Seconded (post 1100)

Greetings good citizen,

While I am the local ‘crank’ who appears to be ‘discontent’ with just about EVERYTHING, on certain topics I am not alone.

Seems Mr. Chomsky agrees that we are on the brink and the current system of leadership (if that’s what you want to call it) is , er, ‘unacceptable’.

There are two issues of overwhelming significance, because the fate of the species is at stake: environmental disaster, and nuclear war. The former is regularly on the front pages. On Sept. 19, for example, Justin Gillis reported in The New York Times that the melting of Arctic sea ice had ended for the year, “but not before demolishing the previous record – and setting off new warnings about the rapid pace of change in the region.”

The melting is much faster than predicted by sophisticated computer models and the most recent U.N. report on global warming. New data indicate that summer ice might be gone by 2020, with severe consequences. Previous estimates had summer ice disappearing by 2050. “But governments have not responded to the change with any greater urgency about limiting greenhouse emissions,” Gillis writes.

“To the contrary, their main response has been to plan for exploitation of newly accessible minerals in the Arctic, including drilling for more oil” – that is, to accelerate the catastrophe. This reaction demonstrates an extraordinary willingness to sacrifice the lives of our children and grandchildren for short-term gain. Or, perhaps, an equally remarkable willingness to shut our eyes so as not to see the impending peril.

That’s hardly all.

A new study from the Climate Vulnerability Monitor has found that “climate change caused by global warming is slowing down world economic output by 1.6 percent a year and will lead to a doubling of costs in the next two decades.”

Okay, then he goes into an in depth look at the ‘nuclear hypocrisy’ being displayed by both the US and Israel.

Or the infamous ‘do as I say and not as I do’ doctrine.

I educate no one by saying this brand of ‘high-handedness’ has started more wars than any other single reason.

Or maybe it is me who is being obtuse when I recognize the fact that they have been simply itching for a reason to invade Iraq…and the disturbing question is who would stop them? [The ‘indefinite ‘them’ in this case is the military industrial/energy complex who brook no defiance to their desires. Wait, there’s just another dash of gasoline for this inferno, guess on whose behalf this complex operates?

But I don’t need to draw you pictures.

Unfortunately this backs us into the same old corner we’ve been backed into for the past thirty years.

You know which one I’m talking about, right?

It’s the ‘what are YOU gonna do about it’ corner.

And you will eventually have to accept if YOU don’t do ANYTHING about it, it won’t stop.

And as Mr. Chomsky points out, the survival of our species hangs in the balance.

Kind of funny really. We all know things will go downhill quickly when this ‘false peace’ gives way in a couple of months…then there will be nothing for it…because you literally will be ‘fighting for your life.’

Um, most of you probably haven’t noticed but the crap the Oil Drum keeps harping on…well, that shit is already happening.

Remember the second law of thermo dynamics? Also known as ‘the law of diminishing returns?

Simply put there is a point where you will expend more energy that you get back then extracting the energy is a counterproductive exercise.

They won’t admit it but we’re already there with these oil sands and oil shale.

We’re probably roughly level. We’re probably expending as much energy trying to mine these ‘incomplete’ energy sources as we are reaping from the effort.

Which is to say we are expending a barrel of oil to extract one…and that’s already a losing proposition…

But the fuckers HAVE NO CHOICE!

And they can’t let YOU know that we’ve reached the end of the line because it means abandoning everything north of the Tropic of Cancer and everything south of the Tropic of Capricorn!

The bad news is seven billion people AREN’T going to fit in that tiny space…(considering much of it is desert.)

WE COULD start a ‘crash’ program to build solar and wind facilities to offset our oil and coal energy plants, and we could also beef up our national rail system and rebuild our sailing ship industry…and you can even add ‘airships’ back into the mix.

But that would require a mindset that isn’t intent on the extermination more than half of the human race…which is what the >One Percent has determined it needs to do to maintain THEIR status (the rest of us can go pound!)

Which is to opine that the quicker we, er, liberate these 'owners of all they survey' from their leadership responsibilities and give them something more pressing to deal with (like survival: personal) the better off we will all be.

I can’t be that crazy if members of the ‘serious people’ crowd are echoing my sentiments…

But then again, crazy is ‘relative’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Energy and its addicts!

Greetings good citizen,

Markets are in barely positive territory for reasons as of yet unfathomable. Let it suffice to say the destruction of our civilization proceeds apace…

And it is the forces behind this destruction that are preventing desperately needed changes in our social psyche.

Fossil fuels were never ‘unlimited’ and we have finally reached a consensus that we are beyond the halfway point of consuming all there ever was.

One factor adding urgency to a deteriorating situation is our growing (and rapidly ‘Westernizing’) population.

If we don’t start switching to renewables soon there is going to be a major crisis.

Which maybe a bit ‘premature’, it appears we WILL experience a catastrophic financial meltdown BEFORE we are hit with a catastrophic energy shortage…

Ever wonder why, five years down the line that the only thing ANYBODY can think to do is ‘bail-out’ the banks?

Which is to ask the age old question, are they just plain stupid or do they think the rest of us are?

Um, not to go all shin-kicking or anything but this article (like most Alternet pieces) misses the mark by a wide margin.

We need an environmental movement that can put millions of people back to work, giving them the tools and the technologies they need to retrofit, re-engineer, and reboot the nation’s energy, water, and waste systems. Green-collar jobs can restore hope and opportunity to America’s failing middle-class and low-income families while honoring and healing the Earth. Those new jobs could create a ladder up and out of poverty for jobless urban residents. Under even the most depressing of scenarios, there certainly will be economic opportunities and green-collar jobs—from building dikes and levees and reconstructing devastated structures to installing community-owned wind turbines and operating renewable biofuel factories using regional feedstocks. The United States can fight global warming, energy scarcity, and poverty in the same stroke.

With 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States now produces 25 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas pollution. It also locks up 25 percent of the world’s prisoners in its domestic incarceration industry. Those numbers document the notion that too many U.S. businesses and political leaders govern as if we have both a disposable planet and disposable people.

As the new green economy springs to life, will we live in eco-equity or eco- apartheid? Will clean and green business flourish only in the rich, white parts of town? Will our kids be left to deal with the toxic wastes of polluting industries, the life-threatening diseases that decimate polluted communities, and the crushing lack of economic opportunity as the old polluting economy goes bust? How we answer these questions will impact the fate of billions of people.

The first thing this article suffers from is myopia, green energy will NOT make up the entire ‘new economy’.

The second thing this article ignores is ‘WHY’ nothing is being done about instituting ‘renewable energy alternatives’.

Do YOU know why (besides the bulk of the industry being based in China) green energy alternatives are ‘dead in the water’?

This ties directly to the irrational tendency of US (and foreign) auto manufacturers to persist in producing gas guzzling SUV’s and their doppelgangers, the ‘cross-over’.

(How friggin sad is it good citizen when the number of people a vehicle can bed down trumps its fuel economy?)

Why are these irrational policies persisting? Is Wall Street as deaf and blind as Washington?

You betcha!

Let’s roll the stock ticker back a few notches and have a look at why the richest people on the planet are rich.

The answer, invariably, is fossil fuels.

Why would the most powerful people on the planet ‘support’ alternative energy?

Short answer, they don’t.

But millions (if not billions) will die if we don’t convert to a sustainable energy source!

Talk to the hand little man!

This is that ‘entrenched power’ thing the feckless founders were always warning us about.

This shit was also completely preventable but the myopic greed heads didn’t want to lay down the necessary obstacles to what they thought their kids might be able to cash in on.

Add to this the disturbing episode of ‘Through the wormhole’ I saw last night. There the ‘opinion’ was expressed that people who felt they were not ‘in control’ compensated by ‘rationalizing’ their fears with conspiracy theories that were often the symptoms of mental illness.

How many of you think I’m mentally disturbed because I persist in pointing to a, ‘cartel’ that is controlling energy policy ‘worldwide’?

This is not the ‘Abra-cadabra brotherhood’, it is the ‘by-product’ of global capitalism!

Some nations have made great ‘progress’ in switching to alternative energy…because they don’t have a domestic source of fossil fuel under their control.

I fall back on the old standby, Just because (I am) you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they AREN’T out to get you!

But we digress.

The point I am making here is one where we will not, er, ‘enjoy’ renewable energy until the entrenched interests are uprooted and driven from their positions of power.

This will not happen until capitalism is replaced with a more equitable commercial system.

