Over on his blog, Mat Gross has an interesting post on the BBC 2003 production The War for Oil.

Past Peak provides us with a link to this BBC special from 2003, which weaves together the threads of declining oil resources and the US/British invasion of Iraq.

It’s a well-done documentary, and a great introduction to peak oil and the present resource wars– well worth spending half an hour to watch. Its most salient point? The oil wars aren’t about who owns the oil, but who burns it. Check it out.

Larisa Alexandrovna pointed me at Michael C. Rupert’s long post on Peak Oil over on From the Wilderness.

There were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, based on the government’s top terrorism center. This suggests that the “War on Terror” is failing. The State Department is taking steps to correct the problem – by discontinuing the report, which is “the definitive report on the incidence of terrorism around [...]

By: Michael Cudahy

For those of you who are familiar with my writing for Greater Democracy, Alternet, Truthout and a variety of other websites and publications, you are aware that I have always been an advocate of bridge building as a means of progressive political organizing.

A few days ago I engaged in an interesting and somewhat emotive discussion with another member of this web site who felt that my attitudes were old-fashioned and no longer relevant.

She may well be accurate. I am inclined, however, to make the case for my position yet again as I believe it to be an extremely effective method for rebuilding a powerful and respected progressive voice in American politics.

Like many people, I was appalled by the results of the November presidential election. The tone and strategy of the Republican campaign reduced what should have been a meaningful issues debate into a circus sideshow. In my mind the means did not justify end. And, as a result, we have a president who has been almost totally discredited in the minds of millions of Americans by his willingness to pursue whatever tactic he felt was necessary to win him reelection.

By: Douglass Carmichael

The reemergence of religion into the public space is a cultural shock to many. We thought we lived in an increasingly science based secular world, and that the enlightenment was still penetrating the few remaining shadows of old myth, verbal ritual, blood and despair.

The overwhelming movement of the West since the middle ages is probably the confluence among technology, power, capital and status. The ruling class has been able to keep control, more or less, of this ensemble for its own benefit. The industrial phase required a larger middle class of well paid managers to keep this ensemble and its emerging complexity flowing and efficiently productive. The digital world, for its technology and the consequences, seems to imply that we need fewer managers, as coordination technology allows lower level workers to cross coordinate.

We are beginning to see that there is an inexorable flow to the techno-economic that is sensed by almost everyone. Mary Poovey has creatively called it the Axis of Finance. Capital congregates around a few places, and globalization is the extension of the exploitation of resource, but not of real economic power, to more and more of the world. Elites in new countries are paid off for delivering their populations to the megamachine. Law and regulation support the movement into ever more skewed distributions.

Yesterday, I wrote a blog entry comparing The Scream to The Kiss. The timing was opportune. Last Wednesday, Joe Lieberman spoke to the Democratic State Central Committee in Hartford. Friday, my wife and I had coffee with the Senator and on Sunday, the Senator gave my wife a kiss, reminiscent of the kiss the Senator [...]

Let me propose a radical idea. Perhaps, The Kiss is another fraud, another instance, not quite as clear of media assassination.

In The New York Times Sunday Magazine for April 03, 2005, Thomas Friedman has a powerful essay: It’s a Flat World, After All

As far as it goes, Friedman makes a valuable contribution to the conversation about or future we have been avoiding. It will be hard and will require much of us if we are take advantage of the situation. However, Freidman does not discuss four concepts that that would have made his case even stronger:

1] Change in the role of the center vs the edges of the network

2] The technology platform that has enabled and supported the changes he discusses is about to be obsolete. The new platform will dramatically increase the speed of the changes Friedman enumerates.

3] Freidman does not point to current research projects that illuminate the handwriting on the wall.

4]4] A change in the number of dimensions we citizens naturally operate in. The paradox is that as the world loses dimensions, we the people are gaining them.