RWC Unfiltered 10-24-11

And he wonders why Immelt can head Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness when Obama has consistently criticized the oil and gas industry for exploiting what he claims are excessive tax breaks.

As for the permanent "green energy jobs" being created by the wind project, CNN Money has estimated the number to be 35. Taking into consideration only the $490 million grant and ignoring the loan guarantee, the cost of each job will be about $14 million.

Gallup finds Obama’s approval rating has plummeted to an all-time low of 41 percent only Jimmy Carter had a lower approval rating at the same point,

Iran is sponsoring an increasing number of attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq.

Officials said Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was directing Shi’ite militias to strike U.S. military personnel and facilities around Iraq. They said attacks, attributed to IRGC’s Quds Force, have been reported in Baghdad as well as the southern Iraqi province of Maysan.

“Anything they can do to cause separation between us and Iraq helps achieve their greater aims,” U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan said.

On Oct. 12, Quds-trained Shi’ite fighters fired rockets at U.S. forces in Maysan. At least three American soldiers were injured in what officials said marked a campaign against the U.S. military presence in the south.

“[They are doing] Anything they can do to cause dissent or attack our forces and cause us to leave,” Buchanan said.

Officials said Iran has ordered an increase in attacks by Shi’ite proxies in Iraq. They said the Shi’ite cells were responsible for at least 25 percent of the killing of Iraqi soldiers and government personnel in 2011.

The Quds Force has been identified as a planner of foiled attacks on the Israeli and Saudi Arabian embassies in the United States in 2011. Officials said IRGC was working with operatives in the United States to also assassinate Saudi ambassador to Washington, Adel Al Jubeir.

A leading Quds Force officer in both the plot in the United States as well as operations in Iraq was identified as Abdul Reza Shahlai. Officials said Shahlai was working with Shi’ite militias in Iraq, including one linked to Muqtada Sadr, who controls more than 40 seats in the Iraqi parliament.

As Obama was announcing the U. S. pullout of the last 40,000 U. S. troops from Iraq by yearend 35 Turkish battalions that had crossed the Iraqi border were attacking members of the Kurdish Workers’ Party, or PKK, that has been warring against the Turks since 1990. There are 900-1,500 troops in each Turkish battalion it is unknown what other assets are deployed.

The AFL-CIO is making headlines by running ads promoting “Occupy Wall Street.” One seriously doubts its workimg class members have much in common with the left-wing professional agitators running these protests and the tent cities they are erecting illegally in private and public parks in New York, Washington, D.C. and other cities.

The most interesting part of this story, however, is that one of the AFL-CIO affiliates behind the campaign, the Working America group, is headed by a veteran of Cuba’s Venceremos Brigades, a progressive activist by the name of Karen Nussbaum. Equally significant, her husband works for the public relations firm that represented billionaire hedge fund operator George Soros.

The Venceremos Brigades, which are actually still in operation, were the orchestrated “tours” of the communist island, conducted under the authority and supervision of Castro’s intelligence service. They were designed to create a communist cadre on the soil of the United States. The Brigades were organized in 1969 by Bernardine Dohrn, wife of Obama buddy Bill Ayers and other members of the Weather Underground terrorist group. Michael Moore likely enjoyed the benefits of Castro’s intelligence service while on the island when he filmed his misleading mockumentary Sicko. Many think Castro is a cruel dictator who prevents self determination.

“I learned about revolution in Cuba,” Nussbaum has said. Now, she is practicing revolution in the streets of the U.S., armed with the millions of dollars that the AFL-CIO forcibly extracts from unsuspecting members.

“Making the connection between the Occupy Wall Street protests to working class people all over the country will be vital to determining the power of this movement,” Nussbaum says, in an article being distributed by Soros-funded media. “We offer our support and encouragement to Occupy Wall Street and to this growing movement because it’s finally forcing the political, media and financial elites to take notice of what’s really happening.”

Liberal blogger Greg Sargent of The Washington Post is absolutely ecstatic over this development. He wonders, “what if working class white voters actually like and agree with Occupy Wall Street’s message, if not always with the cultural and personal instincts of its messengers?” He quotes Nussbaum in his piece as saying that Working America has signed up 25,000 “new recruits” as a result of the protests in one week alone. It claims three million members.

