Beneath it all...

Greetings good citizen,

Every few months I feel compelled to restate the mission of this blog, which, due to its subject matter, is widely considered a ‘Doom and Gloom’ site.

How sad is it that it isn’t my purpose to frighten anyone nor am I intent upon twisting your mind toward my way of seeing things. (Although part of my mission involves, er, ‘educating’ you in the finer points of my creation, A Simple Plan.)

That said, some of you might find that education bordering on ‘indoctrination’.

I can be rabid when the feeling moves me and I’m forever racing ‘off the reservation’, a fault I readily admit.

Um, to opine that my posts are, er, ‘unbiased’ would be exactly that, an opinion. We’re all biased and there’s no getting away from that fact.

The editor of the local rag was ‘editorializing’ on the subject of biased fact checkers just last night…and you know why the conservative liar was crying about that subject, don’t you?

Yes indeed good citizen, the closer we get to the election the more it looks as though Ol’ Mitt is gonna pull off an ‘upset victory’ much Like W. winning Florida due to ‘hanging chads’.

And they’ll pin it on ‘waitresses’!

But I digress.

We all know those waitresses are working in dives across the nation, just waiting for a One Percenter (like Mitt) to waltz in and sweep them away from the drudgery of being a working class drone.

Billionaire, Princess, same difference.

And, bizarrely, YOU are expected to BELIEVE that it was that sort of BULLSHIT that swung the election in favor of the man who gave HALF OF US the fucking MIDDLE FINGER less than a month ago!

I don’t know how they expect this to play in Peoria but I’m fairly certain it won’t go down well with the decidedly non-conservative 80% of the NATION!

Especially when we have seen first hand how the bullshit with the banks went down.

But again, I digress.

Let us return to the topic that underlies the foundation of modern civilization, a topic that will ultimately bring an end to life as we have come to know it, peak oil and those whose power derives from fossil fuel.

We seem to hear two versions of the story of limited oil supply:

1. The economists’ view, saying that the issue is a simple problem of supply and demand. Substitution, higher prices, demand destruction, greater efficiency, and increased production of oil at higher prices will save the day. [HA!]

2. A version of Hubbert’s peak oil theory, saying that world oil production will rise and at some point reach a plateau and begin to decline, because of geological depletion. The common belief is that the rate of decline will be determined by geological considerations, and will roughly match the rate at which production increased.

In my view, neither of these views is correct. My view is a third view:

3. An adequate supply of cheap ($20 or $30 barrel) oil is no longer available, because most of the “easy to extract” oil is gone. The cost of extracting oil keeps rising, but the ability of oil-importing economies to pay for this oil does not. There are no good low-cost substitutes for oil, so substitution is very limited and will continue to be very limited. The big oil-importing economies are already finding themselves in poor financial condition, as higher oil prices lead to cutbacks in discretionary spending and layoffs in discretionary industries.

The government is caught up in this, as layoffs lead to more need for stimulus funds and for payments to unemployed workers, at the same time that tax revenue is reduced. There can be a temporary drop in oil prices (as there was in late 2008), as recession worsens, but eventually demand rises again, oil prices rise again, and the pattern of layoffs and increased governments financial problems occurs again. [snip]

What the Economists’ View Misses

The economists’ view misses the fact that it is external energy that makes the economy operate the way it does. (See my earlier posts, here, here and here.) If energy products are higher priced, energy importers can afford less of them, and there is a tendency of their economies to shrink back to what their economies can afford—fewer employed workers and fewer government programs. I talk about the connection between employed workers and energy consumption in The Close Tie Between Energy Consumption, Employment and Recession.

Back to the beginning, where I was explaining the objective of this blog.

I can’t help it if the truth sucks…that said I am also not telling you that ‘all is lost’ (although it might be if we don’t, er, ‘rid’ ourselves of those who were born thinking they are the only ones who deserve to live here. The rest of us are ‘excess baggage’ to be disposed of however and whenever necessary.

Worse, the only thing saving our sorry asses in their indecision about how many of us to keep around!

Although there is a building consensus that they should exterminate us wholesale and then let the few that survive breed the ‘servant class’ back up to full strength.

Pretty gloomy, but it doesn’t have to turn out this way.

There are alternatives to the eminent return of a ‘slave economy’ and the bloodshed this will cause.

We just need to bring everyone associated with this ‘New World Order’ (more commonly known as ‘The One Percent’) to Justice…after we purge the now corrupt beyond belief justice system.

The situation IS salvageable…but you need to have faith.

It all starts with small steps and A Simple Plan points the way!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Rinse & Repeat

Greetings good citizen,

For most of us life is centered on doing what we need to do to keep the wolves from the door. We slave away at unrewarding jobs (even good jobs don’t ‘reward’ YOU…) never giving much thought to the NITWITS in charge!

Which is somewhat off base…we think about the MORONS all of the time…but there’s nothing we can do about the incompetents at the top.

We don’t ‘vote’ for them and, push come to shove, we don’t have the luxury of choosing not to work for them, the job market has been tight (and getting tighter) for years.

It’s generally accepted we ALL work for idiots and that we’re also led by incompetents. While we may get to ‘vote’ for who leads us we are powerless to ‘fire’ them…(although these same imbeciles can have us killed for no reason whatsoever!)

But let us not get distracted by the subtleties involved.

Again, I am pointing to something YOU aren’t supposed to be thinking about…

Leadership that is responsive to YOUR needs…(so why would your government need the power to KILL you without reason? Could we be back at the original issue of ‘whose government is it anyway?’)

(Not that it’s going to be an issue much longer.)

Well, here’s something for you to ponder while your figuring out whether you want pork or chicken in the ‘barf bag’ tonight.

This whole ‘investor charade’ only works in the ‘one size fits all’ mode!

Thus, starting last year, Goldman began to offer an N-11 Equity fund to complement its BRIC fund. Ms. Koch said both funds could have roles in retail investors’ portfolios, either as someone’s full emerging-markets allocation or as an add-on, particularly for a person invested only in an emerging-markets index fund. That’s because the leading emerging-markets index, by MSCI, excludes Nigeria, Vietnam and Bangladesh — three countries that Goldman counts as promising.

“We’re saying that the default is suboptimal,” she said. “You have to ask which countries are really going to drive growth.”

BUT William S. Rocco, an analyst for Morningstar, advised caution when considering a BRIC fund or any narrowly targeted emerging-market offering. Investors who haven’t invested in emerging markets before should consider a broader offering, he said. “Generally, at Morningstar, we don’t like the idea of artificially limiting a manager’s choices,” he said.

And if they already own foreign or emerging-markets funds, they probably have exposure to the BRICs and several other emerging and frontier countries, he said. “Why would you want so much Brazil and China?” he asked. “You’re really doubling down.”

DO you understand what you’re seeing here good citizen?

This is taking the ‘Western Lifestyle and ‘making it fit’ around the globe.

And guess what good citizen, in order to pull this off the idiot capitalists’ need one and a half more Earth’s to exploit!

But that doesn’t stop them or even slow them down.

A lack of resources only means higher prices for those who can afford such things.

Remember money’s ‘one useful purpose’, that of ‘regulator’.

You don’t think about it that way but believe you me, those who can help themselves to as much as they want think about it precisely like that…because NOTHING is beyond THEIR reach!

Um, just to verify something that has been troubling you, the impression that you’re trapped on a ‘runaway train’…it’s true…and there is NO SAFE EXIT!

Why are YOU being ‘priced out’ of the market for goods your parents could easily afford? Because they are being sold to hundred of millions more customers than they were back in your parents day…because ALL ECONOMIES ARE LOCAL!

And a sidebar to the priced out argument is we no longer make those things here…which has a huge bearing on their ‘affordability’.

But as I pointed out in yesterday’s post, we will soon be unable to afford the ‘Western Lifestyle’ at ANY price!

Energy scarcity is a real ‘game changer’.

How frightening is it that if we don’t carefully manage the transition to energy scarcity that we could quickly find ourselves in a ‘kill on sight’ situation?

Which is to point out that those of you playing the ‘don’t rock the boat card’ are in for a real ‘hard landing’ when they pop the ‘energy surprise’ out of the box…(likely this winter.)

Which brings us to another issue.

We are far from ‘out’…BUT there isn’t enough to keep things rolling at ‘the current rate of consumption.’…the ONLY way to stretch what remains is to KILL OFF the ‘surplus population.’

Not that is matters to the rest of us but the only way to do this AND maintain the ‘status quo’ is to follow the above recipe…

We can quite easily convert to an energy scarce economy…but we’d need to ‘re-shuffle the deck’ considerably. (Starting with the Human Anti-Exploitation law! When viewed in this context, it’s importance becomes apparent.)

Um, don’t look now but the fucking >One Percent has drawn a bulls-eye on the back of ALL Western (industrialized) nations.

Our masters think we have been ‘too free’ and aren’t ‘sufficiently disciplined’ to meet the challenges of an energy scarce world. Spoiled as we all are by unions and coddled by frivolous civil protections.

So if you’ve been wondering why the West is in decline…it isn’t the regular people who have gone ‘decadent’…it’s the >One Percent who believes we will be ‘unmanageable’.

So your desire to ‘hold on to what you’ve got’ will prove futile…change is coming whether you fight or you lay down and die.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Reprehensible

Greetings good citizen,

The fact that I keep stumbling across news items that reinforce my assertions should be enough to demonstrate that I am not some unhinged nutter pulling wild-ass speculations out of my backside (like your typical conservative does.)

The difference is the conservative does it in an attempt to discredit the opposition, (including blaming the Democrats for the adverse outcomes caused by conservative policy!)

