Another Consequence of Global Warming

There might not be enough cold water to cool nuclear- and coal-fueled power plants, thanks to global warming.

The Dial-up Modem Sound

Looper, "Modem Song", The Geometrid (2000). I first heard (and heard of) this song, which samples the sound of a modem, and performer last night when it played on MC (MusicChoice) 33.




The dial-up modem sound explained.

David Guetta, Adeva

How I First Heard About Peak Oil

Nearly seven years ago, I saw a movie on fX called Oil Storm. This is how I first heard about peak oil. A few months later Shepherd Bliss gave a presentation on peak oil*. Among the books he had on display was Kunstler's The Long Emergency. Reading that book deepened my interest.



*Rising Gas Prices And
Dwindling Oil Supplies
By Dr. Shepherd Bliss
Sept. 28th Wednesday 12:00pm CC313
Sept. 29th Thursday 7:00pm CC301
This presentation will look beneath this symptom to consider a deeper problem—the rising demand for oil products, and the decreasing supply of the non-renewable fossil fuel petroleum.
Hawaiÿi’s situation within the global economy of oil will be explored, including data on oil company profits. Hurricane Katrina and its devastating impact will be considered, in the context of global warming, the likelihood of more such disasters,
and how they might hit Hawaiÿi. A discussion will follow the presentation.
Information from sb3@pon.net.
Sponsors: Global HOPE

Esther Phillips: Candy

This is the first time I've heard of Esther Phillips.

Steampunk

Nancy Nall doesn't like steampunk. And techno. Her commenters are either bemused by it or think it interesting. As for techno, many weighed in with rockist comments on its supposed lack of authenticity.

For the record, I've taken an interest in steampunk since the mid-2000s, as it was emerging in the mainstream. As with anything, it can be taken to extremes.

More later.

==
1 June update: Techno is one of Detroit's homegrown genres. It could be that Nancy Nall and her commenters are confusing techno with other electronic music. But I remember writers in Sassy who spurned techno in favor of alternative rock.

The Rockist Articles of Faith

===
Has electronic music supplanted rock among young people?

Kunstler: Ponzi's End

Note: Below is Kunstler's latest column. He takes a dim view of what he calls "gender obsessions" and "clichéd notion[s] of "patriarchal oppression", but I don't read him for his views on gender. I read him because he has a very good sense of what everyday life might be in a time of oil scarcity.--P.Z.

Ponzi's End By James Howard Kunstler on May 28, 2012 9:55 AM

Way up here in the heartland, far from the craft beer parlors, Facebook stock bucket shops, and gender obsessions of the mythical Urban Edge People, the detritus of your country is up for sale. The lawns are strewn with the plastic effluvia of lives lived through humankind's weirdest moment: Pee Wee Herman action figures, creeping tot tables, failed kitchen appliances that created more labor than they were designed to save, extruded plastic this-and-that, unidentifiable knick-knacks of forgotten sitcoms, Jimmy Carter Halloween masks, trikes brittle and faded from ultraviolet exposure, artworks conceived in a Zoloft fog, pre-owned cat litter boxes, someone's deceased mother's lawn fanny, the complete works of Jacqueline Susann, a savings bank in the shape of an outhouse....

The puzzling part is that every lawn sale contains exactly the same array of useless and pathetic objects. Is this how a Ponzi culture meets its end: the terminal swap-meet beyond which no horrifying object meets any mystifying desire for acquisition? If this is where consumer culture crawled off to die, then what possible zeitgeist awaits a people left so hopelessly de-cultured on aspiration's lowest ladder-rung?

I dropped by a religious cult commune in the next town over on Saturday. Some of the guys who dwell there have been helping me out on hire with the physical labor of the rather ambitious garden construction here at Clusterfuck Farm, so I was informed about their weekend festival. The group occupies a former "gentleman's estate" built in the 1920s when the economic growth machine operated at full Ponzi steam. The buildings are quite beautiful; the main house is a Greco-Roman beaux arts mansion; a massive horse barn has large and graceful arched windows; and there are other houses and barns on the large property, which occupies a sweetly enfolding dell of land in this county of hills and valleys.

The weather couldn't have been more beautiful and the property was maximally groomed for the festival. There were several tents up, nice ones, decorated with colorful medieval-looking swags. One was a big circular tent set up for the folk-dances that are part of their subculture. You got a very clear picture of the demographic shape of the outfit: at the core of it were vital and healthy-looking young adults, median age around 30, I figured, who were running things, doing most of the work, organizing the daily routines. Then there were the old Boomers turned white-haired grandparents (many times), seekers from the 1970s who had signed on with the outfit long ago, reproduced mightily, and now played a background role in the scheme of things.

There was a costuming motif that was not too intense but allowed for visual self-identification among the members: long skirts for women; beards and pony-tails on the men, who all otherwise dressed in ordinary catalog casuals of the day. It set them apart without making them look too kooky. It also reinforced gender differences (the horror!) in a micro-society not dedicated to erasing and transgressing them. I didn't know much about the group's internal workings, but it seemed to me that the men were in charge, and I got the impression that far from representing some clichéd notion of "patriarchal oppression," it produced a reassuring tone of confidence in clear lines of responsibility - a quality now completely absent in outer America's culture of incessant lying, systematic fraud, and consensual evasion of reality.

I was especially interested to observe the behavior of the children, of which there were very many. For one thing, they appeared fully integrated into their society, not ring-fenced into some special ghetto of juvenile disempowerment palliated with manufactured video power fantasies and endless snacks. They were unperturbed and self-possessed. None were screaming, quarreling or carrying on. They were not hopped up on Big Gulps and Twinkies. They did not require constant monitoring. They danced along with the adults, or circulated confidently on their own, and with their friends, in the crowd.

I was a keen student of religious cults in the 1970s when I was a young newspaper reporter. The blowback from the Age of Aquarius had propelled a lot of lost souls into quests for meaning and especially communion beyond the sordid precincts of the idiotic common culture of the day. They were also seeking structure in chaotic young lives unable to get traction in a bad economy. I was interested in what the cult scene had to say about America generally and, I confess, attracted to the melodrama of fringe lunacy I found there, including a lot of colorful unbalanced personalities among the various founders and poobahs. I poked around a number of religious cults, including some accused of maliciously coercive practices, and I eventually even wrote a novel based on my experience ("Blood Solstice," Doubleday, 1988).

All this is to say that I retain a broad skepticism about organized religion in general and about American Utopian endeavor in particular. But the country and its baleful culture are now in an even more advanced state of entropic degeneration than was the case in the last days of Vietnam and Watergate. Those two awful conditions were at least settled and the nation moved on. The troubles that now afflict us guarantee a much broader systemic collapse that will surely require great changes in everything that we do and everything that we are. The demoralization of the larger American public is so stark and pronounced that you can smell it in the rising heat.

What I saw on Saturday on this farm was a wholly different group demeanor: purposeful, earnest, confident, energetic, and cheerful. It mattered too, I think, that this small community's economy was centered on agriculture and value-added production of common household products (they make soaps and cosmetics for the natural foods market). This was a snapshot of the much smaller-scale and local economy of America's future, techno-narcissistic fantasies aside. I don't know whether these people represent a lifeboat, or if these qualities of character can be enacted in a wider consensual culture, and one not necessarily based on religious doctrine, which I am not so avid about.

