Sunday, 14 March 2010

Saturday, March 13, 2010

ETA Terrorists Trained in Venezuela





Surprisingly, the roots of the ETA-Venezuela relationship date to 1959.

Not surprisingly, the terrorist ties have been strengthened under the Communist strongman Hugo Chavez, as reported here.

Click here and here for more about Chavez and the ETA.

And be sure to click here to read about ETA's well known PLO links and suspected Al Qaeda connections.

What Liberals Don't Get About Obama Green Power


What liberals, enamored of Barack Obama's green energy rhetoric, don't get about the President is that he is effectively acting as a tool of powerful, political and economic elites who in turn serve even more powerful interests--international Big Oil and Saudi Arabia.

Emphasizing nonexistent and inefficient sources and solutions, Obama's energy policy does not threaten Big Oil and Saudi Arabia. On the contrary, Obama's green energy nonsense plays into the hands of the very forces he claims to oppose because there are no viable substitutes for the oil and gas on which our entire civilization was built and depends on--and will depend on for at least the next 20 years.

None ... except for coal ... which Obama is out to kill ... and domestic oil and gas ... which he is determined to cripple (like Jimmy Carter during the first big energy crisis, when he made every effort possible to destroy the independent oil industry).

Understand, as Obama likes to say, that green energy and energy independence are often confused and conflated in ways that benefit Big Oil and Saudi Arabia. Whereas wind, solar, and biofuels are incapable of significantly reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil and producing meaningful numbers of well paying, permanent jobs for American workers, development of the nation's awesome coal reserves (the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal, which is the source of more than half the electricity that is produced in the U.S.) and massive, untapped oil and gas resources could make the dream of energy independence a reality.

Hence, Obama's obsession with the myth of manmade global warming--a red herring that is crucial to keeping the U.S. addicted to foreign oil. Branding carbon dioxide--the dreaded "carbon" that conjures up images of choking soot and smog--as a pollutant that is supposedly heating up the planet is central to the goals of crushing cleaner coal before it has a chance to succeed, and crippling domestic oil and gas. The principal beneficiaries of this strategy are (a) Big Oil, which has historically ignored and downplayed domestic U.S. energy resources in favor of seeking and maintaining preferential energy access agreements with foreign tyrannies and despotisms, and (b) Saudi Arabia, which sits astride the world's largest conventional oil reserves.


Sabotaging Energy Independence

Sabotaging energy independence in the name of "saving the planet" also explains another Obama diversion--endorsement of carbon-free nuclear energy. The President knows that nobody wants to live near a nuclear power plant, especially in the age of terrorism (which is likely to become more threatening as a result of his deliberate downgrading of the war on Islamist terror to the level of a mere law enforcement challenge), and that the incredibly costly and complex, conventional nuclear power plants, which take many years to permit and build, are fundamentally uneconomical--especially, when decommissioning and radioactive waste disposal are taken into consideration. But touting nuclear power--a non-starter for all practical purposes--balances Obama's anti-industrial image and gives his adoring, mainstream media pundits something new and interesting to discuss. Diversion and deception rule. Facts and common sense get in the way of the media's almighty "narrative."

Another point to consider. Branding life-giving carbon dioxide a pollutant that threatens life on earth also plays into the hands of Wall Street, especially, globalizing Goldman Sachs, which has invested a fortune in carbon trading--a potential trillion-dollar-a-year business in the U.S. alone. There can be no huge, U.S. market in carbon credits/offsets without a mandatory cap-and-trade system aimed at penalizing/taxing carbon emitters. And the whole money-minting scheme ... the next Big Bubble that makes greedy bankers salivate and drool, that gets them all hot and bothered in anticipation of the obscene amounts of cash just waiting to be made, the mountains of ... green ... dough that can cleanly be amassed from the buying, selling, and leveraging of ... hot air... rests on the ridiculously simple and patently absurd ... but philosophically compelling ... postmodern notion that ... carbon ... emissions from industry are causing ... even as you read this on your computer or mobile device .... irreversible global warming (recently renamed "climate change" in the face of new data that shows, inconveniently, that the earth has actually begun to cool and that the pre-industrial Middle Ages may have seen warmer temperatures than the present period).Sheer genius!


Rationalizing Obeisance

So much for global warming and Wall Street. Notwithstanding the ways in which he seems to serve secretive, super-rich and powerful forces, there is ample evidence that Obama is indeed a crypto-Marxist, as many conservatives allege. His radical left-wing views on everything from nuclear disarmament to "Palestine" have clearly not changed much, if at all, since his undergraduate years at Columbia University. So, if Obama is really a tool of reactionary and repressive elites, how does he rationalize his actions?

The likely answer is that having burrowed inside a system that he basically detests, and having worked from within and all the way to the pinnacle of U.S. political power--to capture the White House--the Anointed One has probably persuaded himself that he is using Them--Big Oil, the Saudis, Wall Street bankers, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists--instead of the other way around. An unholy alliance with intriguing historical precedent. Like Lenin returning to Russia in the diplomatically sealed train that was provided by Imperial Germany, along with $10 million in gold, on a bet that the Bolshevik revolutionary would use the money to seize power in his native land and keep his end of a secret bargain to cease Russia's participation in the First World War on the Allied side (which he did), the Democratic Party's Candidate of Change--hailed as a progressive by liberals, condemned as a socialist by conservatives--apparently ascended to power in his war-weary, economically ruined country with the quiet, behind-the-scenes backing and acquiescence of people who are anything but democratic, progressive, and socialistic. Obama is essentially their man, their Third World-American--their Muslim, so to speak--given his heritage, upbringing, and ideological orientation. They and those to whom they bow benefit most from Obama's failed foreign and energy policies.

Again, in fairness to the President, he probably sees himself as the master of those he appears to be serving instead of as their tool or puppet. No matter. Regardless of who ultimately pulls the strings, of who outsmarts whom most of the time, this much is clear: the American people are getting screwed, hammered, and strung up on Obama's alter of Change.


A few additional thoughts:

(1) Entering office in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Obama could have championed the formation of a U.S. national energy company to aggressively develop the abundant domestic resources that are profitable but not profitableenough for Big Oil--drilling for conventional and heavy crude, squeezing new oil from old fields, liquefying coal to provide motor transport fuel, extending natural gas pipelines, etc. A national energy company would have created tens of thousands of productive, full-time jobs. A real progressive would have pushed for a national energy company, or even dared to advocate the nationalization of universally despised Big Oil on national security grounds.

Instead, Obama and his dumbbell Democrats promoted solar panel production and wind farms, foolish projects that are severely limited by geography, useful only for generating relatively small amounts of electricity--terribly inefficiently, compared with coal--and have nothing at all to do with providing alternative sources of liquid fuel for transportation, which is rightly the holy grail of the energy independence movement.

(2) Self-hating leftists and liberals who admire Obama's outreach to "the Muslim world"--an inherently Islamist idea--and are also tempted to tolerate fascistic political Islam (Islamism), cynically seeing it as a useful counterweight to capitalism and U.S. power and influence, which leftists and liberals regard as the root cause of nearly all the world's ills, would be wise to recall that many German Communists convinced themselves that they would follow the Nazis into power, and that Iranian Marxists joined forces with the Ayatollah Khomeini and his Islamists to topple the Shah.