Official report says US CO2 to rise by 20%

A draft report prepared by the Bush administration admits that emissions of greenhouse gases by the United States will rise by 2020 to 20% above 2000 levels, flying in the face of warnings from scientists that drastic action to cut emissions is needed if environmental catastrophe is to be averted.
The internal administration report, which has been obtained by the Associated Press, should have been handed to the United Nations more than a year ago as part of the world body’s monitoring of climate change, but its publication has been delayed. The draft estimates that US emissions of so-called greenhouse gases, largely from the burning of oil, coil and natural gas, will rise from 7.7bn tons in 2000 to 9.2bn tons in 2020 – an increase of 19.5%.

Posted by: b | Mar 5 2007 10:18 utc | 4

If Hans Blix had any balls (moral fiber or whatever) — he could have nixed the Iraq invasion.
On another topic, this hasn’t had much coverage:-

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan on Sunday angrily denounced the war in Iraq and called for the impeachment of US President George W. Bush in an appearance billed as his final public address.
“What should they do about a man who has been lying to America?” Farrakhan said.

I heard a brief soundbite on ABC Australia. Quite stirring and passionate, but I’m thinking, all of America knows this man is a liar — and they don’t give a shit. (Same goes for Blair).
The fact that both Bush (and Blair) were re-elected (and are still there) just kind of leaves me thinking, well, what are we getting all worked up about? What’s worth saving?

Posted by: DM | Mar 5 2007 10:42 utc | 6

Is Israel Falling Apart?

Foreign observers of Israel tend to focus so intently on the dangers the country faces from its Arab neighbours that they have largely missed an astonishing story that has been accelerating over the past few months: that of the Jewish state’s possible move toward internal collapse.
…
So let us ask again: is Israeli democracy in danger? This democracy is young, evolving, and certainly not indestructible. For a while it has been showing clear signs of strain; not least, the inability to maintain reasonable political stability amid the frequent turnovers of ministers and administrations. Now it is showing even clearer signs of deep crisis. According to every survey and poll, levels of popular confidence in the system have never been so low. People are turning their backs on politics as never before. Indeed, the very violence with which the public is pouncing on every falling public figure is a sign of how deep the anger runs. The present void might well encourage those who promise a radical cleansing of the Augean stables in return for a different kind of political rule – and is it such a stretch of the imagination to see them succeeding?
…
Gaydamak does not want to enter politics himself – or so he says. Indeed, he cannot even speak Hebrew – his speeches are all translated. What Gaydamak wants, and says almost explicitly, is to use his money to become the king maker of Israeli politics: he wants to choose singlehandedly the next Israeli prime minister. And based on current polls, his ambitions cannot be set aside lightly. But if Gaydamak is convinced that the Israeli electorate is for sale, and if the voters are willing to prove him right; and if this transaction is now happening in the public eye, and met with more applause than dismay; then the problem is not one of the political class alone. Israeli democracy is in severe crisis: the friends of the Jewish state should be mobilizing post-haste to help Israeli citizens, jaded, disappointed and angry as they might be, ensure it is not a fatal one.

Posted by: b | Mar 5 2007 14:00 utc | 8

william blum’s march issue of the Anti-Empire Report now up

Posted by: b real | Mar 5 2007 18:00 utc | 10

@ #6

“If Hans Blix had any balls (moral fiber or whatever) — he could have nixed the Iraq invasion”

No balls, no moral fiber? He could have nixed it?
Sorry, but that seems like a cheap shot, DM.
If I had the kind of crap thrown at me that Blix has taken, I don’t know if I could keep talking.

Posted by: Chuck Cliff | Mar 5 2007 20:24 utc | 12

on today’s hideous bombing of the book market:

The book market along Mutanabi Street was a throwback to the Baghdad of old, the days of students browsing for texts, turbaned clerics hunting down religious tomes and cafe intellectuals debating politics over backgammon.
Somehow it survived the war, until Monday, when a powerful suicide car bomb hit the market, slicing through the heart of the capital’s intellectual scene. It killed at least 20 people and wounded more than 65.

