Home › Blogs

admin's blog

admin's picture

via Poor Richard: USA spending more on nukes now than during Cold War

Wed, 11/09/2011 - 21:32 — admin

A subject near and dear to me;
USA spending more on nukes now than during Cold War -
Image from scrapetv.com Image from scrapetv.com TAGS: Health, Nuclear, Russia, History, USA, Government Spending, Culture, War

Though it has been decades since the Cold War came to a close, the United States government spends more money on nuclear warheads now than it did during its stand-off with the Soviet Union.

As the US vows to cut down its arsenal of nuclear weapons, the cost the country spends annually on maintaining its supply is much more than America invested each year during the Cold War. Estimates suggest that currently the US puts around $55 billion annually into its nuclear weapons program, reports Mother Jones; by comparison, the cost of the nuke complex for the country during the Cold War ran at an average of only $35 billion each year.

Only three months into his presidency, Barack Obama said in April 2009 that he envisioned an Earth in the future fee of nuclear weapons. Just two years later, however, America’s arsenal of those warheads amounts to roughly 2,500 nukes ready to be deployed.

It was only less than two weeks ago that the United States finally dismantled its largest atomic bomb, the B53, which was said to be 600 times more powerful than the nuke that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan towards the finale of the Second World War. As that nuke was dismantled, Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Poneman told NPR that the bomb was a “Cold War relic” and showed the direction of dismantling that the United States was heading towards.

Even if the country is cutting back on its nukes, the United States has a backup stash larger than the active bombs, allowing for the country to in total have 5,113 nuclear warheads in its position. The surplus of not-quite-ready nukes is at 2,600, and though they cannot be deployed at a drop of a hat like the others, they can be reanimated as full-fledged warheads.

Peter Fedewa of the pro-disarmament Ploughshares Fund says that those nukes “could be 'raised from the dead' and brought back into deployment with relative ease."

Under the START treaty that the US signed with Russia last year, both countries vow to soon enough limit their stash of active warheads to only 1,500. The document does not, however, say how many back-up nukes either country can have. In the interim, Mother Jones reports that the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas holds around 3,000 warheads that are on the schedule to be dismantled, something America used to do at a pace of around 1,300 per year. Last year, however, both Congress and the White House said that the country would cut back on the cost of dismantling the warheads and instead now invest the money on the upkeep of already dead nukes.

admin's picture

Prisoners Build Patriot Missiles

Wed, 03/09/2011 - 03:09 — admin

From Wired via Raw

This spring, the United Arab Emirates is expected to close a deal for $7 billion dollars’ worth of American arms. Nearly half of the cash will be spent on Patriot missiles, which cost as much as $5.9 million apiece.

But what makes those eye-popping sums even more shocking is that some of the workers manufacturing parts for those Patriot missiles are prisoners, earning as little as 23 cents an hour. (Credit Justin Rohrlich with the catch.)

admin's picture

TSA screenings ineffective

Sun, 12/19/2010 - 01:52 — admin

or another in the "who ever would have guessed?" category

TSA doesn't prevent a loaded gun from being taken on an airplane;
Two weeks ago, TSA's new director said every test gun, bomb part or knife got past screeners at some airports.

huh? Well damn good thing they've been feeling up grandma and squeezing junior's balls, isn't it?!

And here's a "spoof" video about the "underwear bomber" created by a firsthand witness to evidence of the false flag nature of the incident. Which might be even more funny were it not so tragically true.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVMXC5wDfHg

admin's picture

Elections soon

Thu, 10/21/2010 - 03:35 — admin

Yes I know they're all rigged, but I plan to partake. Voting Green.

Any Americans reading this, please vote Green on Nov 2! Or tell me who's better?

GreenChange.org

These are the ten planks of the Green New Deal:

* Cut military spending at least 70%
* Create millions of green union jobs through massive public investment in renewable energy, mass transit and conservation
* Set ambitious, science-based greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, and enact a revenue-neutral carbon tax to meet them
* Establish single-payer "Medicare for all" health care
* Provide tuition-free public higher education
* Change trade agreements to improve labor, environmental, consumer, health and safety standards
* End counterproductive prohibition policies and legalize marijuana
* Enact tough limits on credit interest and lending rates, progressive tax reform and strict financial regulation
* Amend the U.S. Constitution to abolish corporate personhood
* Pass sweeping electoral, campaign finance and anti-corruption reforms

admin's picture

The appearance of impropriety

Thu, 10/21/2010 - 03:22 — admin

"Good morning, Anita Hill, it's Ginny Thomas. I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband. So give it some thought. And certainly pray about this and hope that one day you will help us understand why you did what you did. OK, have a good day."

Thomas recently founded a right-wing activist group called Liberty Central, and there has been chatter about the impropriety of her activities with that organization given that the tea party-like group's funding sources are unclear and there may be conflicts of interests with cases that come before her husband.

admin's picture

GMO: friend or foe

Fri, 05/28/2010 - 22:39 — admin

I prefer to err on the side of caution, but who, as a layman, can judge how much caution is really adequate?
On the one hand there's this:
"This study was just routine," said Russian biologist Alexey V. Surov, in what could end up as the understatement of this century. Surov and his colleagues set out to discover if Monsanto's genetically modified (GM) soy, grown on 91% of US soybean fields, leads to problems in growth or reproduction. What he discovered may uproot a multi-billion dollar industry.

After feeding hamsters for two years over three generations, those on the GM diet, and especially the group on the maximum GM soy diet, showed devastating results. By the third generation, most GM soy-fed hamsters lost the ability to have babies. They also suffered slower growth, and a high mortality rate among the pups.

And if this isn't shocking enough, some in the third generation even had hair growing inside their mouths—a phenomenon rarely seen, but apparently more prevalent among hamsters eating GM soy.

On the other hand there's that:

Below is a (non-comprehensive) bibliography of 57 publications regarding the safety of GM food crops. The first 12 are published in peer-reviewed journals and I have supplied excerpts from the abstracts. These definitely report experimental data to back up their results. Eight more are meeting abstracts reporting data or are agricultural extension reports which also appear to be reporting data.

The rest of the bibliography is to show that the problem of the safety of GM foods has been considered by a large group of diverse organizations - many of which do not have a direct financial interest in GM foods. The consensus of these independent reviews of the data is that there is nothing about the making of GM crops that makes them inherently more dangerous than crops produced by conventional breeding.

I do take issue with this paragraph;

The only practical way to test this is food is to use the model currently in place -- the company developing the product must pay for testing it and the data must be reviewed by an independent regulatory authority. This is the only feasible way. When asked for another feasible model the activists are suddenly silent.

I'm going to see if I can find out if the businesses get to choose who does the testing; that'd be a pretty big conflict of interest right there.

Syndicate content