Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil
Author: Jerome R Corsi
Experts estimate that Americans consume more than 25 percent of the world's oil but have control over less than 3 percent of its proven oil supply. This unbalanced pattern of consumption makes it possible for foreign governments, corrupt political leaders, terrorist organizations, and oil conglomerates to hold the economy and the citizens of the United States in a virtual stranglehold. There is no greater proof of this than the direct relationship between skyrocketing gas prices and the explosion of wealth among those who control the world's supply of oil.
In Black Gold Stranglehold, Jerome Corsi and Craig Smith expose the fraudulent science that has made America so vulnerable: the belief that oil is a fossil fuel and that it is a finite resource. This book reveals the conclusions reached by Dr. Thomas Gold, a professor at Cornell University, in his seminal book The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels (Copernicus Books, 1998) and accepted by many in the scientific community that oil is not a product of fossils and prehistoric forests but rather the bio-product of a continuing biochemical reaction below the earth's surface that is brought to attainable depths by the centrifugal forces of the earth's rotation.
Jerome Corsi explores the international and domestic politics of oil production and consumption, including the wealth and power of major oil conglomerates, the manipulation of world economies by oil-producing nations and rogue terrorist regimes, and the shortsightedness of those who endorse expensive conservation efforts while rejecting the use of the oil reserves currently controlled by the U.S. government.
As an expert in tangible assets, Craig Smith provides an understanding of the history of America's dangerous dissociation of the dollar with precious-and truly scarce-metals such as gold and the devastation that would be inflicted on the U.S. economy if Middle Eastern countries are able to follow through with current plans to make the euro the standard currency for oil instead of U.S. dollars.
Black Gold Stranglehold is a thoughtful work that is certain to dramatically change the debate on oil consumption, oil dependence, and oil availability.
New interesting book: La creación de una Cultura Magra: Herramientas para Sostener Conversiones Magras
Defying Hitler: A Memoir
Author: Sebastian Haffner
Written in 1939 and unpublished until 2000, Sebastian Haffner's memoir of the rise of Nazism in Germany offers a unique portrait of the lives of ordinary German citizens between the wars. Covering 1907 to 1933, his eyewitness account provides a portrait of a country in constant flux: from the rise of the First Corps, the right-wing voluntary military force set up in 1918 to suppress Communism and precursor to the Nazi storm troopers, to the Hitler Youth movement; from the apocalyptic year of 1923 when inflation crippled the country to Hitler's rise to power. This fascinating personal history elucidates how the average German grappled with a rapidly changing society, while chronicling day-to-day changes in attitudes, beliefs, politics, and prejudices.
The Sunday Telegraph - Max Hastings
A short, stabbing, brilliant book . . . It is important, first, as evidence of what one intelligent German knew in the 1930s about the unspeakable nature of Nazism, at a time when the overwhelming majority of his countrymen claim to have know nothing at all. And, second, for its rare capacity to reawaken anger about those who made the Nazis possible.
Literary Review - Richard Overy
Unsurpassable . . . Wonderfully written . . . There is an exceptional literary power in what he writes . . . Haffner's brief autobiography is replete with historical insights, expressed with a lightness of touch and a literary verve.
Die Zeit - Volker Ullrich
An electrifying discovery.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung - Richard Kammerlings
The most important book of the year.
Stern - Heinrich Jaenicke
Sebastian Haffner was Germany's political conscience, but it is only now that we can read how he experienced the Nazi terror himself - that is a memoir of frightening relavance today.
Reinhard Mohr
Reviewers call it the book of the year; readers have made it a best-seller.
Publishers Weekly
A sample historical headline: "1890: Wilhelm II dismisses Bismarck." No one's life was disrupted, writes Haffner. "No family was torn apart, no friendship broken up, no one fled their country." Compare that with "1933: Hindenburg sends for Hitler." In this case, "[a]n earthquake shatters 66 million lives." Thus begins a vivid examination of just how Hitler's ascension affected an ordinary German, a young lawyer with no strong political views, whose career and life were disrupted by the Nazis. Written in 1939, this memoir was not published until 2000, when Pretzel, Haffner's son, brought it out in Germany, where it was a bestseller. Haffner alternates political analysis with accounts of how the rise of the Nazis in the 1920s and early '30s affected his attempts to build a career, keep friendships alive and kindle romantic liaisons. His analysis of the failure of post-WWI German society to create stability is familiar, but Haffner writes with a close familiarity that makes the old new again. And his description of the way the Nazis invaded people's daily lives shines. It becomes clear how many "good Germans" struggled against impossible odds to keep their personal lives politics-free. Unfortunately, Haffner's manuscript ends with 1933 (Pretzel covers the rest of Haffner's life, beginning with immigration to England, in a brief afterword). This intimate self-portrait stands with Victor Klemperer's two-part memoir, I Will Bear Witness, as evidence that the personal can offer insight into the political tragedy of Nazism. (June) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A remarkable account, dug out of a drawer, about daily life in Germany during the rise of Nazism. Haffner-a journalist who left Germany in 1938, married a Jewish refugee in London, and enjoyed a long career as a foreign correspondent and columnist-offers a surprising view of the German character: "As a nation," he writes, "Germany leads a double life because almost every German leads a double life," one summarized by the Prussian motto "Hard outside, soft inside." This dichotomy, one supposes, helps explain George Steiner's famous conundrum: how it could be that concentration camp guards could conduct their business without emotion but weep over Beethoven at night. It certainly explains the German penchant for irony, why dour civil servants such as Haffner's long-suffering father could be secret lovers of literature, and why law-abiding citizens could welcome a murderous regime but insist that they knew nothing of its deeds. In contemplative pages reminiscent of the best of Elias Canetti, Haffner ponders other German qualities that, he avers, led to Hitler's rise: a love of sports and therefore of winners ("We felt very important and patriotic, and ran races for the fatherland"), a fondness for the theater and the carnival ("While Hitler wanted to bring about the millennium by a massacre of all the Jews, there was a certain Lamberty in Thuringia who wanted to do it by folk dancing, singing, and frolicking"), and a fatalistic worldview that assumed the inevitability of evil ("If it makes no difference anyway and everything is lost, then why not be bitterly, angrily cynical and join the devils oneself?"). In that climate, resistance to Hitler came slowly and sporadically, expressed mostlyby a world-weary clenching of the teeth-which, of course, was completely ineffectual, and which made true acts of resistance seem rare and strange. A bestseller in Germany, and deserving a wide readership elsewhere in the world.
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