Strike!

Daily Kos, for once, says something useful.

Some insane Democrats have just insanely voted for an insane bill to insanely approve THREATENING Iran, which is insanely similar in enough symbolic ways to the insane AUMF to make the use of the word insane.....mandatory. And of course, the Republicans are insane too, but we all knew that. Our government is yet again ratcheting up its War Machine to attack yet another sovereign nation that has taken no direct action to harm us.

Combined with continuously giving unconditional blood money to Bush, and the FISA debacle and SOOOO many other just.....insane....actions they have taken and sane ones they have not taken.....how can anyone have ANY hope that the Democrats as a whole will in any way oppose Bush? And if THEY don't oppose Bush, oppose war with Iran, oppose $200 Billion to kill Iraqis.....who will?

Where does that leave us....the sane people of the world? What choices do we have left?


How can we let them know of our disapproval?

How can we repudiate this latest insanity?

How can WE oppose Bush, since they won't?


How do we keep the Blood off of our hands?


A refusal to participate in the system is all we have left.


There is a call for a general strike on November 6, 2007.


Don't go to work. Don't buy anything. Simple.


Tell everyone you know to do the same. Write about it. Do it.


What else is left to us to do, besides surrender and admit that we have NO power, NO voice, and NO chance for ever changing anything.


I refuse.


STRIKE!

What to do?

Let's see - a group of criminals has overtaken the US government - they mass-murder their own people - attack other nations without provocation - remove and torture people without trial - import drugs - and I hear they also return videos a day or two late.

You are absolutely right about general strikes - cut off the supply of energy to the source - it will be painful, but not as much as what they have planned for us all anyway. Shut off the TV - live simply - refuse ID cards or biometric implants - stop living in a reactive mode waiting for their next assault on our freedoms, and ultimately our dignity as human beings. It is absurd that a minuscule group of psychopaths can determine the fate of 99.9% of the population.

Unfortunately...

Unfortunately what 9/11 shows is that a "minuscule group of psychopaths" *does* make the decisions for most of the population. Let us just think about that and realize that this is how society functions. Perhaps this is how humans have always lived, or perhaps it is a new development. But it seems that it is a fact of our lives that most people want to be led and don't want to think about things, especially if they have to abandon previously held beliefs. A good portion of Americans would rather bring about the end of the world by supporting murderous leaders than challenge their myth that the world is going to end by taking away their support for those leaders.

-----
National secrecy is a threat to human security.

Psychopaths Don't Get the Warm Fuzzies

The psychopaths have no problem killing people that get in between themselves and their desires.

"Facism = Capatilism + Murder"
Upton Sinclair

Alexjonesfan = Liberal Democrat & Ron Paul Supporter

I know what I am going to do.

I have always been a peaceful man but criminals HAVE taken over our country. Both parties are corrupt to the core. The press is nothing but a propaganda machine. We already live in a police state. While I still have time I will arm myself to the teeth. I hate violence but I will take a few of them out when they come after me. They may kill me and my family but they will pay the price big time. Count on it!

"Those who make peaceful revolutions impossible will make violent revolutions inevitable." JFK

As I said before, most top Dems are in collusion with most

top Repugs. The 2-party system of checks & balances is broken! Two families have made a dynasty out of the Whtie House, the Bushes & the Clintons.

Chuck Baldwin expains it this way:

"To believe that the Bushes and Clintons are political and philosophical opponents is the height of absurdity. Both have the support and do the bidding of the international elite. Both families are imbedded in secret societies and globalist agendas. And mark my words, the Bushes will be working behind the scenes for a Hillary victory in 2008."

The planned 9/11 strike?

Anyone care to comment on how that went down? Probably not very well, but it'd be nice to know anyway.

I don't know either but

I doubt very much that anything happened. Lets be honest. No one is going on strike. It just won't work and talking about it is just a waste of time. People won't do a thing until they are hurting. If a war is going on they just don't care because it does not hurt them. They see some of it on TV but that is about it. Most people could care less. They would rather watch football. During the Viet Nam era there was a draft so people were up in arms. It just about affected every family in America. Now, nothing. Even 9/11 truth doesn't motivate people much. You would be surprised how many people I know who know the truth about 9/11 but won't do a thing about it. They just don't care. People like us are a rare breed. We do care but there is just too few of us. It's sad but true. To be honest I am disgusted with my fellow Americans.

