At the height of his power with Standard Oil of Ohio, in the 1890's, John D. Rockefeller controlled the production of 90% of the kerosene in the US. As you sit in your home reading this by electric light, you most likely are saying, "so what?" The issue was, when Rockefeller had this 90% control, virtually everyone relied on kerosene to fill their lamps and space heaters. Even though Rockefeller was able to bring the cost of kerosene down by over 80%, he had a stranglehold on the lighting of American homes.

There was way too much power in the hands of one man and this unregulated influence could negatively affect the majority of the nation�s population. The Federal Government busted up Standard Oil through anti-monopoly law suits. Could you imagine if Rockefeller had some kind of mental break with reality and decided to cut off kerosene supplies or raise the price four times higher in one day? A drastic action like that could severely impact the safety of tens of thousands of lives, especially if it happened in the winter. This could not be allowed to happen. No one has or should be allowed to have that much power.

Well folks, that is exactly what is happening in Eastern Europe. Putin, the former Soviet KGB agent turned elected leader of Russia, is the modern day version of the oil baron, J.D. Rockefeller. The difference is that Rockefeller, despite his aggressive, even sometimes ruthless business practices, was a benevolent man.

From his early days as a young working man he always tithed ten percent of his income to charities. He backed education, public health causes, science & research and the arts. His money came from big oil, but Rockefeller wanted to control the oil business for the sake of making a profit, not to control the lives and the potential safety of his customers. He was a very religious man and was not using oil as a weapon to disrupt the daily existence of millions of innocent people.

I suggest that Putin, on the other hand, has got this "oil as a weapon" thing figured out. He is proceeding very effectively to turn the Russian oil and gas industry into the 21^st century�s new, Non-Destructive Weapon of Mass Destruction (ND-WMD). I was in Germany in 1984-85, when they endured the coldest winter since the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. It almost shut the Continent down.

We in the west are listening to this global warming hoax and believing it. I mean if you really believe in man made global warming, the smart business person would be trying to corner the futures market in air conditioners.

Putin is putting his faith in his Russian scientists, who are basing their climate change predictions on solar patterns. If the Russians are correct, the world is going to get a lot colder by 2030-2040.

You�re sitting in Western Europe, in your home heated by Russian gas that flows through the Ukraine, in the middle of a winter that would have stopped Napoleon. The jack-booted successors of Putin, using their ND-WMD gas pipeline, just turned off your source of home heating fuel. In addition, most of your nation's electricity is generated in gas fired power plants.

The Russians tell the European Union to stand down and diminish the size of their militaries. Sort of the modern day equivalent of a 100 canon ship of the line firing a shot across the bow of a merchant schooner: do what we say or perish.

Most of the Western European and NATO countries don�t have much of a real military now, anyway. They expect the US to do any and all of the fighting for them. Do you think that, with their social welfare systems near bankruptcy, they plan any large cash expenditures in the next ten to fifteen years to upgrade their armies?

The Russians will turn the heat and lights off in Western Europe one extremely cold winter in the near future. Very quickly, the new ex-NATO countries will roll over and sit up and beg for any scrap of energy that the sons of Vladimir Lenin might throw to them. Stemming the tide of godless communist aggression, what a joke. Trying to literally not freeze to death will be more like it. Western Europe will be chopping firewood and hoarding wool blankets and lanterns, yearning for cheap Rockefeller kerosene. The new Non-Destructive Weapon of Mass Destruction it is about the ice, not the fire.