There are some basic lay lines and organic travel paths on Earth.
The Silk Road is one.
There is still no complete road and vibrant economy because of this 21st Century Silk Road.
My Art and the Sale of My Art has not been helped by killing more people in Afghanistan.
I am still a starving artist in America, 10 years of war has not helped sell my art.
The Kazakhstan Oil Pipeline to Karachi Pakistan can be the next project after the Silk Road is done and secure.
That was always the goal of this Afghan war anyway.
"Under its license agreement with the state, TransCanada will get a $500 million subsidy in return for seeking federal regulatory approval for the project and finding customers for the pipeline. The license doesn't guarantee construction of the project [emphasis mine]."
So Gov. Palin is going around the country touting her convictions as a fiscal conservative. She may have in fact cut earmarks that the State of Alaska takes from the federal government. But she sure doesn’t sound like a fiscal conservative to me. What it does sound like is the lack of oversight that the Republicans are famous for and that, to a large part, got us into the economic mess we’re currently in.
The fact that it's a Canadian company and part of the pipeline will go through Canada also begs the question of proper oversight, which this decision does not seem on the surface to support.
John McCain calls for transparency. He ought to start with his running mate so we know that the half billion is being well spent, and conidering the overall impact, proper safeguards are in place.
He's married to the Governor of Alaska and the current Republican Party VP candidate. So this entitles him to....
Receive state-related business emails from the Governor?
Accept big oil sponsorship (CITGO and TESORO) of his snow machine races?
View land parcels regarding the Alaska pipeline by airplane, as paid for by the State of Alaska, and make recommendations to his wife, the Governor?
Avoid court rulings because he believes he has immunity as husband of the Governor?
WHAT EXACTLY ARE TODD PALIN'S CREDENTIALS AND WHAT HAS HE BEEN ELECTED / APPOINTED / HIRED TO DO FOR THIS COUNTRY?
Oh, right. NOTHING.
I think that the rich get richer and for the rest of us it's "Arbeit macht frei".
Here is a link to a current article with Sarah Palin's byline in an energy publication discussing the development of Alaskan oil and gas resources. It recommends building a second trans-Alaska pipeline with a trans-Canada extension for natural gas and doubling our reliance on the existing Trans-Alaska Pipeline System by drilling for oil in the ANWR. Her Alaskakin perspective leads her to promote it as a good idea for America but her discussion is devoid of any comparison to alternatives. She seems conversant enough with the issues to refer to some of the challenges involved but makes no mention of the very real national security risk of loosing even the oil now being delivered by the existing pipeline for an extended time.
http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/energycentral/energybiz0908/
Oil needs to be heated to 120 degF to be able to make the 800 mile trip from Prudhoe Bay to the Gulf of Alaska at Valdez where it is loaded into tankers for the trip to the US. When it was approved, the pipeline was supposed to be capable of restarting after being shut down for three weeks in the middle of winter. As built, it will not meet that requirement if the temperature is lower than +40 degF. In winter, when it goes to -40 degF, it will take less than four days for the cargo to congeal into an 800 mile (dare I say) lipstick that's unpumpable until the weather warms up. As things are, the pipeline transports 20% of the total US production of oil, the loss of which would cripple the west coast for long enough to severely undermine the whole economy.
The Trans-Alaska pipeline is is commonly understood to be the single most potent terrorist target in the US. Built during less dangerous times, it was not hardened or even insulated sufficiently to recover from, much less withstand, a serious attack. Now the Governor of Alaska wants us to up the stakes by increasing the oil flow from a newly developed ANWR field and by building a 1,715 mile natural gas pipeline from the North Slope to the TransCanada hub in Alberta. And she wants to do it on the cheap like Rumsfeld:
"In order to protect the value of our resources, we must be sure that the cost of transportation is not made unnecessarily expensive."
It's nuts. Whatever you think of the T. Boone Pickens plan for converting commercial vehicles & trucks to natural gas, his map of all the natural gas fields in the continental US begs the question of why it's a good idea to invest billions to get the gas from Alaska by tripling the size of the pipeline bulls eye. Absent lower cost alternatives that abound, expensive and risky measures like these could be considered. As it is, undeveloped Alaskan resources should be considered more of a last resort than the first thing you'd turn to - the same as making war because it costs and risks too much. But sure enough, Big Oil has found another proxy and sure enough, The Washington Post reportes that 20% of white women just jumped ship and ran off to get on the Alaska bandwagon.
