Howard Bloom joins Art Bell to dissect Iran’s alleged nuclear arsenal, citing Pakistan’s Sunni-Shiite tensions and militant imams’ calls for atomic attacks on U.S. cities—submarines in Karachi could strike 65% of America’s population with 18 missiles each. Bloom warns retaliation risks backfiring due to Islam’s historical patience and martyrdom culture, predicting a nuclear strike within 1.5–3 years. Meanwhile, he champions biofuels as a viable energy solution, highlighting Brazil’s flex-fuel success (75% of cars compatible), U.S. infrastructure readiness (93 plants producing 3.67B gallons annually), and emissions cuts (80% less carbon). Bloom dismisses oil shale independence and BP’s slow progress, urging private sector momentum over government hydrogen schemes, while noting Iran’s protests signal democratic shifts—yet nuclear threats could reverse Western gains. [Automatically generated summary]
It seems the vice president, as you must know by now, went out hunting with a buddy of his, a millionaire.
I guess the vice president was in a hurry to get something, got instead the millionaire.
In the chest, in the face, not good.
He's in intensive care.
The vice president is probably, I heard he was at his side, probably saying, I'm really sorry.
The vice president shot a guy by mistake.
Imagine that.
You imagine how, well, I don't know.
His heart must be all right.
That's all I can say.
Record-setting snow buries northeast.
That's a headline.
Record-breaking storm buried sections of the northeast under more than about two feet of snow on Sunday.
In fact, actually, it's a record.
The old record was 26.4 inches.
This time, they got 26.9 inches.
We're going to have more and more record-breaking weather.
More on that in a little bit.
Unheeded warnings, poor planning, and apathy, and recognizing the scope of Hurricane Katrina's destruction led to the slow emergency response from the White House on down to local parishes.
Now, that's the result of a House investigation, a 600-page report.
And I wonder how much that cost.
I'm sure that quite a few of you probably could have come up with that for quite a bit less.
What do you think?
Unheeded warnings, poor planning, and apathy.
That took 600 pages of government work to generate in a moment, as Paul would say, the rest of the story.
Just like a cat.
My webcam photograph tonight is of Dusty.
She is the, I think she's the youngest member of the household now.
I don't know if it's Dusty or Abydos, but I think Dusty.
Anyway, she is truly a beautiful cat.
And I was taken very close to her, so she's not as big as you think, but she's certainly getting big.
And when we got her, she could walk around in the palm of my hand.
I mean, Dusty was a little one.
And all day long today, I've been trying to teach her to jump up on my lap, and she got very close.
So wouldn't you know, just a minute and a half ago, she came strolling in here while I'm on the air and sat there thinking about jumping up on my lap and started to.
And I went, oh, Dusty, we tried all day, and now you want to get up here.
Anyway, that's Dusty in the photograph.
Dr. Hansen, I want to talk to you.
Now, would somebody out there please acquainted with the now, I shouldn't say infamous, the famous Dr. Hansen who said, to hell with you, NASA.
Well, he didn't say that's not a direct quote, but I mean, he really wants to talk, and they really don't want him to talk.
He said, the ocean's temperatures off Santa Barbara are now the highest in 1400 years.
That was Dusty you just heard.
I don't know if you heard that or not.
After she's out, she doesn't like it.
After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on December 15th showing that 2005 was the warmest year in at least a century, officials at NASA headquarters repeatedly phoned public affairs officers who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be, quote, dire consequences, end quote, if such statements continued.
Those officers said Dr. Hansen said in interviews, among the restrictions, according to Dr. Hansen and an internal draft memorandum he reported to the LA Times was that his supervisors could stand in for him in any news media interviews.
Oh, come on, doctor.
Dr. Hansen and some of his colleagues said interviews were canceled as a result.
Now, Dr. Hansen is speaking out despite NASA's best wishes, and I want to interview you, doctor.
So those close to Dr. Hansen, please tell him he's got an open, nationwide platform.
He's obviously got the cojonies to do this kind of thing.
Well, I've got an ear.
I've got a microphone, Dr. Hansen.
Let's rock.
January, by the way, coming up next hour, is Howard Bloom brilliant, absolutely brilliant man.
January was a fair weather friend, regarding the warmest January on record, allowing Americans to save a lot of money on their heating, but like all good things, it seems to have come to an end.
The country's average temp for the month, 39.5 degrees Fahrenheit.
That would be, get this folks, 8.5 degrees above average for January.
On the other hand, while much of the U.S. was basking in warm weather, parts of Europe and Asia were battered by bitter cold.
Climate details for the rest of the world for January are expected to be available perhaps next week.
A lot of records getting made.
Workers at the Grandfather Mountain area described an unreal scene about a couple of weeks ago now, actually, when record wind gusts of at least 200 miles an hour battered the North Carolina tourist attraction in the Northwest Mountains.
Can you imagine that?
In excess, probably of 200 miles an hour.
Our workers who were inside the visitor center said it was very much like a tornado, a whirlwind, inside the building after, that is to say, said Craig Morton, the windows broke.
Morton said staff members didn't know how strong the northwest winds Really blew late Tuesday night and early Wednesday.
National Weather Service approved anemometer measures only 200 miles an hour.
Morton said the gusts got to that level several times, actually exceeded that mark.
That broke the Grandfather Mountain record of 195.5 miles an hour set on April 18, 1997.
So is anybody out there, raise your hand, is anybody left out there?
Dusty, you're not coming in.
Is anybody left out there who doesn't believe that we really are entering a time of record after record after record with regard to the weather falling by the wayside?
Anybody left?
I don't see any hands.
A Russian astronomer has predicted that Earth is going to experience a, quote, mini-ice age in the middle of this century caused by low solar activity.
Well, according to that, then we should be in it right now.
Solar activity has been just pathetically small.
We are at the bottom of the sun cycle right now, probably within maybe less than a year of the bottom.
Nobody knows for sure until the sun switches polarity, and then we'll know that it occurred, but we're very near the bottom.
Anyway, this Russian scientist in St. Petersburg said Monday that temperatures are going to begin falling six or seven years from now when global warming caused by increased solar activity in the 20th century reaches its peak.
The coldest period is going to occur 15 to 20 years after a major solar output decline, which will occur between 2035 and 2045.
This is wild stuff.
It comes from Physics Web, and it's about ball lightning.
If you've ever seen a mysterious ball of lightning chasing a cow or maybe flying through your window during a thunderstorm, take comfort from the fact that you've witnessed a very rare phenomenon.
Indeed, ball lightning, a slow-moving ball of light that is occasionally seen at ground levels during thunderstorms, has puzzled scientists now for centuries.
But now, researchers in Israel get this, have built a system that can create lightning balls in the lab.
The work may not only help us to understand ball lightning, but could even lead to practical applications that make use of these artificial balls.
Ball lightning is thought to be a ball of plasma that's formed when a bolt of lightning hits the ground and creates a molten, in quotes, hot spot.
Now, the ball can typically measure 30 centimeters across, can last for a few seconds, though they're generally created during thunderstorms.
Eli Gerby and Vladimir Viktor from Tel Aviv University in Israel have now been able to make lightning balls in the lab using a microwave drill.
Check this out.
The device consists of the magnetron from your average 600 watt domestic microwave oven, and it concentrates all the power into a volume of just one cubic centimeter.