If “working class white voters” already have a problem with the “cultural and personal instincts” of the protesters, an apparent reference to their hygiene problems, anarchistic tendencies, and penchant for Marxist-style “solutions,” what do you think the reaction is going to be when they find out that Nussbaum herself, the executive director of the AFL-CIO’s Working America affiliate, is someone who traveled to Cuba to sing the praises of Communist dictator Fidel Castro?

But don’t count on Greg Sargent or any other mainstream media reporter to reveal this information. They probably consider it McCarthyism to document someone’s communist connections or affiliations. But a radical in a crowd at a Tea Party event? That’s a scandal worth covering.

The broader question is: what has happened to the AFL-CIO, which was once a staunchly anti-communist organization?

Since Castro has outlawed independent labor unions in Cuba, as well as freedom in general, Nussbaum’s fascination with the communist system on the island is a relevant line of inquiry for those concerned about the dangers of socialism and totalitarianism here and the current direction of the AFL-CIO. Does her support for Castro and Cuba have anything to do with her support for the “Occupy Wall Street” movement?

An Aug. 10, 1970, a New York Post article about her trip to Cuba quoted Nussbaum as saying that she “was impressed with Castro and with Cuban socialism.” The story said that Nussbaum, then 20 years of age, had met with Castro, then 43, during dinner in Havana.

The Venceremos Brigades came under scrutiny by the investigative panels of the Congress of the United States - panels which have since been abolished or dismantled by liberals. One of the main concerns was that some of the Americans going to Cuba were being trained in guerrilla warfare, insurrectionary tactics, and explosives.

An aide to one Santa Barbara County Supervisor attended training in Cuba included bomb making classes. He and a then supervisor participated in the burming of the Bank of Amierca offices adjacent to the UCSB campus in 1970 a lawsuit  sealed that supervisor’s FBI file until 2020.The rioting was instigated by a campus speech by radical lawyer William Kuntsler (July 7, 1919 - September 4, 1995) defender of the notorius Chicago Seven were seven defendants-Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, and Lee Weiner-charged with conspiracy, inciting to riot, and other charges related to protests that took place in Chicago, Illinois on the occasion of the 1968 Democratic National Convention

The violence at Columbia University in 1969 was instigated by Mark Rudd after his trip to Cuba. Rudd was a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and then the Weather Underground. In addition, three members of the “Chicago 7,” the group charged with sparking riots in the city during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, had been to Cuba.

Another traveler to the communist island was Kathy Boudin, a member of the Weather Underground who had also been to Moscow. Her father, Leonard Boudin, was equally notorious, having been a member of the Communist Party USA and an official representative of the Castro government.

Kathy Boudin, Cathy Wilkerson and Ted Gold, Weather Underground members who had been to Cuba, had established a bomb-making factory in a New York City residence in 1970 when one of the bombs went off, killing Gold and Weather Underground members Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins. Boudin and Wilkerson managed to escape. The bomb was intended for an officers’ dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

Although Nussbaum doesn’t want to talk about her trip to Cuba, she did some talking, in the form of an “oral history” of her involvement in the feminist movement and radical activities. In this interview, conducted in 2003 and published in 2004, Nussbaum talked about her involvement in the communist movement, noting her exposure to groups like the Young People’s Socialist League and the SDS at college. She became a member of the Black Panther Support Committee, a group in support of the black militants who targeted police officers as “pigs,” before going to Cuba as a member of the Venceremos Brigades. Nussbaum admits, “There were a lot of Weathermen who were in the Brigade” and a “huge array of young leftists.”

What’s more, she found Cuba exciting and wonderful. “It was thrilling,” she said. “It was a society that was combating racism, that had provided free health and educational care to every person on earth…” On and on it goes.

But Cuba wasn’t her only stop on the communist world tour. She became a member of a local “peace organization” opposed to American involvement in the Vietnam War and traveled to Hanoi in 1973. Nussbaum says the visit was safe, “though illegal.”

Nussbaum became a friend of “Hanoi Jane” Fonda, who was photographed sitting on an anti-aircraft gun used to shoot down American aircraft and is still regarded as a traitor. Fonda’s website features a photo of them together. Nussbaum’s husband, Ira Arlook, who is also in the photo, works for Fenton Communications, the firm that has represented George Soros, the communist Nicaraguan Sandinistas, and others of that ilk. Arlook, chief of “advocacy campaigns” for the firm, handles the account of the Soros-funded Moveon.org.