Deep Throat was right when he advised: "Follow the money." Even Alan Greenspan admitted that the Iraq adventure was primarily about oil. The oilers are not comfortable until they're running their agenda straight at us hard enough to generate so much cognitive dissonance that it hurts. I guess that undecided people vote for big oil supporters thinking they'll get some relief.
Apply Directly to the Wallet. Apply Directly to the Wallet. Apply ...
Sara's no different - Republican energy experts are mostly like white coated actors in drug adds telling us what's good for us. They do it because some of us are ditzy enough to believe them - like if rape is inevitable just roll over and enjoy it. I'm sorry, we're being violated. If she walks like a junky and she hawks like a junky and she's got her hand in our pocket and tells us it's OK because our gang is getting the money but we still run the risk of geting busted: she's a junky. It appears that her expertise is more in the nature of diverting our money to the Alaska drillers.
And in case you think any of it will trickle down (aside from paying for Alaska state government where citizens get a check instead of a tax bill), you've forgotten to follow the money: Exxon and BP are currently spending more of their windfall profits and government subsidies buying back common stock than they are on exploration while they leave existing offshore drilling leases untouched. When Senator McCain talks about giving oil companies even more leases to leave fallow as CHANGE, people who believe him are buying a bridge to nowhere that he doesn't own and for which they can't pay. With fingers crossed behind their backs, the Republican candidates are thinking: "Plus ca change! plus ca la meme chose".
I know folks throw that "fascist" label around for everything they don't like and every little thing that sounds even slightly authoritarian. Let me begin by saying that the word 'fascist' should be reserved for things that are, in fact, 'fascist'. I'll set aside the fact that the Wiki entry on fascism reads like it was written to describe the Right Wing in this country (and perhaps was, depending on who edited it), and focus on the kind of merging of corporations, state, and nationalist identity that has traditionally been the cornerstone of fascism.
Here's the statement from Sarah Palin that I've been contemplating all night. It occurs in her discussion (in her church) of the gas-pipeline project she was championing:
"I think God’s will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that.”
She is a political leader telling people what to PRAY for, and that something to pray for is "unifying people and companies" as an instance of necessary divine "will".
That the invocation of God's will for the advantaging of political initiatives is in and of itself fascist could be argued. But Sarah is going even further here into what appears to be explicitly fascist thinking: That God's will demands ("has to be done") the merging of people and companies for the special project of a special political personality (hers and her administration's). Merging people and companies in the name of a nationalist identity, and in the intimate reality that is 'prayer' among believers?? pretty close.....pretty close.
"We the people" are the government, are we not? Whether talking populist about simple pockets of 'folk' or about the state as such, the unification of people and companies for ideological advance via the intimate process of praying is about as close a recommendation of explicit fascist movement as I've seen by anyone in our political menagerie. Wherever the popular "we" are, there too is our form of government. Uniting that "we the people" with "companies" is step one in thinking in a fascist manner about how our system should work.
Of course her openly espoused policy stands, as far as they've been shared with us, do not all lend themselves to the 'fascist' label. But the missionary zeal at the base of her thinking, especially its allegiance to seeing her politics as aligned with God's will (including the Iraq War as a "task from God") and commandable as prayer, is nothing short of alarming. My own vetting process for a Vice President would find this by itself an exclusionary factor for anyone seeking office in this country, no matter what their other merits might be (and in that I grant that Mrs. Palin has many merits). No surface merits compensate for a deep-seated theology that shapes, guides and impels ones entire world-view in the direction of a form of nationalism inimical to America. Her extreme and absolutist position on abortion (no exceptions for rape and incest despite her state having the highest rates of both) pales in comparison to the troubling merger of monied and divine interests in a perfect storm of raw power. At the very least this is a nascent theological fascism, which when fully gestated could not help but spawn a political fascism through, say, being given the keys to the White House--the most powerful "bully pulpit" in the world.
Russia-Georgia Conflict Fueled by Rush to Control Caspian Energy Resources
..Even under the Clinton administration, when Eduard Shevardnadze was the president of Georgia, who was hardly a paragon of democracy, President Clinton said that we need Georgia as an energy ally of the United States. And that was the basis on which the US forged a military alliance with Georgia.And since then, we’ve poured hundreds of millions of dollars into beefing up the Georgian military. And this is unmistakable in the State Department and military Department of Defense justifications for arming the Georgian military, specifically to protect the BTC pipeline against sabotage and attack. So, looking into the Pentagon and State Department documents, there’s no question that this is about energy security, not about democracy or human rights or the other justifications that have been given.. - Michael Klare on Democracy Now!