General Strike!

This idea takes hold when the conditions match the opportunities. But the idea is one worth promoting. It is the most powerful tool to shut down a corrupt dictatorship, the safest way to end the nightmare without bloodshed.

The reason the corporate dictatorship is invading other countries is NOT insane, it is unfortunately quite rational. It has to do with peak oil. Check out the Oil Drum forum and learn more about that issue. That's what all of this has been about: trying to keep the machine running. It falls apart as world global supply of oil begins to decline (which it has) and demand continues to rise dramatically with India and China's economies' explosive growth.

If you don't understand peak oil and thermodynamics, you only have a 'crude' understanding of why 9/11 has happened, and why they continue to launch wars of conquest. Rome was under the same pressure in the end. Thomas Homer Dixon's book, Upside of Down, is an interesting comparison of the fall of the Roman Empire to the fall of the US based partly on a thermodynamic analysis. Unfortunately, he got it wrong on 9/11, but otherwise an interesting read.

The US PNAC plan is an attempt to gain control over finite resources, and that's why it's worth trillions of dollars and why a police state makes sense to them. In the end, they have their backs to the wall and most people don't have a clue about this matter. The big machine is fragile and they know it, they just don't want you to know it. The machine depends on an enormous throughput of energy and completely falls apart into a Mad Max scenario without oil.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3014#more

[snip]
Conclusion

I will finish with personal story from my life overseas. When I lived in the UK, I saw what happens when the oil is shut off. In Sept 2000, the lorry drivers blockaded the refineries. My wife and I were brand new in the UK and driving back from a play in Aberdeen one night, we saw huge lines at the petrol stations. We wondered what was going on, but we drove on home not wanting to be in such long lines anyway. Unfortunately, those people in line, knew that the refineries had been blockaded, I didn't. By the time we realized it, the petrol was gone. That led to many interesting experiences. In one week, the food on the store shelves was gone. By two weeks, police and fire and ambulance were having trouble responding. Farmers were about to have to slaughter chickens because they couldn't get feed after only 2.5 weeks. Construction sites shut down. I learned through that experience that a society has about 3 weeks after the oil is shut off. Food ceases to move into the cities.

How can economic growth continue if each day into the future we have less energy than we had the day before??? This is a historic moment in human history. For the first time in 10,000 years, we have less energy than we had yesterday. And that will continue into the foreseeable future.

The only problem

with that scenario is that in fact we have Unlimited & renewable energy, more than we ever had with Oil.

Solar, Wind, Bio fuels etc can very easily take over oil.

The problem is corruption in Government being bought and paid for by Big oil.

and sadly you will never get more than 1% of this country to do anything until we are in extremely dire straits, people in this country are just plain too ignorant & for the most part could not care less.

One thing that would help tremendously would be to take our media back, the media is key.

Agreed, the media is key

But how do we take it back? Corporations have hijacked our government and our media extensively, so even a general strike would be ineffective if it weren't being broadcast. People just don't get worked up about anything, no matter how significant , unless it hurts them directly or they see it on TV.

Maddog is right about Vietnam. The reason why that created such an uproar is because of the draft. This forced people to not only pay attention, but to act. We don't have that now and it's not going to happen. If the neocons need more soldiers, they'll hire mercenaries like Blackwater or Wackenhut to make up the difference. Private soldiers who are not accountable to Congress and who's death toll is not even reported. (Over 1,000 of these guys have been killed as of July '07 along with the 3,800 US "official" count.)

A 1 day strike by a few or more people that receives almost NO media coverage will be a blip at most. Like the stock market dropping a few points one day only to rebound the next. A week long strike by enough people would be better, but are we willing to lose our jobs?

Perhaps if enough celebrites raised hell about about how our Constitution is under siege and the need to defend it, we could get the media working. Or more celbrities putting their careers on the line for 9/11 truth. Any more Rosies out there?

Otherwise, we need a draft or the government trying to force implants into our physical bodies to get people riled up enough to revolt.

EDIT: On a positive note, we are starting to see some prime time coverage in the progressive media. Richard Greene's Air America radio show "Clout" is making waves for us! And the People's Email Network has an action page to investigate 9/11 as a result. Here's the link:
www.usalone.com/reinvestigate_911.php

Wrong: the Alternatives are not Substitutes

I've studied this problem now for about 15 years. There are many introductory books and web sites on the matter. There is NO SUBSTITUTE for oil. The reasons for this are well-documented.

Once we realize our society runs primarily on petroleum, a finite energy resource, then the perils of human economic behavior become more obvious: we proceed ever faster towards an "entropy watershed," a point where a population exhausts its fuel supply and other natural resources. The Sun can support some life on this planet--it has for millions of years. And the potential for a long future, with humans in the picture, is still theoretically possible. But the problem is that we've built up a centralized state, agriculture, cities, etc., that depend on fossil fuel. Petroleum accounts for approximately 75% of our energy used. This is an extremely dangerous situation that most people don't understand. The common assumption is that we will simply "invent" a way out of this problem with a new technology. To show why that's not possible would require an elaborate exploration of entropy and how "alternative" energy resources are in fact highly parasitic upon petroleum. It would also entail a more thorough debunking of a plethora of popular myths concerning the potential for various alternatives. Let the following remarks suffice for a brief explanation and unconvinced readers can refer to a book with the key equations and elaborate analysis, The Refrigerator and the Universe by Goldstein and Goldstein (Harvard University Press: 1993); or see Jeremy Rifkin's easy-reading book, Entropy.
Everyone seems to have their own suggestion for where the next energy resource will come from. Some think gasohol from corn, others believe fuel cells will supply our needs. Many people have offered that “the ocean is full of hydrogen.” Solar, wind, tidal, hydroelectric, fission, fusion. The list of illusory solutions is practically endless.
Few seem to realize that all of these "alternatives" cannot compare with the simplicity and efficiency of pumping fuel from the earth like water from the aquifers. The amount of energy that goes into producing a huge hydroelectric dam is more than will ever be gotten from it, ironically. And at some point, it is all worthless and must be replaced. The same is true for a nuclear power plant. Losing propositions. Obviously, if this point is not clear, then the concern and worry seems unjustified.
Can our world sustain 6 billion people with 6 billion cars, 6 billion computers, and 6 billion houses as fossil fuels become exhausted? The problem is compounded by our exponential population growth. If we continue to muddle along unconsciously as we do, the consequences will be horrific. To fail to consider this problem seriously will contribute to the severity of the eventual and necessary move away from fossil fuels. To reduce energy usage, we should encourage the development of renewable energy resources while discouraging the use of fossil fuel (taxing the latter to pay for the former, for example), sustainable agriculture, industrial hemp for paper, international population education programs, and so on. Nevertheless, any future society based on a renewable-resource paradigm will necessarily entail a vastly reduced use of energy.
Fewer people using far less energy and a plan which moves smoothly and rapidly in that direction, with as little disruption as possible, is the most reasonable option. Unfortunately, that goes against the very assumptions of global capitalism which has its own short-term motivations for driving us over a sharp precipice. And government has never been more subservient to international capital. And so we have a monster of a problem. Remember “Cold Fusion”? The public's assumption that it was a “new” form of energy was contrary to the laws of entropy and thermodynamics. Now we don't hear so much about cold fusion and no one learned the lesson. Wishful thinking is a popular form of entertainment and explains how entropy and its implications never figure into framing the debate about energy, technology, and our future.
If you were to consider a graph of energy usage, we are in the up-swing of another exponential curve. That life is, in a sense, “counter-entropic” doesn't have any bearing on this overall picture of the accelerating expenditure of finite resources and the harsh realities facing humanity and the planet in the next generation.
As if entropy wasn't bad enough, there's another problem which is parallel to many others. We are, sadly, somewhat “locked in” to a technological future. An economic path, once chosen, can lead to a bad product which may triumph over better for unexpected reasons. For example, VHS won over Beta in the video market, but not because it was a better product. VHS simply gained the upper hand in market share. Sound familiar? This problem has been analyzed by economists such as Stanford's Brian Arthur. Computers are similar to the automobile--one generation bought into the basic assumptions that permitted the industry to develop, another has to live in cities like L.A., areas geographically dependent on the automobile. Today, the geography of most U.S. cities is based on the assumption of cars and unlimited energy. In fact, the degree of centralization of our cities, the very ability of a city to function, is based on fossil fuels.
In the long run, the implications of an “entropy watershed” are much more extreme. Unpleasant things can happen when there are more people than can be supported by a shrinking supply of energy and other natural resources such as land, water, minerals, etc. In this regard, our activities are not much more insightful than those of bacteria feeding on a fixed food supply in a petri dish.
The laws of thermodynamics are as merciless as the arrow of time. The first law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. The second law states that all available energy is moving from an available state to an unavailable state. It means that there will be no “new” energy resources discovered. Even our sun is subject to these laws and will eventually exhaust its supply of fuel. Our petroleum resources represent a one-time gift of millions of years of sunlight absorbed by previous life forms and preserved as oil.
To transform our present centralized, petroleum-based infrastructure to one based on renewable energy would be a vast project. For example, try to imagine how much effort and energy would be required to recycle all the current vehicles into electric cars. Existing vehicles are too heavy to be useful and would best be melted down and re-designed. The use of photovoltaic cells requires rare and also finite resources such as cadmium, silicon, germanium, ethylene glycol, liquid metals, selenium, gallium, arsenic, sulfur—as well as glass, plastics, rubber, etc. No photovoltaic solar cell has ever been created without the use of petroleum and other finite resources. Nor could a vast, centralized photovoltaic energy infrastructure be created or even maintained without the use of diminishing and soon-to-be-exhausted finite resources. “The end of the age of nonrenewable energy, then, presages the end of the Industrial Age as well. As the stored nonrenewable energy runs out, the entire economic superstructure built upon it will begin to crumble. Cracks all along that superstructure are already beginning to appear, and, try as we will, there isn’t enough nonrenewable energy left to mend all of them. This is the hard truth that every person on this planet must inevitably face up to.” [Jeremy Rifkin, Entropy (New York: Viking Press, 1980), p. 186.]
Faster, faster, we want it faster. But there is always a price. In this case, the price is the future. If technology is the answer, then the question might be: In what way can we most swiftly use up the available fuel supply

