December 2009

  • Airport Security Questions After Detroit

    By ecoscott on 12/29/09 1:23pm
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    Does the Detroit Incident Mean We Need New Security Measures?Does the Detroit Incident Mean We Need New Security Measures?After what happened over Detroit, how worried are you about it happening again? In the aftermath of September 11 we watched Congress rush through the Patriot Act, and people were more than willing to give up on a lot of their civil liberties to gain what seemed like advantageous safeguards against terrorist threats from both outside and inside the country. Since then there have continued to be terrorist threats form both, and there probably will continue to be.

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  • After Copenhagen

    By ecoscott on 12/23/09 2:10am
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    Copenhagen ended effectively on December 18 and the gavel came down the morning of the 19th. Give everybody 48 hours or so to get home, get through jet lag and wake up to look at the agreement that they all made with their advisors and other important folks on Monday and, you guessed it, Tuesday rolls around and it is the time to start complaining. The wire feeds are flooded with different countries complaining about this or that part of the agreement- nothing surprising, really, as something that takes 193 signatures from around the globe and has to be in consensus is going to be watered down, and anything that gets countries as disparate as the U.S. and the Bahamas, or Australia and Sri Lanka, or even China and say, Jamaica to sign their names to it has got to be full of concessions and compromises, not passion.

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  • Of Borders and Oil: Iran and Iraq

    By ecoscott on 12/20/09 3:52pm
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    OilOilWhen the American media talks about oil fields in the middle east, we usually talk about them in the way that assumes that they are relatively orderly and just sitting there in all their Jurassic glory waiting for someone to come along and dig, gulp, and burn the oil out of them. Maybe you picture the oil well drills that you’ve seen in Texas or somewhere like that, languidly pumping against a sunset backdrop, carefully churning out the highway blood of the American life. But you would be wrong. Not so much about the silhouette or the blood of American life part, but about the sitting and waiting patiently part. Nations fight over oil fields the way we in the U.S. fight over street corners to sell drugs, commercial time to sell products, or ad space in a crowded terminal to push wares. There is so much money in oil that it starts wars. Think about that.

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  • Cheers to Copenhagen

    By ecoscott on 12/18/09 10:30pm
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    Cheers!Cheers!Yesterday I talked about Obama needing to put on the S suit on the plane on the way over to Copenhagen- he did. While it’s nowhere near what everyone had been hoping for when Copenhagen started to gather steam earlier this year, it is in fact more than everyone had been expecting as the summit grew closer. With deadlocks around emissions cut commitments and monetary contributions from industrialized nations, Obama was walking into a snakepit. But he did it anyway. "This progress did not come easily and we know this progress alone is not enough ... We've come a long way but we have much further to go," said Obama.

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  • U.S. and Russia "close" to a Deal On Nuclear Arms

    By ecoscott on 12/18/09 8:10pm
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    Making it happenMaking it happenU.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev met at the end of this week but did not come to an agreement on reducing Cold War era nuclear arms stocks. They did, however, say that they would continue to work to do so until the new year.

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  • Nuclear Power is Wrong for America: Separating Fact from Fiction

    By Niki Fears on 12/16/09 10:31pm
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    Nuclear Power PlantNuclear Power PlantAfter the Three Mile Island Disaster that took place in the United States in 1979, followed by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster just seven years later in 1986, most of the nation, and the world, began to speak out about the dangers that nuclear power posed to not only the stability of the environment but to our own lives as well. Many people realized the truth about the nuclear industry: that nuclear power is dirty, costly, and deadly, and they became quite outspoken about these facts. In fact, so dangerous is the concept of nuclear power plants that before his fall from grace, Patrick Moore wrote in the Assault on Future Generations in 1976 that "Nuclear power plants are, next to nuclear warheads themselves, the most dangerous devices that man has ever created.

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