The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Physicist Geoffrey West has found that simple, mathematical laws govern the properties of cities — that wealth, crime rate, walking speed and many other aspects of a city can be deduced from a single number: the city's population.
In this mind-bending talk from TEDGlobal he shows how it works and how similar laws hold for organisms and corporations.
The below link goes to Matt Ridley's excellent lecture analyzing the importance of heresy in science; and by extension, the danger to science posed by an Authority that dictates what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. The oppression of authority is a subject Galileo learned to his chagrin, and a central theme of Jacob Bronoski's brilliant Ascent of Man, in my opinion, the finest television series ever produced. (Bronoski's subject was the growth of knowledge and its central role in the cultural evolution of mankind. To appreciate the squandered potential of television and the mass media, one need only to watch Bronoski's series of programs.)
Ridley gave the Angus Millar Lecture of the Royal Society of the Arts in Edinburgh a few days ago 31 October 2011. Ridley is trained in evolutionary biology — he has a PhD in Zoology from Oxford. His libertarian philosophy makes him controversial in some quarters, but he one of the best science writers out there, particularly on the subject of evolution. Like Darwin, he thinks and writes from the point view of the bottom-up empiricist (which is my favorite point of view).
Ridley's specific subject is pseudo-science: its temptations, its fallacies, and its dangers: his case study is the theory of anthropogenic global warming–a theme about which he says: “When a study was published recently saying that 98% of scientists ‘believe’ in global warming, I looked at the questions they had been asked and realized I was in the 98%, too, by that definition, though I never use the word ‘believe’ about myself.”
Chuck Spinney
Alexandria, Virginia
Below the Line: PDF Link and Also Full Text Online
Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Matt Ridley on Why Heresy is Important”
Fourth of Four Installments on Libya
Once again, Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya peels away the veneer of legitimacy and deception enveloping the U.S./NATO genocide currently taking place in Libya. In his first article, Nazemroaya makes it clear that there never was any evidence given to the United Nations or the International Criminal Court to warrant or justify United Nations Resolutions 1970 and 1973 or current U.S./NATO operations inside Libya.
In his second article detailing this very sad story, Nazemroaya exposes the relationships between the major Libyan protagonists/NATO collaborators and the U.S. Congress-funded National Endowment for Democracy. Incredibly, when leading Members of Congress publicly proclaimed repeatedly that they did not know who the Libyan “rebel” NATO collaborators were, select so-called rebel leaders were political intimates with stakeholders at the National Endowment for Democracy. Nazemroaya also exposes that, despite its Global War on Terror, the U.S. government actually financed Libyan terrorists and criminals wanted by INTERPOL.
In his third installment, Nazemroaya removes the U.S./NATO fig leaf that attempts to cover the cynical machinations of the pro-Israel Lobby and its objective of balkanizing African and Asian states, especially those whose populations are largely Muslim. Nazemroaya makes the essential point: “An attempt to separate the merging point of an Arab and African identity is underway.” The Voice of America has exposed the psychological aspects of its brutal intervention and hints at the mindset of the U.S./NATO Libyan pawns; several stories suggest that the “new” Libya will turn more toward its Arab identity than its African identity. While Muammar Qaddafi drove home to all Libyans that Libya, as its geography dictates, is an African country, Nazemroaya shows how this fact is not a policy objective shared by the US, NATO, Israel, or their Libyan allies.
Finally, in this last of the four-part series, Nazemroaya shows the ultimate perfidy of the U.S./NATO Libyan allies, especially Mahmoud Jibril, in the pre-emptive strike against the Jamahirya Wealth Redistribution Project. The Libyan people are now fighting the world's most powerful militaries to save their Jamahirya. No matter how many times NATO-inspired media lie to their publics, the lies will never become the truth. Hauntingly, Nazemroaya ends by telling us that the Libyan National Transitional Council has already recognized the Syrian Transitional Council as the legitimate government of Syria. Meanwhile, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, now reputed to be the leader of Al Qaeda and reportedly rewarded with U.S. citizenship after fighting for the CIA in Bosnia, just called for the people of Algeria to oust their President. President Obama's policy of flying drones and dropping bombs over Africa, and invading the Continent with US troops, means that any country that resists an AFRICOM base, as Colonel Qaddafi's wife tells us he did, or expects to exercise its right of self-determination, can expect the kind of treatment we are witnessing now in Libya. We, in the US, must resist these policies for ourselves and and on behalf of the Africans who deserve better than this from the United States of America.
Cynthia McKinney, 25 October 2011
4 of 4: Who Was Muammar Qaddafi? Libya's Wealth Redistribution Project by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya – 2011-10-27. In 2008, Qaddafi announced his plans for a Wealth Redistribution Program. Washington was intent upon undermining this project through military intervention and regime change.