A Simple Plan, and idea whose time has come!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Exploitation

Greetings good citizen,

It is a proven fact there is more, er, ‘profit’ in treating the symptoms of various diseases than there is in providing a cure…thus do we have numerous ‘treatments’ and few ‘cures’.

How fucking sad is it good citizen that this is a prime example of capitalism in action?

Not that ‘exploitation of the situation’ is limited to the healthcare industry:

Profits on Carbon Credits Drive Output of a Harmful Gas

But where the United Nations envisioned environmental reform, some manufacturers of gases used in air-conditioning and refrigeration saw a lucrative business opportunity.

They quickly figured out that they could earn one carbon credit by eliminating one ton of carbon dioxide, but could earn more than 11,000 credits by simply destroying a ton of an obscure waste gas normally released in the manufacturing of a widely used coolant gas. That is because that byproduct has a huge global warming effect. The credits could be sold on international markets, earning tens of millions of dollars a year.

That incentive has driven plants in the developing world not only to increase production of the coolant gas but also to keep it high — a huge problem because the coolant itself contributes to global warming and depletes the ozone layer. That coolant gas is being phased out under a global treaty, but the effort has been a struggle.

This is the kind of thing that gives us millionaire farmers who grow nothing, although this variety of flagrant exploitation can be found throughout the worlds’ capitalist cultures.

How unfortunate is it for the rest of us that the world’s ‘capitalist cultures’ are restricted to the top > One Percent of the world’s population?

And make no mistake about it good citizen, these people are no smarter than you.

Why they get to exploit these situations and you don’t has more to their membership in a criminal network that they were born into than anything related to either luck or skill.

Worse, good citizen, is how these criminals are ‘one trick ponies’. When the surplus population gets too high they only have one solution for it and that is World War.

The ‘handwriting on the wall’ tells us that the next ‘global conflagration’ will center on the dual hubs of energy and food.

What vast majority of the global population is ignorant of the fact that large swaths of land we currently call ‘home’ will become uninhabitable during the winter months because we will lack the ‘cheap and abundant energy’ necessary to heat and light them.

Although we won’t necessarily be ‘out’ of them…it will just be a situation where a capitalist finds it ‘irresistible’ not to ‘take advantage’.

Who gives a fuck if billions die, there’s profits to be raked in!

Full Stop, good citizen.

Is THIS the kind of world YOU want to bring YOUR KIDS up in?

The > One percent have no problem with this because it won’t be THEIR KIDS SUFFERING!

Worse, the hard-hearted pricks will use their kid’s less fortunate cousins as an example of what will happen to them if they don’t adopt the hard line (and traditional) stance of ‘hooray for me and fuck everybody else!’

Even more sinister, they aren’t beyond ‘giving fate a hand’ when it comes to these nasty little scenarios.

We (in my opinion) desperately need to change our operating system, the status quo must go!

It was only viable when energy was cheap and abundant…now that energy is neither; the solution is NOT a return to feudalism…although that is the solution seen by those who can’t conceive of a society without slavery.

Yes good citizen, the > One Percent is more than just a pox on society, it represents everything that is wrong with our species.

A Simple Plan eradicates the One Percent. It also eradicates the criminal from birth society.

Do you want to give your kids a chance to live life their way? (Within reason.)

You won’t find a better vehicle to achieve that goal than A Simple Plan.

And if A Simple Plan ever becomes oppressive, it has been hijacked by the self-interested…and a ‘counter-revolution’ is already underway!

Equality fosters justice and justice fosters peace…and peace fosters prosperity.

That’s the equation and it can’t be deviated from.

Naturally, opponents of equality will lead the charge for change with a direct appeal to the personal ‘I’ in all of us…but this life isn’t about me or you, it’s first and foremost about ‘us’.

Putting personal prosperity first is a recipe for universal poverty…because for some people the wealth of an entire planet is not enough!

Ironically, that is how the ‘invitation only’ (met in secret and under armed guard) ‘founders’ justified THEIR theft.

‘We have all we want and want no more’ (a vicious lie than made even more vicious now by lying liars!)

And they proceeded to do nothing more than cement their theft of public property with a system of government designed solely to protect ‘ownership rights’.

A corrupt system we have, trust me, ‘suffered’ under for more than 230 years.

Every once in a while journalists are given an opportunity to cast a feeble light on the shit hole we live in I jump on it whenever I see an opening.

Naturally, a blogger’s lot is ‘triage’. I can’t write about everything and important is an extremely, er, ‘relative’ term.

Today’s post is nothing ‘new’, just a rare glimpse of the mud puddle we wallow in as we try to eek out a living and keep our families from starving to death.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Walk Backwards...

Greetings good citizen,

It’s been a while since I wrote a ‘free-form’ opinion piece on a topic not in the headlines, er, per se.

I watched National Geographic’s ‘Doomsday Preppers’ last night and it was quite a trip.

They took each ‘clan’ as a group and even provided what they were supposedly ‘prepping’ for.

From a ‘casting’ point of view it was a bonanza! From a credibility point of view, not so much.

Although I think one of the, er, ‘statistics’ they flashed in the second episode provides us with a hint as to why the exec’s at Nat’l Geo green lighted such an unlikely project.

More then fifty percent of US citizens (and probably even more ‘Americans’) fear a ‘financial collapse’ in the next twenty-five years!

Which is weird because anybody who has been paying attention already KNOWS the global financial system is totally ‘insolvent’ and has been to the last three years!

The ONLY thing keeping the lights on and the doors open is ‘creative accounting’!

Without those ‘off-balance sheet’ entries, we’d be fucked! (And guess who CAN’T get away with, er, ‘hiding’ their losses? That’s right…got a mirror?)

Did I mention that YOU are being ‘cheated’?

Just something to keep in the back of your mind as you stumble along, trying to get by here in ‘Wonderland’…

Um, to their credit, Nat’l Geo didn’t play ‘favorites’, they ‘dissed’ every prepper’s claims of pending disaster, regardless of, er, ‘plausibility’.

It was also curious to see that of the 8 ‘vignettes’ I watched last night, 5 of them were ‘fiscal mismanagement’ related.

So by ‘simple majority’ MOST ‘preppers’ are worried about the same thing!

(I find that ‘comforting’ because it indicates more people are ‘paying attention’ than the corporate owned media would have you believe!)

Which is neither here nor there. While many of these survivor groups doubled as ‘networks’, survival/personal is pretty much an ‘all you’ proposition. Some of the ‘well prepared’ (people with years of food for dozens of people) have figured the encounter with the occasional stranger into their ‘survival budget’ but most ‘preppers’ were hard pressed to lay enough aside to meet their own needs, even for a little while.

Only one of last night’s ‘preppers’ followed the, er, ‘correct’ path of survival, ‘don’t have anything worth getting killed for’ (just don’t do it!)

It would literally be a ‘waste of good lead’ to shoot this guy for what he had, (and that’s the way to do it!) He is ALREADY ‘living off the land’, surviving on wild edibles!

He’ll be living even better once the bureaucracy that prevents you from picking up nature’s bounty for yourself (without a license) goes away!

If you don’t have a license to fish, hunt or dig clams, you are legally ‘poaching’ and can be locked up for it!

Not that disputes over ‘whose’ (fill in the variety of wildlife) will, er, ‘end’ once civil order collapses…they’ll just be ‘settled’ in a more immediate and absolute manner.

Which is to advocate the ‘buddy system’, never go fishing, hunting, digging alone (unless you’re the stealthiest son of a bitch in the valley!) Always bring a guard/lookout!

Always ‘assume’ someone else thinks what you’ve found is ‘theirs’ and will be willing to kill you to protect it.

This extends, unreasonably enough, to game ‘on the hoof’. Let word get out that you bagged a deer and don’t be surprised when a group of, er, ‘collectors’ show up on your doorstep, looking for a fee (the balance of the meat and, at the very least, the hyde!)

You’ll be able to tell because they will arrive, loudly pronouncing ‘We don’t want any trouble’ which is code for, We came to make trouble for YOU! (PLEASE wait until we have dismounted our loud, rumbling bikes that are intended to scare the shit out of YOU before you start shooting!)

While we’re here it is a good idea to advise your guards to FIRE WITHOUT HESITATION on anyone STUPID enough to try intimidating you with a fucking motorcycle!

You cannot ride a motorcycle and shoot at the same time!

Here’s another tidbit, for the most part, handguns are USELESS if you aren’t literally on top of your target (within twenty feet.) At 75 feet, your just as well off throwing the fucking thing!

