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United State of Terror: Is Drone War Fair?

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

The Shell Game to Pique Oil Reserves the Rite to Silence.




Kristine Lofgren is voicing surprise at the plan Shell Oil has unveiled to wean the world from its addiction to oil. Or at least, "move us away from its own product."

That phrase alone should tell us about how much we simply swallow the Corporations' representation of reality. Foodstuffs, gasoline, manufactured goods are all produced. Oil, diamonds, gold, and all natural resources are drilled for or mined and delivered to refineries, De Beers or Central Banks. The production process is done by forces of which mankind is incapable of recreating, yet we still call the Oil Companies "Producers", but they produce nothing that isn't already there, they deliver it.

The difference you may argue is merely academic, but it's precisely because of that mistaken perception that Enron, who produced nothing, was able to hoodwink the entire globe as to its value, although having the help of the Governor of the largest oil producing state in the country to help you pull off your scam was certainly a big help ... that Governor being George W. Bush, by the way, cutting his teeth on how to use private industry to rape the public for his cronies' behalf before moving to the White House to hoodwink the entire world by overseeing the transformation of the US banking system into a fraud machine, bringing the entire credibility of finance into question (his father having slid him the template under the table ... The one used to destroy the entire Savings And Loan industry in the United States, and stick the taxpayer with multi-billion dollar cost of the "clean-up").

Why theses facts are cogent with Ms. Lofgren's article, is that Shell Oil, although she doesn't deem it fit to mention the fact, was the first of the Major Producers (I know ... but sometimes, like MultiNational Corporations, (of which there are none but which we're forced to refer to them as) as opposed to TransNational Corporations (which is what they are in actuality, and it is no accident that the former acronym is not only preferred, but used exclusively, to propagate a lie) I'll defer to the accepted usage) to admit that they purposely overvalued what their reserve estimates were, by more than 20%,  from the amounts they actually expected to unearth, in order to goose the value of their stock. 

So there's that. It's like taking the word of Wells Fargo, or VolksWagon, two other known Corporate criminals and Liars that ruin lives and deceive their own customer base as part of their Corporate strategies. And like doing business with either of those firms, believing press releases from Shell Oil is like signing a contract with one of those other two: Caveat Emptor. Because, as GW said, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice ... (he couldn't remember the rest).

The second objection Kristine may have been good enough to raise, is that the time frame of this empty Shell of a plan (most of which is so tiny as to be illegible) stretches out to 2070.

Now, before the end of the last millennia, it was accepted that there were approximate 3 trillion bbl's of oil reserves, half of which had already gone up in smoke, (but the estimate of which has since more than doubled to 7 trillion) such that the term peak oil was used, not by the environmentalists who picked it up and ran with it, but by none other than Dick Cheney, warning the world of the necessity of drilling more, drilling everywhere, drilling faster, or else:

"By 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from?… While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.” [LONDON INSTITUTE OF PETROLEUM, 1999]

That what he prizes is the ultimate lie no one should now doubt. The US, by far the largest oil consumer in the world, consumed 22 million bbls/day, so in a mere decade, the then-CEO of Halliburton, in order to get investment into the fracking technology and horizontal drilling which he, while Secretary of Defense under the First Bush presidency, had the US go to War in order to let Halliburton get away with drilling across the Iraqi border to deliver to Kuwait Iraq's oil reserves, for which he was awarded the CEO of a company he had no experience whatsoever of running, claiming that somehow the world which had for decades been increasing its oil consumption by a steady 1.5%/annum would in the space of a decade, add 2.5 times the oil demand of the entire United States, which, with a mere 5% of world population slurped up in excess of 20% of worldwide oil production. As if out of nowhere an entire two continents' worth of demand were going to be added to the world Map, each of which would exceed the oil demand of the world's largest consumer, which demand had taken an entire century of development to reach, yet which they would somehow, in a mere matter of 10 years, attain.

