“The more you begin to investigate what we think we understand, where we came from, what we think we’re doing, the more you begin to see we’ve been lied to, we’ve been lied to by every institution…”
— Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Zeitgeist

“The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
— Hunter S. Thompson

The entire global economy depends not just on politicians and economists and crooked financial industry executives who make decisions for the world, but on transportation; planes, trains, trucks, and automobiles.

Nothing gets delivered. Nothing gets anywhere. Not food, Not goods. Nothing. Anywhere. Without transportation.

And all of our transportation systems depend on oil and cannot function without oil.

Transportation is the heart that pumps the blood to drive the economy. Energy, oil, is the nourishment that enables the heart to keep on pumping.



What happens when the heart stops pumping? The body, the economy, dies.

Fatih Birol is the chief economist of the International Energy Agency (IEA), and each year publishes the World Energy Outlook, the forecasting report that governments all over the world use to know what energy supplies will be available when planning development of transportation strategies and systems to keep the economy humming along.

Systems that will use the energy Birol’s report tells them will be available to power that development.

George Monbiot is the author of the best selling books Heat: how to stop the planet burning; The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order and Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain; as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man’s Land. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper. He lives in mid-Wales with his daughter Hanna.

Britain’s leading green commentator, George Monbiot, talks to Fatih Birol at the IEA in the Real News video below, who reveals for the first time a startling and worrying prediction for the date of peak oil.

And finds that the rate of decline of oil production that Birol and The International Energy Agency have been giving to governments around the world for the past few years has been simply an assumption – a guess – based on no research at all.

This article and video are from PETA.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), with more than 2.0 million members and supporters, is the largest animal rights organization in the world.

PETA focuses its attention on the four areas in which the largest numbers of animals suffer the most intensely for the longest periods of time: on factory farms, in laboratories, in the clothing trade, and in the entertainment industry. We also work on a variety of other issues, including the cruel killing of beavers, birds and other “pests,” and the abuse of backyard dogs.

PETA works through public education, cruelty investigations, research, animal rescue, legislation, special events, celebrity involvement, and protest campaigns.

Skinned Alive. Why? China supplies more than half the finished furs garments imported for sale in the U.S.

When undercover investigators made their way onto Chinese fur farms recently, they found that many animals are still alive and struggling desperately when workers flip them onto their backs or hang them up by their legs or tails to skin them. When workers on these farms begin to cut the skin and fur from an animal’s leg, the free limbs kick and writhe. Workers stomp on the necks and heads of animals who struggle too hard to allow a clean cut.

When the fur is finally peeled off over the animals’ heads, their naked, bloody bodies are thrown onto a pile of those who have gone before them. Some are still alive, breathing in ragged gasps and blinking slowly. Some of the animals’ hearts are still beating five to 10 minutes after they are skinned. One investigator recorded a skinned raccoon dog on the heap of carcasses who had enough strength to lift his bloodied head and stare into the camera.

Pledge to go fur-free at PETA.org.

“We’ve got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel.”

— George W. Bush

“The regime has longstanding and continuing ties to terrorist groups, and there are Al Qaida terrorists inside Iraq.”

— George W. Bush

“The Iranian regime supports violent extremists and challenges us across the region. It pursues a nuclear capability that could spark a dangerous arms race and raise the prospect of a transfer of nuclear know-how to terrorists. Its president denies the Holocaust and threatens to wipe Israel off the map. The danger from Iran is grave, it is real, and my goal will be to eliminate this threat.”

— Barack Obama

So what did Ahmadinejad actually say? To quote his exact words in farsi: “Imam ghoft een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad.”

Iran’s President Did Not Say “Israel must be wiped off the map”.

“The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time”.

Word by word translation: “Imam (Khomeini) ghoft (said) een (this) rezhim-e (regime) ishghalgar-e (occupying) qods (Jerusalem) bayad (must) az safheh-ye ruzgar (from page of time) mahv shavad (vanish from).“

++ (see explanation below)

How many people across the left blogosphere over the past eight years have said words to the effect “This regime occupying the White House must vanish from the page of time.”? Terrorists all?

So what’s the explanation here? Why is Barack Obama so intent on continuing the same hawkish warlike rhetoric and foreign policies vis a vis Iran? Why the continuation of Bush’s WOT lies?

Weren’t we supposed to be entering a new more enlightened geopolitical era with Obama’s election?

In an interview with Paul Jay of The Real News, historian and investigative journalist on US foreign policy and military policy analyst Gareth Porter describes the general unwillingness in the US to accept the level of clout that Iran has in the Middle East and how this is viewed in Tehran.

Gareth, who returned days earlier from a trip to Iran, points to Iran’s influence over major players in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine as examples of the broader question that is on the table in any discussion of Iran’s nuclear program, and that is whether or not the US will accept an Iran that exercises influence over the region?

“What I’m learning is that the highest officials in our land have proven to be less than capable in making decisions that affect the lives of so many Americans, that we’ve seen about faces, changes of strategy, no clear coherent strategy for fixing a world-shattering crisis.”

Emma Coleman Jordan
On Bill Moyers Journal
Friday, December 12, 2008

Emma Coleman Jordan is a Georgetown University legal and finance scholar. She taught for twelve years at the University of California, Davis.

She began her teaching career at Stanford Law School as a teaching fellow. She has been active in the financial services field, serving as chair of the Financial Institutions Committee of the California State Bar, drafter of the statute to regulate bank check holding practices, and co-counsel in class actions challenging bank stop-payment fee charges.

Her article, “Ending the Floating Check Game” (1985), grew out of this involvement. She organized the Financial Institutions and Consumer Financial Services section of the Association of American Law Schools.

Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.

Trickle down economics will never get us out of the mess that trickle down economics got us into.

The immediate crunch that the automakers are facing is a loss of revenue due to dropping sales greatly exacerbated by less availability of credit due to banking mismanagement encouraged by deregulation over the past couple of decades.

If that is true then the immediate crunch that the automakers are facing is a symptom of a larger “disease”, and not the cause of the disease.

Another countries leaders are threatening your country and threatening your countries allies with very aggressive rhetoric of “annihilation” while they appear to be building nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, and have a navy that can affect access to and shipping in the Persian Gulf and the flow of oil out of the gulf.

Should the President and/or his Foreign Policy designates sit down at the negotiating table and talk to them face to face like adults, or just dismiss them as terrorists?

Those are some of the questions on the minds of many Iranians these days, as they try to make sense of US Foreign Policy signals.