These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.
I've decided it's time for us to do our part to ameliorate the coming climate catastrophe -- but let's please stop using the phrase "climate change."
In an effort to offset carbon emissions produced by Raw Story and everyone who visits our site (our energy costs and yours), we will begin purchasing carbon credits through Terrapass.com.
Our offsets will include: our servers (energy costs), your computer (energy costs of time you spend reading our site), our work-from-home office utilities, our (rather limited) air travel, and any other associated energy expenses.
I'm sure you know why we're worried about a world where the ocean rises, and hurricanes and typhoons consume entire cities. It's already begun.
It's actually gotten so bad that "the president of Maldives and his Cabinet wore scuba gear and used hand signals [last October] at an underwater meeting to highlight the threat climate change poses to the archipelago nation." Countries are going to be underwater. More than 70 percent of the Earth's population lives on coastal plains, and 11 of the planet's 15 largest cities are on coastal estuaries. Global climate catastrophe is not a joke.
But this article just sent me over the edge:
ONE of the worlds largest oil companies broke its pledge to stop funding groups that promote scepticism about man-made climate change, it emerged late Sunday.
U.S. fuel giant ExxonMobil gave almost $US1.5 million last year to organisations that campaign against controls on greenhouse gas emissions.
Several made outspoken attacks on climate scientists at Britain's University of East Anglia and argued their leaked e-mails showed the dangers of global warming had been grossly exaggerated.
The scientists were exonerated this month by an independent inquiry but groups funded by Exxon continued to attack them. The U.S.-based Media Research Centre, which received $50,000 last year from Exxon, called the inquiry a whitewash and condemned climate alarmists.
ExxonMobil isn't just "one of the world's largest oil companies." ExxonMobil is the largest corporation in the world. (For the record -- if it were a publicly traded company, the Pentagon would be the largest corporation in the world; the US military is the world's single largest consumer of oil, much of which it continues to buy from BP.)
That $20 million might look like chump change, these days, to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. The Starbucks chief exec, the Corporate Library 
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