New York Judge Rules Town Can Ban Gas Hydrofracking

By MIREYA NAVARRO  …  Published: February 21, 2012 … http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/nyregion/town-can-ban-hydrofracking-ny-judge-rules.html?_r=1

In August, Dryden’s Town Board used its zoning laws to pass a drilling ban, one salvo in a battle that is playing out nationwide as energy companies move to drill in densely populated areas. A month after the ban’s passage, Anschutz Exploration Corporation, a Colorado driller with 22,200 acres under lease in the town, filed a lawsuit arguing that the town’s authority did not extend to regulating or prohibiting gas drilling.

In a decision issued on Tuesday, Justice Phillip R. Rumsey of State Supreme Court said that state law does not preclude a municipality from using its power to regulate land use to ban oil and natural gas production. The ruling is the first in New York to affirm local powers in the controversy over drilling in the Marcellus Shale, a gas deposit under a large area of New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

It is a victory for hydrofracking opponents as New York State regulators revise an environmental impact document and propose drilling regulations to decide whether to allow the drilling and under what conditions. Dozens of other municipalities in New York have also adopted drilling bans and limits.

“The communities targeted for drilling need the power to determine for themselves when, where and if fracking is permitted,” Katherine Nadeau, the water and natural resources program director for Environmental Advocates of New York, said in a statement. She said the ruling would energize “the dozens, if not hundreds, of cities and towns concerned with industrial gas drilling.”

The Dryden case, however, is sure to prompt further litigation. Thomas West, the Albany lawyer representing Anschutz, said the company might appeal or instead pursue a “takings” claim against the town — based on the principle that private property should not be taken without just compensation. Mr. West said the company had spent more than $5 million securing land leases from Dryden property owners and could claim the lost value of its assets, including any profits it would have derived from exploiting the mineral rights under the land.

“It could be a very large claim,” he said.

Efforts on Tuesday night to reach lawyers for the town of Dryden, with a population of about 14,000, were not immediately successful.

http://www.thewaterchannel.tv/

WaterChannel NewsFlash: February 22

We are pretty sure that all of you have heard about this year’s theme of the largest water event, the 6th World Water Forum.

We believe the theme “Time for Solutions” does not need further explication.

On www.solutionsforwater.org you can rate and comment on the submitted water solutions so far.

On TheWaterChannel these are some examples of the most popular solutions:

• Rooftop rainwater for rural drinking water
• Mr Blue energy
• Smart Water Solutions – An Update on Low-cost Water Technologies

Robert Reich …Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley; Author, ‘Aftershock’  …Posted: 02/22/2012 8:36 am … http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/big-funders-gop_b_1293243.html?ref=daily-brief?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=022212&utm_medium=email&utm_content=BlogEntry&utm_term=Daily%20Brief

Have you heard of William Dore, Foster Friess, Sheldon Adelson, Harold Simmons, Peter Thiel, or Bruce Kovner? If not, let me introduce them to you. They’re running for the Republican nomination for president.

I know, I know. You think Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, and Mitt Romney are running. They are — but only because the people listed in the first paragraph have given them huge sums of money to do so. In a sense, Santorum, Gingrich, Paul, and Romney are the fronts. Dore et al. are the real investors.

According to January’s Federal Election Commission report, William Dore and Foster Friess supplied more than three-fourths of the $2.1 million raked in by Rick Santorum’s super PAC in January. Dore, president of the Dore Energy Corporation in Lake Charles, Louisiana, gave $1 million; Freis, a fund manager based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, gave $669,000 (he had given the Santorum super PAC $331,000 last year, bringing Freis’s total to $1 million).

Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam provided $10 million of the $11 million that went into Gingrich’s super PAC in January. Adelson is chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation. Texas billionaire Harold Simmons donated $500,000.

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, provided $1.7 million of the $2.4 million raised by Ron Paul’s super PAC in January.

