Oil Shortage? What Oil Shortage?
"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." -- PJ O'Rourke
# W. Daniel Hillis at LongNow.org - Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine - I worked at Thinking Machines between 1983 and 1986. I never worked directly with Richard Feynman, but I sometimes got him a falaffel sandwich for lunch, in the days before the office had its own lunch room.
# Brendan I. Koerner at Wired - The Trillion-Barrel Tar Pit - it's heavy oil, which is harder to harvest than the Jed Clampett kind, but with oil prices rising, the money will soon be there to figure it out and do it. And the world's got at least 6 trillion barrels of it, over a trillion of them in Alberta, Canada. [wired]
Heavy oil isn't a new discovery. Native Americans have used it to caulk their canoes for centuries. Until recently, though, it's been the energy industry's stepchild - ugly, dirty, and hard to refine. But the political winds are favoring the heavy stuff, as "energy independence" - aka freedom from relying on Middle East oil - has become a war-on-terror buzz-phrase. Even President Bush has waxed optimistic about Alberta's "tar pits."
# Reuters via CNN - Protesters 'drive' Bush from Ireland - Bushnev was in Ireland over the weekend for a U.S.-E.U. summit on Iraq. Thousands of protesters were also present. More coverage of the protests at Indymedia Ireland. Check the links in the right column. Lots of pictures of the protests in Shannon here.
Some 500 demonstrators marched on Dromoland Castle, the 16th century turreted mansion in western Ireland where Bush met European Union leaders for a summit.
When they were stopped at a police road block, they staged their own version of Shakespeare's bloody Scottish tragedy.
First, a ghost with a whited-out face read the names of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. Then a woman dressed as Lady Macbeth read a list of Iraqi victims.
Finally, a woman dressed as a witch with a black pointy hat and a flowing cape cast a spell on a man wearing a Bush face mask. The man crumpled to the floor as the witch ordered him to leave Ireland and end the occupation of Iraq.
The protesters held up a banner adorned with a quote from Macbeth, Shakespeare's powerful drama of death, destruction and ambition in feudal Scotland.
"There's the smell of blood still," read the banner, on which was painted a gory hand. "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand."
Some 50 police officers watched the drama unfold from behind their roadblock, just half a mile from the castle where Bush was staying for the EU-U.S. summit. The protest passed peacefully and the crowd dispersed after around 90 minutes.
The staging of "MacBush" was one of several events organised by demonstrators to show their anger with the president's visit.
Some 10,000 people marched through Dublin on Friday night in opposition to both U.S. policy in Iraq and Ireland's decision to host Bush and allow U.S. jets to refuel at one of its airports en route to the Gulf.
# Ireland Online - Ring of steel welcome for Bush - another telling of Bushnev's visit to Ireland. [whatreallyhappened]
All routes to Shannon Airport and the luxurious castle grounds were sealed off and police officers paced roadsides keeping a watchful eye that no-one strayed into unapproved areas, while camouflaged army vehicles waited in the bushes.
Local people simply gazed on in amazement as the largest security operation in the history of the State swung into action and transformed their peaceful neighbourhoods into something not unlike a war film set.
The surreal atmosphere was compounded by the location of chemical toilets like those used at music festivals at road junctions to accommodate the needs of hundreds of troops and garda officers patrolling the remote countryside.
Previous American presidents had received a warm welcome to Ireland but Mr Bush was kept well away from the people of Shannon, the majority of whom were firmly against his visit.
Conor Creegan, of Shannon town, said: "The locals are disgusted, our life has been disrupted for several weeks now."
Fiona Wheeler, another local who had been issued with a special security pass to allow her access to her home, said she was disgusted by the "over-the-top" security arrangements.
"In my recollection the last place people had to carry passes was under Apartheid in South Africa," she said.
# Clay S. Conrad at The American Jury Institute - Doing Your Best as a Trial Juror: Surviving Voir Dire - you can't nullify a law if you're not on the jury. How a fully-informed juror can get on a jury without perjuring himself. [clairefiles]
# Michael C. Ruppert of From the Wilderness - Coup D'Etat: The Real Reason Tenet and Pavitt Resigned from the CIA on June 3rd and 4th - I'm with Mr. Ruppert. That the neocons are on the way out is very good news, but I doubt that we'll get anything better in their stead, since the president is primarily a puppet for those who really run the country. Elias Alias has a copy of this article here. [mentalmilitia]
JUNE 8, 2004 1600 PDT (FTW) - Why did DCI George Tenet suddenly resign on June 3rd, only to be followed a day later by James Pavitt, the CIA's Deputy Director of Operations (DDO)?
