How to Save the World?

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You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men. ~ Max Beerbohm

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[jimtzu]

he can certainly ramble on without saying much of anything... and now for the rest of the story.....

[Nickeson]

I suggest we notch up the volume of our bullshit detectors a bit...

he can certainly ramble on without saying much of anything... and now for the rest of the story.....

You two saved me the time it would take to write a long "let's notch up the volume of our bullshit detectors" post. I spent the better part of the morning checking out industry estimates on the vaunted Gull Island field. In Saudi Arabia there are 260 billion barrels of proven reserves. On the total North Slope there are about 55 billion barrels estimated...at current levels of demand that would last the U.S. about 7.5 years on its own. Rule of thumb...if it seems too good to be true it probably is.

Here is an article that seems a little more intelligent and substantiated from the same general outlook.

And this seems to be a source of good information for those who want to spend the time doing real research. Real people make real life decisions based on this kind of stuff. The same cannot be said of the YouTube crackpots who are neither intelligent or entertaining. I had to wonder if Williams runny nose was from a head cold or....?

[Jana]

I find Lindseys slow style rather charming. Thanks for doing the research Stephen...if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Next thing, they will probably find oil in Antartica...Just finding more oil is not the solution to our problems anyway.

Now I am contemplating how if humans put all kinds of chips and electrical equipment inside their brains and bodies then they will probably become defunctional or even dead if a EMP occurs. Since the changes of an EMP are even greater than a nuclear blast...I doubt I would gamble with artifical intelligence...I just damnwell want to use the intelligence I have better. Michio Kaku Visions of the Future http://youtube.com/watch?v=fDfwpA-iYnI   this is the video that Michael posted with all the AI stuff in it.

[jimtzu]

here's a short BBC piece on the following article.  http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_7110000/newsid_7116300/7116306.stm?bw=nb&mp=wm&news=1&ms3=6&ms_javascript=true&bbcws=2



Good and Evil at the Center of the Earth

A Quechua Christmas Carol

By Greg Palast

12/30/07 "ICH" -- --- [Quito] I don’t know what the hell seized me. In the middle of an hour-long interview with the President of Ecuador, I asked him about his father.
I’m not Barbara Walters. It’s not the kind of question I ask.

He hesitated. Then said, “My father was unemployed.”

He paused. Then added, “He took a little drugs to the States… This is called in Spanish a mula [mule]. He passed four years in the states- in a jail.”

He continued. “I’d never talked about my father before.”

Apparently he hadn’t. His staff stood stone silent, eyes widened.

Correa’s dad took that frightening chance in the 1960s, a time when his family, like almost all families in Ecuador, was destitute. Ecuador was the original “banana republic” - and the price of bananas had hit the floor. A million desperate Ecuadorans, probably a tenth of the entire adult population, fled to the USA anyway they could.

“My mother told us he was working in the States.”

His father, released from prison, was deported back to Ecuador. Humiliated, poor, broken, his father, I learned later, committed suicide.

At the end of our formal interview, through a doorway surrounded by paintings of the pale plutocrats who once ruled this difficult land, he took me into his own Oval Office. I asked him about an odd-looking framed note he had on the wall. It was, he said, from his daughter and her grade school class at Christmas time. He translated for me.

“We are writing to remind you that in Ecuador there are a lot of very poor children in the streets and we ask you please to help these children who are cold almost every night.”

It was kind of corny. And kind of sweet. A smart display for a politician.

Or maybe there was something else to it.

Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, one of the first from the streets. He’d won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador, the owner of the biggest banana plantation.

Doctor Correa, I should say, with a Ph.D in economics earned in Europe. Professor Correa as he is officially called - who, until not long ago, taught at the University of Illinois.

And Professor Doctor Correa is one tough character. He told George Bush to take the US military base and stick it where the equatorial sun don’t shine. He told the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which held Ecuador’s finances by the throat, to go to hell. He ripped up the “agreements” which his predecessors had signed at financial gun point. He told the Miami bond vultures that were charging Ecuador usurious interest, to eat their bonds. He said ‘We are not going to pay off this debt with the hunger of our people. ” Food first, interest later. Much later. And he meant it.

It was a stunning performance. I’d met two years ago with his predecessor, President Alfredo Palacio, a man of good heart, who told me, looking at the secret IMF agreements I showed him, “We cannot pay this level of debt. If we do, we are DEAD. And if we are dead, how can we pay?” Palacio told me that he would explain this to George Bush and Condoleezza Rice and the World Bank, then headed by Paul Wolfowitz. He was sure they would understand. They didn’t. They cut off Ecuador at the knees.

But Ecuador didn’t fall to the floor. Correa, then Economics Minister, secretly went to Hugo Chavez Venezuela’s president and obtained emergency financing. Ecuador survived.

And thrived. But Correa was not done.

Elected President, one of his first acts was to establish a fund for the Ecuadoran refugees in America - to give them loans to return to Ecuador with a little cash and lot of dignity. And there were other dragons to slay. He and Palacio kicked US oil giant Occidental Petroleum out of the country.