Kunstler Video

I might have posted this a long time ago, but if I haven't, here it is.

Paul Fussell, R.I.P.

It's been extremely busy at home and work the past few days, so only now have I learned by a glance at NancyNall.com that the great one, Paul Fussell has died. More later.

"A Senseless Shooting in a Soulless Place"

Some time ago, I had a post on what made Sanford, Florida run and wondered how it would fare in a post-oil world. This CounterPunch essay by Alan Farago examines the would-be exclusive gated community where George Zimmermann shot Trayvon Martin. More later.

Kunstler: Dancing Shoes

Here.

60 Minutes: "Christians of the Holy Land"

This feature on Palestinian Christians originally aired 22 April 2012.

"Christians of the Holy Land"


"Pushing for a Boycott of Israel"


"The Lives of Palestinian Christians"

Happy Mother's Day

Bland Leading the Blind

Discussion of the Washington Post expose of Mitt Romney's thuggish ways at Cranbrook has centered on his forcible haircutting of a younger student. But leading a nearly blind teacher to walk into a closed door was another of his so-called pranks. We can disregard his apology as well. He was sorry. Sorry he was caught out there. There's more I could say about this, for example, the culture of boarding schools, but I have to think about it and gather some information. == 11 May update: Like most people, I first heard about Cranbrook in the movie 8 Mile. Rapper B-Rabbit (Eminem), a working-class white man, reveals in the climactic battle-rap scene that his bitterest rival, Papa Doc (Anthony Mackie), happens to be an upper-middle-class student at the academy, thereby annihilating his street cred.

Sarkozy Ousted and Now

Austerity is a Dirty Word in Europe

Historical Gasoline Prices

Here. I'll try to find a more recent list.

Mondoweiss on Rick Perlstein

Mondoweiss on Rick Perlstein article in Rolling Stone (linked below) about American Jewish community and Israel. Perlstein article.

The 2012 National Magazine Awards

http://www.magazine.org/asme/magazine_awards/nma2012/finalists.aspx Here.

Helium: "XXX"

Too good not to post, even if I may have posted it a while ago.

Happy May Day

Whether you celebrate it as a day of aloha or a day of protest.

Kunstler: Letter from the Rust Belt

Elegy By James Howard Kunstler on April 30, 2012 9:40 AM A few weeks ago I flew to Chicago, hopped into a rent-a-car, and navigated my way on the tangle of interstate highways to the now mostly former industrial region in the northwest corner of Indiana just off lowest Lake Michigan between the towns of Whiting and Gary. The desolation of human endeavor lay across the land like nausea made visible, but more impressive was how rapid the rise and fall of it all had been. Not much more than 150 years ago this was a region of marshes, dunes, swales, laurel slicks, and little backwater ponds of the huge lake. The forbidding flat emptiness of the terrain made it perfect for running railroad track, and before long much of the heavy industry that epitomized the modern interval opened for business there, downwind from the pulsating new organism called Chicago. The storied steel mills of Gary are gone, and the numberless small shops and sheds that turned out useful widgets exist now, if at all, as ghostly brick and concrete shells along the stupendous grid of highways. The one gigantic enterprise still going was the BP oil refinery, originally the Standard Oil operation, a demonic jumble of pipes, retorts, and exhaust stacks that sprawled over hundreds of acres, with flared off plumes of leaping orange flame from gas too cheap to sell lurid against the Great Lakes sunset in a lower key of rose and salmon pink. The refinery was there to support the only other visible activity in region, which was motoring. In a place so desolate it was hard to tell where everybody was going in such numbers on the endless four-laners. Between the ghostly remnants of factories stood a score of small cities and neighborhoods where the immigrants settled five generations ago. A lot of it was foreclosed and shuttered. They were places of such stunning, relentless dreariness that you felt depressed just imagining how depressed the remaning denizens of these endless blocks of run-down shoebox houses must feel. Judging from the frequency of taquerias in the 1950s-vintage strip-malls, one inferred that the old Eastern European population had been lately supplanted by a new wave of Mexicans. They had inherited an infrastructure for daily life that was utterly devoid of conscious artistry when it was new, and now had the special patina of supernatural rot over it that only comes from materials not found in nature disintegrating in surprising and unexpected ways, sometimes even sublimely, like the sheen of an oil slick on water at a certain angle to the sun. There was a Chernobyl-like grandeur to it, as of the longed-for end of something enormous that hadn't worked out well. Yet people were coming and going in their cars from the welfare ruins of East Chicago to the even more spectacular tatters of Gary, where the old front porches are disappearing into prairie grass and the 20th century retreats into the mists of mythology. For a while, I suppose, people were interested that the Michael Jackson nativity occurred there, but that, too, is a shred of history now merging with the fabled wendigo of the Wyandots and the fate of the North American mastodon. You might draw the conclusion that driving cars is the only activity left in certain parts of the USA. Many of the ones I saw in this forsaken corner of the Midwest were classic beaters occupied by young men in pairs searching, searching, searching. It takes a certain special kind of mental bearing to persist in searching such a place for something that is not there. [There's no there there, as Gertrude Stein said.--P.Z.] I was never so glad to get out of a place than those hundred-odd square miles of soured American dreamland. I was driving too, along with everybody else, on the Dan Ryan Expressway (US I-94), and for about 20 miles or so, from Pullman to the West Loop, the traffic barely pulsed along, like the contents in the terminal portion of the human gastrointestinal tract. This is what remains out in the Heartland of our country: a place so dire that you want to race shrieking from it and forget what you saw there. I have a feeling that its agonizing return to nature - or what's left of nature - will not be mitigated by anything Barack Obama or Mitt Romney might propose to do. I wouldn't want to be around when the driving stops.

Labor vs. Management at the Hawaii Tribune-Herald

The decision here.

Mitt Romney: the George Bush of the 2010s

Might some intrepid journalist follow Joe Conason's lead and compile "1,000 Reasons Not to Vote for Mitt Romney"? I imagine this is reason #948: Makes stupid joke about freshly-baked cookies really being from 7-Eleven. Right up there with his pretending to be goosed by some waitress.

Kunstler: "As If Nothing Matters"

http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/04/as-if-nothing-matters.html

No one in the American media is paying attention to the unfolding tragedy of Japan - and by this I refer not only to the unfinished Fukushima saga, but the parallel story of Japan closing down virtually its entire nuclear power industry necessitating gigantic additional imports of oil and gas to generate electric power - all of which points to the likelihood that Japan will become the first advanced industrial nation to bid sayonara to modernity and return to a neo-medieval socio-economic model of daily life. The Middle West and North Africa still smolder away like giant root fires. Nothing has been settled politically and the prospects are excellent that Islamic maniacs will shortly be in charge of Egypt and Libya, not to mention Syria, or even America's trillion-dollar battleground of Afghanistan where, after ten years of persistent struggle, we can't control either the terrain or the behavior of the people who dwell on it. Meanwhile, half of Sudan's oil production was blown up over the weekend. [As this points out, Sudan and South Sudan are disputing ownership of oil reserves, most of which lie in South Sudan. And South Sudan now refuses to export its oil through Sudan. This is an overview of the conflict.--P.Z.] And King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is not getting any younger at 88. Saudi spare oil capacity won't matter so much when the kingdom is up in flames. What I wonder is how long the American public will remain in its Kardashian trance. At this torpid moment no one believes that any theoretical political cohort in this land - tea-partiers, swindled youth, professional lefties (or what's left of them), or the fugitive thinking centrists (wherever they are) - might bestir themselves to bust up a nominating convention or march on one of many debauched institutions in the nation's capital, from the SEC to the wax museum formally known as the Department of Justice. I think differently, though. I think this grim interval of crisis consolidation is drawing to a close and, like the buds swelling on every tree in New England, events will soon burst into astounding efflorescence.