And the only weapon you can fire while riding a motorcycle…is a handgun!

Even then you’re still ‘shooting from the hip’ (meaning you’re not taking the time to ‘aim’.) If you hit somebody it is sheer luck!

But enough ‘nonsense’! (although what would one of my posts be if I DIDN’T digress wildly?)

In a word, boring!

Before we got carried away with defensive strategy we were discussing the, er, ‘likelihood’ of financial collapse.

Since all money is funny and our civilization is extremely poorly managed, the ‘trigger’ of a financial collapse will NOT be financial, it will be resource related!

So is it ‘all good’ until we run our of gypsum? (I’m ragging on you here, you know I‘m referring to oil!)

More importantly, will we really be ‘out’ when the managers of our society claim we are, er, ‘short’?

The answer here is NO.

We only just recently passed the estimated ‘half-way’ mark…there is, for now, plenty of oil.

The problem is there soon won’t be. The number of end users is growing exponentially!

How do they ‘fix’ runaway demand on a finite, dwindling resource?

Er, ‘reduce the number of end users?’

Simply enough this would mean pricing oil prohibitively!

But how can you do that without freezing two-thirds of the world’s population to death?

Our entire ‘social model’ is based on ‘cheap abundant energy’ when energy is neither cheap nor abundant, it falls apart, literally collapses!

Very much like the song that tells how the parts of the body are linked by the skeleton, our economy is inseparably linked via energy!

Without energy the entire supply chain literally falls apart.

Knowing this, how wise is/was it to eliminate ‘redundancy’ throughout the supply chain and move to ‘on demand, just in time’ production protocols?

Looks batshit insane if you ask me but unlike our highly compensated MBA’s, I’m looking at the situation from a ‘practical’ point of view and not from a ‘quarterly profit’ perspective.

Did I mention that our civilization is badly mismanaged?

I’ve said this multiple times before and I’ll say it a thousand more times, NONE of this is an ‘accident’! If I were a prosecuting attorney, a ‘murder one conviction’ would be a lead pipe cinch!

There’s ‘pre-meditation’ everywhere you look, so it will be laughable to see the billions of people who are ‘blindsided’ by the coming collapse!

Remember ‘globalization’ was NOT done FOR you, it has been done TO YOU!

We’re in ‘overtime’ here so I’ll try to wrap this up.

Returning to our energy problem and the inability to use ‘price’ to stretch out the energy supply we have another budget problem connected to energy, the cost of producing and harvesting/transporting food.

Since energy is literally ‘dollars’, the higher the cost of energy translates directly into the cost of food! Hyper-inflation results when the cost of living outstrips worker’s purchasing power!

Followed closely by the collapse of civil order…something they are narrowly avoiding in Greece at the moment…

Oh, and if Israel attacks Iran. AND the Iranians close the straits of Hormuz…instant ‘shit soup!

How’s JIT looking for ya now?

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

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

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

Grim and Grimmer

Greetings good citizen,

Since all money is funny, the world’s credit system ISN’T about to collapse (although there is absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t, we are, beyond any reasonable doubt, bankrupt in every possible sense of the word!)

With that as a given we once again come full circle to the deeply perplexing question of just who, precisely, is the ‘opposition’?

Mr. Rich gives us a peek in this weeks editorial that shines a spotlight on a new political party called the ‘no label’ movement.

Neither ‘right’ nor ‘left’, the no labelers describe themselves as ‘centrists’, just like Bill Clinton.

Um, Mr. Rich does not point to Mr. Clinton in his editorial as even being involved with this new ‘alternative’ but if Billy Boy had a ‘claim to fame’, being a ‘centrist’ was it.

The ability to map out the mythical ‘middle ground’ between the left and the right (and it was usually farther to the right than most lefties were comfortable with.) was Clinton’s trademark talent. Through political ‘triangulation’ he’d get a Republican dominated Congress to do his bidding.

Although in all fairness, Billy boy has been called the ‘best Republican president this nation has had in many years.’

And once again, his actions speak considerably louder and truer than his ‘lukewarm apologies’ do (because fuck head has had to apologize for 90% of what he did during his two terms as president…but hey, ‘puppets’ commonly find themselves ‘at odds’ with their ‘legacies’.)

Just as Obama will find himself at odds with the train wreck that occurred on his watch.

At least the ‘betrayals’ of the next two years will by justified by the Republican majority in the House.

And I’m here to tell you that this is just ‘window dressing’ too.

The Republicans didn’t win back the House; the (CO) media handed it to them.

Something the multi-national corporate crowd will keep on doing until all of the corporate owned media outlets spontaneously combust.

Don’t laugh; that day is probably closer than you might think!

So good citizen, just ‘who’ is the ‘enemy’? Who is the opponent that can’t be reasoned with? If we were to listen to the CO media, it is BOTH mainstream political parties.

Although logic tells us that the corporate crowd gutted the Left wing by eviscerating the unions that made up their base.

Not that this happened in a vacuum, there were plenty of ‘opportunists’ that were more than willing to sell the unions down the river for what turned out to be ‘short money’.

Real short money to the crowd that prints as much as it wants!

But this still doesn’t provide us with an answer. Who would decimate our economy AND destroy our way of life just to stretch out their control of the global economy?

Let me give you a hint…our entire way of life is predicated (based) on ‘cheap and abundant energy.’ When energy is neither, our entire socio-economic model collapses.

UNDERSTAND that without energy MOST of you literally couldn’t do what you do and the rest can’t keep doing what they do for very long because the places people live in become uninhabitable after a few days of no energy.

With this as a given we really SHOULD be doing everything in our power to convert to a more sustainable way of life but NO! That’s not happening and do you really have to wonder why?

The cocksuckers that have you by the short hairs don’t want to relinquish their control over the rest of us.

It is, sadly, that ‘serve in heaven or rule in hell’ thing again… and you can guess which direction they decided to pursue.

Yeah, they see no reason to stop ‘ruling’ us (even though millions will die!)

You see, the bastards ‘owe it to their kids’…your kids can go fuck themselves!

As long as you don’t figure out who is putting the screws to you, you can’t fight back…and that’s how they want it!

Um, as grim as this is, it is far preferable to the alternative. An alternative that says we as a species are too immature to manage our own affairs and if left to our own devices, we WILL destroy ourselves.

Understand that the immature few that are currently in charge of things BECAUSE of their ‘nominal ownership’ of our energy supply are indeed too infantile to accept the end of their reign over the rest of us.

Does ANYBODY own this planet’s energy supply good citizen?

Sadly, some people THINK that they do and that’s all it takes.

We are currently playing a (deadly serious) ‘game’ of stick ‘em up!

If we fail to neutralize this threat to our species the whole situation could (needlessly) get out of hand.

Left to your own judgment is whether or not my ‘assessment’ of the situation is overblown of if I’ve underestimated the danger.

As I have mentioned before, our ‘worst case scenario’ is one where the government simply dissolves itself and nothing takes its place, leaving us in an effective ‘Wild, Wild West where the ones with the guns make the rules.

And there will be a lot of people with guns in the first few weeks of the power vacuum, so there will be a lot of new (and mostly temporary) ‘rules’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Save Yourself!

Greetings good citizen,

Considering what usually passes for Spring around here I confess myself ‘amazed’ at it’s early arrival! It is not unusual to get hit with snowstorms of 20 inches or more during the month of April in this neck of the woods, so please pretend this comment is a whisper so as not to invite Mother Nature’s wrath…

On the other hand, this region is widely recognized as the home of ‘the world’s worst weather’. Not only does it get hot (and humid) enough to take your breath away but it also gets cold enough to give you frostbite in seconds! (Usually not in the same day, but hey, what do you want? The weather already sucks enough without having to put up with that!)

If you don’t like the weather in New England…wait a minute.

(So much for the update.)

While it is ‘difficult’ to comprehend this early beautiful spring weather as the direct result of ‘global warming’ (Spring is seldom reason to celebrate around here, it is usually ‘raw and rainy’ until June, when the weather, trust me, ‘suddenly’ turns hot and humid.) It is not very difficult at all for the average New Englander to imagine this region being under a mile thick sheet of ice as recently as 3,000 years ago.

Anyway, what does tonight’s offering have to do with the weather?

Um, the weather is only half of picture; renewable energy takes up a big hunk of the rest. The real ‘head scratcher’ here is what the economic landscape will look like ten to fifteen years from now when energy becomes ‘too precious’ to transport goods around the world?

