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At 2 TV Stations in Maine, What Al Gore’s Movie Says Isn’t News

How important is global warming in Maine? Not important enough for local television.

Michael Palmer, the general manager of television stations WVII and WFVX, ABC and Fox affiliates in Bangor, has told his joint staff of nine men and women that when “Bar Harbor is underwater, then we can do global warming stories.”

“Until then,” he added. “No more.”

Mr. Palmer laid out his policy in an e-mail message sent out during the summer. A copy was sent to The New York Times. Mr. Palmer did not respond to a phone message left with an employee of the stations nor to an e-mail message. But a former staff member confirmed the e-mail message that went out during the summer after the stations broadcast a live report from a movie theater in Maine where Al Gore’s movie on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was opening.

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– this story is from the NY Times and they are a bit of a pain as you need to have a password and an ID to read their stuff. The good news is, it is free to get these and you only need to do it once.

Unlike the Oil, Smoke and Mirrors video, I have no reservations about this one. Keith Olbermann is to be applauded for saying this stuff straight out on a major media outlet. This is about the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and if you are an American and you don’t know about it – you should.

I’ve included it in the Politics – how not to do it category for obvious reasons.

I’ve also included it in the Perfect Storm category because it is representative of the kind of tension that is going to build as things become more and more unstable.

Keith Olbermann’s commentary on the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is here: ➡

This video is interesting and well done but I have reservations about it. You’ll have to watch it to see what I mean. I’d love to know your thoughts on it.

http://www.oilsmokeandmirrors.com/

It tries to make a connection between Peak Oil and 911. The basic idea is that 911 was a put up job to give the US the excuse to wage war in Afghanistan and Iraq with the long term and largely hidden agenda of controlling sufficient oil to help the US avoid the coming consequences of Peak Oil.

I have a problem with most ‘conspiracy’ theories because, while they may sound entirely logical and plausible within their presentational context, once you look beyond what’s been said and consider the wider implications, things become a lot less plausible.

I always think of Roswell, New Mexico in this connection. The idea that hundreds of US military personnel have kept the secret since 1947 and never revealed a cover-up at Roswell is impossible to believe. And the idea that an alien spacecraft crashed there and hundreds if not thousands of pieces of debris were picked up and not one person pocketed a memento is also not reasonable.

So, here we have 911 and the idea that the government, because of a long-term goal to corner oil for the US, had to have a plausible reason to attack Afghanistan and Iraq and therefore decided to aid terrorists to strike the twin towers – it is all too fantastic. Think of all of the people who would have had greater or lesser amounts of insider knowledge of what was going on. Are all of them going to go to their graves as tight lipped patriots? I doubt that in any group of 100 people, you could be assured that all of them would make it through the next year on something like this without spilling the beans – much less five years.

Our government is just not that smart and just not that informationally waterproof. Remember bombing Cambodia, remember Watergate and remember Iran-Contra – those were big secrets and the way they came out was a bit like watching the Keystone Cops in action.

There was a section in this film where they said that the current tightening of laws, the ignoring of the Geneva Conventions and the abrogation of our personal rights (by mechanisms like the Military Commissions Act of 2006 – though they did not mention that act by name here), are part of a long term plan to have control mechanisms in place so that when the problems of Peak Oil begin to manifest and the inevitable social unrest ensues, they will already have the necessary structures in place to control an unruly population. Well, that sounds pretty frightening until you think that in a little over two years, the current administration and most of what it wrought (other than the justices it appointed), may well be history and dust. For this idea to hold together, you have to accept a conspiracy so wide that it encompasses the width and breadth of both parties. Nope – I don’t buy it.

I think it is all much more likely that our government *is* trying to gain control of oil for strategic reasons but that they are simply reacting to opportunities, like 911, as they’ve presented themselves. I also think that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is very dangerous to our personal freedoms but that these things are borne of governmental hysteria and come and go as the pressures and the administrations come and go. That’s poor solace to those who might get imprisoned during such a period of hysteria, though.

If I had to pick out a more insidious danger, I’d say that it is the foisting off on the American public of voting machines full of proprietary software. If the governing party and its proxies gets control of the companies that make these machines, and if they move with sufficient stealth, they may win all the important elections from here on out.

Let me know your thoughts on all of this.

– Talk is cheap. Canada signed up for Kyoto which was commendable. But, when the rubber hit the road, they essentially did nothing. Now, they are going to try to put a good spin on it all by making new grandiose plans for what they will do (really) by 2050. I see it all as just a way to avoid real action. Unfortunately, as the cost of real action becomes apparent, many countries are backing away hoping someone else will come forward and make the sacrifice. And all the while, like a spring building up tension, nature is being pushed harder and harder by our denial and inattention. A Perfect Storm of consequence is coming.

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TORONTO, Ontario (AP) — Canada’s government introduced legislation Thursday that would cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050, a target date that prompted critics to declare that Ottawa effectively has abandoned the international Kyoto accord on climate change.

The proposed Clean Air Act, intended to counter claims that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is soft on the environment, sets no short-term targets for cutting greenhouse emissions. In the long term, it says the government would seek to cut emissions 45 percent to 65 percent by 2050.

Under the Kyoto accord, Canada pledged to cut its emissions by 6 percent from 1990 levels by 2012. The country’s emissions are now 30 percent above 1990 levels.

The legislation, which must be passed by the House of Commons, is certain to get a rough ride from opposition parties who say the act is far too weak and makes no reference to Canada’s commitments under the Kyoto treaty.