==

Robben Ford, "Standing on the Outside"

I've never heard of this singer before. What a find.

"Dude, It's Beef!"

In which three governors visit a meat-processing plant. Along with the lieutenant governors of Nebraska (Rick Sheehy) and South Dakota (Matt Michaels). The largest producer of "boneless lean beef." Video here. (Not this one.)

http://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2012/03/22/cd8-debate-does-the-us-really-have-more-oil-than-saudi-arabia

Huffington Post Wins Its First Pulitzer

When The Huffington Post first appeared in 2005, I thought it was Arianna Huffington's vanity project, and wouldn't last. As it grew, the HuffPo grew on me. It was and is a mixture of hard and soft news, but with this Pulitzer Prize, it has come of age.

Spring Cleaning

In the near future, I'll be cleaning up the list of links, some of which are long defunct. I'm also considering posting some longer pieces of writing, but I write best in longhand (that is, on paper).

New Life for LifeAftertheOilCrash.net

LifeAftertheOilCrash.net was one of the liveliest peak-oil sites around, before the proprietor, Matt Savinar, inexplicably closed it down and turned it into an astrology website. But now another peak-oil blogger has obtained the rights to the site. I hope she'll bring it back to its former heights.

Kunstler: "A Kid With Skittles"

Kunstler discusses the Trayvon Martin case.

A Kid With Skittles
By James Howard Kunstler
on April 16, 2012 9:54 AM

In the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, the excellent Bill Moyers hosted political activist Angela Glover Blackwell on his weekly interview show, Moyers & Company (April 13; "An Activist for Our Times") and in the course of things (12:18 in the program) Ms. Blackwell said, "America does not want to talk about race." In point of fact, we'll talk about it all the live-long day, just not very honestly.

The Trayvon Martin incident certainly provoked a broad media conversation about race all over the cable TV networks and the Internet. It's been an inconclusive discussion because the facts of the case are so muddled and the truth may never be known, or may not satisfy anyone if it becomes known. Mostly, the talk followed predictable patterns of grievance, accusation, and especially hand-wringing - the latter well represented by Bill Moyers, the embodiment of 1960s-vintage idealist Democratic liberalism, who came on the scene as a close aide to President Lyndon Johnson at the height of the civil rights struggle.

The reason the race conversation remains so constricted in America is because the central question makes everyone so uncomfortable. That question is: what accounts for the failure to thrive of such a large percentage of black America? It is uncomfortable for whites (especially Progressives) because it implies a failure of the social justice movement itself, and in particular the watershed civil rights struggles of the 1960s. It's uncomfortable for blacks because it stirs up immense anxiety over the stigma of racial inferiority.

The crucial moment in this recent history of race relations, it seems to me, must be located in the events between 1966 and 1970. This was the historical moment that followed the deconstruction of legal race codes with the passage into law of the Public Accommodations Act of 1964 and then the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These two legislative milestones, promoted and signed by Lyndon Johnson, were supposed to conclude the unfinished business of the Civil War and emancipation, which had festered so long in the Jim Crow inurement.

The expectation was that the removal of legal obstacles to full citizenship would hasten economic justice and cultural equality, but just then something curious happened: the youth revolt of the late 1960s was underway and young black America immediately opted for separatism. Opposition to anything and everything was the motif for my generation back then. A few years after the 1964 Public Accommodations Act passed, the black students at my college demanded (and were given) their own separate student union building. During the riots that followed the Kent State shootings in the Spring of 1971, somebody burned the building down - a mystery never solved.

I believe the black separatist movement of that time derived largely from anxiety around the issues of cultural assimilation - that is, of black and white America forming a true and complete common culture. In any case, it was at this moment of history that the multicultural movement presented itself as an "out" for white America. Multiculturalism allowed white America to pretend that common culture was not important. It also promoted the unfortunate idea that we could have a functioning civil society with different standards of behavior for different ethnic groups. It has left the nation with the unanswered question of black America's self-evident failure to thrive, and an enormous body of narrative affecting to explain it away as "structural racism."

Bill Moyers did not even attempt to address the failure to thrive question in his interview with Angela Glover Blackwell. Both of these people are about as well-intentioned as anyone in the country where race relations are concerned, but neither of them were able to honestly confront the issue. My own opinion is that it's about behavior at least as much as its about race and probably more, and we continue to make tragic decisions in this country about what behavior is okay and what's not. Are there proportionately more black men in prison than members of other races in America? Yes there are, and most of them behaved badly enough to get locked up, whether our drug laws are stupid or not. Is something preventing black children from learning in school? Probably a number of things, but I would begin absolutely with the duty to teach them to speak English intelligibly - something that nobody expresses any interest in, especially white Progressives. Do white people fear black males who affect to act as if they are dangerous? Maybe black men should stop trying to scare people. Are these "racist" observations or exercises in reality-testing?

I doubt even that question can be settled conclusively in our time. The truth is that white America is too uncomfortable with the discomfort of black America and white America will do anything, and will bend any view of reality, in order to avoid the most frightening outcome of all, which is the possibility of race war. Well it's hard not to sympathize with that, but it still leaves us with the burden of all the tragic choices we made since those heady days of 1964 and 1965 when Bill Moyers could stand behind President Johnson signing those landmark civil rights bills, basking in the broad-based belief that real human progress was being made.

I don't know for sure what Trayvon Martin was doing in the moments before George Zimmerman shot him in the Florida condo cluster. The public may never learn what really went on, even after Mr. Zimmerman's trial. People don't get shot for no reason, though sometimes it is not a good reason, or one we want to talk about.

Bob Krauss Newspaper Index

http://manoa.hawaii.edu/hawaiiancollection/krauss/kraussabout.html

Alexander Cockburn: Is the Foodie Frenzy Finally Fizzling Out?

Here.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/13/farewell-gastro-porn-is-the-foodie-frenzy-finally-fizzling-out/

Sepia Mutiny is Defunct

I just found out through a Colorlines article (linked at Feministing) that Sepia Mutiny has stopped publishing. The article discusses the challenges the ethnic blogosphere faces: lack of money and buy-outs.

"Global Oil Risks in the Early 21st Century"

Here.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9015

Al Jarreau: "Girls Know How"

From the original motion picture soundtrack of Night Shift (1982).

John Derbyshire Interview with Gawker

Here.