[Purloined from: Some Assembly Required]

‘Green Gone Wrong’: Can Capitalism Save the Planet?

By DEVIN LEONARD
Published: April 2, 2010

IT may seem quaint to recall this now, but on the eve of the financial crisis, one of the biggest business stories was how large corporations were going to save the planet and make billions of dollars for their shareholders at the same time. [Or so the ‘free marketers’ would still have you believe! The major flaw in this meme is people, contrary to FM doctrine. Are NOT ‘made of money’, which is the only way this arrangement was ever going to work!]

USA Today wrote glowingly about Wal-Mart’s push to sell environmentally friendly light bulbs. Fortune gushed that Goldman Sachs, Continental Airlines and DuPont had jumped on the ecological bandwagon. [Capitalist cheerleaders are tireless in their enthusiasm for a system that shamelessly exploits its victims.]

The global economic collapse pushed the rise of green capitalism off business magazine covers, but it will surely resurface. After all, Wal-Mart and G.E. are still pushing it. In a recession, they need all the good publicity they can get.

Now, along comes Heather Rogers, who warns about the dangers of buying into this mind-set with “Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution” (Scribner, 272 pages, $26). She says green capitalism is actually undermining ecological progress. [Notice how Heather is tarred within a single sentence of her introduction!]

Ms. Rogers is a muckraking investigative reporter who is also the author of “Gone Tomorrow: the Hidden Life of Garbage.” She says corporate America has led us into thinking that we can save the earth mainly by buying things like compact fluorescent light bulbs, hybrid gas-electric cars and carbon offsets. [If we can’t save ‘the earth, at the very least we can breath life into the retail sector! It’s the ‘capitalist’ thing to do!]

“The new green wave, typified by the phrase ‘lazy environmentalism,’ is geared toward the masses that aren’t willing to sacrifice,” Ms. Rogers complains. “This brand of armchair activism actualizes itself most fully in the realm of consumer goods; through buying the right products we can usher our economic system into the environmental age.” [What are they saying! You mean WE CAN’T ‘buy our way’ out of this? We’re so freaking Doomed! Arrgggh!]

Ms. Rogers offers plenty of evidence that consumers who load up their shopping carts with organic food, for instance, may be unwittingly subsidizing big farm companies that are eradicating forests and defiling the soil in some developing countries. She says their governments aren’t as concerned about the environment, and well intentioned non-governmental organizations don’t have much clout.

“Green Gone Wrong,” to be released later this month, doesn’t just go after easy targets like big corporations that she says are clearly more interested in making money than saving the earth. [And what’s wrong with that? It’s the ‘capitalist way’! All good patriots should boycott this piece of socialist filth when it hits the bookshelves! New readers should be advised to turn their ‘snark meters’ up to ‘high’. Gegner is an Anarchist!]

She is also critical of fashionably green rock bands like Coldplay, whose members fly around the world and think they can erase their sizable carbon footprints by planting trees in developing countries. In Coldplay’s case, many of the trees died. [Sort of redefines the term ‘lip service’ doesn’t it?]

Indeed, Ms. Rogers is so scornful of the mainstream environmental movement that a lot of her points could be used by its enemies, like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, who are always looking for ammunition.

Even if you don’t agree with all of Ms. Rogers’ assertions — and I don’t — they are not so easily dismissed. “Green Gone Wrong” is well-written and exhaustively reported. The author went to places like Uruguay, Borneo and India to show problems she says the green movement has inadvertently created. [Okay, ‘snark off’, unlike Devin, I tend to agree with Ms. Rogers ‘mindset’, not having specific knowledge of her assessment.]

But some of the most poignant moments come when Ms. Rogers visits organic farmers in upstate New York. She laments that they can’t make a living because it is so expensive for them to comply with the federal certification requirements for organic foods. “What isn’t being talked about is that many of the small organic producers who are expected to lead the reinvention of the food system can barely make ends meet,” she says.

Like many books that depict a crisis, “Green Gone Wrong” falls short when it comes to offering solutions. All too predictably, Ms. Rogers calls for higher taxes and government spending. That sounds like wishful thinking after the Democratic majority on Capitol Hill struggled to pass health care reform. [If we substitute ‘resource allocation’ for ‘taxes’ we may accomplish a lot more than the needy greedy ‘supply chain’ will allow us to achieve.]

It would have been better had Ms. Rogers delved more deeply into another of her suggestions: instead of buying green, we simply need to buy less stuff. She seems reluctant to push this too hard because it’s a truly radical idea that flies in the face of capitalism — green or not. [How many of you think both of then are wrong? It’s not about the ‘buying and selling’ its about ‘producability’ and more efficient distribution. No irony should be lost on the fact that the supply chain itself offers the greatest potential for increased efficiency!]

“Around the world, many politicians, the conventional energy sector and manufacturers of all kinds oppose any major reduction in consumption,” Ms. Rogers writes. “If people start using less, then economies based on consumption — such as that of the United States, where buying goods and services comprises 70 percent of all economic activity — will be forced to undergo a colossal transformation.” [Again, no irony should be lost on the fact that if done correctly this ‘transformation’ would yield huge positive social benefits!]

At first, her muted call for a new frugality sounds almost as far-fetched as a carbon tax in the United States anytime soon. But it isn’t. This is something individuals could do on their own instead of waiting for reluctant politicians to act. [Um, appealing to your ‘better nature’ isn’t going to solve much. Most of us have very little choice when it comes to the products we buy, our budgets prohibit ‘social righteousness’.]

If there was ever a time to ponder the long-term consequences of our spending habits, it’s in the wake of the worst economic crisis in decades, which was fueled by rampant consumer borrowing. Is it possible that we could save the planet and restore the economy at the same time?

Where does the NY Times dig ‘em up? Is one of the job qualifications ‘mindless synchopant?’

Does anyone else see the disturbing implications of Mr. Leonard’s observations? What do you suppose will happen to an already ‘starved’ supply chain if calls to ‘buy less’ produce results?

Understand, the giants actually want you to buy less…less of their competitors products! When the competition (such as it is) is gone, you’ll have no choice but to pay their prices.

But naturally, the editors at the NY Times think YOU are STUPID. (It’s a really sad indictment to add that most of the time, they’re right!)

Getting back to ‘opinions’ here good citizen, it is mine that capitalism will NOT succeed in saving itself, never mind anything else!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Political Suicide...

Greetings good citizen,

Can you say ‘KA-BLAM’?

Why would I ask this? Isn’t that the sound commonly associated with blowing one’s own foot off?

Um, if I’m not mistaken, it was the party of whack jobs who LOST the last election by screaming ‘Drill here, drill now!’

Um, let me first dispel any illusion that drilling for oil off of America’s seacoast is going to result in more/cheaper oil for US consumers. That oil will be sold on global markets for the current global price. [Nobody is going to cheat those oil speculators out of their ‘cut’!]

Again, if I remember correctly, Bobo didn’t ‘campaign’ on (decidedly unpopular) expanded oil exploration, he ran on the promise of ‘energy independence’. Specifically laying out a policy of pursuing ‘alternative energy’ as a ‘two-edged sword’ which would create jobs as well as wean us off of our ‘dangerous’ dependence on foreign oil…

What do you suppose happened to that idea?

You don’t think the ‘Banksters’ slapped him upside the head and wagged their finger in his face while they told him, ‘You can’t do that! Do you know how much we have invested in Chinese wind technology? If you’re gonna ‘go green’, you’re gonna go green OUR way!

But still, after losing the last election, where the fuck did ‘Drill here, Drill now! Re-surface from?

If you ask me, Peak Oil ‘deniers’ appear to be running out of ammunition.

Obama Details Plan to Open Offshore Areas to Oil Drilling

By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: March 31, 2010

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Wednesday described his proposal to open vast expanses of American coastlines to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time, as a painful but necessary decision.

He said that his plan to allow drilling along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska — ending a longstanding moratorium on exploration from the northern tip of Delaware to the central coast of Florida, covering 167 million acres of ocean — would balance the need to produce more domestic energy while protecting natural resources. [!] But it is also intended to generate revenue from the sale of offshore leases and help win political support for comprehensive energy and climate legislation. [What part of ‘sold on the global market’ do they think the public doesn’t get? Never mind that one of the ‘dangers’ of peak oil is the end of ‘cheap and easy’. It’s that last part that really rattles my feeble noggin’, how the hell does drilling more fossil fuel ‘help’ the environment?]