“What we can see now is that no matter what the government says about not pulling out of Kyoto, we officially pulled out of Kyoto today,” said John Bennett of the Sierra Club of Canada.

“There is no intention now to even try to achieve what we had pledged; we have decided to abandon our international commitment,” he said.

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– I haven’t, to date, written anything about current U.S. Foreign Policy. It isn’t that I don’t care or don’t have opinions but it is, rather, that I think that the issues I generally blog about are going to cut a far deeper swath through our future than most current events or the squabbles between the Democrats and the Republicans here in the U.S. (whom I refer to as Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee since very little of what they yammer about as they oppose each other bears at all on the issues which I think are pressing, immediate and extremely dangerous to all of our futures).

– But, in spite of all that, I found the following article poignant and sad about what really happening on the ground in Iraq. I don’t have any good ideas of how to get out of this mess, and a great mess it is, but it’s worth reading just to realize what day to day life there is like behind all the impersonal statistics.

– And, this story does,after all, bear on my main Perfect Storm theme in that this sort of political chaos is likely to spread ever wider so long as inequality, ignorance and radical faith-based philosophys continue to dominate human affairs.

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Published on Thursday, October 12, 2006 by the Independent / UK

Iraq: The Reality

The overthrow of Saddam Hussein was supposed to bring them freedom democracy and peace. But murder, kidnap and lawlessness have become the facts of life for the people of Iraq. In an exclusive extract from his new book, Patrick Cockburn describes the terrifying disintegration of a nation.
by Patrick Cockburn

A sense of utter lawlessness permeated everyday life in Baghdad as the war approached its fourth year in spring 2006. In his Memoirs of an Egotist Stendhal describes how, when he visited a city, he tried to identify the 10 prettiest girls, the 10 richest men and the 10 people who could have him executed; he would have had his work cut out in Baghdad. Veils increasingly concealed girls’ faces, the rich had fled the country – and almost anybody could have you killed. To give a picture of Baghdad, surely the most dangerous city in the world at this time, it is worth explaining just why a modern-day Stendhal would be in trouble if he tried to identify any of the three categories he mentions.

Iraqi women used to enjoy more freedom than almost anywhere else in the Muslim world, apart from Turkey. Iraq was a secular state after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958. Women had equal rights in theory and this was also largely true in practice. These were eroded in the final years of Saddam Hussein as Iraqi society became increasingly Islamic. But under the constitution negotiated with the participation of the American and British ambassadors and ratified by the referendum on 15 October 2005, women legally became second-class citizens in much of Iraq. About three quarters of the girls leaving their schools at lunchtime in central Baghdad now wore headscarves. The reason was generally self-protection. Those girls who were truly religious concealed all their hair, and these were in a minority. The others left a quiff of hair showing, which usually meant that they wore headscarves solely because they were frightened of religious zealots.

There was also a belief that kidnappers, the terror of every Iraqi parent, would be less likely to abduct a girl wearing a headscarf because they would suppose she came from a traditional family. This is not because of religious scruples on the part of kidnappers but because they thought old-fashioned families were likely to belong to a strong tribe. Such a tribe will seek vengeance if one of its members is abducted – a much more frightening prospect for kidnappers than any action by the police.

The life of women had already become more restricted because of the violence in Baghdad. Waiting outside the College of Sciences in Baghdad one day was a 20-year-old biology student called Mariam Ahmed Yassin, who belonged to a well-off family. She was expecting a private car, driven by somebody she trusted, to take her home. Her fear was kidnapping. She said: “I promised my mother to go nowhere after college except home and never to sit in a restaurant.” Her father, a businessman, had already moved to Germany. She volunteered: “I admire Saddam very much and I consider him a great leader because he could control security.”

Mariam’s father was part of the great exodus of business and professional people from Iraq. A friend suffering from a painful toothache spent hours one day ringing up dentists only to be told again and again that they had left the country. If Stendhal was looking for the 10 richest Iraqis he would have had to begin his search in Jordan, Syria or Egypt. The richer districts of the capital had become ghost towns inhabited by trigger-happy security guards. In some parts of Baghdad property prices had dropped by half. Well-off people wanted to keep it a secret if they sold a house because kidnappers and robbers would know they had money. “Some 5,000 people were kidnapped between the fall of Saddam Hussein and May 2005,” said the former human rights minister Bakhtiar Amin.

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– Climate skeptics are working world-wide.  Even in such an environmentally enlightened country as New Zealand, the claims and counter claims rise to confuse the public over what’s best for all of our futures.   Hopefully, they’ll be smarter than we’ve been to date.

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News from new Zealand:

Call for TVNZ Balance on ‘Alarmist Doomcasting’

A challenge to TVNZ to balance what he termed “alarmist doomcasting” in its Tuesday evening 6 pm OneNews, has been issued by the secretary of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, Terry Dunleavy.

“TVNZ chose to broadcast a hugely exaggerated claim about global warming by an American supporter of global warming, James Hansen, on precisely the same day that Mr Hansen was being denounced in the U.S. Senate, by Senator James Inofe, chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. I challenge TVNZ to balance the record with the following except from Senator Inofe’s speech,” said Mr Dunleavy:

“On March 19 of this year ‘60 Minutes’ profiled NASA scientist and alarmist James Hansen, who was once again making allegations of being censored by the Bush administration. In this segment, objectivity and balance were again tossed aside in favour of a one-sided glowing profile of Hansen.

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