Friday, December 29, 2006

An open letter to US policy makers


“This is very important….I never had a security briefing which said what some of these very serious, but conservative petroleum geologists say, which they think that, either now or before the end the decade’s out, we’ll reach peak oil production globally, and with the rise of China and India and others coming along, unless we can dramatically reduce our oil usage, we will run out of recoverable oil within 35 to 50 years.
And that would mean that…in addition to climate change, we have a very short time in the life of the planet to turn this around….we may not have as much oil as we think.
So we need to get in gear.”

— Former President Bill Clinton, Aspen Ideas Festival, July 2006

Top Ten Orwellian Moments of 2006

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Twenty-eight years ago today, 31-year-old Dennis Kucinich, then the youngest-ever mayor of a major American city, famously pushed Cleveland into economic default rather than capitulate to the demands of a group of bankers eager to gobble up the city’s power plant.

Harvey Matusow: The Biggest Snitch in American History

He also created the rumor that smoking banana peels would get you high.

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

The most memorable work of literature to come from the debate over gold and silver in the United States was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, by journalist L. Frank Baum, who greatly distrusted the power of the city financiers and who supported a bimetallic dollar based on both gold and silver.
Taking great literary license, he summarized and satirized the monetary debate and history of the era through a charming story about a naive but good Kansas farm girl named Dorothy, who represented the average rural American citizen. Baum seems to have based her character on the Populist orator Leslie Kelsey, nicknamed "the Kansas Tornado."
And from the Obscure Fact deprtment,, The lion costume in the film 'Wizard of Oz' was made from real lions.

Monday, December 18, 2006

A video that shows Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh at a U.S. military base that specializes in explosives and demolition training over a year after he supposedly left the army puts the official story of the April 19 1995 federal building bombing under serious doubt and mandates a re-opening of an investigation into the terror attack that killed 168 people.

The video was released by Bill Bean, a film producer who has suffered intense surveillance and harassment since taking the footage, and is the subject of a
February 2007 Hustler Magazine feature story.