More Americans are getting their news from the Internet than from newspapers, according to the Pew Research Center for People and the Press. This is the first time the Web has eclipsed print since the study started asking about the Internet in 1999 [pdf].
Television is still the dominant source for news in the U.S., with 70% of respondents saying they got most of their news from TV (down from 74% last year). Forty percent said the Web was their No. 1 source -- up from 24% last year -- and 35% chose newspapers.
Perhaps just as noteworthy was the study's finding that as many young people say they get their news from the Web as TV (both about 59%). That's again way up from September 2007, when only 34% of young people cited the Internet as their news source of choice.
The study didn't ask users to get into specifics about their online news reading, so we don't know how much of the news consumption was done on blogs, aggregators or mainstream news media sites.
The Pew study is another brick in the wall for the physical newspaper, an increasingly obsolete medium that is unlikely to see a resurgence in popularity. By the same token, the study reconfirms that the journalism that's printed in the newspaper is as popular as ever. It's a major conundrum for news organizations. People are increasingly consuming a digital version of their decreasingly popular print product, often in far greater numbers, but the capacity to generate revenue from the online version is still incredibly weak.
Will the news industry be content to shrink to a size that can be completely supported by online ad revenue? Or will the industry get smart and work on a technological solution -- a next-generation pay system that will ask users to give a little back for the information they're receiving?
12/27/08
"The Excrement of the Devil": How Crude Oil Shortfalls Are About to Turn Our Lives Inside Out Forevermore
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You probably saw at least excerpts from Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, about the effects of global warming. You may or may not like Gore, and you may or may not agree with the crescendo of scientific consensus concerning the imminent impact of global warming.
You probably saw at least excerpts from Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, about the effects of global warming. You may or may not like Gore, and you may or may not agree with the crescendo of scientific consensus concerning the imminent impact of global warming.
Whether global warming was an inconvenient truth or an inconvenient lie for you, soon it will fade from prominence as the consequences of Peak Oil begin to take hold.
Global Warming may still be subject to some conjecture concerning data interpretation, timing, severity, the contributing effects of fluctuating solar radiation, politics, and reversibility.
There is far less room for ambiguity concerning Peak Oil, however. Peak Oil is the point at which half the world's supply of crude oil has been used up. The oil in the second half of the curve — the half when supply starts to decline — will be a lot tougher to extract, produce, and distribute than the oil in first half was.
Peak Oil is coming soon. Some experts think it arrived in 2008.
Peak Oil is not reversible. No renewable energy source or combination of sources, including coal, will ever compensate for more than a fraction of the energy that oil supplied.
So things are getting a bit urgent.
Check out what the pundits and informed innocent bystanders have to say.
Here are some places to start, with more panicked experts than you can shake a stick at. They are listed more or less in their order of complexity, so you could grasp the PeakOil paradigm by just looking at a few of the pieces in the Primers section immediately below.
Online primers and resource sites
- Peak oil primer and links | Energy Bulletin (excellent!)
Multiple/multi-media sites, grouped by production
- The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream (2004) (Internet Movie Database information)
- The End of Suburbia promo trailer (video that includes interviews with James Kunstler, from Saratoga Springs, NY)
- Kunstler's well-written and thoroughly researched blog, essential reading that complements the stuff below.
- A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash (2006) (web site promoting film)
"One year ago, in a report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy, Robert L. Hirsch challenged the notion that the free market can solve the onrushing emergency:
The world has never faced a problem like Peak Oil. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary."
- A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash (2006) (Internet Movie Database site)
The Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions, founded in 1940 as Community Service, Inc., is a non-profit organization located in Yellow Springs, Ohio, that educates on the benefits and values of small local community living. We envision a world where people live sustainably and cooperatively in local communities which are diverse, equitable, and just.
Peak Moment #27: Megan Quinn of The Community Solution discusses her visit to Cuba, and the movie "The Power of Community". She sees Peak Oil as an opportunity to create the communities we want, but notes that we must reduce our consumption despite environmentalists' assurances that biofuels will save us.
- The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil (2006) (Internet Movie Database site)
- Crude Impact (2006) web site
- End of Oil: The Peak Oil Debate YouTube interview with the makers of Crude Impact; answers some of the main anti-Peak Oil arguments.