Mitt Romney’s super PAC raised $6.6 million last month — almost all from just forty donors. Bruce Kovner, co-founder of the New York-based hedge fund Caxton Associates, gave $500,000, as did two others. David Tepper of Appaloosa Management gave $375,000. J.W. Marriott and Richard Marriott gave a total of $500,000. Julian Robertson, co-founder of hedge fund Tiger Management, gave $250,0000. Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman gave $100,000.

Bottom line: Whoever emerges as the GOP standard-bearer will be deeply indebted to a handful of people, each of whom will expect a good return on their investment.

And this is just the beginning. We haven’t even come to the general election.

Non-profit political fronts like “Crossroads GPS,” founded by Republican political guru Karl Rove, are already gathering hundreds of millions of dollars from big corporations and a few wealthy individuals like billionaire oil and petrochemical moguls David and Charles Koch. The public will never know who or what corporation gave what because, under IRS regulations, such non-profit “social welfare organizations” aren’t required to disclose the names of those who contributed to them.

Before 2010, federal campaign law and Federal Election Commission regulations limited to $5,000 per year the amount an individual could give to a PAC making independent expenditures in federal elections. This individual contribution limit that was declared unconstitutional by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals in a case based on the Supreme Court’s grotesque decision at the start of 2010, Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission.

Now, the limits are gone. And this comes precisely at a time when an almost unprecedented share of the nation’s income and wealth is accumulating at the top.

Never before in the history of our Republic have so few spent so much to influence the votes of so many.

What would happen if Iran had the bomb?

02-20-2012  •  Scott Peterson 

Even as Tehran signals an interest in nuclear talks, many experts have already envisioned what the world would look like if the country got nuclear weapons. It wouldn’t be as dire as many fear, but it would unleash new uncertainties – and perhaps 

Activist Says He Lied to Obtain Climate Papers

By JOHN M. BRODER and FELICITY BARRINGER  …http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/science/earth/activist-says-heartland-climate-papers-obtained-by-deceit.html?_r=2

A prominent environmental researcher, activist and blogger from California admitted Monday night that he had deceitfully obtained and distributed confidential internal materials from the Heartland Institute, a libertarian group based in Chicago devoted in part to questioning the reality of global warming.

Peter H. Gleick, founder and president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, wrote in a statement published on The Huffington Post that he had posed as someone else to get the materials, which include fund-raising and strategy documents intended only for the board and top executives of the group.

Dr. Gleick distributed the documents to several well-known bloggers and activists who support the work of mainstream climate scientists and who have denounced the Heartland Institute as a center of climate change denial. The document release, which lit up the Internet last week, was cast by some bloggers as the work of a whistle-blowing Heartland employee or ex-employee who had access to internal papers, when it was in fact orchestrated by Dr. Gleick, a Yale- and Berkeley-trained scientist and environmental activist who says that he was frustrated with Heartland’s anti-climate-change programs.

Dr. Gleick denied authorship of the most explosive of the documents, a supposed strategy paper that laid out the institute’s efforts to raise money to question climate change and get schools to adjust their science curricula to include alternative theories of global warming. The Institute asserted that document, which is in a different format and type style from the rest of the Heartland materials, was a fake, but implicitly acknowledged that others were legitimate and vowed to legally pursue those who stole and published them.

In his statement, Dr. Gleick said he had received the dubious strategy paper anonymously in the mail this year. He said he did not know the source of the document but said he tried to confirm the validity of the document because the disclosures in them would serve to undercut the institute’s mission.

“In an effort to do so,” he wrote, “and in a serious lapse of my own professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name.”

He said he then forwarded, anonymously, the documents to “a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues. I made no changes or alterations of any kind to any of the Heartland Institute documents or to the original anonymous communication.”

He said that he would not comment further on Monday, but wrote: “My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.”

As a founder and president of the Pacific Institute, based in Oakland, Dr. Gleick, 55, has been a prominent figure in researching and making publicly available information on the regional consequences of global warming in California, the nation and the world. He received a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2003.

