Don's Review: Law, Politics, Science, Philosophy

Jan. 9, 2010

Energy, not money, is the root of all economic activity.

—Michael C. Ruppert

[Regarding to oil in the field]: At the moment, we are flying almost blindly and we desperately need more insight.

—Fatih Birol, chief economist for the International Energy Agency, in 2008.

The Saudis have been pumping their oil virtually flat-out for six decades. However, if one looks at their current declared reserve numbers, one finds that they are claiming to have almost the same amount of oil as 60 years ago. Imagine that!!”

—Michael C. Ruppert

It is a given that if Saudi Arabia has entered decline, planet Earth has entered decline. Oil geologists have been scouring the planet since 1920. There is NO chance of finding another Ghawar, let alone the three or four needed to offset decline in other countries. “It would already have been found. The Saudis know this, the oil companies know this, and Wall Street knows this. Thus, if it became known that Saudi Arabia has entered decline, it would rock the kingdom’s standing and signal to the whole world that humankind is in deep trouble.”

 —Michael C. Ruppert

“Those hoping that an economic recovery is possible must remember that NO economicy recovery is possible EVEN CLOSE to where we were in early 2008 without driving oil consumption back up to where it was then. Contrast that with a 9 percent decline rate. The numbers just don’t balance. They never have, and this is what M. King Hubbert so clearly understood in thelate 1940s.”

—Michael C. Ruppert

 “The key to understanding infrastructure liest at the heart of a complex civilization. Civilization can easily break down. Consider the implications if a gasoline tanker truck crashes and burns on a defective bridge. Consider the implications if a main sewer line collapses in New York City and takes three subway lines out of service. Consider the implications if the electricity, generated by oil or natural gas, stops providing the power to pump water out of those subways 24/7.”

—Michael C. Ruppert

Wind doesn’t blow 24 hours a day and the grid has no ability to STORE electricity generated at midnight that is needed at 3 p.m. The batterry technology to store electricity on a large scale doesn’t exist. Batteries are very expensive and don’t last that long. Even the batteries in vaunted hybrid cars need to be replaced after 70,000 to 80,000 miles.”

—Michael C. Ruppert

 “Hydrogen remains the cruelest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public. Hydrogen bleeds through many metals and has a tendency to turn them brittle. It cannot be pumped through hundreds of thousands of miles of existing natural gas pipelines. The pipes can’t handle hydrogen. So California’s Hydrogen Highway, touted by Governor Schwarzenegger, is a true pipe dream.”

—Michael C. Ruppert

• 
  After Edward M. Kennedy's recent passing: Playwright, journalist and Republican Clare Boothe Luce, "Where else but in gothic fiction, where else among real people could one encounter such triumphs and tragedies, such beauty and charm and ambition and pride and human wreckage, such dedication to the best and lapses into the mire of life; such vulgar, noble, driven, generous, self-centered, loving, suspicious, devious, honorable, vulnerable, indomitable people?"

• Bobby Kennedy, quoting Aristotle, in 1968: "If we believe men have any personal rights at all, then they must have an absolute moral right to such a measure of good health as society can provide."

• Hiroshima's mayor in August 2007: "That fateful summer, 8:15 a.m. The roar of a B-29 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast-silence-hell-on-Earth. The eyes of young girls watching the parachute were melted."

• Chris Hedges, Sept. 14, 2009, commondreams.org: "War and conflict have marked most of my adult life. I know what prolonged exposure to industrial slaughter does to you. I know what it is to confront memories, buried deep within the subconscious, which jerk you awake at night, your heart racing and your body covered in sweat. I know what it is like to lie, unable to sleep, your heart pounding, trying to remember what it was that caused such terror. I know how it feels to be overcome by the vivid images of violence that make you wonder if the dream or the darkness around you is real. I know what it feels like to stumble through the day carrying a shock and horror, an awful cement-like despair, which you cannot shed. And I know how after a few nights like this you are left numb and exhausted, unable to connect with anyone around you, even those you love the most. I know how you drink or medicate yourself into a coma so you do not have to remember your dreams. And I know that great divide that opens between you and the rest of the world, especially the civilian world, which cannot imagine your pain and your hatred. I know how easily this hatred is directed toward those in that world.

  There are minefields of stimulants for those who return from war. Smells, sounds, bridges, the whoosh of a helicopter, thrust you back to Iraq or another zone of slaughter, back to a time of terror and blood, back to the darkest regions of your heart, regions you wish did not exist. Life, on some days, is a simple battle to stay upright, to cope with memories and trauma that are unexplainable, probably unimaginable, to those seated across from you at the breakfast table. Families will watch these veterans fall silent, see the thousand-yard stare, and know they have again lost these men and women. They hope somehow they will come back. Some won't. Those who cannot cope, even by using Zoloft or Paxil, blow their brains out with drugs, alcohol or a gun. More Vietnam veterans died from suicide in the years after the war than during the conflict itself. But it would be a mistake to blame this on Vietnam. War does this to you. It destroys part of you. You live maimed. If you are not able to live maimed."