In the interview, Nussbaum talks about how John Sweeney, then chief of the AFL-CIO, and Richard Trumka, secretary-treasurer under Sweeney, had worked to “open up” the labor federation to “new constituencies” and had become “more aggressive.” Nussbaum was brought into the AFL-CIO as part of this effort, becoming an assistant to Sweeney and running the Working America affiliate under Sweeney and now Trumka, the current president.

It is fascinating that Nussbaum will talk about these things with another radical but closes her mouth when asked for an explanation from those critical of her involvement in communist and anti-American causes.

How did a Castro sympathizer come to “occupy” a top position in the AFL-CIO? The terrible truth is that the anti-communism of this once-great labor federation has been snuffed out, first under Sweeney, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and now under Trumka. Today they’re literally in bed with the Reds and conducting street actions and protests to bring the revolution that Nussbaum saw firsthand in Cuba to America.

Because the police are being restrained in most cases from closing down the illegal protests, which are growing in response to support from Obama and his backers, the fear is that the Marxist violence of the 1960s and 1970s will return. Most of the young people and “workers” in the protests are, whether they know it or not, mere cannon fodder. They will be sacrificed for the revolution when the inevitable confrontation with law enforcement occurs.

The main stream media can stop this catastrophe before it happens, but only if they blow the whistle on those like Nussbaum at the AFL-CIO and elsewhere using the protests for their own anti-America purposes.

In a rather startling coincidence and just in time for the 2012 Presidential election Social Security will raise benefits by 3.5% in January 2012. There have been no such adjustments for three years ostensively because there has been no increases in the cost of living.

Libya’s ex-leader Col Muammar Gaddafi was killed  fleeing an assault on his home town of Sirte, Gaddafi’s convoy of 80 vehicles was attacked by a U. S. Predator drone and French fighter jets while dashing out of town, Gaddafi was found later cowering in a culvert dragged out —  and executed with a shot to the head.

Mahmoud Jibril, a rebel leader told a news conference in Tripoli it was time to launch a new unified Libya.

VP Joe Biden was quick to praise NATO, the British and French for joining the efforts. One thing almost always missing in discussions if Libya is that the US has been paying 80% of all those costs.

Hopefully the results in Libya will be better than the Egyptian disaster were the radical Muslim Brotherhood has taken over. The Bugaboo in Libya is now what? Before the fighting Libya exported 1,5 million barrels a day- that’s fallen to a third of the amount. Oil spiked at $114 a barrel for Libya’s high grade crude. The dictator stole a trillion over his 40-years and all of it is still missing. Immediately after Qaddafi’s death oil prices fell.

The threat is that Islamic fundamentalism will take cover the first step is to demilitarize and to convince everyone to lay down arms, and that’s what to watch

A hypocritical Obama was clearly joy filled by Gaddafi’s death puffing up like some sort of faux warrior even though Obama disdains the military except when it benefits his reelection campaign and never served even one day in so much as a Boy Scout uniform.

A Frenchman’s boxer dog routinely jumped out of the window of its owners first floor apartment, then the man moved up to a sixth floor apartment and the dog  jumped out fortunately landing on a balcony just below. Reportedly the dog is now looking before he leaps.

Unbelievably Senator Harry Reid (D) Nevada said Wednesday that private sector jobs are doing just fine but government jobs are what’s suffering and he proposed $35 billions to prop up government jobs. Over the course of Obama’s first thousand days 2,500,000 private sector jobs have been lost which raises the suspicion that the Senate Majority leaders needs to have his medication adjusted.

Reid wants to shovel $35 billion to state and local government in borrowed Chinese money to solve what he sees as the problem.

V. P. Joe Biden ranted Wednesday about crime going up unless Obama’s Jobs Act is approved. He sounded almost hysterical.

Someone should point out that had SOLYNDRA not been given over $500 billion taxpayer dollars to squander it could have gone to cops and firefighters.

Los Angeles police officials searched on Monday for a stolen cache of submachine guns and semi-automatic handguns that disappeared from a SWAT training facility, and said they were embarrassed by the loss.