Jim Lakely, a spokesman for the Heartland Institute, said Monday, before Dr. Gleick’s admission, that his organization was waiting for the results of an investigation by a “professional digital forensics team” to try to establish who obtained the materials and how. Until then, he said, “we don’t want to speculate” on the identity of the leaker.

But on Friday, Ross Kaminsky, a senior fellow and former board member of the Heartland Institute, speculated in the conservative magazine The American Spectator that Dr. Gleick was the source of the Heartland documents, calling him “a true enemy of the Heartland Institute” and “a committed alarmist rent-seeker.”

Brendan DeMelle, the managing editor of the Web site DeSmogBlog, which has received a letter from Heartland threatening legal action if the documents were not removed from DeSmogBlog, said in an e-mailed response: “Heartland has not identified any legal basis for a civil action to force removal of the documents. We see none at this time.” But that was before Dr. Gleick’s published admission.

18 Statistics That Prove That The Economy Has Not Improved Since Barack Obama Became President

02-20-2012  •  endoftheamericandream.com 

Has the economy improved since Barack Obama became the president of the United States? Of course not.  

Sheriff Babeu defends sending naked picture to ex-boyfriend

02-20-2012  •  azcapitoltimes.com 

Babeu, a Republican who is running for Congress in the 4th Congressional District, just as emphatically defended his right to take sexually explicit photographs of himself and send them to boyfriends. “We’re talking about personal liberties and freed 

Spider Goats, Bullet-proof Skin, Meat from a Petri Dish and Transhumanism – Oh My!

Barbara H. Peterson  …Farm Wars …http://farmwars.info/?p=7876

In what appears to be a case of the rich experimenting on their version of life for a transhumanist agenda, the UK Telegraph reports that by sometime in the fall of 2012, we will be happily munching on burgers made from meat grown in a lab. Yes, that’s right.

Pro.  Post said his team has successfully replicated the process with cow cells and calf serum, bringing the first artificial burger a step closer. He said: “In October we are going to provide a proof of concept showing out of stem cells we can make a product that looks, feels and hopefully tastes like meat.”

Why should we be concerned with this? After all, benefits would include slaughtering fewer animals. What could possibly be wrong with that?

Although it is possible to extract a limited number of stem cells from cows without killing them, Prof Post said the most efficient way of taking the process forward would still involve slaughter. He said: “Eventually my vision is that you have a limited herd of donor animals in the world that you keep in stock and that you get your cells from there.”

Each animal would be able to produce about a million times more meat through the lab-based technique than through the traditional method of butchery, he added.

This sounds reasonable if you want to trust your food to a lab. Oh, we already do? And just how is that working out so far? Our food supply has been adulterated by chemicals, genetic engineering, cloning, pesticides, and irradiation, courtesy of a so-called “science-based” process, which is anything but. When left to their own devices and funded by megalomaniacs, it seems that the guys in the little white lab coats like to cook up a whole host of concoctions that animals don’t even want to eat unless they are forced to. Maybe the animals are smarter than us, eh?

So, here is what they are cooking up this time:

To produce the meat, stem cells are placed in a broth containing vital nutrients and serum from a cow foetus which allow them to grow into muscle cells and multiply up to 30 times. The strips of meat begin contracting like real muscle cells, and are attached to velcro and stretched to boost this process and keep them supple.

At the moment the method produces meat with realistic fibres and a pinkish-yellow tinge, but Prof Post expects to produce more authentically coloured strips in the near future.

He forecast that, with the right funding and regulatory approval, his method could be scaled up to industrial proportions within as little as ten years. UK Telegraph

With the right funding? Well, it seems that you already have it, Professor.

The work is being financed by an anonymous and extremely wealthy benefactor who Prof. Post claims is a household name with a reputation for “turning everything into gold.” UK Telegraph

While vegans rejoice, another agenda just might be afoot. Ponder this:

Think artificial life, transhumanism, synthetic biology, genetic engineering and cloning. Now think Cargill.

