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

Shazam!

Greetings good citizen,

Seeems a bit odd to engage in a discussion/debate over ‘money’ when we have so many other legal issues demanding our attention.

I’ll offer this item from the very astute Jesse as an illustration of ‘mainstream thinking’ on the matter.

I, as most of you are well aware, disagree with most mainstream arguments/rationales surrounding that failed attempt to ‘simplify’ barter commonly known as ‘money’.

What you SHOULD glean from Jesse’s article is the (in my opinion) ‘mistaken’ notion that the value of gold is somehow immutable and that all ‘value’ stems from this singular relationship.

So, good citizen, how much IS an ounce of gold ‘worth’?

Before being abandoned the ‘universal standard’ was $35 per ounce. Now that ‘standard is hovering around $1,400 an ounce (and it was stuck at $200 an ounce for years after ‘freak event’ that pushed gold to $800 an ounce in the late Seventies…)

So the relationship between gold and dollars isn’t nearly as ‘solid’ as its followers would have you believe.

for a different ‘twist’ on the same problem we have this article by Mr. Krugman which nicely illustrates the dangers of chasing chimera.

Which brings me back to the destructive effect of focusing on invisible monsters. For the clear and present danger to the American economy isn’t what some people imagine might happen one of these days, it’s what is actually happening now.

Unemployment isn’t just blighting the lives of millions, it’s undermining America’s future. The longer this goes on, the more workers will find it impossible ever to return to employment, the more young people will find their prospects destroyed because they can’t find a decent starting job. It may not create excited chatter on cable TV, but the unemployment crisis is real, and it’s eating away at our society.

There are real problems and imaginary ones. How unfortunate is it that those responsible for making the decisions around here are unable to distinguish the difference between the two?

To put it more bluntly, capitalism ‘failed’ (repeatedly) in its initial attempts to institute it for precisely this reason over two hundred years ago.

Given the ‘global race to the bottom’, where does the ‘incentive’ to create jobs in the more expensive here come from?

Short answer, ‘nowhere’.

Capitalism couldn’t get a solid ‘foothold’ until the ‘basement’ was established (and ultimately closed to outsiders.) Commercial ventures were constantly being scuttled by products produced in ever-cheaper labor pools.

This provides all the ‘proof’ anyone needs that money failed miserably in its original goal.

But capitalism ultimately DID take root…with a little ‘help’ from its backers…and to this day none dare call it ‘collusion’.

So, where are your ‘free markets’ now?

The same place your individual ‘freedom’ hides, in your ‘imagination’!

If you don’t feel like a chump good citizen, you should!

You’ve been taught to chase a lie your entire life and now you’re about to have the rug pulled out from under you…which might be funny…if you weren’t about to fall into a pit lined with sharpened stakes.

Worse, the ‘history’ of revolution within our species isn’t particularly promising. The axiom ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ keeps being verified over and over again.

There are revolts followed by bloodless ‘counter-revolts’ that open the door to the same forces that sparked the revolution so they can seize power once more…worse, it happens EVERY time!

To guard against this constant threat the system itself HAS TO prevent the self-interested from ever being in the position to turn the tables in their favor.

That is why A Simple Plan was designed to put the laws we all must live under BEYOND THE REACH of the self-interested.

A leader’s job (under ASP) is to ‘solve problems’. It is their problem solving capabilities that win them the ‘top spot’ in their respective division.

They are NOT ‘legislators’, they are expressly forbidden to draft (never mind implement) laws ‘on a whim’, to do so is an exile offense.

As I have mentioned before, we need to ‘re-think’ the entire legal process from top to bottom.

Even lawyers will tell you that the law and justice are only, er, ‘tenuously’ related. This is the primary reason for abolishing the ‘practice’ of law as a paid profession…because you ‘get what you pay for…’ which tends to defeat the whole purpose of justice.

Toward that end the ‘deep pocketed’ will cease to exist. Everybody works for a paycheck, no exceptions!