==
12 April update: Tom Fleming of Chronicles says, "Johnny, They Hardly Knew Ye"

On the other hand, the worst thing that John Derbyshire has done to his reputation with serious people is to associate with NR. He is intelligent, reasonably well-read, possessed of a decent prose-style and the courage of his convictions. What in the world was such a man doing in such company?

JohnDerbyshire.com

Santorum Drops Campaign

Rick Santorum Suspends Campaign.

But the news of his departure is overshadowed by George Zimmermann's lawyers' announcement that they will no longer represent him.

==
It's obvious Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee, but I think Ron Paul will hang on until the end.

Kunstler Predicts Youth Uprising

Strange Jubilee
By James Howard Kunstler
on April 9, 2012 9:26 AM

Is there a Baby Boomer so dim in this land of rackets and swindles who thinks that he or she will escape the wrath of the Millennials rising? The developing story is so obvious that only an academic economist could fail to notice. Here's how it will go: some months from now, as the financial unwind worsens, and the mirage of gainful employment shimmers away to nothing, and the technocrats of Europe meet nervously by some Swiss lakeside (and are seen glumly shaking their heads), and Romney and Obama try to out-do each other peddling miracle cures for the tanking national self-esteem - a dangerous meme will go forth across the internet, and this meme will say: Millennials, renounce your college loans and set yourselves free!

And then something truly marvelous will happen. They will at once disempower the swindling generation of their fathers, teachers, loan officers, and overlords and quite possibly bring on, at long last, the epochal collision of pervasive American control fraud with the hard hand of reality.

I think this will happen, and I would venture even to set the meme loose here and now and watch it go viral. The college loan racket has been an even more cynical enterprise than the mortgage racket was because so many people who ought to have known better, people of supposed intelligence such as college deans, cabinet secretaries, and think-tank Yodas, all colluded to support the false promise that the gigantic cargo cult of higher ed would keep churning out fresh careers forever - when the truth was that the entire groaning vessel of hopes and dreams was already under water and sinking into the eternal darkness.

And is there a Millennial so dim who believes that the promised package of lifetime goodies once called "a job with benefits" waits like a liveried servant to conduct them without friction through the ceremonies of career and family according to premises and promises of an obsolete American Dream? Dreams do die hard. As dreams go it was a pretty good one while it lasted, but like all dreams, it has vanished in the mists of a new morning leaving the dreamers half-sick, anxious, and drained. They have nothing to lose but their fears of the re-po man and the simulated dudgeon of telephone robot debt-collectors.

This idea should catch on as the election season heats up. Like the anti-war youth of August, 1968, burning their draft cards in the streets of Chicago, the Millennials should flock to Charlotte and Tampa this summer and fill the parking lots (there are no streets in these places) with the smoke of their burning loan contracts - and then proceed with the loud repudiation of party politics in its two current useless, lying, craven, feckless factions. The effrontery of these rogues, promising a hundred years of shale gas, and jobs, jobs, jobs, and a personal relationship with Jesus! Send them packing into the bowels of history, then go home and make it work locally, where it will have to happen in any case because the arc of events has a velocity of its own now and that is our certain destination.

The colleges themselves will, of course, implode shortly, along with everything else currently organized on the super-gigantic scale. They are no more prepared for what is about to happen to them than the chiselers in government, banking, medicine, and global corporate enterprise. We will wonder in retrospect how they ever managed to winkle 50-grand a year for their absurd promises, and how we permitted young people with undeveloped powers of judgment to sign their financial lives away on terms even more stringent than their parents' mortgages. When the universities do go down, tossing their employees overboard in the process, it will be interesting to see the former faculty chairpersons and distinguished professors of econometric modeling learn how to plant kale and care for chickens side-by-side with their formerly-indentured students. I can imagine a period of turmoil in America even harsher than, say, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s in China where officials, professors, and authorities of all kinds were paraded through the angry mobs wearing dunce caps. Weird things happen history.

The college loan money will not be paid back anyway, so Millennial youth ought to seize the golden opportunity to make the deliberate point that the years of swindling are officially over now. This strange jubilee could, and should, change everything.

Al Jarreau: "Burst in With the Dawn"

From the 1977 album Look to the Rainbow.

Conservative Infighting

Gary Johnson Tops ACLU Liberty Watch Report Card

http://www.lvtsg.com/imho/2012/01/gary-johnson-tops-aclu-liberty-watch-report-card/

Kunstler: "Unthinkable"

Unthinkable
By James Howard Kunstler
on April 2, 2012 9:29 AM

In the drunken, drug-crazed twilight of its run as Leader of the Free World, America's collective imagination swerves from one breakdown lane to the other while the highway patrol throws a donuts-and-porn party down at headquarters and the news media searches the gutter on hands-and-knees looking for the spot where it dropped its brains.

The other day, Larry Kudlow, the king popinjay at CNBC, told viewers that the US has over a trillion barrels of oil waiting to be drill-drill-drilled on our way to "energy independence." This is the kind of malarkey that America thrives on these days, the way yeasts thrive on sugary mash. [The two links I added are typical of Kudlow's views.--P.Z.] It's a complete falsehood, of course, but the working dead over at The New York Times said substantially the same thing in a front-page story the week before. The Timespersons have only one source for their stories: Daniel Yergin, chief public relations pimp for the oil industry, because he makes it so easy for them by providing all the information they will ever need. The oil and gas companies would like to direct the fire-hose of loose and easy money out there into their stock prices - building to the magic moment when, Mozillo-like, the executives can dump shares, cut, and run for the far hills where no SEC officer or DOJ attorney will ever think to look. This is just another racket in an all-rackets society.

The fantasy of energy independence therefore takes shape as a "settled matter" as we lurch toward elections. The arch-moron Mitt Romney will inveigh against Obama for holding the oil dogs back while Obama pretends to spank the oil companies for gouging the public on that alleged Niagara flow of new oil. None of them understands the true situation, which is that the USA is enjoying one last gulp of a very expensive oil cocktail with the last few dollars it can prestidigitate out of the central bank's magic box, and then there is no more even notional surplus wealth to blow on more drinks.

And it isn't even much of a gulp. US production of "all liquids" - which includes methane gas drippings, ethanol, etc - went from 7.2 million barrels a day in 2004 to about 7.7 in 2011. We use about 19 million barrels a day, down about a million from peak US consumption before the financial crash of 2008. The reason it's down: Americans are going broke, one household and one small business at a time. Shale oil production is approaching half a million barrels a day. That's about 45 minutes of daily go-power. It might go up to an hour-and-a-half before production of shale oil permanently crashes on the combination of fast-depleting wells and a lack of capital to keep drilling new ones at $8 million per well.

The story for shale gas is similar, except that initial production was so exorbitant that it drove the price down to nearly nothing (the $2 range), and the bust from that Ponzi will be even more spectacular than the shale oil. Everyone from Mr. Obama to the chiselers who run Citigroup maintain that there is a one hundred year supply of gas in the USA. They are going to be very disappointed. The public, on the other hand, will not even remember what they said as they burn down the cornfields in anguish.