Not that there are any ‘real’ democrats anymore.

All that’s left are Libertarians pretending to be democrats…

Geez, how pathetic is that? I digress while I’m defending my sanity!

(And THAT’S pretty damn pathetic!)

Now, back to news articles that I can be accused of twisting out of proportions, we have this article that may be a bit too ‘optimistic’ in its assumption that we could have ‘dumped’ fossil fuels decades ago.

This story is not new. Today, solar energy is picking up momentum. But despite the current numbers and the recent raves, the solar saga, and that of renewable energy as a whole, has been going on for decades. It is a history of false starts and stutter steps.

First, the good news. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), 2011 showed record-breaking numbers for U.S. solar installations. The industry's best year ever saw demand rise by 109 percent over the previous year. With tremendous incentives and benefits for homeowners, and as prices continue to decline, the future looks bright for this alternative energy source.

However a quick glance to the past throws harsh light on the fact that we've been at this precipice before. In 1978, the White House Council on Environmental Quality issued this glowing statement: "Our conclusion is that with a strong national commitment to accelerated solar development and use, it should be possible to derive a quarter of U.S. energy from solar by the year 2000. For the year 2020 and beyond, it is now possible to speak hopefully, and unblushingly, of the United States becoming a solar society."

Um, if the population remained ‘static’ we have enough energy resources to keep the lights and the TV burning.

But that never has been the problem. The problem is getting shit where it needs to be when it needs to be there!

Neither ‘manyana’ or it’s evil twin ‘manyana-ish’ works.

This is the principle cause of ‘cascading systemic failure’, When JIT turns into days and weeks late and there’s no way (or sense) in ‘expediting’ anything.

Remember, one ‘sub-standard’ part is enough to destroy an entire complex mechanism.

Worse, after it fails you have to restart the ENTIRE production cycle over again, this time INSURING the ‘sub’ delivers product that is ‘up to spec’.

The scariest thing I’ve ever heard from a buyer is ‘quality is assumed’.

In a world where quality sources are dropping like flies sprayed with bug killer, you quickly exhaust a very shallow pool of ‘alternatives’.

And remember where ‘profits’ come from under capitalism, good citizen…they come from ‘cutting corners’!

Okay, they also come from overcharging…but the two are NOT mutually exclusive.

In fact it is rather common to be overcharged for junk (like NASA was for the recent failed launch of the private sector rocket!)

But again I digress!

Worse, it is difficult to drive home the urgency you should be feeling about this perilous state of affairs.

Which is to opine that the ‘bean-counters’ should all be shot!

Back-up, there is NO SUBSTITUTE!

But our (even back then) bought and paid for legislators took it into their heads to ‘tax’ inventory if it could be considered a ‘finished good’.

Now if we back up a little, we would find that all money is funny and the purpose of commerce is not to create an ‘artificially rich’ class but to meet the needs of ALL society!

So what ‘good’ came from JIT?

Nada (besides an artificially reduced tax burden…which itself was artificial!)

Worse, food stores, held in reserves after century’s of famine have also been reduced to JIT levels…to promote ‘demand’. (WTF!)

Which is to ask (again) what kind of MORONS do we have running things around here?

Sadly, good citizen, we are about to find out.

Back to our ‘energy independence’ article (and my original point.)

We ‘could have’ weaned ourselves off of our oil dependency decades ago, to the point of having a thriving ‘alternative energy’ sector in our society instead of the ‘stillborn’ rarity we are saddled with today.

Why aren’t we working to ‘stretch out’ our dwindling fossil fuel reserves?

Because of the few who derive their power from the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.

Who would pay exorbitant rates if there were a cheap and renewable alternative?

Short answer is YOU will because that cheap, renewable alternative has been withheld from you.

I said it yesterday and I’ll repeat it again today, they don’t want you to PAY, they want you to DIE!

The dead don’t vote…nor do they firebomb your factories or your banks…

Just because it is reprehensible doesn’t mean the wouldn’t actually DO it…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Retrograde

Greetings good citizen,

Personally I find it difficult to figure out how they’ve kept it glued together over the past four years…not that there have been any overt reasons to revolt.

Well, the ‘foreclosure crisis’ was kind of a self-inflicted wound. Most of the borrowers KNEW it was ‘too good to be true’ so few were honestly surprised when irresistible force smashed head on into rock solid reality.

Home values can only climb as high as a buyer’s salary. And the past three decades of the global race to the bottom found salaries pretty much ‘stagnant’.

You can hang any stupid price you want on your ‘stack of lumber’ but that doesn’t mean the greater fool is going to come along and pay you that amount!

(Although it was not uncommon during the run-up to the crisis for herds of them to come along and bid up the asking price to get their foot in the door of the next big thing.)

How ironic is it that this is the sort of shit banks are supposed to prevent?

Worse, now banks are borrowing money from the public just to keep their doors open!

(Seriously, how ‘insane’ is that? Isn’t this what ‘bankruptcy’ is all about…but what can we expect from people who are obviously ‘unclear’ on what a bonus ‘is’, never mind when you should be awarded one…)

More interesting is ongoing disaster created by the business owner’s alliance:

Claims for Jobless Benefits Rise
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 41 minutes ago

The Labor Department said weekly applications for unemployment benefits were up last week, while the Consumer Price Index dropped 0.3 percent in May.

Now wait a minute Slim, you know this is being done just to ‘sour’ Obama’s chances of re-election this November.

Although I personally believe the fact that he has run ‘unopposed’ speaks volumes about the current state of the Libertarian dominated Democratic Party.

Sort of makes you curious as to what they’ll do if Mitt doesn’t get elected…although I suspect we’ll be just as fucked either way.

Let’s suppose we put all of the doom and gloom aside and look to the ‘bright side’.

As you WILL note, the economy ISN’T getting any better…and that’s unlikely to change if the status quo remains unchallenged.

In fact, in case you didn’t notice, the economy is actually (albeit slowly) getting worse.

This is how you ‘slip’ into Banana Republicdom.

And remember good citizen, this IS looking at the ‘best case’ scenario here.

More ‘chicken scratching on the wall’, energy prices…they haven’t been discovering any ‘new’ energy reserves so the ones we’ve got continue to be depleted at an alarming rate.

Someone recently observed that we are already on a ‘see-saw’ where energy prices climb and the economy tanks, causing energy prices to drop which results in a ‘faux recovery’ where energy prices start to climb again!

Suspect this coming winter we will see energy prices rise and stay there.

The unspoken question is how much will they rise and what will we do when people start freezing to death in large numbers?

Will it be ‘too late’ to riot then?

I know, let’s wait and see what happens…who knows maybe next winter will be milder than last winter (although that’s not how it went in Europe…)

Do any of you actually BELIEVE things are going to get better?

I’ll bet you DON’T, you just (mistakenly) don’t think they will get ‘much’ worse.

And that’s where you’ll be proven, er, optimistic.

(Not to put too fine a point on it but the Donner Party started off as ‘optimists’.)

More disturbing is Hollywood’s recent obsession with Zombies…a creature that is only a half a step removed from a (very real) cannibal.

Don’t think there are cannibals around? You haven’t seen ‘hungry’ yet!

But I digress, we are SUPPOSED TO BE looking at the ‘bright side’ here.

How fucking sad is it that capitalism doesn’t offer us a ‘bright side’ once resources are reset to ‘finite’ (and I’ll kill you if you touch mine!)

Because we all know how the game is going to play out if the adults don’t return, pronto.

Which is to make another plea to remove the criminals from power and bring them to justice before they abandon ship, taking the ‘keys’ with them.

Naturally, this is where ‘be careful of what you wish for’ comes into play. One of the things that keeps us watchdogs up at night is the likelihood of a ‘witch hunt’ where ‘semi-innocent’ people are thrown under the bus while the guilty make their escape.

We can look at things like the Forbes 400 list but what we don’t know is how ‘complete’ that sort of list is…especially during a time like now, where ‘class animosity’ is out in the open.

You can bet a lot of ‘truly wealthy’ people have ‘done what it takes’ to keep their names off of those lists.

The top ten probably have contracts with Blackwater to ‘spirit them away’ if the shit hits the fan, the rest are rolling the dice.

So, will the social clock turn back a hundred years or a thousand when the energy crisis hits full stride?

Sadly, good citizen, a hundred years is only going to happen if the adults return in time, if not…it’s ‘barbarian time’ all over again!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

What's Normal?

Greetings good citizen,

The destruction of our civilization proceeds both on schedule and as planned.

Increasingly, the ‘progressives’, the heirs apparent to the now defunct Democrats, have been displaying their ‘centrist’ credentials.

Which gives the rest of us a nauseatingly small amount of room for disagreement with ‘Conservative Dogma’.

Eliminate the opposition good citizen and the only thing that remains is the isolated people who ‘disagree’ with mainstream dogma…

How fucking sick is it good citizen that most people falsely believe ‘The Progressives’ have their backs? when every mainstream political movement has ‘sold out’ to the corporatocracy!

Why Going 'Back To Normal' Is No Longer An Option for the American Economy -- And Where We're Headed Now

Stop waiting around, because "normal" as we know it isn't coming back. [snip]

Other theorists, including Gar Alperovitz, Jeffery Sachs and Umair Haque, agree that there’s a phase shift happening under our feet — but they believe the real shift lies in the changing structure of capitalism itself. Forming markets is a core human activity that we’re not any more likely to abandon than eating or breathing. But our understanding of the purpose and value of markets — and the role of capital within them — is overdue for a profound change. Haque argues that “twentieth-century capitalism’s cornerstones shift costs to and borrow benefits from people, communities, society, the natural world, or future generations." But, he continues, "both cost shifting and benefit borrowing are forms of economic harm that are unfair, non-consensual, and often irreversible.” The result is a great imbalance that we are finally being forced to fully reckon with, one that will call us to radically change our focus, creating a totally new kind of capitalism.

