Oil-Qaeda: The Indictment

Everyone is getting hot because of Oil-Qaeda

Hear ye! Hear ye!, The Court of Public Opinion is now in session.

The charges against Oil-Qaeda are: government subversion, mass murder, deceit, and reckless disregard for the health, safety, and lives of the billions of people of the planet Earth.

All done to put cash into the coffers of Oil-Qaeda, as it takes for its own profit, the well being of an entire planet and those who struggle to live on it.

Ok, so "who is this Oil-Qaeda?" you might ask -- so let's get that description by reading some posts that others have shared about it:

Just like those running asbestos, lead paint, and tobacco companies who knowingly continued to do harm for profit ... energy executives ... are the business equivalents of terrorists.

In fact, for years they’ve funded a massive campaign to deny the reality of climate change ... we should think of them as oil-Qaeda ...

(Tom Dispatch, emphasis added). Those who are doing the following are indeed terrorists:

More than 100 million people will die ... by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday.
...
It calculated that five million deaths occur each year from air pollution, hunger and disease as a result of climate change and carbon-intensive economies, and that toll would likely rise to six million a year by 2030 if current patterns of fossil fuel use continue.
...
"A combined climate-carbon crisis is estimated to claim 100 million lives between now and the end of the next decade," the report said.

(New Climate Catastrophe Criminality Policy, emphasis added). Has our society become so "sophisticated" that mass murder is ok, but killing one person gets a murder prosecution?

Perhaps there is a social dementia that the murderous Stalin recognized, and that he figured would protect his mass murder of his fellow citizens:

One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.

(Stalin Quotes). Is there something in the public mind that causes us to see the ongoing mass murder results of Oil-Qaeda as a statistic instead of seeing it for the terrorism it is?

Just how brilliant and sophisticated is it for the federal government to be flying drones around the world killing "suspected al-Qaeda" members, as well as innocent civilians who happen to be too close, but then helping Oil-Qaeda conduct mass murder in a business-as-usual manner?

According to a paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, this will bring certain doom upon current civilization:

But today, for the first time, humanity's global civilization—the worldwide, increasingly interconnected, highly technological society in which we all are to one degree or another, embedded—is threatened with collapse by an array of environmental problems. Humankind finds itself engaged in what Prince Charles described as ‘an act of suicide on a grand scale’, facing what the UK's Chief Scientific Advisor John Beddington called a ‘perfect storm’ of environmental problems. The most serious of these problems show signs of rapidly escalating severity, especially climate disruption. But other elements could potentially also contribute to a collapse: an accelerating extinction of animal and plant populations and species, which could lead to a loss of ecosystem services essential for human survival; land degradation and land-use change; a pole-to-pole spread of toxic compounds; ocean acidification and eutrophication (dead zones); worsening of some aspects of the epidemiological environment (factors that make human populations susceptible to infectious diseases); depletion of increasingly scarce resources, including especially groundwater, which is being overexploited in many key agricultural areas; and resource wars. These are not separate problems; rather they interact in two gigantic complex adaptive systems: the biosphere system and the human socio-economic system. The negative manifestations of these interactions are often referred to as ‘the human predicament’, and determining how to prevent it from generating a global collapse is perhaps the foremost challenge confronting humanity.

(Can a Collapse of Global Civilization be avoided?, emphasis added). The greatest threat to civilization is Oil-Qaeda, together with those who have a fetish for fondling nuclear weapons, i.e., Nuke-Qaeda, the clone "friends" of Oil-Qaeda.

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The lyrics to this song are here.

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Oil-Qaeda: The Weakening?

There has been some flickering and some increase in brightness in the few lights out there on the horizons of the future.

Many are hoping that it is a sign of good news or a sign that there is light at the end of the current tunnel of doom.

A doom which has unfortunately been brought to us by the doomers of Oil-Qaeda (a "doomer" is one who brings doom; one who warns of doom is a public servant).

The Hagel and Kerry nominations to Secretary of Defense and State give rise to hope.

Hope that the wretched, warmongering madness of recent neoCon vintage, beginning with Bush II, has some potential of fading into the bad-memory-hole of recent history.

Fighting wars to take poison from other nations so we can use it on ourselves is somewhere on the wrong side of the border between sanity and insanity.

Add to that the rumors that President Obama is contemplating hosting a climate summit, and the optimists among us light up with anticipation:

Barack Obama may intervene directly on climate change by hosting a summit at the White House early in his second term, environmental groups say.

They say the White House has given encouraging signals to a proposal for Obama to use the broad-based and bipartisan summit to launch a national climate action strategy.

"What we talked about with the White House is using it as catalyst not just for the development of a national strategy but for mobilising people all over the country at every level," said Bob Doppelt, executive director of the Resource Innovation Group, the Oregon-based thinktank that has been pushing for the high-level meeting. He said it would not be a one-off event.

"What I think has excited the White House is that it does put the president in a leadership role, but it is not aimed at what Congress can do, or what he can do per se, so much as it is aimed at apprising the American public about how they can act."

(Guardian). Not a bad idea in the light of 2012 being the warmest year in the contiguous United States by a clear margin:

If you found yourself bundling up in scarves, hats, and long underwear less than usual last year, you weren't alone: 2012 was the warmest year on record in the contiguous United States, according to scientists with The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The average temperature for 2012 was 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit, 3.2 degrees above normal and a full degree higher than the previous warmest year recorded -- 1998 -- NOAA said in its report Tuesday. All 48 states in the contiguous U.S. had above-average annual temperatures last year, including 19 that broke annual records, from Connecticut through Utah.

“We’re taking quite a large step,” said Jake Crouch, a climate scientist from the NOAA National Climatic Data Center, which has recorded temperatures in the contiguous U.S. for the past 118 years.

(2012 Was Hottest Year, emphasis added; see also State of the Climate). A full degree jump is a “quite a large step” as the climate scientist indicated.

Meanwhile, according to award winning economist Joseph Stieglitz the catastrophic damages done by global warming induced climate change are adding up to being the greatest threat to our economic recovery:

In the shadow of the euro crisis and America's fiscal cliff, it is easy to ignore the global economy's long-term problems. But, while we focus on immediate concerns, they continue to fester, and we overlook them at our peril.

The most serious is global warming. While the global economy's weak performance has led to a corresponding slowdown in the increase in carbon emissions, it amounts to only a short respite. And we are far behind the curve: because we have been so slow to respond to climate change achieving the targeted limit of a 2C rise in global temperature will require sharp reductions in emissions in the future.

Some suggest that, given the economic slowdown, we should put global warming on the backburner. On the contrary, retrofitting the global economy for climate change would help to restore aggregate demand and growth.

(Guardian, emphasis added). One can see why stopping the oil wars, weakening the strangle hold of Oil-Qaeda, and stopping our ecocidal habits, have some in the climate change community cautiously optimistic.

The word Dredd Blog emphasizes is "cautiously," especially in the light of statements by Secretary of the Interior Salazar that the U.S. is firmly committed to drilling in the Arctic, even in the face of a dangerous performance heretofore.

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Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Gerrymandering - Geological Deceit? - 4

In this series, which began about this date in 2009, Dredd Blog started a discussion about a subject related to a constitutional command.

The U.S. Constitution commands that every ten years a census is to be taken in the United States.

Once that is done, then House of Representatives congressional districts are redrawn by state legislatures -- in theory they are redrawn only when and where needed.

No problem, that makes sense.

The problem arises when redistricting becomes gerrymandering, a form of bullying by the more powerful political party that year in the state being redrawn.

Gerrymandering is by definition wrong, because it is a form of one party taking advantage of the other simply to benefit one party, forgetting about the voters:

ger·ry·man·der [jer-i-man-der, ger-]

noun
1. U.S. politics. the dividing of a state, county, etc., into election districts so as to give one political party a majority in many districts while concentrating the voting strength of the other party into as few districts as possible.

verb (used with object)
2. U.S. Politics. to subject (a state, county, etc.) to a gerrymander.

Origin: 1812, Americanism; after E. Gerry (governor of Massachusetts, whose party redistricted the state in 1812) + ( sala ) mander, from the fancied resemblance of the map of Essex County, Mass., to this animal, after the redistricting

(Dictionary). Since by definition gerrymandering is wrong, I was surprised at a blogger who took exception to Dredd Blog's view:

Why 'gerrymandering' doesn't polarise Congress the way we're told

Biased redistricting is commonly held up as the culprit for America's increasingly partisan politics. If only it were that simple
...
Fair redistricting just doesn't have the impact you might think.

(Gerrymandering, Guardian). The Guardian writer's argument seems to be that there has to be some reason to be fair, and if gerrymandering does not cause "polarization" then it is ok to be unfair.

The play in that Guardian article might have been to divert from the real issue into a straw man debate about polarization, rather than a debate about deliberate cheating.

The issue is that democrats got more popular votes for house seats than republicans did, yet the republicans through massive gerrymandering ended up with the most seats, and as a consequence they got the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The issue ends up being that the will of the voters is thwarted when unfair cheating in the form of gerrymandering takes place.

The previous post in this series is here.

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Black Merda ("They are considered to be the first all black rock band"):

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Dredd Blog's Fourth Anniversary

"Do you have your papers?"

Wow, a lot has been going on in the past year and Dredd Blog tried to give a useful view on notable events.

There was a strange election cycle, a continuation of environmental disasters, wars, and political polarization.

It was the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States.

There were 270 posts on Dredd Blog in 2012, covering a range of subjects: Oil-Qaeda, sanity, psychopaths, sociopaths, plutocracy, plutonomy, rogue banksters, epigovernment, the bully religion, oil wars, agnotology, social dementia, Mars, history, troubling social evolution, wonderful scientific discoveries, and on and on.

Other subjects are covered at Toxins of Power Blog and Ecocosmology Blog.

Let's get going into 2013, hoping for a major improvement in world events.

Previous anniversary posts are third, second, and first.

The very first post on Dredd Blog was It's The Peace Stupid.