(To see photos of Thomas Friedman giving his keynote speech at the 2008 Book Expo, the front cover of his book, my son Joe practicing up for Fathers Day with baby Mena in a front-pack and a self-portrait of me hanging out with the Undead, go to my blog.)
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Okay. Suppose that you are Noah -- yes, that Noah, the one in the Bible. And you know that a huge flood is coming. But instead of building your ark, you spend your days shopping for high heels at Wal-Mart. This is the best analogy that I can come up with in order to point out to Americans which dangers threatening us today are urgently crucially real -- and which dangers are pretty much trumped up.
Even Noah, if he thought long enough, should be able to tell the difference between the minimum level of danger that America is now facing from "terrorists," and the HUGE level of danger that America is now facing due to global warming, population growth and the disintegration of civilization as we know it -- or, as author Thomas Friedman calls these three critical dangers -- "Hot, Flat and Crowded".
If America withdraws from Iraq, what is the worse that can happen? Some Sunni and Shia tribesmen will kill each other, Iran will become a "Superpower" (like that's ever gonna happen), Israel will be forced to stop running a mini-Auschwitz in Gaza and the price of oil will either go up or go DOWN.
But if America becomes "Hot, Flat and Crowded," everyone here will be screwed -- forever. Noah, stop shopping for trinkets and start building that freaking ark. The big flood is HERE.
I dearly love the US military. But it is WASTING ITS TIME fighting foreign wars and Bush's so-called "War on Terror" when the real danger to America is lurking right here at home like some sort of zombie. Or vampire. Or what other form of Undead that is your current favorite right now. Werewolves? Frankenstein? "How about brain-sucking pod-people, mind-slaves and savage alien invaders!" my daughter Ashley calls out from the next room. Sure. Those too.
While America is being purposely distracted by Bush's puny, paltry and poor-spirited "War on Terror" and Noah is out shopping for Gucci knock-offs at Target instead of keeping an eye on the ark, our country is being left defenseless, unprotected and without lifeboats while the biggest Flood ever is rapidly heading our way. "Noah! Get your freaking arse in gear!" I scream at the top of my lungs -- but nobody ever listens to ME. However. Maybe someone will listen to world-renowned New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman.
Even though Friedman apparently claimed back in 2003 that the "war" on Iraq was totally necessary when it was NOT, he now appears to be trying to redeem himself by trying to warn us about an actual REAL danger. And I think that this time he finally got it right.
"But Friedman did not just sell us out on Iraq," stated one former Marine that I correspond with regularly. "He is also a full-blooded globalist who wants to use the Marines to further globalization. Globalization is his God. Friedman is blinded by religion -- and his religion is corporatism."
"Really? I thought that the book he wrote about Beirut made some pretty good points. And now he is one of the few mainstream journalists who is actually talking about the gravest danger to civilization since Genghis Khan." Or perhaps Freddie Kreuger.
"Give it up, Jane," my friend replied. "Friedman is no ecological hero. If you are going to write about Friedman out of the context of what he has been preaching for decades, that's a mistake. The guy flies to India for one week, visits a few tech centers, overnights in New Delphi and then flies back to New York where he writes about the blooming glories of India. How about the 800 million Indians living in absolute squalor with no education and less of a future thanks to 'globalization'? Friedman was too busy to see them. The man should be put in a cage and stuck up on a lightpost at 57th Street and 7th Avenue to entertain tourists." Okay. I get the picture. There are some people out there who are definitely NOT Friedman fans.
Be that as it may, Thomas Friedman was giving the keynote speech at the 2008 Book Expo and I was totally looking forward to that. So I ran up and down a bunch of endless hallways at the L.A. convention center, located his room, pushed my way past three or four hundred booksellers and librarians to an empty chair in the third row, got out some scrap paper and started to take notes.
Here's what Friedman said: "If we want things to stay as they are here in America, things have GOT to change. And fast. Our country has lost its groove and we can get it back by helping the world change too. Global warming and global flattening -- that's what happens when poverty meets crowding -- are the major disasters facing us today. It's like the developed world has filled the bathtub and now India and China have just turned on the shower. And in our lifetime, the world's population will triple."
