Those in the peak oil, deep ecology and anarcho-primitivism movements say we can't use technology to solve our environmental crises. Local activist Chuck Lynd disagrees. “I believe in what E.F. Schumacher called ‘appropriate technology' ...That’s true in agriculture, in industry, and in high technology. We’re creative and innovative. We just need to apply it in healthy, sustainable ways.”

But the fossil and fissile fuel industry is getting in the way of that, said Lynd, during a protest against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project during Obama's visit to Columbus on Sept 12.

“We can move now to solar, wind, and geothermal energy. There are technologies that are just in the waiting. We just have policies that support and subsidize what Harvey Wasserman calls King CONG---coal, oil, nuclear, and (natural) gas.”

Juan Williams’ 2011 book, Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate, contains information relevant to the lack of public-access television in Columbus. Williams wrote the book in response to his firing from National Public Radio in 2010.

NPR gave Williams the ax because he publicly admitted to feeling nervous when seeing people dressed in Muslim garb while he’s boarding airplanes. NPR’s ire was not allayed by the fact that in the same interview, Williams said we need to override such fearful emotions with a rational recognition that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful and not connected to terrorism.

Concerning the media’s extensive coverage of his firing, Williams states: “I am struck by how little of it tells the full story of what actually happened. Basic facts were distorted, important context was not provided, and personal attacks were treated as truth. The lack of honest reporting about the firing and the events that led up to it was not just unfair – most of it was flat-out lies.”

BANGKOK, Thailand -- When voters recently elected a crude, joke-cracking, former massage parlor tycoon to parliament, no one expected him to immediately unleash a video sting against Thailand's biggest illegal casino, and topple the country's chief of police, plus the military-installed head of the National Security Council.

"I have been removed for a reason which has nothing to do with my ability or my shortcomings," Thawil Pliensri, the ousted National Security Council secretary-general, said on September 7.

All the chaos and drama is thanks to the wise guy tactics of Chuvit Kamolvisit, who has even upset the U.S. State Department.

The American Embassy refused to issue Mr. Chuvit a visa to meet his two daughters and former wife in San Diego, California, because he previously owned several huge Bangkok massage parlors packed with sex workers and openly admitted to bribing police, he said.

"I stopped my massage parlors," a reformed Mr. Chuvit said in an interview while waxing nostalgic about his life in America in 1985 when he worked as a doorman at a sleazy sex club in New York City's Times Square.

DC Occupation Marks the 11th Year of Afghan War, Austerity Budgets and Builds on Arab Spring, European Summer, Madison and Occupation of Wall Street

The People’s Uprisings seen around the world and in the United States come to Washington, DC’s Freedom Plaza beginning on Thursday, October 6 when thousands will converge to begin a prolonged people's occupation of Freedom Plaza. The October2011 Movement involves thousands of people and 150 organizations who have already signed. The DC occupation comes at a pivotal time: the beginning of the 11th year of war in Afghanistan and a new federal fiscal year that promises austerity of everything except weapons and war.

The Freedom Plaza occupation occurs as activists in New York are occupying Wall Street and follows major protests across the Midwest against austerity budgets, the environmental protest of the Tar Sands Pipeline where more than 1,200 were arrested and protests throughout the United States on a wide range of issues.

The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and Al-Qaeda
by Peter L. Bergen
Free Press, New York, 2011

Writing history is a matter of placing points in time as bookends or markers for significant events that have occurred around the world. Generally this is done by the winners of the particular struggles that create the events of history in order to highlight their own prowess and beneficence as compared to the other parties backwardness and ignorance.

Peter Bergen, representing the U.S. as putative winner of the war on terror, bookends the "war on terror" with the dates spanning Sept 11, 2001 to the extra-judicial assassination of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011. The latter date is not written in stone yet, as Bergen's last statement is "In 2011, the Longest War, finally, began to wind down." I will return to that final statement later, partly because of the convenient name change from the "war on terror" and partly because of the "winding down" aspect.