Correa STILL wasn’t done.

I’d returned from a very wet visit to the rainforest - by canoe to a Cofan Indian village in the Amazon where there was an epidemic of childhood cancers. The indigenous folk related this to the hundreds of open pits of oil sludge left to them by Texaco Oil, now part of Chevron, and its partners. I met the Cofan’s chief. His three year old son swam in what appeared to be contaminated water then came out vomiting blood and died.

Correa had gone there too, to the rainforest, though probably in something sturdier than a canoe. And President Correa announced that the company that left these filthy pits would pay to clean them up.

But it’s not just any company he was challenging. Chevron’s largest oil tanker was named after a long-serving member of its Board of Directors, the Condoleezza. Our Secretary of State.

The Cofan have sued Condi’s corporation, demanding the oil company clean up the crap it left in the jungle. The cost would be roughly $12 billion. Correa won’t comment on the suit itself, a private legal action. But if there’s a verdict in favor of Ecuador’s citizens, Correa told me, he will make sure Chevron pays up.

Is he kidding? No one has ever made an oil company pay for their slop. Even in the USA, the Exxon Valdez case drags on to its 18th year. Correa is not deterred.

He told me he would create an international tribunal to collect, if necessary. In retaliation, he could hold up payments to US companies who sue Ecuador in US courts.

This is hard core. No one - NO ONE - has made such a threat to Bush and Big Oil and lived to carry it out.

And, in an office tower looking down on Quito, the lawyers for Chevron were not amused. I met with them.

“And it’s the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?” Rodrigo Perez, Texaco’s top lawyer in Ecuador was chuckling over the legal difficulties the Indians would have in proving their case that Chevron-Texaco caused their kids’ deaths. “If there is somebody with cancer there, [the Cofan parents] must prove [the deaths were] caused by crude or by petroleum industry. And, second, they have to prove that it is OUR crude – which is absolutely impossible.” He laughed again. You have to see this on film to believe it.

The oil company lawyer added, “No one has ever proved scientifically the connection between cancer and crude oil.” Really? You could swim in the stuff and you’d be just fine.

The Cofan had heard this before. When Chevron’s Texaco unit came to their land the the oil men said they could rub the crude oil on their arms and it would cure their ailments. Now Condi’s men had told me that crude oil doesn’t cause cancer. But maybe they are right. I’m no expert. So I called one. Robert F Kennedy Jr., professor of Environmental Law at Pace University, told me that elements of crude oil production - benzene, toluene, and xylene, “are well-known carcinogens.” Kennedy told me he’s seen Chevron-Texaco’s ugly open pits in the Amazon and said that this toxic dumping would mean jail time in the USA.

But it wasn’t as much what the Chevron-Texaco lawyers said that shook me. It was the way they said it. Childhood cancer answered with a chuckle. The Chevron lawyer, a wealthy guy, Jaime Varela, with a blond bouffant hairdo, in the kind of yellow chinos you’d see on country club links, was beside himself with delight at the impossibility of the legal hurdles the Cofan would face. Especially this one: Chevron had pulled all its assets out of Ecuador. The Indians could win, but they wouldn’t get a dime. “What about the chairs in this office?” I asked. Couldn’t the Cofan at least get those? “No,” they laughed, the chairs were held in the name of the law firm.

Well, now they might not be laughing. Correa’s threat to use the power of his Presidency to protect the Indians, should they win, is a shocker. No one could have expected that. And Correa, no fool, knows that confronting Chevron means confronting the full power of the Bush Administration. But to this President, it’s all about justice, fairness. “You [Americans] wouldn’t do this to your own people,” he told me. Oh yes we would, I was thinking to myself, remembering Alaska’s Natives.

Correa’s not unique. He’s the latest of a new breed in Latin America. Lula, President of Brazil, Evo Morales, the first Indian ever elected President of Bolivia, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. All “Leftists,” as the press tells us. But all have something else in common: they are dark-skinned working-class or poor kids who found themselves leaders of nations of dark-skinned people who had forever been ruled by an elite of bouffant blonds.

When I was in Venezuela, the leaders of the old order liked to refer to Chavez as, “the monkey.” Chavez told me proudly, “I am negro e indio” - Black and Indian, like most Venezuelans. Chavez, as a kid rising in the ranks of the blond-controlled armed forces, undoubtedly had to endure many jeers of “monkey.” Now, all over Latin America, the “monkeys” are in charge.

And they are unlocking the economic cages.

Maybe the mood will drift north. Far above the equator, a nation is ruled by a blond oil company executive. He never made much in oil - but every time he lost his money or his investors’ money, his daddy, another oil man, would give him another oil well. And when, as a rich young man out of Philips Andover Academy, the wayward youth tooted a little blow off the bar, daddy took care of that too. Maybe young George got his powder from some guy up from Ecuador.

I know this is an incredibly simple story. Indians in white hats with their dead kids and oil millionaires in black hats laughing at kiddy cancer and playing musical chairs with oil assets.