Hey, this is good stuff. I took notes as fast as I could on the back of a flier put out by Random House about John Zogby's new book because I had just run directly from Zogby's lecture to Friedman's and had nothing else to write on.
"There are five major trends driving us today -- energy supply and demand, petro-dictatorships, poverty, food supply and demand and biodiversity loss. We will have one billion more people on the planet in the next 12 years. And if we gave each one of those new people one single incandescent light bulb, we would need 20 more power plants just to turn on those billion bulbs. The 'Common Era' is over. Today's date is EC 1." I missed what Friedman said that EC stood for but I assume that it was something not good.
Stillwater is a freelance writer who hates injustice and corruption in any form but especially injustice and corruption paid for by American taxpayers. She has recently published a book entitled, "Bring Your Own Flak Jacket: Helpful Tips For Touring Today's Middle East". According to Ms. Stillwater, "It's a fabulous and entertaining book. I loved writing it. And I hope that you will love reading it too." It's available at http://www.amazon.com/Bring-Your-Own-Flak-Jacket/dp/0978615719 or you can special order it at any independent bookstore.
In the Report From Iron Mountain, said to have been commissioned at the time of the Kennedy Administration, but not completed until after his death, it concluded in part that in order to maintain social control in the absence of war, we need an external threat. Our leaders create these threats for our own good, so they believe. Remember, in order for men who believe themsleves to be good to do evil, they must believe that the end justifies the means, and that evil they do is to achieve good. Good as in whats good for them must be good for us.
What we call Wars today are essentially military exercises to present the appearance of war and an external threat, but which are essentially target practice with an unfortunate "enemy" and human sacrifice of Americans in numbers that are acceptable to the people. These are not real wars since they are not being fought to be won, the conflict is extended by design, and there is no risk of sovereignty
[actually we have already surrendered sovereignty to the defacto World Government operating in the shadows].
Some extracts froom the report (google it for the entire report if still available, my copy is in pdf format)
" The existence of an accepted external menace,.... is essential to social cohesiveness as well as to the acceptance of political authority. The menace must be believable, it must be of a magnitude consistent with the complexity of the society threatened, and it must appear, at least, to affect the entire society."
snip
"Credibility, in fact, lies at the heart of the problem of developing a political substitute for war. This is where the space-race proposals, in many ways so well suited as economic substitutes for war, fall short. The most ambitious and unrealistic space project cannot of itself generate a believable external menace.
It has been hotly argued that such a menace would offer the "last, best hope of peace," etc., by uniting mankind against the danger of destruction by "creatures" from other planets or from outer space. Experiments have been proposed to test the credibility of an out-of-our-world invasion threat; it is possible that a few of the more difficult-to-explain "flying saucer" incidents of recent years were in fact early experiments of this kind. If so, they could hardly have been judged encouraging."
[technology today, esp with HAARP, satellites, etc could make a threat more easily staged and believable. UFO sighting are reported in order to keep this card on the table ]
snip
"The environmental pollution model does not seem sufficiently responsive to immediate social control, except through arbitrary acceleration of current pollution trends; this in turn raises questions of political acceptability. New, less regressive, approaches to the creation of fictitious global "enemies" invite further investigation"
[The bugs have been worked out and a hotter sun has taken us from Global cooling in the 60's and 70's to Global Warming of today, which has been hyped for this purpose, and it is a big hoax, as is the fact we are running out of oil soon]
So Obamas change will be to bring us into the War against the Global Warming Terror Bunnies (otherwise known as the gas guzzling consumer). Carbon caps and Carbon trading will be the weapon used to fight this. It will of course, benefit nobody but the carbon traders who are the same guys that speculate in oil and have given us high oil prices. This will mean lower standard of living for Americans and an exodus of whats left of our manufacturing. It will do absolutely nothing for the planet since carbon in the air is actually feeding our plants and improving crop yields, and China is moving towards coal and will exceed our carbon emissions soon. The warming that has occured, even if attributed entirely to CO2, has been beneficial. Both McCain and Obama said they would sign the Lieberman bill next year.
Of course, they still might keep the GWOT going, just need to do another 9/11, blame it on Iran, and then Obama will lead the charge to keep Israel safe and retaliate for the attack.
by
pft (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 337 comments)
on Thursday, June 12, 2008 at 7:08:09 PM