More than 30 Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns and M1911 pistols that had been stored at the training facility were stolen.

Based on U. S. intelligence of an Iranian grand plot starting with the mujrder of the Saudi Ambassador while he is in U. S. and attacks by some 20,000 pilgrims during the Haj Saudis Arabia is conducting security exercises for Haj, (Nov. 4-9) bracing for an Iranian surprise, Saudi Arabia, bracing for millions of Muslim pilgrims, has staged a security exercise.

Saudi authorities have been bracing for a range of threats, including from neighboring Iran. A special security unit has been set up to prevent individuals who do not possess valid Haj permits from entering Mecca and other holy places.

Hundreds of troops demonstrated skills in riot control and counter-insurgency. Squads were sent into Mecca’s Grand Mosque. The exercise, which sought to draw lessons from the brief takeover of the mosque in 1979, called for hostage negotiations followed by the storming and destruction of the building.

At least two million Muslims would attend the Haj. They said a key concern has been the infiltration of insurgents.

The Hajj (Arabic: حج‎ Ḥaǧǧ “pilgrimage“) is the pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It is the largest pilgrimage in the world, and is the fifth pillar of Islam, a religious duty that must be carried out at least once in their lifetime by every able-bodied Muslim who can afford to do so. The Hajj is a demonstration of the solidarity of the Muslim people, and their submission to God (Allah in the Arabic language).

The pilgrimage occurs from the 8th to 12th day of Dhu al-Hijjah, the 12th and last month of the Islamic calendar. Because the Islamic calendar is a lunar calendar, eleven days shorter than the Gregorian calendar used in the Western world, the Gregorian date of the Hajj changes from year to year. Ihram is the name given to the special spiritual state in which Muslims live while on the pilgrimage.

The Hajj is associated with the life of Islamic prophet Muhammad from the 7th century, but the ritual of pilgrimage to Mecca is considered by Muslims to stretch back thousands of years to the time of Abraham

Pilgrims join processions of hundreds of thousands of people, who simultaneously converge on Mecca for the week of the Hajj, and perform a series of rituals: Each person walks counter-clockwise seven times around the Kaaba, the cube-shaped building which acts as the Muslim direction of prayer, runs back and forth between the hills of Al-Safa and Al-Marwah, drinks from the Zamzam Well, goes to the plains of Mount Arafat to stand in vigil, and throws stones in a ritual Stoning of the Devil. The pilgrims then shave their heads, perform a ritual of animal sacrifice, and celebrate the three day global festival of Eid al-Adha.

Darkle(DAHR-kuhl) verb tr., intr.: To make or become dark, indistinct, or gloomy. EtymologyBack-formation from darkling (in the dark), from Middle English derkeling. Earliest documented use: 1819.

The Occupy Wall Street movement reflects values that are dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American people-and particularly with swing voters who are largely independent and have been trending away from the president since the debate over health-care reform says Clinton pollster Doug Schoen in a Wednesday Wall Street Journal article.

The protesters have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies. On Oct. 10 and 11, a senior researcher at his polling firm, interviewed nearly 200 protesters in New York’s Zuccotti Park. Those findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion.

That research shows clearly that the movement doesn’t represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda.

The vast majority of demonstrators are actually employed, and the proportion of protesters unemployed (15%) is within single digits of the national unemployment rate (9.1%).

An overwhelming majority of demonstrators supported Barack Obama in 2008. Now 51% disapprove of the president while 44% approve, and only 48% say they will vote to re-elect him in 2012, while at least a quarter won’t vote at all.

Fewer than one in three (32%) call themselves Democrats, while roughly the same proportion (33%) say they aren’t represented by any political party.

What binds a large majority of the protesters together-regardless of age, socioeconomic status or education-is a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas.

Sixty-five percent say that government has a moral responsibility to guarantee all citizens access to affordable health care, a college education, and a secure retirement-no matter the cost. By a large margin (77%-22%), they support raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, but 58% oppose raising taxes for everybody, with only 36% in favor. And by a close margin, protesters are divided on whether the bank bailouts were necessary (49%) or unnecessary (51%).