But maybe it’s just that simple. Maybe in this world there really is Good and Evil.

Maybe Santa will sort it out for us, tell us who’s been good and who’s been bad. Maybe Lawyer Yellow Pants will wake up on Christmas Eve staring at the ghost of Christmas Future and promise to get the oil sludge out of the Cofan’s drinking water.

Or maybe we’ll have to figure it out ourselves. When I met Chief Emergildo, I was reminded of an evening years back, when I was way the hell in the middle of nowhere in the Prince William Sound, Alaska, in the Chugach Native village of Chenega. I was investigating the damage done by Exxon’s oil. There was oil sludge all over Chenega’s beaches. It was March 1991, and I was in the home of village elder Paul Kompkoff on the island’s shore, watching CNN. We stared in silence as “smart” bombs exploded in Baghdad and Basra.

Then Paul said to me, in that slow, quiet way he had, “Well, I guess we’re all Natives now.”

Well, maybe we are. But we don’t have to be, do we?

Maybe we can take some guidance from this tiny nation at the center of the earth. I listened back through my talk with President Correa. And I can assure his daughter that she didn’t have to worry that her dad would forget about “the poor children who are cold” on the streets of Quito.

Because the Professor Doctor is still one of them.

Watch the Palast investigation, Rumble in the Jungle: Big Oil and Little Indians, on BBC Television Newsnight,

[Jana]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sstDwKTCpM&feature=related Bill Moyers, secret government 1987…basically sums it up

CFR-Counsel on Foreign Relations is the unseen government of the US
1. Corrupt Federal Reserve - Robbing Americans Since 1913 [1/3] www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPU8w7Bxc0A
2. CFR - The Secret Government [2/3]
3. The CFR Controlled Media Cabal [3/3]

The agenda appears to be to increase debt and create a depression so that civil war breaks out which justifies a police state…but even if people do nothing the CFR will still instigate the globalist agenda…however if the entire world is run by these guys, that means that wars are not the struggles of sovereign powers, but are orchestrated to ensure resource supply lines, and sqwish opposition.

All this is very much like the matrix

[jimtzu]

a cogent analysis of things:

From hyperpower to new world disorder

For the first time since the end of the Cold War, America isn’t alone on top. What’s replacing the unipolar world of the 1990s? A gang of five superpowers: China, Russia, India, the Eurozone and the U.S.

By David Olive
Feature Writer

01/01/08 "Toronto Star " -- -- "We seek your leadership. But if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of our way."

Kevin Conrad, delegate from Papua New Guinea, at the Bali summit on climate change earlier this month, to a U.S. delegation that tried to thwart reforms agreed to by the other 185 nations present.

It became more apparent than ever this year that the U.S. is no longer the world's lone superpower. Instead, there are five superpowers that will define the world for at least the next half-century: the U.S., China, India, Russia and a united Europe.

The news came home to Americans on Main St. from tainted Chinese products to the fact that practically every toy sold in America comes from Red China. Boston seniors on group tours of the great capitals of Europe were humbled to discover that their greenbacks had shrivelled in value to 60 per cent of the local currency. And New Yorkers were taken aback that the credit crisis arising from cascading defaults on U.S. subprime mortgages had so weakened the balance sheets of leading financial institutions in the Big Apple that the likes of Citigroup and Merrill Lynch had sought bailouts from state-owned investment funds in Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.

Canadians felt it, too, in a 15 per cent gain against the greenback.

That America was not in charge in Iraq was widely known for some time. That American global hegemony had severely dissipated was news. Nor was it of the passing variety, like the 1970s U.S. economic "stagflation" that inflated the German and Swiss currencies; or the Japanese boom a decade later in which Tokyo parking spots fetched $90,000.

This was different. Mandarins in Brussels now passed judgment on merger proposals between American companies, not hesitating to block them on antitrust grounds. Chinese oil interests in Sudan made Beijing intransigent about Western meddling in Darfur. Russia wouldn't abide Washington's sanctions on Iran. India insisted upon, and received, U.S. support of its nuclear arms program despite predictable outrage from Pakistan, a key U.S. ally in the pursuit of Al Qaeda. It was either that or have New Dehli turn to the Russians. To an unprecedented degree, decisions affecting America were being made elsewhere. A mere 16 years after attaining its lone-superpower status, the crown had slipped, and America's destiny is now shaped by a new world disorder of five superpowers.

All five members of this new quintet are nuclear powers. All but one, India, have veto power at the United Nations. Collectively, the four non-U.S. superpowers have 10 times the population of the U.S. The European economy has eclipsed that of the U.S., and those of China and India will do so by mid-century. The imperial legacy of many EU members and of Russia provide them a lingering influence from Indonesia to Zaire to Brazil that the U.S., whose experiences with colonizing have been reluctant and short-lived, cannot match.

The resentment of what the French labelled "the U.S. hyper-power" in the 1960s subsided in the 1990s. The Europeans were preoccupied with their unification project. China and India were experimenting with a free-market model to replace sclerotic command economies. And by the early years of this decade, Russian recovery from the upheaval of the Soviet breakup was manifesting itself in a new national pride and respect for a decisive Vladimir Putin.

