"I would approach Integral Evangelism with the same spirit that I've always approached Christian Evangelism with: with the premise that it be guided by the interest and receptivity of the intended recipient. Letting myself be a vehicle of Spirit and trying not to get in the way. Sharing what I've learned with grace, tact and good humour. Being sensitive to how much a given person can absorb without their eyes glazing over. Being truly loving while getting across "the message". (The messenger IS the message.) Sharing personally about how this particular vision has affected my life. Being truly agendaless and letting amazing things unfold before my eyes." -feral, Integral Naked post, 11/25/05
http://globalfire.tv/nj/05en/globalism/us_end.htm
In just 5 short years the national debt has increased by nearly 3 trillion dollars while the dollar has continued its predictable decline. The dollar has fallen a whopping 38% since Bush took office, due largely to the massive $450 billion per year tax cuts. If oil is traded in euros then central banks around the world would be compelled to follow and America will be required to pay off its enormous $8 trillion debt. That, of course, would be doomsday for the American economy. There's only one thing that the administration can do to ensure that energy dealers keep trading in dollars: control the flow of oil. That means that an attack on Iran is nearly a certainty.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/10/28/vice_president/index.html
Cheney's other major advisor besides Libby on Middle East affairs is David Wurmser, a Johns Hopkins Ph.D. in international relations. He served as project officer at the congressionally funded U.S. Institute of Peace, from 1988 to 1994. He then moved for two years to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he was director of institutional grants until 1996. In the latter year he co-authored, with Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and others, a now-famous policy paper for incoming Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," that advocated a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein and install a Hashemite monarchy in Iraq as a way of moderating the Shiites of the region and securing "the realm" of Israel. Since post-Khomeini Shiites despise monarchy as un-Islamic, and since the Hashemites, who used to rule Iraq before 1958 and still rule Jordan, are Sunni Muslims, this plan was worse than science fiction. Science fiction is coherent and often involves some actual knowledge.
"A Clean Break" advocated the removal of Saddam Hussein mainly as a way of pressuring Damascus. The policy paper said, with astonishing ignorance, "Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq -- an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right -- as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions. King Hussein may have ideas for Israel in bringing its Lebanon problem under control. The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najf [sic] Iraq rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria. Shia retain strong ties to the Hashemites: the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet's family, the direct descendants of which and in whose veins the blood of the Prophet flows is King Hussein."
This paragraph must be the most absurd, ill-informed and frankly lunatic pieces of prose ever produced by any policy advisor anywhere. It is full of false premises and ignorant assumptions. Saddam Hussein's branch of the Baath Party was a rival of the Syrian Baath Party, not a supporter. Syria had joined Bush I's coalition against Iraq, allying with the Americans in 1990-91. Removing the Iraqi Baath would more likely strengthen Syria than weaken it. As for the Shiites in Iraq and southern Lebanon, they had been deeply influenced by the ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini, who preached that monarchy is incompatible with Islam. The idea that the old Hashemite monarchy could be revived and reinstalled in revolutionary Iraq was itself absurd. That a Sunni king in Baghdad might have any appeal to the Shiites of southern Lebanon, who favored Hezbollah and Khomeinism, would only occur to someone completely ignorant of the actual politics of Tyre and Nabatiya. The tragedy is that this sort of hallucination appears actually to have underpinned real policy moves by the neoconservatives as they became powerful in Washington under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-shearer/who-drowned-new-orleans-_b_10026.htmlCoverage of Rosa Parks' funeral, second-day reaction to the Alito nomination--what else will drown out the story of the Senate Homeland Security Committe hearing today? In case you missed it, and you probably did, the Committee heard the testimony of the experts whose preliminary studies of the floodwall breaches in New Orleans have been scattered across the print press for the last three weeks. As those preliminary reports indicated, the scientists' assessments suggest that the overwhelming majority of damage to New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish was not caused by a natural disaster, but by design and construction flaws of the levees and particularly the canal floodwalls. Absent an independent Katrina commission, today's hearing may be the closest this nation comes to learning that the Federal government, under both parties, bears significant responsibility for the destruction of much of the Crescent City and its neighboring parishes.
The money quotes from AP's story on the hearings:
"It became clear to us that they (the Army Corps of Engineers) were struggling to get the right kind of people put in charge of the projects to get the concerns addressed," (UC Berkeley engineering professor Raymond) Seed said.
...
The Senate hearing also examined the NSF's report showing that the levees may not have been designed to protect a major city. Moreover, engineers who designed the levees did not fully consider the porousness of the Louisiana soil or make other calculations that would have pointed to the need for stronger floodwalls, the study shows.
Acclaimed musician Tom Waits is designing Zoetrope's Winter 2005 issue, to be released in mid-December. The issue includes contributions from Mary Gaitskill, Miranda July, Charles D'Ambrosio, and Paul Auster, among others; and will mark the magazine's first edition to be printed on glossy paper. Tom has completed the early design passes; this promises to be an exceptional release. There's another mention of it here: http://www.finaldraft.com/media/newsletters/newsletter_050601.html "Up coming guest designers are Wes and Eric Anderson and Tom Waits."
Poor construction was to blame for failures in New Orleans flood defences
Hunger in America up 43% over last five years
Satellite data reveals Beijing as air pollution capital of world
Satellite images show alarming deterioration to Africas lakes
Most Offspring Died When Mother Rats Ate Genetically Engineered Soy
Bush: Treaty Outlawing Torture Doesn't Apply Beyond US Soil
Global warning: The past two years were the warmest ever recorded in some of Greenland's coastal communities ... ice didn't form
Higher ocean acidity poses threat to food chain
The End of Pensions
Global warming threatens drought for Mediterranean