I met a guy at the pumps last week who was filling up a pickup truck at least twice the size of mine a few yards away. I asked him how things were going fuel-wise with that monster Ram-Charger he was feeding. At more than $100 a fill-up, it was killing him he said. His line-of-work required him to drive all over the county incessantly. His reality was a bit different from the oil company execs promising limitless horizons of oil to CNBC-watching retirees desperate for some "yield" on investment in the face of ZIRP bond rates. The price of oil (and gasoline) may well crash again, but when it does, there will be fewer business reasons for anyone to drive around the county all the live-long day, and that guy's Ram-Charger could fall into the hands of the re-po goon squad. He may never be able to get another one, either. No more money for truck loans. Capital shortage. Sorry. [I know a man with a GMC Sierra, and he says it costs about $90 to fill. But his truck has been fully paid off. A retired airline pilot, he's starting a car restoration business with his brother who lives on the far side of town so he drives--a lot.--P.Z.]

This oil and gas thing cuts so many ways that the public will feel like it is gargling Gillette blue blades. Just add up the total tonnage of steel necessary to keep this Ponzi going and you would reach a discouraging conclusion: this thing has nowhere to go but swift and implacable contraction. The ultimate destination of "energy independence" will be a nation with no cars and trucks to run. We'll get there, you'll see. But that is speaking the unthinkable.

*
Thanks to all readers for sending many kind and thoughtful letters about cholesterol, diet, statins, doctors, and the medical racket in response to my two previous blogs on those subjects.

"How Do You Keep the Music Playing?"

Rebecca: "Vanity Angel"

Q: What is Sanford, Florida?

A: A town in Central Florida.

A: A place that at first glance has little charm or history.

A: A place that owes its current existence to abundant fossil fuels.

A: A town that would likely suffer in the Long Emergency.

"The Myth of Peak Oil"

is the title and subject ofthis essay on today's CounterPunch. I'll read it more fully and comment on it later.

On Indigenous Control of Pacific Media

Here.

I've found the blog of the Pacific Island News Association and begun subscribing to its feed. Press coverage of the Pacific region is very sparse. Sometimes the Pacific region (i.e., the islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia) is lumped in with Asia and Australia, but those two areas receive far more attention.

Kunstler: Matrix of Rackets; Fracking

Kunstler continues a discussion of his diet and the American health system. Matrix of Rackets

There's a good article on fracking in the 15 March issue Rolling Stone. Specifically it's about Chesapeake Energy, America's second-largest producer of natural gas. The article is behind a paywall so pick up a copy (Whitney Houston is on the cover).

27 March update: The article is online, after all. But it's easier to read in the print format.

Andrea Bofill: "I Just Wanna Stop"

Andrea Bofill brings an unmistakenly jazzy flavor to her late-eighties remake of one of Gino Vannelli's biggest hits.

Community Radio

FCC Promotes Community Radio.

FCC Decision Strikes Critical Blow to Right-Wing Radio Dominance

"And They Will Know We Are Christians By Our Love"

Pat Robertson says Peyton Manning deserves injury over Tim Tebow snub.

On Tar Sands Pipeline Spills

"Report: Pipeline Spills of Tar Sands Oil Three Times as Frequent as That of Crude Oil and Nastier"

The report itself.

Kunstler: "Juked By Medicine"

Kunstler takes time off from discussing peak oil and financial shenanigans to write about the strict vegan diet he followed for about four years, and how awful he felt afterwards.

I'll discuss this more later.

==
late 24/early 25 March update: In the 1 March KunstlerCast, Kunstler discusses his vegan diet and how the American diet will change in the Long Emergency.

Kony2012 is Phony

Ten Ways That Kony2012 is Phony.

I know at least one young person who supports Kony2012. A lot of good-hearted people have fallen for this.

==
16 March update: Jason Russell Arrested.

==
21 March update: "Kony's Invisible Christian Fanaticism"

==
6 April update: Swans.com article by Michael Barker

Ron Paul's Hour of Decision

Here.

The Sixth Anniversary of Poppa Zao

This blog is six years old today.

Newt Gingrich: Cornucopian

Newt Gingrich: Cornucopian

More here.

"The idea of peak energy is a stupid idea. It does not exist, it is a technologically limited model, it has been the basis of American energy policy for 40 years, and it is wrong."

Enjoy the Silence

The Rush controversy is slowly disappearing from the mainstream press, but it reminds me of this, from the June 2010 issue of Index on Censorship, an essay on talk radio by Joe Queenan, a pretty good writer I know of mainly from his work in GQ. (He sure gets around.)

But most important, I dislike talk radio. I dislike talk radio for one reason and one reason only: because it is unrelentingly unpleasant. (This is true not only of politically oriented radio but of sports-talk radio.) Talk radio, the stomping grounds of a battalion of Johnny One-Notes, creates the impression that everyone in the United States is at everyone else’s throat, that everyone is angry and bitter and outraged and miserable all the time. Talk radio is dominated by crackpots and paranoids; talk radio is dominated by people whose entire emotional repertoire consists of rage and disbelief; talk radio is hysterical. Thus, if you turned on your radio while motoring past the wheat fields of Kansas or through the foothills of the Rockies or across the wide Missouri you could easily forget what a remarkable country you are living in, a country of hard-working people who love their jobs, love their families and love their country.

===
My own listening to Rush is a long story, on which I'll elaborate soon.

Kunstler Starts a Garden

Intermezzo
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 12, 2012 10:21 AM

Unless your mobile home was blown all over the county on opening day of the tornado season, this must seem like an interlude of reassuring normality in the world's convulsive wendings. The IED known as Greece has not quite yet exploded, loud as all the graveyard whistling that emanates from Europe might be. Even the invocation of a "credit event" by the notorious ISDA has seen a first-stage payout of a few mere billions - though you've got to believe that this is some kind of stage-managed dumb-show designed to conceal the fact that the whole credit default swap racket is a network of frauds.

Where I live, in the uppermost Hudson Valley, the peace and tranquility of the moment is overlaid by sweet spring zephyrs arriving about a month early. I hope that doesn't portend weeks on end of 90-degree summer heat, but I have the consolation of not being in Texas, where that would be more like three straight months of 100-degree-plus heat. It must get tedious running in and out of the a.c.

My gardening schemes which fermented all winter are finally going into action. Yesterday, I banged together the first two of ten raised beds arrayed geometrically in a forty-eight foot square foot formal vegetable and herb garden. I've done it before on a smaller scale at a different house in a different time when nobody except the clinically paranoid expected the collapse of civilization. I'm going to put in a not-so-formal patch of corn-squash-and beans outside of that in the manner of the people who lived here a thousand years ago, really just to see how it works, and I may also plant a monoculture patch of potatoes elsewhere.

The "back forty" awaits the arrival of twenty fruit trees - mixed apple, pear, cherry, plus blueberry, raspberry and current shrubs - and two blight-resistant American chestnuts (not absolutely guaranteed blight-free). A mighty effort has been made over recent decades by valiant arborists to restore the American chestnut. It was this tree (Castanea dentate) which made the forests east of the Mississippi so prolific with game in the time before clocks arrived in North America. My back forty used to be huge lawn, with an above-the-ground pool decorating the middle of it. The pool is gone, thank you Jeezus. I'll start with this set of fruit and see how they take to the soil here, and if they get going well I'll get twenty more next year. It could add up to a really immense amount of fruit for one household. There's always cider....

