thorn's Blog

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYJqSWLCB60

 

If you ask me yes it is....

Ok watch all of this video and tell me what  George Bush and Adolf Hitler have in common?

 

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=4972
51819335380093&hl=en

 

Oil. Practically every facet of our modern civilization depends on it. So what would happen if it ran out?

That's exactly what happened in 2024. well it didn't happen all at once. Like someone turning off a faucet. No , it happened slowly. It started in the summer of 2008. that's when the international demand for oil surpassed the ability of oil producers to pump more to keep supply ahead of demand. "Peak Oil". They called it.

In hindsight, it should have been hard to miss what happened next. The price of oil jumped from $70 , to over $100 per barrel. Aside from paying more fro gas and heating your home. No one seemed to notice at first. It was conventional wisdom that the price would go down again. But instead , oil prices begin an irrevocable rise that slowly began to weigh on global economics and advanced energy to the forefront of national polices.

At first it was just a recession; prices went up. Earnings went down, people tightened their belts and waited for it to pass. But it didn't. Recession slowly gave way to depression. Unemployment soared, bankruptcy increased, businesses failed. Global trade started to slow. By 2012, the economies of the developed nations were sagging under unemployment lines and failing finances. Automobiles became a luxury, as did long distance travel, or even just the sight of  planes in the sky. People got by with less. Microecononmics, weather it was wind or solar power, back yard farming, or "garage" manufacturing with recycled materials, kept people alive.

In the third world depression and global climate change resulted in darker, more cataclysmic events. Huge populations of refugees, fleeing starvation, disease or environmental disaster, went on the move causing disruption, chaos and conflict. Entire nations crumbled and bodies started to pile up. The world watched as the large kill-offs began, the lucky ones sighing"Thank you God it's not me"

As the second decade of the century advanced, the oil depression lead to political turmoil around the world, but the Middle East, the global oil reservoir, was the worst affected. Religious, cultural and political divisions led to cataclysmic violence and arbitrary destruction on a massive scale. the horrible climax came in 2014 when western forces used tactical nuclear weapons to defend oil fields from a revolutionary army, leading to catastrophic casualties, and transforming several important oil fields into radioactive dead zones. Subsequently, governments fell and anarchy arose. Mobs, death squads and religious purges reduced much of the region and the world to a pre-technological, tribal wasteland.

In the developed world, things worsened. the people could live with blackouts and electricity rationing, but they weren't ready for food riots, outbreaks of virulent disease, or the collapse of the environment. The hospitals filled up. Once unthinkable, people got used to seeing starvation and death on their own streets and just tried to survive. As it stretched on, the depression came to be known as the "new dirty 30's" and it made the old one seem easy.

Desperate for energy, the superpowers, the United states, Europe, russia and China, found themselves a stand -off over some of the world's last reserves of oil; one in particular being the Caspian Basin in Central Asia.  There wasn't enough for everyone and none could get it by themselves. So they hastily allied into two superpower blocks: The Western  Coalition, Comprising  the US and EU and the Red Star Alliance; evolved from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization by Russia and China. East side deployed sophisticated satellite missile defence systems that rendered long distance nuclear combat obsolete. Therefore, they had to fight with conventional armies. Both sides undertook a massive build-up. soldiers were conscripted and shipped out, vehicles based off synthetic fuel blend technology rolled off the assembly lines. the region is a tinderbox, with each side fortifying their oil fields and eyeing each others. Everyone knows it's just a matter of time until someone fires the first shot.

The answer we've found to the question, "what would happen if it ran out", seems to be that men fight over the last few drops..

Priceless. truely priceless.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya9FrMgkIyU&sdig=1a>

Bush: "We Should Have Bombed" Aushwitz To Stop The Killing - Ignores Fact His Grandfather Profited From Nazi Slave Labor
By Jon Ponder
January 11, 2008

George Bush toured the Holocaust memorial in Israel yesterday, and through tears, came up with a telling formulation about what his predecessor, Pres. Franklin Roosevelt, should have done to stop the horror at the German concentration camps:

President George W. Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel’s Holocaust memorial and told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the US should have bombed Auschwitz to halt the killing, the memorial’s chairman said.

Bush emerged from a tour of the Yad Vashem memorial today calling it a “sobering reminder” that evil must be resisted, and praising victims for not losing their faith.

Wearing a yarmulke, Bush placed a red-white-and-blue wreath on a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six extermination camps. He also lit a torch memorializing the victims.

Bush was visibly moved as he toured the site, said Yad Vashem’s chairman, Avner Shalev.

“Twice, I saw tears well up in his eyes,” Shalev said.

At one point, Bush viewed aerial photos of the Auschwitz camp taken during the war by US forces and called Rice over to discuss why the American government had decided against bombing the site, Shalev said.

“We should have bombed it,” Bush said, according to Shalev.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, the saying goes, then every solution will look like a nail. Thus, in Bush’s primitive brain, the best way to have stopped the horror at the camps would have been to bomb the hell out of them.

Mainly, though, it’s hard to get past the cognitive dissonance of reading an honest, human utterance from Bush’s mouth that was not crafted by the White House political shop and focus-grouped in Paramus to ensure ambiguity.

