Whispers from the Wild

There’s a huge lie being repeated time and time again, mainly but not exclusively by the right.  The lie goes something like this:  The US can’t stop drilling for oil just because of the Deepwater Horizon spill, because doing so is giving up on moving away from dependency on oil to other fuels.

To this I say: What… the… fuck????

You don’t cure dependency by taking more of the drug.  You don’t cure dependency on oil for drilling for more oil – you cure dependency on oil by drilling for LESS oil and implementing other solutions.

It’s a lie.  An outright lie.  These people don’t want to break free of oil, they want to go on drilling and drilling until the last drop is earned.  Then… well, they don’t have a plan for then, they refuse to look at that scenario.  Ask any rabid right winger what happens when the oil runs out, and I guarantee you that not only will they not give you a straight answer, but if you can ever pin them down through the BP-sized gushing of bullshit that comes out of their mouths, they will actually find a way to deny the scenario exists in the first place.  Out of sight, out of mind.

The earth has less than fifty years of oil left.  We’ve extracted nearly all of it.  When it’s gone, it’s gone, and it will take centuries for the earth to make more of it.  At that time, ANY nation still dependent on oil is fucked.  Completely fucked.  You cannot run on what you can no longer find to harvest.  Most telling of all, the biggest and best equipped army in the world is useless, if you have no fuel for the tanks and aircraft.

That more drilling will help lead to weaning off oil is a shameless lie, and it’s about time people started laughing in the faces of those who repeat it.  Drilling today won’t even effect oil prices for years; likewise stopping drilling today won’t effect oil prices for years.  This planet of ours produces far more means of generating the power and resources we need than just oil.  If we put our minds to it, we can wean ourselves away from oil before the last drop is drilled, but we need to have the right mindset for doing it, and the right mindset is not to pretend the scenario where we drill the last drop and then still don’t have any alternatives prepared to take over doesn’t exist.

A while ago I was browsing websites when I came across this image, a screencapture of a live Fox News broadcast.  It should go without saying that the country in between Syria and Iran is in fact Iraq, not Egypt.  I submitted it without hesitation to failblog.org who have now published it.

Reading through the comments, one thing shocks me completely.  This comment:

Curbie says:

August 12, 2009 at 6:15 am

I hate to do this, because there is obviously a lot of hate for fox news here, but they were probably high lighting those two regions by magnifying or enlarging them on the map. I’ve seen every single news source do this, not just fox news. This was just a creative, convenient screen capture for the person who submitted this. That is all.

I had to read it several times before I could come to terms with how many ways this fails in itself.  In fact, it made me quite sad, because this poster appears to be serious.  First he says that there is a lot of hate for fox news (he’s evidently an avid viewer and dislikes seeing the site ridiculed) and goes on to talk about the highlighting.  Yes, he’s quite correct, news sources do indeed – and have here – highlight countries they are specifically talking about – but that wasn’t the reason this was posted, and the fact that he can’t even spot that the country in between those two highlighted groups of countries is wrongly named is extremely sad.

There are a few accusations that the picture is photoshopped; it was not.  Fox News broadcast that Iraq is actually Egypt.  While it’s sad enough that such a mistake made it through to broadcast, it’s even sadder that some people would criticize the screengrab for being hatred towards the news station that broadcast it and of being edited, and yet not spot the actual problem.

What is the world coming to?  Is this the state of American education nowadays?

When internet techy kids calling themselves “Anonymous” hacked into Sarah Palin’s email account (which, apparently, was ludicrously easy and only really borderline hacking – someone clicked the “Forgot password” link, and answered her ‘secret question’ which apparently was a piece of personal trivia well published on the internet, then got her password mailed to them) Bill O’Reilly was all over it.  Cyber Terrorists was what he described Anonymous as.

Anonymous responded by hacking Bill O’Reilly’s site and posting his subscriber list.

Now I’m not saying what Anonymous did there is right; clearly they abused lax security in both cases.  But if Bill O’Reilly was as “fair and balanced” as he likes to pretend, he’d be all over this story.