..Even under the Clinton administration, when Eduard Shevardnadze was the president of Georgia, who was hardly a paragon of democracy, President Clinton said that we need Georgia as an energy ally of the United States. And that was the basis on which the US forged a military alliance with Georgia.
And since then, we’ve poured hundreds of millions of dollars into beefing up the Georgian military. And this is unmistakable in the State Department and military Department of Defense justifications for arming the Georgian military, specifically to protect the BTC pipeline against sabotage and attack. So, looking into the Pentagon and State Department documents, there’s no question that this is about energy security, not about democracy or human rights or the other justifications that have been given.. - Michael Klare on Democracy Now!
Georgia : A Blow to US Energy - Steve LeVine, Businessweek
..At the core of the struggle is a vast network of actual and planned pipelines for shipping Caspian Sea oil to the world market from countries that were once part of the Soviet empire. American policymakers working with a BP-led consortium had already helped build oil and natural gas pipelines across Georgia to the Turkish coast. Next on the drawing board: another pipeline through Georgia to carry natural gas from the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea to Austria—offering an alternate supply to Western Europe, which now depends on Russia for a third of its energy. But after the mauling Georgia got, "any chance of a new non-Russian pipeline out of Central Asia and into Europe is pretty much dead," says Chris Ruppel, an energy analyst at Execution, a brokerage in Greenwich, Conn..Map : An End Run Around Russia
..At the core of the struggle is a vast network of actual and planned pipelines for shipping Caspian Sea oil to the world market from countries that were once part of the Soviet empire. American policymakers working with a BP-led consortium had already helped build oil and natural gas pipelines across Georgia to the Turkish coast. Next on the drawing board: another pipeline through Georgia to carry natural gas from the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea to Austria—offering an alternate supply to Western Europe, which now depends on Russia for a third of its energy.
But after the mauling Georgia got, "any chance of a new non-Russian pipeline out of Central Asia and into Europe is pretty much dead," says Chris Ruppel, an energy analyst at Execution, a brokerage in Greenwich, Conn..
Map : An End Run Around Russia
For the past six years of relentless media pounding, the malleable public mind has been rendered into mush, brow-beaten into accepting the premise for the invasion and occupation of Iraq as, somehow, in fact, being based on a legitimate war. It is not a war and never has been. If you proceed from a false assumption, you will end up with a false argument. In this case, any reference to the term ‘Surge’ is a misnomer, and by default, an attempted extension to justify an already illicit deed. Therefore, any argument for, or against any kind of SURGE as working, or not, is simply a vain, elaborate attempt to mask and justify the mass slaughter and displacement of millions of people the current misconception has already left in its wake. This can not be dismissed, or condoned by a simple play on words. The architects should not be allowed, so easily, to wash from their hands the spilt innocent blood and wryly walk away!
Iraq never attacked the U.S., nor did it ever pose a threat. It was already occupied; cornered and bludgeoned by an already ongoing occupation initiated by Bush I. Bush II simply utilized the chaos that issued forth from the psychodrama of 9/11, as a means to escalate its belligerence against the Iraqi people to satisfy neocon agenda, seize the oil fields and restore U.S. Dollar supremacy. The U.S. Congress never declared war against Iraq, it simply signed off, giving Bush abusive powers to escalate existing aggressions of occupation; technically it has been nothing more than a congressionally sanctioned police action from the very beginning.
Now that the neocon warmongers wish to play a shell game with a ‘redeployment’ of troops from one illicit invasion: Iraq; transferring the focal point of its aggression by escalating those actions into the, long forgotten, initial invasion of Afghanistan, perhaps it would benefit all if we were to revisit the timeline encompassing the events of: Cheney/Enron – Taliban – Afghanistan – leading up to 9/11.
The Enron scandal runs so deep into the Bush/Cheney regime that evidence shows Enron may have been a major factor in Bush/Cheney complicity in 9/11 as pretext for the present "global war on terror" a war for the control of Central Asian oil, gas reserves and pipelines implicating the Bush/Cheney neocon regime in both the Enron scandal and 9/11, as Enron also had its interests in the Afghanistan/Central Asia energy grab.
From 2001 to 2003, Dick Cheney continued to openly break the law by defying GAO requests to turn over his records of meetings with Enron. The General Accounting Office decided not to challenge a judge's decision to dismiss the watchdog agency's lawsuit against Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force.
The decision by GAO ended a nearly two-year battle with the White House over documents detailing meetings Cheney held with the National Energy Policy Development Group in 2001. The meetings resulted in the president's national energy policy and many of the officials there came from Enron Corp., the Houston-based energy company that filed for bankruptcy in December 2001 amid accusations of hidden debt, inflated profits and improper accounting methods.
