Israel is one of the countries most fervently criticizing Iran in Iran’s quest for nuclear research (see here and here). Al Jazeera English notes, however, that Israel hasn’t even signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Amidst new reports that Iran has not been forthcoming about its nuclear program, Glenn Greenwald urges that we do what the Chinese are doing, as reported by the NYT:
The Chinese, one administration official said, were more skeptical [of recent reports], and said they wanted to look at the intelligence, and to see what international inspectors said when they investigated.
What Greenwald is suggesting is common sense. He might need to repeat his advice endlessly, though, because we live in a country where the gold standard for the news media is hyped up conflict and because we are a country that doesn’t seem to “get” common sense anymore.
Stewart Brand was the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. He’s been doing a lot of thinking over the years, and gave an update at TED.
He discussed the 1 Billion people living in squatter cities, soon to be 2 billion. There’s a lot of desperation and a lot of crime, but it’s not all bad news. There is a scale of efficiency about these cities. Talk about compactness! Go to the 6 minute mark of this video within a video and watch what happens immediately after the train goes by.
Brand suggest that coming to the city gives people hope that they will be better off financially, which inexorably brings down the birth rate.
He has nothing good to say about coal–it is the cause of the climate change we see. He has nothing bad to say about nuclear power; it is a “green” fuel. According to Brand, we can’t get rid of coal fast enough. We are going to be facing massive climate change, faster than we can imagine. This will cause many millions of “climate refugees” and ongoing “resource wars” such as the one in Darfur.
The U.S. spent $52 billion on nukes last year, according to the The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing cooperation between nations and promoting active international engagement by the United States.
The United States spent over $52 billion on nuclear weapons and related programs in fiscal year 2008, but only [...]
Yes, science is back! In Obama, we will have a President who appreciates the power of science to understand the world and fix the world, not merely to spy on the world or to blow up the world. That’s the report from Think Progress:
SCIENCE IS BACK: The choice of Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, is a [...]
There are plenty of innumerate groups who think that the LHC will destroy the world, as they have with each generation of nuclear test device before. Loud groups with mailing lists and placards.
The Large Hadron Collider (in case you were unaware) is the Swiss upgrade to the unfinished Superconducting Super Collider that the U.S. half [...]
An enthusiastic conservation effort, coupled with a wide variety of alternative sources of energy, will soften the blow of peak oil, but it might be too little too late. And it’s incredibly difficult to get people to actually do something serious about conserving energy (see Janisse Ray’s “Altar Call for True Believers” at Orion Magazine). [...]
I’m tired of hearing Neocons cavalierly talking about “nuking” one or more Middle Eastern countries. These days, Neocons often talk about this “need” to use nuclear weapons to show people in the Middle East that “we” mean business. I have personally heard this sort of talk several times (when you mostly listen instead [...]
Perhaps the rule should be that countries that don’t show the utmost care for nuclear weapons shouldn’t be allowed to have any. Oops, that’s us, according to the Associated Press:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Air Force said Friday it has punished 70 airmen involved in the accidental, cross-country flight of a nuclear-armed B-52 bomber following an [...]
