Peak Oil - Part 2

Just a reminder for those of you who read my guest blog called "Peak Oil." This is what the oil money is paying for. Future societies will be wondering is this "The 21st Centuries Alice in Wonderland? My best RS

KEEP BUYING OIL. HERE IS WHERE ALL THE PROFITS ARE GOING!!!!!

This is really amazing..



Dubai in 1990 prior to the craziness.



The same street in 2003.



Last year.



The madness. Dubai is said to currently have 15-25% of all the world's cranes .



The Dubai Waterfront. When completed it will become the largest waterfront development in the world ..



All of this was built in the last 5 years, including that island that looks like a palm tree.



The Palm Islands in Dubai . New Dutch dredging technology was used to create these massive man made islands. They are the largest artificial islands in the world and can be seen from space. Three of these Palms will be made with the last one being the largest of them all.



Upon completion, the resort will have 2,000 villas, 40 luxury hotels, shopping centers, movie theaters, and many other facilities. It is expected to support a population of approximately 500,000 people. It is advertised as being visible from the moon.



The World Islands. 300 artificially created islands in the shape of the world. Each island will have an estimated cost of $25-30 million.



The Burj al-Arab hotel in Dubai. The world's tallest hotel. Considered the only '7 star' hotel and the most luxurious hotel in the world. It stands on an artificial island in the sea.



Hydropolis, the world's first underwater hotel. Entirely built in Germany and then assembled in Dubai, it is scheduled to be completed by 2009 after many delays.



The Burj Dubai. Construction began in 2005 and is expected to be complete by 2008. At an estimated height of over 800 meters, it will easily be world's tallest building when finished. It will be almost 40% taller than the the current tallest building, the Yaipei 101.



This is what downtown Dubai will look like around 2008-2009. More than 140 stories of the Burj Dubai have already been completed. It is already the world's tallest man-made structure and it is still not scheduled to be completed for at least another year.



The Al Burj. This will be the centerpiece of the Dubai Waterfront. Once completed it will take over the title of the tallest structure in the world from the Burj Dubai.



Recently it was announced that the final height of this tower will be 1200 meters. That would make it more than 30% taller than the Burj Dubai and three times astall as the Empire State Building.



The Burj al Alam, or The World Tower. Upon completion it will rank as the world's highest hotel. It is expected to be finished by 2009. At 480 meters it will only be 28 meters shorter than the Taipei 101.



The Trump International Hotel & Tower, which will be the centerpiece of one of the palm islands, The Palm Jumeirah.





Dubailand. Currently, the largest amusement park collection in the world is Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando , which is also the largest single-site employer in the United states with 58,000 employees. Dubailand will be twice the size.



Dubailand will be built on 3 billion square feet (107 miles)² at an estimated $20 billion price tag. The site will include a purported 45 mega projects and 200 hundred other smaller projects.





Dubai Sports City. A huge collection of sports arenas located in Dubailand.



Currently, the Walt Disney World Resort is the #1 tourist destination in the world. Once fully completed, Dubailand will easily take over that title since it is expected to attract 200,000 visitors daily.




The Dubai Marina is an entirely man-made development that will contain over 200 high rise buildings when finished. It will be home to some of the tallest residential structures in the world. The completed first phase of the project is shown... Most of the other high rise buildings will be finished by 2009-2010.



The Dubai Mall will be the largest shopping mall in the world with over 9 million square feet of shopping and around 1000 stores. It will be completed in 2008.



Ski Dubai , which is already open, is the largest indoor skiing facility in the world.
This is a rendered image of another future indoor skiing facility that is being planned.



Some of the tallest buildings in the world, such as Ocean Heights and The Princess Tower, which will be the largest residential building in the world at over a 100 stories, will line the Dubai Marina.


The UAE Spaceport would be the first spaceport in the world if construction ever gets under way.

I'm not joking...

Some other crazy... The Dubai Metro system, once completed, will become the largest fully automated rail system in the world. The Dubai World Central International Airport will become the largest airport in size when it is completed. It will also eventually become the busiest airport in the world, based on passenger volume. There are more construction workers in Dubai than there are actual citizens..

The Coming Guantanamo Trial

Here we are with a lame duck President trying to figure out his legacy and the Republican party trying to figure out how to stop what has been a pretty broadly held assumption that the the Democrats would continue their 2006 election victory into a 2008 presidential campaign. Once again the conservatives will use “fear” as their way out.

I have observed with some amazement how the Karl Rove crowd would spare absolutely nothing to get the “scare the life out of them” strategy into play. Let me go back to the 9/11 Republican playbook for one example. FBI agent Rawley was scheduled to testify before a Senate committee on the 9/11 disaster. Remember, she tried to warn her superiors about some weird guys who were training to fly super jets, but not to take off and land them. She thought it warranted some serious investigation, but her Washington superiors at headquarters thought she was just an alarmist.

What did Rove do to kill her testimony? The idea of the “Department of Homeland Security” had been planned for some time. Rove decided to change the timing. He pushed the plan on to the front pages and that pushed the Rawley testimony into the shredder. Instead of holding people responsible for the intelligence failure, we got this bullshit that “nobody could connect the dots.” We were paying our intelligence agencies 28 billion a year and the poor fellows couldn't connect the dots. Honestly now?

The Bush administration has refused to hold anyone in Washington responsible for what happened on 9/11, as that might imply that we were at least partly responsible. This would diminish the level of fear and increase our level of responsibility. The Bush administration has never admitted that we had a failure, either at home or in Iraq or anywhere else. This is also why they have not really hunted down Osama bin Laden. He’s more useful out there alive as a real threat, a real live contributor to the program of fear.

Basically fear has been the strategy of the the Bush administration. Perhaps you thought that, with his last nine months in office, he would just float out to Crawford, Texas to be forgotten. Not so quick. The 2008 election is too important to just fade away.

Here comes the new fear scenario. After five years of detention, the administration has decided that this is the time to charge and try six of the Guantanomo inmates for the 9/11 attacks on the World trade Center. Be prepared to see all the horrors of the 9/11 explosions trotted out again to have us once again relive that trauma. The trials will be conducted by Military Tribunals. Why not in our regular court system? Because that would require that the lawyers defending the accused would have access to the all the documents, as well as the right of the defendants to confront their accusers.

(Nobody is quite sure what the procedure is in a Military Tribunal. The military says it is having trouble finding any lawyers who would be willing to defend the accused. One of the accused who may well be a little off his rocker is claiming that he was the sole person responsible for the 9/11 attack. Obviously there is much to be said about the whole weird “Military Tribunal” bit. This is not my major concern in writing this blog.)

I am convinced that this is the same “scare em to death” technique that seemed to work so well for Bush, at least up until the 2006 election. Yet, if the Democrats run from fear that they will be considered soft on terrorism, it could work again. An additional factor adding to the fear is the deteriorating economy. People are justifiably worried about their pocket books and their ability to continue a life of high wire spending. If the fear barometer climbs above 102, I believe McCain will win the election simply because the fever will have scared our citizenry enough to send them voting for a warrior who can make them feel more safe. From what I hear so far from the McCain camp, this will definitely be there ace card, “scare em into voting for an experienced old fighter.”

We need to take the “scare ‘em strategy” head on. If the Democrats waffle in the face of an onslaught of “swift boat-like” attacks, they will self-immolate and lose the election. Just keep in mind that fear has been the chosen tactic of all those who have wanted to get a firm control on their populace, whether it was Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Putin or Karl Rove.

I believe this message is so important that it needs to be passed on to all who are concerned about the outcome of the 2008 election.

Thank you Kate N.H.W.Y.

There Will Be Blood

Once I learned that the movie There Will Be Blood was based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil, I was anxious to see it. I have this vague memory of when the book came out in 1927. Papa was very excited about it and was insisting that, for all who wanted to understand the capitalist system, this book was a must read. The movie is about one man’s obsession with being an oil millionaire, although Kate says it is mainly about a deranged man. We both agree that Daniel Day Lewis did an admirable piece of acting. I had reservations about the book’s relationship to the Sinclair novel, so I decided to read it.

It’s a long novel (527 pages) that reads more like a saga with many interweaving plots. J. Arnold Ross and his son Bunny are the main characters. (In the movie their names are Plainview and H.W.) Movie reviewers have been generally favorable. Dargis, from the Times, said an “epic American nightmare, arrives belching fire and brimstone and damnation to Hell. Set against the backdrop of the Southern California oil boom of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, it tells a story of greed and envy of biblical proportion--reverberating with Old Testament sound and fury and New Testament evangelicalism--which Mr. Anderson mined from Upton Sinclairs 1927 novel Oil!”

Rereading the Sinclair novel was an emotional throwback to another time when there was serious discussion taking place regarding capitalism. The book, about the discovery of oil in California, is simply Sinclair’s vehicle for going after the whole system of capitalism that ends up corrupting everything it comes in contact with. Sinclair does not blame Ross, he blames the system that produced him. In the book his son Bunny becomes his alter ego, constantly questioning what Ross is doing and why. Ross keeps explaining to Bunny that, if he is the to continue becoming a millionaire “oil man”, he has to go along with bribing local politicians, stealing the land of local ranchers, supporting the US government’s intervention in the Russian Revolution and supporting the local police raids against the IWW in Los Angeles. When Bunny asks his father if the Federation of Independent Oil Producers are going to buy the Presidency of the Country, his father answers, “yes, that’s what we are going to do.” That became known as the “Teapot Dome Scandal” with huge payoffs that reached right into the White House.

Upton Sinclair was first and foremost a lifelong socialist. What he was doing in Oil, as he did in his books Jungle and Coal, was to expose the corrupting nature of the capitalist system. In Oil he even takes a big swipe at Hollywood film making. His son becomes involved with a very sexy, beautiful movie queen. It turns out that she too is a victim of the system since she has absolutely no say in making movies that denigrate people who are seen as “outsiders.”


For a nonagenarian like me, I am saddened that people are given such watered down versions of what was going on in the country a short 90 to 100 years ago. What has been lost in the present discussion of issues is any fundamental examination of what makes us what we are? That’s what people like Upton Sinclair added to those debates back then. In the present so-called primary debates, the only one who even was suggesting that corporate America is our real problem was John Edwards, and unfortunately he’s out of the race. That may very well be because there are no socialists, no Upton Sinclairs, no Wobblies, no communists who are constantly challenging the capitalist system for its failures to serve the interest of all, instead of the few.

I do not disparage my own years as a radical and union leader for I think we helped to humanize the system. That is a process that needs to be ongoing. There always needs to be a group of people who are willing to question “the system”. Edward’s couldn’t sustain his questioning about the “corporate dominance” of America because people have lost a familiarity with the argument. It just isn’t out there anymore.

For a good insight into another time in the history of our country, I highly recommend Upton Sinclairs Oil. If read alongside my own book, Wasn’t That a Time: Growing up Radical and Red in America, one can get a fairly interesting perspective of some of the countervailing forces at work in a time of great change.


Thank you Kate N.H.W.Y.