Haque makes a distinction between “thin” and “thick” value. Things with “thin” value tend to be artificial, unsustainable, and meaningless to anyone but the people who produce and consume them. Hummers, McMansions and Big Macs are all examples of thin value items. They’re produced without any recognition of our larger values context or the externalized costs to the community, and consuming them tends to add to the overall imbalance in our economy. Thin value, he writes, is “profit that is in many ways a financial fiction, because it fails to exceed a fuller, truer economic cost of capital.” And the phase shift is evident in the fact that the companies that are falling hardest right now are the ones whose past profits have relied most heavily on monetizing our common wealth for private profit.

“Thick” value — produced by companies that practice “constructive capitalism” — is value that is sustainable, that has a moral component that matters, and that multiplies itself. Companies that practice it tend to win because they produce things that have a deeper meaning to people. Their real wealth isn’t what they’re able to extract from the rest of us, but in their long, deep, trusting relationships with their customers. The world is shifting from the economics of a game reserve to those of an ark, says Haque. The companies that are thriving now are the ones that increasing their focus on “constructive advantage” — “how free a company is of deep debt to people, communities, society, the natural world, or future generations.” While this focus-shift is far from complete, the current economy abounds with firms that are showing us a new way forward. (Apple is a prime example of a company that creates “thick value,” [Seriously?] but we’ve seen recently that its commitment to this ideal has some rather glaring thin spots.)

WTF, Good citizen!

How screwed up is it that the only ‘acceptable’ political solution to our crippled economy MUST center on ‘for profit’ capitalism?

What does it tell you about their dogma when the only ones who support it are from relative ‘newcomers’ to predatory capitalism (or the brainwashed and clueless children of the one percent?)

This mirrors the recent attempts to ‘print our way to prosperity’ (which is working about as well as it did(n’t) in Zimbabwe!

‘Responsible Capitalism’ is an oxymoron! (Especially when capitalism provides the vehicle with which to ‘buy off’ regulatory oversight!)

How pathetic is it good citizen that ALL mainstream political movements have ‘sold out’ to the corporatocracy for access to the funding necessary to mount a campaign!

When there is only one source of political funding…(and let’s not have any lies between us, good citizen, there is only one source!) Politics becomes a one note song!

Maybe we are confronted with the same ‘fatal myopia’ that eventually sunk the Greek Empire, the one where their oligarchic leadership was ‘incapable’ of even conceiving of a society that wasn’t dependent on slavery.

Well, don’t look now but slavery is back…and it’s growing.

What will you do when the ONLY way you will be able to ‘legally’ support your family will be by literally selling yourself in exchange for ‘regular’ meals and habitation and management will decide what constitutes the definition of both ‘fit’ and ‘sufficient’.

Oh, and don’t forget the ‘health’ clause…get sick and your on your own. The whole arrangement rests upon your continued good health!

Because there’s a couple of million other poor slobs just waiting in line to take your place!

Welcome to the future, good citizen!

I doubt many of us will ‘tolerate’ that kind of treatment for very long…

But that’s just my opinion, it’s up to YOU to prove me right!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Money IS NOT wealth!

Greetings good citizen,

Occupy Boston was folded up ‘peacefully’ last night. I can’t help but wonder if the ‘kid gloves’ weren’t partly due to history. The ‘shot heard ‘round the world’ was fired not too far from Dewey Square…

And I suspect, more than a little, that there is a very deep fear of ‘repeating’ that historic event.

But that’s not the topic of today’s offering…

No, today’s offering is intended to disabuse you of the notion that when The End comes, it will drop like a bag of hammers.

When, as I have been, er, ‘warning’ (actually for years now) that it will ‘creep up on us’…gradually.

Still, at this point the same lack of bankable projects has come home to roost. A series of lavish Fed money printing operations (the euphemism du jour is "qualitative easing") flooded the banking system in the United States with immense amounts of cheap cash, in an attempt to make up for the equally immense losses the banking system suffered in the aftermath of the 2005-2008 real estate bubble. Pundits insisted, at least at first, that the result would be a flood of new loans to buoy the economy out of its doldrums, but nothing of the kind happened. There are plenty of reasons why it didn’t happen, but a core reason was simply that there aren’t that many business propositions in the industrial world just now that are in a position to earn enough money to pay back loans.

Among the few businesses that do promise a decent return on investment are the ones involved in fossil fuel extraction, and so companies drilling for oil and natural gas in shale deposits—the latest fad in the fossil fuel field—have more capital than they know what to do with. The oil boomtowns in North Dakota and the fracking projects stirring up controversy in various corners of the Northeast are among the results. Elsewhere in the American economy, however, good investments are increasingly scarce. For decades now, profits from the financial industry and speculation have eclipsed profits from the manufacture of goods—before the 2008 crash, it bears remembering, General Motors made far more profit from its financing arm than it did from building cars—and that reshaping of the economy seems to be approaching its logical endpoint, the point at which it’s no longer profitable for the industrial economy to manufacture anything at all.

I have begun to suspect that this will turn out to be one of the most crucial downsides of the arrival of peak oil. If the industrial economy, as I’ve suggested, was basically an arbitrage scheme profiting off the difference in cost between energy from fossil fuels and energy from human laborers, the rising cost of fossil fuels and other inputs needed to run an industrial economy will sooner or later collide with the declining cost of labor in an impoverished and overcrowded society. As we get closer to that point, it seems to me that we may begin to see the entire industrial project unravel, as the profits needed to make industrialism make sense dry up. If that’s the unspoken subtext behind the widening spiral of economic dysfunction that seems to be gripping so much of the industrial world today, then what we’ve seen so far of what peak oil looks like may be a prologue to a series of wrenching economic transformations that will leave few lives untouched.

What is described in the last paragraph is ‘clearly visible’ to any capitalist today. We are rapidly (and I cannot stress that point enough, think ‘the ground is rushing up to meet us’, ‘rapidly’.)

With all of the, er, ‘overhead’ associated with the financial sector (which is to point out, once again that ‘money’ IS NOT ‘wealth’) the ‘capacity’ to produce wealth diminishes as the ability to ‘pay’ for it shrinks.

One can easily see this is a ‘management problem’ BUT the, er, ‘demands’ of capital have outstripped the ability of wealth creation to produce sufficient ‘profit’.

No irony should be lost on the fact that efforts to ‘offset’ this ‘imbalance’ has come from the ‘employee/customer’ (higher prices/lower pay.)

This is akin to starving a beast of burden while working it twice as hard…

And somehow the idiots are outraged when the obvious outcome is realized!

Seriously good citizen, this is INSANITY!

We have certifiably whacko people in charge of our economy!

Which leaves us with our ‘original problem’…

What the hell can we ‘do’ about it?

Due to the extremely ‘poor planning’ on our founder’s part, these, er, ‘morons’ are, in fact, ‘The Law’ and we have no (legal) way to, er, ‘remove’ them before they drive our civilization off a cliff!

But, as I pointed out in ‘Fear Factor’ it is futile to point out that we’ve been here (many times) before.

Although, this time I would definitely say it IS ‘different’…but not in a good way.

As I have undoubtedly annoyed many of you every time I repeated it, the destruction of our civilization proceeds apace (and unhindered, despite OWS best efforts.)

While some would opine that ‘A’ doesn’t happen if ‘B’ isn’t present, the difficulty of having to adopt a new commerce system coupled with the realities of ‘energy scarcity’ (that will render large swaths of this planet ‘unlivable’ for considerable periods each year) present a considerable ’challenge’.

Worse, the current ‘foot dragging’ regarding ‘alternative energy’ will result in needless bloodshed. Billions will suffer so ‘a few’ can be rich…

But as I have emphasized repeatedly, money IS NOT ’wealth’.

This is a reality that will dawn upon the clueless all too soon.

Then the current regime’s ‘mismanagement’ will be writ large for all to see…and to weep over!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Taking Sides

Greetings good citizen,

Reporters do us (another) disservice by alluding to the idea that the energy wars will be conducted solely on the National level when they will not; it will be much finer than that.

Worse, they often predict these conflicts will erupt in the murky future, instead of today. How they can ‘ignore’ the near tripling of energy prices over the past five years boggles the mind.

Except people don’t commonly connect the two. The sky-high price of energy is being viewed as the end result of manipulation by speculators (with nothing better to do with their money…how sad is THAT?)

If we are to consider that our ENTIRE SOCIAL STRUCTURE is based on CHEAP AND ABUNDANT energy, then the following is ‘Pollyannaish’ at best:

Were I to wager a guess, I might place my bet on energy systems that were decentralized, easy to make and install, and required relatively modest levels of up-front investment. For an analogy, think of the laptop computer of 2011 versus the giant mainframes of the 1960s and 1970s. The closer that an energy supplier gets to the laptop model (or so I suspect), the more success will follow.

From this perspective, giant nuclear reactors and coal-fired plants are, in the long run, less likely to thrive, except in places like China where authoritarian governments still call the shots. Far more promising, once the necessary breakthroughs come, will be renewable sources of energy and advanced biofuels that can be produced on a smaller scale with less up-front investment, and so possibly incorporated into daily life even at a community or neighborhood level.

Whichever countries move most swiftly to embrace these or similar energy possibilities will be the likeliest to emerge in 2041 with vibrant economies -- and given the state of the planet, if luck holds, just in the nick of time.

