https://www.occrp.org/en/project/corruptistan-azerbaijan/how-to-build-yourself-a-stealth-lobbyist-azerbaijani-style

What lawmakers listening to Shaffer didn’t know was that the Caspian Studies Program she headed at Harvard was set up in 1999 through a $1 million grant from the US Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce and a consortium of oil and gas companies led by Exxon, Mobil, and Chevron, all of which had commercial interests in the region. The chamber of commerce is a pro-Azerbaijan pressure group whose Board of Directors includes a vice president of SOCAR, the Azerbaijan state-owned energy company, and top lobbyists for BP and Chevron.

Supported by an overseas regime and an assorted network of overt and undercover lobbyists, she used oil money to build her academic credentials, then in turn used those credentials to promote Azerbaijan’s agendas through Congressional testimony, dozens of newspaper op-eds and media appearances, countless think tank events, and even scholarly publications.

She’s still doing it. Brenda Shaffer

Shaffer first walked into Congress in 2001 to testify before the House of Representatives’ Committee on International Relations.

She was introduced as “the director of the Caspian Studies Program and a post-doctoral fellow in the international security program at the Belfort [Belfer] Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government”.

Addressing lawmakers, she asked them to repeal a section of the Freedom Support Act that barred direct US aid to the Azerbaijani government. “They have extended their hand to the US. They have huge expectations that the policy of this country is based on some sort of morality and high ideals,” she told them, and reinforced this in written testimony she also submitted.

Challenged about Azerbaijan’s democratic record, she replied: “There is a lot of room for improvement in terms of democratization. However, every six months, every year, things are getting better and better.”

What lawmakers listening to Shaffer didn’t know was that the Caspian Studies Program she headed at Harvard was set up in 1999 through a $1 million grant from the US Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce and a consortium of oil and gas companies led by Exxon, Mobil, and Chevron, all of which had commercial interests in the region. The chamber of commerce is a pro-Azerbaijan pressure group whose Board of Directors includes a vice president of SOCAR, the Azerbaijan state-owned energy company, and top lobbyists for BP and Chevron.

Fossil fuel is incredibly well financed profitable well explored. The tiny modicum of public and private money that went into renewables didn’t stop any otherwise profitable exploration or expansion of fossil fuels.

Iran had leverage since its resources began to be exploited. We could have spent a lot more on renewables decades ago that would in fact have blunted that stick. Instead we worked to make fossil fuels more valuable and thus hand them more leverage then we swung a stick at their head.

You need to be a special kind of stupid to come up with such a story.

You know what recently came to my mind…

Israel is basically a military outpost for the US in the middle east. it’s one large military base that is supposed to pressure arab countries into giving their oil to the US. It’s “either you sell your oil in US dollar (which we can conveniently print at will) or … you know, Israel is your neighbor, and they have a ton of arms”. It’s an extortion scheme.

This is why Israel is threatened by renewable energy. Because if the world is not dependent on oil, then Israel has no reason to exist, as the US won’t give them a lot of weapons anymore to conduct their extortion scheme. And then Israel would collapse.

Brenda Shaffer, whoever she is, is clearly an idiot.

So the valid observation is this: Countries started using green energy as a supplement and replacement to fossil fuels, and as fossil fuels are being phased out for any number of good reasons, those counties also started moving away from fossil fuel collection and stockpiling. But because they weren’t yet entirely free of the need for fossil fuels yet, cutting off those fuels left them with an energy deficit.

The bad take: The move towards green energy made the western world vulnerable to an energy crisis, so we should go back to funding the fossil fuels industry as soon as possible.

The correct take: The continued reliance on fossil fuels made the western world vulnerable to an energy crisis, so we should rid ourselves of that reliance as soon as possible.

A country that runs entirely on non-fossil fuel energy, on solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, even nuclear, doesn’t have to worry if the flow of oil is open or not. Ever. Your infrastructure would have to be attacked directly (like the war crime Trump threatened) to cut you off at that point. That’s about as invulnerable as you could hope for.

True culprit behind poop all over the floor is potty-training a toddler.

The parents handed their toddler leverage by deluding themselves into believing they could wean their child from diapers

^By SOMEONE WITHOUT OBJECT PERMANENCE OR PATTERN RECOGNITION^

“Instead of relying on energy we can produce at home, we should rely on an energy source from an unstable part of the world that can be easily cut off because it makes a small group of billionaires very rich.”

40 years ago, this article was titled “the toxic chemicals in no-smoking signs are the real cause of lung cancer”

The Onion or NotTheOnion?

The rare mental quadruple backflip. It takes so much brain power you have to get a running start

You can’t get it any more ass-backwards than that.

I’m sure there is a joke about gaslighting somewhere in here. “The modern economy doesn’t run on gas combustion engines, it runs on gaslight newspapers.”

Big Sun turned me into a newt

What absolute horseshit.