Seven Generational Ruminations

I just listened to an National Public Radio piece that presents one mans concept of utopia. Namely, individuals or small scale organizations working on small scale work projects.

Kevin Phillips is one of the political operatives who helped bring the Republicans into power in the 1960's and 1970's. He's billed as a Republican Strategist, and eventually worked in the Reagan White House. With that as background we have a very interesting book from him, warning of the danger of the neo-Theocracy we find ourselves with today in the United States.

Here's some resources:

American Theocracy : The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury

Earlier I wrote about plans by BellSouth and other ISP's to discriminatorially throttle 3rd party Internet traffic. The BellSouth CEO was quoted saying, essientially, those other companies (such as Google) need to pay to use their lines. And that if those 3rd parties did not pay up, they'd throttle however much of their lines those 3rd parties can use.

Malaysia is going for biodiesel production in a big way. They are building many palm oil plantations and building biodiesel production plants. I have previous coverage here, here, and here.

Hopefully you saw Fahrenheit 9/11, the movie by Michael Moore that was prominent in 2004. His main topic throughout the movie was to explore cronyism and how that created the war in Iraq. The main example is the laundry list of business ties between the Administration, the Saudi royalty and even to the bin Laden family.

McDonald's sued over fries ingredients Seems that McDonalds just doesn't get any respect. People complain about them, how their food is causing an epidemic of fatty Americans, the amount of waste products that come from McDonalds, etc. And, now, it's the ingredients of their french fries.

Well, if McDonalds were a responsible corporation they might not be so badly beat up over what they do.

Democracy Now for February 15, 2006 has an interesting interview with John Perkins, author of "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man". Ostensibly he worked as an economist for a big consulting company, but he describes his real job as

On January 17, 1961 (45 years ago) President Eisenhower delivered his farewell address as he was leaving office, and as President Kennedy was taking office.  It is this speech in which he made the fateful warning to beware the growing influence of the military-industrial complex.  I'll copy the text of that address to the end of this posting.

James Lovelock is an independant scientist who has been nurturing the Gaia model of understanding the earth. He's published a string of books claiming the planet we call Earth is a living being he names Gaia. e.g. Gaia : A New Look at Life on Earth He began this work as a space scientist advising NASA on how would they determine whether there was "life" on other planets, such as Mars. That is, given the sparse set of instruments we can send to Mars, which ones should be sent to make the measurements required to determine whether "life" exists there.

Wow, now I understand the significance of something I've seen mentioned in the press. The U.S. Federal Reserve is planning to stop publishing the M3 number. I've seen this in the news, but it didn't register for me the significance, but according to The Story about Oil you NEED to Hear this technical detail in the economic statistics reporting couldn't be more important.