Friday, January 15, 2010
china confidential
China Confidential First Broke the Story that NY Democrats Were Stabbing Clinton in the Back
The book everyone is talking about--meaning, everyone in Washington, DC--is Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. The blockbuster reveals that U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer from New York and other powerful Democrats secretly urged Barack Obama to run for President while letting Hillary Clinton believe they were solidly behind her candidacy.
In other words, the authors say, Clinton's fellow Democrats--including a fellow Senator from New York--were stabbing her in the back instead of backing her.
All of which comes as no surprise to China Confidential readers. The blog was the first to break a similar stab-in-the-back story. Read it here. Ironically, the back-stabber in the piece--a mediocre New York Congresswoman--went on to replace Clinton as Senator when she was appointed Secretary of State in the Obama administration. The Congresswoman basically posed as a political conservative to win over her rural Upstate district and has since turned viciously leftward--in line with her hatred of Israel and actual disdain for rural Americans.China Likely to Ban Google
The bottom line: behind-the-scenes diplomacy would probably have failed, too. Google seems destined to join Twitter and Facebook (and blogs like China Confidential) on the big, banned-and-blocked-in-China list.Thursday, January 14, 2010
Israeli Hero: Apply Lesson of Munich to Iran
Aviam Sela, a former senior Israeli Air Force officer, who participated in and was responsible for planning the attack on Iraq’s nuclear reactor, sees Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a new Hitler--who should have been terminated, Sela says, in 1938. Click here for Sela's must-read essay.
China Confidential agrees with Sela. This reporter has consistently and repeatedly warned that just as Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Nazi Germany failed to preserve the peace in Europe and instead made World War II inevitable, Barack Obama's appeasement of Islamonazi Iran will make war in the Middle East inevitable.
Horrible Choice
Already, it seems that Israel may be forced to choose between launching a preemptive conventional attack on Iran's conventional and missile sites and a preemptive nuclear attack on these targets. Failure to wipe out the missiles in Iran and in Iran/Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon could result in the rubbling of Tel Aviv--which Iran has vowed to "burn"--and Haifa. Thousands of Israelis could perish; and the death toll could be even greater if Iran's ally, Syria, joins the conflict with its arsenal of chemical warheads and ballistic missiles.
it should never have come to this--having to choose between mass death in Iran and mass death in Israel. The world should not have allowed Iran to develop nuclear weapons. In fact, the Islamists should have been stopped from overthrowing Iran's modernizing monarch, the pro-American Shah, in the first place. But that is another story.
Fact is, the Obama administration, as this reporter predicted, gave Iran a critically important additional year to achieve its atomic aims; and absent a miracle--regime change through revolution or military coup--there is no diplomatic solution to the problem of nuclearizing Iran.US Expert Predicted Haiti Quake a Week Ago
An international earthquake expert at Oregon State University in the United States predicted one week ago that one of the world’s most at-risk locations for a major, destructive earthquake is the fault that runs through Haiti and near Port-au-Prince.
That prediction, made during an interview with a reporter for Scientific American, was by geologist Robert Yeats, a professor emeritus at Oregon State University, who said the death toll would be tremendous “if they have an earthquake on this fault that runs through Port-au-Prince” – an observation that is now playing out in the aftermath of the hugely destructive earthquake Tuesday that appears to have killed tens of thousands of people.
The observation also brings home the remarkable advances scientists have made in recent years in understanding the complex, as-yet-unpredictable behavior in the thousands of faults around the world that set the stage for earthquakes, and the socio-economic forces that make some locations more vulnerable than others.
The fault in Haiti, called the Enriquillo-Plaintain Garden Fault, is one place where the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates move past each other, the type of forces that often cause earthquakes. Stresses have been building up on that fault since the last major earthquake on it about 200 years ago. But in this case, the fault was disturbingly close to a major city, and occurred at a shallow depth in an area where poorly constructed masonry buildings were common.
Yeats has written books and numerous professional publications not just on earthquake dynamics but also the ways that cities, nations and individuals can prepare for them, either through well-enforced building codes or personal disaster preparation. The lack of a strong social services network and substandard construction in places like Haiti, Yeats predicted earlier, make it especially vulnerable to any earthquakes that hit.
“The problem is not always just the size of the earthquake, but also the social structure and preparation for it,” Yeats said. “Haiti is one of the poorest nations in the world and that’s reflected in the quality of their housing. And sometimes, even when engineers design buildings properly, the contractors who build them don’t always follow the plans.”
Importance of Building Practices
Places such as California, Yeats said, face some geologic concerns similar to those of Haiti but have far more advanced building practices that would help protect against loss of life in a similar tectonic event.
In a new book to be published soon through Cambridge University Press, called “Active Faults of the World,” Yeats also points to some cities such as Kingston, Jamaica; Tehran, Iran; and Istanbul, Turkey as locations that may face similar concerns, with major earthquake risks and many buildings vulnerable to them.
Yeats was also one of the first scientists in the world to begin warning in the mid-1980s that the Pacific Northwest faced major risks from a subduction zone earthquake, very similar to the one that in 2004 caused massive damage and a major tsunami in East Asia that killed nearly 230,000 people.
Such an earthquake in the Pacific Northwest was thought to be improbable at that time, but later research by OSU geophysicist Chris Goldfinger and others has demonstrated such events have happened repeatedly in the past several thousand years on the Cascadia Subduction Zone that runs from northern California to British Columbia. The last one occurred Jan. 26, 1700, and the next one could occur almost any time.
Studies of fault zones and earthquake risk have continued to improve in recent decades. And although advances have been made in building codes in the Pacific Northwest, California and other earthquake regions of the United States, OSU researchers in recent years have warned that not enough has been done to prepare for tsunamis, one of the other forces often associated with marine earthquakes. More studies on that are being done at the tsunami wave basin in OSU’s Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory, the most sophisticated facility of its type in the world.
The university has been involved in some exploratory studies on construction of the first tsunami-resistant public building in the U.S. in Cannon Beach, Ore., a place where people could run to in the few minutes they might have before a tsunami hits following a major subduction zone earthquake. Other OSU research is also under way on ways to make structures more resistant to earthquake shaking with building techniques that may help protect both property and lives.
Yeats is also involved in a research project to create a global fault database that will provide more scientific information about faults around the world.Al Qaeda Planning More Attacks on US
Al Qaeda terrorists trained in Yemen are at large and planning more attacks on U.S. targets, including airliners, according to U.S. intelligence officials. Click here for the story.Israel Seeking Sixth German Submarine
Security Major Issue for Haiti Aid Workers
The Wall Street Journal reports:A badly damaged seaport, a congested one-runway airport, a shattered communications system and difficulty coordinating the aid have delayed relief efforts. Help will arrive too late for many. The Red Cross federation estimated that 45,000 to 50,000 people have been killed in the earthquake. Haitian officials have said the death toll could top 100,000.
Read the whole thing here.
Friday 15 January 2010
A letter to the New York Times takes issue with Google's public show of anger towards the Chinese government. Read the letter here.
Israel is talking to Germany about buying a sixth submarine capable of firing nuclear-tipped missiles (at Iranian nuclear and missile sites). Click here for the story.
Sheer anarchy.... Drug gangs and criminals rule. Aid workers rushing to Haiti fear for their lives as they approach a devastated nation with no central authority, as reported here.
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