Apparently, the old market has suffered previous attacks:

I had been visiting al-Mutanabi for years and always found it a relief from the oppressive atmosphere in the rest of the city. The street runs between the Tigris river and al-Rashid Street, now shabby and decayed but once the commercial heart of Baghdad. The bookshops are small and open all the time; on Fridays there is a market, when vendors lay out their books in Arabic and English on mats on the dusty and broken surface of the road, which is closed to traffic. Most books are secondhand. In the 1990s, after the First Gulf War, I used to walk around the district looking at books, often English classics once owned by students. Difficult words were underlined and translated into Arabic in the margin. There was plenty of stock as the Iraqi intelligentsia, progressively ruined by sanctions, sold off their libraries.
The market was carefully monitored by a section of the alAmn al-Amm led by Major Jammal Askar, a poet who used to write poems in praise of Saddam. He oversaw the banning of books on modern Iraq, mostly histories and memoirs written by exiles, and works by Shia and Sunni clerics. Even so, books, often printed in Beirut, were smuggled in through Jordan, Syria and Turkey. `You could bribe the officials at the border to let in religious books, but not political books,’ one bookseller told me. `We used to take off the covers and replace them with the jackets of Baath party books which they approved of.’ Often only one copy was brought in, photocopied a hundred or more times and then sold covertly. The Amn al-Anon, its operations on the street led by a certain Captain Khalid, launched repeated raids to find out who was selling them.
…
The booksellers in al-Mutanabi were relieved that, with the fall of Saddam, Major Askar and Captain Khalid had disappeared, but by the end of this first summer under occupation they were already wary of talking of the future. By now they were selling books by Shia clerics as well as big pictures of Hussein and Abbas, the Shia martyrs. When I asked a group of booksellers standing beside Haidar what they thought would happen, one said, without much confidence, that `Saddam Hussein was difficult to overthrow, but the Americans will be easier to get rid of. Iraqis were having difficulty adjusting to the sheer pace of events since the beginning of the year: the bombing of Baghdad, the end of Saddam, the looting, the broiling summer without electricity, the banditry and the first sporadic guerrilla attacks. New problems appeared almost daily. As I walked away from the book market a Kurd came up to us. He had just heard that the US had invited 10,000 Turkish troops into Iraq. `I want to tell you that the Americans are going to betray us again just as they did in 1975 and 1991,’ he said.
I visited al-Mutanabi market every few weeks during the summer and autumn. Works by Shia theologians still lay on the ground beside elderly volumes of Shakespeare and Dickens. Then one evening at the end of October I heard there had been a bomb explosion in the area. When I got there next [81] morning I saw that several tall houses supported by white pillars on the comer of Mutanabi and Rashid Street had been burned out. Distraught booksellers, whose shops had been on the lower floors, were looking at the smouldering ruins. `They are destroying our history,’ shouted Dr Zaki Ghazi, waving his arms in anguish. `I have lost everything,’ said Munaf Fatah Mahmoud more quietly. `I had two shops with books on Iraqi folklore and they were both bumt. I have sold books here for twenty years and how am I going to feed my children?’ His voice was almost drowned by Dr Ghazi’s lament over the damage: `This area is at the heart of Iraqi history and the Iraqi people’s struggles. First we lost the museums. Now they are letting Arabs into the country to do things like this.’–Patrick Cockburn, Occupation, pp. 80-81.

Posted by: slothrop | Mar 6 2007 3:02 utc | 14

this just came in my email from annie’s brother-in-arms howie in seattle.
pink – dear, mr. president

Posted by: conchita | Mar 6 2007 4:31 utc | 16

fauxreal, I thought of you when I read sloth’s #14–why do I grieve for books in particular when so much has been destroyed?

Posted by: catlady | Mar 6 2007 6:11 utc | 18

Because Afghanistan is supposed to be the “good” war? The one we approved of, back in October 2001?

Posted by: catlady | Mar 6 2007 6:42 utc | 20

@#12
Yea, I know, I’m not a nice person.
I’m sure Hans Blix may be a very nice person. Intelligent, diligent, thoughtful, and thorough.
When he stood up at the United Nations, he said, in too many words, that Saddam Hussein did not have any Weapons of Mass Destruction.
He said so in such a considered fashion (with a doff of the hat to Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns philosophy) — that it wasn’t quite clear to anyone what was said.
I was not aiming a cheap shot – but this is my take on the man and the moment. At that very moment, if Hans Blix had dropped the oblique references, and stated clearly and unequivocally, as he knew, that Iraq did not possess “Weapons of Mass Destruction”, it may have been enough to nix the causus belli.
Hans Blix behaved exactly as one would expect a diplomat to behave. But he knew what was coming.
From what I can remember of his speech (I have read nothing on this since) – it seems to me that he may have been as concerned about his delivery as he was on demolishing what he knew was a lie.
Too bad for all these people with their brains splattered over the ground.

Posted by: DM | Mar 6 2007 12:13 utc | 22

Libby verdict at noon: Firedoglake

Posted by: b | Mar 6 2007 17:21 utc | 24

Not so early: Libby is still out on appeal. Perhaps he will conveniently die before the appeal can be brought to trial like Kenneth Lay…

Posted by: ralphieboy | Mar 6 2007 17:24 utc | 26

i just came over from fdl to let you know.i got thru to fdl

Posted by: annie | Mar 6 2007 17:45 utc | 28

I didn’t have trouble with fdl either but what I really want to say is:
GOT’IM!
Now break out the bubbly. (I know, I know, he’ll never serve)

Posted by: beq | Mar 6 2007 17:56 utc | 30

Brief on the curious history of IIPA (the law causing Libby so much troubl, indirectly) and the Bush family’s close relationship with it. At The Next Hurrah.
Starts with Church committee in 1975, and CIA intent on silencing Phillip Agee. Includes juicy bits of spooklore — the killing of CIA chief of station Richard Welch in Athens in 1974 and CIA agents roaming Germany in 1989 with briefcases of cash, in order to buy Stasi secrets. Seems Stasi wrote down EverYThinG.

In one respect the bill was written as a tailored “get Agee” effort, in another respect it was designed as a “put the fear of God into them” effort to stop people like Sy Hersh whose late 1974 article had caused the Church-Pike hearings in the first place. Bush got the CIA Job, served 11 months, but when Carter won the election he was told that Carter would appoint his own DCI. Thus between the end of 76 and 1981 there was no action on the bill — it was introduced in two congresses, but never got out of committee. The problem was First Amendment matters.

Fun reading the whole piece.
Ultimate question: Did B43 & co. design the Plame outing, from the beginning, specifically to be hidden behind journalists, because they knew that was the protected loophole in the IIPA?

Posted by: small coke | Mar 6 2007 20:17 utc | 32

well Noirette, I can assure you that there were not 300 million Americans ganging up on Hans Blix. If there was anyone at all it was a few rightwing newspaper editors.
why the sympathy for Blix? He knew what he was getting into. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
it is not ironic, it is pathetic.

Posted by: dan of steele | Mar 6 2007 22:10 utc | 34

Vanity Fair: Iraq’s Mercenary KingAs a former C.I.A. agent, the author knows how mercenaries work: in the shadows. But how did a notorious former British officer, Tim Spicer, come to coordinate the second-largest army in Iraq—the tens of thousands of private security contractors?

I knew who Spicer was. He’d popped up on the C.I.A.’s radar after he retired from the British Army and went to work, in 1996, as the C.E.O. of Sandline International, a private military company offering “operational support” to “legitimate governments.” A year later Spicer was in Papua New Guinea, where he fielded a mercenary army for the government in order to protect a multi-national copper-mining company. After Spicer was expelled, he moved on to Sierra Leone, this time helping to ship arms to coup plotters. Spicer’s name resurfaced in 2004 in connection with a putsch aimed at Equatorial Guinea, allegedly led by Simon Mann, his friend, former army colleague, and onetime business associate. Though questioned by British officials, Spicer was not implicated in the incident.
But then, somehow, two months later, Spicer’s company, known as Aegis Defence Services, landed a $293 million Pentagon contract to coordinate security for reconstruction projects, as well as support for other private military companies, in Iraq. This effectively put him in command of the second-largest foreign armed force in the country—behind America’s but ahead of Britain’s. These men aren’t officially part of the Coalition of the Willing, because they’re all paid contractors—the Coalition of the Billing, you might call it—but they’re a crucial part of the coalition’s forces nonetheless.

Posted by: b | Mar 7 2007 10:34 utc | 36

German bishop compares Ramallah to Warsaw Ghetto

On Friday, the group went to Ramallah after a visit of a number of hours at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority. “During the visit we saw at Yad Vashem the pictures from the Warsaw Ghetto and in the evening we are traveling to Ghetto Ramallah,” Bishop Gregor Maria Hanke told reporters who accompanied the group.
Earlier, when the group crossed the separation fence, Cardinal Joachim Meisner said “something like this is done to animals, not to human beings.” Meisner, the Archbishop of Cologne, is from the former East Germany. “I never in my life thought to see something like this again,” he said.

The Israel lobby in Germany is howling over this …

Posted by: b | Mar 7 2007 11:03 utc | 38

b- thanks for that link @#37

Posted by: b real | Mar 7 2007 15:38 utc | 40

counterpunch has posted the ketcham articles online now
What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?
The Kuala Lumpur Deceit: a CIA Cover Up

Posted by: b real | Mar 7 2007 18:39 utc | 42

pepe escobar: Bush down south

SAO PAULO – US President George W Bush – biting the dust in Iraq, contested at home, despised around the world – is taking a break and heading south on a five-stop tour of Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico. He is not visiting the 100,000-hectare family ranch his daughter Barbara bought last autumn in the Paraguayan chaco. He might be tempted to stay in.
The Bush reception won’t be exactly of the Rolling Stones variety. Massive protests are scheduled everywhere – even in countries where he is not showing up. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez – Bush’s continental nemesis – will address a huge crowd in Buenos Aires, probably in a soccer stadium, as US Secret Service paranoia turns Sao Paulo into an immense Green Zone.
This had to be, fundamentally, a Bush-against-Chavez tour. Inevitably, it is also a Bush-against-Ahmadinejad tour. Last month, strengthening ties with Latin America, the Iranian president visited Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua, which in the neo-con scheme of things qualify, along with gas-rich Bolivia, as the southern “axis of evil”.
For the Bush visit, the White House/State Department tactic is once again imperial “divide and rule’.

james petras: The First Line of Defense of the Empire is the Local Client President

In the Great Contest between Chavez and Bush, between national-popular welfare initiatives and the reactionary regressive neo-liberal status quo, there is no question that Chavez is winning and the US is losing influence. Bush’s visit to Latin American is an effort to recoup declining imperial influence by consolidating ties with both the rightist client regimes (Garcia in Peru and Calderon in Mexico) and the pseudo ‘center-left’ neo-liberal regimes of Vazquez and Lula. The purpose is to integrate these client regimes into the US economic and diplomatic orbit and to construct an anti-Chavez coalition. Given that Bush has no popular support in Latin America, he will only meet with client rulers behind closed doors with heavy security protecting him. Parallel to Bush’s visit, President Chavez will visit Argentina where tens of thousands of people will attend a mass public meeting to welcome him. The Chavez-Bush visits reflect the profound polarization in Latin America, in which the vast majority of the people and a few governments stand with Chavez while corrupt and discredited ‘ex-leftists’ embrace the emperor. Washington’s clients, Vazquez, Lula, and Calderon will answer to their people who demonstrate in the streets that the governments who welcome Bush do no represent their opinions or interests. No government can claim to be ‘progressive’ which welcomes and signs military base and free trade agreements with the worst imperial President in US history.

borev.net: Latin America is as Excited As We Are
Bush’s Magical Mystery Tour stars tomorrow, and as AP photographers document, the welcome wagons are already rolling into high gear.

mark weisbrot: Washington Is Losing Its Grip on Latin America

This week President Bush heads South for a seven-day, five country, trip to Latin America to see if he can counter the populist political tide that has brought left governments to about half the population of the region.
Carrying vague promises of a joint effort on ethanol production — but no offer to lower tariffs protecting the U.S. market — President Bush hopes to entice Brazil into taking his side against his nemesis, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. This is a fantasy.
President Lula da Silva of Brazil made a point of visiting Venezuela for his first foreign trip after being re-elected last October. There he presided over the dedication of a $1.2 billion bridge over the Orinoco river, financed by the Brazilian government, while he lavished praise on Chavez and gave the popular Venezuelan president an added boost in his own re-election campaign.
The Bush Administration’s policy of trying to isolate Venezuela from its neighbors has only succeeded in isolating Washington. Last week President Nestor Kirchner of Argentina, speaking in Caracas, flatly rejected the notion that Argentina or Brazil should “contain President Chavez,” who he called “a brother and a friend.” In another thinly-veiled swipe at Washington, Kirchner said: “It cannot be that it bothers anyone that our nations become integrated.” At the same time he announced that Venezuela and Argentina will jointly issue a “Bond of the South” for $1.5 billion.

Posted by: b real | Mar 7 2007 19:26 utc | 44

There are excerpts from a story by Michael O’McCarthy at GI Special, a meditation on the abuse of American troops in warfare with some very personal observations.
But the most salient observation, the answer to the question, “How can this keep going on?” :

However, nothing has been as clear as the total and systemic neglect for the well being of the average American citizen than the outrage that continues within the military medical system and that of the VA.
Why have these systems not been fixed as the politicians clamber for reform time after time? It is more than just the excrement of denial!
There is a far more profound question to be asked about this systemic maltreatment:
Why would a Congress, which functions as the chief lobbyists of a “for profit healthcare system,” appropriately see to the delivery of the best example of socialized medicine?
Why is it that every time the harbingers of economic doom speak of reform they talk of cutting the social welfare programs of Medicare and Social Security?
Because the system is geared to fail; its failures hidden under the flag of patriot zeal until there is disclosure of its gross human casualty.

The indictment is startling and at once puts the whole sorry mess in the context of the corrupt political class, in service to its corporate employers, at war against the people… all of us, Americans and otherwise.
Scroll down through the issue. You can look into the eyes of Justin Rollins, 22, from Newport NH. 82nd Airborne. Murdered by the present American regime in Iraq on 6 March.
A little farther down the page the smiling face of Spc. Luis O. Rodriguez-Contrera, of Allentown PA, also 22, appears. Murdered by the present American regime on 2 March.
Down a little farther and you’ll see two unnamed and unlegged men in Walter Reed. One perched on his artificial legs, starring into the future.
Then a picture of Jonathan Hutto, USN, and Liam Madden, USMC who together began the “Appeal For Redress”. Striking back at the Evil Empire in Washington DC.
Towards the end of this edition is a picture of a smiling Muhammad Ali, who refused induction forty years ago on 6 March, 1967 saying “I ain’t got no quarrel with those Vietcong.”
We may go on and on, chasing our tails, and scratching ourselves to distraction… but it’s the people being murdered and maimed who, stirring their own bloody stumps, will finally have to end this.
Our enemies are not in the Middle East.
They are in Washington DC.
Support Our Troops.
And they will save us.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Mar 8 2007 3:08 utc | 46

Ah, behold the power of a Democrat congressional majority!
The party that could not unite to bring articles of impeachment against the President or Vice-President for their well-known laundry list of high crimes, who would not unite to protect civil liberties lost to the USAPATRIOT Act, who would not unite to prevent torture and “extraordinary renditions”, who would not act in concert to close down the abomination of Guantanamo Bay (“secret” tribunals begin Friday! Bring a buddy, tell a friend!), who would not unite to stop funding the massacre of Iraqis long after the “mission” was supposedly “accomplished”, who would not unite to filibuster the packing of the US Supreme Court with fascists…
okay, I’m tired and this list could chew up some serious bandwidth… well, they have finally found an issue that absolutely, positively crosses the line. The President had just better NOT pardon a meaningless, mid-level lackey and undo a sideshow that was three years in the making!
All hail Pelosi! All hail the mighty Democrat Party! The Age of the Blank Cheque is over, and the Age of the Non-Binding Resolution has begun! Let there be stern finger-waggling and tongue-clucking throughout the land!

Posted by: Monolycus | Mar 8 2007 4:33 utc | 48

oh fuck, everybody and their god damn brother knows exactly what she was saying.
yeah, a faggot used to be a cig, or was that a fag? even the ‘joke’ reference was the tv show where the ‘faggot’ in question was gay. she already called gore gay. screw her excuse. really this is asinine!
she’s a friggin bitch and the most famous face of the conservative movement.
pardon my french

Posted by: annie | Mar 8 2007 7:57 utc | 50

I keep thinking about what Indira Singh said about Patrick Fitzgerald just after he got put on the Plame case. She didn’t trust him. Thought he was a tool of the Powers That Be and that a fall guy would be put up and the real players would walk. This was based on another case she had followed. I think it was the 93 WTC bombing, but I’m not sure…
Anyone?
p.s. Is it just me or has comments fallen off considerably here at da moon?
However, one thing is sure, we are soon to be reaching the one million mark in visitors. I predict mid summer, if not sooner.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Mar 8 2007 9:41 utc | 52

Petraeus: Force will not solve Iraq
Maybe “we” need more troops though. Maybe they will have to stay for a long time.
Al Jazeera reminds us :

An estimated 655,000 Iraqis, 2.5 per cent of the population, have been killed as a result of the invasion, according to an estimate in October by the Lancet, the British medical journal, and the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the city of Baltimore in Maryland, US.

That’s one in forty Iraqis murdered for Oil. Murdered to profit the War Profiteers. Murdered for Greater Israel.
One in forty.
Yeah. I think comments are dropping off.
What can you say to this.
I guess you can say we’re four times better than the Romans.
We’re beasts.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Mar 8 2007 14:35 utc | 54

b real @55, that one made me physically ill.
uncle @52, i agree. i also think this is a trend that exends beyond moa. booman has had a few things to say about it. also wondering, when is the last time you and other folks from here checked out le speak? you generally catch the scent of trouble at dkos, but i think you must have missed this week’s second departure of armando. this one, i fear, does not bode well for the site nor for the left blogosphere in general.

Posted by: conchita | Mar 8 2007 17:15 utc | 56

uncle
i don’t know how b feels but i have always felt the flow is organic
given what is happening in this world & given the fact that we also live outside this electricity of ours – i think it is completely natural that we get exhausted & that will be reflected in post
sometimes it is delicate, elegant & slow & sometimes we are like machine guns trying to make sense of the felonious way our world(s) are (run)

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Mar 8 2007 20:29 utc | 58

lots of festivities going on down south, r’giap. not expecting the u.s. media to do it justice. justin delacour over at latin america news review looks to be keeping on top of it. as will dispatches from the bolivarian revolution and lotsa others.

Posted by: b real | Mar 8 2007 23:30 utc | 60

Palestinian government must recognise Israel, says Solana

The Palestinian unity government being formed by Hamas and Fatah must clearly state that it recognises Israel, the EU’s foreign policy chief Javier Solana said today.

The Israeli government must recognize Palestine, says every sentient being on this earth. Say the rocks and sands of the “Holy Land”.
The EU is now as much an integral part of the US/Israeli extermination machine as the Israelis could hope for.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Mar 9 2007 1:53 utc | 62

In the interests of sharing out more than just despair…
Is there an Artificial God?

Q � What is the fourth age of sand?
Let me back up for a minute and talk about the way we communicate. Traditionally, we have a bunch of different ways in which we communicate with each other. One way is one-to-one; we talk to each other, have a conversation. Another is one-to-many, which I’m doing at the moment, or someone could stand up and sing a song, or announce we’ve got to go to war. Then we have many-to-one communication; we have a pretty patchy, clunky, not-really-working version we call democracy, but in a more primitive state I would stand up and say, ‘OK, we’re going to go to war’ and some may shout back ‘No we’re not!’�and then we have many-to-many communication in the argument that breaks out afterwards!
In this century (and the previous century) we modelled one-to-one communications in the telephone, which I assume we are all familiar with. We have one-to-many communication�boy do we have an awful lot of that; broadcasting, publishing, journalism, etc.�we get information poured at us from all over the place and it’s completely indiscriminate as to where it might land. It’s curious, but we don’t have to go very far back in our history until we find that all the information that reached us was relevant to us and therefore anything that happened, any news, whether it was about something that’s actually happened to us, in the next house, or in the next village, within the boundary or within our horizon, it happened in our world and if we reacted to it the world reacted back. It was all relevant to us, so for example, if somebody had a terrible accident we could crowd round and really help. Nowadays, because of the plethora of one-to-many communication we have, if a plane crashes in India we may get terribly anxious about it but our anxiety doesn’t have any impact. We’re not very well able to distinguish between a terrible emergency that’s happened to somebody a world away and something that’s happened to someone round the corner. We can’t really distinguish between them any more, which is why we get terribly upset by something that has happened to somebody in a soap opera that comes out of Hollywood and maybe less concerned when it’s happened to our sister. We’ve all become twisted and disconnected and it’s not surprising that we feel very stressed and alienated in the world because the world impacts on us but we don’t impact the world. Then there’s many-to-one; we have that, but not very well yet and there’s not much of it about. Essentially, our democratic systems are a model of that and though they’re not very good, they will improve dramatically.
But the fourth, the many-to-many, we didn’t have at all before the coming of the Internet, which, of course, runs on fibre-optics…

My apologies if you’ve heard it all before.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Mar 9 2007 3:01 utc | 64

Chemmett
thanks for saying what I would have could I write sensibly. I kind of go through cycles of up and down. Lately there have been many negative things and even the positive things that happen are too little and too late.
what to do now? carry on carrying on. we can be one of George the Elder’s “Thousand Points of Light”. Good ideas eventually win over, at least after all the bad ones fail.

Posted by: dan of steele | Mar 9 2007 8:46 utc | 66

Noam Chomsky in the Guardian: A predator becomes more dangerous when woundedWashington’s escalation of threats against Iran is driven by a determination to secure control of the region’s energy resources

In the energy-rich Middle East, only two countries have failed to subordinate themselves to Washington’s basic demands: Iran and Syria. Accordingly both are enemies, Iran by far the more important. As was the norm during the cold war, resort to violence is regularly justified as a reaction to the malign influence of the main enemy, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. Unsurprisingly, as Bush sends more troops to Iraq, tales surface of Iranian interference in the internal affairs of Iraq – a country otherwise free from any foreign interference – on the tacit assumption that Washington rules the world.
…
For the US, the primary issue in the Middle East has been, and remains, effective control of its unparalleled energy resources. Access is a secondary matter. Once the oil is on the seas it goes anywhere. Control is understood to be an instrument of global dominance. Iranian influence in the “crescent” challenges US control. By an accident of geography, the world’s major oil resources are in largely Shia areas of the Middle East: southern Iraq, adjacent regions of Saudi Arabia and Iran, with some of the major reserves of natural gas as well. Washington’s worst nightmare would be a loose Shia alliance controlling most of the world’s oil and independent of the US.
Such a bloc, if it emerges, might even join the Asian Energy Security Grid based in China. Iran could be a lynchpin. If the Bush planners bring that about, they will have seriously undermined the US position of power in the world.
…
Despite the sabre-rattling it is, I suspect, unlikely that the Bush administration will attack Iran. Public opinion in the US and around the world is overwhelmingly opposed. It appears that the US military and intelligence community is also opposed.
…
Then again, a predator becomes even more dangerous, and less predictable, when wounded. In desperation to salvage something, the administration might risk even greater disasters.
…

Posted by: b | Mar 9 2007 11:15 utc | 68

The Angry Arab says Hillary will trot out this pic of Obama speaking with Edward Said, who’s a bad person because he thinks Palestinians are people. Bu there wouldn’t necessarily be an overt rebuke. The poison would look more like this.
By the way, Said said things like this (from Wikipedia, although with a second’s worth of googling you could probably find several Democracy Now Interviews):
In August 2003, in an article published online in counterpunch, Said summarizes his position on the contemporary rights of Palestinians vis-à-vis the historical experience of the Jewish people:

I have spent a great deal of my life during the past 35 years advocating the rights of the Palestinian people to national self-determination, but I have always tried to do that with full attention paid to the reality of the Jewish people and what they suffered by way of persecution and genocide. The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, co-existence, and not further suppression and denial.

via

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Mar 9 2007 16:29 utc | 70

“So, who is left to lead the action. … Everyone’s working hard & spending their free time engaged in totally atomised pursuits like being online, alone.
Posted by: jj | Mar 9, 2007 5:23:53 AM | 67
That’s probably why it seems ‘nothing is changing’.
We simply do not have a loud enough voice.
We need a *national* voice.
Our best chance is to support public media to the tune of at least as much as we pay for the daily rag that is delivered to our door.
How do we get that message out to more than the few dozen faithful here? Many of whom are Expats.
They don’t make them like Eugene Debs anymore.

Posted by: pb | Mar 9 2007 17:53 utc | 72

Speaking of Latin America, anyone remembering Nelson Rockefeller’s trip back when??

Posted by: jj | Mar 9 2007 18:08 utc | 74

Unfortunately, the only way I see positive change taking place in the near future would be a major economic recession.
i believe this is the only ‘beneficial’ aspect of the war in iraq. it is really a tragedy to many iraqis have to die for america to get pushed off it’s pedestal. faster please. i have no idea what having a different world superpower will mean for the globe, but i am ready for this one to step down. as a society that floows the money, the way out is to follow the decline of funds. when we are sucked dry will the aparatus be in place for our elite to replace the need for us by sucking off the ME teet?
we need to unlegislate corporate personhood.

Posted by: annie | Mar 9 2007 21:18 utc | 76