Phi Beta Iota: We decided to post a long email about helping a major international bank decide not to fund mountaintop removal coal projects for the following reasons:
1) It illustrates the emergent power of focused citizen advocacy.
2) It documents the modified behavior of select major banks.
3) It highlights the complete fragmentation of citizen advocacy–all over the lot with no strategic analytic model, no information-sharing network, no ability to co-evolve and achieve multiplication effects.
The Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot reports that President Obama begged Prime Minister Netanyahu to extend his settlement freeze in order to save the so-called peace talks.
As a quid pro quo, Obama is reported to have promised Netanyahu that (1) Israel could resume settlement construction if the peace negotiations failed to produce results and (2) that the United States would give Israel written assurances of its commitment to Israel’s security (suggesting a formal peace treaty perhaps?). Despite Obama’s desperation, Netanyahu blew Obama off and allowed the so-called freeze to expire.
If, as is likely, this report is true, Israel has humiliated the United States once again — a fact that will no doubt be deemed irrelevant by Israel’s shills on both sides of the aisle in Congress, not to mention the mainstream media.
The last president to stand up to Israel was Dwight Eisenhower, when he pulled the plug on the second Arab-Israeli war in 1956 and forced Israel to retreat from the east bank of the Suez Canal and to give up its conquest of the Sinai.
But eleven years later, Israel learned US condemnation was no longer a problem.
In fact, Israel learned it could get away with murder and could treat the United States with utter contempt when (1) its air and naval forces not only attacked the USS Liberty — a high priority US Navy signals intelligence ship — on 8 June 1967 during the Six-Day War, killing 34 and wounding 171 US sailors, but (2) was able to secure a cover up of its perfidy by the highest levels of the US government, including President Johnson, Secretary of Defense McNamara, and most of the senior military officers in the Pentagon, despite the misgivings of Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State and Admiral Thomas Moorer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (neither of whom chose to resign in protest, however).
Phi Beta Iota: As has been reported on more than one occasion, even when Israel “promises” to stop settlements, they continue apace. The Israeli government cannot be trusted on any detail.
Click on Title to Read at Huffington Post and/or Comment.
My fellow Americans, I am honored to present to you my thoughts on restructuring and down-sizing the federal government along with a proposed Coalition Cabinet. Many of these names, while stellar, are conventional. I am asking each of you to put forward any suggestions for improving how we govern ourselves. I am strongly inclined to embrace your suggestions by joining your recommended candidates with these candidates to achieve a collective balance at every level of the government, one focused on restoring American the Beautiful.
As I indicated in my first post on 28 September 2010, I believe we must have three Vice-Presidents, one for the Commonwealth who shall be the Principal Vice-President; a second for Education, Intelligence, & Research; and a third for Global Engagement (changed from National Security to break the back of the military-industrial complex and the two ubber Services with no shame).
I am proposing for your public deliberation and consent, some consolidations as shown below–indented organizations are subordinate to, and will be represented on the Cabinet by, the principal organization. I have moved the Department of Commerce to serve under the Vice President for Global Engagement.
Here's my bottom line for our future: We the People are going to restore the Republic, re-instate the Constitution, balance the budget, and create a prosperous world at peace in which every citizen has a job with dignity and a sufficiency of income to raise a family. My first priority, if you do not spontaneously demand this before 2012, will be achieve Electoral Reform and then to create a Smart Nation.
The report of the fact-finding mission of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla released last week shows conclusively, for the first time, that US citizen Furkan Dogan and five Turkish citizens were murdered execution-style by Israeli commandos.
Vote and/or Comment on Review Limits to Growth in the 21st Century
September 30, 2010
Laurence C. Smith
This book was recommended to me and I recommend it to others, but with the following observations:
1) Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update was there in the 1970's. It troubles me, as much as I read, how I seem to see the same books every ten years as someone reinvents knowledge that was known before and then either not read, or forgotten.
2) I completely agree with the Deep North concept (the Pacific Northwest Passage is opening, Iceland is now independent of Denmark, and the Yukon and Northwest Territories, along with Alaska, stand to be the main beneficiaries. Similar benefits will acrue around the South Pole, if Chile and Argentina get smart and throw Wall-Mart out of their oceans and off the continent.
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Phi Beta Iota: Rarely, if ever, do we find a book reviewed by someone we know, and in this instance, two someone's we know. It is for that reason we are ranking the book as 6 Star and Beyond.
38 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The Most Frightening Book of the Decade – Genius!, January 24, 2008
Steve Alten clearly states that many of the factual threads running throughout “The Shell Game” were based upon the extensive research found in my book, “Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil”. I actually didn't know about Shell Game until after it had been written, when Steve offered to send me a review copy. I am so glad he did.
My book is 600 pages of non-fiction with a thousand footnotes. It is in the Harvard Business School Library.
Steve's book is a gripping, fire-breathing, page-turning novel that the great Robert Ludlum would envy. Both books convey exactly the same message: that the world is running out of oil fast; that human civilization hangs in the balance; and that the US government used this crisis as a rationale for perpetrating the attacks of 9-11 and (very likely) attacks yet to come.
Why? The American people would never allow their sons and daughters to be used and sacrificed as bloody oil conquistadors unless we could call ourselves victims.– We are victims, but not that kind.
Steve's absolute genius is in his ability to make the unpalatable irresistible. It lies also in his ability to separate research “ice cream” from research “bs”. “Children”, hucksters and some with more sinister motives have hijacked the so-called 9-11 “truth movement.” That clear thinking is what makes “The Shell Game” slice through consciousness and reach the soul like a hot scalpel through butter. Steve takes us into a terrifying future as though he were reading a military GPS locator.
Phi Beta Iota: We decided to post a long email about helping a major international bank decide not to fund mountaintop removal coal projects for the following reasons:
Robert David Steele
Limits to Growth in the 21st Century