While Mr. Obama has staked out middle ground on other environmental matters — supporting nuclear power, for example — the sheer breadth of the offshore drilling decision will take some of [?] his supporters aback. And it is no sure thing that it will win support for a climate bill from undecided senators close to the oil industry, like Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, or Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana. [It’s safe to say that Bobo has ‘accepted’ the idea he won’t be re-elected so he’s dropping all pretense that he ever supported the progressive agenda. Looks like Bobo is going to give Billy-Boy a run for his money when it comes to the title of ‘best Republican president’. If this isn’t W’s third term then you could sure fool me!]

“This is not a decision that I’ve made lightly,” [Excuse me? Did you think about it for a whole ten minutes or did we get it the same way you did ‘This has been a public service announcement, so STFU!] the president said in prepared remarks in a speech on energy security. “But the bottom line is this: given our energy needs, in order to sustain economic growth, produce jobs, and keep our businesses competitive, we’re going to need to harness traditional sources of fuel even as we ramp up production of new sources of renewable, homegrown energy.” [Um, let’s suppose they aren’t yanking our crank and we will soon find ourselves in a world suddenly devoid of oil that people/nations are willing to sell. Talk about your screeching halt, the ‘whiplash’ alone would kill millions! That’s the only way this meme of ‘we need to enlarge our personal oil reserves’ makes any sense.]

But Jacqueline Savitz of the environmental group Oceana countered on Wednesday: “We’re appalled that the president is unleashing a wholesale assault on the oceans. Expanding offshore drilling is the wrong move if the Obama administration is serious about improving energy security, creating lasting jobs and averting climate change.”

Under the plan, the coastline from New Jersey northward would remain closed to all oil and gas activity. So would the Pacific Coast, from Mexico to the Canadian border.

The environmentally sensitive Bristol Bay in southwestern Alaska would be protected and no drilling would be allowed under the plan, officials said. But large tracts in the Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska — nearly 130 million acres — would be eligible for exploration and drilling after extensive studies.

To critics who already were branding the decision both unnecessary and a threat to the environment, Mr. Obama said in his remarks: “There will be those who strongly disagree with this decision, including those who say we should not open any new areas to drilling, But what I want to emphasize is that this announcement is part of a broader strategy that will move us from an economy that runs on fossil fuels and foreign oil to one that relies more on homegrown fuels and clean energy. And the only way this transition will succeed is if it strengthens our economy in the short term and long term. To fail to recognize this reality would be a mistake.” [Um, there is ‘no way’ they are going to succeed in keeping any oil found within our coastal waterways for ourselves…and it’s ‘fucking stupid’ to even entertain the idea!]

On the other hand, oil industry officials and Republicans in Congress claimed the president did not go far enough in making domestic resources available for exploitation.

House Republican Leader John Boehner on Wednesday criticized the administration for keeping the vast majority of America’s offshore energy resources off limits at a time when, the Ohio representative said, Americans want an “all of the above” strategy for promoting American energy production and creating American jobs. [Jesus! Either Beanie-boy is an absolute moron or he thinks the rest of us are! Like Obama’s ‘shovel ready’ projects, all this strategy will accomplish is to provide ‘job security’ for the relative handful of people already employed in energy exploration. Just as ‘Shovel ready’ provided job security for people already employed in roadway maintenance.]

Mr. Obama tried to answer that criticism as well.

“They’d deny the fact that with less than 2 percent of oil reserves, but more than 20 percent of world consumption, drilling alone cannot come close to meeting our long-term energy needs,” he said, “and that for the sake of the planet and our energy independence, we need to begin the transition to cleaner fuels now.” [So why the fuck is num-num instituting ‘drill here, drill now?]

“Ultimately,” he concluded, “we need to move beyond the tired debates between right and left, between business leaders and environmentalists, between those who would claim drilling is a cure all and those who would claim it has no place. Because this issue is just too important to allow our progress to languish while we fight the same old battles over and over again.“ [What a crock of crap! There is NO WAY there are going to drill their way to ‘energy independence’ AND keep it for themselves! And if they did the ‘blow-back’ would be incalculable! Think we have ‘terrorist problems’ now, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!]

The Senate is expected to take up a climate bill in the next few weeks — the last chance to enact such legislation before midterm election concerns take over. [I’m not even going to go there, these idiotic attempts at bipartisanship are beyond pathetic!]

Mr. Obama and his allies in the Senate have already made significant concessions on coal and nuclear power to try to win votes from Republicans and moderate Democrats. The new plan now grants one of the biggest items on the oil industry’s wish list — access to vast areas of the Outer Continental Shelf for drilling. [The citizens of the US WANT the WAR to end…what do we get? Off-shore drilling (along with an off-shored economy!) WTF!!!]

But even as Mr. Obama curries favors with pro-drilling interests, he risks a backlash from some coastal governors, senators and environmental advocates, who say that the relatively small amounts of oil to be gained in the offshore areas are not worth the environmental risks.

The Obama administration’s plan adopts some drilling proposals floated by President George W. Bush near the end of his tenure, including opening much of the Atlantic and Arctic Coasts. Those proposals were challenged in court on environmental grounds and set aside by President Obama shortly after he took office.

Unlike the Bush plan, however, Mr. Obama’s proposal would put Bristol Bay, home to major Alaskan commercial fisheries and populations of endangered whales, off limits to oil rigs.

Actual drilling in much of the newly opened areas, if it takes place, would not begin for years. [And when it does begin people will be so desperate for oil they won’t give a damn about the environmental risks.]

Mr. Obama said several times during his presidential campaign that he supported expanded offshore drilling. He noted in his State of the Union address in January that weaning the country from imported oil would require “tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development.” [He did? Funny how the media ‘glosses over’ certain topics so they won’t upset powerful advertisers.]

Perhaps in anticipation of controversy, the new policy has been closely held within the administration. White House and Interior Department officials began briefing members of Congress and local officials in affected states late Tuesday.

It is not known how much potential fuel lies in the areas opened to exploration, although according to Interior Department estimates there could be as much as a three-year supply of recoverable oil and more than two years’ worth of natural gas, at current rates of consumption. [This number is not ‘static’ so actual yields could be dramatically lower.] But those estimates are based on seismic data that is, in some cases, more than 30 years old.

The first lease sale off the coast of Virginia could occur as early as next year in a triangular tract 50 miles off the coast that had already been approved for development but was held up by a court challenge and additional Interior Department review, officials said.

But as a result of the Obama decision, the Interior Department will spend several years conducting geologic and environmental studies along the rest of the southern and central Atlantic Seaboard. If a tract is deemed suitable for development, it is listed for sale in a competitive bidding system. The next lease sales — if any are authorized by the Interior Department — would not be held before 2012. [Um, Aren’t these the same leases that go ‘unpaid’ year after year because ‘nobody’ is in charge of collecting the fee?]

The eastern Gulf of Mexico tract that would be offered for lease is adjacent to an area that already contains thousands of wells and hundreds of drilling platforms. The eastern Gulf area is believed to contain as much as 3.5 billion barrels of oil and 17 trillion cubic feet of gas, the richest single tract that would be open to drilling under the Obama plan.

Drilling there has been strongly opposed by officials from both political parties in Alabama and Florida who fear damage to coastlines, fisheries, popular beaches and wildlife. Interior Department officials said no wells would be allowed within 125 miles of the Florida and Alabama coasts, making them invisible from shore.

The Interior Department and the Pentagon are discussing possible restrictions on oil and gas operations in some areas off Virginia and Florida, home to some of the nation’s biggest Navy and Air Force facilities. States are also likely to claim rights to the revenues from oil and gas deposits within 3 to 12 miles of shore and to some portion of lease proceeds, officials said. [Too bad for the States that the oil industry is a notoriously poor payer AND very tightly politically ‘connected’.]

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar developed the offshore drilling plan after conducting four public meetings over the past year in Alaska, California, Louisiana and New Jersey. The Interior Department received more than 500,000 public comments on the issue. [Um and they only met with officials from four states! Talk about ‘political suicide’, now the general public knows what they’re up to!]

Mr. Salazar has said that he hoped to rebalance the nation’s oil and gas policy to find a middle ground between the “drill here drill now” advocacy of many oil industry advocates and the preservationist impulse to block oil exploration beneath virtually all public lands and waters. [Understand good citizen, the ‘public’ has been routinely ‘swindled’ out of the income these so-called ‘leases’ generate, and if you think that’s about to change I’ve got a bridge you might be interested in…]

He has called the offshore drilling plan a new chapter in the nation’s search for a comprehensive energy policy that can open new areas to oil and gas development “in the right way and in the right places,” according to an aide. [Despite being termed as ‘right/proper’ what we are really seeing is the ‘second phase’ of worldwide oil extraction…the easy to get at and refine stuff is spent, now it’s time to go after the stuff that’s harder to reach and more expensive to bring up.]

