right forms on the TSA website and none have come in the mail after officials promised to send them. “No one can give any answers to why my son is on the list or really how to get him off,” she says.

White says many names will be cleared when the government begins requiring air travelers to provide their birth date. The government won’t start collecting that information until next year, he says.

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Randy Pausch : The last lecture

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch (Oct. 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008 ) gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving presentation, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals.

Randy Pausch

See the video here
And this is his web site

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The misery they leave behind

Cases of deformities in children are escalating at an alarming rate in Fallujah. Could these birth defects have occurred as a result of White-Phosphorous gas used by US troops in 2004 ? – See here

Google Fallujah and cry.

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Scott Ritter on bombing Iran

Here

UN Inspector Scott Ritter: Fools would Bomb Iran

And this song inspired by a Mc Cain speech

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Desk rage spoils workplace for many Americans

By Ellen Wulfhorst

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Get out of the way, road rage. Here comes desk rage.

Anger in the workplace — employees and employers who are grumpy, insulting, short-tempered or worse — is shockingly common and likely growing as Americans cope with woes of rising costs, job uncertainty or overwhelming debt, experts say.

“It runs the gamut from just rudeness up to pretty extreme abusive behaviors,” said Paul Spector, professor of industrial and organizational psychology at the University of South Florida. “The severe cases of fatal violence get a lot of press but in some ways this is more insidious because it affects millions of people.”

FULL TEXT HERE

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Nominee Called Traitor to Democrats’ Losing Tradition

The liberal blogosphere was aflame today with new accusations that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) is trying to win the 2008 presidential election.

Suspicions about Sen. Obama’s true motives have been building over the past few weeks, but not until today have the bloggers called him out for betraying the Democratic Party’s losing tradition.

“Barack Obama seems to be making a very calculated attempt to win over 270 electoral votes,” wrote liberal blogger Carol Foyler at LibDemWatch.com, a blog read by a half-dozen other liberal bloggers. “He must be stopped.”

But those comments were not nearly as strident as those of Tracy Klugian, whose blog LoseOn.org has backed unsuccessful Democratic candidates since 2000.

“Increasingly, Barack Obama’s message is becoming more accessible, appealing, and yes, potentially successful,” he wrote. “Any Democrat who voted for Dukakis, Mondale or Kerry should regard this as a betrayal.”

Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean said that he was “sympathetic” to the concerns of bloggers who worry that their nominee seems stubbornly bent on winning the election, but he warned them that the DNC’s “hands are tied.”

“If Sen. Obama is really determined to win, I don’t think any of us can talk him out of it,” Mr. Dean said.

Liberal bloggers said that they would be watching Sen. Obama’s vice-presidential selection process “very closely” for signs that he is plotting to win the election.

“Barack Obama still has a chance to pick someone disastrous as a sign that he wants to lose this thing,” Ms. Foyler wrote. “If not, he should brace himself for some really mean blog posts.”

For the odd person who does not suspect that this is a spoof, the text is from Borowitz

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