Saturday, March 21, 2009
How Soon Will Torchlight Parades Come to America?
According to reports, disgruntled taxpayers took a bus ride to visit the palatial estates of AIG executives to protest their bonuses. The citizens are being distracted by the bonuses, which are mere pocket change compared with the huge gobs of money the US government has thrown at AIG and other entities, but that’s another story. Here I want to make an observation on the anger of the masses, which is nothing to trifle with, as history has shown.
Elites obviously believe that the protests aren’t always going to be peaceful, that it’s only a matter of time until there are nasty visits from torch-wielding crowds. They may be right. And they are making preparations to deal with citizen anger.
For example, according to PR Watch,
Harvard Law School is hosting seminars in April and November to teach “Public Relations, Communications and Media Strategies for Dealing With an Angry Public.” They’ll be teaching techniques for dealing with people who “are angry because you’ve let them down” or who “want to embarrass you publicly,” as well as “environmental groups threatening you” over issues such as “the use and disposal of toxic materials.” You can visit their website for details. A flyer announcing the seminars carries endorsements from officials with the U.S. Air Force, Federal Aviation Administration, ConocoPhillips, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals.
Another sign that companies are seriously worried about unrest is this Marketwatch article, which informs us that “U.S. companies are being advised to batten down the hatches for their annual meetings this year amid rising anger among investors and the public over bonuses, bailouts, layoffs and slumping share prices.” An expert suggests that they are anticipating violence at annual meetings.
If it’s not possible to keep the pot from boiling over, torchlight parades could occur, and considering the number of guns owned by Americans, the situation could become very ugly. That is no doubt behind the preparations for mass internment.
October 6, 2009
How Soon Will Torchlight Parades Come to America?
Posted by Alex Williams under UncategorizedLeave a Comment
October 6, 2009
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Difficulties Facing Renewables
In addition to the need to use fossil fuels to build the equipment for renewable energy sources (raising the question of ultimately how “renewable” they are), a recent news item tells us that T. Boone Pickens’ plan to build the world’s biggest wind farm has been stymied by two problems: financing and the grid. Specifically, the credit crunch is limiting the funds available for financing renewable energy projects, and America’s grid isn’t up to handing the power that the wind farm would be feeding into it.
The lack of money for financing is crimping just about everything. We are also supposed to be looking forward to a revival of nuclear power, but the skyrocketing costs of these large-scale, high-tech installations is killing the nuclear renaissance even before it gets started. And while various costs are being quoted for upgrading the grid, they are all astronomical.
Thus, dreams of expansive wind farms, solar parks, and other installations need to be tempered with the reality of cost, which ultimately comes down to the price of fossil fuels.
August 14, 2009
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
- Thomas Jefferson, 1816
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August 14, 2009
I know, I know; haven’t posted anything here in the last month! Too much FaceBook and Twitter + Life in general. Not to mention NOTOCON and preparations for.
Was an incredible weekend of fellowship, fraternity and Joy!
Will now be working harder to keep this blog up to date and varied.
July 14, 2009
July 14, 2009
July 8, 2009
POCKET PARaDIGMS BY SAM SMITH Advertising America Anthropology Baseball Balancing rights Beat generation Blame Budgets Bush Campaign Choice Cities Community Cooperation Culture Democratic Party Devolution Economics Elite Entropy Evolution Experts Freedom
Posted by Alex Williams under Sustainable economy, politicsLeave a Comment
This is not just about 9/11; it’s about America. It’s about us. It’s about what we have forgotten. Fear and a constant arousal of fear from media has driven some of these basic propositions from our minds. Let us remember.
“Many years ago some people built castles and walled cities and moats to keep the bad guys away. It worked for a while, but sooner or later spies and assassins figured out how to get across the moats and climb the walls and send balls of fire into protected compounds. The Florentines even catapulted dead donkeys and feces during their siege of Siena.
The people who built castles and walled cities and moats are all dead now and their efforts at security seem puny and ultimately futile as we visit their unintended monuments to the vanity of human presumption.
Like the castle-dwellers behind the moat, we are now spending huge sums to put ourselves inside a prison of our own making. It is unlikely to provide either security for our bodies nor solace for our souls, for we are simply attacking ourselves before others get a chance.
This is not the way to peace and safety. Peace is a state without violence, interrogations and moats. Peace is a state of reciprocity, of trust, of empirically based confidence that no one is about to do you in. It exists not because of intrinsic goodness or rampant naivete but because of a common, implicit understanding that that it works for everyone.
This discovery is often hard to come by, but it is still cheaper, less deadly, and ultimately far more effective than the alternative we seem to have chosen, which is to imprison ourselves in our castle and hope the moat keeps the others out.”
July 6, 2009
Clerical Leaders Defy Ayatollah on Iran Election – NYTimes.com
Posted by Alex Williams under politicsLeave a Comment
“This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. “Remember, they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei.”
And the revolution continues…
July 4, 2009
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July 1, 2009
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