In many of the newly opened areas, drilling would begin only after the completion of geologic studies, environmental impact statements, court challenges and public lease sales. Much of the oil and gas may not be recoverable at current prices and may be prohibitively expensive even if oil prices spike as they did in the summer of 2008.

Um, I don’t know about you good citizen, but I certainly didn’t see that coming! Worse, there are several ‘off the wall’ assertions being made here that are outright lies!

Naturally, they are politicians and this is to be expected. Perhaps we need to take a moment and mourn the loss of anything even resembling ‘subtlety’

What disturbs me most is the increasing sense of ‘desperation’ being displayed by the ‘spin-masters’…they’re losing control of the lies and they’re not quite sure what to do about it.

Sorry good citizen but any of you that doubted ‘peak oil’; this is the ‘convincer’. It is what would logically follow passing the half-way mark in ‘known reserves’.

More, er, diabolical is there have been people staring down this hole for a long time, doing precisely what we’re doing here, trying to figure out what comes next and what comes after that.

Let it suffice to say that you can only see just so far ahead with any degree of certainty. The trouble with variables is they are indeed ‘variable’.

The next decade will witness a ‘rush’ of alternative energy, stretching out fossil fuel supplies into the near future…what is unknown is how ‘reliable’ renewables will be in practice as opposed to theory.

If the parts prove to need replacement on too frequent a basis, you put yourself right back where you started with a ‘resource shortage’.

Going after the ‘harder to extract' oil is, er, frightening enough because the next ‘stop’ on this dead-end railroad is governed by price, where the ‘cost’ of extracting the fuel exceeds the benefit reaped from harvesting it. (Meaning you use more energy than you extract.)

Bizarrely this is one instance where ‘cost’ has absolutely nothing to do with dollars and cents.

You can’t expend ten ‘joules’ of energy to harvest a single joule, even nature respects the laws of mathematics/diminishing returns.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wind Power

Greetings good citizen,

There is nothing more infuriating than observing the kabuki dance of international ‘uncompetitiveness’ as it is played out against the backdrop of currency manipulation. In some respects, the chutzpah of the MSM to even run an article like this one takes the breath away.

Worse are the false claims of politicians that ‘alternative energy’ is the engine capable of returning our empire to greatness. (The fallacy here lies with the word ‘our’.) Investors in Chinese alternative energy will most certainly wax very wealthy indeed. Great for them, sucks for US. (Double-entendre intentional.)

I’ll jump on my ‘socialist’ high horse for a moment to condemn the irrational practice of placing private investment ahead of the public good. The ‘lowest bidder’ only benefits those who can play, everybody else gets the shaft!

This equipment will be sold to public utilities for a profit, who will in turn, charge their customers a premium so the utility can pay their bond owners a ‘dividend’…the unanswered question here is why these ‘middlemen’ are allowed access at all?

Our civilization is collapsing because too many ‘parasites’ are baked in to every deal, both public and private. No irony should be lost on the fact that every (I hesitate to call them this but) ‘Great’ civilization throughout history has crumbled for precisely this reason.

The ‘Great Contradiction’ of capitalism is the impossibility of pursuing your own interests AND those of the society. What’s ‘good’ for you is ultimately ‘bad’, not just for some but for many (if not most) others. For every opportunity created there are a thousand denied.

Ownership don’t float in a universe of limited resources…and we only have a single planet to work with here!

Anyway, I’ll give it a rest and you can make up our own mind about tonight’s offering

China Leading Global Race to Make Clean Energy

By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: January 30, 2010

TIANJIN, China — China vaulted past competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States last year to become the world’s largest maker of wind turbines, and is poised to expand even further this year.

China has also leapfrogged the West in the last two years to emerge as the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. And the country is pushing equally hard to build nuclear reactors and the most efficient types of coal power plants. [Is this a case of those ‘clever’ Chinamen…or those fucking traitorous, cheapskate capitalists? No irony whatsoever should be lost on the fact that China still claims, er, ‘loyalty’ to Communist principles. The ‘People’ are doing very well, just some more so than others…but I digress.]

These efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China. [Why do you suppose investors think that? Could it be because even the oil industry is now admitting that demand is outstripping supply?]

“Most of the energy equipment will carry a brass plate, ‘Made in China,’ ” said K. K. Chan, the chief executive of Nature Elements Capital, a private equity fund in Beijing that focuses on renewable energy. [What do you suppose would be revealed if we ‘scratched the surface’ of this ‘vulture fund’? Who do you think we’d find under there?]

President Obama, in his State of the Union speech last week, sounded an alarm that the United States was falling behind other countries, especially China, on energy. “I do not accept a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders — and I know you don’t either,” he told Congress. [Yet ‘Uncle Tom’ hasn’t lifted a single finger to put a stop to the ongoing off-shoring of US jobs. Worse, the traitorous corporations who engage in this reprehensible practice have yet to have their (corporate) charters or their patents revoked! But, naturally, that wouldn’t be very ‘business friendly’…so what, exactly, is wrong with these idiots?]

The United States and other countries are offering incentives to develop their own renewable energy industries, and Mr. Obama called for redoubling American efforts. Yet many Western and Chinese executives expect China to prevail in the energy-technology race. [Currency manipulation…plain and simple, otherwise Chinese workers would starve to death.]

Multinational corporations are responding to the rapid growth of China’s market by building big, state-of-the-art factories in China. [Don’t suppose that has something to do with it, do you?] Vestas of Denmark has just erected the world’s biggest wind turbine manufacturing complex here in northeastern China, and transferred the technology to build the latest electronic controls and generators. [Thwack! That’s the sound of investors kicking you in the gonads (or where your gonads should be!) Why these cokesackers aren’t swinging at the end of a strong cable remains a mystery. Make no mistake about it, the same people responsible for the destruction of the world’s economy are also responsible for the currency manipulation that made it possible!]

“You have to move fast with the market,” said Jens Tommerup, the president of Vestas China. “Nobody has ever seen such fast development in a wind market.” [What do you suppose that means for the future of ‘cheap and abundant’ energy, good citizen? Which is to ask ‘how will you pay’ in a world that no longer needs you? (it’s not an ‘idle question’.)]

Renewable energy industries here are adding jobs rapidly, reaching 1.12 million in 2008 and climbing by 100,000 a year, according to the government-backed Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association. [Sure looks promising…if you’re Chinese!]

Yet renewable energy may be doing more for China’s economy than for the environment. Total power generation in China is on track to pass the United States in 2012 — and most of the added capacity will still be from coal. [You build the future with the technology you have, not the technology you wish you had. An honest look at this concept reveals some frightening truths about our ability to deploy sufficient ‘clean energy technology’ to meet the demands of a growing population…with the ‘growing population’ part being the key.]

China intends for wind, solar and biomass energy to represent 8 percent of its electricity generation capacity by 2020. That compares with less than 4 percent now in China and the United States. Coal will still represent two-thirds of China’s capacity in 2020, and nuclear and hydropower most of the rest. [So, the energy needs of the rest of the world appear to supercede those of the world’s newest ‘workshop’. Is that also the work of ‘the investors’?]

As China seeks to dominate energy-equipment exports, it has the advantage of being the world’s largest market for power equipment. The government spends heavily to upgrade the electricity grid, committing $45 billion in 2009 alone. State-owned banks provide generous financing. [Contrast that with the crumbling energy infrastructure here in the US. Government can’t afford to ‘upgrade’ (too many demands on too little cash flow) and the private sector is unwilling to commit. (They are fully aware the consumer is tapped out and there aren’t any ‘public funds’ left to grab.)]

China’s top leaders are intensely focused on energy policy: on Wednesday, the government announced the creation of a National Energy Commission composed of cabinet ministers as a “superministry” led by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao himself. [Here’s an interesting question: how many of you will be genuinely surprised to see oil prices head for the stratosphere by Summertime? You already know the MSM will be utterly breathless, besides being shocked an awed!]

Regulators have set mandates for power generation companies to use more renewable energy. Generous subsidies for consumers to install their own solar panels or solar water heaters have produced flurries of activity on rooftops across China. [Probably the same kind of subsidies that St. Ronnie ‘trashed’ back in the eighties. There’s a fine example of ‘forward looking’ conservatism for you! Which is to ask, imagine where we’d be today if not for ‘the second worst president ever’?]