3 of 4: Beating the Drums of a Broader US-NATO Middle East War – by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya – 2011-10-24
2 of 4: Israel and Libya: Preparing Africa for the “Clash of Civilizations” – by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya – 2011-10-11. “An attempt to separate the merging point of an Arab and African identity is underway.”
1 of 4: America's Conquest of Africa: The Roles of France and Israel – by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Julien Teil – 2011-10-06. Terrorists not only fight for Washington on the ground, they also act as frontmen for regime change through so-called human rights organizations that promote democracy. Introduction by Cynthia McKinney
Missed this when it first came out. Multiple countries appear to be declassifying modern extraterrestrial contact information, should be interesting. Note the non-apocalyptic view of 12 December 2012.
Mayan documentary to show ‘evidence' of alien contact in ancient Mexico
Guatemala and Mexico release secret documents and artefacts for forthcoming film Revelations of the Mayans 2012 and Beyond
Ben Child
Guardian, 29 September 2011
The ancient Mayans had contact with alien visitors who left behind evidence of their existence, according to a new Mexican documentary.
Sundance winner Juan Carlos Rulfo's Revelations of the Mayans 2012 and Beyond is currently in production for release next year to coincide with the end of the Mayan calendar, reports the Wrap.
Producer Raul Julia-Levy said the documentary-makers were working in cooperation with the Mexican government for what he said was “the good of mankind”. He said the order to collaborate had come directly from the country's president, Álvaro Colom Caballeros.
“Mexico will release codices, artefacts and significant documents with evidence of Mayan and extraterrestrial contact, and all of their information will be corroborated by archaeologists,” he said. “The Mexican government is not making this statement on their own – everything we say, we're going to back it up.”
On Sunday November 6 the Tar Sands Action will return to Washington DC to send an unmistakable message to the President.
Exactly one year before the election, we want to encircle the whole White House to ask President Obama to reject Keystone XL and live up to his promise to free us from the tyranny of oil. In doing so, we want to remind him of the power of the movement that he rode to the White House in 2008. This is bigger than any one person – President or no – and we will carry on, with or without him.
Phi Beta Iota: November 6th is also a useful target date for demanding that Congress and the White House accept for action the public demand for Electoral Reform.
CORRUPTION is the common enemy, both in government and in the private sector.
ELECTORAL REFORM is the singular demand.
SUNSHINE CABINET is the method.
INTEGRITY is the core value.
COMMONWEALTH RESTORED is the outcome.
North Dakota is debt free with a surplus of cash that can only be spent with 66% of the legislature approving. Integrity seems to be plentiful there, but not in Washington, where Obama refuses to free up access to oil in our ground, at the same time that he is blowing taxpayer money on fraudulent green schemes.
How North Dakota Became Saudi Arabia
Harold Hamm, discoverer of the Bakken fields of the northern Great Plains, on America's oil future and why OPEC's days are numbered.
Wall Street Journal, 1 October 2011
Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma-based founder and CEO of Continental Resources, the 14th-largest oil company in America, is a man who thinks big. He came to Washington last month to spread a needed message of economic optimism: With the right set of national energy policies, the United States could be “completely energy independent by the end of the decade. We can be the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas in the 21st century.”
“President Obama is riding the wrong horse on energy,” he adds. We can't come anywhere near the scale of energy production to achieve energy independence by pouring tax dollars into “green energy” sources like wind and solar, he argues. It has to come from oil and gas.
Phi Beta Iota: The difference between North Dakota reserves and the Canadian oil tar scam is that the latter requires vast amounts of aquifer water to flush, a trade-off that no honest person would ever make. The Governor of North Dakota has every right to nullify federal interference with his state's natural resources.
Democrats in the US like to think they can use green politics to revitalize their base. But will going green achieve this end when most of the people in the world (and the US) are either poor or lower middle class and the distribution of income is getting worse in a global economy dominated by the ideology of neoliberal economics? The attached essay in the French journal Le Monde Diplomatique provides some interesting food for thought in that regard, at least as far a Germany is concerned.
Greens now just ‘neoliberals on bikes’
Germany goes for sustainable capitalism
The Greens are likely to be a major part of the next German government; few seem to have noticed that they’ve already been a substantial part of its regional governments for 59 years
by Olivier Cyran, Le Monde Diplomatique, October 2011
EXTRACT:
The fat cats who live in [the totally green] Marco Polo Tower may not vote Green in the elections. The tower was built on a natural promontory in the port that gives residents a bird’s eye view of the landing stage for liners. But the designers forgot that these floating palaces belch out toxic smoke that the wind blows back on to the balconies and windows of the tower. According to an investigation by Der Spiegel, a “breath of fresh air” for Marco Polo’s residents contains the equivalent of the emissions from “50,000 lorries travelling at 130kmph, with significant quantities of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and other carcinogenic particles”. Multi-millionaires poisoned by luxury cruises: sustainable development has some surprising twists.