As the last line implies, the writer is throwing out the ‘technology will save us’ card when this, er, ‘problem’ has been on radar for the past 50 years and we got nuthin’!

Then there’s the ‘quaint’ anecdote in the close about ‘authoritarian governments’ like China being willing to, er, ‘abuse’ international environmental legislation because they are ‘authoritarian’.

If communist China is ‘authoritarian’ then what does that make us? (Considering the US is directly responsible for what has become ‘modern China’…)

But wait, there’s more misdirection from the corporate owned media

U.S. Markets Edge Ahead on Greek Optimism
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: June 27, 2011

Stocks on Wall Street rose in early trading after encouraging signs about Europe’s debt crisis overshadowed a dismal report about spending by American consumers.

Greece’s parliament was debating an austerity package that must pass for that nation to receive a second bailout and avoid defaulting on its debt. European markets rose Monday after French banks agreed to let Greece repay some of its debt more slowly.

The first thing to get straight here good citizen is that Greece is NOT capable of paying back the billions it owes ‘at all’.

It doesn’t have the money and it has no way of getting the money…

So why would idiotic US investors be ‘optimistic’ that Greece will be ‘bailed out’ with loans it CANNOT repay?

Sort of redefines the term ‘stupid’ but there it is.

How much ‘bullshit’ are you willing to swallow good citizen? (Because they sure are feeding it to you by the bucketful!)

Optimism is one thing but if you turn a nation into a desert expecting a garden to bloom, it takes more than a ‘positive outlook’.

But you’re supposed to think,’great, the French are willing to let the Greeks ‘float a little’ so they can pay back what they owe’ (when it is debatable that they actually ‘owe’ anything.)

In case you haven’t caught on good citizen, the, er, ‘turmoil’ being experienced by the world’s financial markets was created by the same people who ‘own’ those financial markets.

And they should all be told to ‘go pound’ but they have no problem getting their ‘pet politicians’ to pick the public’s pocket for them.

Understand good citizen our ENTIRE CIVILIZATION is going to collapse over some stupid banker trying to cover their ‘bad bets’ (with public funds.)

Left to our imagination is why NOBODY is lifting a finger to put a stop to this nonsense?

Totally fucked up is the idea that our politicians are powerless to stop the reckless bankers.

They have the power, they simply don’t have the necessary ‘backbone’ to use it!

Which brings us (once again) to the ‘hell of it all’.

Um, I was going to wrap this up but I noticed today’s
lead story in the NY Times has a direct relation to today’s Alternet story.

Likeminded cities welcome new shopping malls and apartment buildings but severely restrict the allowable number of parking spaces. On-street parking is vanishing. In recent years, even former car capitals like Munich have evolved into “walkers’ paradises,” said Lee Schipper, a senior research engineer at Stanford University who specializes in sustainable transportation.

“In the United States, there has been much more of a tendency to adapt cities to accommodate driving,” said Peder Jensen, head of the Energy and Transport Group at the European Environment Agency. “Here there has been more movement to make cities more livable for people, to get cities relatively free of cars.”

As I commented earlier, this is happening TODAY, so the ‘energy war’ is being fought…today too!

And again we see the ‘misdirection’ at work once again.

How much of our economy is dedicated to ‘personal transportation?’

Not as much as it used to be and that accounts for a big part of the most recent ‘dent’ put in our workforce.

It has become increasingly apparent that our politicians can’t be trusted and will soon need to be forcibly removed from office.

Which is to point out you don’t NEED a representative if you are capable of representing yourself.

And the ones who say it is ‘too messy’ are the ones who need to be lynched because they don’t want you capable of defending your rights!

So good citizen, whose ‘side’ are you on?

They’re ‘winning’ now but it is unlikely to be the case in the future.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Power Failure

Greetings good citizen,

Yesterday was the ‘last day of school’ in this neck of the woods (although my kid’s cousins have been out since last week!)

Not that I’m using THAT as an excuse for not posting yesterday. No, ironically it was a much more common ‘beastie’ that devoured last night’s post. We had a Power Failure when I was 90% done (and then I couldn’t find the ‘recovered’ document, just like I can’t find the recovered economy anywhere either!)

So much for yesterday…onward with today.

Okay good citizen, it’s 10:30 AM EST and the Dow is down a touch more than 200 points…(not that this has anything to do with reality.)

I didn’t find this telling bit of news in today’s NY Times, this link comes from the news feed tied to my browser’s Home Page.

Are the two news items related?

Without a doubt (even if you have to make the connection your self.)

The headline reads loosely as follows:

Saab runs out of cash to meet payroll.

Why do you suppose that is, good citizen?

Could it be ‘economics 101’? That unalterable fact of capitalism; businesses’ which fail to attract sufficient market share go bankrupt?

Let’s repeat the refrain, shall we?

The destruction of our civilization proceeds apace!

(Don’t forget the sub-refrain: Capitalism is Doomed!)

While it currently isn’t ‘on radar’, we will soon be asking ourselves why we are following the Lemmings off the cliff…and we won’t have a good answer.

It will resonate like those Scott trade commercials with the shifty, weasel broker (spending YOUR money like it was water) trying to justify his existance…

Understand good citizen when the few succeed in, well, ‘monopolizing’ the world’s markets, the know they won’t hold on to their bonanza via Democracy or anything resembling ‘free markets’.

So BOTH will have to go…and if you don’t like it, you can go pound sand!

Or hang these criminals! Really, the choice is yours.

Either YOU put up with it or you don’t.

Understand there’s more to it than just saying ‘no’. The criminals have made themselves the nominal superiors of 'the men with guns and badges.'

Theoretically, the men with the guns won’t fire upon ‘innocent civilians’ a distinction that is difficult to make while the civilians are trying to throw off the yoke of corruption the criminals have saddled them with!

Unsurprisingly, we have this disturbing story the ‘infamous they’ are pinning today’s market woes on.

Talk about your ‘short term solutions’, looks like the market is ‘pricing in’ the pending economic disaster brought on by rapidly escalating energy prices.

If you don’t live somewhere that you can walk around in shirt-sleeves all year long, move (cuz you’re gonna freeze to death if you don’t!)

Oh, PS by the way, you can still fall victim to hypothermia in places where the temperatures never go below freezing!

Talk about your ‘double whack’ you’ll be unable to afford the fuel to escape the cold nor the fuel to keep you warm.

Got your eye on that forest outside your window? Are you prepared to kill for it? That’s what it’s going to take…in case any of you thought there was ‘plenty to go around’.

Yep, it’s getting DAMN scary out there! Good thing it’s summer time!

Things are going to take a definite turn for the worse once cold weather threatens to return…

Not that things could get much worse than they already are

Which is to ask why do any of you still doubt that ALL money is ‘FUNNY’?

If we’ve got the money to pay for frisking the general population then we have the money to bail out (all of) the banks and fight a dozen wars at once!

Which is to say, the more removed money becomes from its intended purpose, the more ridiculous our reality becomes.

It’s outrageous that we have a handful of people with more money than they can spend and huge numbers that have all they can do to keep food on the table and a roof (of sorts) over their heads!

And NOTHING is done about it…

WTF, good citizen, WTF?

What’s happening right here and now has little to do with economics and everything to do with ‘power’.

The few are trying their damnedest to kill off as much of the ‘surplus population’ as they can without getting themselves killed.

Methinks they will succeed on one level but will fail to survive the other.

For some unfathomable reason the term ‘blowback’ is meaningless to them…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Stocks rise, insanity suspected!

Greetings good citizen,

Peak oil has come and gone so the economic insanity is only going to get more pronounced going forward.

As I have postulated earlier, what we are seeing is the ‘death throes’ of those who derive their ‘power’ from the fossil fuel industry.

We can feel fortunate that these self-centered cretins have so far failed to incite an all out nuclear exchange (because the one sure way to extend their reign as ‘masters of the (human) universe’ is to significantly reduce the number of ‘end-users’, preferably those made redundant via automation/off-shoring.)

How fortunate is it that radiation, like communicable disease, isn’t ‘selective’ enough to eradicate ‘the problem’?

Which is not to say that either has been ruled out, desperate people will dare desperate things when pushed far enough.

Lynch someone who richly deserves it and we may just win a local detonation of a weapon intended to defend us from attack!

Never underestimate the ‘reach’ of corruption. The same assholes who bought our government also bought the keys to our nuclear arsenal…just in case you were under the false impression that the military couldn’t be bought.

Not that anyone would ever admit to detonating one of our own nukes on a US target. Even if you found a piece of the bomb with traceable serial numbers on it, the CIA would claim the weapon was ‘stolen by terrorists’ to protect their masters.

How do we know that?

If the corruption DIDN’T go all the way to the top then why hasn’t anybody been prosecuted?

Still ‘gathering evidence’ eh?

Well, here’s some evidence that things are rotten in Denmark!

Stocks on Wall Street traded higher on Friday after a report showed that Americans’ income edged up last month.

Before trading began, the Commerce Department said that both personal income and spending rose 0.4 percent in April, in line with what economists expected. Higher food and gas prices accounted for most of the spending increase.

A cut in the amount withdrawn from paychecks for Social Security has given incomes a boost this year. But that extra take-home pay has been pinched by higher prices for gasoline

Um, does anyone read this shit before it hits the presses?

Once again we have to ask ourselves if they think we’re that stupid or if they are (that stupid?)

One suspects ‘ass covering’ when you read ridiculous claims like this.

Left to your imagination is who thinks this is saving anybody’s face?