China’s biggest advantage may be its domestic demand for electricity, rising 15 percent a year. To meet demand in the coming decade, according to statistics from the International Energy Agency, China will need to add nearly nine times as much electricity generation capacity as the United States will. [Um, Chinese energy consumption, which is admittedly not the same as ‘capacity’ has fallen considerably so the initial ‘assertion’ in this paragraph is a boldfaced lie even though they try to camouflage it by saying ‘domestic demand’. There isn’t a way to ‘separate’ commercial use from domestic use and overall use figures are down.]

So while Americans are used to thinking of themselves as having the world’s largest market in many industries, China’s market for power equipment dwarfs that of the United States, even though the American market is more mature. That means Chinese producers enjoy enormous efficiencies from large-scale production. [That’s a steaming pile of manure as well!]

In the United States, power companies frequently face a choice between buying renewable energy equipment or continuing to operate fossil-fuel-fired power plants that have already been built and paid for. In China, power companies have to buy lots of new equipment anyway, and alternative energy, particularly wind and nuclear, is increasingly priced competitively. [Another statement that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny but there is very little about capitalist math that could be considered ‘logical’…]

Interest rates as low as 2 percent for bank loans — the result of a savings rate of 40 percent and a government policy of steering loans to renewable energy — have also made a big difference. [Understand what they’ve just admitted here good citizen! How the hell do you get a 40% savings rate? Chinese workers are ‘obviously’ overpaid BUT you would starve to death if you had to live on their paycheck! If it don’t make sense, it isn’t sensible!]

As in many other industries, China’s low labor costs are an advantage in energy. Although Chinese wages have risen sharply in the last five years, Vestas still pays assembly line workers here only $4,100 a year.

China’s commitment to renewable energy is expensive. Although costs are falling steeply through mass production, wind energy is still 20 to 40 percent more expensive than coal-fired power. Solar power is still at least twice as expensive as coal. [More fine examples of capitalist thinking…dimwits!]

The Chinese government charges a renewable energy fee to all electricity users. The fee increases residential electricity bills by 0.25 percent to 0.4 percent. For industrial users of electricity, the fee doubled in November to roughly 0.8 percent of the electricity bill. [Imagine if they tried to pull that stunt here?]

The fee revenue goes to companies that operate the electricity grid, to make up the cost difference between renewable energy and coal-fired power.

Renewable energy fees are not yet high enough to affect China’s competitiveness even in energy-intensive industries, said the chairman of a Chinese industrial company, who asked not to be identified because of the political sensitivity of electricity rates in China.

Grid operators are unhappy. They are reimbursed for the extra cost of buying renewable energy instead of coal-fired power, but not for the formidable cost of building power lines to wind turbines and other renewable energy producers, many of them in remote, windswept areas. Transmission losses are high for sending power over long distances to cities, and nearly a third of China’s wind turbines are not yet connected to the national grid. [This poses some pretty bizarre questions, doesn’t it?]

Most of these turbines were built only in the last year, however, and grid construction has not caught up. Under legislation passed by the Chinese legislature on Dec. 26, a grid operator that does not connect a renewable energy operation to the grid must pay that operation twice the value of the electricity that cannot be distributed. [Funny how capitalist principles of ‘non-performance’ have popped up in this so-called communist nation…all you need is a ‘payee’ and how many of those ‘payee’s’ just happen to be investors, looking out for their capital at the public’s expense! (Just like here…kind of reminds you of home, don’t it?)

With prices tumbling, China’s wind and solar industries are increasingly looking to sell equipment abroad — and facing complaints by Western companies that they have unfair advantages. When a Chinese company reached a deal in November to supply turbines for a big wind farm in Texas, there were calls in Congress to halt federal spending on imported equipment. [You all know T. Boone Pickens, the mighty capitalist, abandoned his plans for a huge wind farm in Texas after plans to import the wind turbines from China leaked to the press…and public outrage went right off the charts!]

“Every country, including the United States and in Europe, wants a low cost of renewable energy,” said Ma Lingjuan, deputy managing director of China’s renewable energy association. “Now China has reached that level, but it gets criticized by the rest of the world.”

What do you suppose the prospects are of ever seeing a ‘renewable energy industry’ (besides the ‘cottage industry’ of small-time, virtually custom built units available today) popping up here in the US?

Um, the latest ‘breakthrough’ in solar panel technology came from where good citizen? It came out of MIT, probably from Lincoln labs down in Lexington rather than the automation labs in Cambridge.

Where did this ‘innovation’ end up? Where do you think it will turn up? The answer to that question is simple, which Chinese energy company is partnered with G.E.? Why pick on G.E.? Guess who owns the world’s largest manufacturer? Did you guess J.P. Morgan?

Funny how we always seem to find ourselves back on Wall Street.

Anyway, we still haven’t answered the question, although you’d be correct to wonder which question I’m referring to as several have been left ‘open ended’.

Life as we have come to know it is built upon a foundation of ‘cheap, abundant energy’, once energy is neither, life as we have come to know it will cease to exist.

Which is as grim as it sounds. Yes, many alive today will not be alive tomorrow, the world is incapable of supporting them in the absence of cheap abundant energy.

Is there a sufficient number of resources available to build a renewable grid capable of supporting the ‘survivors’? Ironically, the answer is in the question, it is unlikely the number of survivors will exceed the resources available to build and sustain a grid.

However, if the ‘talent’ to build said grid becomes ‘collateral damage’ in the down/right-sizing of the population then all bets are off.

Just wanted to put those considerations out there before we tackled the more obvious question of ‘political salvation’. Understand that the next elections will be decided on such fantasies as building a domestic renewable energy industry as well as expanding educational opportunities (with a steadily decreasing amount of funding) for…’our’ children…just understand YOUR kids are unlikely to be included in these political calculations.

Oh what fun it would be to ‘pin down’ a politician with their own rhetoric! Watch the denial kick in once you start calling them on their ‘sweeping generalizations’! Depending on the firmness of their grasp of the situation (most of them don’t ‘get it’ at all) you will see some wild gyrations as well as some astounding contradictions! But once again I digress.

All kidding aside there is another ‘dynamic’ at work here, one the economists are either too stupid (most likely) or are too clever (far less likely), perhaps I should use this as an opportunity to challenge your gray-matter!

What does the ‘end’ of cheap fossil fuel and the geographic location of the world’s workshop mean to each other? No clue?

Um, okay, here’s a hint…when energy is no longer cheap, what do you suppose is going to happen to China’s alleged ‘competitive advantage’?

The mental image of a tiny ‘poof’ comes to mind. Now let’s turn that idea on its head. The world’s workshop is six thousand, no matter how you slice ‘em, miles from here…regardless of freight costs, what do you suppose this is going to do to ‘availability’?

A lot of this crap isn’t ‘locally produced’ anymore, there are no ‘competing products’. You either pay the price or you do without the sumbitch!

Um, not to raise a more ‘worrisome’ topic but guess what else comes to us from halfway around the world…computer chips! Bad enough we are totally dependent on foreign suppliers for our personal electronics but ALL of our MILITARY MIGHT comes from chips we don’t make for ourselves.

WTF were our lawmakers thinking? The ‘Cold War’ didn’t end until 1990 and it’s not idle speculation to consider that we are only experiencing a temporary lull, not a cessation of hostilities.

Which is to point out that our government is no longer run by public servants but greed motivated capitalist pigs who could care less about the ‘common good’, which explains why most of the nation feels the country is on the ‘wrong track’.

When our ‘forefathers’ set up this nation, it wasn’t so the government could hold the gun while our merchant/bankers raped us.

Um, sorry about that…better out than in.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Swoosh!

Greetings good citizen,

I am such a slouch, leaving you high and dry all weekend…but you know, ‘shit happens.’

While I follow the stock market…I don’t ‘study’ it so I was a bit surprised to see that the markets took a nose dive this morning for, you guessed it…no discernable reason.

So we arrive at tonight’s offering which attempts to ‘gloss over’ the inexplicable, because you know what they say, if you can’t ‘dazzle ‘em with brilliance…baffle ‘em with…well, you know the rest.