The real reasons, contrary to the saturation spin being put out by major news outlets, have nothing to do with Tenet's role as taking the fall for alleged 9/11 and Iraqi intelligence "failures" before the upcoming presidential election.
Both resignations, perhaps soon to be followed by resignations from Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage, are about the imminent and extremely messy demise of George W. Bush and his Neocon administration in a coup d'etat being executed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The coup, in the planning for at least two years, has apparently become an urgent priority as a number of deepening crises threaten a global meltdown.
Based upon recent developments, it appears that long-standing plans and preparations leading to indictments and impeachment of Bush, Cheney and even some senior cabinet members have been accelerated, possibly with the intent of removing or replacing the entire Bush regime prior to the Republican National Convention this August.
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The Bush administration has proved itself to be an insular group of inept, dishonest and dangerous CEO's of the corporation known as America. They have become very bad for business and the Board of Directors is now taking action. Make no mistake, the CIA works for "The Board" - Wall Street and big money. The long-term (very corrupt and unethical) agenda of the Board, in the face of multiple worsening global crises, was intended to proceed far beyond the initially destructive war in Iraq, toward an effective reconstruction and a strategic response to Peak Oil. But the neocons have stalled at the ugly stage: killing hundreds of thousands of people; destroying Iraq's industrial and cultural infrastructure as their own bombs and other people's RPGs blow everything up; getting caught running torture camps; and making the whole world intensely dislike America.
These jerks are doing real damage to their masters' interests.
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It is one of the greatest ironies of the Plame affair that the Bush administration, spawned and nurtured by oil, might have committed suicide by vindictively, cruelly and unthinkingly exacting personal retribution on an intelligence officer who had committed no offense, and who was, quite possibly, providing the administration with critical oil-related intelligence which the President needed to manage our shaky economy and affairs of state for a while longer to squeak through to re-election. In our opinion, nothing better epitomizes the true nature of the Neocons.
# Vin Suprynowicz at The Las Vegas Review-Journal - Shuffling to the sound of the Morlocks' dinner bell - why Michael Badnarik beet Aaron Russo as the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate. Mr. Suprynowicz intends to vote for Mr. Badnarik in November. If you intend to vote for somebody else, what do you expect to win?
Come November, I with perhaps 1 or 2 percent of the populace will cast my lonely vote for Michael Badnarik, an articulate, reasonable, personable freedom fighter of modest means, who lacks any discernible pathological need or expectation for brass bands, snapping flashbulbs or public adulation.
I will vote for a candidate who -- if he had his way -- would end the insane war on drugs; end the income tax; restore my God-given and constitutionally guaranteed firearms rights; protect the rights of all Americans to medical privacy; end the noxious daily trampling of our Bill of Rights in the nation's airports; pull us out of the deadly, illegal and unconstitutional war in Iraq; and put the U.S. military back to work tracking down the real culprits of Sept. 11. q
"At which point, if we can find them, you think it would be OK to just kill them?" I asked the candidate last week.
"Sure," Badnarik said.
Sounds about right to me.
I will cast that vote on Nov. 2, and get my ass whupped (politically speaking), and go to bed proud and justified.
In contrast, 95 percent of you (if you bother going to the polls at all -- and who can blame you for your increasing sense of mortification? You must start to feel like the Eloi, shuffling in to the sound of the Morlocks' dinner bell in H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine") will vote for a lying politician who you know to be a lying politician -- one of two interchangeable Skull & Bonesmen without any discernible political principles, who (no matter which wins) will proceed to raise your taxes, take away more of your freedoms, and continue frittering away whatever remains of America's reputation for decency by continuing the violent military occupation of scores of foreign countries that have never attacked nor declared war upon us. All this in hopes of temporarily propping up the bottom lines of sundry well-heeled banks, oil companies and federally subsidized engineering and construction firms.
