Green is the new Red, White, and Blue

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.html

Tom Friedman, NY Times OpEd Guru Extraordinaire, World Flattener, Intellectual Inspiration to Many, Future President of the United States of America??

New Book: Green is the Next Red, White and Blue; due April 19

This is a man who, when speaking, even captured via third party low quality podcast, gives me goosebumps. His oratorical as well as written words are unparalleled in their clarity and focus; he is a true inspiration in the area of foreign affairs and cutting edge policy discussion. His last book, The World is Flat, detailed the "flattening" of the world, the trashing of the old world order, insourcing outsourcing, offshoring, and the new era of global competition. I can't wait for his new work; it will without a question bring important new insight and focus into the green revolution. Other than Nicholas Kristof, my favorite writer at the best newspaper on the planet (with The Onion a close runner-up).

Heres a clip from his NY Times article of the same title, a glimpse of what the book will soon bring to the intellectual table:

The biggest threat to America and its values today is not communism, authoritarianism or Islamism. It's petrolism. Petrolism is my term for the corrupting, antidemocratic governing practices - in oil states from Russia to Nigeria and Iran - that result from a long run of $60-a-barrel oil. Petrolism is the politics of using oil income to buy off one's citizens with subsidies and government jobs, using oil and gas exports to intimidate or buy off one's enemies, and using oil profits to build up one's internal security forces and army to keep oneself ensconced in power, without any transparency or checks and balances.

When a nation's leaders can practice petrolism, they never have to tap their people's energy and creativity; they simply have to tap an oil well. And therefore politics in a petrolist state is not about building a society or an educational system that maximizes its people's ability to innovate, export and compete. It is simply about who controls the oil tap.

In petrolist states like Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Sudan, people get rich by being in government and sucking the treasury dry - so they never want to cede power. In non-petrolist states, like Taiwan, Singapore and Korea, people get rich by staying outside government and building real businesses.

Our energy gluttony fosters and strengthens various kinds of petrolist regimes. It emboldens authoritarian petrolism in Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Sudan and Central Asia. It empowers Islamist petrolism in Sudan, Iran and Saudi Arabia. It even helps sustain communism in Castro's Cuba, which survives today in part thanks to cheap oil from Venezuela. Most of these petrolist regimes would have collapsed long ago, having proved utterly incapable of delivering a modern future for their people, but they have been saved by our energy excesses.

(Not only is Tom Friedman a master writer, but also a master at making up new words! "Petrolism?" Why not!
Here he is discussing the repricussions of $60 a barrel oil...this is a bit dated....I am very curious as to how exponentially these problems compound when the real cost of a barrel of the sweet stuff has more than doubled. A whole other area of discussion in itself (speculators, hedge funds, soverign wealth funds....you will face your day of reckoning for reaking this havok on the world). I will be preordering his book, not on Amazon, but with the New York Public Library. I am a library nerd. Confirmed.)

Otherwise, heres a bit of "creative" writing I did at 12am last nite, thoughts pulsing in my feeble mind.

The urbaneness of urbane chatter fills me with a longing to mentally float out of the window with the steam melting off the hot iron furnace.
My mind wanders as if it thinks its time for sitting meditation, snapping and coming back to Earth,
an unalert student called to the board,
unaware of the lesson at hand.
A lesson in humility, futility, longing, striving,
living the best way we understand,
a product of our environment,
the whole a sum of the parts.
Or do we all feel, somewhere deep inside,
as I feel?
Have we suppressed this feel for lack of a rational translation, afraid of meeting the translator,
pushed back in the cabinet behind the J Crew cable neck sweaters and Hanes pantyhose?
No translator necessary to step outside ourselves,
open our eyes and feel,
like a blind man searching for a light switch in the middle of a bright, sunny day,
open our eyes to something else,
question something else,
a dog not chasing the bone, saying,
Fuck the bone, I'm going to get a steak.



The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. -- Albert Einstein

A human being is part of the whole, called by us "Universe"; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely but striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security. --Albert Einstein