RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/nobel-physicist-thorium-trumps-all-fuels-as-energy-source/33365

GENEVA – It’s high time for the nuclear industry to overhaul its conventional technology and shift to radically different reactor designs based on thorium fuel, a Nobel Prize winning physicist said.

Carlo Rubbia, a former director of the CERN laboratory who shared the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics, described thorium as having “absolute pre-eminence” over all other fuels including fossil fuels and uranium, the metallic element that has driven reactors since nuclear first started powering public grids in 1956.

“In order to be vigorously continued, nuclear power must be profoundly modified,” Rubbia said at the Thorium Energy Conference 2013, held on the CERN campus here last week.

Rubbia pointed out that thorium leaves less long-lived waste than uranium, is far more plentiful and is resistant to weapons proliferation, as I reported on my Weinberg blog. He also noted that thorium is effective at safely breeding more fuel, and that it has a much higher energy content than uranium or fossil fuels (see chart below), a characteristic that he said gives it “absolute pre-eminence…as a source of energy.”

Proponents of thorium disagree over the reactor technology that is best suited to optimize its characteristics. Unlike uranium, thorium is not “fissile,” so it needs to be coaxed into a reaction.

Rubbia, a particle physicist, favors a method that would bombard thorium with neutrons freed from a source hit by protons from a particle accelerator. Advocates of that approach claim it is highly safe because the thorium would not sustain a chain reaction and operators could stop the reactions by simply switching off the accelerator. Operators could also vary a reactors’ energy output by modifying the particle beam.

Critics say that the accelerator method – Rubbia invented one called the “energy amplifier” – is too unwieldy and unreliable.

http://www.realclearenergy.org/charticles/2013/11/04/is_israeli_gas_field_a_game_changer_107323.html

Motley Fool is waxing enthusiastic about the offshore finds in natural gas that Noble Energy has recently made for Israel. “In 2010, Noble Energy and its partners found something in Israel’s offshore region that the country had been looking for since the oil embargoes of the 1970’s; its own hydrocarbons. . . . The Tamar and Leviathan fields are estimated to have as much as 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, which is enough gas to supply Israel for decades even if it were to convert all of its energy consumption from coal and oil to natural gas — with enough left over to export. Noble Energy estimates that this gas field and the planned export projects could net the country more than $130 billion in energy savings and government revenue from gas royalties.” The U.S. Geological Survey also estimates there are 600 million barrels of recoverable oil in the field. Cyprus is also sharing this bounty. Not only will the field turn Israel from an importer to an exporter of hydrocarbons, the find also has the potential of supplying Europe, freeing it from dependence on Russia and Qatar. The potential for political realignment are enormous.

  http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4047/global-peace-and-unity-conference-uk Speakers at the upcoming Global Peace and Unity conference can be categorized as follows: 65% are anti-Semitic, misogynist, homophobic and pro-terror preachers, 20% are public servants offering political legitimacy and moral credibility to the other speakers, while the remaining 15% could perhaps claim to be part of the conference’s “project dedicated to creating […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/majid-rafizadeh/the-iranian-hostage-crisis-34-years-later/print/ As the Obama administration stays determined to push for domestic and foreign policies that would prevent further pressure on the Islamic Republic of Iran, attempting to diplomatically and pleasantly reach out to the Islamists in Iran, just this week Islamist Iranian leaders responded to Obama’s outreach and foreign policies with a robust reaffirmation of […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/to-lie-for-obamacare-on-the-glazov-gang/

The Glazov Gang was joined by titans Mell Flynn, a Hollywood actress and the president of the Hollywood Congress of Republicans, Kai Chen, a former basketball star on the Chinese national team and the author of One in a Billion, and Monty Morton, a Conservative Entrepreneur and walking Encyclopedia of Economics.

The Gang gathered to discuss What The $17 Trillion Debt Really Means. The discussion occurred in Part II (starts at the 3:55 mark) and focused on the frightening catastrophe the Obama administration is cooking up for us. The segment also shed light on ObamaCare’s Dirty Little Secret, Mao’s Kitchen in Los Angeles and Sean Penn’s Call for Ted Cruz and Tea Party Members to be Institutionalized:

Part II:

“What Max Blumenthal brings to the table in Goliath is not journalism, but uncompromising hatred for Israel. In a media environment where every fake “Jew Stones Dog” story goes to the top of the heap, the fake journalists like Max can only distinguish themselves by setting aside the pretenses of journalism.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/max-goes-mad-over-israel/print/

In 1948, The Nation featured a column about the growing conflict between Israel and the Arab powers which warned that “The strength of the [Arab] league is based on the suppression of all progressive movements and civil rights at home”

That was then.

Now The Nation Institute has decided to publish Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, a book which the magazine’s own reviewer, Eric Alterman, no friend of Israel, wrote could have been published by the “Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club.”

But not all the reviews were bad.

Glenn Greenwald, who defended Hamas, called it, “eye-opening and stunningly insightful.” Stephen Walt, who claimed that the Jews controls America (in a thesis he originally published in the house organ of the Saudi Lobby), wished Blumenthal could write for the New York Times.

Charles Glass, who once wrote that “Gaddafi could learn much about crowd control from Israel’s security forces”, praised it; as did Charles H. Manekin, who has written that boycotting the Jewish State “may be the best hope for liberal Zionists who haven’t given in entirely to ethnic loyalties.”

