Almost Daily Rant

Quick Hits for 22June10

· A lesson of history while the US-Israeli Iranian war drums beat: We’re usually if not always manipulated into war. Take the acceptance that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was completely unprovoked. FDR wanted to get the US into the war against Germany, but it would be political suicide to align with communist Russia. So in FDR knew the best indirect route was to pick a fight with Russia’s enemy Japan through an 8-point plan, which included cutting off her oil.

· Kunstler on the inability of most Americans to face the realities of contraction.

· At what point will the Mother of all Bailouts (MOAB) extend to the states? Look for people to continue to leave California in droves.  

 

· The Army employs man-hunting blimps.

 

Quick Hits for 21June10

· The services so many take for granted are going away as cities are beginning to charge to keep street lights lit. "Government can't afford now the basic kinds of things that we thought government basically did.”

 

· 11 US warships cross the Suez Canal.

 

· The Baltric Dry Index points to a drop in trade. Also see flashback for background on the BDI from the end of 2008.

 

· Something mysterious is killing crops in the south. Is there a connection to the dispersants used on the oil gusher?

 

Quick Hits for 18June10

· As if we needed a reminder, housing isn’t close to a bottom because there are too many houses, demographics don’t support it, the government is already propping up most of the market, defaults are still adding to supply and the peak of mortgage resets are still 2 years out. The bigger picture of course is that most housing “wealth” was squandered on a living arrangement that assumed an infinite supply of cheap oil.

 

· Greer wrote a heady essay on a maturing peak oil meme hitting the mainstream and the evolution of social and personal outlooks beyond the two extremes: Myth of Infinite Progress and Myth of Apocalypse.

 

Let's just hope the early majority peakists self-organize to the new realities and don't look to government and the international community to "do something" as was the case with the climate cultists. For our corporatist government shall do it it does best: Stripmine the productive assets that remain even in a shrinking economy, under the cloak of moral cause, which could be put to better use at the local level.

 

· Add lithium, lead, copper and other minerals to pipelines, opium and Russian-Chinese leverage for the reasons for being in Afghanistan.

 

· Have you really considered what your life will be like if they don’t stop the oil gusher?

Quick Hits for 16Jun10

· Newsflash: We don’t need more MBAs to serve as lieutenants in a failed, destructive centralized economic system. We’re going to need more independent thinkers who don't mind getting their hands dirty in a decentralizing economic model. Unfortunately what is marketed as education should be relabeled indoctrination. Years of government subsidies of low interest college loans have driven tuition rates beyond their inherent market value, much like low interest rates worked the same effect in the housing market. So it shouldn't be a surprise that there aren't enough jobs for those leaving the assembly lines of college.

 

· BP’s hiring of private security contractors gives us a glimpse of the iron fist of corporatism, as the mask behind outright control of shell governments by multinationals fades. When asked how a private security guard can keep a journalist off a public beach, the response is, “I can tell you where to go because I’m employed (by the corporation) to keep this beach safe.” A corporation by definition is a sociopath, so it is not a stretch to say that we are under sociopathic control.

 

· Isreal’s self-chosen committee into the Gaza flotilla incident should be fair and unbiased (cough). Meanwhile, Isreal has deployed a nuclear Dolphin class submarine off the coast of Iran.

 

· What will the state-bank-military complex plan next?

Quick Hits for 13June10

· How bad is it, really? As a follow-up to his post last month, “SRH” has pulled together and sourced the very disturbing conclusion that while BP is siphoning some of the oil from the BOP to pacify the masses, the subsurface structure is deteriorating.

· And how extensive is the ecological damage and cover-up of the real impact? I will say for the record that I’ve always been skeptical that even if oil were produced deep within the earth’s crust as per the abiogenic oil theory, that we couldn't bring enough production on line due to net return on energy and materials to mitigate the overall depletion rates of traditional oil and gas production at this stage in the game. The claim that there's a Ghawar underneath the GOM without extensive proof shouldn't cloud the real gist of the article of the extensive corporate-government cooperative effort to cover-up how dire the situation really is.

· For ladies in the US adapting to the new realities and wondering what it was like to be a woman in Argentina after things went sideways.

· Didn’t Keynes say that in the long run we’re all dead anyway? It seems this is the long run.

· A man in China protects his home with a homemade cannon.

• Xe, the company formerly known as Blackwater, is for sale. Do you know of any private buyers with multinational corporate interests to protect in an age of rage?

 

Quick Hits for 8June10

Kunstler on America spiraling into a scary place.

Got Goggle? You might instead go with startpage.com which doesn't log searches.

Peakaholics make the NYT, but true to form, it was a silly depiction about a woman growing plants in her kitchen and I'm sure most readers will simply go back to their lattes. Nothing to see here folks. Seriously.

Yes, Obama has known how bad things are in the Gulf for a long time. Now Senator Bill Nelson is confirming that the casing is pierced underneath the surface, would mean that oil is making its way up through the subsurface strata gushing from one or more additional places on the sea bed away from the BOP.

Iran Red Crescent to Gaza. An Iran-Israeli skirmish could be the tipping point for WWIII.

Major Concerns for Those Living near the Gulf

The catastrophe in the Gulf is getting to a point where the ecological, social and economic impacts are beyond comprehension. The suffering is immense and unfortunately getting worse, from the fishermen who can no longer make a living to the sea creatures floundering in a toxic stew.

At the risk of sounding like an alarmist, I’ve feared since reports started breaking on how dire the downhole situation was a month ago, that we are on the verge of a massive exodus from the entire effected region. It seems unavoidable that the current will push the oil around the coast of Florida, up the Eastern seaboard and out into the Atlantic Ocean.

One immediate concern is that power plants that use water from the Gulf Coast may need to be shut down. Rolling blackouts are especially concerning with Florida’s large elderly population and a flat terrain which means that most water distribution requires electricity.

There is also a risk that rain could distribute the dispersant Corexit on shore, even though I have not seen conclusive evidence of the percentage that could be distributed through the evaporation cycle. Nonetheless, hurricanes and tropical storms would push the toxic waters further inland even without the help of rain. The third major risk is benzene contamination of the water supplies. Sadly, but at this point probably inevitably, economic desperation will drive many westward as was the case during the Dust Bowl of the Depression.

Never, Never, Never, Ever

Let a crisis go to waste, in the words of Rahm Emanuel. As a follow up to yesterday's article about the void of leadership how fitting it is that Obama is proclaiming it is time to thrust forth the climate legislation. For the five people out there that still believe this self-serving nonsense is about the environment, please for the love of your highest good follow the money.

 

Whether it is through FAT, VAT or Carbon Taxes, rest assure the bankrupted governments of the world, acting as agents of the financiers and multinationals that back them and certainly not your representatives, will do absolutely anything they can to ensure their existence by extorting whatever wealth still remains from the other 95% of the population. You could see this coming a mile away knowing that it was only a matter of time before O would take advantage of the highly emotional situation enfolding in the Gulf to railroad the agenda.

 

Our Chernobyl of Leadership

In the article below, Dmitry Orlov explains how the response to the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is a nail in the coffin of government leadership legitimacy. I've long thought that Obama is our Gorbachev, and now Orlov makes the case that politically the oil volcano is our Chernobyl. Although I’ve never seen it as a strictly linear process, you can see Orlov’s 5 stages of collapse (Financial (2008), Commercial (2009), Political (2010), Social, Cultural) play out with each passing day.

 

It is embarrassing to be lost. It is even more embarrassing for a leader to be lost. And what's really really embarrassing to all concerned is when national and transnational corporate leaders attempt to tackle a major disaster and are found out to have been issuing marching orders based on the wrong map. Everyone then executes a routine of turning toward each other in shock, frowning while shaking their heads slowly from side to side and looking away in disgust. After that, these leaders might as well limit their public pronouncements to the traditional "Milk, milk, lemonade, round the corner fudge is made." Whatever they say, the universal reaction becomes: "What leaders? We don't have any."

Getting lost can be traumatic for the rest of us too. When we suddenly realize that we don't know where we are, urgent neural messages are exchanged between our prefrontal cortex, which struggles to form a coherent picture of what's happening, our amygdala, whose job is to hold on to a sense of where we are, and our hippocampus, which motivates us to get back to a place we know as quickly as we possibly can. This strange bit of internal wiring explains why humans who are only slightly lost tend to trot off in a random direction and promptly become profoundly lost. After these immediate biochemical reactions have run their course, we go through the usual stages of:

1. denial—"We are not lost! The ski lodge is just over the next ridge, or the next, or the next..."
2. anger—"We are wasting time! Shut up and keep trotting!"
3. bargaining—"The map must be wrong; either that or someone has dynamited the giant boulder that should be right there..."
4. depression—"We'll never get there! We're all going to die out here!" and 
5. acceptance—"We are not lost; we are right here, wherever it is. We better find some shelter and start a campfire before it gets dark and cold." (Read Full Article)

The Israeli Influence over US Foreign Policy

Two former CIA officers, Ray McGovern and Philip Giraldi, discuss the depth of the Israeli influence of US foreign policy through its political action committee AIPAC. For a deeper dive, read The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt.

 

Keep this in mind as Israel’s propagandists go into overdrive after their attack of a Gaza humanitarian aid ship in international waters. Imagine for a moment what the US response would be if the attacker would have been Iran.