Cargill just happens to be responsible for 70-75% of the hazardous waste hydrofluosilicic acid used in fluoridation programs. (Fluoride Action Network)

The U.S. government considers the basic chemical composition of hydrofluosilicic acid, a toxic waste, and fluoride to be the same when dumped in the water supply. (Farm Wars)

What do all of these things have in common? How about the obscenely rich making even more of an obscene profit off of feeding the masses with their experiments in engineering humanity the way they want to?  Experiment with synthesizing flesh and muscle for future transhumans, and sell your experiments to the public as food – a win/win situation. Get paid to throw away your waste products much like Cargill does with its hazardous waste from the manufacture of fertilizer, which gets purchased and put into our water supply to supposedly prevent tooth decay, while Big Pharma rakes in the profits from inevitable illnesses that follow.

Think this is far-fetched? The wanderings of a deranged and paranoid mind? Think again. This is not science fiction, it is happening now, one piece at a time. Take for instance the spider goat genetically modified to produce bullet-proof human skin. I can’t make this stuff up. This is the transhumanist agenda, and it appears they are happily on their way to developing who knows what to unleash upon humanity without even so much as a thought about the consequences.

We are being transformed as we speak. Each time we eat a genetically engineered organism (GMO), we are eating something that was designed to horizontally/laterally transfer DNA to other cells. We have scientists busily working on the Soul Catcher chip that purports to catch a person’s every lifetime thought and sensation.

This is the end of death,” said Dr. Chris Winter, of British Telecom’s artificial life team. He predicted that within three decades it would be possible to relive other people’s lives by playing back their experiences on a computer. “By combining this information with a record of the person’s genes, we could recreate a person physically, emotionally and spiritually. Cyberbrain

Now all they need is the body, and it seems that the guys in the little white lab coats are working on just that. How long before we begin to see artificial men walking among us with flesh grown in a Petri dish? And just how will we know them? Maybe when we come face to face with a not so benevolent personality wrapped in bullet proof skin who decides that the 38 special pointed at it is nothing more than a nuisance at best. And most of all, when will we natural humans be declared an endangered species?

Think Tanks Are Nonpartisan? Think Again

Once seen as non-ideological “universities without students,” the American think tank has, in many cases, become a partisan stalking horse that devalues the sector’s scholarship.

By Emily Badger …http://www.miller-mccune.com/politics/think-tanks-are-nonpartisan-think-again-39850/?utm_source=Newsletter201&utm_medium=email&utm_content=0221&utm_campaign=newsletters

One of the strangest institutions in Washington — and perhaps the hardest to comprehend from the outside — is the think tank, that quasi-academic, sort-of-political organization that offers, as its primary output, ideas. Universally, think tanks claim to be nonpartisan, and as tax-exempt nonprofits, this is a basic requirement in the tax code. But most people in Washington know the ideological leanings of think tanks that may obscure this fact in their titles: There’s the Cato Institute (libertarian), the Heritage Foundation (conservative), the Brookings Institution (moderate liberal) and the Center for American Progress (progressive).

And that’s just four of the 400 think tanks that have grown up in town, by Tevi Troy’s count. Troy is a think tank scholar himself, from the Hudson Institute (“a nonpartisan, independent policy research organization dedicated to innovative research and analysis that promotes global security, prosperity, and freedom”). In a thoughtful new article in the journal National Affairs, he argues that think tanks have proliferated to the point of devaluing the research and ideas that come out of them. Most damning, he suggests that these institutions — once thought of as “universities without students” — have become political, stripping them of the power to float new ideas that politicians would never put forward.

PHOENIX (AP) — The Fiesta Bowl’s former top executive has reached a plea deal with Arizona prosecutors to settle allegations connected to a political donations scandal.

The lawyer for John Junker says his client plans to plead guilty Tuesday afternoon in Phoenix to a single felony count in state court related to his role in soliciting political contributions from Fiesta Bowl employees. The bowl later reimbursed employees about $48,000 over a nine-year period.

The state felony carries a presumptive 2 1/2-year sentence that’s also eligible for probation.

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