Thus Occupy Wall Street is a group of engaged progressives who are disillusioned with the capitalist system and have a distinct activist orientation. Among the general public, by contrast, 41% of Americans self-identify as conservative, 36% as moderate, and only 21% as liberal. That’s why the Obama-Pelosi embrace of the movement could prove catastrophic for the Democrat party.

In 1970, aligning too closely with the antiwar movement hurt Democrats in the midterm election, when many middle-class and working-class Americans ended up supporting hawkish candidates who condemned student disruptions. While that 1970 election should have been a sweep against the first-term Nixon administration, it was instead one of only four midterm elections since 1938 when the president’s party didn’t lose seats.

With the Democratic Party on the defensive throughout the 1970 campaign, liberal Democrats were only able to win on Election Day by distancing themselves from the student protest movement. So Adlai Stevenson III pinned an American flag to his lapel, appointed Chicago Seven prosecutor Thomas Foran chairman of his Citizen’s Committee, and emphasized “law and order”-a tactic then employed by Ted Kennedy, who denounced the student protesters as “campus commandos” who must be repudiated, “especially by those who may share their goals.”

Today, having abandoned any effort to work with the congressional super committee to craft a bipartisan agreement on deficit reduction Obama has thrown in with those who support his desire to tax oil companies and the rich, rather than appeal to independent and self-described moderate swing voters who want smaller government and lower taxes, not additional stimulus or interference in the private sector.

Rather than embracing huge new spending programs and tax increases, plus increasingly radical and potentially violent activists, the Democrats should instead build a bridge to the much more numerous independents and moderates in the center by opposing bailouts and broad-based tax increases.

Put simply, Democrats need to say they are with voters in the middle who want cooperation, conciliation and lower taxes. And they should work particularly hard to contrast their rhetoric with the extremes advocated by the Occupy Wall Street crowd

Granted it is a small sample and the statistics are so small and consequently the margin of error so high as to lay open those findings for criticism. The left-wing blogosphere is afire over Shoen’s article and finds charging bias and misrepresentation.

Regardless that facts that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Obama have all expressed support for the protesters is simultaneously damning.

The United Federation of Teachers gave space worth $100,000 @ month to the protesters for one dollar.

An 30-year old New York City ice cream vendor who peddled prescription painkillers from the same truck he sold frozen treats to kids, was sentenced on Tuesday to three and a half years in prison. He stole prescription pads got 43,000 oxycodone pills between July 2009 and June 2010, with a street value of $20 a piece and sold them along with popsicles and fudgebars.

Has been aging actress Susan Sarandon slammed Pope Benedict XVI at The Hamptons Film Festival last weekend.

Sarandon was interviewed by Bob Balaban at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor on Saturday. She said she sent the pope a copy of the anti death penalty book, Dead Man Walking, authored by Sister Helen Prejean. Sarandon starred in the 1995 big-screen adaptation.

“The last one,” she said, “not this Nazi one we have now.”

Christian and Jewish anti-defamation leagues lambasted Sarandon for defaming the Pontiff who happens to be absolutely against the death penalty. Susan should fact check before she pops off: she os not known for her good judgement or strong intellect.

A Russian man had a few too many with his buddies and fell asleep between the rails on tracks enroute his home. Not even the arrival of a 140 ton train woke him; nor could rescuers who found him under the train after the engineer braked and stoped atop him.. They had to back the train from over him and drag him away to arouse him and take him home. Now that’s drunk.

One of the greenest of all energy sources is nuclear fusion that drives the stars, including our sun. Sustained and controlled fusion for electrical power production has never been realized. But, research persists, because. Fusion yields far more energy than any other source per unit of mass; its heavy-hydrogen fuel is plentiful in sea water; burning it produces not a trace of carbon - zip, zero, nada, Plus our planet is up to its rearend in hydrogen albeit combined with oxygen as water and in its free state.

Of course the very idea of a nuclear anything sends critics mostly with the IQ of a snail and knowledge base of a horse apple hysterically to the barracades beating their bongo drums. As an example, one of today’s premier medical imaging gadgets was delayed and nearly killed 30-years ago because it was called Nuclear Magnetic Imaging and the luddites went nuclear nuts. But, when the name was changed to Magnetic Resonance Imaging it became OK even though it was not changed in any way but name.

