This Time magazine article from late 2007 sets the scene:

Geoengineering has long been the province of kooks, but as the difficulty of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions has become harder to ignore, it is slowly emerging as an option of last resort. The tipping point came in 2006, when the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen published an editorial examining the possibility of releasing vast amounts of sulfurous debris into the atmosphere to create a haze that would keep the planet cool. “Over the past couple of years, it’s gone from an outsider thing to something that is increasingly discussed,” says Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University.

Wired’s Danger Room blog has the details:

One scheme calls for adding iron to the ocean, to stimulate the growth of greenhouse gas-absorbing algae. Another for “loading the skies” with sulfate particles that “act as mini-reflectors, shading out sunlight and cooling the Earth.” A third, “covering the Arctic with dust.”

Yes, yes – spread tiny reflectors throughout the stratosphere to reflect away all that dangerous sunlight! What could possibly go wrong? And, who better to explore this topic than… the U. S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency?

Science magazine’s Science Insider blog tells us that

An official advisory group to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is convening an unclassified meeting next week to discuss geoengineering… DARPA is the latest in a number of official science funding agencies or top scientific societies that are exploring the controversial idea. But one leading advocate of the work opposes the military developing geoengineering techniques.

I think I’ll let Mr. Burns, that paragon of virtue and human compassion, have the last word:

“Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun. I will do the next best thing…block it out!”

 

We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship. The constitutional rights we learned about in high school civics were suspended. That was thanks to secret memos crafted deep inside the Justice Department that effectively trashed the Constitution. What we know now is likely the least of it.

That’s Harper’s contributor and Constitutional law expert Scott Horton, reacting to the Obama administration’s release yesterday of a slew of secret Justice Department memoranda from the Bush administration.

The New York Times has the sobering details:

The secret legal opinions issued by Bush administration lawyers after the Sept. 11 attacks included assertions that the president could use the nation’s military within the United States to combat terrorism suspects and to conduct raids without obtaining search warrants…

The opinions reflected a broad interpretation of presidential authority, asserting as well that the president could unilaterally abrogate foreign treaties, ignore any guidance from Congress in dealing with detainees suspected of terrorism, and conduct a program of domestic eavesdropping without warrants.

Seldom is the illustration of Orwell’s words so vivid. Above, a screen shot from the New York Times‘s front page today. Notice that the 50 Americans who died were “musicians and law students, parents and pilots,” whose “varied lives ended on a cold, foggy night,” and that five of them are illustrated with flattering photographs; whereas the report from Pakistan tells us that “Missiles from pilotless drones killed up to 32 people, including Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.” Were their lives “varied?” Were “musicians, law students, parents, and pilots” among those killed? Was it cold and foggy in the mountains of South Waziristan?

During the “bad old days” of George W. Bush, people were kidnapped off the street by the CIA, drugged, chained to the floor of an airplane, and secretly flown across the world to be tortured, in a policy known as “rendition.” Five of these people tried to sue the responsible Bush administration officials, but the Bush Justice Department had the case thrown out of court on the grounds of “state secrets.” These five are now bringing a civil suit against Jeppesen DataPlan, the Boeing subsidiary that coordinated, enabled, and profited handsomely from these secret flights to hell. The Bush DOJ lawyers argued before the Ninth Circuit that this civil case, too, should be thrown out based on the state secrets privilege, but the Court gave the Obama administration a chance to alter their argument.

The Obama administration, and Eric Holder’s Justice Department, actively reviewed the facts of the case. The facts of the case are known publicly – in addition to having been widely published, other nations have investigated the claims, and one of the plaintiffs even received compensation from the Swedish government for its ancillary role in the kidnapping and torture.

Obama chose to maintain the Bush stance: the case, in its entirety, must be dismissed, because for a Federal Court to even examine the matter would be to violate our precious National Security. Notice that the claim is not that specific pieces of evidence must be withheld; or that the Court should make a determination as to whether the case may proceed with publicly available evidence. No, the Obama administration is making the same sweeping claim the Bushites did: our entire program of rendition and torture is a secret, and may not be subject to any judicial review.

This stance is in direct contradiction to the Democratic consensus that emerged during the Bush years, and stands in opposition to candidate Obama’s repeated pledges to roll back the Bush administration’s abuse of executive power.

I find today’s action horrifying, depressing, and entirely unsurprising.

But, you know – Obama’s a great guy. I’m sure he won’t abuse his dictatorial powers the way Bush did. So, y’know, it’s all good.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell when the New York Times is being ironic:

Mr. Bush’s arrival in Iraq during daylight hours was one measure of progress; his first visit on Thanksgiving Day 2003 took place entirely at night.

Sneaking into the country five years after the invasion during the day instead of at night and having shoes thrown at him during a press conference… yes, indeedy, those are sure signs of progress!

I’ve linked to Ioz before, and I’ll link to him again:

the idea that the General Electrics of the world are going to let their marketing arms – which is to say, the television networks, movie studios, [and other] “content providers” that they own – act as judicious guides to the ethical policy implications of blowing up Wherethefuckistan is palpably ridiculous. Living in a realm of Platonic pure-form divided government counterbalanced by a free-press fourth-estate held accountable by informed enfranchised citizenry blah blah bloggity blawg is just the teetotaling post-Harvard civics-student version of staying constantly stoned: tethered to reality, and yet floating free of it. Complaining that NBC is in the tank for the defense industry is like complaining that Pravda was in the tank for the Red Army.

…since I harshed your mellow. Chris Floyd steps up to do the job:

Indeed, the entire arc of America’s bipartisan policies in [Central Asia] over the past 40 years can be seen as the elaborate construction of a gargantuan, self-propelled blowback machine, producing an endless effluent of violence, threat, chaos and crime that is now sluicing through the entire world. But blowback, as we all know, is not a design flaw of imperial policy, at least not for the most part; it is a design feature. No War Machine without perpetual war and rumors of war; no war profits – and no war powers – without the War Machine.

He’s talking about Barack Obama and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown pledging an escalation of their countries’ military commitments to Afghanistan. Executive summary: more death and misery for the people there, more profit and power for a very select group of people here.

IRAQ WAR ENDS and other great headlines in today’s (fake) New York Times (courtesy of The Yes Men).

Good.is has a snappy video breaking down the $3 Trillion cost of war (as documented in Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilme’s exhaustively researched book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict)

Bush administration officials have shown a determination to operate under an expansive definition of self-defense that provides a legal rationale for strikes on militant targets in sovereign nations without those countries’ consent.

That’s from deep within an article that details how President Bush signed a secret order back in 2004 allowing the U. S. military to engage in hostile operations in countries that we’re not at war with.

Um… sweet!