There are indications that Enron and the White House were working closely with the Taliban -- including Osama bin Laden -- up to weeks before the Sept. 11 attack. Why was the bin Laden family, swiftly whisked out of the country, immediately following the events of 9/11?
The Bush Oil Team, and their neocon drivers can momentarily rely on the support of the interim Prime Minister of Afghanistan, may think that war and oil profits mix, but there is simply too much evidence that the War in Afghanistan was primarily about building UNOCAL's pipeline, not about fighting terrorism.
How does McCain fit into the Enron ball game? Following Enron’s collapse in December of 2001, it was McCain’s financial guru, Phil Graam, the evil genius of world high-way robbery, whose UBS interests scavenged the remnants of Enron’s energy and oil interests throughout the Middle East. In other words, the chameleon UBS is the new Enron. (The following material will allow you to see the Enron scandal and its ties to Bush-Cheney in a whole new light: Center for Research on Globalization.)
Since the Democrats continue buckling under the weight of their own invertebrate skeletal structure when it comes to defending the Constitution, perhaps the public would best be served, by enlisting the services of those members of courage, who still have eyes, ears and a backbone; to investigate Cheney’s Enron agenda prior to 9/11 and the secretive deals between Big Oil, Bush, and the Taliban in the early months of 2001. If the spineless majority continues to lay prostrate in the face of such questions, perhaps we should raise the specter of their own criminal malfeasance.
What ever the opinions may be regarding the sanitized version for its causes, much weight outside of the anointed pronouncements, suggest that 9/11 may very well have been a rouge GLADIO-CIA styled false-flag operation utilized to ignite the necessary psychodrama that has permeated, and swept the public mind into accepting the all consuming ‘global war on terror’, a bloody cover for imperial madness…money and power!
Think Oliver North type covert ops run by then VP (CIA) Bush-I, in sleepy Reagan’s basement, but this time, Cheney’s basement, along with all of the same Iran/Contra neocon planners. A pliable Bush II, still a complicit traitor, has simply been the epitome of Marx’s ‘useful idiot’ for the neocon agenda, to plunge the world into a clash of civilizations and force into existence a fascist order.
GLADIO - false-flag operations are quite frightening as they are, in fact, quite real! Many will ask, "Well, what happened to the passengers seen boarding the aircraft?" These folks are psyops specialists, mind-benders, who study deception and distraction. My response is, "how did the famous magician, David Copperfield, manage to make the statue of liberty disappear before a, massive, live audience?"Interestingly, numerous NORAD, and its eastern counterpart, NEADS gamers, were performing live, what if, hijacking scenarios at that very same precise moment; to add a fog of confusion, the actual event was piggybacked into these live games. Suspicion has it that the 'aircraft' may have been outfitted with a DARPA designed electronics mechanism 'Global Hawk', which had the capacity for disabling and over-riding onboard pilot control of the craft and placing it into the hands of a remote crew. (Webster Tarpley - 9/11 Synthetic Terror-Made in USA) “Deception is a state of mind and the mind of the state.” - James Jesus Angelton - Director of CIA Counter Intelligence (1954-74)“The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” - William Colby - Director of the CIA (1973-76)
The corporate media, along with its PR firms, have done a masterful job in turning upside down the intended original meaning for the idiom ‘conspiracy’. With the association of negative thought patterns, evoked by images bound to such statements as: fringe, lunatic, left-wing, conspiracy-nut, etc, the public mind has been convincingly conjured into suspecting that it is the truth seeker that is fact the conspirator instead. The negative coloring of the word ‘conspiracy’ has effectively become a psychological repellant to any serious prying; as something beyond the pale of ordinary, rational thought; unworthy of consideration; a subliminal mental stop sign, impugning the rational mind that only lunatics and fringe elements dwell therein! Very effective indeed!
The fact of the matter is that history is replete with conspiracies. The American Revolution was a conspiracy against the King of England, a premiere example.
Con – meaning against; Spire – from the Latin, to breath -- giving us the result: to breathe against; from this, have evolved terms such as: con-job, con-artist, or confidence man, all of which are individual conspirators. The only difference being that, a conspiracy involves a 'group' of individual confidence men, or con-artists – think big, think Federal Reserve and Wall Street, both involve 'consumer confidence'. The con builds its subject’s confidence, for the purpose of bilking the supplicant out of something that it has; something of value and which the con desires to take by slight of hand. In 1913, when the money powers centralized their control, consecrated in the creature of the Federal Reserve, the popular press from that bygone era criticized it as a, “den of vipers and thieves”, in other words, a sanctuary of con-artists.