Don't try this at home, but I'm sure Tempted do.
The researchers inject the microwaves through a pointed rod into a solid substrate made from glass, silicon, germanium, alumina, or other ceramics.
The energy from the microwaves then will produce a molten hotspot in the substrate.
What the scientists do then is pull the microwave drill out of the solid, which drags the molten hotspot and creates a hot drop.
This hot drop then becomes a floating fireball, plasma folks, that measures about three centimeters across, lasts for some tens of milliseconds.
The fireball looks just like a hot jellyfish quivering, said Gerby, and in fact buoyant in the air.
So if, I mean, they did this with an average microwave oven and a little more, that really sounds like fun at home, huh?
But again, don't try that at home, even though I'm sorely tempted.
Astronomers have discovered what they call an Earth-like planet.
You may have heard this, orbiting a distant star.
It's a big discovery, Earth-like planet.
They feel they're finally getting close to a possible discovery of alien life.
They're searching for another relatively small rocky planet where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for life to exist.
You know, in parenthesis, it should say as we know it.
But doesn't, I added that.
Most of the planets we discover are huge, gaseous things like Jupiter.
And the only reason that we're discovering those is because they're big enough to be seen.
You know, the way astronomers are seeing these planets now is by looking at a star and then watching for something to blink.
Well, that used to puzzle them.
Why do we see it blink out every now and then?
Well, the reason is because planets are passing between our view of that star and we have light interrupt us.
Do, in fact, other worlds exist beyond planets?
Non-scientists of, I speak frequently, as you know, of other dimensions like Nichio Kaku and people who have had UFO encounters often say they think it's where ETs come from.
Quantum physicists call these parallel universes or brain worlds as B-R-A-N-E worlds, membrane-like places where there are more than the simple three dimensions that we have here on Earth, four dimensions, if you include time.
Do these other worlds really exist?
Researchers are discovering they definitely do.
A neutrino detector at the South Pole called Amanda, what a nice name, has detected ghost-like particles from space that could act as probes to a world of more dimensions than exist here on Earth.
This is from Whitley Strieber's unknown country.
Neutrinos are particles that are similar to electrons, but they do not carry an electric charge.
Because neutrinos are electrically neutral, they're not affected by the electromagnetic forces which act on electrons and can travel great distances without being affected by gravity.
They can thus be spotted because they travel in a straight line rather than a curve.
Earlier research into parallel universes postulated that everything that is possible to happen does happen somewhere in some universe.
This could explain things like mediums who contact the dead.
You see, they'd somehow be entering another universe where the person being contacted had not died.
Quantum theories have now evolved to embrace the idea of worlds with more or fewer dimensions than ours, and physicists think these other universes may exist all around us.
But of course, we're unaware of them.
And now scientists are trying to find them.
A radio shack in southwestern Canada, stop me if you've heard this, has been plagued by paranormal activity, many locals believing the store events are a sign of the end.
Hmm, the end.
The end of everything or radio shack?
Some employees have heard a pedometer chanting the Lord's Prayer backwards.
That's right, you heard correctly.
A pedometer sitting in the store chanting the Lord's Prayer backwards.
That would be concerning.
The radio shack looks like any other.
You know, they have PCs, they have radios, they're unidentifiable cables and electronic devices, but this retail outlet has something that all the other stores don't.
The talking pedometer is possessed, says an attractive young employee.
Every few days or so, the tinny, lurching female voice announcing how many steps this stationary pedometer has taken and echoes through the store while I work at it.
Then it stops immediately when I walk around the corner to shut it off.
Other employees have had run-ins with the talking pedometer.
Some employees have heard the pedometer chanting the Lord's Prayer backwards.
The pedometer told a regional manager that it would take him to hell.
I'm sorry I hadn't read this part.
Let me read that again.
The pedometer told a regional manager that it would take him to hell.
And once the pedometer held a 10-minute conversation with an employee on why selling $30 USB cables is evil.
I hadn't read this before.
I didn't get down this far.
This is just the latest in a long string of events.
Recently, a dual-headed display computer arrived at the store, but they didn't order one, and no one's been able to figure out who sent it.
Last summer, Vatican and Sprint officials were called in to investigate the PCS guy cardboard stand-up that was crying blood.
This can't be real.
Vatican officials have yet to comment on the incident.
While the cardboard man is gone now, the feeling of doom and blood-stained carpet remains.
So if you're in a radio shack in southwestern Canada and a pedometer begins talking to you, you may want to consider a hasty exit.
Now, it's from a news service called SNN in Burnaby.
All right, SSN in Burnaby.
If you want to try to verify that story, that's the source.
Now, here's a story that makes all kinds of sense to me.
You know, most of the colds, the illness, the flu, the terrible things that happen to us in America, around the world, in fact, they occur because we pass a virus from person to person, right?
And any halfway-informed medical official will tell you very quickly that the way to stop all of this, well, most of it anyway, is for God's sakes, wash your hands.
Or if here in the West, as is the case, I mean, people meet each other and men stick out their hands and you shake hands.
A good hearty handshake, right?
Well, wrong.
Here is an article by George H. Russell, which suggests don't shake hands.
Instead, bow for health.
I believe he says that we could vastly improve the health of our citizenry and save billions of dollars, billions, that is, in costs associated with colds, flu, and other illnesses, if we as Americans would simply adopt the practice of bowing when greeting each other.
Let's all turn Japanese.
Millions of Americans at any given time are infected with various viruses, the symptoms of which often are concealed by the use of a vast array of medications you can get over the counter, which allow sick people not to look sick, and they can keep working, but they're going to spread this thing like the black plague.
And so I think George Russell is dead flat right.
What we need to do is to either get manic about washing our hands or we need to take, well, turn Japanese.
And instead of shaking hands, simply bow.
It's a wonderful gesture of respect and greeting and goodbye.
And really, it's not bad at all, except for people with bad backs.
And so I think it's a grand idea, and it would stop so much disease.
What do you folks say?
In addition to getting rid of the God-forsaken time change we have to go through twice a year, what do you say?
We stop shaking hands.
I assume you may have looked outside.
It's great big moon out there, full last night, I think, and very full tonight.
People spend entire lifetimes trying to learn to speak, read that, so lots of ruck.
unidentified
Well, let me say this.
I believe the Blu-ray disc, which is probably a better format, because I had beta, and I tried for years to convince my friends beta was better than VHS.
Well, it's just that I know that there are a lot of other people out there who are having problems, and they go to the doctors, and the doctors just want to keep filling you full of crap.
Look, you can complain and bitch and moan all you want about antibiotics, but maybe without them, a lot of people would be dying of otherwise simple infections.
So I think the weight of the argument is clearly on the side of the antibiotics.
I know a lot of people object to them, but they save lives, millions of lives.
So whatever downside they might have, the discovery of antibiotics is Keeping a very large number of people alive.
He was killed when ball lightning came down the chimney and hit him in the head.
And he lived for a while, but was not quite the same and would get into bar fights.
He had a huge, apparently, schism in his personality, shall we say.
And my mother, who is his direct descendant, and they're also descendants of a first, a guy who signed himself on as an indentured servant on the Mayflower and was a scoundrel and fought sword fights, etc.
But my mother saw ball lightning once as a child in Illinois, southern Illinois, in an area around a barn, and then the second time, likewise, down a hall and up a chimney in a house here in Southern California.
Um I what you're suggesting is that there's some sort of genetic propensity to see ball lightning, and I see no such connection at all, just simple luck.
I mean, a couple members of your family, separated by some generation, saw ball lightning.
Interesting, but somewhat short of a direct connection to genetics.
Well, yes, actually, if we can verify that they are building or attempting to build nuclear weapons, I think either Israel or the United States should take a preemptive, not nuclear, just a preemptive strike to knock out the facilities.
And if they go crazy, they're going to have to consider because the other people around the head of the government do not, and they're smart, they're not dumb people, they do not want to get into a nuclear exchange with the United States and Israel because they know that's a one-legged butt-kicking contest.
Well, I think probably we would be the ones to conduct the preemptive strike.
I know Israel has done this sort of thing before.
Are you still there?
Oh, he's gone.
We've done this sort of thing before, but my guess would be we have as much interest in seeing Iran not pursue nuclear weapons as does Israel, since they no doubt fall into the hands of Islamic terrorists.
And so we all know what would occur.
So yeah, I think we would probably conduct the strike.
If Israel were to do it, the possibility of another Mideast war would be too great.
And what the hell, everybody hates us already anyway.
Nor am I. But I just wanted to go ahead and give a report of that, and I'm not sure if anybody else went ahead in the Charlotte area actually noticed what was going on in the uptown area.
And as an abductee, I can say that anyone who has had an experience like this should watch that movie and pay strict attention to what that little girl says clear through that show.
And they'll have a better handle on what happened to her.
About the ball of lightning, I'm wondering if anybody's correlated this with HAARP, because if you take that type of energy and focus it on that massive scale, you're going to end up with plasma projectiles, basically.
And that's kind of what I'm thinking about.
This is a small-scale version of it.
Of course, I think the reason that HAARP is where it is is because you've already got the atmosphere in a state of flux up there with plasma already.
So it's just a matter of them focusing that beam, and I believe that's what they're going through That in stages, and then if they can bounce it off the troposphere, no telling what kind of damage they could do wherever it happens to land.
You're certainly correct that they focus a great deal of energy using an array that's very wide at the point of RF emission and very narrow when it hits the ionosphere.
I mean, very narrow.
We've never done anything quite like it again.
And at that point of contact, I wonder if there is something like plasma that forms.
Interesting question.
unidentified
Right.
And I was just thinking that what they're trying to do is find the rate of propagation so it can come down on a target.
I believe that's what they're doing.
Or else they're trying to make it such an RF static, if you want to call it, for lack of a better word, that any incoming ballistic missiles will lose their guidance.
But there was a recent article indicating that the scientists up in Alaska cranked HAARP up to a...
They had an aurora going on.
It's fairly common in Alaska in the northern latitudes.
Well, it was raging away as usual up there, or as many times it does, I guess I ought to say.
And they cranked HAARP up all the way, or as high as they could at that time.
And all of a sudden, the sky above them was full of little sparkly, multicolored things.
I mean, it was like a light show that they were producing.
All of the scientists, it is my understanding, ran out of the building and said, oh my God, look what we're doing.
Ran out there like a bunch of children in a fireworks display to look at the effects of what they were doing with this incredible amount of RF pointed right up at the ionosphere.
And there it was, sparkling away.
Can you imagine?
And so, yeah, I'm a little bit concerned about HARP.
And while we're on that topic, Dr. Eastland had to bow out of a recent, I don't know if I ever want to call out a debate with Dr. Nick Begage, but we're looking for Dr. Eastland to reconfirm I want to do that show.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
unidentified
Hey, Art.
Boy, hey, it's great to get in touch with you again.
I called you once a long time ago, back in like 97 or 90.
Okay, well, anyway, what is it you wanted to mention?
We don't have a lot of time coming to the end of the day.
unidentified
I wanted to talk to you about guests you had on many years ago.
Stephen Gibbs, the man with the time machine, has wondered if you might get him back on the air because, to be honest, that's got to be the best interview I've ever heard.
That young man is, to the best of my knowledge, I've not been able to locate him.
Dr. David Anderson, who was an expert on time travel, is also gone.
We have made numerous attempts to contact him, and he is gone.
So over the years, a number of people that I've interviewed on the subject of time travel are just gone.
Now, isn't that interesting?
When do you suppose they could be?
Testing his theories of mass emotion in the brutal lab of reality, Bloom helped shape the careers of Prince, John Cougar, Mellencamp, Beth Middler, Billy Joel, and many others.
Wow.
He is a visiting scholar graduate in the psychology department at New York University and a core faculty member at the Graduate Institute.
He's also co-founder of the International Paleopsychology Project in the Big Bang Tango Media Lab.
And in addition, is a founding board member of the Epic Evolution Society and the Darwin Project.
He is also a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior, and Evolution Society, and the International for Societies, or rather Society for Human Ethology.
So he's pretty wrapped up in a lot of things in a moment, Howard Bloom.
Howard has written a couple of books, The Lucifer Principle, A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History, and Global Brain, The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century.
And from that infinitely small thing, suddenly comes rushing the biggest burst of speed you have ever seen in your life.
Now, what is speed?
Speed is a measure of time and space.
So time, space, and speed, which we call energy, come bursting from this nothing at a speed that utterly defies belief.
You go from nothing in size to humongous sizes, literally within seconds.
From then, and also in the first, this is the first 10 to the minus 30 second of the cosmos.
In other words, a sliver of a second so small that it doesn't even constitute a sliver of a sliver.
And in that sliver of a second, from this giant unfurling sheet that has come from nowhere, there is a precipitation, like the precipitation of hailstones in a storm, of quarks.
Now, art, quarks are things.
There have never been things before in this cosmos.
Things of no sort.
That initial time-space manifold that I was talking about, unfurling like a sheet, that didn't have things in it.
All of a sudden, there are things.
And these quarks have sociality.
They need to get together in groups of three.
They have this inanimate longing.
It's like inanimate love or inanimate pining away for each other.
And they come together in these groups of threes, and those threes make protons and neutrons.
Now, Art, how in the world, implicit in nothing, is there a something of such amazing capacities?
This is one of the biggest subjects in front of science.
But at least between the two of us and the other 6 billion people on this planet, we have consciousness and intelligence.
Well, that consciousness and intelligence was implicit in that first nothing of the Big Bang, just like that unfurling space-time sheet was, just like those first quarks were, just like those first protons and neutrons were.
Now, how the hell did that happen?
What you've got is an advance of this cosmos toward intelligence, and we hope, toward higher degrees of intelligence.
No, I don't think that's going to happen because the Bloom theory is called the Big Bagel.
It's the toroidal theory of the cosmos.
And it says that the big bagel theory.
Well, I'm Jewish, so of course, a torus is a donut.
And it's a bagel.
And if you start from this little pinprick of nothing, and a universe of normal matter comes out of one side, the top of the bagel, and a universe of antimatter comes out of another, comes down on the bottom of the bagel, and the two of them eventually go over a hump, which is when the acceleration increases, and they meet each other at the bagel's edge, then you have what you were talking about.
A universe that is born, reaches maturity, eventually dies and comes together in guess what?
A crunch, another one of these singularities, an infinitesimal little point from which a new universe can conceivably be born.
And this kind of thing can go on over and over and over again.
I'm suggesting that the positive universe, that's our universe, and the negative energy universe, the universe down below us, that the two of them come together in the end and annihilate each other, which is what happens when you get an antiparticle together with a normal particle, and in the process of annihilating each other, produce another singularity, another little infinitesimal point from which a new universe can spring.
But I haven't really done anything with it in the scientific community because my work has been elsewhere.
My work has been with basically taking the big picture all the way from the Big Bang up to what's going on in your brain today, mine brain today, and the brains of everybody from Islamic fundamentalists to Christian fundamentalists.
Well, again, what is it that causes you to frown on the concept, bearing in mind all you just said, of intelligent design, because you have no other explanation for it?
It means there has to be intelligent design behind it all.
To which I responded.
To which I responded, well, Father, that would be our perception.
Even if it's not creation, but evolution, it certainly would be our perception because, sure enough, we wouldn't be here unless everything was perfect.
And this is why the Lucifer Principle, my first book, is called The Lucifer Principle.
Things are not perfect.
You and I have both, and I hate to get into personal things, but you and I have both been through things so hideous, Art, that no God with any sense of decency could possibly have produced them.
Not possibly.
And what happened in Rwanda, you know, back in the 1980s, I was trying to get all of my friends in the media, of which I had many at that time, because I was running the leading PR firm in the music industry and one of the leading firms in the film industry.
This was part of my field work.
I did 20 years of fieldwork of mass culture to discover what I needed to discover about mass behavior.
I discovered that what was going on in Central Africa was a massacre, that blacks were killing each other left and right.
Well, if Israel does it, we in the West have, that is, England, the United States, and France, have callously used Israel as our point person in this kind of thing since the war of 1957 when we sent them down to recapture the Suez Canal.
So it doesn't matter whether Israel does it or the United States does it, but somebody's got to do it.
I think that speaking as a Jew, speaking as behalf of something I've been told never to tell a soul because it's the equivalent of saying you're a Nazi, I'm a Zionist.
To me, a Zionist means that my job in life is to save my brethren, and my brethren are Arabs.
And there are 300 million of them, and they're wasting their lives.
And they're wasting their lives in violence right now.
But if Israel, which has a total population, Israel has a total population one quarter the size of Just one Islamic city, Cairo.
It is so precarious a population.
It could be wiped out with one nuclear weapon, the entire country.
So I hope that Israel is not forced to do this, and I hope that the United States does it.
Actually, that would be, while I may not agree with everything you said there, I certainly think the U.S. would be more appropriately the arm of action in this case.
Well, if you consider the wipeout of an entire country and a third of the population of all the Jews on the planet, a collateral damage, then, of course, it behooves America, which has just sold a whole bunch of bunker-busting missiles to Israel.
I mean, why would we sell a whole bunch of bunker-busting missiles to Israel?
Why in the world did a bunch of imams from Denmark to go traveling all over the world, starting in December, with a bunch of phony cartoons, they were not the cartoons published in the Danish newspapers, and start a massive, massive uproar in the entire Islamic community, and it relates to what we're talking about.
It was to unite the Shiite and Sunni populations which were beginning to war with each other.
They're beginning to war with each other in Iraq.
The reason out why, if Pakistan, which very self-consciously went after getting a nuclear weapon in 1992 and called it to the Islamic bomb six years before it ever exploded its first bomb, if this is the Islamic bomb to be shared by the entire Islamic community worldwide, why doesn't Iran have a nuclear weapon yet?
And in the words of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was the most important interpreter of the Quran of the 20th century, a kafir, an unbeliever, is as impure as urine or feces or even dog feces.
Okay, the Sunni population, much of it, looks at the Shiite population as kafirs, as as impure as dogs, wine, and urine.
That's why the Sunni population of Pakistan would not give the bomb to the Shiites of Iran.
Now, if you've got a split that big in your community and it's getting worse every day, and you can reunite it again around a cartoon, you can take a bunch of pictures the Danes never, ever published using pigheads with turbans on their heads.
And as a consequence, when a statement came from Ayman al-Zawahiri, I think it is, the left-hand man to Osama bin Laden, a statement came out of him five months ago that was released by the Defense Department in the United States.
And it said it was to the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And it said to him, stop fighting the Shiites.
We need unity between ourselves.
Yes, you can pull a genocide on the Shiites later on.
And that's the sense that the American press wants to believe in itself and wants you to believe in too.
One of my Islamic friends was over here.
I mean, we're talking from a bedroom.
We've been talking from a bedroom together for the last God knows how many years.
Because, you know, I was stuck in a bed with an illness for 14 years.
And one of my Islamic friends was over here, and I said, look, if only 10% of the Muslim population of the world is militant or pro-militant, that's 120 million people, which is more than the population of France, Germany, and England combined in the Second World War.
That's one opinion from one friend in the Islamic community.
I have another friend in the Islamic community who is an atheist and doesn't dare tell his family.
He is, I mean, you could die for being an atheist in Pakistan.
And his impression is the same.
Almost everybody he meets, including, because he's from America.
He's only spending a year in Pakistan with his family.
And even here in the American community, that's his impression.
The first friend that I was talking about said, you should have seen it in my community, meaning his Arab community, Islamic community, Islamic American community of upper-middle-class professionals.
You should have seen it in my community the day after 9-11, he said.
Now, I look for Islamic moderates because, again, as a Zionist, these Arabs in particular are the closest genetic cousins I've got on the face of the planet.
And I think they've got tremendous amounts of ingenuity.
I think that whoever has pulled that off, and of course we can't, we don't know who pulled it off, but whoever has pulled that off is doing a brilliant job with something.
They use tremendous amounts of creativity in their violence.
They have no compunctions about wiping out populations.
And they've been limited to a bus attack and subway attack in London, to a horrible, horrible train attack in Spain, but no attacks on the greatest Satan of them all.
You know how many attacks they've had on Russia since 9-11?
It's been attack after attack after attack after attack.
And they are known for greater toughness, military toughness, than sure.
But remember, this is the longest-lasting world war in the history of this globe.
It's a war that's been going on for 1,400 years.
The kind of supremacy that the West has, it's only had for at most 200 years.
I mean, the last, well, let me do it from a different point of view.
I'm just finishing the 10th anniversary edition of the Lucifer Principle.
The Lucifer Principle is credited as the book that predicted 9-11.
I felt I owed my audience a history of Islam.
It has taken years to get this together, decades to get this together, because it's such a fragmented history.
But what you come up with when you finish putting the pieces together is that within 100 years of Muhammad's death, the Islamic Empire was five times the size of the Roman Empire and seven times the size of the United States.
And it has been fighting Dar el-Harb, the abode or the land of the unbeliever, which also literally means the abode or the land of war, ever since Muhammad's death in 632 AD.
That's a long, long, long world war.
So we have damaged the warriors for the moment, but Islam knows something we don't.
It has a wisdom we don't have.
It is willing to participate in multi-generational projects, projects that could take 700 years to come to completion.
We are obsessed with quarterly profits and exit strategies.
When I hear the words exit strategy for Iraq, I get furious because the people behind it don't understand the nature of this world, and they don't understand the nature of our opponents.