Altogether I have about an acre-and-a-quarter of already clear land to experiment with. The rest is woodlot. The woods will require a lot of grooming and brush-hogging to get decades of "trash" out: rampant honeysuckle, Virginia creeper, box elder. There's a lot of good hardwood in there otherwise, and I built a saw-jack set up to cut stove lengths. There's enough in there to be self-replenishing with careful management. The house I bought last fall has a fireplace with a stove insert. The builder insulated the shit out of the place. The chain saw is off in the shop getting its battered old chain replaced. I have to learn how to sharpen the damn thing now. Cutting firewood is where you get a really vivid sense of the power embodied in gasoline. A couple of gallons will get next season's supplementary supply laid in. In the past, and probably, in the future, this is a job that would be nearly impossible to do by yourself.

These days, except for highway repair and oil-drilling, there are few outdoor activities that require a gang of men working together. In the years ahead, household composition is going to change hugely for many reasons. It's unusual these days to have a lot of children - considering population overshoot, it seems crazy to promote that - but people with something to offer in the way of skills and labor may have to join forces just to get the necessary day's work done together. I'm sure that will have its consolations, even if it means you don't get to have a 3,500 square foot house to yourself.

The deer-fence installer just submitted his estimate. It was an eye-opener, but it has to be done and it's a one-time thing. I could have done it myself in a half-assed way with plastic netting but this is not a time for half-assed measures. My place is like a petting zoo, there are so many deer on and around it. Left open, they would ravage anything I grow like locusts. And they had the easiest winter in memory - no snow on the ground all January and February, something nobody around here has seen before. Here it is March and they are still looking plump and ready to pop out lots of healthy babies. So I have to put a fence up around the garden and orchard part of the property, with gates into the woodlots. The fence has to be eight feet high because the white-tailed deer is a mighty leaper. It's going to look a little like Jurassic Park.

Of course, if the USA gets into really deep socio-political shit, it's easy to imagine the entire deer-herd of Washington County getting exterminated inside a couple of years by hungry, desperate jackers. The people I play fiddle with on Tuesday night, many of them boomer-age hippie homesteaders and master gardeners, remember thirty years ago when you hardly ever saw a deer. We could easily get to that point again when times get hard.

About a week ago, I stopped on a country road to take a leak. I stepped into the woods for a minute and then, stepping out, was horrified to see dozens of ticks crawling on my pants legs. I took the otherwise unused snow-brush to them. The really weird part is that it was only thirty degrees that day. Yet they were already active and right lively. This place is now the epicenter of the eastern Lyme Disease epidemic. I went to a party not long ago where at least fifteen people were currently in treatment, or had been more than once before, for Lyme. Some just couldn't get rid of it. It is a wicked-ass illness, very difficult to get out of your system, and debilitating in myriad ways. It, too, was unknown around here thirty years ago.

I honestly don't know if my own little homesteading experiment at the edge of this sweet-but-beat little village is going to work out. I'm pretty confident about growing vegetables because I've done it successfully before, even in recent years when I was a renter sitting out the housing bubble. But it gives you something psychologically nourishing to do while the turbo-industrial world wends its way into the long emergency. Pictures to come on my website as the season wends where it will.
Apologies for late posting today...time change and all....

"Shock Me": Jermaine Jackson feat. Whitney Houston

I'm reading an unauthorized biography about Whitney Houston, in which I found out about this song from the soundtrack of the 1985 movie Perfect. Jermaine and Whitney were an underrated duo.

Evangelicals and Israel

Interesting article on evangelicals tightening their embrace of Israel amid that country's rising tension with Iran.

===
10 March update: I don't know if he's an evangelical, but Tom O'Halloran obviously wants "Bibi" for president, and also seems to be a birther.

http://twitter.com/#!/TPO_Hisself/status/178405935562227712

Tom O'Halloran
‏ @TPO_Hisself
#Bibi for potus, OBVIOUSLY birth cert is not a concern, and we NEED a president that has Honor, dignity, love for America & has BALLS!

11:04 PM - 9 Mar 12 via web ·

The Notorious B.I.G.: Fifteen Years Later

The Notorious B.I.G. died fifteen years ago today (9 March).

The video for "Sky's the Limit", apparently made after Biggie died, is inspired by Bugsy Malone.

Cornucopians to the Left, Cornucopians to the Right

Keith Olbermann:

http://twitter.com/#!/KeithOlbermann/status/177472185424818177

It means, Sasquatch, that if you can artificially recreate the natural compression process you can MAKE crude oil

http://twitter.com/#!/KeithOlbermann/status/177457115110191104

Answer? Oil was once algae, plankton RT @GingerGibson Newt "I don't think your car is going to go very far if you s... http://tl.gd/ga8hph

===
Rush Limbaugh: "The supply may be infinite [sic], but we're nowhere near its end. There is enough oil in this country to run this country at current levels of usage for around 250 years, and the regime wants you to believe we've only got 20 billion barrels; we're gonna run out here in ten years or so. That's outrageous."

==
Cornucopians: A Guide for the Perplexed.

A further definition.

==
10 March update: The Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore on "What North Dakota Could Teach California: While One Plays Host to a Modern-Day Gold Rush, the Other Shuns Evil Fossil Fuels and Wallows in Debt.":

"Williston [North Dakota] sits atop the Bakken Shale, which will later this year be producing more oil than any other site in the country, surpassing even Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, the longtime leader in domestic output." (Subscription required for full access.)

Michael Klare, interviewed in 2010 by Chris Hayes, is certainly not a cornucopian. Neither is he a doomer.


(Here, Chris Hayes casts a skeptical eye on Kunstler's book The Long Emergency.)

Rush Limbaugh: No Longer on KPUA

Who could have thought today was the last day The Rush Limbaugh Show would air in Hilo--at least for now? KPUA became the first radio station in the United States to stop carrying the program. This New England station soon followed suit.

KPUA's announcement

http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/breaking/141474943.html

I wonder if this will make tomorrow's Tribune-Herald.

(6 March update: Full front-page treatment. An article by John Burnett incorporating content from the Associated Press, and a large color photo of station manager Chris Leonard.)

And check out HFP for this pungent rant, headlined CENSORSHIP:

(Make one nasty comment about an abortion activist and you will be silenced. Meanwhile UH Hilo Faculty is infested with 9-11 trooothers and anti-Semites. And they are PAID to spout their filth.)

==
11 March update: Rush scrubbed his website of "slut" comment and demand for sex videos.

Dropping Rush Attracts Support Across Nation (10 March Hawaii Tribune-Herald)
==
14 March update: Michael J. Smith at StopMeBeforeIVoteAgain takes it in stride.

Breakfast at Wailoa State Park

Busy at home, but I had a nice breakfast (from Hilo Lunch Shop) with a friend today at Wailoa State Park. The ducks and other fowl came right up to our pavilion. I found that Hilo Lunch Shop serves generous cups of coffee, and ogo salad. (Recipe for ogo salad if you want to make it yourself.)

Thomas Naylor mentions Morris Berman's book on America.