It also reminds us of the unique kid-glove treatment George W. Bush receives from the media. It is impossible to imagine any other politician whose grandfather had profited from Nazi slave labor who could tour a Holocaust memorial with the media in tow and not be hounded for a comment on his grandfather’s role in the horror.

First the history: Before the war, the Hitler regime’s mistreatment of Jews — particularly the government’s policy of ethnically cleansing Jews out of mixed neighborhoods into Jewish-only ghettos — may have seemed less outrageous in the racially segregated America of the late 1930s than it does today. The same goes for conscripting Jews into forced labor. In 1942, just four years after the Germans began sending Jews to labor camps, the US government sent thousands of Japanese-American citizens into camps in the west, for example.

While the American public had no idea about the mass killings until after the camps were liberated in 1945, the debate continues even now among historians about the extent of FDR’s knowledge of the genocide while it was underway. He died in April that year, just four months after Auschwitz was captured.

In the scheme of things, however, the martyrdom of the Jews, Gypsies and gay people in the camps has had a positive effect on European and German society, for the entirety of civilization, because the fact that the camps were intact at the war’s end provided irrefutable evidence of the genocide.

For example, after the war, the Allied commanders forced rank and file German citizens, who claimed not to have known that their government was gassing 6 million people literally under their noses, to tour the camps to see with their own eyes the horror wrought in their names (and with their tax dollars) — and to witness the inevitable result of the bigotry ingrained in their culture. Forcing the Germans to accept the horrible truth about Nazism contributed to bringing an end to Germany’s decades of aggression against its neighbors, once and for all.

What has been all but forgotten, however, is the role of Prescott Bush, George W. Bush’s grandfather, who was in business with the Nazis even after the US entered the war in late 1941:

George Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

We will never know if George Bush gave any thought to his grandfather’s role in the creation of the Nazi camps while he toured a memorial to the horror they produced. One of his biggest flaws is his instinctive reflex to deflect responsibility for his own failings, so it is unlikely he’d see any connection between himself, the family fortune that paved his way to power and the portion of it that came from profits from his grandfather’s business dealings with Hitler’s government.

That would hit him a little too close to home.

Bush Visits His Odious Saudi Friend

How do you punish the principal global purveyor of fundamentalist Islam, someone who backed the Taliban and continues to harshly suppress political freedoms, women and religious minorities?

If you’re President Bush, you reward him with a state visit, of course!

During his current Middle East trip, Bush is looking in on a rogues’ gallery of U.S. allies, from Bahrain and Egypt to the United Arab Emirates and Israel. But King Abdullah’s Saudi Arabia occupies the pride of place.

“The government places strict limits on freedom of association, assembly, and expression,” writes Human Rights Watch [1] in its roundup of conditions in the kingdom in 2006. “Arbitrary detention, mistreatment and torture of detainees, restrictions on freedom of movement, and lack of official accountability remain serious concerns. Saudi women continue to face serious obstacles to their participation in society.”

Things haven’t improved since then. In a recent outrageous incident, which received media coverage globally [2], a woman who was gang-raped was sentenced to 200 lashes because she was meeting with a former boyfriend when they both were abducted and brutalized. The punishment had an undertone of bigotry, too, since the woman was Shiite, a persecuted minority sect under the Wahhabi fundamentalist Sunni rule perpetuated by King Abdullah and his clerics. (In all his benevolence, Abdullah finally pardoned the woman and her ex-boyfriend—sentenced to 90 lashes—after an international uproar.)

In another recent event, the Saudi authorities have jailed an outspoken blogger, Ahmad Fouad al-Farhan. Apparently, he was poking his nose into the detention of political prisoners. The crackdown by Saudi authorities on bloggers like al-Farhan is consistent with their suppression of other forms of independent media. (See the appeal by Reporters Without Borders [3] for his release.)

In November, a Saudi judge sentenced two activists [4] to four and six months in jail, respectively, for the heinous crime of encouraging a public demonstration. And the list goes on.

When I visited Saudi Arabia a few years ago as part of a journalists’ group, Saudi officials repeatedly told us that they couldn’t bring about political and social change because a conservative public would resist it. Turns out that this was hogwash, like most of everything else they fed us. A Gallup Poll conducted last summer found that majorities of both Saudi men and women favor an expansion of women’s rights in the country.

“More than 8 in 10 Saudi women (82%) and three-quarters of Saudi men (75%) agree that women should be allowed to hold any job for which they are qualified outside the home,” the poll says [5]. “Sixty-six percent of Saudi women versus 52 percent of Saudi men agree women should be able to hold leadership positions in the cabinet and the national council.”

The other troubling aspect of my trip was the extent to which U.S. Embassy officials I met were apologizing for the regime. We all know that the Saudis have the United States over an oil barrel. Added to that are the massive defense purchases the kingdom makes and the sizeable investment it has in U.S. treasuries. Plus, there are the multiple ties that the Bush family has with the Saudi monarchs. (Craig Unger’s slightly hyperbolic but basically sound “House of Bush, House of Saud” is the best-known dissection of the U.S.-Saudi relationship.)