If you tell a little lie, you’ll get caught, but if you tell a BIG lie, and tell it often enough it and teach it as the truth, eventually it will be perceived and accepted by all as the truth. (In other words, the larger and more magnificent the con, the more difficult it is to see through it, especially if it is sanctioned and cloaked in the respectable shroud of one’s own government.)
I’d be willing to venture a ten-fold return on your every dollar, that there are currently, and have been from the very beginning, numerous false-flag fires set off all over the Middle East landscape. To this bloody thought process, the ends justify what ever means are at its disposal.
If these things are not openly vetted, the House can only remain under the dark cloud it has gathered itself under, while innocent blood continues to spill and scream from the ground to haunt the ears of the living.
I say, reopen the investigations into Enron/Cheney (currently, morphed into the UBS of McCain/Gramm/Cheney) because this might very well be the thread to pull that will unravel the cloak, which was 9/11.
In 43 BCE, Cicero spoke these words to the Senate: A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is well known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared.
Peace, Best Wishes and Hope
Referenced Material-----
Afghanistan, the Taliban and the Bush Oil Team
ENRON Entanglements to UNOCAL Taliban to Texas and Controlling Afghanistan
UBS Is Enron
GLADIO-Death Plan for Democracy
The Flight of the Global Hawk
The Power of Nightmares - Why We Fight
9/11 Synthetic Terror-Made in the USA
The Annotico Report (former president of Italy, Francesco Cossiga, reveals 9/11 as rouge GLADIO-CIA op)
The corporation’s successful deployment of Freudian psychological tricks, employed once before to harness the purchasing power of the consuming masses, has now turned an even more sinister corner. Tapping into the deeply rooted xenophobic religious fears of the psyche, enabling it to pit ‘Us’ against ‘Them’, while an evolving war industry thrives in the chaos, bloating itself upon the export market of war material, as it covertly seeks to undermine imerging democracies, a thorn in the side, and threat to imperial desires.
This force has evolved the capacity and of necessity, the psychological tools to incite global dominance, while the masses languish in its psychic prison, as automatons, a manufactured corporate bubble of consensus reality, suitable only to its own egocentric survival.
If you haven't seen the BBC documentires, I highly recommend you set time aside to watch both: 'The Century of Self' followed by 'The Power of Nightmares'. You will see how the - Al Qaeda Everywhere - specter morphed into its present form; a psychological tool for the exploitation of fear, to promote a never ending war!
Adam Curtis exposes the public manipulation we sense but usually don't understand. His BBC documentaries are legendary in Britain but practically unknown in the US. An American network executive who wouldn't even let his name be used said "we would be crucified if we showed that here". These documentaries are like a graduate course in how the American and British public has been herded like cattle since the end of World War I.Essential BBC documentaries not shown on US TVThe Power of Nightmares Part 1 (Alternate to part 1 broken link at above location)
Adam Curtis exposes the public manipulation we sense but usually don't understand. His BBC documentaries are legendary in Britain but practically unknown in the US. An American network executive who wouldn't even let his name be used said "we would be crucified if we showed that here". These documentaries are like a graduate course in how the American and British public has been herded like cattle since the end of World War I.
Essential BBC documentaries not shown on US TV
The Power of Nightmares Part 1 (Alternate to part 1 broken link at above location)
A cursory examination into the networking tentacles of the defense industry, which tap and prioritizes every innovative thought that bubbles to the surface, from each and every institution of American society, it becomes obviously difficult to escape the clutches of its reach into every segment of our economy. What should be even more worrisome is the continued raising up of mercenary, Solders of Fortune.
In the HBO documentary video, ‘Why We Fight’, the point is quickly hammered home, just how deeply permeated every nerve and fiber of American psyche has become, with the notion that war is necessary, war is good and war creates jobs.
This is the mindset Obama wishes to change. If not, it will be to our own peril. There is something beastly psychopathic reflected in a nation's annual military budget of 650 billion dollars, when weighed in the balace of world population, of roughly 7 billion people.
“Deception is a state of mind and the mind of the state.” - James Jesus Angelton - Director of CIA Counter Intelligence (1954-74)“The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” - William Colby - Director of the CIA (1973-76)
“Deception is a state of mind and the mind of the state.” - James Jesus Angelton - Director of CIA Counter Intelligence (1954-74)
“The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” - William Colby - Director of the CIA (1973-76)