Actually, this is the media throwing the goofy government statistics under the bus…’proving’ the Republican meme that government doesn’t work.

And when is government at its worst? When the corporate dick sucking Republicans are in charge! (Not that the Democrats have acquitted themselves any better in recent memory.)

For our next trick we have a look at the true state of the economy:

No. 370: GDP Revision, Revised Durable Goods, Home Sales
Subscription required May 26th, 2011

• Major Downside Revisions to GDP Loom in Upcoming Benchmark
• Durable Goods Orders Revised Lower by 8% in Trough-Year 2009
• Housing Activity Disaster Exacerbates Systemic Solvency Issues

The elephant in the room good citizen is how the housing debacle has not been rectified, even a little, making the global economy ‘insolvent’.

Er, there is, however, a bit of irony here considering it was the ‘elephants’ who created ‘the elephant problem’

The ‘crisis’ we will face with the return of cold weather THIS YEAR is how many millions of people will have to choose between freezing to death and/or starving to death?

Naturally, we are faced with the ongoing question of whether or not a government that is not answerable to us would admit a crisis is in the works?

One of the most frequently repeated themes in the independent blogosphere is the high degree of ‘irregularity’ present in the world’s financial sector.

Here’s Jesse with his take on the subject:

Power indeed corrupts all, and their thinking, even in the well intentioned.

And this is what I fear the Federal Reserve is becoming, or more likely, has already become. And so I would not necessarily argue that an independent central bank is a bad idea per se, although such an argument can certainly be made.

But I would propose that the Greenspan-Bernanke Fed itself has outlived its lifespan as an effective organization, and is in dire need of reform and refocusing, and it must come from outside the group think of their bureaucracy. And the Congress and the Executive seem insufficient to the task having been severely compromised over the years through participation in the Fed's decisions and its control of money flows.

So the question of reform is problematic. The current government, both Republicans and Democrats, seem to be up to their elbows in the muck, beholden to a powerful elite and their vested interests that operate behind the scenes, and too often outside the law.

Terrible thoughts in their implications, and so most cannot bear to even think them. In times of the big changes people may desperately cling to the familiar, even if it is a rotting corpse of what it had once been. Reform is hard and often tedious work, never easy, and it has it own dangers. The cure may be as dangerous as the disease, and so it bears much thought and careful action. But action is required, it must be done.

Perhaps more telling is the uptick in the frequency with which we are hearing calls to action.

We know this situation isn’t going to fix itself but most of us are waiting for the catalyst, that one clarifying event that says undeniably where the bear shits.

So which will come first, the nuke or the lynching?

Guess we’ll just have to wait and see…although, ‘tick-tock’ good citizen, we don’t have forever here to ride the fence.

And when the temperatures are sub-zero it will be a lousy time to wish we had acted sooner.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Up again, down again...

Greetings good citizen,

Oil dropped below $100 a barrel (again) today after bouncing back to nearly $105 a barrel. Some pundits are predicting $3.50 a gallon gasoline this summer but with more and more evidence that Peak Oil occurred ‘on schedule’ roughly five years ago is that really going to be the case?

It’s all tied together good citizen and you can’t ‘isolate’ the bad parts from the salvageable ones. Worse, when energy goes bad, it ALL goes bad.

Oil wasn’t the only thing to ‘take a dive’ on Wall Street today, stock markets around the globe bled from the eyesockets today. Not all markets finished in negative territory but the ones that didn’t we’re up much.

As I have pointed out in the past, the, er, ‘global economy’ is suffering from more than just an energy crisis.

There are (in case you haven’t noticed) serious problems with money but especially interest payments.

Under the ‘tied together’ theme, the, er, dearth of ‘investment opportunities’ is the direct offshoot the too much money with noplace to go phenomenon, and truly ironic is how both factors feed the excess capacity problem (by driving too many potential customers out of the job market!)

Did I mention ‘mismanagement’?

Which is to point out that these idiots couldn’t have done a better job of destroying the economy if they had been trying to! (And the evidence actually favors this conclusion!)

Naturally, good citizen, none of this is news.

One of the most ‘frequently repeated' memes of the day was how the unemployment situation is considerably worse than the official data and media ‘happy talk’ would have you believe.

But you knew that through your own experiences and observations.

You even sort of understand why they are being less than forthright.

The (few) people ‘the system’ works for, it works VERY WELL for them.

And, considering some of the other shenanigans these people have pulled, there is that whole ‘evading prosecution’ thing motivating them (big time!)

As I have pointed out repeatedly, not only have they committed crimes, they have even gone as far as to have committed ‘capital crimes’, the kind of things most civilizations hang the offender for…although there was that one time thing with the guillotine…

So we can see why these people would be reluctant to step down from their powerful perches without insuring some kind of amnesty first.

If we offered them unconditional amnesty they’d probably ‘vacate’ on their own the day after tomorrow.

Although I doubt that would be a ‘win’ because the plan has been and probably still is to scram as soon as ‘tomorrow’ gets here.

Naturally, we are confronted here with the ‘tomorrow never comes’ problem.

Worse, it is very difficult to work up a sense of urgency because nothing has been done about any of these issues for a very long time.

Although I suspect ‘peak oil’ will bring pressure to bear that no one will be able to ignore…and sooner rather than later.

It’s going to be a very interesting summer good citizen, very interesting indeed.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

A peek at 'past peak' oil

Greetings good citizen,

Mother’s day is early this year, which has absolutely nothing to do with the price of tea in China or anywhere else for that matter.

No, today’s Message In A Barrel: highlights something pundits have been pointing at for the past two decades, this particular development is indeed more recent:

Despite high prices, crude oil production has stayed basically flat for roughly five years. Either there's a basic flaw in capitalism's profit motive thingy, or something else is going on.

That aside, the drumbeat that we are already past peak oil has been growing steadily as the price of crude rises ‘without provocation’.

Despite high prices, crude oil production has stayed basically flat for roughly five years. It seems this is the all-time high-water mark, according to Fatih Birol, chief economist for the International Energy Agency. “We think that crude oil production for the world has already peaked in 2006,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “I think it would have been better if the governments have started to work on it at least 10 years ago.”

At a European Parliament conference on peak oil, the European Commission’s director-general for transport and mobility policy warned if actions are delayed to reduce oil dependency, “we may be forced to drastically reduce all our mobility.”

Already, rising energy costs are taking their toll around the world, with U.S. economic growth stumbling and raising the spectre of stagflation, as well as, helping to drive up food prices in Latin America, and driving inflation in Europe.

The reality of peak oil and what comes after are as difficult to picture in one’s mind (accurately) as the vivid, albeit conflicting images the Bible paints of the Second Coming.

If we were to convert fossil fuel into its ‘manpower’ equivalent we would see how Unsustainable our current lifestyle is.

Given the realities of peak oil (the end of cheap slaves and the advent of extremely brutal substitutes) and the fact that China and India now want more petroleum slaves too, that level of consumption or slavery can't be sustained. In fact Hughes warns that the world of the petroleum slave owner can only get smaller. He calls it "the Energy Sustainability Dilemma."

This indelicate dilemma will be ugliest for those who employ the most slaves. Right now the average Canadian lives as extravagantly as the feverish English master of a large Caribbean sugar plantation. In fact Canadians typically boss around five times more slaves than the global average. [One suspects the original audience for this article was Canadian, thus the comparison.]

"Your average Canadian consumes five times the world average per capital consumption, seven times the per capita consumption in China and 29 times the per capita consumption in India," calculates Hughes.

(For the record the new and leaner slave masters of Shanghai or Tianjin burn but 2.4 barrels of oil a year which puts 20 coolies at their beck and call.)

"Maybe we have been even less cognizant of the services provided by fossil fuels than people did from their slaves," reflects Hughes. "Slavery, after all was in your face. Now it's all about filling up the tank."

In his thoughtful 1973 essay, "Energy and Equity," the radical Catholic theologian Ivan Illich questioned whether "the well-being of a society can be measured by the number of years its members have gone to school and by the number of energy slaves they have thereby learned to command."

While most people worried about the scarcity of fodder for these slaves, Illich asked whether free men really needed so many slaves in the first place.

The iconoclast concluded that each and every human being was entitled to a certain amount of energy, but beyond a certain threshold, people lost both their freedom and humanity as slave owners typically do.

Even if nonpolluting slaves were feasible and abundant, Illich reckoned "that the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving."

He then dropped a Promethean question that most economists, philosophers, environmentalists and energy analysts avoid: can a society be progressively hooked on a larger numbers of energy slaves and remain autonomous?

It remains civilization's central question.

I think it is important to point out that the article was written to raise awareness of how much energy the typical Western lifestyle consumes. I also suspect it used 1973 data for ‘energy consumption’ when much of our modern energy consumption is digital as opposed to analog like it was in 1973.

It is also ‘inaccurate’ to draw an image of a ‘dark’ future. There is, er, ‘a lot’ of hydro electric and there ‘will be’ a lot of solar and wind power available long before we, er, ‘exhaust’ our fossil fuel reserves.

The biggest nut to crack in an energy scarce future will be transportation/getting shit where it needs to be, when it needs to be there.

‘Re-making’ the global supply lines into local ones with much longer lead times and far greater ‘redundancy’ will cause some serious, er, ‘disruptions’.

‘Out of season’ produce will return to being a rare luxury as cold region green houses become cost prohibitive to operate. Worse, refrigeration over long distances will also become a costly proposition.

In this respect some thought should be given to developing future hi-speed rail lines underground to reduce the need for refrigeration/cooling…and even heating (of passenger areas) for that matter.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of this dark vision for the future is how some fucktards will actually attempt to make the poor into ‘energy slaves’.