The ‘plus side’ of this change in method is, EVERYBODY works!

Life is a pretty simple equation that the HOPELESSLY STUPID keep ignoring.

You WORK which provides you with MONEY so you can obtain the things you need/want!

Nothing too complicated there, it there?

Why am I ‘ignoring’ the elephant in the room?

With nearly half of the world’s workforce unemployed, where are all of these jobs going to come from?

Easy, we just ‘adjust’ the workday/week so everybody can ‘participate’.

That, good citizen, is every individual’s most basic RIGHT! Each of us has the RIGHT to participate in human society.

Being denied that right justifies criminal behavior, just as it does today.

So we had best make damn sure that everyone is allowed to participate in our society because ‘exile’ (the ultimate punishment for criminal behavior) is a ‘one way trip’.

Which is to say you can’t play the ‘I was denied my rights’ card with the ‘I didn’t like the job I was qualified for’ excuse.

A vast majority of jobs will only be for a couple of hours at a time, a couple of days a week. Surely you can ‘suck it up’ for a couple of hours! It all the more incentive to ‘win’ come test time. If you get promoted, you change jobs!

Yeah, I’ve received some complaints that A Simple Plan isn’t that simple, and they’re correct. Paving a new road without cracks is a painstaking task and I only provide the ‘foundation’, the finished product is up to you and future generations to craft as you like.

A Simple Plan is a ‘finished product’ but the ‘execution’ of it remains ‘flexible’. I propose some ‘variants’ to provide space for humanity’s diverse ‘appetites’.

Sadly the word ‘harm’ encompasses different things for different individuals. It is entirely possible for one man to love what another loathes.

I am of the, er, ‘opinion’ that ‘tolerance’ should reign in as much as no one is ‘harmed’ by the practice in question.

It is neither practical nor reasonable to attempt to ‘legislate’ behavior.

Murder is a rather interesting case study in precisely this sort of verbiage because it only forbids killing between individuals, leaving killing by committee both intact and acceptable.

The recent ‘execution’ of a well-known ‘global criminal’ is proof of this. Bin Laden COULD HAVE BEEN captured…but he wasn’t…because ‘the committee’ had already passed judgement on him.

Talk about your ‘slippery slopes’, we had best stop in our tracks else we set off another land mine!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Until the roof caves in...

Greetings good citizen,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How’s THAT for ‘short sighted’?

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

Could these idiots really be THAT stupid?

Apparently so, good citizen, apparently so.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tweaked!

Greetings good citizen,

Did I mention that the jungle drums are still pounding out the message that the world’s financial markets are on the verge of collapsing?

Hard to imagine where I got that idea considering the corporate owned media appears to be hellbent on keeping you focussed on the fact that they (finally) got OBL!

Yesterday was ‘the big reveal’; today we’re getting the ‘juicy, intimate details!’

You’d never know we have larger, more immediate problems to be dealt with.

How sad is it that ‘mismanagement’ is baked right into the political pie?

Could we find (let alone name) even one ‘competent’ politician?

It is more important to keep You focussed on ‘going along to get along’ than to let your thoughts wander into contemplating the endless bumbling of our superiors.

If YOU fucked up as badly and as regularly as these assholes do, YOU’D be history!

But (and our politicians are no exception) YOU aren’t in a position to fire THEM!

The boss doesn’t want to hear about his fuck-ups (and you’re in no position to do anything but testify against him in court, if push comes to shove!) His fuck-ups are not YOUR problem, it is your perceived fuck ups the boss can’t seem to forget.

And when do YOU fuck up? Usually when you get bad information from ‘guess who’…

Worse, 99% of all fuck-ups are the direct the result of the underling failing to READ THE BOSSES FUCKING TWISTED MIND!

Geez, that sounds bitter, doesn’t it?

Well, we tend to ‘write what we know.’

How lucky is it for me that 99% of my resume is ‘phantom’ (largely due to the bosses ‘too big to fix’ fuck-ups?)

Now it is ‘quiz time’ good citizen. I am going to ask you what the last 9 sentences ‘point to’?

Does it look like, in your opinion, that our system of management is, to put it bluntly, FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Repair) ?

Understand, it is regularly acknowledged that our system is, er, ‘less than perfect’ and that ‘mistakes happen’ and that a certain amount of shit ‘slips through the cracks’. BUT ANY attempt to alter the current system is met with rigid resistance (mostly from ‘vested interests’ who worked long and hard to get their foothold in the system.)

So we return to the ‘it’s fucked up and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it’ situation.

How sad will it be when it is precisely this ‘rigidity’ that pushes the system over the cliff?

While that will be a relatively happy event, the bad news is, where the system goes, we will follow!

Speaking of irrational memes we arrive at this story about how the stock market is tanking because ‘estimates’ about April employment figures failed to meet ‘expectations’.

Shares on Wall Street declined on Wednesday after a weaker-than-expected report on jobs from a private payroll firm.

In a precursor to Friday’s unemployment report from the Department of Labor, the ADP payroll firm reported that private employers in the United States added 179,000 jobs in April. The figure was lower than the 195,000 analysts had expected. The ADP report is closely watched because it can provide insights into the government’s monthly jobs report.

In early trading, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 69.85 points or 0.55 percent. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index lost 7.77 points or 0.57 percent. The technology heavy Nasdaq gained 4.99 points, or 0.18 percent.

Naturally, economic recovery is wholly reliant on a recovery of the job market. No jobs = no recovery.

Only accountants/economists can achieve a jobless ‘economic recovery’ and then they can ONLY do it on paper.

So in the ‘real world’, no jobs = no recovery.

Now we have to consider just how many of the ‘gained’ jobs are ‘imaginary’?

When we get the unemployment numbers Friday they are likely to be ‘better than expected, not because there is more hiring but because more people will have exhausted their claims and be dropped from the unemployment roles.

Time has a funny way of doing that.

For a closer look, I purloined this article from Some Assembly Required:

While they mentioned job losses due to offshoring as one important factor, they emphasized that displacement effects have been difficult to measure. The possible trade-offs between job creation in the United States and in other countries are even more difficult to quantify.

But a recent article by David Wessel of The Wall Street Journal provided startling evidence of the impact of globalization. His analysis of data from the Commerce Department indicates that major multinational corporations cut their employment in the United States by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million.

This is a big change from the 1990s, when those corporations added 4.4 million jobs in the United States and 2.7 million abroad.

Mr. Wessel pointed out: “The growth of their overseas work forces is a sensitive point for U.S. companies. Many of them don’t disclose how many of their workers are abroad. And some who do won’t talk about it.”

Yes, good citizen, the ‘enemy’ seldom desires to admit their guilt. It is time to wake up to the fact that corporate America is NOT your ‘friend’.

So how, er, ‘unfortunate’ is it that this, er, ‘unfriendly force’ HAS YOU BY THE SHORT HAIRS!

Please allow me to (once again) bring the single most important issue facing our species to the fore: What is the purpose of commerce?

Understand, if we fail to get this right, it will remain ‘impossible’ to fix the other issues facing civilization as a whole.

If you REALLY want to tweak it, we haven’t got a ‘systemic problem’ on our hands, we’ve got a big time legal problem!

This is what it looks like when the criminals take over.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Default!

Greetings good citizen,

Chalk it up to ‘lag time’, no matter where you look today the main story is the same…and you know how I feel about ‘going along with the crowd’.

Which is my way of assuring you that you won’t find ‘more of the same’ here.

As far as I’m concerned, $4 a gallon gasoline is what has me spooked. I’m in the process of searcing for a new job and every time I pass a gas station the minimum acceptable wage rises.

Although I’m beginning to think I’m all through working for somebody else…If I’m going to ‘get a job’ I’m gonna have to make my own.

I’m also getting a little sick and tired of being the first one let go because I’ve got a few grey hairs and a pot belly.

At least I’ve got hair!

But I digress.

We need to rewind a couple of yards here and start again.

The collapse of our civilization proceeds apace. The various ‘like-minded’ financial sites are all…ooo, there’s that bad word again…anyway, they’re all ‘predicting’ that there is a second ‘leg down’ just around the corner.

The old double whipsaw of rising commodities and falling wages promises to put the economy into an unrecoverable tailspin that will crash the financial sector.

Repeat that one to yourself until it sinks in…“crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”, “crash the financial sector”,

Okay, you got it?

Naturally, some of you need me to ‘splain’ it more clearly so there is no mistake what ‘crash the financial sector’ means. (To the average Joe in the street.)

You know the FDIC was founded to ‘guarantee’ all bank deposits, right?

Well, it turns out John Q. Public isn’t the only one with a ‘mountain of bad paper’ that he must ‘somehow’ make good on.

Seems the banks, through their ‘off balance sheet vehicles’, also have billions (if not trillions) that need to be ‘rolled over’.

If they can’t find a way to roll this debt over, they will be forced to default.

IF THEY default, it will result in the dreaded ‘cascading systemic failure’ hinted at in the parable ‘for want of a nail’.

Riding the razor’s edge right now is whether or not the scandalously greedy actually WANT their debtors to default.

There is the small matter of their being guilty as sin of high treason that they THINK bankrupting the nation will make go away, (if not permanently, at least long enough to make good their escape.)

Although the financial sector is globally interconnected, with many parts being held up by the flimsiest of pretenses.

I’d posit that once it starts to go they will be unable to ‘save’ it, even if they wanted to.

And right about now I’m not so sure they want to.

We seem to be looking at the classic ‘brick on the accelerator’ ploy, the thieves have long since abandoned the vehicle. Worse, by now they have ringside seats from which to witness the spectacular ‘ka-boom’.

As I have grown fond of saying, this is not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’.

Think about it good citizen, is anybody making even the most feeble of efforts to head off certain disaster?

Who will put the other HALF of our working aged population back to work?

Who will declare the ‘jubilee’ we so desperately need to put the economy back on a secure footing?

Who will remove the boot of the tyrannical owners from our collective necks?

I will.

But you know I can’t do it without you!

None of what’s coming is ‘necessary’, those who profess to be interested in ‘saving’ you are in fact only interested in saving themselves…

Wake up and smell the coffee good citizen, we’re going into the fourth year of this bullshit and they haven’t done anything!

Which is to point out that you are NOT expected to take the news of the financial sector’s collapse ‘stoically’.

They want bloodshed and confusion, and yours in preferable to theirs.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

What a load of Crap!

Greetings good citizen,

I only caught a moment or two of this morning’s news (and it happened to be the weather) so I was somewhat astonished to see that, er, ‘Undesirable number one’ has been, er, ‘laid to rest’.

I can’t say with any certainty that the spin-doctors and perception managers haven’t ordered the nation’s news anchors to perform a live ‘victory dance’ on the screen. They very well may have, I just haven’t seen it.

And probably won’t because I’m not big on televized news.

Just to give you an idea of my own feelings on the matter, I’m inclined to say, “What a bunch of crap!”

The time to kill Bin Laden was ten years ago.

IF he’s been personally organizing and funding terrorist attacks around the world (as conservatives would have us believe) he has failed repeatedly and consistently!

To ask a question that is on everyone’s lips/mind, what the hell’s up with this ‘burial at sea’ crap almost immediately after the fact?

The article mentions something about ‘Islamic tradition’ (of laying the corpse to rest before sunset.) But hell, if you want to go that route, why didn’t we insist on displaying the outlaw’s head on a pike (outside the UN if not at an appropriate location down the street closer to ‘ground zero’?)

History shows us that ‘religious tradition’ usually takes a back seat to the public’s thirst for revenge…

But we aren’t savages, are we?

Wait, don’t answer that if you’re gonna lie!

Yeah, cameras, mirrors and the truth are the three things people hate the most.

The truth may be ugly, but attempting to paper it over only makes it worse.

Speaking of the ugly truth we have this stark admission from none other than Business Insider regarding the hallowed ‘American Dream’.

This self-determination "American Dream" is deeply important to the American psyche. It has helped the country build the most vibrant economy in the world. It has made millions of Americans rich. It has also, unfortunately, allowed us to justify inequality that is appalling to just about every other developed country in the world.

So what if the richest 1% of Americans control a third of the country's wealth, this story goes--they deserve to. The other 99% are just a bunch of lazy bastards with their hands out.

If that were actually true--if the riches of the richest Americans were entirely a product of their own efforts and value to society--America's increasing inequality might be more tolerable. But, increasingly, it isn't.

Yes, it's still possible for people to go from rags to riches in this country, and that's a great thing. But it's also increasingly unusual.

Increasingly, more public figures have come forward in condemnation of the ‘bootstrappers’ that pedal what most of us know to be utter nonsense.

It is, without question, better to be the employer than the employee, which is the primary reason we will never see ‘capitalist utopia’, it simply CAN’T exist!

And there’s the rub! All Chiefs and no Indians does not a stable society make.

Let’s not even get started on capitalism 101 and market share!

Which is to ask are conservatives totally stupid? What part of insufficient market share don’t they get?

They may counter with ‘what part of I own it’ do liberals fail to understand?

To which the liberals should counter ‘prove it’ (and we’ll only accept a bill of sale from Mother Nature or God himself, with all of the ‘proper endorsements’!)

It is arguments such as the one above that illustrate what is wrong with the very foundations of, er, Western society…not that Eastern or any other civilization (with the marked exception of Native American society) gets it right.

Yes good citizen, one civilization got it right and it flourished for tens of thousands of years before the Europeans came and wiped it out…but that’s ‘progress’ for you.

Do any of you wonder what happened to “The most vibrant economy in the world” that, er, ‘vibrant economy’…the economy has SUCKED for my entire 55 years here! Could they be referring to somewhere else?

I tend to agree with George Carlin, you have to be (literally) dreaming to believe 'The American Dream'!

More succinctly, the lie that is the American Dream is no longer taught to kids on the bottom of the food chain. Probably because their parents feel guilty enough about being failures themselves and how that failure has condemned their children to the same fate.

Yet it persists. My teenage son is only slowly realizing that he won’t just walk into a boardroom somewhere and start barking orders because that’s how he thinks things should be done.

Ironically, is he any less qualified than any other ‘masters of the universe?’ I’d opine the only thing he lacks is ‘seasoning’, otherwise he’s just as ‘qualified’, from a ‘self-importance’ point of view.

But then it sometimes seems like the world is being run by a bunch of self-important 15 year-olds…so who can tell the difference?

Um, in more ‘disturbing’ news, the stock markets rose 115 points last week, despite the worsening conditions over in the (bankrupt) world’s third largest economy.

Which is to ask, in keeping with today’s ‘theme’ just how much crap are you expected to swallow?

You’re expected to swallow it all…and then beg for seconds!

Me, I’ve had enough…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Missing the point...

Greetimgs good citizen,

Happy May Day for those of you who celebrate such things! We can start off today’s mental journey with a disturbing headline: today marks the 39th ‘Walk against hunger’ here in Boston.

Does this not bode poorly for any hopes of ending this scourge?

Naturally, there are other fundraising events which are much older and it begs the question of if are they really trying to find a cure or is this just a handout program for fake researchers?

But I both digress and commit a common sin. I am mixing intractable diseases that are genuinely difficult to cure with a wholly man-made phenomenon like hunger.

And, given the economy, ending such efforts wouldn’t help the needy that those in charge of our society neglect, creating the need for such charity programs!

Still, it is both a shame and a condemnation of our society that such efforts have to be undertaken in the first place.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, isn’t it good citizen?