Wall Street Gives Up Early Gains

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: October 26, 2009 [There it is again! For some reason nobody at the NY Times want’s their name attached to, er, ‘less than glorious’ reporting…]

Stocks gave up early gains Monday as a rising dollar stalled a rally in commodities and financial stocks fell. [which is bizarre all by itself…why would financial stocks fall on news of a ‘stronger’ dollar…unless US financial institutions are heavily invested in non-dollar assets! And considering there is no such thing as a US financial institution that ISN’T taxpayer supported, exactly how happy does this news leave you?]

A drop in the dollar initially gave a boost to stocks Monday, but a strengthening in the currency short-circuited the market’s advance. Oil is down $1.16 to $79.34 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. A gain in the dollar makes commodities more expensive for overseas buyers. [This naturally leads one to think the US actually makes export goods, which couldn’t be further from the truth! Our entire ‘export sector’ is identical to that of a Third World nation and consists solely of raw materials and food.]

At midday, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 97.64, or 1 percent, to about 9874.54. [At around 3:00 PM the markets were still ‘loitering’ in the same general vicinity.]

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index was down 10.81 points, or 1 percent, to about 1,068.79, while the Nasdaq composite index was down 12.10 points, or 0.6 percent, to 2142.37 .

David Hefty, chief executive at Cornerstone Wealth Management, said the market’s recent gains — major indexes hit their highs for the year last week — will give investors pause.

“Anytime you’re flirting with the top, it’s hard to push through,” Mr. Hefty said. He added that with little economic data due out early in the week, a quiet start to trading is likely. [What strikes me as curious is how the media is always quoting people you’ve never heard of before and likely will never hear from again as everyday they pull someone new out of their backside to make us ask ‘Who is this clown and why should I care?”]

However, trading will probably pick up throughout the week ahead of the Commerce Department’s report on third-quarter gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the economy’s health. Economists predict the economy grew at an annual rate of 3.2 percent in the quarter, according to Thomson Reuters. That would mark the first quarter of growth after four straight declines. [GDP at 3.2% when unemployment is off the charts and the only reason ANYONE is posting a profit is due to the massive slashing of both payrolls and headcount? Are they stupid or do they simply believe we are? Down is Up and Black is White indeed!]

Investors have been hunting for definitive signs of growth in recent weeks and the G.D.P. report, due out Thursday, would provide the clearest sign yet of how far the economy has bounced back from its depths earlier in the year. [Um, ironically, this part of the article has been deleted from the ‘updated’ version currently on display…]

Earnings reports released throughout the week should also provide the insight traders crave. The health of the consumer will be analyzed through the results of companies like Kellogg, Procter & Gamble and Visa. Consumer spending accounts for more than two-thirds of economic activity. [Um, if the consumer dies, do you think they will tell us? (survey says: Hell No!)]

The energy and insurance sectors will also take center stage throughout the week with ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil as well as Aetna and MetLife scheduled to release quarterly results.

Meanwhile, bond prices dipped slightly as the government is set to auction more than $120 billion in new debt. [So…how long will it be before confetti is worth more than the cash in your pocket (because confetti is rarer!)]

Demand for the new debt will be closely watched for signs that investors are still willing to buy up Treasuries, Mr. Hefty said. Strong demand shows there is confidence in the nation’s economy and markets, he said. [Um, not to be mean but it looks like the unspecified writer is having a conversation with a certain brand of garbage bag…just saying, you know?]

On Friday, American shares faltered as investors dumped stocks and locked in profits after the glow of a week full of strong earnings reports faded. [Hmmn…dumped stocks and locked in profits. Seems as though the wise move would be not to go there in the first place..]

But markets in Asia found new impetus Monday after South Korea’s central bank said economic growth accelerated to 2.9 percent in the third quarter from the previous quarter — the fastest rate of growth since the first quarter of 2002.

Asia’s fourth-largest economy has been bolstered by government stimulus spending, low interest rates, and a falling won which bolsters exports. Huge stimulus spending also played a part in China’s economic growth accelerating in the third quarter, according to official figures last week. [Before we get carried away with all of this ‘Happy Talk’ it is wise to remember that the only governments less transparent than our own just happen to be the Asians…]

“It’s a full-fledged recovery in Korea,” said David Cohen, chief of Asian forecasting at Action Economics in Singapore. He described as “dramatic” the economy’s turnaround from the depths it hit late last year as the financial crisis unfolded. [Oh really? Who the hell is buying their output if things are so wonderful? Bet ya dickhead doesn’t have an answer for that one! We can suppose the answer is China…the stumper would be ‘prove it!’]

Meanwhile, trade in Europe was subdued with little corporate news to digest. In afternoon trading, Britain’s FTSE 100 added 0.5 percent to 5,267.14 points, Germany’s DAX was up 0.6 percent to 5,776.89 and France’s CAC 40 gained 0.5 percent to 3,828.69. [Um, all of these markets closed ‘down’ for the day, only the Asian markets had an ‘up’ day.]

“There is not a great deal of direction in the market,” said Keith Bowman, analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown Stockbrokers, [Hello? Who is this and why should I care? (again!)]

Oil companies edged higher, helped by the price of crude. Although down slightly on the day, it was still not far off last week’s 2009 high of $82 a barrel. Total rose 0.6 percent, while Shell and BP both advanced 0.7 percent. [As of this afternoon oil was down $ 4 a barrel to $ 78.]

A big loser across Europe was ING Groep , one of the world’s largest financial services companies. Its stock plummeted 9 percent after it announced it would split itself in two, spinning off its insurance arm to simplify its business and issuing 7.5 billion euros ($11.3 billion) in new shares to repay state bailout money. [Good luck with that! If they keep this sort of crap up, people will stop buying insurance of all types because they are sick of being swindled!]

Earlier, in Asia, Japan’s Nikkei 225 stock average rose 0.8 percent to 10,362.62 and South Korea’s Kospi advanced 1 percent to 1,657.11. Hong Kong’s market was closed for a holiday.

China’s Shanghai benchmark gained 0.1 percent in choppy trade as investors worried the government might temper its stimulus policies following the acceleration in third quarter growth. Taiwan’s market rose 0.3 percent, Singapore’s index gained 0.2 percent, and India’s Sensex was up 0.6 percent.

Australia bucked the trend with the S.& P./ASX 200 index falling 0.6 percent. In Sydney trading, the coal miner Felix Resources jumped 4 percent after the government approved a takeover by the Yanzhou Mining Company of China.

Oil prices slipped to near $80 a barrel in Europe after last week’s jump to a 2009 high. Benchmark crude for December delivery fell 15 cents, to $80.35 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell 69 cents a barrel to settle at $80.50 on Friday

US markets closed down today 104 points as only the Brazilian market snuck back into positive territory during the last possible moments of trading (You should see it, the line is literally straight up and down, talk about ‘painting the tape’.) As I commented earlier, this particular ‘version’ of this article is the article as it was originally posted…as the day wore on, they cut more and more out of it. Which makes it a rather interesting example of ‘manipulative journalism’.

The current ‘spot price’ of oil is $ 78 a barrel but then again gold slid a dozen bucks today too.

Not that a single day tells you much by any stretch of the imagination. Other sources say the US markets are ‘overvalued’ by 40%…I’d put this figure considerably higher but were talking ‘subjective valuations’ here and it isn’t my assessment they are using to make the evaluation, so there it is.

Although at the end of the day this is where the real ‘bogeyman’ lies…how high is up?

Or more to the point, what constitutes a fair days wages for a day’s labor?

Not only does that answer come out in the wash but we can see precisely who makes out in the deal, can’t we.

There aren’t any (zip, zero, zilch, none) rich men working for a paycheck. Some of the wealthiest men in our predatory capitalist society don’t draw paychecks at all…so what’s this bull shit about all of the hard work they keep claiming they do?

These guys don’t even cut your paycheck although they do (sometimes) ‘authorize’ its signing (because they don’t actually ‘do’ that either.)

You bust your hump and they walk away with all of the, er, ‘reward’…because they are the ones ‘taking their chances’ You get a paycheck (you can barely live on) every week (until you don’t) oh yeah…and when the paychecks dry up…you’re on your own. Snickerdoodle ‘cashed in’ for a thousand times more than you’ll make for the rest of your natural days and all you’ve got to show for your years of sacrifice is an exhausted unemployment compensation account.

And conservative fucktards have the chutzpah to call you bitter-- like you don’t have every reason in the world to be Class A homicidal maniac!

Hard to believe ‘We the People’ put up with this nonsense…but we didn’t ask for this deal, we inherited it. Worse…it’s the only game in town.

That’s the coffee you need to get a good wiff of!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner