1. 13 April 2006

    876 days ago

    An Inconvenient Truth - Trailer

    yikes. Trailer for Al Gore’s upcoming documentary on global warming.

    via Kjell Olsen876 days ago

  2. 23 February 2006

    925 days ago

    Al Gore on global warming at TED 2006

    The speech I quoted last seems to have been an impressive one by Al Gore:

    We’re all going to die, really soon, unless we make big changes, really soon. It’s as simple as that. It’s not a hundred years off, it’s fifteen years off. We will be dead. Al has so much scientific data that supports this from so many different sources that, at the end of his talk, you sit there feeling like you’ve been lied to by our leaders. Wil Shipley

    via Kjell Olsen925 days ago

  3. 925 days ago

    I am Al Gore. I used to be the next President of the United States of America.
    laughter, applause
    I don’t think that’s funny.

    Al Gore

  4. 16 January 2006

    963 days ago

    'We the People' Must Save Our Constitution

    Al Gore grows a pair. On how our government has failed us, and we have failed our government. Now we have some work to do.

    An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution – an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

    If the President has the inherent authority to eavesdrop, imprison citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can’t he do?
    The Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the Executive Branch’s claims of these previously unrecognized powers: “If the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution.”

    As a result of its unprecedented claim of new unilateral power, the Executive Branch has now put our constitutional design at grave risk. The stakes for America’s representative democracy are far higher than has been generally recognized.

    If this President’s attempt to dramatically expand executive power goes unquestioned, our constitutional design of checks and balances will be lost. And the next President or some future President will be able, in the name of national security, to restrict our liberties in a way the framers never would have thought possible.

    The President’s judicial appointments are clearly designed to ensure that the courts will not serve as an effective check on executive power. As we have all learned, Judge Alito is a longtime supporter of a powerful executive – a supporter of the so-called unitary executive, which is more properly called the unilateral executive. Whether you support his confirmation or not – and I do not – we must all agree that he will not vote as an effective check on the expansion of executive power. Likewise, Chief Justice Roberts has made plain his deference to the expansion of executive power through his support of judicial deference to executive agency rulemaking.

    In the United States Senate, which used to pride itself on being the “greatest deliberative body in the world,” meaningful debate is now a rarity. Even on the eve of the fateful vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, Senator Robert Byrd famously asked: “Why is this chamber empty?”

    The political economy supported by these short but expensive television ads is as different from the vibrant politics of America’s first century as those politics were different from the feudalism which thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages.

    Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: “Men feared witches and burnt women.”

    via Kjell Olsen963 days ago

  5. 06 October 2005

    1065 days ago

    Text of Gore Speech at Media Conference

    I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse . I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America’s fabled “marketplace of ideas” now functions.

    Gore alludes our age to that of the founding fathers – then it was the printing press, now it’s the internet. Before media stagnated due to the strong hand of the ruling elite, now it’s strangled by corporations. What could our situation lead to, if theirs led to such great things?

    But some extremely important elements of American Democracy have been pushed to the sidelines . And the most prominent casualty has been the “marketplace of ideas” that was so beloved and so carefully protected by our Founders. It effectively no longer exists.

    I have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. Thomas Jefferson

    Television brought on the “refeudalism of the public sphere” (??Jurgen Habermas??), reducing average citizens to the level of peasants and serfs, manipulated to serve interests not of their own. One way street.

    I don’t like the direction in which America is headed. Hate it, even. To the point that I’m becoming ashamed of being American.

    It seriously embarrasses me that my peers watch four and a half hours of TV a day. People don’t think! People hate reading! And I can’t ignore the educated demographic – but without encouraging the entire population to be privy to it more and more people just don’t care.

    Our democracy has been hallowed out. The opinions of the voters are, in effect, purchased, just as demand for new products is artificially created. Decades ago Walter Lippman wrote, “the manufacture of consent…was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy…but it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique…under the impact of propaganda, it is no longer plausible to believe in the original dogma of democracy.”

    via Kjell Olsen1065 days ago

  6. Also somewhat recently

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