Goliath should be recommended to liberals who haven’t “given in” to their shameful ethnic loyalties and know that Israel is worse than Gaddafi, Hamas and Assad put together and must be boycotted to within an inch of its life (a policy popularized by the Arab League and Saudi Lobby). It not only makes a great Nakba present, but can also be wrapped in a brick and tossed through the window of a Jewish store.

The perfect target audience for Goliath would be The Finkler Question’s Merton Kugle who “had ruined his spine and all but worn out his eyes” searching for racist Israeli goods at the supermarket to boycott and had taken to shoplifting Israeli produce and carrying it around in his coat pockets until it rotted.

Kugle may be fictional, but his real-life counterparts make up most of the small numbers of protesters denouncing Israel, alongside younger recruits from various campus Communist societies. Their academic careers create the illusion that they represent some larger consensus outside their airless rooms where they debate how to best destroy a country that they know, despite their hate, will outlive them.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/11/yes_virginia_the_gop_establishment_did_stick_a_shiv_in_ken_cuccinelli.html

Reagan conservative Ken Cuccinelli lost his bid for the Virginia governorship because the patrician, turf-protecting Republican Party establishment in his state wanted him to lose.

It’s really that simple.

Cuccinelli campaign strategist Chris La Civita suggested on election night Tuesday that the federal government’s partial shutdown last month may have hurt his candidate in parts of Virginia where many federal employees and contractors live.

He also suggested that Cuccinelli could have won if he had received more money from national GOP sources, which he said dried up as of Oct. 1.

“There are a lot of questions people are going to be asking and that is, was leaving Cuccinelli alone in the first week of October, a smart move?” La Civita said. “We were on our own. Just look at the volume [of ads].”

Cuccinelli lost by a mere 2.5 percentage points in a state that until somewhat recently had been solidly Republican. Even with Cuccinelli’s various tactical mistakes (and there were many), it is still very difficult to believe that the GOP machine couldn’t have gotten another fifty-odd thousand voters to the polls to support him if it really wanted to.

Predictably, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who won re-election comfortably on Tuesday, refused to lift a finger to help his vulnerable fellow Republican in Virginia. Even with mountains of cash, Christie had no electoral coattails, which is not exactly a resume-builder for a presidential candidate.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303763804579181924168682210?mod=trending_now_2

There probably isn’t time to mitigate the ObamaCare debacle.

The ObamaCare debacle carries the name of the president and the face of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the highest-ranking official subject to congressional oversight. Sebelius was on Capitol Hill again today, testifying before the Senate Finance Committee. She assured the Democrat-run panel that “repairs are under way on the most serious [technical] problems” afflicting the federal insurance exchange, The Wall Street Journal reports. Such problems, she claimed, number “a couple of hundred.”
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Little Miss Disaster Associated Press

The exchange was supposed to be functional at the beginning of October. The administration now promises it will be by the end of November. Sebelius’s assurances strained the credulity even of Chairman Max Baucus, who cast the deciding vote to pass ObamaCare in December 2009. “It has been disappointing to hear members of the administration say they didn’t see problems coming,” Baucus told Sebelius today. “We heard multiple times that everything was on track. We now know that was not the case.” In April Baucus famously told Sebelius “he saw ‘a huge train wreck coming down,’ ” a statement that proved to be an outrageous slander against train wrecks.

The administration’s decision to cut itself two months’ slack raises two questions: Can it keep the new promise, and what happens in December?

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-problem-with-pay-as-you-go-social-programs-theyre-ponzi-schemes

Ignoring the facts won’t help us address the insolvency of pay-as-you-go social programs.

I was fortunate enough to be invited back on Max Keiser’s Keiser Report for a wide-ranging discussion of Peak Retirement, currency wars and more. Since the topics Max raises are profound and not always that easy to summarize (if there is another media host who covers complex topics in such profusion and with such a diverse range of guests, he/she is unknown to me), I’m devoting the next few blog entries to offer context for the topics Max and I discussed.

Max’s first question related to my entry on Peak Retirement (October 15, 2013) in which I showed that the ratio of full-time workers to Social Security beneficiaries has dropped to 2-to-1.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/canadas-growing-islamic-radicalization-a-warning-sign#ixzz2jxCm69PW

The man who calls himself Abu Muslim sits with his fellow fighters, members of the group Katiba al Muhajireen, and raises his rifle for the camera. He has come to Aleppo to fight, he tells the man who has come to interview him for Britain’s Channel 4. A Muslim convert, he – like some 100 others joining the jihad in Syria’s civil war – has left his family at home. In Canada.

The United States’ neighbor to the north is experiencing a radicalization problem, according to a confidential report by the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS). Made public earlier this year through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Canada’s National Post, the report confirms that “Islamist extremists are now radicalizing Canadians at a large number of venues,” ranging from mosques to dinner parties and even the family home.

“Parents have radicalized children, husbands have radicalized wives (and some wives have radicalized or supported their husbands,” the study’s authors contend, “and siblings have radicalized each other.”

Indeed, according to one assessment cited by the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC), “with the exception of the United States, there are more terrorist groups active in Canada today than in any other country in the world.” And while most of their activity is based abroad, a study published earlier this year by the International Institute for Counterterrorism (IIC) shows that 25 individuals have developed or been involved in four plots against Canadian targets since 2006. Of these, eight were Canadian born; three were converts to Islam; and 20 – nearly all – were between the ages of 18 and 35. Most were affiliated with al-Qaida. Among them: