Well, today is it, the National Day of Climate Action!  Three months of organizing by Bill McKibben, his crew of six Middlebury College grads, and folks all over the country is culminating today in over 1400 actions.  The photos and action reports are streaming in, and a slide show with some of the first pix is scrolling across the screen at the Step It Up site.  You can see red-shirted bodies spelling out Step It Up in New Orleans; Middlebury College students spelling it out with flashlights just after midnight this morning; scuba divers with a banner underwater off Key West; bike rallies; kids making colorful banners; contra dance-based activism in Maine; and more.  

The best will be tonight at 8:00, when McKibben and friends put on a live webcast of the day's events.  Just tune into the same site!

since it opened last Friday but evidently not. Go see it, ASAP! It's entertaining, timely, well researched and tells an important story about the power of the auto companies, other entrenched interests, and associated politicians to take down enterprises that threaten them. From the NYT review:

A murder mystery, a call to arms and an effective inducement to rage, "Who Killed the Electric Car?" is the latest and one of the more successful additions to the growing ranks of issue-oriented documentaries. Like Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" and the better nonfiction inquiries into the war in Iraq, this information-packed history about the effort to introduce -- and keep -- electric vehicles on the road wasn't made to soothe your brow. For the film's director, Chris Paine, the evidence is too appalling and our air too dirty for palliatives. . . .

Continued below the fold.

MoveOn has launched an organized effort to match up refugees and housing at http://www.hurricanehousing.org.  Full text of their email in extended.

BenGoshi and I, who have both put up housing diaries (his and mine) for Katrina refugees, have been talking (on the phone, no less) about the next steps.  We are both very grateful for the response so far - just look at the wonderful map Timroff posted on both threads and is updating with places where people have offered housing!  

Next, however, assuming New Orleans is hit, there will be many people on the road Monday and Tuesday who will need ways to get in touch with housing resources.  Some of them may have friends or family who read this blog.  What we need is a network of people in all these areas who are willing to put their phone numbers and emails on this thread and to serve as local coordinators.

More below.  

If you haven't read DarkSyde's diary
on the disaster likely approaching New Orleans and adjacent parts of the Gulf Coast, do so NOW.  Things are looking to be catastrophic since (as I understand it) the jet stream is too weak to divert or to weaken Katrina.  Southeastern Kossacks, now is the time to volunteer your spare beds, sofas and floors.  I'm in Atlanta and my phone is 404-378-5424.  I hope folks that are closer will add their contact info below.   [UPDATE] Folks have pointed out you should disguise your email address to shelter from webbots, as in lizbryant at yahoo dot com.

This is a rebroadcast of a talk he gave last Saturday, which someone described to me as giving conclusive proof of Bushco's involvement in 9/11. I don't get cable so I'm hoping someone will watch it and comment. I used to scoff at these theories, but now I don't put anything past the Bush crime family. If anything could bring him down, it's this issue.

Here's an interview he gave a year ago after his first book, The New Pearl Harbor, came out. More recently he published a critique of the 9/11 Commission's report.  

Recently PLS posted a diary in which he suggests that the peak oil topic's leaking to the mainstream in itself could hasten the crisis. He says, correctly imo, that "the only way to avert a hard landing is to start doing something now, which would take tremendous public pressure." This theme is elaborated in an article that is a must-read for anyone interested in this topic, which should be us all. The Most Important Thing You Don't Know About "Peak Oil" by Steven Lagavulin lays out a scenario as to how the crisis could manifest.

There's an aspect to the concept of "Peak Oil" which I don't believe is sufficiently grasped by people following the subject. It's the understanding that the most dangerous aspect we face is not really the state of the resource itself--the actual "Peak" dates or depletion rates, or any of the physical realities of oil supply/demand--but rather the reaction in the oil markets upon realization that the issue no longer [is] even important.

More below.

Unbelievable.  Amy Goodman just gave air time to one of the groups funded by Exxon Mobil to debunk global warming. According to the rush transcript, this jerk Myron Ebell "oversees all global warming and international environmental work at the Competitive Enterprise Institute." This exchange with one of the other guests pretty well sums it up:

AMY GOODMAN: Ross Gelbspan, can you talk about this debate around global warming?

ROSS GELBSPAN: I can, Amy. (snip) The very fact that you are using the word debate shows how pervasive this campaign of disinformation and deception has been. There really is no debate about global warming. What you have on the one side are more 2,000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the U.N. in what is the largest and most rigorously peer-reviewed scientific collaboration in history.

More over the fold.

 

In Monday's Financial Times, Ian Rutledge puts some facts behind what many suspect to be the ultimate motivation behind the Iraq war.  While no doubt the stage was set by the general impulse toward world domi-, um, "leadership" as the Project for a New American Century calls it, the specifics were in evidence several months before 9/11.  

Time has the scoop on secret back-channel negotiations going on between senior elements of the insurgency and the military in Iraq.  It makes an interesting follow-up to BooMan23's excellent diary from yesterday, An Invitation to Discuss Iraqi politics, which details the ethnic and political groupings and current maneuverings to form a government.