Gaia Community: rhobherto's Blog

possible near-future news

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:44:37 -0000

Recent Bush Administration mutterings about an enduring "Status of Forces Agreement" (SOFA) between the US and Iraq, together with the still-pending passage of a new "Oil Law" in Iraq, inspires the following:

FUTURE REAL-SPEAK NEWS FLASH -- CHENEY: "IT’S THE OIL!"

Sweet Crude Victory!

US Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney convened a press conference early this morning on the White House lawn to announce and publish, "Our Open Letter to the World: Yes, Our Sights Were Set Upon Iraq’s Oil." The Vice President was flanked by several, prominent signatories of this newly published "Open Letter," later identified as officials or principal participants from the VP’s Energy Task Force; the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans; and The White House Iraq Group.

The Vice President began his remarks by announcing what he describes as, "[O]ur true and final victory in Iraq." These remarks referenced the Iraqi government’s passage and ratification, earlier this week, of both it’s new "Oil Law" and the "The Permanent US/Iraq Agreement on Military Cooperation."

"Iraq’s new Oil Law," said the Vice President, "at last codifies all three of our fundamental and hard-won objectives in Iraq." The Vice President also noted "the indispensable and enduring importance" of the new "Permanent Agreement," also recently passed by the Iraqi Parliament. "This Agreement, " said the Vice President, "ensures our ongoing ability to enforce the new legal rights granted to our corporations by Iraq’s Oil Law."

A summary of those "three . . . fundamental" objectives was later spelled out in an "Official Supplementary Press Release" distributed immediately after the news conference, which included the full text of "Our Open Letter to the World." As that "Letter" states, those "fundamental objectives" were: "1) The de-nationalization of Iraq’s oil industry; 2) The expulsion of ‘foreign suitors’ for Iraq’s oil; and 3) The delivery of control over Iraq’s vast oil wealth to ‘our’ oil extraction and oil service corporations."

When asked to comment on the US "victory" in achieving these objectives, the Administration official distributing the "Release" remarked only, "Bub-bye France! Bub-bye Russia! Bub-bye China!"

Soon after the press conference, the Vice President was regaled at a "Victory Luncheon" held within the White House. Of all the hortatory remarks lavished upon VP Cheney, it was a statement read by AEI-fellow, Michael Ledeen that brought all the luncheon’s attendees to their feet:

"Our bombs express only our benevolence. Our DU munitions are tipped with love! Our torture chambers are but workshops of our compassion. Our corporations will now begin to export 'shrink-wrapped pallets of cash' out of Iraq, but will plant in this arid, blood-soaked place the patented seeds of our superior McCivilization. And now that our benevolence and love and compassion have conquered the futile resistance to our goodness, let’s join hands around the smoking rubble, the funeral pyres, and ‘blend with ours your voices in the triumph song!’"

Mr. Ledeen summarily punctuated his statement by shaking his fist in the air and exclaiming, "Victory in Iraq! On to Iran!"

------------------------------------

A "SOFA" agreement, together with the "benchmark" passage of a new "Oil Law" in Iraq, encapsulates the real, yet-unresolved, "mother of all legal battles" still roiling both in Baghdad and our nation's Capitol.

"a Godsend"

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 12:33:51 -0000

caught this segment on 60 minutes, about these folks, Remote Area Medical. Tremendous!

a question for the AQAL/SD community

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:28:08 -0000

When lords of orange topple a red dictator, does indigo applaud?

In a recent Holons poll, If the 2008 Presidential Election were being held today, for whom would you vote?, I found several of the comments there "whacks" to the side of my head.

TC: "I too am swamped by green and often disguise my vote for the sake of civility and friendship while reaching downward toward orange and amber to help preserve my self absorbed friends of green from the wrath of red."

Could it be that Cheney & Company, by instigating the biggest armed robbery of this nascent new century (the oil grab in Iraq), are somehow preservers and defenders of The Spiral unfolding?

Should "integral" blogrolls be amended to include the philosophy of Leo Strauss, The Project for a New American Century, Exxon-Mobil, British Petroleum, Halliburton, Blackwater, et al?

Seeking an integral perspective on the US/British invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq,

rhobherto

courtesy of Formless Mountain: AQAL chart

From Scott Horton's Blog, No Comment

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 15:12:01 -0000

[link]

Oscar for ‘Taxi to the Dark Side’

No Comment readers recently saw my interview with Alex Gibney, the producer of “Taxi to the Dark Side.” Last night, Alex and his team got the best documentary Oscar. (Disclosure: I appear in “Taxi” and had many discussions with Alex and his crew about shaping it.) Here’s a wire report:

An investigation into the death later found Dilawar had been repeatedly kicked and punched and was chained to the ceiling of his cell for days. Gibney, who also produced hit documentary “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”, said in his acceptance speech that his wife had wanted him to make a romantic comedy.

“But honestly after Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition that simply wasn’t possible,” the film-maker said before dedicating the film to Dilawar, and his own father.

“This is dedicated to two people who are no longer with us, Dilawar, the young Afghan taxi driver and my father a Navy interrogator who urged me to make this film because of his fury at what was being done to the rule of law,” said Gibney.

“Let’s hope we can turn this country around, move away from the dark side and go back to the light,” he said.

Discovery originally took broadcast rights to the documentary, and then backed out, saying it was “too controversial.” Actually there is nothing “controversial” about the film. It is a compelling, honest account of something that the Bush Administration fervently hopes that Americans learn nothing. Discovery evidenced supreme cowardice. I was halfway expecting them to take a lambasting from the Oscar podium, but the “Taxi” team is far too classy for that.

The film rights were flipped to HBO. Let’s hope HBO gets it out and on the air quickly.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

the film's website, Taxi to the Darkside

congratulations!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

link to Department of Defense autopsy reports detailing other "homicides of detainees in U.S. custody," here.

UPDATE: Alex Gibney in conversation with Robert Scheer

sunday morning reads

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 08:56:47 -0000

Caught a rebroadcast of Bill Moyers' keynote address to the 2004 Inequality Matters Conference, aired on LinkTV earlier this week.

excerpts from, This is the Fight of Our Lives:

I know, I know: this sounds very much like a call for class war. But the class war was declared a generation ago, in a powerful paperback polemic by William Simon, who was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury. He called on the financial and business class, in effect, to take back the power and privileges they had lost in the depression and new deal. They got the message, and soon they began a stealthy class war against the rest of society and the principles of our democracy. They set out to trash the social contract, to cut their workforces and wages, to scour the globe in search of cheap labor, and to shred the social safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control. Business Week put it bluntly at the time: "Some people will obviously have to do with less....it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."
The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand." This is a lie. What's happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us.
. . .

In a book to be published this summer, Daniel Altman describes what he calls the "neo-economy -- a place without taxes, without a social safety net, where rich and poor live in different financial worlds -- and [said Altman] it's coming to America." He's a little late. It's here. Says Warren Buffett, the savviest investor of them all: "My class won."
Look at the spoils of victory:
Over the past three years, they've pushed through $2 trillion dollars in tax cuts -- almost all tilted towards the wealthiest people in the country.
Cuts in taxes on the largest incomes.
Cuts in taxes on investment income.
And cuts in taxes on huge inheritances.
More than half of the benefits are going to the wealthiest one percent. You could call it trickle-down economics, except that the only thing that trickled down was a sea of red ink in our state and local governments, forcing them to cut services for and raise taxes on middle class working America.
Now the Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits totaling $2.75 trillion over the next ten years.
These deficits have been part of their strategy. Some of you will remember that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to warn us 20 years ago, when he predicted that President Ronald Reagan's real strategy was to force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic dimensions. Reagan's own budget director, David Stockman, admitted as such. Now the leading rightwing political strategist, Grover Norquist, says the goal is to "starve the beast" -- with trillions of dollars in deficits resulting from trillions of dollars in tax cuts, until the United States Government is so anemic and anorexic it can be drowned in the bathtub.
There's no question about it: The corporate conservatives and their allies in the political and religious right are achieving a vast transformation of American life that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children's children are ready for retirement, and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions except rewarding the rich and waging war.

Had me googling "class war;" leading me (not for the first time) to the Third World Traveler site, where eventually I settled in on an excised version of Lewis Lapham's book, Pretensions to Empire.

Quote grab from the book:

"Suppose that this administration did con us into war. And suppose that it is not held accountable for its deceptions .... In that case, our political system has become utterly, and perhaps irrevocably, corrupted."

~ Paul Krugman

Speaking of Krugman, his, The Tax-Cut Con, speaks to the "class war" theme; as does, Starving the Beast, by Ed Kilgore.

Highly recommended:

Dismantling the arguments against impeachment, a DKos dairy entry by occams hatchet

If one were able to remove all of the "political factors" that have
led Nancy Pelosi, John Conyers and other congressional Democrats to
declare impeachment off limits - to strip away the fears about
November's elections, the fears about timing, the fears about what
others might say - if one were able to decide whether to pursue
impeachment strictly on the basis of whether it were the right thing to do, would one do it?
I hope that no one reading this hesitated for even a moment before
answering, emphatically, "Yes!" If ever a president and vice president
deserved impeachment, George Bush and Dick Cheney do.

Inside the world of war profiteers, by Chicago Tribune reporters David Jackson and Jason Grotto

ROCK ISLAND, Ill.—Inside the stout federal courthouse of this Mississippi River town, the dirty secrets of Iraq war profiteering keep pouring out.

The Audacity of Hopelessness, by NYT columinst Frank Rich

WHEN people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the
Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended
in the long dark shadow of Iraq.
It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless
value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her
still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then
compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy
that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After
promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.

Election Madness, by Howard Zinn, The Progressive

Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war.

Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.

American Adam; Obama and the cult of the new, by John B. Judis, The New Republic

Obama is the candidate of the new--a "new generation," a "new leadership," a "new kind of politics," to borrow phrases he has used. But, in emphasizing newness, Obama is actually voicing a very old theme. When he speaks of change, hope, and choosing the future over the past, when he pledges to end racial divisions or attacks special interests, Obama is striking chords that resonate deeply in the American psyche. He is making a promise to voters that is as old as the country itself: to wipe clean the slate of history and begin again from scratch.

Final thought:

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.

~ Frederick Douglas

Hillary, Blackwater, and Spam ("meat" product)

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 13:00:02 -0000

What do they share in common? They are all clients of Mark Penn, "worldwide CEO" of Burson-Marsteller.

Was reading a NYT opinion piece by Chris Suellentrop, Clinton's Delegate Tactics, and a comment mentions Penn and his company:

"This is all about karma. Penn heads Burson Marsteller, a company that is probably the most deeply cynical in American history. If a company makes cigarettes, cow hormones that end up in milk, dangerous pesticides, or massive clearcuts they call Penn at BM. He will turn death and poison into flowers and honey."

Hmmm? I'd heard of the guy; that he is Hillary Clinton's chief campaign strategist, but decided to dig a bit deeper:

wikipedia entry on Mark Penn
Corporate Watch profile of Burson-Marsteller
SourceWatch profile of Burson-Marsteller
Blackwater's Hired Guns: Hillary's Helpers, by Sharon Weinberger

What I find there I find downright revolting. And I am completely prepared to take a rap for jumping on the Hillary-bashing bandwagon. (Sorry, Hillblazers.)

Today, I double-down anything and everything I can do for Obama'08.

[Blackwater, Spam]

Icaro Doria's "Meet the World" Flag Campaign

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 11:17:01 -0000

see more here

"Like hope, but different"

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 09:20:16 -0000

[glommed from TruthDig]

The inevitable parodies of Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” video have begun—this one isn’t so much about Obama or Hillary Clinton as it is about Republican front-runner John McCain, whose infamous hundred-year (or more) plan for America’s presence in Iraq is deservedly and humorously lambasted here.

Watch the clip:

Lawrence Lessig on Obama v. Clinton

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 05:42:41 -0000

Lawrence Lessig offers up, 20 minutes or so on why I am 4Barack:

and a follow-up -- 10 minutes on whether Hillary can win:

* * * *

related:

Seeking Superdelegates

By Lindsay Renick Mayer

As the Democratic Party's superdelegates decide whether to support Clinton or Obama, will they take into account the $904,200 they've received from the candidates?

Obama's Ties Might Fuel `Republican Attack Machine' (Update2)

By Timothy J. Burger

Besides his relationship with indicted businessman Antoin Rezko, Obama might face Republican criticism over contacts with a former leader of the Weather Underground, a banker with ties to a convicted felon and even his church.

Unofficial Tallies in City Understated Obama Vote
By Sam Roberts

In fact, a review by The New York Times of the unofficial results reported on primary night found about 80 election districts among the city’s 6,106 where Mr. Obama supposedly did not receive even one vote . . . [emphasis added]

The Moment for This Messenger?

By Eugene Robinson

Obama is the personification of "both-and."

He said his belief that American politics has seen enough "either-or" -- and that he can shift the paradigm to "both-and" -- is what led him to undertake "the risks and difficulties and challenges and silliness of a modern presidential campaign."

(from an Obama speech: "As Dr. King said, it is not either-or, it is both-and. Hope is not found in any single ideology. . ." -- very integral!")

btw -- found link to Lessig video here: Integral Analysis of Barack Obama, by Bosco

previous incarnation

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 01:03:44 -0000

discoverd the Wayback Machine and dug up my first webpage:

[sans graphics -- oh well]

Dajibhabbha's Home Page

Oil Crimes

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 00:41:46 -0000

comments added to, A Quick Cruise through the (Not Too) Recent and Brief History of Afghanistan–As Affects the US Directly or Indirectly, by Metonymy:

If we peel back the whole GWOT overlay, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan reveal themselves for what they are: the titanic clash of Oil Giants coopting State powers and vying for control of our planet's oil -- "market penetration" by military means (nothing new).

The real, true "strategic" objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan:

- de-nationalize their oil industries

- expel "foreign suitors"

- hand-over control to "our" Giants (and their related service and subsidiary companies: Exxon, BP, Haliburton, Bechtel, etc., etc.)

Unravel the tapestry of lies in which these military conquests are cloaked, and examine how control of oil (Iraq) and "the pipeline" (Afghanistan) has changed as a consequence.

This (latest) US/British conquest of Iraq, in particular, then reveals itself for what it is: one of the biggest armed robberies in all of human history (the biggest, thus far, of this nascent new century).

see:

Terrorized by "War on Terror," by Zbigniew Brzezinski

The So-Called "War on Terror," by Richard Behan

Crude Designs, by Greg Muttitt

Slick Connections, by Erik Leaver and Greg Muttitt

Cheney's Energy Task Force [amended: Task Force Maps and Charts}

The White House Iraq Group

p.s. Google: "Bridas, Unocal, Afghanistan"

follow-on:

Just as McCain is catching flak, in some quarters, for his “anti-torture” rhetoric; as there is a political block in this country that is “down” with torture — so, too, many are tacitly “down” with the unvarnished oil-grab aims of Bush/Cheney & Company.

“So we had to launch an aggressive war (”the supreme international crime”) — with as many as one million dead; several million “displaced;” a-trillion-dollars-and-counting spent — in order to maintain our lighted, heated, TV-watching, web-surfing, SUV-driving, plastic-and-pesticide-laden lifestyle. So what?”

note to John Edwards / new from Yunus

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 20:43:14 -0000

Dear Mr. Edwards,

Until you "suspended" your campaign for the Presidency, I was on a fence: Edwards or Obama? And I can fairly say, I was leaning strongly in your direction.

Now, you are cast as the most notable fence-sitter in our nation, as anticipation grows surrounding whether you will endorse the candidacy of Senator Clinton or Senator Obama.

Concerning this question, I wish to share the following:

The John Edwards Endorsement: A Last Chance To Prove He's No Phony, by David Corn.

I find Mr. Corn's delineation of the choice before you a bit heavy-handed, perhaps, but persuasive.

If you are tallying up the voices of your supporters on this matter, please count mine in the "Go with Obama" column.

Thank you, Mr. Edwards, for your passion, your work, your campaign.

BTW: Have you considered some level of collaboration with Muhammad Yunus? I just learned he recently launched Grameen America.

Best,
Robert L.

* * * *

Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity

(established and directed -- until December '06 -- by John Edwards)

* * * *

Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism

Yunus talks with Amy Goodman

"While America Slept"

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 23:56:41 -0000

Michael Moore speaks, "in broad strokes," about a new film project he is currently working on:

"In the last 8 years, alot of things happened in this country that we didn't pay alot of attention to because we were so focused on Bush and the war. And while we were so focused on that and distracted, Corporate America and others got away with alot -- alot of stuff that we're gonna have a hard time getting our democracy back. And the theme of it is, 'While America Slept.'"

His "can't vote for Hillary" comment striking, also:

"I am morally prohibited from voting for Hillary in the primaries because of her war votes, I mean that not as a personal attack against her, but I simply can't side with somebody who participated, whether willingly or unknowingly, as she claims, in something that has been so evil."

Michal Moore's website

comments on torture

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 00:25:42 -0000

from Balkinizaion: Shorter Michael Mukaskey, by Jack Balkin --

[slightly amended -- added links]

rigamarole: rI gE mE rol

1. a complicated, unnecessarily involved procedure.

2. a long, rambling, confused, or senseless story; nonsense.

3. General Mukasey's testimony before the Senate

seems another Bush AG has joined himself with the Administration's criminal conspiracy.

related:

Taxi To The Darkside enters wider release. includes interviews with Scott Horton, Alberto Mora, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, John Yoo, et al.

"memo" archives:

torture memos w/ cold war, gitmo and iraq documents

ACLU FOIA -- including DOD autopsy and death reports that "reveal homicides of detainees in U.S. custody."

from Balkinization: Oh, and by the way, we tortured people, by Jack Balkin --

[slightly edited and amended]

"These are the times that try men's souls."

~ Thomas Paine, OAM (original anti-monarchist)

remarkable (and tragically, monumentally sad) how the putative champions of moral absolutism and Constitutional fundamentalism have fallen, so precipitously, so deeply, into this morass of moral and legal relativism: "9/11 changed everything."

the abominable savagery of that day has become the "normative" backdrop -- exploding more than those airplanes, those buildings, those thousands of lives.

if THEY can do THAT; if they want to go all 7th-century on us, well:

"We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will."

the pinnacle advances of 20th-century jurisprudence, hard-won by the
"greatest generation" and their immediate heirs -- "universal" laws
regarding the preservation and advance of peace and human rights: vapor.

some of those ancillary addenda to that fading, hand-scrawled parchment of
1787; even some of its core (Article 2), founding edicts: obviated.

700-plus years of nearly unbroken fidelity to the Magna Carta: suspended.

and neatly folded in to our crimes against peace; our complicity in
defiling and debasing our own identity; our pyrrhic tilt away from "the
rule of law" and toward "the law of the jungle:" an oil grab. "exploit the crisis!" [crisis=opportunity]

we'll make a show of cloaking our exercise of military power in universal pieties (i.e.:fabricate a tapestry of lies); yet knowing, with adamantine clarity (as we often have), that our armies are instruments of "market penetration;" knowing
what Marine General Smedley Butler knew: "War is a Racket." (seems corporations, like other tribes, have "long memories," and can harbor simmering resentments for many years: former principals of the Iraq Petroleum Company -- booted by Iraq's Ba'athists in '72 - marshal their will; soldiers, in the subsequent invasion, name forward bases after them; and their bag men, er, "lawyers" march in.)

* * * *

Six Questions for Alex Gibney, Producer of the Oscar-Nominated ‘Taxi to the Dark Side,' by Scott Horton

Taxi to the dark side

2 seconds with Barack Obama

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 21:49:57 -0000

was among the upwards of 5,600 hungerers for hope who gathered to attend a "Stand for Change!" rally in Santa Fe yesterday, to see and hear Barack Obama.

was among the more than 3,500 who packed a community-college gymnasium, while outside, hundreds who couldn't be squeezed in huddled beyond the gym's closed doors, in freezing weather, after dark, expecting only to listen to the p.a. system set up by the organizers. (surprise! surprise!)

was among those who arrived several hours before the Senator did, in order to claim a spot along the railing set up around the raised, 20x12-foot stage upon which he would stand -- certain he would, at some point, walk along that railing and shake our hands.

was among those who can say that, after the speech, he did walk along that railing -- and he shook my hand, grinning, resting his other hand on my shoulder for a moment as he looked into my eyes and said, "thank you!"

and, finally, was among everyone in attendance who said aloud or exclaimed in their hearts in reply, while holding his hand or not, "THANK YOU!!"

* * * *

THIRTY PERCENT!

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 02:37:39 -0000

sat still for some of today's testimony, by Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, before the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming (broadcast on CSpan).

was struck by an item of "good news" shared by Committee Chairman, Edward Markey:

wind power accounted for 30% of all the new electrical generating capacity built in the United States in 2007.

see: Wind Energy Market Report

* * *

[TAKE THAT!, Cheney Energy Task Force -- architects of the US/British invasion of Iraq. recall that the principal task force participants -- US and British oil giants -- dominated Iraq's oil industry from its inception. when Saddam Hussein and his Ba'ath Party nationalized Iraqi oil production back in 1972, he ended the dominant role future Cheney-Energy-Task-Force members (or their precursors) had , to that point, played in Iraq, and specifically banned their participation in Iraqi oil production. "Exxon-Mobil -- OUT! Standard Oil -- OUT! British Petroleum -- OUT!! Anglo-Dutch Shell -- OUT!" out, that is, until US Marines secured the Iraq Oil Ministry in April 2003.]

Uncounted

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 10:54:39 -0000

Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections

In Too Many Elections, Voters Remain 'Uncounted' -- an interview with film maker David Earnhardt

sunday morning papers

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 20:33:09 -0000

Michael Mukasey, Robert Jackson and George Orwell, by Marty Lederman

Bulletins from the Ministry for Torture, by Scott Horton

UK Sunday Times: State Dept. Official (Marc Grossman) Outed Plame's 'Brewster Jennings' to Turkish Agents in 2001, According to Sibel Edmonds, via The Brad Blog

* * *

Barack Obama's SC victory speech:

Kucinich to file Articles of Impeachment tomorrow:

another strong voice in the "wake up!" humanity chorus

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 16:23:54 -0000

The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman

global coolers

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 11:38:09 -0000

Everything's Cool -- a real-life disaster movie:

EVERYTHING'S COOL is a film about America finally "getting" global warming in the wake of the most dangerous chasm ever to emerge between scientific understanding and political action. While industry funded nay-sayers sing what just might be their swan song of pseudo- scientific deception, a group of global warming messengers are on a high stakes quest to find the iconic image, the magic language, the points of leverage that will finally create the political will to move the United States from its reliance on fossil fuels to the new clean energy economy - AND FAST.

We follow the country and our global warming messengers through an extraordinary three years of transformation, from 2003-to the eve of 2007:

Bill McKibben: "The Poet Laureate" of global warming literally wrote the book on this issue when he published The End of Nature in 1987. After 20 years of impassioned writing, speaking, blogging and advocacy, he finally takes to the streets. He realizes "The thing that has been missing from the movement is THE MOVEMENT!", and he and others stage the largest global warming demonstration in U.S. history (to date). There might be hope for our democracy and our planet.

Ross Gelbspan: The "Columbo of Climate Change" has recently come to believe that his decade of writings, interviews, public readings and policy discussions have come to nothing and he is more than ready to retire. Yet, like a "firehouse dog," every time the alarm bell rings he is back on the job.

Dr. Heidi Cullen: Heidi is the first on-air climatologist in America exclusively dedicated to covering the global warming beat. As a PhD from Columbia University and an expert in multi-decadal oscillation, can she distill her vast scientific knowledge into 30-second sound bites for The Weather Channel?

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus: Two thirty-something Berkeley, CA based "eco-messiahs", otherwise known as the "Bad Boys of Environmentalism" rise to the top of the green charts for levying a radical critique of the movement, The Death of Environmentalism. The self-published essay challenged what has, until now, been the basis of almost all climate change messaging - the "I have a nightmare" speech of polar bears floating away on ice caps.

Rick Piltz: His job was to prepare scientific reports to congress on the latest research on climate change. Repressed and depressed by political censorship, Rick Piltz went from downtrodden public servant to front page news when he blew the lid off the White House's scandalous manipulation of global warming science.

Bish Neuhouser:A frustrated snow groomer (who has less and less snow to groom) at the Canyons resort near Park City, determined to convert first his 1970s Mercedes, then all of the Canyons' vehicles, to biodiesel.

* * * * *

caugt a recent re-broadcast of a March-'07 edition of International Dateline, via LinkTV. introduced me to Dr. Zhengrong Shi, Jeremy Leggett, and Cathy Zoi. no video to share (drats!). but here are transcripts:

The Sun King

Jeremy Leggett and Cathy Zoi Interview

* * * * *

Al Gore and Bono spell it out at latest Davos conference:

* * * * *

emergent and emergency measures -- modifying Earth's albedo and other geoengineering schemes:

Reflections On Albedo

Scientist Publishes 'Escape Route' from Global Warming (see too: Paul Crutzen)

Virgin Earth Challenge

be cool!