"World War III has started...Soon it will affect every citizen..."

[Beam Me Up]

Since the first post of this with a more respectable subject line just sank with no interest what so ever, thought I'd throw it in again with something more inflammatory, if no less significant:

In his presentation, (Ali) Bakhtiari (Vice President of the National Iranian oil Company (NIOC)) told the conference, "The crisis is very, very near.  World War III has started.  It has already affected every single citizen of the Middle East.  Soon it will spill over to affect every single citizen of the world. Syria’s oil production is in terminal decline. Yemen is following.  Major Middle East producers, including Saudi Arabia, will peak soon or have already peaked."

Off the stage he was even more direct, “The present war cannot be confined to the Middle East. It will soon spill over to the rest of the world. The final implications will upset the global applecart.”

.snip.

. . . the world’s economic system is hopelessly corrupt and absolutely incapable of telling the truth. Yet, even so, there are signs that the thin veneer between outward confidence and fear; between a half-truth which is really a lie and a whole truth which can lead to real solutions; is fast dissolving. Until that Rubicon is crossed the deception and denial are overcome, there will be no real solution other than continued war, bloodshed and destructive behavior which is blocking us from more peaceful, longer-term and more humane solutions.

George Bush and Dick Cheney may have meant it when they said that the American way of life is not negotiable. But it most certainly is on life-support and being sustained by cruelty, brute force and lies.
The markets just can’t hide it anymore.

more:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/062104_berlin_peak.html

[skooooo]

1. Maybe a Depression is coming..?

Seems more likely than huge full-blown world war.

[Beam Me Up]

2. They could very well be related.

If energy prices begin -- I should say continue -- to go through the roof, how do you think that is going to effect our economy and the larger geopolitical theatre?

[Jose Diablo]

6. The peak oil is reality

the nations will have no choice but to attempt to grab what remains. What resources that remain that could have been used to take us to the next level on energy sources has been and will be squandered on war.

I am sorry, but I wish I could more optimistic. Call me tinfoil hat, whatever. Thats reality as I see it. I hope I am wrong.

[Taylor Mason Powell]

22. I hope you're wrong too.

And I hope I'm wrong in agreeing with you.

[WLKjr]

3. The huge full blown war

I don't beleive will happen all at once. Depression will come first, last a little while, long enough for it to cause in-fighting within a government, tensions will rise and then someone will slip and fire on the other. This may not happen intentionally but it will cause a nation to go to war with that someone. Then all the allies jump in from either side..........wait a second. This might be another domino affect like WWI for those history buffs out there, maybe they will see where I am comming from kind of.

[Beam Me Up]

5. You understand what is being referred to is a RESOURCE WAR?

Are you familiar with the "peak oil" scenario: the end of affordable energy?

[WLKjr]

12. heard of it

and only imagined it. I can see resource wars comming sooner than people think.

[Beam Me Up]

13. The position of the article's author is that for all practical

purposes we are already in one. Our military is in the ME for resource-strategic purposes having NOTHING to do with a "war on terrorism" much less "WMDs" or "Iraqi liberation".

[TreasonousBastard]

9. The Depression had a lot to do with...

WWII. And one now could be the trigger for WWIII.

Hitler's rise was made much easier by the complete economic collapse in Germany. The economic collapse led to social and governmental collapse, and Hitler took advantage of it by selling himself as the strong leader Germany needed to stave off the rising Communist Party. Murder, mayhem, and a fire in the Reichstag helped seal the deal.

Should we have a major collapse now, there are many possible scenarios. The one I don't see happening is that we all get together and find peaceful and humane solutions.

In a crisis, either cream or shit rises. England got Churchill, we got Roosevelt, Germany got Hitler, Italy got Mussolini...

Don't count on the cream rising here next time.

[lovedems]

4. Who was it that said WW4 would be fought with sticks and stones?

Now that Iran is getting into the mix, articles like this make me nervous.

[Beam Me Up]

8. Albert Einstein, I believe.

And YES, we should all be PAYING ATTENTION to what is going on in the ME right now -- not to mention what is going on in the halls of power.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION IS A THREAT TO OUR NATIONAL SECURITY.

[aquart]

7. Hysterical twit from the world's most alarmist site.

I guess that running out of oil IS the end of the world to the ME. And he's right that oil-based economies are about to crash and burn. Which could be all of us. Except that oil ain't all there is. And the human race, being a kind of vermin, is very adaptable to its circumstances.

So we collapse? Honey, we were going to do that because of Georgie's tax cuts anyway. Them and the silly bits of legislation snuck into other bills. Georgie dreams of the good old days of the Roman Empire, forgetting that really pissed off barbarians mopped up the floor with them and their all-volunteer/mercenary army. If only he'd stayed awake in class and had some analytical ability, he'd know that.

[Beam Me Up]

11. Denial is a river that even flows through some here at DU n/t

[zbdent]

10. "The universe is already mad. Anything else would merely

be redundant."

God, I miss Londo.

[Beam Me Up]

15. "If you're going to be worried that the universe doesn't make sense,

you're going to be worried every moment of your natural life."

I'm not worried for, from my perspective, it isn't the universe that is mad, but those of us conditioned by Western so called Civilization with a fatal epistemological error:

The cybernetic epistemology which I have offered you would suggest a new approach. The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by "God," but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology.

Freudian psychology expanded the concept of mind inwards to include the whole communication system within the body—the automatic, the habitual, and the vast range of unconscious process. What I am saying expands mind outwards. And both of these changes reduce the scope of the conscious self. A certain humility becomes appropriate, tempered by the dignity or joy of being part of something much bigger. A part—if you will—of God.

If you put God outside and set him vis-a-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables.

If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of over-population and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite.

If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. This is not funny, and I do not know how long we have to do it in. If we continue to operate on the premises that were fashionable in the prescybernetic era, and which were especially underlined and strengthened during the Industrial Revolution, which seemed to validate the Darwinian unit of survival, we may have twenty or thirty years before the logical reductio ad absurdum of our old positions destroy us. Nobody knows how long we have, under the present system, before some disaster strikes us, more serious than the destruction of any group of nations. The most important task today is, perhaps, to learn to think in the new way. Let me say that I don't know how to think that way. Intellectually, I can stand here and I can give you a reasoned exposition of this matter; but if I am cutting down a tree, I still think "Gregory Bateson" is cutting down the tree. I am cutting down the tree. "Myself" is to me still an excessively concrete object, different from the rest of what I have been calling "mind."

http://www.rawpaint.com/library/bateson/formsubstancedifference.html

[Massacure]

14. Europe runs mainly on nuclear energy

I'm sure they can produce ethanol as cheap as gasoline.

They won't get hit as hard as the U.S. will if that is true.

[Sirveri]

16. Even if you don't buy into Peak Oil

You still must buy into the law of supply and demand.

We're at 82 Million Barrells of production a day and we use 80. Factor in a 1% estimated production increase and a 3% consumption increase and in two years even without peak oil we will begin to have problems.

[Beam Me Up]

17. It looks to me like we're having problems already. n/t

[SpiralHawk]

18. Remember the Good Old Days when gas was $1.60?

Ahhh, the Good Old Days...

This is another fine mess you've gotten us into Shrubby...

[Sirveri]

19. I remember when gas was .99 cents.

[Jose Diablo]

21. I can remember $0.17 per gallon in the mid 60's

Then again, with $0.17 you could also get a White Castle hamburger too.

I guess its close to being comparable today. Maybe fuel is slightly higher in comparison. Its hard to tell though with money floating and unsure inflation figures.

The fuel is different too, being unleaded.

One thing I am sure of though, is the average pay compared to basic living expense is way lower today. Used to be able to raise a family on one paycheck, I doubt that can be done today.

[Sirveri]

20. Yeah, especially if the article was correct about demand

increasing by 3 Million barrel a day by the end of the year.

We're basically screwed, even without Peak oil.

The thing is, if Peak oil is for real (which it has been shown to be), then what we're about to experience is going to be MUCH worse.

I guess it's time to finally make a fuel cell and create generators capable of powering them. too bad it's too late for that. Hydrocarbon fuel cells were pretty awesome for a while their. Oh well.

[Beam Me Up]

23. We should have begun building a sustainable energy

infrastructure THIRTY YEARS AGO. We *KNEW* this was going to happen. But the powers that be -- the likes of G.H.W.B. and his fellow OIL BARONS derailed any such thinking because there was still TOO MUCH MONEY to be made in oil. So, what they've done, is brought the whole of global civilization to the brink of disaster. Do they have a solution? Oh, hell yeah: massive reduction in global population. That'll the trick. :mad:

[NEOBuckeye]

24. Jimmy Carter tried, but then Reagan came along

Carter may not have been the best President, but he at least had the foresight to see where our dependence upon finite energy sources would eventually lead us. He tried to wean the country from them. But then came a conservative Ronald Reagan who, rather ironically, had little if any notion of what Carter had set out to do, moving to take down the solar panels from the White House and turning the oil spicket back up, full blast.

It's a shame, really. It seems that now, the American people are going to have to learn about managing our finite energy resources the HARD way, as they begin to manage US. I don't necessarily believe, as some fear, that Peak Oil will be the collapse and waterloo of civilization and humanity -- Fidel Castro's Cuba, of all places, has proven that a post Peak Oil society is both viable and sustainable -- but it does definitely look to be a pretty nasty test coming up. And just like in college, too many of us have been spending much more time "PARTYING" than we have spent "STUDYING" for that upcoming exam. When test time arrives, A GREAT MANY are going to find themselves massively overwhelmed and extremely underprepared.

For what it's worth, I have some hope in people -- such as the Europeans -- who have been moving ahead in development of alternative fuels and resources, as well as social infrastructures that aren't as massively dependent upon the automobile (as America now is). It still probably will not be enough to shield them from the full impact of Peak Oil, but they're already so very much better off than us.

[Beam Me Up]

25. Thank you for your thoughtful reply.

I wish I had the time to give it the response it deserves. Unfortunately, besides job, I also have out of town guests taking up a lot of my time just now.

However, I didn't want this to sink into the cyber-abyss with no response at all. So much of the time what goes on here is so much like a 'sound bite opinion' that it is refreshing when one has the opportunity to actually "talk," leisurely, as if one were having a conversation.

I appreciate very much what you are saying about Carter vs the REACTIONARY forces that, as I see it, brought a healthy movement toward social change to a virtual standstill. Just as the Nazis had been created to stop the rise of socialism in Germany, the "Silent Majority" transformed into the "Religious Right" TO PREVENT THE RISE OF A NEW SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS in the West, and particularly in the US. Those of us who were interested in social change HAD NO IDEA how threatening we were to the REAL structures of power that determine the course of our 'human affairs.'

We had BELIEVED in Democracy. Slowly, perhaps, many of us have now come to believe that much of what we had been given to understand as being the consequences of democratic process, may, in fact, have been something else entirely.

So, I want to make a very PUBLIC statement, that I personally hold certain very namable families and individuals within those families not only RESPONSIBLE but potentially LIABLE for damages against Humanity. True, the rest of humanity, the working classes and so on, also bare a certain responsibility. But we have to ask, what is LEADERSHIP supposed to do if not LEAD. It would be one thing if our Democratic process actually worked; but given the overwhelming influence the elite, moneyed classes have had -- and what self-interested and short sighted leadership has come from them as a class -- I've come to the opinion that humanity as a whole can no longer afford them.

In closing, this email came across my desk a week or so and I've decided to post it here -- for the amusement of it if nothing else:

There's something new and magical starting on Main Street ...

So come on out and celebrate July 4th the Solari Way ... with a Declaration of Financial Transformation

+ We hereby declare our transformation from the financial behavior which is destroying our country and our world.

+ We are not going to wait for November.

+ We are voting now.

+ We are not going to ask more Congressmen, Commissions.
Administration Representatives or Presidential Candidates for help.

+ We have the power of our votes in the marketplace.

+ We are going to exercise that power now!

Our kickoff date is July 4th. We are calling for 600,000 people
worldwide to join us in pulling our checking accounts, certificates of deposits, credit cards and other business out of multi-national banks such as Citibank, Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase, and switching to local, well managed community-friendly banks or credit unions.

Don't miss out on the financial fireworks!
Click here for details:
http://www.solari.com/campaign/july4th.htm


From the Solari Action Network Team

Catherine Austin Fitts
Christina Engelbart
Henri Poole
Court Skinner
Carolyn Betts
John Maeck