Well said, WR.

I don't want to turn this thread into another energy/peak oil battle, but this is one issue Alex Jones and others in this movement are dead freaking wrong. The U.S. production peaked in the early '70's. Fact. Three of the world's four largest fields have gone into decline in the past five years. Fact. Whether global production can increase at this point in the face of major declines in places like the North Sea and Mexico essentially all rides on whether Saudi Arabia has the reserves they say they do. The folks over at the Oil Drum have built a very nice case that the Saudis don't and are on the verge of decline. Scroll down to all of the Ghawar links at the bottom of this post.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2828#more

As far as wind and solar, what the heck are you going to use to build all of that infrastructure? That's right, petroleum. And even if that stuff helps up keep the lights/electricity on in the face of natural gas declines, it won't work as a transportation fuel. Are you going to fly planes and run trucks and ships on wind and solar? Haha. No, nothing replaces oil as a transportation fuel. Nothing. The interstate highway system and global economy also aren't going to run on corn oil either. Guess what you need to grow that corn? Fossil fuel based fertilizers and pesticides, not to mention fossil fuel powered equipment and irrigation.

We may need coal and nukes to keep the lights on, but that won't help ship goods.

You can bitch all you want about how peak oil is used as a Malthusian population agenda ( I actually buy into overpopulation theories), but to deny it's occurrence as anything other than geological fact is stupid.

"9/11 research is a rabbit-hole of Byzantine complexity full of snares and delusions and peopled with false friends, lunatics, earnest lost souls and a few heroes."
- Jenna Orkin

So you are trying to tell me that

if not one drop of oil was now available that we would not ever be able to reach the same or better energy output in this country? LOL

Yeah right, we already have at least 75% of the technology needed to achieve that and NO we don't need 95% of the petroleum based products you listed.

We COULD do it what is stopping us are the oil companies.