The Oscars

The Artist won five awards, and it's playing at the Prince Kuhio Stadium Cinemas, not yet at the Palace. I haven't seen it yet. Interestingly, it's only the second silent movie to win Best Picture. I figure that the Academy Awards began around the time silent movies began to be displaced by the "talkies."

Oscar site.

I don't like the recent practice of nominating ten films for the Best Picture category.

Kunstler: "A Fog of Mendacity"

[Note: All links added by me.--P.Z.]

A Fog of Mendacity
By James Howard Kunstler
on February 27, 2012 9:43 AM
Those frightening sounds, sights, and odors on the wind this foreboding snowless winter - like emanations from some back ward of a global psychiatric hospital - are the signs of a nation going completely mad. The traumatic rise of oil prices above the $100 level is one irritant, prompting a range of people-who-oughta-know-better to gibber and fulminate as though they'd been locked in the nation's attic since Thanksgiving with nothing to do but play with a box of pencils. Meanwhile, several absurd "narratives" circulate around the mainstream media that are sure to cause this country more trouble - as any set of pernicious untruths will.
One popular new lie is that US oil production is suddenly so robust that America is about to become a leading world oil exporter again - which is completely untrue. The lie arises at the intersection of wishful thinking and the willful misuse of statistics. It was trumpeted by the appallingly credulous Tom Friedman in his Sunday New York Times column, of all places, and it shows how effective the oil and gas industry's propaganda campaign has been.
A lot of the wishing comes out of the shale oil and shale gas sectors. Those TV commercials you see around the news hours on the cable networks are designed to extract investment capital from elderly people who have been swindled in the bond markets and don't know where to stick their dwindling retirement funds. Shale oil and gas must seem like a good bet to them, especially the ones marooned in retirement housing clusters in dismal places like Arizona and Florida, where not being able to drive is a virtual death sentence.
The US government is in on this propaganda offensive, especially the Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency (EIA), which routinely issues overly optimistic reports about future oil production. The political spin is a quixotic effort to promote another commonly touted lie about the future: that the US is approaching a point of "energy independence." You'll know we got there when you have to walk to your new job weeding the potato fields. The mendacity behind this propaganda is strictly the wish of politicians to avoid telling voters the truth, out of sheer cowardice for the consequences. US Energy Secretary Steven Chu will go down in history as a pathetically passive quisling, who thought he was honest and patriotic by standing in the background and keeping his mouth shut.
In fact, a lot of the propaganda behind the current madness is based on the incapacity of Americans to imagine daily life without all the cars. One very active drummer on the propaganda scene is John Hofmeister, former CEO of Shell Oil. About a week ago he debated Tad Patzek, a petroleum engineer from the University of Texas. {See below for the embedded video.--P.Z.] Hofmeister's rap is based on one central fallacious idea: that American life can only continue if we keep all the cars and trucks running. Any other outcome is unthinkable, off the table. To put a finer point on it, he insists that our national identity and destiny are tied to "personal transportation," code for car dependency. The debate was therefore absurd and Patzek was way too polite. He never challenged Hofmeisiter's core idea.
The public's gross misunderstanding of these issues arises over a set of mis-statements made in recent years especially focusing on the Bakken shale oil basin on North Dakota, the various shale gas plays around the country, and the tar sands of Canada (which so many spinmeisters seem to regard as belonging to the United States). The true state of the US oil industry is that we only barely stalled a 40-year decline in oil production by throwing massive amounts of money (capital) at oil reserves that are very expensive and difficult to get. In so far as we've entered the terminal stage of a long debt cycle, one thing we can be sure of is a shrinking pool of real capital investment. Hence the frantic propaganda effort to funnel remaining available money into the shale plays.
A companion fantasy to all this is that the US has a hundred year supply of natural gas. President Obama is guilty of this whopper. (One commentator, financier Bert Dohmen, made the ridiculous claim in a recent podcast on the Financial Sense News Network, that the US has a thousand year supply.) These are the kinds of irresponsible statements that will eventually inflame a public yet again swindled by authorities they desperately want to trust. The truth is we probably have perhaps a seven-year supply of shale gas, and maybe 20 of all gas including the regular old conventional gas. And even that could easily be reduced by the disorders in capital formation now underway in the destabilizing banking sector.
In any case, all this wishing and lying is about to collide with price volatility to make the American voting public absolutely batshit crazy with dread and anger. That, of course, will only prompt more lying, whopper-spinning, and grievance-flogging in the political arena. It will be nearly impossible for the public to evaluate reality. In the meantime, those disorders in banking and financial markets are close to running out of control. Events are tending ever closer to criticality. I believe they will be expressed in political violence around the major party conventions this summer. Those will be interesting fog-lifting weeks.

TransitionVoice.com: A Snarky Guide to Peak Oil

Everyone Has Feet of Clay

Elizabeth Warren

Ron Paul

If what I hear is accurate, that Ron Paul intends to withdraw troops from around the world, only to install them on the border between the United States and Mexico, then I don't like that at all.

John B. featuring Shaz Sparks: "Red Sky"

Is Fox News Mellowing With Age?

Here.

"Ron Paul's Last Hurrah"

by Justin Raimondo.

The American Press: "Male and Getting Maler"

Here.

Lookalikes: Bashar al-Assad and Glenn Quinn

Glenn Quinn, who played Becky's boyfriend Mark on Roseanne and the president of Syria, the aptly-named Bashar al-Assad.

Whitney Houston Dead!

I just logged onto the Internet at 4:15 P.M. and saw a headline announcing the death of Whitney Houston at age 48. Immediately I turned on CNN. It's all over the news.

L.A. Times: Houston Found Dead at Beverly Hilton Hotel in L.A.

(The first CD I ever got, on Christmas Day 1991, was Whitney Houston (1985), her self-titled debut album.)

Analyzing Romney

John Dean: Profiling "President" Romney

Give Her All Your Luvin'

The new song by Madonna, featuring Nicki Minaj and M.I.A.

Komen

Some thoughts off the top of my head: The Komen group was compromised long before this controversy. I would donate to Breast Cancer Action.

Breast Cancer Action
55 New Montgomery Street, Suite 323
San Francisco, CA 94105
415-243-9301
877-2-STOPBC
http://bcaction.org
info@bcaction.org

The Super Bowl

An interesting column on four reasons to watch the Super Bowl.

I'll add another one: Madonna's halftime show.

"Arthur's Theme"

The War Between the U.S./E.U. and China and India to Control the World's Energy Resources.

Kunstler: "Jive Talkin"

Kunstler on The State of the Union, and his disillusionment with the President:

I've had enough of Obama, though I voted for him in 2008. I won't vote for him again.

Good news in sight.

New SuperPAC Targets the Tea Party Ten.

Peak Oil Skepticism

Is it a Big Oil plot to drive up prices, asks Owen Paine. The commenters aren't having it.

And have you ever heard of the hypothesis of abiogenic petroleum origin?

Cockburn Opines on Gingrich, and Tin Tin

Here.

Sick with disappointment that I missed the Tin-Tin movie showing in Eureka, I had to settle for Obama’s State of the Union and Thursday’s Republican debate in Jacksonville.

...

==
I saw Tin Tin--in 3-D--on the third and enjoyed it thoroughly, but my friend, who had chosen the movie and invited me to watch it, found it relentlessly propulsive.

Blast From the Past: The Hawaii Observer

Ian Lind has a post about The Hawaii Observer, an investigative magazine from the seventies.

Morris Berman

Before reading this review by Kirkpatrick Sale of his latest book, I have never heard of Morris Berman. But now I think I'll check out his books.

He has a blog, Dark Ages America

Health After Oil

http://healthafteroil.wordpress.com/

Introduction

Welcome to Health after Oil (HAO), a place for news, opinion, research, discussion, networking, planning and action in response to the unprecedented and sweeping challenges peak oil, energy decline, and population pressures poses to human health and the institutions whose purpose it is to protect and promote human health. We invite submissions -original content and links- about energy and health and related fiscal/economic and environmental and ecological issues. We note in particular that: 1) Climate change and peak oil are indivisible threats, both stemming from reliance on fossil fuels; and 2) The fiscal and economic crisis now enveloping world economies are intertwined with population growth, energy decline and resource depletion. Infinite growth cannot continue on a finite planet.

Oil Production Will Decline Shortly After 2015

as

Olivier Rech, formerly of the International Energy Agency has predicted.

Original post.

Afterwards, in my view, we will have to face a decline of the production of all forms of liquid fuels somewhere between 2015 to 2020. This decline will not necessarily be rapid, however, but it will be a decline, that much seems clear.

Cockburn's Latest

The return of Newt and other things.

Sanctimonious Santorum

(Picture of Santorum lookalike Eric the Cavalier..)

Here.

"America's Last Chance"

according to Paul Craig Roberts.

Kunstler on the Situation in Iran

What Gives
By James Howard Kunstler
on January 16, 2012 9:55 AM

The awesome exertions of the global banking system to evade the mandates of reality finally yield in a sickening slippage to epochal unwind. What a bad idea: to try to juke nature itself. In case you weren't paying attention over the weekend - and who really wants to? - the cosmic Brinks truck of free money went over a cliff, and the darn thing will keep free-falling until (at least) the American markets open again on Tuesday.

So, everybody and his uncle over in Europe got a sovereign debt downgrade and now the math changes for all the pretend bail-outs and back-stops that had been so exquisitely rigged through the long, nauseating autumn. Math is an annoying representation of reality, but hard to argue with. Bail-outs and back-stops finally became unaffordable even as poetic constructs.

Thus, we also approach the dreaded inflection point for the credit default swaps. Nobody believes that this Mount Everest of jive bond "insurance" can actually pay out, since the first instance of any attempt will bankrupt everybody. And yet there are the holders of all that paper who will object to, say, an 80 percent haircut on their Greek (and other) bonds. Surely some of them will try to invoke their CDS contracts. What then? Three possibilities that I see: 1) all parties and counter-parties go down the drain faster than you can say Benedict Cumberbatch; 2) all parties declare in unison that CDS were a prank that should now just be ignored, as if the cast of Downton Abbey showed up naked at the dinner table; and 3) every sort of loan on God's Green Earth is instantly re-priced and the entire world turns into a flea market. How will America do with its stock of slightly pre-owned Dunkin' Donuts stores, a million-odd Elvis lunch-boxes, and all those old videos of Friends? Don't you wish you'd invested in some hand tools?

In the background of these grave machinations lurks the tragedy of Iran. Subtract the Islamic maniacs who seized the levers of government there thirty-three years ago, and you'd actually find a perfectly modern society, complete with industries, skyscrapers, highways, TV shows, and people eating nice food in restaurants. One can understand why the last Shah was hated and resented. But here you now have a whole class of despotic maniacs much worse than the Shah ever was and they cannot be gotten rid of. Worse, they are devoted to exacting vengeance on the USA and its kindred western nations.

This may be just a tragic case of collective psychological scripting, but it is tending in the direction of a full-dress play-out. Our government believes that their government is determined to build an atomic bomb. Iran's government says, over and over, "...what an idea...!" The trouble is, our guys don't buy their vaudeville act. They will not be allowed to have a bomb, and that's all there is to it. We are doing everything short of all-out war to prevent it, but let's face it, a lot of these things could be construed as acts of war: Stuxnet attacks... blowing up nuclear scientists in their cars. These things are making already-crazy people even crazier, and more reckless.

If events continue down this path then there will be some action in the Persian Gulf. The oil markets will be thrown into disarray. Iran may sink a US naval vessel or two, but we know about their sunburn missiles and we won't put the whole fleet in harm's way, and before too long we will fuck them up very badly. The Iranians are capable of busting up a lot [of] stuff in their neighborhood even as their air force is vaporized and their electric grid goes down. They could launch missiles into the Saudi Arabian oil terminals, for instance. Surely they will try to rain hell down on Israel. That would be a recipe for turning Teheran into an ashtray and a terrible tragedy for those otherwise normal Iranians who are not religious maniacs who wanted nothing more than to raise their children and once in a while go out for a nice lamb dinner.

I don't see any percentage in China and Russia coming into this rumble, though more than a couple of European nations may want to forget their troubles for a moment and, at least, cheerlead from the sidelines.

The result of all this - if the action doesn't get totally out-of-hand - is sure to be a gigantic step down in worldwide energy consumption, trade, and advanced economic activity. It would make the Great Depression look like a sit-com. The American suburban nexus would fail in a matter of weeks. The USA would have to commence the greatest work-around the world has ever seen. In the event, governments everywhere are liable to fall, even here, with elections postponed. There will be little in the way of real money to repair all the things that are falling apart.

Most amazing of all is how quiet the world scene has been, really, since 2001. The buildup of tensions must be out-of-this world. Something had to give.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Death in the Amazon

I found this at twitter.com/maxblumenthal

Loggers burned Amazon tribe girl alive.

The Amazon rainforest isn't featured as prominently as it was twenty years ago, but the destruction continues.

More on Ron Paul

StopMeBeforeIVoteAgain.com has some interesting posts on Ron Paul.

A$$hole

As I said at Hattie's Web, it's not that Mitt Romney is a Mormon, it's that he's an a$$hole. (It's never a good idea to put your money where your mouth is.)



16 January update: More proof of Mitt's a$$holiness.

"Ron Paul will fight on"

From Alexander Cockburn's latest column.

Now Romney heads down south to a likely victory in South Carolina and probably in Florida. Such triumphs, should they come to pass, will plunge the election industry into profound crisis. At this stage in the game, precisely one week after the presidential year opened with the Iowa caucuses on January 3, no one – except perhaps the candidate himself – wants to have the race locked up. The news business, led by the TV networks, wants cliffhangers. Campaign managers, dirty tricksters, and kindred consultants want volley after volley of campaign ads rolling dollars into their pockets. There are armies of “strategists” to be fed their campaign stipends.

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Ron Paul will fight on, and give the campaign season at least the semblance of life. In New Hampshire he won strong support from low-income Republicans and the young. It’s conceivable he could bolt onto the Libertarian third party ticket. It would certainly juice up the political year. High-level Republicans are reportedly threatening Paul that if he does bolt, they’ll make sure that his son Rand is not re-elected Senator in Kentucky in 2016.