And they don't even understand the nature of our own civilization, which has pulled off brilliant multi-generational projects that have made us, you and me, so rich in powers.
Everything from Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone, which was based on 300 years of research into electronics, that has now evolved into the cell phones that have changed our lives.
Again, that electrical revolution that started with research into electricity in approximately 1650, that's a long time ago, now sits in a laptop computer on my lap.
That's a multi-generational project.
We do brilliant multi-generational projects.
It's time for us to wake up and realize that we do them.
And it's time for people who run companies like Enron to realize that they are running a company, which if it's not in the Multi-generational game, they don't belong at the head of that company.
If it's not a company they want to see as the company of the next 50 years and the next 50 years of American history and the next 50 years of Western history and the next 50 years of the history of mankind, they don't belong in a CEO position.
I would imagine there's a gigantic effort to lay hands on a bomb.
It's just got to be monstrous now.
Knowing what you know about what may be loose in the old Soviet Union, what technology may be for sale and or what bombs may be for sale, if you had to make a guess about when the next atomic weapon will be used in anger by anybody, how long do you think that might be?
And so these nuclear subs carry 18 missiles apiece.
All of those missiles are nuclear.
And they can reach 65% of the American population.
So if the Osama fans, if the militants were to get their hands on these two submarines, and one of the most unhinged cities in the world is Karachi, which is where these submarines are based, then they could take out Houston, which would take out all of our fuel capacity.
They could take out L.A. just for symbolic significance.
They could take out New York.
They could take out Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, all at once.
And you take those cities out, and that's the end of America.
We would respond, but we'd have a hard choice of picking a target.
If these submarines come from Pakistan and Pakistan is our closest ally, what do we do?
Nuke Pakistan, which has one of the biggest Islamic populations in the world, when we're in fact dealing with an enemy that's living in Hamburg, in Germany, that's living in New York City, in Brooklyn, which is living in Detroit, and which is living all over the world?
Secondly, we fight it by knowing that multi-generational strategies count.
Third, we fight it.
I'm writing a book.
You probably know about this.
It's available online at HowardBloom.net in draft form called Reinventing Capitalism, Putting Soul in the Machine, A Radical Reperception of Western Civilization.
We understand why this civilization we live in is worthy of more idealistic commitment than any civilization that has ever existed on the face of the earth.
Why this is the only civilization that's done what every major idealistic system promises, which is to raise the poor and the oppressed.
We have done it in ways that are absolutely astonishing.
A poor person in the United States has a television set, for God's sakes.
Well, about six months ago, I noticed I watched the Arab News every night, and I watched something very strange unfolding in Arab news, that instead of the usual shoot the dictator and have a coup d'etat form of governmental change that has dominated in the Middle East during most of our lifetimes, all of a sudden there were protests, very much like the civil rights protests of the 1960s, taking place in Iran, taking place in Syria.
I mean, Syria, you go on the street and dare to protest, you just signed a death sentence for the Spanish.
And the language of freedom, the language of democracy as we know it, is being used all of a sudden in the last four to six months On Islamic TV news, every single night.
Transparency, accountability, these are words that are showing up in the Islamic press, the TV news, every single night.
And I wrote to a bunch of friends of mine.
I wrote to a friend in the State Department.
I wrote to a friend in the intelligence community.
I wrote to a friend who's a managing editor of a huge publishing operation in Dubai.
I wrote to a friend who is responsible for helping negotiate the end to the apartheid problem in South Africa and has just come from making incredible progress in the Israeli-Palestinian situation.
Don Beck is his name, is the spiral dynamics movement.
I wrote to all of these friends and to a friend who is the founder of the 2, who is a Muslim, who is the former education minister for Malaysia, who's a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and the founder of the two leading journals of Islamic studies in the Islamic world.
And I said, I see a velvet revolution unfolding here in the Middle East.
Okay, so if you're in that group of people that hates our guts right now, what you're perceiving is that we are winning, and so you're beginning to get to be very desperate.
And they, first of all, they feel we're about to topple.
Secondly, they feel that that is pollution on earth.
When they talk about tyranny, the word tyranny is used very, very often in the Islamic community.
But it doesn't mean tyranny in the way that we think of tyranny.
Tyranny means any form of government which is not run according to Sharia, at least in the vocabulary of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranians.
That's what it means.
The Ayatollah Khomeini talked over and over again about any force that threatens corruption on earth must be eliminated, which means our people, that means the Muslims, have been forced to eliminate many a tribe in order to stop corruption.
It's simply allowing an influence of the language, like the language of elections and constitutions and transparency and accountability to penetrate the Islamic world.
That's corruption on earth.
That has to be wiped out by the most violent means possible.
Art, it's very hard to say because so many things are classified.
There are good things about this administration and bad things about this administration.
And one is that so many things are classified for good reason right now so that the enemy can't follow our moves, that it's very hard for you and me to know what we're doing and what we're not doing.
Remember, I mean, we've only got a few minutes before the break, but remember that Germany convinced the world that it was dedicated, utterly dedicated to peace in the 1920s.
And it convinced the world so thoroughly that a guy named Stressman, who was a major figure in the German government, who negotiated peace treaties with the West, with the rest of us, won a Nobel Peace Prize.
Do you know what they were doing the whole time that he was negotiating this stuff?
you feel the same kind of effort is underway with regard to nuclear devices right now.
And Annie, these are fast blasts I'm getting.
Annie from Idaho says, hey Art, if we are hit by the fundamentalists with a nuke, perhaps prior to that occurring, we should warn those people that the
Howard, have we served up privately back-channel any such warnings?
Well, I think it's a good idea because Mecca and Medina are very, very important.
There are a lot of people who would believe that God would not let that happen one way or the other.
Let me say something about the warmongering accusation and the accusation about nuclear war polluting the planet to the point where no life could exist.
In 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt made a speech in Chicago saying it's time to put a halt to the violence of the Japanese in Asia.
What were the Japanese doing?
They had taken over in, oh God, Mongolia.
They had then invaded China.
In the rape of Nanking alone, They killed 367,000 people, raping as they went.
And at that point, FDR said, enough.
It is time for us to stand up against this violence.
That was 1936.
Do you know what the newspapers shouted him down for and the public?
Now, if we had taken on Germany and Japan in 1936, we would have saved 40 million lives because Germany at that point wasn't strong enough to stand up to us.
Because of our newspapers, because of people who claimed that FDR was a warmonger, they gave the Germans an extra three years in which to arm themselves, and the result was 40 million deaths.
Right, and that, unfortunately, that time has passed.
We're an international power, and the human race is at stake here.
Because, again, when it comes to polluting the planet, as far as the militant Muslims are concerned, this planet, and I'm quoting, is but a speck of dust in the eye of God.
It doesn't matter.
Number two, because Allah is going to protect the faithful, all that fallout stuff, that won't happen.
If the audience listening to you right now finds that they're doubting what you say about the belief systems, because after all, the belief systems dictate what somebody ultimately would be willing to do.
And so it all really hangs on that.
If they want to learn more about the belief systems you're describing and verify for themselves that this is the psychology at play, what would you recommend they read?
Well, you know, the Quran's a better seller than mine.
It doesn't need the help.
But literally, you can get the Quran in English translation all over the Internet.
So please just sit down and read the Quran.
Or do something better.
Do a search for the word fire.
One of my Islamic friends came over here one night, and he had been having a fight with another friend who obviously doesn't read the Quran, but listens to his Imam every Friday, and said that his friend said that fire never appears in the Quran.
Well, fire appears over and over again, and it's fire that is so premonatory, it's so prescient about nuclear fire that it's ridiculous.
I'm defending with all of my intellectual skills or all of my communicative skills or all of my research skills.
I'm doing my best to wake up America.
I was told, and I'm not sure whether it's true or not, that Ian Punnett about eight months ago went on the air and said that Howard Bloom is the Paul Revere of America.
Somebody's got to Paul Revere us, and it can't just be me.
And, you know, there are books coming out right now.
Don't read Peter Bergen's book about Osama, because Peter Bergen, unfortunately, who is one of the experts on Osama and should know better, doesn't seem to have a clue.
He has not studied Islamic history at all.
He's ignorant.
But there are authors right now who are bringing up books of Osama's speeches.
Now, this is the problem with Osama's speeches.
In the same way that if I were to say to you, I believe in, or certainly you believe in the Constitution and in the principles of Thomas Jefferson, don't you?
You know, the problem is that the word truce in Islamic history, where war is considered to never stop, war between the unbeliever and the believers never stops.
And I'm talking about mainstream Islam.
A truce is a temporary period in which you build up your own strength so you can overcome the enemy.
It says, you stay calm and think that I'm not doing anything against you, and I will build up my forces so that you will never recover from the next move I've made.
But if you do not accept my invitation, you will be sinners.
And you will be sinners against your people.
And then, in the 10th anniversary edition of the Lucifer and Soul, which probably won't be out for six or seven months, I tell you exactly what the Quran says happens to sinners.
Now, I know that you got very upset at even the mention of a troop pullout or an exit strategy or anything that would suggest even that we're going to let up or pull out or get our butts out of there.
But again, Art, we lived in a world where if there is a God, he has been doing unacceptable things through us for a long, long time, and not just through us, through all of animal kind.
George Bush, I've always wondered about Iraq, and I can tell you an Iranian conspiracy theory, if you'd like to hear it, and it's a very interesting one and the only one that makes sense to me about how the Iranians manipulated us into starting this war with Iraq.
Chalabi spent 25 years building up his contacts in the White House, in the State Department, in the Department of Defense, and in Congress.
25 years.
That's a lot of contacts you can make if you're very good.
And he was very good at that.
The Iranians and he, the Iranian Secret Service, or the Iranian CIA has had a very close relationship with him for a long time.
Now, think of, okay, you're running Iran right now.
Put yourself in Iran's position.
You were forced to go to war with Iraq.
And you welcomed the war, in a sense, because you wanted to demonstrate that you could put religious leaders like yours in top positions in countries all over the world.
And this was your opportunity to topple that horrible, satanic, secular leader, Saddam Hussein.
So you spent eight years and a million lives facing down Saddam Hussein, making war with Saddam Hussein, and you couldn't win.
You weren't able to win.
Now let's come up with a strategy that doesn't cost us anything.
Why don't we, as Iranians, phony up a bunch of documents that show exactly where all of the weapons of mass destruction are located in Iraq?
Now, why don't we give them to Chalabi and claim that they are legitimate documents so that even Chalabi thinks that he's coming to the State Department and he's coming to the Department of Defense with legitimate intelligence?
I'm not going to bother to rewrite it up in my book because it's not going to be relevant 10 years from now, and I'd like my books to be around for 10 to 15 or 20 years.
It was sent to me by a friend who is a writer at CNN, and I wrote him immediately back saying this is the only thing that I have read that answers the question, why Iraq?
Yeah, I mean, the only other explanation is that Iraq was the weakest point and the easiest thing to pick on.
But if we, Tony Blair is not a man who lies.
I cannot say that about George Bush.
If George Bush says he's about to go big time on a program, that means that tomorrow he's going to pull the budget from that program.
He's not an honest man.
But Tony Blair is a man of integrity, or that's my impression.
And Tony Blair literally went in front of Parliament saying, I have documents that prove that Iraq could be hitting us with weapons of mass destruction within 48 hours.
Yes, America once had the luxury of waiting until she was hit directly before she responded.
We had that luxury because oceans were big, not easy to necessarily cross, and attack another nation.
So we had the luxury of waiting until we got hit.
We don't have that anymore, David.
And I guess I would ask this: if you knew that a man, any man, had stated an intention to kill you and your family, and you saw this man essentially running up your driveway with a loaded shotgun, David, would you wait until he pulled the trigger, or would you grab a gun yourself and try and preempt him.
You know, actually, my little story about the guy running up the driveway with a shotgun loaded and ready was insufficient because he had not just stated that he would kill your family and kill you, David.
But in the case of the people who want us dead, they've already more or less demonstrated with 9-11 what they are willing to do.
So we already have seen an act of violence on their part, a mass violence.
And you honestly think, David, that they would not, given the opportunity, explode a nuclear device either in Tel Aviv or in New York City or whatever?
And that means that when the United States told Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, shut up about this stuff already.
You're a warmonger.
Those people who said that were the accomplices in 40 million deaths.
When I went to television producers and to publishers in the 1980s asking them to cover the Hutus and the Tootsies, and none of them would do it, those people, in my mind, became accomplices in the deaths of a million Hutus and Tutsis.
I was marching against the war in Vietnam, in Washington, over and over again.
I do not like war, and that's a vast understatement.
But as long as there are people on this planet who do, those of us who don't, when we see violence about to happen, when we avert our eyes, we are accomplices in the deaths.
And those deaths, in the case of World War I and World War II, were deaths in the 40 million range.
And believe me, when nuclear weapons come into use, those deaths will be in the billions.
And we, all of us, who shut our eyes, will be accomplices, possibly, in the destruction of all of humanity and possibly even of all multicellular life.
We will never kill off bacteria.
They are so much better at us that research or development and creativity that it's ridiculous.
And it's a group that was founded in 1989 by NASA and to do major coordinations between disparate things.
It's been headed by a guy named Ken Cox ever since then.
Ken Cox was with the Apollo program and was instrumental in bringing Apollo 13 back to Earth safe after one of its canisters blew up.
It includes people like Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut who was Apollo 14's lunar module pilot, the guy who ran Mission Control Center in Houston, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And new technology revolutions are usually based on new energy revolutions.
There was the Wood Revolution, the Wind Revolution, the Water Revolution, the Coal Revolution, and now the Oil Revolution.
And now it's time for the next revolution.
It's already taking place in Brazil, but it's taking place because of two automakers, GM and Ford.
Ford invented the flex-fuel vehicle.
It started to develop it in the 1980s.
It brought it to a point of perfection three years ago, such that, according to a Fortune magazine article from two weeks ago, flex-fuel vehicles are selling like iPods in Brazil.
He's an oil president, and this is an oil presidency.
And Dick Cheney and all the boys are in the oil business.
But the simple fact of the matter is somebody does a wonderful job of writing Bush's speeches, and there are an awful lot of truths in those speeches.
And one of them was back in February when I was wondering why in the world we're going to Iraq, and he said it was because he felt that the Middle East was anxious for democracy.
And then, as I told you, I discovered what seemed to be a velvet revolution taking place in the Middle East and was astonished because only George Bush's speeches had predicted this.
And in the Middle East, George Bush was being credited.
I mean, everybody was saying this is not happening because of George Bush's speeches.
What does that tell you?
They were all aware of George Bush's speeches.
But back to this alternative revolution.
This thing is ready to go.
There are 73 companies in the United States producing biofuels.
There are 93 plants in the United States producing biofuels.
There are 3.67 billion gallons a year of biofuels being produced, and we have barely gotten started.
We haven't gotten started for all practical purposes.
The 5 million flex-fuel vehicles, biofuel-capable vehicles on the roads in America today, their owners don't even know they've got biofuel vehicles.
They don't even know they're driving the vehicles of the future.
Back to what happens in history, that country that dominates the coming technology is the country that becomes dominant in the world.
And today we are looking backwards.
We are looking back as if our heyday was the 1960s and 1970s when we had men on the moon.
I'm sorry, our future is the future.
Our future is in these alternative fuels.
And what I came up with with my collaborators from NSF and from NASA, with the Aerospace Technologies and Working Group, was a very, very simple plan.
And it's first, we go to biofuels, which we're all set for.
GM and Ford are cranking these things out left and right.
The next step is we go to plug-in hybrids capable of operating on biofuels.
And the next step is that we put up space solar arrays in space.
And this is what my friend Paul Verbos at NFF has been funding all the research for for years.
We put up solar array after solar array after solar array, not using our old clunky billion-dollar throwaway tin cans of rockets, but using a space plane that Paul and a person named Ray Chase have developed that takes off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, lands, takes off again, and lands.
And we put up as many of these things as possible.
Then they all have their own propulsion systems, all of these solar arrays.
And I haven't had a chance to go check it out, triple-check it, and do the stuff I usually do.
But what Paul says is we have the two alternatives.
One is a light-to-light laser.
The other is a microwave laser.
Paul has funded the research on these lasers.
That is, NSF has funded the research.
And Paul says that the technology has been checked, double-checked, and triple-checked, and it's absolutely safe.
And I hate, Paul is probably listening, and so are probably all of the guys in the Aerospace Technologies Working Group who are very interested in this program, if they didn't turn off in our first hour and a half because of our warmongering.
But I hate to say this in front of Paul's listening ears.
I won't believe it until I have triple-checked it.
Well, all of these things that you're talking about are certainly things that we can move forward on if and when we get the political backbone to do it.
But if you basically call your congressman, and if I can ever find the name of this bill, which is escaping me at the moment, but if you tell them that you want them to push for biofuels, that's all you have to say, push for biofuels.
They've got a bill right in front of them, right now.
And if they pass that bill, that bill will give $150,000.
Let's imagine you own a gas station and you're willing to put in an alternative energies pump of any kind.
This bill will give you up to $150,000.
Do you know how much it costs to convert a gas pump to biofuels?
Well, see, now you're implying, and you may well be right, that the guys from Bechtel and Brown and Root and whatever the name is of Dick Cheney, who just shot somebody's company, Halliburton, and all of these companies that are invested in nuclear plants in particular and in oil, that all of them might want to stop this.
And all I would suggest is emailing as many senators and congressmen as you possibly can because it's in front of both the Senate and the Congress right now, and it has 35 sponsors.
It was introduced by a Republican, Jack Kingston.
It is, among other people, co-sponsored by Joseph Lieberman, who's a Democrat.
And let us hope that, and if you want to raise a stink, then by all means, send an email to the White House and tell them you want this bill.
And tell them that you agree with George Bush that we are addicted to oil.
And it's going to be a problem.
Because among other things, the biofuels, they're cheaper.
They'll increase your horsepower.
If you've got a car that's 300 horsepower right now, and you put in biofuels, you now have a 360 horsepower car.
So that your kids don't grow up coughing their heads off and dying of an early death because of what they've breathed.
These things reduce carbon emissions by 80%, according to Feng Shu, who is the head of risk analysis for NASA, and who's one of my major mentors in this.
Bless him.
He is really pushing me ahead on this.
They reduce carbon monoxide by 40%, smog-four-year pollutants by 15%, greenhouse gases of other kinds by 30%, ozone pollution by 20%, et cetera.
Well, you flip the lid for the gas tank, and there should be a decal under there if you've got a flex-fuel vehicle that indicates the fuels you can use.
Or you go to HowardBloom.net, you go down to the very bottom of the navigation bar on the left-hand side, and it will show you a complete chart that will tell you whether your car is one of the 34 existing models.
Well, there's an answer that art has been implying, Fred, and that is that Jimmy Carter, this is ancient history and to a lot of people who read my books, this is before they were born, but Jimmy Carter declared the equivalent, a moral equivalent of war to make us energy independent.
And there was a tremendous amount of money that was being spent on alternative sources of energy, including wind power, including solar power.
And I'm not sure about any of the things we're talking about now.
Nevada's politics have been very strange ever since the days of Richard Nixon.
And what else can I tell you?
I really don't have an answer aside from that.
But the fact is that with the necessary political will, we're a country that is addicted to oil, and our administration is addicted to oil, and our administrations have been addicted to oil ever since 1980.
And this is a major problem for us.
Whatever positive values, and there are many positive values that our administrations have had, I'm sure, over the last 25 years.
It doesn't sound to me like you feel the Bush administration has positive values.
And I'm not saying they don't have some negative ones, but I think that this administration has been doing a pretty good job of responding so far to the attack on the United States.
No, because again, if you look at oil versus biofuels, if we got onto biofuels and off of oil, then that frees us from the Middle East.
Now, as a Jew who's committed to Israel, do I want us to be totally free of the Middle East?
I'm sorry, I want us to be totally free of the Middle East, period.
If we support Israel, it's because of Israel, period.
But I don't want this country to be hooked and addicted the way that it is right now.
And the fact is that we do have an infrastructure that's already in place.
The only missing piece of this biofuels infrastructure is the fact that we've only got 587 pumps, biofuel pumps, in this country out of 180,000 gas stations.
So the choke point is the retail point for biofuels.
And this is despite the fact that we can make biofuels from wheat sugar, sugar beets, sweet sorghum, cane sugar, switchgrass, castor beans, wood, sawdust, garbage, and even manure.
Right next to a butterball turkey factory, a ConAgra factory, one of the biggest, ConAgra is one of the two biggest conglomerates in agriculture in the world.
Okay, now how can we work with this new empowerment concept and get ourselves away from considering ourselves consumerist or a capitalist society and make something work and get rid of this fear mode we're in right now?
Well, for one thing, I think that the whole consumerist idea is dead wrong.
I did a speech in Manhattan about seven or eight months ago basically on the spiritual fruits of materialism.
And you know if you've got a computer or if you've got a cell phone that those two devices have taken you into entirely new virtual realms.
I mean it's just like when Daniel Defoe invented the novel back in 1710, he gave us whole new virtual landscapes, real estate to work in.
When you set foot into a novel, you set foot into a world that didn't exist before the novel existed.
There are ways in which, and I'm getting off, I seem to be getting off of your question, but one of the things that happens when you go into something new like biofuels is you get into it thinking only in terms of an extension from where you are today, and then somebody comes up with 15 new ideas for using this stuff that nobody ever thought of before.
So every time you make a major energy transition or a major techno-transition of any kind, the unexpected gives you new human powers.
And it does it through ways that our imaginations are not capable of conceiving right now.
We talked about the implicit parts of the cosmos, that in that initial unfurling sheet of space-time, there were things, the quarks, and they came popping out like crazy.
Well, there are tremendous things implicit in humans right now.
And we will find out what they are explicitly by moving into the new realms like the realm of biofuels and solar energy.
Well, I was about to mention to you the President's last major contribution to saying anything about all of this at all was to suggest that we move toward a hydrogen economy.
I think Art, as a person who's been editing and writing almost all of his life, I can see in the sentence in which he talked about our addiction to oil, that it started out as an addiction to foreign oil and an addiction to Middle Eastern oil.
It was only by some great stroke of God knows what that sentence was rearranged so that it said oil addiction point blank.
But I think it's going to take an awful lot of pressure from Ronnie, from you, from me, from everybody we know to get this president to realize that what he said was true and to get him moving on to, again, the one alternative that's right under our nose.
No, it's not inaccurate, but the fact is that that implies that we should be drilling in Alaska, that we should stay hooked on oil.
And I think that George Bush, God bless him, and I'm an atheist, but God bless him for allowing that sentence to be changed so that it said point blank, we are addicted to oil.
Now let's just get him to move on it.
And even if he doesn't move on it, let's support all these people.
First of all, again, call your congressmen and call your senators and tell them that you want biofuels.
Kyle in Calgary, Alberta writes, and I have no idea whether he's right, but Howard, he writes, hey, Art, with current technology, a solar farm 100 miles by 100 miles would be enough to displace the entire fossil fuel consumption of the U.S. You know, I've read figures that are very similar to that.
But when you buy a car next time, even if it's a used car, ask for a flex-fuel vehicle because these cars have been on the road in America for 10 years.
Now, General Motors put an ad on the Super Bowl advertising its flex-fuel vehicles, and its new campaign is called Live Green, Go Yellow, and they're offering a yellow gas cap to anybody who's got a flex-fuel vehicle.
Wildcard line, you're on the air with Howard Bloom.
unidentified
Hi.
Good morning, Art and Howard.
This event's from Denver, and my question is this.
I've heard it said that there's more oil shale reserves in Colorado than there is oil reserves in Saudi Arabia.
My question to you would be if we could find a way to bring it out as cheaply as we could buy Middle East oil, and thereby making the U.S. independent of foreign sources of oil, would you still be against the use of oil?
I have noticed that, and I defy anybody to tell me different, that in the 70s, early 70s, a gentleman came out with a carburetor that would get 50 and 60 miles to the gallon, and a petroleum company snapped up the patent on that and set on it.
Well, I frankly have to tell you that I wouldn't know.
I've heard stories like that for a long time.
We all have a myth, and it's very hard to tell.
We do know that British Petroleum has a very active alternative energy department, but whether they're sitting on things and hiding them from us instead of getting them to us, it's hard to say.
I'll tell you something very, Very fishy in doing the research on biofuels.
General Motors announced, both General Motors and Ford announced that they're going on major programs to make biofuels available at your gas station, at a gas station near you.
I told you we've only got something like 187 or 587 pumps in a country with 180,000 gas stations.
Do you know how many new pumps they're putting in in this massive effort that they're doing with sun oil?
Well, there's a tricky thing there, and that's a whole different subject for another time.
But there have been 144 mass extinctions on this planet long before there were human beings and long before we were turning out carbon dioxide.
And the lesson of that is we have to become adaptable to change no matter what, because nature's going to throw it at us if we don't throw it at ourselves.
And you were talking about microwaves and all that.
But then again, you know, what good would any of them do if hijackers can come in, terrorists can come in and hijack a plane and go through a building?
And one last thing I wonder if there's a power plant or something of the sort.
The border situation, America's great strength in the world.
Look, we all know that the coming century is in all probability going to be the Chinese century.
And because they've got 1.25 billion people, and those people have been students.
They have been busy studying.
They have been accustomed to working night and day for at least 2,200 years now.
They put out their first encyclopedias 2,000 years ago.
There are five times as many of us as there are of them.
If we want to stay ahead in this world, it's because we have the advantage of being a mongrel culture who have taken the best of all kinds of different cultures.
There are Slavic peoples here, there are Anglo-Saxon peoples here, there are African American peoples here.
And every time we gain a new kind of people, it gives us a new kind of energy and a new kind of strength.
So if we're going to compete with the Chinese successfully in the next century, it's going to be in part because of the creativity and innovation that is created by our hybrid nature.
Well, Mr. Green party himself came out and pointed out the Office of Congressional Research had shown that ethanol and methanol is very harsh fuel on vehicles.
It's very harsh on vehicles, and that's why the invention of the flex-fuel engine has been such a remarkable thing, because whereas these fuels will corrode a normal vehicle, they'll just eat through it.
They will not eat through a flex-fuel vehicle.
These are vehicles that have been specially made so they can handle either ethanol, methanol, or gasoline.
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In regards to that, Nader pointed out that the Office of Congressional Research had shown that the ethanol and methanol vehicles increased, in some cases, hydrocarbons, definitely increased ozone pollution, and were known to produce the carcinogen formalde when you burn any type of alcohol.
I know in the last, I'll be honest with you, in the last couple of years, they've really sprung up here in South Dakota, but then we're in corn country, too, so that would be part of it.
Well, one of the remarkable things about ethanol and methanol is that a state like Missouri has gotten very into, okay, if the Americans don't want to become energy independent, that doesn't mean that we in Missouri don't want to become energy independent, so let's become energy independent.
And they are pushing the heck out of using their own fuels made in their own territory.
You can't make gasoline in any territory you choose, but you can make ethanol and methanol in any midwestern state you choose.
They're talking about having a midwestern ethanol corridor.
And turning, well, Illinois and Missouri are the two states that are leading right now.
But you're right, South Dakota has one of these giant plants that has been up and operating and is run by Verison, which is a company that both General Motors and Ford have partnered with for this biofuels revolution.
As I said, it's a very weak start to a biofuels revolution when you're only putting in an extra 70 pumps.
But that's where we've got to all put the pressure.
That's why in my neighborhood, where gasoline is frowned on even though everybody owns an SUV, if we all just walked down to our local gas station a block and a half away from here and told them in no uncertain terms, we want an ethanol or methanol, a biofuels pump, believe me, with enough pressure, they'd put one in.
You're on air with Howard Bloom and not a lot of time.
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Okay, good morning, Art.
And it's good to talk to you.
I'm actually really happy to get through because I'm in a business program here in Northern California in Santa Rosa, and we're studying sustainable business practices, and my focus is actually to start a business that has an alternative fuel station as this core business model.
So I've got a lot of connections already established in that field.
My question to you is what role do you see yourself having in this developing business?
Well, about two weeks ago, when I discovered that this is an avalanche about to happen, it is a tidal wave about to happen, I turned to all of the members of the Aerospace Technology Working Group and said, guys, are we really necessary?
And all of the guys said yes.
And my role in life has generally been as a catalyst because I work across disciplines.
It's pulling people together and pulling together a coalition, a coalition of all of these hundreds of companies that are involved so we can push this through like crazy.