This will cause riots the likes of which have never been seen before! (At least throughout the so-called ‘free world’.)

Then again you never know, maybe it is just me who thinks crazy thoughts like that…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Until the roof caves in...

Greetings good citizen,

Not only did the stock markets bleed from the eyesockets today but the price of a barrel of oil dropped under a hundred dollars a barrel for the first time in months!

In another ‘bizarre’ reversal, gold and silver fell while the dollar rose!

Understand, there is no LOGICAL reason for this sudden shift in ‘values’.

Worse, it is illustrative of something far more disturbing that many suspected but couldn’t quite prove. Those whose fortunes are measured by their equity holdings know the score, it is people who only dabble in stocks that remain ignorant.

What is it that the dabblers suspect and the super rich know?

That equity prices are set on a ‘because I said so’ basis. That’s how Wall Street is able to keep commerce on a short leash.

Did your stock ‘beat expectations’ last quarter…was anyone more surprised to hear this than you?

Well, I’ve got bad news good citizen. The world continuously strives for balance, often resulting in what’s good for some proving to be bad for a whole lot of other people.

Don’t look now but we passed the ‘tipping point’ a couple of years ago.

When the ‘scales’ of justice rebalance themselves there will be a hellacious number of dead people on both sides.

How ironic is it that for every one who meets their deserved fate, two will not deserve the wretched end they will ultimately suffer…

While it may not look like it today’s piece is a ‘two-parter’, I pulled the first article this morning before being sidetracked for the better part of the day and before the markets closed.

We begin today’s oddesy with a dire warning about the true stakes of the delayed action to raise the Federal debt ceiling.

Many Republicans dismiss these warnings. They argue that the government could maintain the confidence of investors by prioritizing interest payments. There is ample revenue to make those payments, and the Republicans — also backed by economists and financial experts — say investors would not punish the government for failing to fulfill other financial obligations. [Let us not forget just who caused this crisis with their ‘wrongheadedness’…not that the Democrats put up a fight over the poor policy decisions the ‘party of (bad) ideas’ implemented.]

“I think the important thing to do would be to make it clear to markets that the government is not going to default on its debt,” said Senator Patrick Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, whose bill assigns priority to interest payments. “It would be easy, I think, to make it clear to the markets that they don’t have to worry about this.”

Treasury officials respond that the failure to pay any obligations would set off a crisis.

“What participant in the market would want to buy our debt as we are defaulting on other obligations?” asked Ms. Miller. “I think the markets would be completely spooked.”

How disturbing is it good citizen to see poiticians with a firm grip of the situation only to have legislation that defies all logic pass through both houses with a ‘filibuster proof’ margin?

Which begs the question ‘has ‘common sense’ become so rare that it can no longer be possessed by a majority in government?

I’d opine that much misunderstood and over-rated ‘common sense’ isn’t particularly ‘common’ at all. I further posit that it is totally absent from the decision-making process throughout our entire society.

But that’s just me passing judgement on our ‘self-appointed’ leaders.

You know, the ones the people we elect to public office take their marching orders from, those boobs!

Well, this playing ‘chicken’ with the world’s largest economy isn’t going to end well.

IF we raise the debt limit (like we did TWICE for GW) AND the money is ‘squandered’ on ‘payola’ for cronies via wars of choice, what’s the point?

People miss the ‘real danger’ of this budget Kabuki Dance.

Once they stop ‘pretending’ to care about paying us, the next step is to stop pretending to care if there are enough resources to go around.

This next story Crude Oil Falls Below $100 a Barrel is as ‘unlikely’ as it is implausible…

After four months of surging higher, oil prices plummeted by almost 9 percent as traders worried that American drivers were beginning to balk at paying nearly $4 a gallon of gasoline. [Beginning? WTF!]

Energy specialists had a variety of explanations for the drop, including Thursday’s weak employment data and a strengthening dollar that tends to make all dollar-denominated commodities cheaper in dollars and more expensive for holders of other currencies. [snip]

Mr. Kloza predicted that the price of a regular gallon of gasoline would drop about a quarter by Memorial Day to $3.75, and gasoline could drop as low as $3.50 a gallon later in the summer. Other analysts said oil prices would continue to decline in the coming days.

While is would be ‘politically savvy’ to ‘back off’ on the price of energy over the warm summer months (people are more inclined to fight when the weather is less of a factor.)

I somehow think Mr. Klonza is ‘irrationally optimistic’ in thinking oil prices will remain low.

We have already passed ‘peak oil’, ALL of the world’s oil fields are in decline and demand continues to rise due to ‘faux prosperity’ in the nations that won the global race to the bottom.

The economies of the world’s most populous nations are, er, ‘severely’ imbalanced.

Soon, when the resource wars start in earnest, these ‘too big to save’ population concentrations will, er, ‘collapse’, taking with them the productive capacity of the modern world.

How’s THAT for ‘short sighted’?

More ironic is how rapidly escalating energy prices will cause a similar, er, ‘disruption’ in international shipping?

Could these idiots really be THAT stupid?

Apparently so, good citizen, apparently so.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Uncharted Waters

Greetings good citizen,

As some of you may have observed, the ‘warning’ phase is over. There seems to be a consensus that for good or for ill, events are already underway and will play out as they may.

Fairly vague terms to be sure but even the corporate owned media has stopped dismissing ’peak oil’ and all that such an event portends for life as we have come to know it.

How ironic is it that future scientists will point to the end of cheap and abundant fossil fuel as Mother Nature’s ‘answer’ for human overpopulation?

The question that remains open is whether or not that day is here?

I’d opine that it is NOT. The ‘problem’ we will soon be faced with has more to do with increased demand rather than dwindling supply.

Which is not to say supply isn’t dwindling, it more a case of having used up most of the easy to get at stuff, making the remainder less ‘cost effective’ to bring to market.

Think ‘price war’ good citizen. The capitalists are going to ‘squeeze’ the market and the pressure this will put on society will result in widespread, er , ‘unrest’.

As I have stated multiple times, mismanagement.

How frightening is it that our captive government is incapable of taking the lead here and removing control of this vital commodity from the grasp of the self-interested?

Because, ultimately, that’s how it’s going to go down.

Watch how quick a rationing scheme is put in place once gas stations and banks start burning!

Although this didn’t happen in the past…(but in the past most people didn’t feel like they were being played for chumps either.)

Which is to say I think the public is pretty disillusioned with the way things have played out. Worse, they’re getting sick of having to watch their back every second for every little friggin’ thing they do.

‘Constant vigilance’ can be VERY taxing.

Which is to point out that life would be a whole lot simpler if we removed the income streams that only benefit a few from private hands.

It’s yet another ‘symptom’ of our badly broken society. They didn’t used to be able to get away with this ‘gotcha’ bullshit they regularly pull now.

It was considered ‘bad business’. You’d think more enterprises would be concerned with how the public perceives them in these days of social networking but no!

Why do you suppose that is good citizen?

Can you say, ‘captive audience’?

When everybody is sticking it to you, you have no choice but to put up with it…until you don’t anymore…and that day is coming.

If there is ONE lesson to be learned from ‘globalization’ it is that private interests are incapable of being ‘honest operators’ in the marketplace…especially when they have a ‘corporate shield’ to hide behind!

In a world of increasingly scarce resources, paychecks all around is the way of the future…fuck you, pay me is out the window!

In the future nobody will be ABLE to pay you because there will only be one way to get money and that will be to work for it!

Doesn’t matter what you have ‘for sale’ because nobody has any cash to hand you!

Think what kind of a dent this will put in crime! It all (pretty much) disappears (violent crimes are another story but even they will diminish significantly because most murders are committed over money.

Think about it…

Once we start doing it you will wonder why we didn’t do it this way right along! (although it would have been cumbersome as well as tedious to facilitate a cashless system before computers came into widespread use.)

More important is the resource management tool this creates. You no longer have greedy bastards putting as much as they can get their hands on into the marketplace just because they can!

No more clear cutting and no more over-fishing because YOU no longer get to personally pocket the cash!

Better still, no more making your crew go out in dangerous conditions because YOU tried to draw to an inside straight and lost (and if you don’t go, you’re gonna lose the damn business!)

Did I mention that private industry tends to be irresponsible? (And not just the little guys either!)

Um, just to clear up what might look like a contradiction…how would we implement a totally electronic banking system when we’re running out of fossil fuels?

There’s plenty of hydro-electric, when oil becomes cost prohibitive the lights aren’t going to go out…well, not all of them.

Renewable energy will lend itself handily to our electronic demands. While getting stuff from point A to point B will become challenging, you (if we can fix management in time) probably won’t be wandering around in the dark, humming to yourself.

But then there’s that ‘end of civilization’ stuff to deal with.

Nobody ‘thinks’ the right wingers are going to start lobbing nukes around just because they can…but…they offered 120% financing on some class A dumps just because they could…so, I wouldn’t be to quick with the ‘never’ stuff.

There is little I would put beyond those who think they can exterminate us.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Price vs Cost

Greetings good citizen,

It is difficult to cobble together the many multifaceted aspects of life into a single stream of consciousness, thus is it necessary to back away and simplify…which often leads to this kind of incredible bullshit

Oil is over $105 a barrel BUT the so-called ‘experts’ say the public is ‘better prepared’ to handle budget busting increases in both food and fuel prices (probably because we’ve all gotten so much better at ‘magic’!)

Talk about ‘confused’, we have the above article which is essentially ‘happy talk’, making light of a disastrous situation and then we have articles like this which contradict the ‘happy talk’ but are apparently (as far as the stock markets are concerned) ‘irrelevant.’