The aim of the four new superpowers has been the same: to unleash, under the banner of patriotism, the potential economic prowess of a nation or region, and in doing so to claim a role on the world stage equal to that of the U.S. Here's Tony Blair, who revered Britain's "special relationship" with the U.S. more than most of his predecessors. "A single-power world is inherently unstable," Blair said back in 2005. "That's the rationale for Europe to unite.

"We are building a new superpower. The European Union is about the projection of collective power, wealth and influence. When we work together, the European Union can stand on par as a superpower and a partner with the U.S."

The euro has been the world's strongest currency since 2005. But not until this year did everyone from OPEC to the People's Bank of China to rock stars flirt with abandoning the U.S dollar – the world's undisputed reserve currency since the end of World War II – in favour of a euro that has soared to a current $1.48 (U.S.)

It was a year of new boondoggles coming to light in the U.S. occupation of Iraq; and of U.S. diplomatic setbacks in Pakistan, China, Turkey, Burma, the Middle East – almost everywhere the U.S. has tried to exert influence. But then, America's deficient military and intelligence capabilities have removed the big stick behind diplomatic threats.

America now is the world's largest borrower, and China the biggest creditor nation.

As everyone but the White House acknowledges, it's difficult to have much impact in pressuring China on its under-valued currency, its military buildup and its human-rights record when that country is also your biggest banker.

World leaders have been putting distance between themselves and Washington ever since the U.S. occupation of Iraq, embarked upon with a theological righteousness that alienated the secular Europeans, and based on assumptions seemingly designed to salvage the reputations of Barbara Tuchman's cast of feckless leaders in The March of Folly.

But this year, world leaders lost their reticence and subjected Washington to a parade of embarrassments. Kevin Rudd, the new Australian PM, isolated the U.S. on global warming by embracing a Kyoto Protocol that incoming U.S. president George W. Bush trashed in 2001. Gordon Brown, the new British PM, used the occasion of his first state visit to Washington to state that Afghanistan, not Iraq, is the central front in the battle against Islamic extremists. Bush watched in stony silence as America's staunchest ally in the Iraq invasion bluntly repudiated an assertion the U.S. president has been making for five years.

As Russia has slipped into autocracy, and shipped uranium to Iran this fall over U.S. objections, Bush has been reduced to tacitly endorsing Russian actions the U.S. is powerless to control. After his first encounter with the Russian president, Bush famously said he had looked into Putin's heart and found a man he could work with. In an angry Munich speech earlier this year, Bush's soulmate excoriated the U.S. for "an almost uncontained hyper-use of force . . . that is plunging the world into an abyss of conflicts."

America's foreign policy impotence hit a nadir in Pakistan, where Washington's full-court-press diplomacy failed to prevent the leader of an unreliable but nonetheless vital ally in the struggle against Al Qaeda from imposing martial law and imprisoning his country's supreme court justices. In one go, with its continued support of Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf, America has turned its back on supposed goals of promoting democracy, punishing nuclear proliferators, and taking a hard line against nations harbouring large populations of Al Qaeda operatives.

"No [U.S.] president will ever have handed over a worse international situation than George W. Bush," says Richard Holbrooke, the former U.N. ambassador in the Clinton administration and adviser to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Which is to suggest that America can reclaim its lone superpower status by simply installing a new president in 2009 who will extricate the U.S. from Iraq and sign Kyoto 2.0, to be negotiated over the next two years.

America lost its chance at enduring supremacy in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, which coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then-U.S. president George H.W. Bush spoke at the time of creating a "New World Order" of universal peace and mutual prosperity.

Had it only chosen then to redeploy its massive defence and foreign aid budgets to humanitarian causes, rather than propping up its military allies, America could have secured its new found global supremacy by simply setting a good example.

Instead, the lone-superpower era began with a unilateral, botched invasion of Somalia and ended with the Project For The New American Century, a late-1990s doctrine of preserving U.S. hegemony by overthrowing unfriendly regimes – a moronic vision that nonetheless manifested itself in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, with Iran as the regime-changers' next target.

In the Middle East, which has some of the youngest populations in the world, the past two generations have come of age with the belief that America is antagonistic to Muslims, a proposition reinforced by America`s invasion of two Muslin nations in the space of three years. And a new generation of Europeans – the "E generation," as author T.R. Reid labels it in his bestselling United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy (2005) – has grown up with the isolationism of the 1990s U.S. Republican Congress and the calamitous unilateralism of George W. Bush.

Plainly, the U.S. has failed to lead on climate change; genocide; nuclear proliferation; human rights; and the other most pressing global concerns for so long it has effectively ceded its claim to the "benign hegemony" that still shapes America's regard of its impact on the world.

And Americans know it, at least in Bill Clinton's view. In the 1990s, then-president Clinton declared that "America is the indispensable nation." In a Charlie Rose interview earlier this month, a Clinton who has grown more internationalist in retirement from the White House, said, "The American people now know something they've never known before. In their bones they know that there's almost no problem we can solve all by ourselves – terror, war and peace, nuclear proliferation, climate change, you name it. They know we have to do this in a co-operative way."

Gwynne Dyer, heralding the end of America's lone-superpower status, has warned that "Seeing the United States reduced to only one great power among others cannot be a prospect that appeals to American strategic thinkers of a traditional bent – so what is their grand strategy for averting it?

"They must have one," the London-based global military analyst wrote. "Paramount powers facing relegation always have one, although it rarely stays the same for long and it never, ever works. There is no way of stopping China and India from catching up with the current Lone Superpower without nuking their entire economies."

Without exception, the emerging superpowers have achieved that status by tending to the home front, where much work remains to be done. China is the world's second-largest CO2 emitter, trailing only the U.S. India has the world's largest population of poor people. Europe has national licence plates, birth certificates and a lottery played from Krakow to Liverpool, but lacks a foreign policy and has a nascent army of just 60,000 troops. Russia's regard for investors, whose property it expropriates on a whim, will have to change for the country's entrepreneurial forces to be fully unleashed.

The same focus on domestic shortcomings would serve America well. The factors undermining its prosperity and global influence are almost all self-inflicted. There is more at stake here than even the current crop of presidential candidates seem to realize. They all talk of restoring America's respect in the world, with no apparent sense that a big part of the problem is that the world is increasingly less inclined to regard America as "the shining city on the hill" that Ronald Reagan invoked.

With strikingly little notice, David Walker, head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, spoke in August about disturbing parallels between today's America and the decline of the Roman Empire. Among the similarities Walker cited were "declining values and political civility at home, an overconfident and overextended military in foreign lands, and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government."

Even in a world without budding rivals, the American superpower would still be jeopardized by its "unsustainable" disregard for tackling rundown schools and inner-city neighbourhoods, a yawning gap between rich and poor, and a route to citizenship for the country's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.

Even superpowers are fragile once the rot of complacency sets in. "It's time to learn from history," Walker said, "and take steps to ensure that the American republic is the first to stand the test of time."

© Copyright Toronto Star 1996-2007
 

[Jana]

Thus we see how notions of God are holding back human progress and allowing unlawful international behaviors by playing on old age tactics of fear, guilt, exclusion, status-piggybacking and divine providence. Manifest destiny into a nonnegotionable way of life...greed filling the coffers of the few and causing the gullible to go to their deaths, seeding endless suffering through genetic deformity etc...
Religion and War have always been a racket.
 
http://youtube.com/watch?v=MuyUz2XLp1E  —The Four Horsemen

We can say about happenstance, that it is a pendulum and it flips. Such that even if we do have the military-industrialist wolves dressed up as Christian crusaders blasting the "hell" out of the Muslim world, and these crazy fatalist end timers that desire Armageddon because they have failed at their humanity, rationality and creativity...that there is a flip side to this. I just finished the last of the "Four Horsemen" series, and was flabbergasted by Hitchen's statement that...thank God we have got the United States going into the Middle East seeking to control or exterminate the Theocratists (fundamentalists). He failed to qualify that the US crusaders are also Theocratists. Follow this line of logic and we come to the idea that the more people get into the frey the better, for then those who have religo-fundamentalist genes will wipe each other out. In this sense you could call it a just war in the broadest philosophical sense.

[jimtzu]

another Hitchen statement in the video that i still can't believe went something like this..  the Dali Lama preisiding over his facist government in Dharmasala...  unless i misheard or am misremembering.   

i don't agree with everything said on there, as thinking people we're really not supposed to agree, but the series is great for nothing else than to show how to have a DISCUSSION!

[Jana]

Yes I was extremely impressed with the level of conversationalism...however we do have to remember they are all on the same side of the conversation, so really what they appeared to be doing was organizing their war-plan. Lots of fun, I didn't want it to end.

Yea I think he did say that about the Dali Lama... in one respect it is true to have a feudal system of guruship, however that is nothing compared to the major pathologies of the Chinese.

The Naked Truth is one of my all time favorites, and I wish Jordan Maxwell and friends would keep on going with this teaching...perhaps even build universities to the Herman Hesse-like dissection of world religions. All the religious stories for the last 10,000 years are basically astrological allegories of the sun moving through the zodiac.  This video totally exposes how Religion and War have always been a racket.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aW2N46vf4Q&feature=related  —Son of the Sun
www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlbIYTjeQP4  —The Naked Truth

[Nickeson]

I thought it was a great conversation, but that it missed a couple of points.

1. I don't know if I would call these four men Horsemen because I doubt if any of them have much to do with horses except for the fact they are beating one that is almost dead already. Compared with where it was a 100 years ago, not to mention 200 years ago, this culture is almost totally materialistic and secular, so much so that almost all it’s people take as given what would have been totally heretical at the turn of the previous century. This makes me think there other things at work below the surface. These could include the cultural presence of a sector that is just solidly afraid of the uncertainty they find all around and so in search of psychic protection run off to religion or spirituality or other superstitions like illusions of truth or evolution being intelligent and purposeful. There is also another sector that finds the rationality of the leading cultural and educational forces too anal and restrictive and run off to superstition just to get away from the science geeks. Fighting the illogic of either of these approaches is shooting at the wrong target.

2. The Four Men obviously fear religious war and so want to disarm the motivating power of the jihadists on the other side. They seem to miss the point that history is fairly clear on the fact that a religious war is not fought because Group A prays to a different god than Group B, but that Group A’s old men in suits have something—usually access to resources and the power to regulate the distribution of those resources—that Group B’s old men in suits don't have, but want badly enough to send someone else’s kids off to take big risks on their behalf. Not wanting to appear greedy because greed is supposedly taboo in all religions, Group B righteously goes after the false doctrines of A. Spiritual matters are a very thin veneer over much of what life is about and this is doubly so when it comes to the causes of war. So again the Four Men are shooting at the wrong target; a symptom rather than a cause.

As for the details: I like to listen to Hitchen’s sales pitch but I wouldn’t trust buying anything from him. I found it interesting that Dawkins couldn’t understand anything about the conversation that wasn’t 2 + 2 = 4 and therefore he couldn’t understand anything that Hitchens said that was inspired by emotional impulse, which was a lot of what Hitchens said in the 2nd hour of the discussion. But it was fairly clear that if and when Science becomes the accepted religion/superstition of the world, Dawkins wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to be Pope.

[Jana]

Nice appraisal Stephen, you should do a critque of a Dawkins and Hitchens book and send it to them. If the victims of war are indeed the easily indocrinated troops that the priest-warlords work up into a lather...then some kind of social outreach into the youth web/schools would be more effective than trying to outsmart religion itself. For these wits religion is not an adequate competitor to joust with. I think they are correct in that religion should not be "exempt" from critical debate. In fact we need to start exposing it and government to radical degrees and every creative way possible.

Trouble is some % love war...the toys, the danger, the blood lust.  Soldiers/CIA government workers are brainwashed in unrealities...a few years ago they were told they were fighting communists, now they think they are fighting socialists.

I think we are addressing the dangers of the human construct of God...the creator of the Universe is oblivious-immune to us...but humans will bring themselves to the point of extinction over concepts of God due to faulty programming, bad self esteem, lack of self empowerment, security needs and greed. Religions fail to heal these conditions because religious leaders also exploit notions of God to keep the flock "sheep" ...basically farming sick sheep. If the sheep ever got well, religious organizations would not exist.

 Since overpopulation will increase the fight for resources, we had better understand what is going down, why humans are war-like and the mechanism of war...the pieces of the wargame and how they all have to fall into place before war can be orchestrated. We need to understand our animal-reptilian brain, the nature of security and defense, why our spiritualization has failed us in mass. We need to understand materialism, the nature of resource use, fascist capitalism, waste production. We need to understand how Nature's economy and ecocommunity works and work on transforming all human systems toward increasing Universality and ephemeralization. That is we need to create a spiritual global community without notions of God. Buckminster would say that war only comes about due to inefficent, unintelligent use of resources and bad-design.

[Jana]

Ephemeralization is a Bucky term for doing more with less, due to evolution of subtle design by understanding nature and the universe.

What I am proposing is not a Godless materialist society, but a deeply rational society based on genuine spiritual evolution (transmutation) and the numinous rather than myth and superstition. I am proposing an advancement in profound lived-spirituality by penetrating and discarding outdated and dangerous God myths. I am proposing spiritual "evolution" to a transanthropomorphic universal morality. I am proposing sovereignty of the individual with full development of visionary, creative and spiritual faculties...and a permaculturalist, Natural Step based economy so that there is plentiful capital and resources for forthright embarking on the ephemeralization of culture on all levels from agriculture to government. I am proposing a design revolution over to human systems that work for us and not against us.

In a few years the oil scarcity myth will be penetrated by the huge array of new energy systems…at which point the oil baron-banker-weapons mongers will lose their iron grip on the planet.

Penetrating the Lie
If people were educated to know that their holy book is derivative of the same astrological solar worship allegory the world over, then perhaps they would be less inclined to be manipulated into being canon fodder by the military-industrial cancer. When young people grow up to know only war, then we can expect perpetual war. The dissociative mechanism, the authoritarian structure and the externalization of holiness that constitutes religion breeds the kind of spiritual vacuum, loss of individual sovereignty and deadening of rational faculty that allows the infestation of war to continue. War is an aberration caused by brain damaged, soul damaged people. Politicians rely on vast populations of these gullible, brain dead people that cannot decide right from wrong and who will even be “entertained” by carnage.

If people knew they are being fed propaganda and that neither their government nor the general push of civilization itself has their best interests at heart…then perhaps we could all use our energy more creatively to further human progress instead of selling our souls as killers in illegal wars. It is not sane or ethical to waste resources in resource wars, when the smart alternative is change, ephemeralization and the evolution of subtle technology.

Sure there are technological breakthroughs that are made through the evil genius of war…however malevolent technology has reached the point of mutually assured lose-lose no matter which way you look at it. What use is it to have petrol to drive around in if you no longer have a soul. A smarter use of human genius would be to turn all efforts towards earth regeneration and resource equalization…allowing all humans the change at betterment and spiritual evolution, beyond mere survival, subsistence and war. We do not need smarter weapons of war because war is dumb! We need smarter technologies of peace!

Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy, Jay Inslee

[Jana]

Very much like the Four Horseman discussion...if Religion is cut off and exempt from rational disclosure, it becomes a breeding ground for the type of emotional hysterical superstitious nonsence whereby tribe can be pit against tribe, race against race, class against class...by the political powers. Just as what is happening now in Kenya and Pakistan. And the way that the Bush-Cheney gang pulled the wool over the Christian right sheep in order to conduct the illegal wars in Iraq and now Iran. Spirituality should involve the highest intellectual capacities, informed by the deepest intuition—it should not be an excuse to go to sleep and let evil have free reign.
The luciferians (for want of a better name) use the Christian right as camoflage, as piggy bank and for fresh canon fodder. This can only continue because of the brain-scrambling and loss of individual sovereignty that occurs through religio-mytho programming. If all people were taught to think clearly like Noam Chomsky or Carl Sagan...if the bulk of humanity could at least be bought up to a rational level of cognition...then state-corruption could not infest entire nations with megnamaniacal resource wars with other nations. Such bad, subhuman behavior can only occur in conditions of unconsciousness and power-intoxication, in populations that are easily brain washed into conformity...because they are compartmentialized by trauma, fear and parental projection onto figures of leadership. The religion susceptible brain is an easy mark to use as a pawn on the political chessboard.

Perhaps in Afterworld we will see that it was created through some kind of spiritual sickness like we are engaged in right now in the US. http://afterworld.tv/

[Jana]

Tribune Media reviews SOLARTOPIA!
GREEN BEACON
By Robert C. Koehler
Tribune Media Services

Harvey Wasserman’s newly published “Solartopia!” is a breath of fresh air, blowing — well, whipping, at Great Plains velocity —across the thinking person’s vision of the future. What a gift this book is: an informed, science-savvy vision of tomorrow that isn’t an eco-nightmare.

Rather, it’s an enthusiastically optimistic look at a rational, very green near future. (To order, go to solartopia.org.) The setting is 2030; the premise is a flight in a hydrogen-fueled airship from Hamburg to Honolulu, with Wasserman serving as tour guide and eco-historian as we watch the world unfold beneath us and gradually learn about the death of King CONG, the joyous global proliferation of rooftop gardens and how all those giant wind turbines wound up off the coast of Holland, among much else.

King CONG, an acronym of Wasserman’s coinage — Coal, Oil, Nukes, Gas — is the fossil-fuel addicted junkie-beast we think of today simply as reality, but to the relaxed narrator of “Solartopia!,” this beast, which in 2007 seemingly runs the world and holds it hostage to its appetites, is nothing more than a historical curiosity.

Listen up, boys and girls: We make it! We survive as a species. King CONG collapses of its own irrationality. Mind you, it ain’t pretty, but by 2030 its death throes, its meltdowns and final mad wars of resource acquisition (though not, of course, its radioactive waste and eco-dead zones) are behind us, and renewable-resource technology — wind, solar and biomass, along with extreme techno-efficiency — powers the human race to a sustainable, prosperous and democratic future, in which healing can begin.

This isn’t sci-fi. Wasserman, prolific author and long-time environmental activist, describes a world that has rethought and rebuilt itself on the basis of what we know right this moment. “All the technology that was ever needed for a post-pollution world was available in 2007,” he writes. He also makes the point that this technology, once the foot of King CONG is off its chest, is hugely profitable. That’s the clincher.

“Solartopia!” powers along, as we silently cross Europe in the hydro-jet, then glide across the Atlantic Ocean and the North American continent, with nonstop ironic wonder that the world below us was once run by self-destructive fools.

“Nuke weapons were once tested here,” our guide, for instance, informs us as we cross Nevada. “Then King CONG tried to stuff the place with radioactive waste. The dormant volcano at Yucca Mountain was once drilled with a $10 billion tunnel-and-train gizmo meant to accept huge quantities of spent reactor rods. Now it’s just another offbeat tourist attraction, with slot machines in the caverns and a spa in one of the would-have-been waste chambers.”

The pervading good sense that prevails in Wasserman’s 2030 is predicated on the existence of a human survival instinct that, while responsive to fear, is not centered in the reptilian (fight or flight) brain. Oh my, I hope he’s right.

When “people began keeling over dead from China’s brown, filthy air,” the guide notes, and “the wrath of climate chaos drowned millions and starved more,” what happened wasn’t the worst of human nature coming to the fore but — my God, finally — the emergence of our capacity to take the long view.

A sustainable world “became less an impossible dream than a fervent prayer for deliverance,” he writes. “And it demanded, first and foremost, that we ‘face the waste.’ To avoid extinction, ultra-efficiency became a vital necessity. . . . Nothing — NOTHING — on ‘Spaceship Earth’ is manufactured that cannot be . . . recycled or composted.”

Wasserman even cites a late-20th-century cultural reference point for inspiration: the 1995 Ron Howard/Tom Hanks movie “Apollo 13,” about the ill-fated 1969 moon expedition that, following a shipboard explosion on the return trip, “could only limp back to Earth by preserving every electron their damaged craft could muster.” This heroic flight becomes the metaphor for the plight of the whole planet.

In the twilight of the era of King CONG, Wasserman writes, “the West wasted fully half the juice it produced” and the emerging economies of Asia were even worse. Turning this around was not simply a matter of “super-compact fluorescents, ultra-light composites, mega-efficient manufacturing, totally tight solar building designs,” but also, ahem, the rational recycling of waste, human and otherwise.

“Sewage systems everywhere,” he writes, “double as energy-generating compost operations” and have morphed into “the trillion-dollar business of converting waste to power. Few today can comprehend it . . . but this country once actually dumped human waste onto the lands and into the oceans!”

The only downside to this book is that it ends, and we’re left treading the polluted water and grappling with the flaky politics of 2007. The book returns us to a world that believes far more in guns than recycling; and our survival — our willingness to make peace with the planet — is still very much in doubt. But with “Solartopia!” Wasserman has planted a beacon two decades into the future to guide us past the rough spots
solartopia.org

[Michael]

I thought this might resonate Jana:

Clive Thompson on How the Next Victim of Climate Change Will Be Our Minds

Australia is suffering through its worst dry spell in a millennium. The outback has turned into a dust bowl, crops are dying off at fantastic rates, cities are rationing water, coral reefs are dying, and the agricultural base is evaporating.

But what really intrigues Glenn Albrecht — a philosopher by training — is how his fellow Australians are reacting.

They're getting sad.

In interviews Albrecht conducted over the past few years, scores of Australians described their deep, wrenching sense of loss as they watch the landscape around them change. Familiar plants don't grow any more. Gardens won't take. Birds are gone. "They no longer feel like they know the place they've lived for decades," he says.

Albrecht believes that this is a new type of sadness. People are feeling displaced. They're suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven't moved anywhere. It's just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them, and they miss it terribly.

Albrecht has given this syndrome an evocative name: solastalgia. It's a mashup of the roots solacium (comfort) and algia (pain), which together aptly conjure the word nostalgia. In essence, it's pining for a lost environment. "Solastalgia," as he wrote in a scientific paper describing his theory, "is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.'"

It's also a fascinating new way to think about the impact of global warming. Everyone's worrying about resource management and the spooky, unpredictable changes in the ecosystem. We fret over which areas will get flooded as sea levels rise. We estimate the odds of wars over clean water, and we tally up the species — polar bears, whales, wading birds — that'll go extinct.

But we should also be concerned about the huge toll climate change will inflict on our mental health. In the modern, industrialized West, many of us have forgotten how deeply we rely on the stability of nature for our psychic well-being. In a world of cheap airfares, laptops, and the Internet, we proudly regard mobility as a sign of how advanced we are. Hey, we're nomadic hipster capitalists! We love change. Only losers get attached to their hometowns.

This is a neat mythos, but in truth it's a pretty natural human urge to identify with a place and build one's sense of self around its comforts and permanence. I live in Manhattan, where the globe-hopping denizens tend to go berserk if their favorite coffee shop closes down. How will they react in 20 or 30 years if the native trees can't handle the 5-degree spike in average temperature? Or if weird new bugs infest the city in summer, fall shrinks to a single month, and snow becomes a distant memory? "We like to think that we're cool, 21st-century people, but the basic sense of a connection to the land is still big," Albrecht says. "We haven't evolved that much.

"What's more, Albrecht has noticed that the more quickly environmental change occurs, the more intense the solastalgia. The mental-health effects can be powerful. In the Australian outback, industrial activity — notably open-pit coal mining — has turned verdant areas into moonscapes seemingly overnight, and the suicide rate in the region has skyrocketed. Or witness New Orleans, where a Harvard survey found that survivors of Hurricane Katrina reported suffering a "serious mental illness" at roughly double the rate of the city's residents three years earlier. Fully 6 percent have thought about suicide. Trauma and personal loss obviously play a role in this, but the decimation of the city's physical environment surely does as well.

Ironically, we may simply be rediscovering a syndrome that we thought was dead and buried. Back in the 1940s, the military considered homesickness to be a serious and potentially fatal illness, because drafted soldiers who got shipped overseas would often become savagely depressed. These days, Americans are rarely dislocated against their will, and the army is all-volunteer. Few of us have the experience of being unmoored in the world.

But that may be changing rapidly. In a world that's quickly heating up and drying up, you can't go home again — even if you never leave.