Almost Daily Rant

Quick Hits for 8July10

 

· Britain as the canary in our coalmine for dehumanizing police state technologies has introduced Sigard, a mobile communications technology that can “anticipate anti-social behavior and violence by analyzing the information picked up by its sensors”. Thought crimes anyone?

· The FAA is under pressure to open skies to drones beyond patrolling the borders. This will be a major step in removing the face-to-face aspect of policing the population in the US as it has in wars overseas. Unmanned aircraft will play a major role in the turbulent events that unwind over the next two decades.

· The EU wants to keep all Internet searches for 2 years to protect the children. When are draconian measures not sold to the public as measures to protect the children? 

· Saudi’s announcement that they are “conserving oil for future generations” isn’t going to go over well with its petro welfare population. The thinking may be the illusion of holding back wells may be better than exposing the reality of dry holes in what too many believe are infinite supplies.

· Lenny Kravitz, Mos Def and More Jam for Gulf Aid is the only good thing to come out of the oil disaster.

 

Quick Hits for 4July10

The Dwarves dug too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum... shadow and flame.

— Saruman, The Lord of the Rings

 

· Like warmed over cold war comfort food, the Russians are back. OK, not exactly – this is less about borders and more about dueling global factions.

· Speaking of the “borderless” universe, see the rise of corporate-hollow state gang warfare. I’m reminded of the Kurt Vonnegut quote to “join a gang, any gang”.

“Our society has become a neighborhood where street-gangs—corporate entitites—battle one another for position. Even the Government is just another street gang. (Meanwhile) Courts and the so-called “justice system” are busy policing individuals. Individuals’ rights are more curtailed and restricted than ever before. But corporate entities are freer than ever before.”

· In the shape of things to come as more cities, counties and states go bankrupt, the town of Maywood, California laid off all city employees and dismantled its police department. Don't expect government fiefdoms to go down without a fight as the lines, in some cases, between taxing authority for fewer and fewer services, and extortionist mob blurs.   

 

 

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?

 

The Racial History of Gun Control Laws

Gun control laws have historically been enacted to selectively disarm segments of the population. The blaring case in point is Hitler's disarming of the Jewish population. The history of gun control laws in the US goes hand-in-hand with discrimination towards blacks, something gun control advocates selectively forget.

Stepping back further, the ugliest periods of genocide in the 20th century that resulted in tens of millions dead, under authoritarians like Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot were preceded by government restrictions of personal weapons. History clearly trumps the statist concept that government-sponsored disarmament results in more safety and freedom. It does neither.