Basically, a 14 year old brat bereft of proper morals and education gets his brother to videotape him beating up his cat, twice, and posting it on YouTube.  Since Bill O’Reilly is too busy worrying about underage fathers and single mothers of lots of children, he let this one completely pass him by.

Anonymous didn’t.

Within 24 hours, hackers operating under the “Anonymous” moniker discovered the brat’s name, identity, facebook account and address.  These details were posted publically, and called in by concerned citizens to the authorities, who obtained a warrant to search the premises for the cat in the video.  On finding the cat, charges of animal abuse will now be brought against the brat and his brother.  The cat, and a different cat which was also abused by the teenagers, was taken into shelter, and will be adopted out to a more loving family.  With any luck the teenager will end up in indefinate youth detention and will end up feeling much like that poor cat by the time he’s finally released.

But what has “Culture Warrior” O’Reilly had to say about Anonymous finding and bringing to justice this brat and his brother?

Nada.  Zip.  Absolutely nothing.  No congratulations, not even a mention.  Anonymous may well have saved the life of that cat and possibly other animals if this little sadist had decided that beating up animals on camera was fun and gone on to abuse other animals – and Bill O’Reilly can’t even afford Anonymous 15 seconds to name them patriots in his “pinheads and patriots” segment.

People like O’Reilly make me sick.  Full of bluster and “it really grins my gears” hot air, but when it comes to someone actually championing someone or something in need, not a word.  Whichever “Anonymous” found that brats address did a public service.  Time people like O’Reilly either shut the hell up about themselves being “culture warriors” or “champions of the common man” – or gave these guys the praise they so richly deserve for a job well done.

You may remember a long while ago I advocated watching The Story of Stuff which was a thought-provoking look at the mentality of how we treat our disposable items.  Now there’s another thought provoking video, much larger in size but absolutely fascinating.  Zeitgeist isn’t a light watch, at just over two hours – but it’s a must-see if you are of a free thinking nature.

It starts with a look at the end of the world.  No, seriously.  Most people when they think of the Book of Revelations from the Bible think that it literally means the end of the world.  Not so, argues Zeitgeist.  In fact, Christianity plagiarises a much older religious system, from 3,000BC Egypt, which believes not in fire and brimstone end of the world scenarios, but different ages.  The different ages are represented by the signs of the Zodiac, and right now we’re in the age of Pisces, the fish.  The ages are around 2,200 years long, which by coincidence is the time it takes the earth to do a full circuit of the sun.  The current age will come to a close around 2150, when the next age – Aquarius – will begin.  This is the ‘end of the world’ scenario Bible Bashers like to talk about, ignoring the original Egyptian belief that it didn’t mean the end of the WORLD, it meant the end of the AGE.  Part one talks about how those in power use religion to keep the masses in line, but shows that religion is purely a tool and nearly all religions have the same base, which is rooted in what we human beings perceive as the universe around us.  It puts in perspective that religion is the soil upon which other things can be planted and made to grow.

Part two deals with the politics that puts the world where it is now.  9/11 prominently, and the fact that a very small number of people make money in huge amounts from wars.  It goes through the various wars of the last century – WW1, WW2, Vietnam – and shows the major banking establishments were playing both sides against the other, and profiting off the wars.  That’s why Vietnam went on so long; the longer it went on, the more money it generated.

The eventual shaping is four huge unions.  The European Union, the African/Middle East union, the American Union (Canada/US/Mexico) and the Asian Union.  All bankrolled by the same people.  All to be joined together into one at the start of the next age (the end of the world as we know it).  And this leads us to section 3:  The men behind the curtain.

I won’t spoil the ultimate conclusions of the film – go watch it for yourself.  But take into account that a lot of people now equate research with what comes off the internet.  Control the places of reference on the internet, such as Wikipedia, and you can manipulate what people believe because the research they do is already modified to say what the powers that be want it to say. So people do simple research on official stories, and get back information that they accept as factual even if that information has been doctored before it reaches the medium that it’s stored on before those people do their research.  Information is power.  Power corrupts.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Watch the film.  Feel free to comment on it here.  It’s absolutely fascinating, and if even 10% of what it says is true it sheds some real light on the whole world we live in.

Second Link to the film, but with subtitles