We, as a society, have our issues, don’t we?

So we arrive at shin kicking time, although I leave it up to you to determine which one of us is missing the point here?

When I lived in China in the 1980s and ’90s, there was always an awkward economic imbalance between me and my Chinese friends. I had a car, and they had bicycles. I paid for our meals together because I was so much better off.

Now there’s a new imbalance: Some of those same people ride around in chauffeured limousines while I get around in taxis. They take me to fancy restaurants whose prices give me headaches.

One Chinese friend took me to a home with private indoor basketball court and personal movie theater. It was a tribute to the stunning improvement in the country’s standard of living. But it also speaks to growing income gaps at a time when, by official figures, 320 million rural Chinese do not even have access to safe water.

Moreover, some of the economic boom appears attributable to a bubble, particularly in real estate. And some of the grand fortunes are linked to corruption by government officials. One friend, the son of a Politburo member, once told me that he was being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by a Chinese company just to be on its board. That way, the company could persuade local governments to give it land at reduced prices.

What are we to make of such a country?

That it contains multitudes. And that at this time of rising China-United States tensions, any simplistic black or white view of it may well be right — but also incomplete and misleading.

Mr. Kristof’s point is fairly clear if not somewhat banal. Who gives a flying fuck if a Chinese kid has a longer life expectancy than your average US kid (by a couple of years.)

Given the way things are going I do not think a child born in China today will to see old age period. The social as well as the developmental clocks around the world are both poised to do some serious retrograde action in the not too distant future.

The world eighty years from now will be an alien environment that your great grandfather would be right at home in. Although ‘politically’ it will likely to regress to something that your great, great, great grandfather experienced (and if he wasn’t a ‘noble’ he almost certainly didn’t ‘enjoy’ it.)

But still we digress!

Mr. Kristof’s point is (in essence) the great strides China has taken ‘lifestyle-wise’ in a relatively short period of time.

Make no mistake about it bubba, something’s got to give and we’ve seen the ‘writing on the wall’ already.

As the ‘winner’ of the global race to the bottom, China is (temporarily) enjoying a taste of the ‘western lifestyle’ (a lifestyle that has already bankrupted Japan.)

Why do I say ‘temporarily’?

The western lifestyle was developed and is totally reliant upon ‘cheap and abundant energy’. Once energy is neither, all bets are off.

More chilling, good citizen, is the implications ‘Peak Oil’ has for ‘the world’s breadbasket’. We became the world’s breadbasket thanks to ‘automation’. Much of China’s success is heavily reliant on cheap food imported from…you know where (and they don’t pay anywhere near what we pay!)

Call it a ‘government subsidy’…

Did I mention that Mother Nature DOESN’T HAVE A CASH REGISTER?

How many times do I have to repeat something before it sinks in?

How ironic is it that the thieves say it themselves…’If they knew what we were up to they’d lynch us on the spot!’

But STILL I digress!

The ‘point’ that struck most of you right in the eye (that Mr. Kristof appears to have missed) is how China came to enjoy this sudden change of fortune!

Geez Louise, you don’t suppose this sudden turnaround in lifestyle is due to the fact they are now doing our jobs, do you?

OH, but wait a minute…those actually aren’t ‘our’ jobs, they belong to the capitalist who generously awards them to the ‘lowest bidder’!

It would be ‘semantics’, I’m sure, to point out that the ‘demand’ for the products they make only existed here until just recently. Which is to ask how ‘fortunate’ is it for the capitalist that the Communist Chinese can set the value of their currency wherever they need it to be? (Something we can do here too, IF we wanted to…but, naturally, that would eliminate China’s advantage!)

Do the words ‘captive audience’ mean anything to you?

If you understand what I’m saying then it should be clear just how badly the capitalists are fucking us!

And, PS, by the way…there IS another way!

If you don’t understand what I’m saying then there isn’t much hope.

So, good citizen, who, if anybody ‘missed the point’?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner