2011 Kia Optima: One Epic Ride — Big Game 2011 Commercial
Check out this very cool ad for the Kia Optima which includes an alien, flying saucer, worm hole and ancient Mayans. Apparently Graham Hancock is now writing ads for car companies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGj6iSZvak
Filed under: Current Events, Films | Tagged: Kia Optima ad | 1 Comment »
Over the last twenty-some years, in more than a dozen of his books and annual reports, Lester Brown has been describing the interlocking global economic/ecological changes that are converging in multiple ways to a variety of catastrophic outcomes – with rapidly increasing probability estimates. Here is a (a selection from) a press release on his latest work – on the impending collapse of the world food bubble. His statistical work is impeccable and his perceptions and predictions are being studied by government and scientific experts around the world. They should be required reading for all – especially journalists, school teachers and those charged with the responsibility of educating the public.
“If we cannot reverse these trends, economic decline is inevitable,” notes Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental research organization. “No civilization has survived the ongoing destruction of its natural support systems. Nor will ours.
“The question is not whether the food bubble will burst but when,” says Brown. While the U.S. housing bubble was created by the overextension of credit, the food bubble is based on the overuse of land and water resources. It is further threatened by the climate stresses deriving from the excessive burning of fossil fuels. When the U.S. housing bubble burst, it sent shockwaves through the world economy, culminating in the worst recession since the Great Depression. When the food bubble bursts, food prices will soar worldwide, threatening economic and political stability everywhere. For those living on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder, survival itself could be at stake. …
“How much time do we have before the food bubble bursts?” asks Brown. “No one knows. If we stay with business as usual, the time is more likely measured in years than in decades. We are now so close to the edge that politically destabilizing food price rises could come at any time.”
“The new reality,” says Brown, “is that the world is only one poor harvest away from chaos. It is time to to reverse these trends on the scale and urgency of the U.S. mobilization for World War II. The challenge is to quickly reduce carbon emissions, stabilize population, and restore the economy’s soils, aquifers, forests, and other natural support systems. This requires not only a redefining of security but a corresponding reallocation of fiscal resources from military budgets to budgets for climate stabilization, population stabilization, water conservation, and other new threats to security.”
For decades, we environmentalists have talked about saving the planet. Now it is civilization itself that is at stake.
For the rest see: http://www.earth-policy.org/books/wote/wotepr
Filed under: Current Events, Ecology, Economics & Finance, Politics, Science | Tagged: carbon emissions, climate stress, collapse of civilization, collapsing World food supplies, Earth Policy Institute, Lester Brown, population stabilization | Leave a Comment »
Are You Ready for Life on Our Planet Circa 2011? For two decades now we’ve been ignoring the impassioned pleas of scientists that our burning of fossil fuels was a bad idea. And now we’re paying a heavy price.
If you were in the space shuttle looking down yesterday, you would have seen a pair of truly awesome, even fearful, sights.
Much of North America was obscured by a 2,000-mile storm dumping vast quantities of snow from Texas to Maine–between the wind and snow, forecasters described it as “probably the worst snowstorm ever to affect” Chicago, and said waves as high as 25 feet were rocking buoys on Lake Michigan.
Meanwhile, along the shore of Queensland in Australia, the vast cyclone Yasi was sweeping ashore; though the storm hit at low tide, the country’s weather service warned that “the impact is likely to be more life threatening than any experienced during recent generations,” especially since its torrential rains are now falling on ground already flooded from earlier storms. Here’s how Queensland premier Anna Bligh addressed her people before the storm hit: “We know that the long hours ahead of you are going to be the hardest that you face. We will be thinking of you every minute of every hour between now and daylight and we hope that you can feel our thoughts, that you will take strength from the fact that we are keeping you close and in our hearts.”
Welcome to our planet, circa 2011–a planet that, like some unruly adolescent, has decided to test the boundaries. For two centuries now we’ve been burning coal and oil and gas and thus pouring carbon into the atmosphere; for two decades now we’ve been ignoring the increasingly impassioned pleas of scientists that this is a Bad Idea. And now we’re getting pinched.
Oh, there have been snowstorms before, and cyclones–our planet has always produced extreme events. But by definition extreme events are supposed to be rare, and all of a sudden they’re not. In 2010 nineteen nations set new all-time temperature records (itself a record!) and when the mercury hit 128 in early June along the Indus, the entire continent of Asia set a new all-time temperature mark. Russia caught on fire; Pakistan drowned. Munich Re, the biggest insurance company on earth, summed up the annus horribilis last month with this clinical phrase: “the high number of weather-related natural catastrophes and record temperatures both globally and in different regions of the world provide further indications of advancing climate change.”
You don’t need a PhD to understand what’s happening. That carbon we’ve poured into the air traps more of the sun’s heat near the planet. And that extra energy expresses itself in a thousand ways, from melting ice to powering storms. Since warm air can hold more water vapor than cold, it’s not surprising that the atmosphere is 4% moister than it was 40 years ago. That “4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms,” said Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate analysis section at the government’s National Center for Atmospheric Research. It loads the dice for record rain and snow. Yesterday the Midwest and Queensland crapped out.
The point I’m trying to make is: chemistry and physics work. We don’t just live in a suburb, or in a free-market democracy; we live on an earth that has certain rules. Physics and chemistry don’t care what John Boehner thinks, they’re unmoved by what will make Barack Obama’s re-election easier. More carbon means more heat means more trouble–and the trouble has barely begun. So far we’ve raised the temperature of the planet about a degree, which has been enough to melt the Arctic. The consensus prediction for the century is that without dramatic action to stem the use of fossil fuel–far more quickly than is politically or economically convenient–we’ll see temperatures climb five degrees this century. Given that one degree melts the Arctic, just how lucky are we feeling?
Filed under: Current Events, Ecology, Economics & Finance, Politics, Science | Tagged: Anna Bligh, Bill McKibben, cyclones, excess carbon, Extreme snowstorms in the midwest, extreme weather, fires, floods, Queensland Australia, snow storms | Leave a Comment »
For a totally upbeat explosion of joy and laughter and music, watch this five minute video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0REJ-lCGiKU
Filed under: Films | Tagged: Beethoven, child conductor, laughter, music, prodigy | 1 Comment »
Richard Wolff is an Economics Professor at the University of Massachusetts, whose documentary film Capitalism Hits the Fan
Until the 1970s, US capitalism shared its spoils with American workers. But since 2008, it has made them pay for its failures…One aspect of “American exceptionalism” was always economic. US workers, so the story went, enjoyed a rising level of real wages that afforded their families a rising standard of living. Ever harder work paid off in rising consumption. The rich got richer faster than the middle and poor, but almost no one got poorer. Nearly all citizens felt “middle class”. A profitable US capitalism kept running ahead of labor supply. So, it kept raising wages to attract waves of immigration and to retain employees, across the 19th century until the 1970s.
Then everything changed. Real wages stopped rising, as US capitalists redirected their investments to produce and employ abroad, while replacing millions of workers in the US with computers. The US women’s liberation moved millions of US adult women to seek paid employment. US capitalism no longer faced a shortage of labor…US employers took advantage of the changed situation: they stopped raising wages. …
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/18-2
January 18, 2011 by The Guardian/UK
Filed under: Current Events, Economics & Finance, Films, Modern History, Politics | Tagged: American exceptionalism, gap between rich and poor, Richard Wolff, tent cities, U.S. capitalism | Leave a Comment »
Journalist Don Lattin, author of The Harvard Psychedelic Club, is writing a book about the relationship between the philosopher/writers Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, and their shared interest in LSD, which led to Bill Wilson being cured of alcoholism and founding AA. (Fortunately for the subsequent extraordinary success story of AA, Wilson’s original idea of also using LSD as part of the program, was dropped as too controversial). The film footage shows psychiatrist Sidney Cohen conducting an LSD experimental therapy session with a woman in the 1950s – and demonstrates the extraordinary disconnect of psychedelic experiences from the worldview and understanding of mainstream psychiatry.
http://www.donlattin.com/pagehpc/dl_harvard_psychedelic_club.html
Filed under: Consciousness, Current Events, Films, Holistic Healing, Psychedelics, Science, The Sixties | Tagged: alcoholism therapy, Bill Wilson, Don Lattin, LSD, mainstream psychiatry, Psychedelics, Sydney Cohen, The Harvard Psychedelic Club | 3 Comments »
Photo slideshow shows ten Palestinian and Israeli civilians who are using nonviolence to work against the occupation. http://www.justvision.org/highlights
Filed under: Current Events, Modern History, Politics, Roots of War & Domination | Tagged: non-violence, ordinary people doing heroic things, Palestine-Israel conflict, peacemaking, resistance to occupation | Leave a Comment »
Toward Sensible Monetary Policy
By U.S. Rep. Ron Paul Monday, January 10, 2011
http://paul.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1816:…
Alone in the US Congress, Representative Ron Paul has been waging a so far largely unsuccessful campaign to unmast the “wizards behind the curtain” of the Federal Reserve – a privately owned bank that avers it requires secrecy to steer the US government monetary policies. In the new congress he was given the chairmanship of a financial subcommitte in the House and can now conduct more public hearings, in his seemingly quixotic, but necessary campaign. Here’s a recent statement of his intentions:
I am pleased that I will be chairing the Monetary Policy Subcommittee of the Financial Services Committee, which has oversight of the Federal Reserve. Obviously, this position will facilitate my efforts to ensure that the Fed provides the American people with more information about what they have been doing with and to our money.
Not surprisingly, since my chairmanship was announced, apologists for the Fed have been recycling the old canard about how increased transparency threatens the Fed’s so-called political independence.
By independence, they are referring to the Fed’s ability to greatly impact the economy with virtually no meaningful oversight. We only recently learned that the bankers at the Fed were able to use the latest financial crisis to bail out Wall Street cronies and foreign central banks with billions of dollars that were created and wasted, instead of appropriated and voted on by representatives of the people.
Filed under: Current Events, Economics & Finance, Modern History, Politics | Tagged: Federal Reserve Bank, Financial Services Committee, monetary policy, oversight of fed reserve, US Rep. Ron Paul, Wall Street cronies | Leave a Comment »
This is a powerful documentary about the Nürnberg trials in 1945 was made by Stuart and Budd Schulberg, shown in Germany to appreciative audiences, but strangely, never released in the US (ostensibly not to distract people from the new enemy-creating propaganda campaign directed at the “red menace” of the Soviet Union). The negative was lost with the sound-track, we now have a new release with a newly created sound-track and commentary. The historical significance of the Nuremberg trials cannot be overestimated: for the fist time in history, the principle of personal accountability for your actions, even (and especially) in war time, was established as a principle of law – the Nazi functionaries were not released from responsibility by claiming they were “just following orders.” As such it was the precedent for all subsequent war crimes tribunal and the impetus for the setting up of the International Court in The Hague – a court that only the Americans (who were the chief prosecutors at Nuremberg, along with the English, the French and the Russians) have so far refused to sign on to.
This film is now being shown in a couple of venues in the SF Bay Area, and has been shown around the country. The passage below is from the website:
One of the greatest courtroom dramas in history, Nuremberg: Its Lesson For Today shows how the four allied prosecution teams — from the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union — built their case against the top Nazi leaders. As documented in the film, the trial established the “Nuremberg principles,” laying the groundwork for all subsequent prosecutions, anywhere in the world, for crimes against the peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide…. The original film was written and directed by Stuart Schulberg, and edited by Joseph Zigman, under the aegis of Pare Lorentz, chief of Film/Theatre/Music at the U.S. War Department, and completed by Schulberg in 1948, under the aegis of Eric Pommer, chief of the Motion Picture Branch of U.S. Military Government in Berlin. The film makes extensive use of footage from The Nazi Plan and Nazi Concentration Camps, evidentiary films compiled under the supervision of Budd Schulberg, that were presented at the Nuremberg trial. Schulberg Productions and Metropolis Productions now present the first complete 35mm picture and sound restoration of the U.S. Government’s 1948 film about the first Nuremberg trial – the International Military Tribunal.
Filed under: Current Events, Films, Modern History, Politics, Roots of War & Domination | Tagged: Budd Schulberg, concentration camps, genocide, Germany, International Court The Hague, international military tribunal, Joseph Zigman, Nazi, Nuremberg, Pare Lorentz, Stuart Schulberg, war crimes | 2 Comments »