- The Last Oil Shock: A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man (2007) (YouTube video)
- The Last Oil Shock - The Explosive Story of Peak Oil
Single video or movie sites
- A Post-Oil Man (video) The Cheney-Bush strategy for survival in a Post-PeakOil world
Web sites only
- Life after the oil crash (Matt Savinar)
- oilcrash.com (New Zealand) (Robert Atack)
Peak Oil associations & institutes
Articles from online periodicals
- End of Cheap Oil @ National Geographic Magazine by Tim Appenzeller (June 2004)
- NYT Magazine cover story on Peak Oil by Peter Maas (August 21, 2005)
- What they don't want you to know about the coming oil crisis by Jeremy Leggett, The Independent (UK) (January 19, 2006)
12/25/08
Nixon-Kissinger Celebrated ‘72 Bombing of N. Vietnam, New Transcripts Show
Source: The Public Record
“A million pounds of bombs,” Nixon exclaimed. “Goddamn, that must have been a good strike.”
The telephone communications between Nixon and Kissinger also illustrate Kissinger’s efforts to spin the media, monitor and control the process of decision-making, disparage rivals, keep important associates, such as his patron Nelson Rockefeller, in the loop, and win over critics.
The Public Record | Dec 23, 2008
by Jason Leopold
Former National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon discussed their satisfaction over the U.S. bombing campaign of North Vietnam, according to previously unpublished transcripts of their telephone conversations obtained by George Washington University’s National Security Archive and released Tuesday.
“They dropped a million pounds of bombs,” Kissinger briefed Nixon in an April 15, 1972, telephone conversation from his home.
“A million pounds of bombs,” Nixon exclaimed. “Goddamn, that must have been a good strike.”
Nixon and Kissinger ordered heavier bombing of North Vietnam weeks after the North’s 1972 Spring Offensive, although withholding attacks on Hanoi or mining Haiphong Harbor, two actions which they held out for the next decision to escalate, according to the National Security Archive.
“In light of Hanoi’s decision to postpone private talks with Kissinger scheduled for 24 April [1972], Kissinger told Dobrynin that “such behavior by Hanoi [was] clear evidence of an unwillingness to conduct serious negotiation and as reflecting a basic desire of the North Vietnamese ‘to bring down a second American president.’” While the White House was willing to hold back on attacks on Hanoi or Haiphong, Nixon believed that such threats were a “hold card” in the negotiations: “It either got to be [a] settlement or we blockade.”
The conversation was secretly recorded by Kissinger and Nixon without the other’s knowledge, and reveals that Nixon and his national security advisor shared a belief in 1972 that the Vietnam War could still be won.
“That shock treatment [is] cracking them,” Nixon declared. “I tell you the thing to do is pour it in there every place we can…just bomb the hell out of them.”
Kissinger optimistically predicted that, if the South Vietnamese government didn’t collapse, the U.S. would eventually prevail: “I mean if as a country we keep our nerves, we are going to make it.”
Unbeknownst to the rest of the federal government, Kissinger secretly taped his incoming and outgoing phone conversations and had his secretary transcribe them. After destroying the tapes, Kissinger took the transcripts with him when he left office in January 1977, claiming they were “private papers.”
Kissinger never intended for the documents to be released publicly, according to William Burr, senior analyst at the National Security Archive, who edited the collection, Kissinger Telephone Conversations: A Verbatim Record of U.S. Diplomacy, 1969-1977.
“Kissinger’s conversations with the most influential personalities of the world rank right up there with the Nixon tapes as the most candid, revealing and valuable trove of records on the exercise of executive power in Washington,” Burr said in a news release. “Kissinger created a gift to history that will be a tremendous primary source for generations to come.”
In 2001, the National Security Archive initiated legal proceedings to force the government to recover the telephone conversation transcripts and used the freedom of information act to obtain the declassification of most of them. The archive spent three years cataloging and indexing the transcripts, which contain more than 30,000 pages. The Digital National Security Archive (ProQuest) published the material this week.
Burr called on the State Department to declassify more than 800 additional transcripts of telephone conversations that it continues to withhold on the grounds of executive privilege, a decision the National Security Archive said is “extraordinary.”
“That the [State] Department used (b) (5) exemption and the claim of “privileged presidential communications” to exempt thirty year old documents may make this one of the biggest abuses of (b) (5) and privilege claims the history of the [Freedom of Information Act],” the archive said in a news release. “As federal courts have ruled, such privileges erode over time, and as time passes the public interest in open historical records has far greater weight.”
“In the soon-to-depart Bush administration, such considerations have little influence and it is no surprise that the hands of the White House are behind the executive privilege claims. Henry Kissinger has been an adviser to President Bush and Vice President Cheney and, according to government sources, he influenced the declassification review process to ensure that his telephone discussions with President Ford remain classified for as long as possible.”
The telephone communications between Nixon and Kissinger also illustrate Kissinger’s efforts to spin the media, monitor and control the process of decision-making, disparage rivals, keep important associates, such as his patron Nelson Rockefeller, in the loop, and win over critics:
After Gerald Ford shuffled his cabinet in November 1975, removing Kissinger as national security adviser and shifting Donald Rumsfeld from his chief-of-staff position to be Secretary of Defense, Kissinger spoke to Secretary of the Treasury William Simon. “The guy who cut me up inside this building isn’t going to cut me up any less in Defense,” he noted.
In an August 13, 1974, conversation with Elliott Richardson after Nixon resigned, Kissinger disparaged George H.W. Bush as a candidate to replace Gerald Ford as Vice President. “I am not as high on George Bush, as some others are, partly because of his lack of experience.”
In a conversation with President Nixon on the illegal wiretap scandal in June 1973, Nixon threatened to go to political war with Democrats if they pressed the issue. “Lets get away from the bullshit,” Nixon stated angrily. “Bobby Kennedy was the greatest tapper.” The President even suspected his own phone had been wiretapped in the early 1960s.
“[J.Edgar Hoover] said Bobby Kennedy had [the FBI] tapping everybody. I think that even I’m on that list,” President Nixon told Kissinger. When Nixon noted that the wiretap scandal would “catch some of your friends,” Kissinger responded: “Well, I wouldn’t be a bit unhappy.”
In the April 15, 1972, conversation about bombing North Vietnam, Nixon recalled that bombing had failed to defeat Ho Chi Mhin’s forces in the past:
Nixon: “Of course, you want to remember that Johnson bombed them for years and it didn’t do any good.”
Kissinger: But Mr. President, Johnson never had a strategy; he was sort of picking away at them. He would go in with 50 planes; 20 planes; I bet you we will have had more planes over there in one day than Johnson had in a month.
Nixon: Really?
Kissinger: Yeah.
Bill Hicks
But we always kill the good guys, you ever notice that?
And let the demons run amok.
Jesus - murdered.
Martin Luther King - murdered.
Malcolm X - murdered.
Gandhi - murdered.
John Lennon - murdered.
Reagan…. wounded.
The Media Morons' War on Christmas
As sure as Christmas comes once a year, so do the morons claiming that there is a war on Christmas. Led this year by Fox News' Bill O'Reilly and Gretchen Carlson, the true war is between these blowhards and reality. So Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from everyone at GoLeft TV, and we hope you enjoy this special Christmas Media Moron poem.
T’was the night before Christmas,
And shakin in their shoes,
Spewing hatred and lies,
Were the folks at Fox News.
“There’s a war on Christmas!”,
Shouted Bill O’Reilly,
Being the skeptic I am,
I doubted this highly.
They’ll remove all our trees!,
Said the shrill Fox & Friends,
I guess atheists and Christians,
Will never make amends.
Sitting up in his chair,
Looking dazed and confused,
O’Reilly continued,
Our holiday we will lose!
“There’s no war on Christmas!”
I shout at my screen,
This cat named O’Reilly,
Gets marked down as mean.
And Gretchen, though pretty,
She’s still quite insane,
As for Doocy and Kilmeade,
They still need a brain.
You now get the point,
There’s no need to go on,
That’s why all of Fox News,
Is my media moron.
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR
From Goleft.Tv
This 2008 year!
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