All this means that the United States is basically willing to overlook the Saudi regime’s noxious export of Wahhabi fundamentalism around the world and its appalling record at home. A few years ago, Bush accorded King Abdullah the rare honor of hosting him at his Crawford ranch, and is now furthering his friendship by dropping in on his buddy.

What’s a few human rights violations between friends?
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"When America gets fascism it will be called anti-fascism." - Huey Long
http://www.progressive.org/mag_wxap011008

Former CIA Analyst Says Evidence Abounds for Impeachment

by Gretel Macalester

PORTSMOUTH - The evidence for impeachment of the president and vice president is overwhelming, former CIA analyst and daily presidential briefer Ray McGovern told a room full of people at the Portsmouth Public Library Monday night.

McGovern, who provided daily briefings for former presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush as well as other high ranking officials during his 27 year CIA career, said he has witnessed a “prostitution of his profession” as the Bush administration lied to the American people about the evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

“Don’t let anyone tell you the President was deceived by false intelligence … they knew,” McGovern said.

For the next 40 minutes, he relayed a series of events leading up to 9/11 which illustrate the President’s desire to go to war with Iraq well before 9-11, that reliable CIA evidence showed that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and was presented to the administration and the “facts were fixed” in order to legitimize the invasion.

“The estimate which said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was prepared to the terms of reference laid down by Dick Cheney in a speech on Aug. 26, 2002. It was the worst estimate of intelligence and came to the wrong conclusions, but it was designed to do that,” McGovern said.

McGovern has been an outspoken commentator on intelligence-related issues since the late 1990s and since 2002 has been publicly critical of Bush’s use of government intelligence in the lead-up to the war.

The recent report detailing Iran’s stopping its nuclear weapons program four years ago, is an example of how the administration knows it can no longer hide such “incontrovertible evidence” from the American people in the fallout from the misinformation they received on the Iraq War, McGovern said. He added that he had almost given up on believing their were people still working at the top with a conscious and enough people at the top willing to let analysts do their job and accept independent analysis.

In late 2005, Congress requested an estimate on Iranian nuclear capabilities.
“My former colleagues got really good, incontrovertible evidence that the program, such as it was, has been ordered stopped since 2003. The evidence was such that not even Dick Cheney could deny it. That’s why the report was not produced until three weeks ago,” McGovern said, adding that the Bush administration has been putting “spin” on their rhetoric ever since.

McGovern also addressed the reasoning he believes is behind the threat of war with Iran. He said he believes Israel thinks they have a pledge from the White House to deal with Iran before Bush leaves office and relayed the story of the U.S.S. Liberty, which was attacked by the Israelis in 1967 and covered up by the United States. Thirty-four U.S soldiers were killed and about 170 were seriously injured.

“It seems to me, that on June, 8, 1967, Israel realized it could literally get away with murder,” McGovern said.

McGovern said he also believes Congress will be of little help. Recently House Speaker Nancy Pelosi admitted to learning about torture and illegal eavesdropping in briefings, but said it was her understanding when briefed, that she will not share the information with anyone else, including other members of the House Intelligence Committee.

McGovern called Pelosi out on violating her oath to uphold the Constitution “against enemies, foreign or domestic” by allowing acts in violation of the Constitution to continue by not saying “diddly.”

He added that although an impeachment bill currently in Congress is gaining more support, Democrats are shying away because of the influence of lobbies and political analysts telling them to “wait it out” until the election.

Charges in the impeachment bill sponsored by Dennis Kucinich, are very detailed and “as good as any,” McGovern said, and referenced the illegal eavesdropping of American citizens. He added that the President has “admitted” to this “demonstrably impeachable offense.”

“The argument for impeachment is overwhelming,” Randy Kezar of Kingston said after the event. “Impeachment is constitutionally required.”


Fosters.com - Dover NH,  Rochester NH, Portsmouth NH, Laconia NH, Sanford ME
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"I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." Dick Cheney.. June 20.2005.

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At this point it's more about showing the America people that the Democratic Party is WILLING to do something about it. We all know that we won't be able to impeach the two hell spawn. Either the republicans will add one more to their already record-breaking number of filibusters this session, or it'll end in a 50/50 split and the Bush administration will claim that the fact they're still in office is a vindication of their policies, then use the conservative media machine to attack Democrats for "wasting the time of the American people rather than quickly passing the latest spending bill for the war."

It really stinks to think about how few places liberals/progressives can get a fair audience. You start to realize how backed into a corner they really are.
*Some problems are the Dems fault themselves ,
*but the ones who are really trying to create legislation get it buried in committee or locked into filibuster (If the Dems gain more seats in '08, they should move immediately to exercise their responsibility under Article 1 section 5 and expel Tom Coburn).

*The ones who try to use the mass media to deliver their message never get a fair shake "The Nuclear Option" and the Dem's unfair use of the filibuster was all the talk in '05 and '06. The Republicans aren't halfway through this session of congress and have already broken the record for number of filibusters in a session, and are just using it with the express intent of making this session look like a do-nothing congress. They can do it because they know the media is conservative.