• Richard Clarke, former director of the counterterrorist operation at the White House, just minutes after President George W. Bush spoke on TV the evening of 9/11. On the subject of international law, Bush responded: "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass."

• Ratings Agencies and the Meltdown of 2008: Like its competitors, S.& P. is paid by the issuers of the bonds it assesses, setting up what appears to be a rather spectacular conflict of interest — like a teacher appraising the work of the students who pay his salary. Another issue--the now-infamous back and forth of instant messages between two S.& P. analysts, one of whom says the firm’s risk assessment model hasn’t captured half the risk of a particular deal. The analyst wrote: "It could be structured by cows, and we’d rate it."

It’s cliché (and also true) that the future is unknowable. What isn’t so obvious is that the past might as well be unknowable, as apparently it already is for large numbers of people, perhaps the majority of human beings. In traditional societies, the present tends to resemble both the past and the future, leaving little reason to distinguish either from the present.

But a limited sense of time also exists in the postindustrialized civilization, despite persons having the most sophisticated technology humankind has ever produced.

In fact, many people lack historical perspective altogether. Anything prior to their birth might as well have happened in the distant past. The future, if it’s thought about at all, is imagined to be  either a much better version of the present with a few exotic details thrown in or a much worse, dystopian one. This lack of historical perspective explains why sizable numbers of people can easily believe that the universe sprang into existence only six thousand years ago, and why, to such folk, an apocalypse foretold by biblical prophecy seems as likely a future as any.

-- Pamela Sargent and Anne Corwin

“Do You Want to Live Forever?”

From “Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge,” Ed. By Damien Broderick (Atlas & Co., 2008).

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

--Martin Luther King

"We have at work a strange version of the force/power distinction that operates as if force is the measure of power. Those holding this belief think that a bigger force will inevitably win, and they dread that others will conquer them if they don't achieve total domination first. The only thing that can be won in such a paradigm is more control. And to maintain such control requires an ever-increasing ruthlessness and creates a world that responds only to force - a world that is driven by extrinsic reward or consequences rather than by an intrinsic sense of hope and of true community."

--Unknown

"Niebuhr understood that the exercise of power can be shocking and, at times, corrupting. But he also understood that power is absolutely necessary to fight the battles that must be fought. The trick is to fight these battles with humility and constant introspection, knowing that there is no monopoly on virtue. Moreover, this combination is simply more effective. For power untethered from humility is certain to eventually fail."

--Unknown

"We are so deluded by the concept of our innocence that we are ill-prepared to deal with the temptations of power which now assail us."

-- Reinhold Niebuhr, post-World War II

"If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory."

--Reinhold Niebuhr

"I've just been given a list of the most recent casualties in Vietnam.  We're losing too damned many people over there.  It's time for us to get out.  The Vietnamese are not fighting for themselves.  We're the ones who are doing the fighting.After I come back from Texas, that's going to change.  There is no reason for us to lose another man over there.  Vietnam is not worth another American life."

—JFK, Nov. 21, 1963

"American had to ‘win' in Vietnam because America always wins.  America knows better than everyone else because of that intellectual firepower deployed at Harvard and other elite universities.  America does not have to know about other people because other people are not worth knowing.

"Goldstein's decisive clue to why Bundy failed came by accident.  He found a note written in 1996, when Bundy was asked what had been most surprising about the war.  He answered, ‘the endurance of the enemy.'  Goldstein writes: ‘He didn't understand the enemy ‘because, frankly, he didn't think they warranted his attention.'"

-- author William Pfaff

Dec. 31, 2009

“You can have a serious life or a nonserious life, Teddy. I’ll still love you whichever choice you make. But if you decide to have a nonserious life, I won’t

have much time for you. You make up your mind. There are too many children here who are doing things that are interesting for me to do much with you.”—Joe Kennedy Sr.

“There’ll be no crying in this house.”—Joe Kennedy Sr.

Upon hearing that Teddy had bought a cowhorn for his new car: “I want to point out to you that when you exercise any privilege that the ordinary fellow does not avail himself of, you immediately become the target for display and newspaper criticism. It’s all right to struggle to get ahead of the masses by good works, by good reputation and by hard work, but it certainly isn’t by doing things that (could lead people to say), ‘Who does he think he is?’”—Joe Kennedy Sr.

“It has been said that time heals all wounds. I don’t agree. The wounds remain. Time—the mind, protecting its sanity—covers them with some scar tissue and the pain lessons, but they are never gone.”—Rose Kennedy

--Edward M. Kennedy, “A Memoir: True Compass”

March 12, 2010

"[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences."

--Prof. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966 

April 4, 2010

"[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences."

--Prof. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966