Oliver Stone seeks to film 'Ahmedinejad's Adventures'

from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2007, Issue No. 118
5 Dec 2007

Secrecy News Blog:  http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

 

OLIVER STONE SEEKS TO FILM "AHMADINEJAD'S ADVENTURES"

Filmmaker Oliver Stone is expected to visit Tehran in the near future
to negotiate arrangements for a film about Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, the Iranian press reported last week.

"We have announced that he has asked for permission to travel to Iran
for direct negotiations and to plan the project," one official told the
Tehran Times.

Stone first sought Iranian permission last summer to make the film,
variously referred to as "Ahmadijenad's Adventures" or "The Truth About
Ahmadinejad."  His initial request was denied, but was then reconsidered
and approved by the President himself "if certain conditions were met."

Among such conditions, the Tehran Times reported, "Stone would not be
allowed to invent any scenarios. [Instead,] he should only use
incidents from the president's real life in the film."

See "Oliver Stone may visit Tehran for Ahmadinejad biopic: Sajjadpur,"
Tehran Times, November 30:

     http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=158249

News about the proposed film project "has amazed and worried many
friends of Islamic Iran's honour and power and those concerned about
its reputation," according to one Iranian commentator.

"How can one trust a person... who, despite efforts at proclaiming
himself to represent the opposition in America's ruling system, is in
line and in accordance with the essence and the overall policies of
this system," wrote Elham Rajabpur in the conservative Tehran daily
Keyhan.

The writer objected to several of Stone's films including Alexander ("a
hated figure among Iranians") and The Doors (about "one of America's
perverted and half-mad singers").

"We are afraid that the outcome of [Stone's Iranian film] venture will
not be the true and realistic portrayal of an intellectual and a
peacemaker such as Ahmadinejad, but a portrayal of Ahmadinejad
according to Stone, Hollywood, and global Zionism."

See "Oliver Stone's Presence in Iran: Opportunity or Threat" by Elham
Rajabpur, Keyhan, December 3 (translated by the DNI Open Source
Center):

     http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2007/12/stone.html

'The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil'

"When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, Cuba's economy went into a tailspin. With imports of oil cut by more than half – and food by 80 percent – people were desperate. This film tells of the hardships and struggles as well as the community and creativity of the Cuban people during this difficult time. Cubans share how they transitioned from a highly mechanized, industrial agricultural system to one using organic methods of farming and local, urban gardens. It is an unusual look into the Cuban culture during this economic crisis, which they call "The Special Period." The film opens with a short history of Peak Oil, a term for the time in our history when world oil production will reach its all-time peak and begin to decline forever. Cuba, the only country that has faced such a crisis – the massive reduction of fossil fuels – is an example of options and hope.

 

The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil is a project of The Community Solution, a non-profit organization that designs and teaches low-energy solutions to the current unsustainable, fossil fuel based, industrialized, and centralized way of living. Visit www.communitysolution.org for more information."

 

http://www.powerofcommunity.org/cm/index.php

More than half of Amazon will be lost by 2030, report warns

" ... Climate change could speed up the large-scale destruction of the Amazon
rainforest and bring the "point of no return" much closer than previously
thought, conservationists warned today.

Almost 60% of the region's forests could be wiped out or severely damaged
by 2030, as a result of climate change and deforestation, according to a
report published today by WWF.

The damage could release somewhere between 55.5bn-96.9bn tons of carbon
dioxide into the atmosphere from the Amazon's forests and speed up global
warming, according to the report, Amazon's Vicious Cycles: Drought and
Fire.

Trends in agriculture and livestock expansion, fire, drought and logging
could severely damage 55% of the Amazon rainforest by 2030, the report
says. And, in turn, climate change could speed up the process of
destruction by reducing rainfall by as much as 10% by 2030, damaging an
extra 4% of the forests during that time. ... "

 

~ Read on... ~

 

social lending

" ... Pouring your cash into the far reaches of the world wide web may sound like a crazy idea.

 

After all, the internet has seen its fair share of nasties from phishing e-mails posing as a bank to key logging software pinching our passwords and personal information, all in an effort to steal our identity and cash.

But now there is a wave of sites trying to convince people that the web is the place for their money.

The concept is called social lending and the idea is to introduce people who need money to people who want to lend some - cutting out the middlemen like banks and mortgage companies. ... "

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/6623267.stm

Bob Black: The Abolition of Work and other essays

Part I: The Abolition of Work

"Abolition" originated as a speech at the Gorilla Grotto in San Francisco,
an "adult play environment," in February 1981. Proprietor Gary Warne, who
later became a policeman, has denounced the event as the worst spectacle he's
ever staged, and he must have meant it since he later had his goons beat me
up. Intrigued by the posters of the Last International, Warne challenged me
to "put your foot where your mouth is." I put it somewhere else. The
exclusion of a noisy group of punks who, at my instigation, tried to get in
without paying was only one of the evening's diversions.
Five years later I revised and greatly expanded the spiel into the following
essay, while retaining, I think, much of its feel as a speech. It has pride
of place because I still think, as many of the other texts assert in
particular contexts, that work as the most fundamental negation of freedom
is an institution that must be addressed, and overcome, by anyone pretending
to have an interest in liberty. Anyone who ignores or evades the issue of
work itself may well be a "libertarian" (or for that matter a Marxist) but
he is no libertarian.

Introduction by Ed Lawrence

The Abolition of Work (1996 Revision)

Suggested Readings

Rants and Essays by Bob Black

source: http://www.inspiracy.com/black/

'RAN Stumps Toyota: Why Not?'

From the Rainforest Action Network blog:

" ... after a great day of cloak and dagger infiltration at the LA Auto Show. Here’s what the AP had to say about incident in this video:

After the Sequoia was introduced Wednesday, an environmental activist with a video camera approached Toyota’s general manager for U.S. sales, Bob Carter, and asked why the company won’t withdraw from a lawsuit against California, which has sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to establish tougher fuel economy rules.

Carter refused to answer and knocked the camera out of Brent Olson’s hands. Olson, of San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network, was eventually led away by two policemen. ... "

~ Link ~

"Gold is for optimists. I'm diversifying into canned goods"

The shock of a thousand trillion
By The Mogambo Guru

Today we are going to Rgemonitor.com for the Mogambo Laugh O' The Day (MLOTD) concerning gold, in the award subcategory, "A joke that does not make fun of people so damned stupid that they have no clue of what the last 4,000 years of economics and gold says about why they should be buying gold with both hands with every penny at their disposal, and selling the kids into slave labor to get a few extra bucks with which to buy gold, and since they are slaves and thus somebody else's problem now, they won't need their stupid piggy banks, and these parents can help themselves and use whatever money is in them to buy a little more gold. Later, when gold has zoomed up in price and you are finally rich, happy and generous instead of being poor, hateful and stingy, you can buy the kids back! Probably at a discount! And certainly better trained to follow orders and able to work 20 hours a day chained to a sewing machine for weeks at a stretch!"

Anyway, this is not about Fabulous Mogambo Financial Plans (FMFP) that always seem to take a backseat to some stupid "child-labor laws" I never heard of, or how some stupid judge wastes the court's time with some pointless diatribe about how I am the most "despicable father" he has ever seen in his life, but about the MLOTD, which is from a Financial Times quote about how the economy is in such bad shape, and how we have such a disastrous penalty to pay for being so damned stupid as to allow the Congress to allow the Federal Reserve to create so much excess money and credit.

Now, things are so bad that a reader at Felix Salmon's Market Movers blog is moved to darkly say, "Gold is for optimists. I'm diversifying into canned goods." Hahaha! Gold is for optimists! Hahaha!

The Times went on, not about this terrific joke, but about economist Nouriel Roubini, of Roubini Global Economics and former director of the Treasury Department's Office of Policy Development and Review, who "has long been positioned firmly on the gloomy side of the outlook scale - but the past week's batch of predictions has been ominous even by his own dark standards. In fact, they're nigh on apocalyptic. Or, in other words, a 'generalized systemic financial meltdown.'"

In his own words, Mr. Roubini said, "Losses due to subprime alone will be as high as $400 to $500 billion and this does not count losses due to near prime, prime mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, commercial real estate, leveraged loans, loans to the corporate system; if add it all up losses could end up - in a US recession - as being as high as $1,000 billion or $1 trillion. The financial bloodbath thus has only started and a hard landing of the economy is clearly ahead of us."

A trillion? It used to be that a trillion was a lot of money, but my eyes opened when I saw the Opednews.com article by Sharon Kayser, titled, "Hey Buddy, Can You Spare $1,000 Trillion?"

Instantly, I knew that someone had erred! A thousand trillions? Hahaha! What a preposterous number!

So I was instantly on the phone to call Ms. Kayser so I could tell her that there has been an error in the title, and then maybe, you know, she could drop a line to my boss and tell her what a nice guy I am and how firing me right before Christmas is so tacky, no matter how well-deserved, or maybe she could get me a job there with her or something.

So imagine my horror when I learned that there was no error! We are talking about a quadrillion freaking dollars! Instantly I knew that she was doing that on purpose to give me a heart attack!

The actual excerpt is that "there is currently at least a $1,000 trillion dollar black hole in the world economy", what with "$600 trillion in world liabilities, plus more than a $400 trillion-derivatives neutron bomb, all of which will go off when the Westerners (from EU and US) will no longer be able to borrow."

