Image by MATEUS_27:24&25 via Flickr

http://www.alternet.org/audits/39416/?page=1

Most of my family does not want to believe that the US is not out to help countries and ’spread democracy’.

I probably piss them off by repeating it over and over, but I feel that this is the key to turning things around. As long as most Americans feel that we really try to help countries like Iraq, we will always fall into the same trap. Apologies will be made (’oh I guess there were no WMD. Ooops’), accusations will fly, but in the end, it will just continue the next time we want to attack someone (Iran?). Why? Because most of us do not know that the US has installed dictators and *ousted Democratically elected leaders* when it suited people in power to do so.

I need to buy a shirt that says ‘US sanctions on Iraq killed 500K Iraqi children. We suck.’ The propaganda and nationalism here is so strong though, that I would probably get accosted by some wingnut who thinks we are in Iraq to fight the war on ‘Terrah’.

If every American knew of the Guatemala coup, or how we screwed with Iran, or our involvement in Chile, and knew what really happened, we would never even have gone into Iraq…

If you follow politics, or have parents that irritate you with their ‘bomb the Middle East, it will make the world safer’ views, you often hear the word ‘liberal’ tossed around. The ‘liberal media is anti-American’ or ‘those liberal treehuggers should just leave the US!’

By the way, is it possible to be ‘Un-American’? We are supposed to be the country that allows anyone to have any view, as long as it does not involve hurting other people, and we are the melting pot, or whatever they are calling us now, that has all cultures and ethnic groups… exactly what viewpoint makes you un-American then, when we supposedly encourage people to have different views?

Anyway, this site, www.politicalcompass.org, lets you take a test about your views, and then shows where you fit in the larger political ‘compass’. A quick quote explains the site well, I think:

The idea was developed by a political journalist with a university counselling background, assisted by a professor of social history. They’re indebted to people like Wilhelm Reich and Theodor Adorno for their ground-breaking work in this field. We believe that, in an age of diminishing ideology, a new generation in particular will get a better idea of where they stand politically - and the sort of political company they keep.

Is this website perfect? Probably not, as it is hard to really determine where a person stands based on a short questionnaire. But I do think it is correct in one important fact: the so-called ‘Liberals’ in our government are not really Liberal at all. Almost all Politicians lean towards the Authoritarian/Fascist axis, and the NeoLiberalism axis. NeoLiberalism, it turns out, has nothing to do with Liberalism. “Broadly speaking, Neoliberalism seeks to transfer control of the economy from state to the private sector.”

Here is where I stand on the axis, when I took the test:

I took this test about a year ago, which might explain why I leaned towards Communism. The more I read about how the government handles our money, the more I lean towards Libertarian/Neoliberalism. My communist tendencies are usually about people being equal economically. Basically I am a Libertarian who feels people should all make the same amount of money - as long as they work as hard and as long as everyone else does.

Here is a compass of the Presidential Candidates (remember I did this a year ago)

This is the enlightening ‘compass’. Supposedly ‘Left’ leaning politicians are not *really* on the Left at all. Or at least, very few are. The two who were really on the left? Ignored as wackos and lunatics. Did Kucinich and Gravel really have radical viewpoints, or has the rest of the political crowd moved to the Right? Remember that Communism, or Collectivism, is really about letting the government run things, and where all people are equal in status and wealth. Communism is not inherently evil, people are evil. Unfortunately evil people can and will abuse a communist system. But hey, people are abusing our system right now too, we are not immune.

Here are two more enlightening compasses:

Who would you rather be associated with? GW Bush, or Gandhi and Nelson Mandela? Obama, Hillary… much closer to Bush than Gandhi…

The truth, I think, is that people who run for political offices are usually not truly Liberal, or on the Left at all. People like me, who are really on the Left, want to dismantle government, not be the leader of it.

Remember these charts the next time you hear some politician called a Liberal.

Do other nations pledge allegiance to the flag? So far I can’t find any… except possibly North Korea. Nice. Ever wonder why we happen to be involved in more wars than any other country? Is Patriotism just the door to Nationalism? There is a war going on. For your mind. Chucklechucklechuckle.

The Amnesty International ads are quite impressive.

The photo of the *patriotic* American defending his country from those pesky black people is explained here. As George Carlin would say ‘we only kill brown people.’ Have we ever attacked any country that was predominantly white? A former Texas Governor who was 18 when the Civil Rights Act was passed is now our president. His grandfather made money off of the Nazis, and plotted a fascist coup against the US during the Great Depression.

Nah, no possibility of racial motivations there at all. Just a laid back, easy going guy.

The photo of the guy in the helmet with the orange clogs? No. Friggin. Idea. Weirdest photo I have ever seen on the Internet.

(When you click a thumbnail, it displays a medium sized image. You can click that image to get the full size image. Why Wordpress chose to set up their gallery that way, I have no idea.)

“The Markets” is just a synonym for “The Mob Mentality”.

Could it be Bush is banging the war drums for Iran to drive up oil prices?

Image via Wikipedia

In case you missed it, bees are dying.

So… few governments seem to be worrying about it, and it gets little press. The linked article states there may be a link between Genetically Modified Corn, and the Bee issue, called Colony Collapse disorder. Recent articles are starting to sound more alarming. When do we say ‘hey, without bees, we die. Maybe someone should look into this?’

I think, at some point, we need to say ‘Capitalism just does not work.’ We are modifying our food to make more profit!

Think about this for a second. Producing food more efficiently creates population growth. Do we really need more people on the planet? In the last year I have read that: we are in danger of a natural gas shortage in the US. We have world oil supply problems (Peak Oil). OPEC nations are likely inflating their oil reserve numbers. It is likely that US Coal deposits are less than expected (Peak Coal). We are having water problems all over the world (Peak Water). Australia is looking at desalinization. California has major problems. Hmm. Oh, there will likely be a shortage of Helium soon. Most helium comes from Texas, and they are running out. Helium is used in making electronics, if I remember correctly. That will suck, won’t it, to find out that electronics will get expensive because we like our balloons to float? Admittedly, I only read this once, and do not remember the source.

How stupid are we, to continue to increase our population, knowing that resources are finite? Copper is worth $3 a pound at a scrap yard…

Yet we have scientists modifying corn so that it is resistant to Round Up. AN OIL BASED PESTICIDE. Now we can spray an entire field with RoundUp, and not kill the corn. Did you know fertilizers are made from oil too? Did you know that without fertilizers, the ground would lose nutrients far too fast for nature to replace them? Without oil, we cannot grow food at the rates we do now…

Capitalism doesn’t work. We lasted longer than Communism, but the game is up. With Capitalism there is no throttle. We run full out, every day, all day. Always push for more, use more, sell more, make more. The world is telling us to go screw ourselves.

We better start listening.

Evolution: Evidence has been provided - a shitload of evidence - to back this theory. Scientists call it a theory because if they found evidence contradicting their theory, they would look at that new evidence and try to figure out what the real truth is. As Richard Dawkins has stated “there are few if any scientific theories that have more evidence than Evolution does.”

Intelligent Design: No evidence. No data. Just an idea - “Hey, maybe some godlike being started it all! Maybe God created evolution”.

This goes against what the Bible says, but hey, lets ignore that for awhile. As a friend of mine says ‘well people don’t take the Bible literally anymore’. Well if you don’t take the part about the world being 6000 years old, Adam and Eve, Noah or whatever literally, then maybe people shouldn’t take the idea of God, Jesus and Heaven literally. Right?

The problem is Schools are trying to teach Intelligent Design along with Evolution. The last sentence of the linked article is simply… amazing.

In August, President Bush endorsed teaching intelligent design alongside evolution.

And this reminds me of a H.L. Mencken quote:

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost… All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.‘ The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Woohoo! That day is today!

There is a point to my ranting. The issue here is that people want to put a theory alongside evolution/The Big Bang that has absolutely no evidence to back it. This is most ridiculous. Most ridiculous. So… I say we all make up our own theories, and submit them to school boards and textbooks publishers. I want my theory alongside ID and Evolution. My personal theory is that a big dog made up pudding was the only object in existence before the Universe. One of his toes was cut off by a ninja star, the dog then pee’d on it as it fell through space, and his ever so potent urine made his toe explode into the stars and planets we have today.

Now, ignore the fact that I said there was only the Pudding Dog in existence when a ninja star came into the picture, and ignore that without anything in existence than the dog, there would be no gravity other than that generated by the Dog. So when the toe would have been cut off, it would have fallen towards the dog and stuck to him, not fallen down (where is down when there are no other objects in existence but a dog made of pudding and a ninja star?). The Bible does this stuff all the time and no one seems to care. An important side note: it has been almost 20 years since I took a science class. Am I wrong about the dog generating its own gravity if no other objects were around. Guess what, if I am - I will say thanks to whoever proves me wrong. This is how people should think. The danger of Religion is that it does NOT promote this type of thinking at all…but I digress.

Now I just need to find out where to submit my theory. Maybe if a million (or 10, or 100…) people all did this and mailed their theories to book publishers and school boards, people would realize how absolutely …. (shit I cannot think of a synonym for ’stupid’ that is powerful enough to really convey how moronic this is)…Intelligent Design is. To close, I think everyone should read this Richard Dawkins quote. It explains the essence of what Science is. (Link to video of the quote, if you are interested.)

Science is about testing, comparing, corroborating this massive evidence. And using it to update old theories of how things work.

I do remember one formative influence in my undergraduate life. There was an elderly professor in my department who had been passionately keen on a particular theory for, oh! a number of years! And one day a visiting American researcher came and he completely and utterly disproved our old man’s hypothesis. The old man strode to the front, shook his hand and said, my dear fellow, I wish to thank you! I have been wrong these 15 years!

And we all clapped our hands raw! That was the scientific ideal. Of somebody who had a lot invested, a lifetime almost invested in a particular theory and he was rejoicing that he had been shown wrong and that scientific truth had been advanced.

There is no testing, no comparing, no corroborating of evidence with Intelligent Design. There is NO evidence!

My Dog O’ Pudding idea will look great in print, don’t you think?

This video on war, again not to be a sycophantic schmuck but… this video says it all.

He probably wouldn’t have liked me much, but he was insanely funny.

This is another interesting video made to a Carlin bit.

“It’s a big club - and you ain’t in it”

Well I found one.

Bush’s Secretary of The Treasury Paul O’Neill has stated that ten days - TEN DAYS after Bush was inaugurated into office, in his first National Security Council Meeting, Bush wanted to know how they could get into Iraq. The video shows a memo (apparently from Jan 31st 2001) that talks about a ‘plan for post Saddam Iraq’.

Awhile ago I had posted about how Saddam had started selling oil in Euros in November 2000, just a few months before Bush was inaugurated.

Watch the video. It is from 2004, it needs to be aired again on TV, now that people are paying more attention and not caught up so much in the 9/11 patriotic zeal.

Also interesting at the end of the video - a quote from Scott McClellan, backing the president.

Just to toss this in, here is another video, of a former CIA case officer, saying the evidence points to 9/11 being an inside job.

Image via Wikipedia

Having read quite a bit about Peak Oil I have been on the side of supply shortages. Lately though, I am not so sure.

Take this article for instance. The author is F. William Engdahl who is “active as a consulting geopolitical risk economist.” Seems reliable. What is interesting is that George Soros, a famous rich dude in the financial markets, recently claimed that oil prices were due to speculation, but then added that he doesn’t pay too much attention to oil. Yet on many sites, his quote was used as ‘proof’ that oil prices were not due to oil supply problems.

The author of the article I linked above is an economist and “has written on issues of political economy, geopolitics, energy, agriculture, WTO, IMF, politics and economics for more than 30 years, beginning with the first oil shock and world grain crisis in the early 1970s.” He is the author of “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order.”

I point this out because what he says is controversial.

He claims that Bush and Co. have deliberately caused this problem. Here are some key pieces from his article (which is long and detailed, and sometimes hard to follow)

• today’s oil prices are really determined is done by a process so opaque only a handful of major oil trading banks, such as Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, have any idea who is buying and who is selling oil futures or derivative contracts that set physical oil prices in this strange new world of “paper oil”.
• Since the advent of oil futures trading and the two major London and New York oil futures contracts, control of oil prices has left the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and gone to Wall Street
• a gaping loophole in US government regulation of oil derivatives trading so huge a herd of elephants could walk through it
• (A US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report states:) Until recently, US energy futures were traded exclusively on regulated exchanges within the United States, like the NYMEX, which are subject to extensive oversight by the CFTC, including ongoing monitoring to detect and prevent price manipulation or fraud. In recent years, however, there has been a tremendous growth in the trading of contracts that look and are structured just like futures contracts, but which are traded on unregulated OTC [over the counter] electronic markets. Because of their similarity to futures contracts they are often called “futures look-alikes”.
• He also states the “Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a financial futures regulator” is not doing its job - limiting trades to keep important commodities stable.
• Then, apparently to make sure the way was opened really wide to potential market oil price manipulation, in January 2006, the George W Bush administration’s CFTC permitted the ICE, the leading operator of electronic energy exchanges, to use its trading terminals in the United States for the trading of US crude oil futures on the ICE futures exchange in London - called “ICE Futures”.
• in January 2006, ICE Futures in London began trading a futures contract for WTI crude oil, a type of crude oil that is produced and delivered in the United States

Loopholes, seemingly minor changes, inaction by the CFTC, and finally Bush hammering the nail in the coffin. And the result is, according to Engdahl:

Is that not elegant? The US government energy futures regulator, CFTC, opened the way to the present unregulated and highly opaque oil futures speculation.

(Emphasis is mine)

And here is the real rub. Ready?

Lets move to this article from - amazingly - an environmental website. This site proposes that we do not need to drill in environmentally protected areas, because US oil and gas companies hold perpetual leases on Federal lands that they are not developing. It cites this House Natural Resources Staff Committee Report. The highlights of this report?

If we extrapolate from today’s production rates on federal land and waters, we can estimate that the 68 million acres of leased but currently inactive federal land and waters could produce an additional 4.8 million barrels of oil and 44.7 billion cubic feet of natural gas each day.

That would nearly double total U.S. oil production, and increase natural gas production by 75%. It would also cut U.S. oil imports by more than a third, and be more than six times the estimated peak production from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

To me, this is explosive. The oil and gas they are talking about is on Federal land already leased to the oil and gas companies - NOT wildlife preserves or other environmentally protected areas. Yet why does Bush and the rest of the Republican parrots (sorry, I voted for Ron Paul, but most Republicans just parrots. *Squawk* Environmenalists are keeping us from ANWR *Squawk* Nuclear power will save us *Squawk*)

Anyway, why is ANWR all over the news, yet this report gets no press? Unfortunately, I do not think many people know. What is funny is that even the ANWR.org page pushes for more oil exploration! This made me chuckle: “there is a 95% chance that a ’super field’ with 500 million barrels would be discovered. DOI also estimates that there exists a mean of 3.5 billion barrels, and a 5% chance that a large Prudhoe Bay type discovery would be made.”

The US uses 21 million barrels of oil a day. 500 million barrels would last us… 24 days. 3.5 Billion would last us less than 6 months. The phrase ’super field’ sounds impressive though, doesn’t it?

Something is afoot. Why is everyone pushing to get into ANWR when there is six times the resources available right on land already set aside for gas prices? Why are these lands not developed if oil prices are supposedly due to lack of supply?

I don’t have the answer, but the results seem to benefit a Republican Oil Man, which Bush definitely is. The public is starting to push to drill in an environmentally protected area, Democrats are looking like the reason gas prices continue to rise (”Why won’t the democrats just let us drill in ANWR, Glenn Beck said it would solve the problem!!!”), and oil companies are reaping record breaking profits.

I doubt few people know now, or will ever know, the whole truth, but my month is on speculation causing the price increases. Too bad this won’t help me pay my heating bill this winter…

Lately there are a lot of articles like this popping up, where influential and/or political people admit that the War on Drugs is failing. Pot smokers everywhere rejoice every time someone says it.

Why is this idea suddenly gaining political favor?

I would say, the answer lies in our history - prohibition. This article explains it pretty clearly.

Prohibition was not repealed because the government suddenly realized that people should have the freedom to drink alcohol, or that the legal measures taken to keep people from drinking were ineffective, or even because social pressures finally swayed politicians to make changes that the public wanted.

The government needed more money. As the linked article states:

Prior to the creation in 1913 of the national income tax, about a third of Uncle Sam’s annual revenue came from liquor taxes…By 1920, the income tax supplied two-thirds of Uncle Sam’s revenues and nine times more revenue than was then supplied by liquor taxes and customs duties combined.

The government didn’t need liquor tax revenue “once a new and much more intoxicating source of revenue was discovered, the cost to politicians of pandering to the puritans and other anti-liquor lobbies dramatically fell.”

Once the Great Depression hit, and didn’t appear to be ending anytime soon, the government needed revenue and so… Prohibition is repealed.

That being said, I would say Marijuana should be decriminalized. I would call myself a Libertarian, and I think the War on Drugs in crazy. In Ron Paul’s book ‘The Revolution, A Manifesto’ he cites evidence pointing to the criminalization of marijuana being racially motivated. He states that the ‘expert’ that testified (just one person) at the time admitted later that he had no evidence that marijuana was dangerous. The problem is that the government will make it completely legal, and then tax the shit out of it. 10 years after it is legalized, it will be more expensive than it is now, with a ton of the revenue from the sale of it going to make government budgets ever bigger.

The answer: decriminalize, but don’t legalize.

Disclaimer: Author has not smoked pot in 15 years, is completely out of the loop, and was never really much ‘in the loop’ at any point.

Most importantly though, beware politicians saying to legalize drugs. Are they realizing the War on Drugs didn’t work, or are they looking for future revenue?