Oil, CO2, Environment, Climate, War
by Caroline Arnold


This year there are real, physical issues for the humans on Planet Earth. We hear hints of them when our mainstream media can tear itself away from runaway brides and the gong-show in Rome, where old men in red dresses and lacy rochets fiddle around with edicts about sex and sin while AIDS smolders, populations explode, and fossil fuels burn steadily worldwide.

This decade has brought a new reality of terror, torture, and high-tech war, all obscured by secrecy, forgeries, lies, distorting frames and red-herrings that serve the purposes of Power and Money. The Newsweek/ Koran-flushing story was a massive conflagration that effectively bedazzled everyone into disregarding fundamental questions of torture. (Even this paragraph is more about the abuses of communication than about the abuses of real flesh-and-blood human beings.)