So, here are some facts to ponder and file away:

There’s more than one scheme for producing fusion power; the two main categories are magnetic confinement and inertial fusion energy. A promising approach to inertial fusion energy, called heavy-ion fusion (HIF), has long been advocated by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

In inertial fusion, the fuel is a solid target made of frozen isotopes of hydrogen (deuterium, or deuterium and tritium), which is instantly heated to fusion temperature when hit by driver beams of laser light or energetic particles. The heavy-ion fusion approached pursued at Berkeley Lab uses driver beams of ions (atoms lacking one or more electrons) whose atomic mass is generally greater than 100-cesium or xenon, for example. (For comparison, iron has an atomic mass of 55.85.)

Most controlled-fusion efforts today involve magnetic confinement, however, with the most common reactors being the doughnut-shaped chambers called tokamaks. Tokamaks try to contain, squeeze, and heat a plasma of heavy hydrogen isotopes with magnetic fields, long enough for the nuclei to fuse. Magnetic-confinement research continues, but the inertial fusion energy approach has lately been gaining new attention.

In the spring of 2011, Berkeley Lab’s Accelerator and Fusion Research Division (AFRD) held a Workshop on Accelerators for Heavy Ion Fusion that drew 68 participants from national laboratories, universities, and private companies in the U.S., Germany, and Japan. For four days the members debated the best kinds of ion sources, the best kinds of ion-beam accelerators, the interface between the beams and the reactor chambers, and the best kinds of targets and how to position them.

“A couple of things are driving renewed interest in inertial fusion, and especially heavy-ion fusion,” says AFRD’s Peter Seidl, who chaired the workshop’s organizing committee. “One is the National Ignition Facility’s campaign to achieve ‘burn and gain,’ in which more energy is generated from the fusion reaction than went into creating it. Ignition is the sine qua non of fusion power, a goal they hope to reach soon.”

Although intended mainly for weapons research-by testing fusion reactions in miniature-the laser-based National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has always had the important goal of demonstrating the potential of fusion power production as well. Successful “burn and gain” ignition is a necessary first step to validate the promise of inertial fusion energy.

NIF is a multi-billion dollar installation that uses 192 high-powered laser beams to ignite pea-sized targets inside a small gold cylinder called a hohlraum. What ignites the target are not the driver laser beams themselves but pressure from the X-rays these beams produce when they bounce off the inner walls of the hohlraum.

“A second thing that’s sparked interest in heavy-ion fusion is that the National Academies will soon issue a report on the prospects for inertial confinement,” Seidl says. “Their mission is to evaluate the various systems, identify the challenges, and advise DOE on a research program that would deliver the scientific and technical basis for a decision to build an IFE demonstration plant.”

Seidl points out that such a facility would necessarily be on the scale of NIF-in other words, big-but devoted solely to energy research and the demonstration of power production.

Early designs for a heavy-ion fusion reactor called for high-power beams of ions, produced in an accelerator, to be focused on a pea-sized hohlraum ( a non-specific German word for a ” hollow area” or “cavity”) and fusion capsule like those being tested at NIF. The ion beams would heat the hohlraum, in turn bathing the capsule in X-rays. This would ablate the surface of the fusion capsule inside, creating a rocket effect that would implode and crush it. The fuel would burn so quickly that it would be confined long enough to ignite and maintain fusion.

One advantage for heavy-ion fusion is the familiar technology of particle accelerators. Existing heavy-ion accelerators for basic research, like the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory or the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (when used to collide heavy ions like lead instead of protons), have individually demonstrated several of the necessary features required by HIF.

These machines use radio frequency (RF) power to create a series of strong electric fields that accelerate bunches of atomic nuclei to very high energies in two opposed beams. To generate the required power, however, HIF would require many more beams, accelerating many more ions per bunch.

HIF researchers choose a combination of ion energy and ion mass that allows a short “ion range”-short enough that the ions deposit virtually all their energy near the surface of the target. This is a much lower energy than the top energy at RHIC or LHC, suggesting that a different kind of accelerator is needed for optimum performance.

Canada is an Indian word meaning “Big Village”.

Fisker , a California-based startup automaker now says it will not be delaying the introduction of its electric car, known as “Project Nina,” despite a report in the News-Journal of Wilmington, Delaware saying production had been pushed to mid-2013.