So, with trembling hands I feverishly punched the calculator, adding 400 trillion plus 600 trillion, which is 400,000,000,000,000 and 600,000,000,000,000,and then I think, "That's too many zeroes! It won't even fit on my calculator screen, for God's sake!"

So I do it by hand, and it keeps coming out as "1,000,000,000,000,000", and it looks so weird that I knew that had to be wrong. It can't have that many zeroes in it!

So, I go to the dictionary and look up "quadrillion", and it says that it is "a one followed by fifteen zeroes." Except in Britain, where it is 24 zeroes, for some reason.

Anyway, it really IS written out as $1,000,000,000,000,000!

That number must have stunned me into insensibility, as the next thing I knew, it was later in the day, things were coming into focus, people are yelling at me to wake up and get back to work, and asking when I am going to do a little work around here, and how about getting a little work done? Naturally I responded to their inquiries by yelling obscenities and spitting on them, when right in the middle of the discussion about my work habits, here comes Ms. Kayser again, saying, "Talking of jobs, did you know that in 1972, wages reached their peak? Today, real wages are nearly one-fifth lower - inflation adjusted!"

If I wasn't so engrossed in teaching some manners to my fellow office workers, I would have said, "No, but I do know that you can't have economic growth if prices are rising faster than incomes!"

Now that I think about it, this is a perfect segue to a Loud Mogambo Discussion (LMD) of how inflation eats away at the buying power of your income, and how the damnable Federal Reserve and the despicable Alan Greenspan destroyed the dollar and the American economy when he was in control of the Federal Reserve and how this means that anybody who sees Alan Greenspan should be able to slap his nasty little face, and maybe beat him with sticks, and throw rocks and him and his nasty little car and when he has to pay a lot of money to have the dents taken out and repainted, maybe he will think to himself, "Hey! That Mogambo Idiot (TMI) was right! I was a stupid little man who created too much money and credit, and now we are going to be destroyed by inflation in prices! For example, look how much the repair shop wants to fix my stupid car!" Ugh.

Mogambo sez: Another day, another wheeze from the morons who think that they run things, as they frantically drive down the price of gold, silver and oil with their market manipulations, meaning that all you gotta do is walk over and pick up a few bargains every time they do this. Ahh! Life is sweet!

P.S. To get The Daily Reckoning sent directly to your inbox, sign up for our free email newsletter, or if you prefer to use RSS, subscribe to the Daily Reckoning RSS feed.

Editor's Note: Richard Daughty is general partner and COO for Smith Consultant Group, serving the financial and medical communities, and the editor of The Mogambo Guru economic newsletter - an avocational exercise to heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve it.

 

~ Link ~

 

'The plan to topple Pakistan's military'

Asia Times

6 Dec 2007

SPEAKING FREELY
By Ahmed Quraishi

 

 

ISLAMABAD - On the evening of September 26, 2006, Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf walked into the studio of Comedy Central's Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the first sitting president anywhere to dare do this political satire show.

Stewart offered his guest some tea and cookies and played the perfect host by asking, "Is it good?" before springing a surprise: "Where's Osama bin Laden?"

"I don't know," Musharraf replied, as the audience enjoyed the rare sight of a strong leader apparently cornered. "You know where he is?" Musharraf snapped back, "You lead on, we'll follow you."

What General Musharraf didn't know then is that he really was being cornered. Some of the smiles that greeted him in Washington and back home gave no hint of the betrayal that awaited him.

As he completed the remaining part of his US visit, his allies in Washington and elsewhere, as all evidence suggests now, were plotting his downfall. They had decided to take a page from the book of successful "color revolutions" where Western governments covertly used money, private media, student unions, NGOs and international pressure to stage coups, basically overthrowing individuals not fitting well with Washington's agenda.

This recipe proved its success in former Yugoslavia, and more recently in Georgia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

In Pakistan, the target is a president who refuses to play ball with the US on Afghanistan, China and Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan.

To get rid of him, an impressive operation is underway:

A carefully crafted media blitzkrieg launched early this year assailing the Pakistani president from all sides, questioning his power, his role in Washington's "war on terror" and predicting his downfall.

Money pumped into the country to pay for organized dissent.

Willing activists assigned to mobilize and organize accessible social groups.

A campaign waged on the Internet where tens of mailing lists and "news agencies" have sprung up from nowhere, all demonizing Musharraf and the Pakistani military.

European- and American-funded Pakistani NGOs taking a temporary leave from their real work to serve as a makeshift anti-government mobilization machine.

US government agencies directly funding some private Pakistani television networks; the channels go into an open anti-government mode, cashing in on some manufactured and other real public grievances regarding inflation and corruption.

Some of Musharraf's shady and corrupt political allies feed this campaign, hoping to stay in power under a weakened president.... ~ Read on... ~