Oil WAS $104 a barrel yesterday…and the market opened DOWN more than 60 points but finished UP more than 124 points...go fucking figure, eh?

So, do you think the rain will hurt the rhubarb?

Not if it’s in cans…

In a similarly disturbing development Handouts Make Up One-Third of U.S. Wages Once again we have an ‘interpretational barrier’ to contend with.

Define ‘a third of wages’? If we ASKED our self-important employer class if they thought what they paid their employees was a ‘gift’ we’d be talking about how 200% of wages are ‘handouts‘, wouldn’t we?

So it is obvious that the ‘third’ mentioned in the article isn’t based on what employers are ‘overpaying’ us.

Which leaves ‘government disbursements’ as a portion of the total payroll picture.

As we have repeatedly pointed out here, the 40 MILLION ‘recipients’ of various forms of ‘food assistance’ are NOT individuals but FAMILY UNITS!

Which leaves us to ponder just how desperate things are getting when one third of total payroll is made up of ‘government assistance’ that the Republican ’deficit hawks’ are trying to eliminate?

Does anyone else see ‘Trouble’ on the near horizon? (note the capital ‘T’)

I appreciate how psychologically unsettling this must appear good citizen. One day we are tramping down the off ramp to Hell and the next we are dealing with seemingly ‘mundane’ economic issues (not that any of this could even be charitably considered as mundane by any rational individual.)

The question begged by this article is not how much more can we spend but how much longer we can maintain this level of support considering how the economy has shrunk below the number of people it needs to support…

This is the shit wars are made of…in case any of you were wondering.

Worse, ‘wars’ waged against unarmed civilians are more accurately described as ‘genocide’.

Just saying…ya know?

In keeping with our ‘open to interpretation’ theme this last piece takes on a decidedly ‘Libertarian’ slant

Working for the Greater Share

Hard to say where Mr. Panzers sympathies lie. This could be a simple case of failing to make oneself clear. The water gets pretty muddy when you stray off of the ‘All economies are local’ path.

Is he criticizing or supporting the decision by local governments to support local commerce?

Hard to say…

There are still people out there who think globalization is a net positive.

This doesn’t make any less an idiot, they can think what they like…they just need to be kept a safe distance from the decision making processes.

No irony should be lost on the fact that they think the same way, that those who don’t agree with them should be ‘removed’ from the decision making process.

They only see one side of the puzzle, that globalization results in ‘lower prices’.

They remain to this day blissfully ignorant of the ‘captive audience’ aspect the elimination of domestic sources results in.

Those lower prices come at a cost that is much too dear for any society to pay.

And we are witnessing that bill ‘coming due’ right here and now.

You know my feelings on the subject. No matter how much they protest, this was no ‘accident’ nor was it due to incompetence…except maybe in the Justice Department.

One thing is certain good citizen, we have one fuck of a mess on our hands and there will be buckets of blood before it is all said and done.

The great ‘mis-underestimation’ the political right has made is mistakenly believing that the left will jump on ‘peace at any price’ as soon as it is offered.

How unfortunate is it for the rest of us to find ourselves pitted against such a stupid adversary?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Ride the lightening...

Greetings good citizen,

I don’t usually harp on the subject but I feel compelled to remind you that The End, when it comes, could be lightening fast.

While making no claims, Jesse (of the Crossroads café fame) shares this unusual market tidbit for your consideration.

Once again, for no apparent reason, the Dow is up 180 points right out of the box today (as of 10:00 AM EST.) Pretty remarkable performance for the first hour of trading, eh?

Or are you asking the same question I am, why?

Is Wall Street, er, ‘happy’ that oil is once again over a hundred dollars a barrel and that the average price at the pump stands at $3.50 a gallon?

Forty percent of the nation’s population only has (combined) two tenths of a single percent of the nation’s income to live on…and this makes Wall Street happy why?

Flip that around good citizen and ask yourself how sick are these bastards?…(although it will eventually shift to just how stupid they are as those who only appear to be ’well-off’ start taking the heat for their greedhead masters.)

We keep hearing ’torches and pitchforks’, well it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out what they’re going to do with the torches.

No, the first couple of times the fire department will respond…or at least try to. Sadly, the rioters didn’t start the greedhead’s place on fire for ‘fun’, so when the fire truck gets ambushed (despite being warned not to respond) there will be an insane ruckus from the media and little sympathy from the public…

Naturally, only one fire truck needs to get bushwhacked and the rules will change so ALL fire trucks will require a police escort. But that won’t stop the ambushes.

Alternatively, it WILL stop emergency vehicles from responding to questionable calls. Contrary to popular belief, even the cops didn’t sign up to be shot at!

Fire at the bank? Oh fucking well…hope their insurance is up to date!

Which will only serve to hasten the declaration of martial law, which will trigger a full-blown civil war.

Which brings us full circle to the ‘willingness’ of US soldiers to fire upon the people they were sworn to protect.

Is the danger of having your family murdered for the crimes you commit while wearing the uniform of the armed forces worth it?

This is why there still isn’t an effective Afghan or Iraqi military force after ten years of recruiting.

It is also why the US military is offering citizenship to ‘volunteers’ from outside the US. People without family here will be less concerned about ‘retribution’ than your average ‘native’ would be.

But I (as usual) digress…

Did I mention that the corporate owned media is worthless? Do I need to mention that our corporate owned government is even worse?

Perhaps more chilling is the fact we are only a single incident away from the declaration of martial law and all that would entail…including the long list of violations that could result in ‘summary execution’.

Like your family of four walking together as one group (within ten feet of one another)…you’re all dead!

Three people in one place at one time constitutes a ‘conspiracy’ that lethal force is authorized to ‘disperse‘.

Oh yeah, good citizen, if you think things were tough before martial law, they’ll be even more ‘fun’ afterwards…because the assholes with the guns get to make up the rules as they go along and if you don’t like it there ain’t a fucking thing you can do about it!

Have you got a gun yet?

If I were you I’d put that right on the top of my bucket list!

What’s that? You can’t hit the broad side of a barn? That’s why shotguns are so ‘popular’!

I KNOW I’m on the local ‘troublemakers list’, what we don’t know is if your name got added just because you were curious?

I already plan on being ‘hard to find’ when the shit hits the fan. Although if there is trouble nearby, chances are good I won’t be too far away.

Which brings to mind the wise words of ‘Rush’…

If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice!
So what will you do, good citizen…fish or cut bait?

Thanks for letting me inside your head, something that is increasingly becoming an act of outstanding courage as our situation deteriorates.

Gegner

Unchained, but not yet unleashed...

Greetings good citizen,

Does anybody else find it ‘peculiar’ that the web of foreign dictators propped up by the United States is suddenly, er, ‘collapsing’?

While this looks like ‘blowback’ from the invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq (widely interpreted in the Muslim world as a resumption of the long dormant crusades) is that really the case?

Yesterday we looked at the, er, ‘thin’ ranks the status quo has to draw upon to maintain its iron grip on the world’s energy supply.

If El Baradai is ‘as good as it gets’ I suspect there will be soon be trouble with a capital ‘T’ in the oil exporting regions of the world.

As I have postulated repeatedly, the true ‘danger’ facing Western civilization is the sudden collapse of the supply lines that bring us the Western way of life.

Will we get a ‘rude awakening/reality check’ in the form of $300 a barrel oil?

Like all things in ‘hooray for me, fuck you capitalism’, we won’t even be given the courtesy of a public service announcement, it will just be ‘fuck you, pay me!’

And some fools will actually try!

Which is to say the ‘point’ behind $300 oil isn’t widespread distribution, it’s pay or die…and they are really telling you if you can’t pay, they don’t care!

If you die, tough! The price is the price.

Sound, er, ‘incredible’?

Ask your self just how ‘far gone’ things are and suddenly it doesn’t look like such a big stretch.

Exactly what I just described has happened repeatedly throughout history.

This perhaps is the scary part, the denial of the lessons of history.

What are the ‘positive attributes’ of a society whose main commercial focus is financial manipulation?

Don’t be embarrassed, I can’t think of any either.

(Mental) show of hands, How many of you think it is time that WE throw off the yoke of our oppressor?
That’s a pretty good showing (although your mental image may vary!)

Which leads us to a second (totally mental) opinion poll.

What do you suppose is going to happen first?

Christ’s return of the collapse of the US government?

Right about now door number #2 is looking far more likely than that of the second coming.

The Republicans are already laying the groundwork for the collapse and takeover of what used to pass for our government.

And only one in five are expected to be ‘happy’ about this unseemly outcome…although they’d be hard pressed to explain why?

Worse, like the Bush presidency, they will soon be claiming that the usurpers are not ‘true conservatives’. (Sadly, nobody knows for sure what precisely makes you a ‘true conservative.’)

But what are ya gonna do?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Enlightenment...

Greetings good citizen,

The markets are up but what would you expect considering the Fed continues to fuel the surge in stock prices through ‘quantative easing.’

Which is to point out that this current swelling in the value of capital is actually meaningless if it were put in the perspective of a rotting corpse, which is precisely what this phenomenon is reflective of.

As you might imagine, the recent ‘excitement’ over retail sales figures are precisely the ‘smoke and mirror’ hocus pocus one would expect from a shrinking customer base.

Defunct businesses do not report sales figures, these figures can only come from the surviving outlets which now enjoy a bigger share of the market, causing their sales figures to improve.

Worse, many of the ‘survivors’ have shut ‘under-performing’ locations, driving business to the remaining stores. And reporting the results as an ‘increase’…

Nothing from nothing leaves nothing…and that’s a fact, Jack!

Fewer people working and even less shopping does not equal a net increase in sales! IT IS IMPOSSIBLE!

Yet the fucktards expect YOU to swallow it!

Worse good citizen is the ‘basic dishonesty’ these tactics represent.

How can we trust the systems that produce this incredible bullshit?

Short answer, you can’t!

More succinctly, it is this ‘basic dishonesty’ that will lead to the collapse and eventual destruction of our civilization.

Yes good citizen, Debunking Gonzalo Lira and Hyperinflation here we have an argument that is essentially moot. Which is to say pointless because this is not how things will ‘play out’.

As Stoneleigh points out in the beginning of the article (a fact that dovetails nicely with my, er, ‘assertion’ that money is in fact a fantasy, wrapped in an illusion enforced at the point of a gun) that ‘hyper-inflation’ requires isolation. A key separating factor between our current crazed banking system and the economies of Wiemar Germany and that of Zimbabwe.

So no, it won’t be ‘hyper-inflation’ per se that causes our economy to collapse, it will be the sudden necessary shift from fiat currency to ‘in kind’ commodity trading that will cause the financial system to…evaporate.

Once the tax rate reaches zero, the currency becomes ‘illegitimate’ since it is no longer required to pay one’s taxes (talk about a mind fuck!)

However, the basic dishonesty we are witnessing throughout our society will only serve to increase the demand to be paid in ‘items of value’ as the situation continues to disintegrate.


That said, Stoneleigh and I are in perfect accord regarding the ‘ultimate outcome’.

I do not see this as a transitory problem leading back to business as usual, and I mean NEVER returning to what we would now regard as business as usual, let alone doing so in only a couple of years.

Deflation and depression are mutually reinforcing. This is a persistent dynamic that should last at least as long as the last depression, and likely longer as every parameter is worse going into depression this time. We have more debt, far more structural dependencies (on cheap energy and cheap credit primarily), looming resource limitations, far higher expectations, a much larger population, a far smaller skill base etc.

I think we are looking at an economic catastrophe of unprecedented proportions, not a bump in the road that can be quickly consigned to history, if only we face our problems head on. In my view we are going to have to live through deflationary deleveraging, a long and grinding depression, and then quite possibly hyperinflation once the international debt financing model is broken, and with it the power of the bond market to constrain currency printing.

This could easily take twenty years to play out, and even then the upheaval is very unlikely to be over. The last time a major bubble burst - the South Sea Bubble of the 1720s - the aftermath lasted for several decades and culminated in a series of revolutions. This bubble is much larger, and the aftermath is likely to be proportional to the excesses of the preceding bubble. This is why I call the presentation I travel to deliver A Century of Challenges.

Moreover, I do not see a return to what we consider to be business as usual at any point, because our business as usual scenario is critically dependent on cheap energy, and the energy subsidy inherent in fossil fuels has been a once in a planet's lifetime deal. We are going to be living on an energy income instead of an energy inheritance, and this will mean living a life none of us in the developed world will recognize.

UNDERSTAND GOOD CITIZEN, when she says ‘never’, she doesn’t mean in a couple of years, she means right here and now!
The ‘tipping point’ has already been passed even if the MSM is pretending otherwise because acknowledging this event opens the social contract to be re-written!

We no longer enjoy cheap abundant energy so the conditions we must live under WILL change…considerably.

Allowing them to remain ‘the same’ or even ‘similar’ for the few will make things much worse for the rest!

Funny how a ‘little’ hoarding can screw up an otherwise equitable distribution plan. People with ‘income streams’ will be at a decided advantage to those of us with less, er, ‘flexible’ forms of income.

Those with a paycheck that is negotiated on an annual basis will find themselves facing a crisis for most of the year…because it is not in your employer’s interest to pay you a cent more than they absolutely have to.

Since the FUCKING CONSERVATIVES have fucked up the tax structure of this nation, you now have no one to protect you from being ‘shortchanged’ by your employer.

Worse, if you’re ‘two-steps’ down on the distribution chain, your fucked because your employer ‘lacks the leverage’ to negotiate a better deal for himself.

Do you see how this inter-locking piece of shit can cave in quite suddenly?

If there is a ‘common thread’ on the gloom and doom sites it is this, the speed with which collapse can be upon us will astonish most of you.

Everything can be ‘fine’ when you go to bed tonight only to be unrecognizable by the time you wake up in the morning…IF you wake up in the morning.

Be Prepared (for pretty much anything, including deception!)

The depths of their depravity are unknowable and they’ve done some pretty ‘mad shit’ already!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Just say No!

Greetings good citizen,

Today is one of the heaviest ‘travel days’ of the year as people cover what can be great distances so they may reunite with their kin.

Somewhat ‘in tandem’ with this annual event is the TSA’s ‘stepping up’ of ‘security measures’ in the ‘war without end’ against terror.

Oddly, nobody has stepped forward to lead others in exercising the ‘obvious’ retaliatory measure…boycott.

If they are going to strip search or force you to walk through a device that renders you virtually naked, ‘just say no’…meaning DON’T BUY AN AIRLINE TICKET!

Make the planes SIT ON THE FUCKING GROUND! FUCK ‘EM!

At ‘what price’ safety good citizen? I would posit right here and now that the price we’re being, er, ‘asked’ to pay is too fucking much. If you want to live with/like ‘Chicken little’ knock yourself out. The thing you need to be aware of is the ‘cost’ of this intrusive herding; this gross violation of the ‘presumption of innocence’ costs you your humanity as well as your dignity!

For the moment you can take the train or the bus without suffering the ‘indignity’ of being treated like a steer in a chute or, more factually, a ‘potential terrorist’.

Although I did see today that ‘our legislators’ have already proposed putting both of these ‘safety measures’ in place at ALL REMAINING transport terminals. Hell, the article went on to point out that these ‘defacto’ strip search machines are already turning up in the nation’s courthouses…but those weasels have a right to be paranoid, they are well aware of the crimes they have committed!

Please allow me to direct your attention to the fact that THIS KIND of intrusive legislative action will sail through the supposedly deeply divided houses of Congress, the same way funding for ‘war without end does’ while any proposed extension of unemployment benefits is blocked by ‘partisan politics’…

How STUPID are you good citizen? You’d have to be pretty fucking dumb not to recognize what’s going on both in your name and right under your nose!

Just to give this particular drum another well deserved pounding, why is it that the LYING, CORPORATE OWNED MEDIA HASN’T BEEN BURNT TO THE GROUND?

Are reporters ‘blind’ or (and more likely) they are too fearful of ‘biting the hand that feeds them.’

Not that this admission does the rest of us any good.

So no, nobody would be more surprised than me to learn of even one media outlet ANYWHERE, being deliberately destroyed by angry consumers.

Ain’t going to happen and when it does, it will be attributed to ‘collateral damage’, the station burned down because the whole block burned down with it.

Which is to point out that the lying media wouldn’t admit to its own destruction unless it was impossible to deny.

Naturally, it is ‘inadvisable’ to stick around after committing an act of wanton destruction of private property no matter how ‘righteous’ the act was.

Sort of brings us full circle to that ‘bought and paid for’ government thing and how their ‘toadies’ ‘do as they’re told’ as opposed to doing what’s right.

There is a ‘flip side’ to this sudden, heavy handed ‘deterrent’ to travelling freely and that is the ‘Peak Energy’ issue.

In the not too distant future, only the very wealthy (who also happen to enjoy a certain ‘immunity’ from the tactics so freely employed against ‘lowlifes’ like you) will be able to afford to travel.

And AGAIN, the important distinction will be ‘how’ you derive your income…if you get a paycheck, you’re a ‘peasant’ but if you ‘own an income stream’, you’re one of the privileged few…

Um, Forgive me good citizen by ‘subtlety’ is not my strong suit…

Nor is what’s happening here particularly subtle by any stretch of the imagination.

Continue to believe in ‘THE BIG LIE’ at your own peril.

Naturally the question returns to ‘which big lie are you talking about?’

That should be the first ‘red flag’ good citizen. When there is so much (obvious) falsehood being transmitted by ‘official sources’ that one is uncertain which lie is the subject of the moment.

Well, let’s cut to the chase and go to the most persistent lie we’ve been told over the past forty years…that ‘everything is going to work out fine.’

There is no ‘happy ending’ waiting for you once you hit retirement age or any other age for that matter. Even a lottery jackpot contains your certain doom within it!

If you don’t use your fellow humans as an ‘income stream’, your goose is cooked!

A one time, huge pile of cash will do absolutely nothing for you good citizen because our entire economic system is based on faulty premises supported by ‘short-term thinking’.

Politicians regularly ‘gild the lily’; pretending things are more equitable than they are in reality, which is why I pull no punches with my proposal. It is what it says it is, it is both brutal AND fair.

We’d all love to believe that we could all get along with everybody else and be content with our share of what there is…but, there isn’t enough of ‘the best’ for all of us to enjoy.

So, who gets the dregs is the eternal contest of the moment…

We should not be put off by this distinction; even competition for ‘the dregs’ is fierce!

It’s that ‘serve in Heaven’ or ‘rule in Hell’ thing again…

Bizarrely, there is no shortage of people willing to do whatever it takes to make themselves ‘kings of the shit-heap!’

Yet again we encounter that dubious distinction between ‘famous’ and ‘infamous’…

Which is to point out that there isn’t a nickel’s worth of difference between a ‘serious person’ and a ‘seriously defective person(ality.’)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

It is time once again to remind you that I am not here to tell you what to think, I am here to provide you with something to think about!

Gegner