The company got $529 million in U. S. taxpayer guranteed loans to build what turns out to be a $97,000 car now built in Finland. It insist none of those dollars are used in Finland. In addition to the nearly four figure price after just 32 miles the turbocharged German built gasoline engine has to kick in lowering gas mileage to only 19 MPG about the same as a Ford SUV and you could but 3 or 4 of them for 100 grand.

Similar to the way that the Chevrolet Volt operates, the Nina will be able to run on battery power for an undisclosed distance, or by using a small four-cylinder engine that Fisker is buying from BMW to generate electricity for longer trips. Fisker expects to build 100,000 Ninas a year for sale in the United States and abroad, creating at least 2,500 jobs in the process.

After several delays, the larger, more luxurious $96,895 Karma sedan officially went on sale this week after receiving official EPA certification. According to the federal agency, the four-seat sedan is capable of travelling only 32 miles on battery power alone while using the equivalent energy of a conventional automobile that gets 52 mpg. It has a fuel economy rating of 20 mpg in extended-range mode when it is being powered by its General Motors-supplied turbocharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine.

In addition to the half billion dollar federal loan guarantee the company is banking on Obama’s promise of big long term tax credits for anyone that buys one like the $7,500 credit applying to the Chevy VOLT that can’t give those cars away..

Al Gore is an investor in FISKER that has only sold one car to Leonardo Decaprio of Titanic fame.

A book about the late Steve Jobs claims he ragged on Obama about being much more business friendly saying its easier to do business in China than the U. S.      JOBS SHOULD KNOW SINCE ALMOST EVERYTHING APPLE is made there. Jobs reportedly warned Obama he was headed to become a one term President,

The Saudi distrust of Obama has grown in wake of the U.S. disclosure of an Iranian plot to assassinate Riyad’s ambassador to Washington. Officials said the Saudi royal family believed that the administration’s response to an Iranian plot on American soil was tepid.

“The way the Saudis see it, Washington is much more supportive of Iran than of Gulf states,” the official said. “So, the Saudis are acting on their own.”

Officials said the Saudis and its Gulf Cooperation Council allies have intensified efforts to stop Iranian influence in the Middle East. They said Riyad was supporting Yemeni efforts to quell Iranian-backed Shi’ite unrest in Bahrain and Yemen while funding the Sunni opposition to the regime of President Bashar Assad in Syria.

“One of the most important consequences of the Arab Spring is the intensification of the competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran,” Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, told a forum in Qatar on Oct. 17.

Relations between Saudi Arabia and the United States are said to have declined sharply since the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The Saudi king has openly referred to Obama’s perfidy meaning deceitfulness; untrustworthiness

Officials said the administration of President Barack Obama has detected a significant cooling in Saudi relations with Washington over the last year. They said senior Saudi officials were expressing distrust of in wake of the fall of the Mubarak regime in February.

“The Saudis will not do anything to sever relations with us, but are looking for alternatives to the United States,” an official said. “This has harmed cooperation on the strategic level.”

Officials said Saudi King Abdullah was stunned when Obama called for Mubarak’s ouster within 10 days of protests against the Egyptian president. They said the Saudi king told both U.S. as well as Western leaders that Washington betrayed Mubarak, deemed the most reliable Arab ally in the region.

“Our policy with regard to Mubarak as interpreted by some of our closest Arab allies in the Gulf has not gone over well,” former National Security Advisor James Jones, who served under Obama until 2011, said.

In a meeting with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in October, Jones acknowledged a rift between Washington and Saudi Arabia, which in 2010 requested $60 billion worth of U.S. fighter-jets and munitions. Jones said the U.S. abandonment of Mubarak demonstrated the danger of relying on the United States, regardless of the level of cooperation.

“In their interpretation of our dumping President Mubarak very hastily, [it] answered the question of what we would be likely to do if that happened in their countries,” Jones said.

Officials said the remarks by Jones matched the assessment in the White House and State Department.

The Saudis are turning to China as an ally. China is pleased since it wants Saudi oil.. Riyad has become closer to China and Pakistan and were relying on those countries for strategic weapons and internal security assistance. The Sauds are rumored to have purchased two nuclear warheads from Pakistan whose nuclear weapons program the Saud’s bankrolled.