Instead, partly because of the world-wide calamity brought about by the same administration of which he was a part, oil demand in 2010 had risen by less than 10 million bbl/day. He was "mistaken" by panicky overestimating by a factor of FIVE! The CEO of an Oil Service Company! Talk about Fake News.This isn't just propaganda, this is deliberate lying, the reasons for which we all now know, but none cared to look too closely at then, until the term Peak Oil was invented by those who, believing his distortion of future demand, saw the end of life as we know it in the near future, many guesstimating that future to be as soon as 2005.

The "co-incidence" that fracking, funded by the same Fed Chairman that abetted the largest criminal syndicate in the guise of a federal agency in modern history, making John Law look like an honest broker, Bernanke, QE'd to the tune of trillions and trillions of dollars, enriching Goldman Sach's who was a prime broker, and funneling it to the fracking industry, which was poured into the profits of none other than Halliburton, even as the oil we supposedly went to Iraq to procure, is still, more than 150 billion bbl's of it, reserves 2'nd only to Saudi Arabia, in the ground. All thanks to the machinations of the same government he was the chief cheerleader for in its invasion of Iraq. And which no one has bothered to even ask what, if not WMD, and every other reason they concocted, was the REAL reason? Now we know ... have in fact known all along, but, while the spectacle of GW, "tearing up the dance floor", receives accolades from a celebrity-besotted press, the guardian story of how Tony Blair conspired to spread the lie of WMD to justify the Iraq War receives scant attention.

Now before I get back to the Shell game, let's look at another Bush-era energy confabulation: Ethanol from corn. Here we have the dick Cheney claiming that the world is going to need 50 million bbl's /day of oil he just has no idea whence it may come, so what do they do? They come up with this scam of ethanol from corn to make the US "Energy Independent" (LIAR!). How? By literally pouring oil into the ground, because that's what modern agriculture pretty much does. It is  the largest single user of oil resources, after transportation and the military, so the energy equation has to be rigged by leaving out certain factors (Such as the necessity for different pipelines from the existing ones, as ethanol has different characteristics than gasoline) to come up with a mere 1.2:1 ratio of energy in:energy out. So in a very real sense, they were digging oil out of the ground in one place to pour it back into the ground in another. Collecting profits at every step in the process. All while deliberately panicking the world into believing that oil was running out in order to get us to go along with their agenda. If we had only thought to call it a transagenda, perhaps people would have paid more attention.

So, in case you've wondered why I seem to be on such a tear about Greenwashing and the New York and exTerminator's lawsuits against big oil, that is the reason. Their busy doing it to us all over again, and we're just as gullibly falling for it all over again. Why not sue the Fed, the Bushes, Cheney,  all the Car manufacturers, Halliburton, Archer Daniels Midland, the coal companies, all of whom benefited from various schemes to goose their profits by burning enormous amounts of oil unnecessarily, schemes so vast and so all-encompassing, it makes the term Deep State a running joke, VW's crime completely understandable (they know the enormity of  the profits the Iraq War is the centerpiece for, even if we don't). It demonstrates the really childlike view of the world the US citizenry assumes in order to justify their perceived right to two cars in every driveway (because the garage is too jam-packed with "Stuff" - mostly plastic, an oil byproduct - to accommodate them). Any scheme can be put forward and it will be swallowed hook, line and sinker so long as it promises that "The American Way of Life (AWOL) is Not Negotiable", even as the policies it adopts to supposedly maintain that way of life, undermines it instead.

How? Well the ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere is now well over 400, and is accelerating at a rate far faster than what it was before the Kyoto protocols were signed (the first year, 1992,  in which GW, in a conference in Rio, used the above phrase, and our reason has been AWOL ever since). How can this be when the USA is still by far, the largest consumer of fossil fuels, of all kinds, and yet the US has barely increased its oil consumption since Cheney's lie that the world would need 50 million bbl's more per day than it did in 1999?

Because every single program instituted to alleviate the need for burning more fossil fuel has done the exact opposite, we burn more now than ever, and leave a path of smoking guns all along the Green highway: fields (ie CO2 sinks) plowed under (and thereby turning them into CO2 pumps) to "grow" fuel, rain forests utterly destroyed to produce oil (another carbon sink turned into a carbon pump as centuries of carbon sequestration is released into the atmosphere) on vast scales. And to disguise the increase in energy needed, building a string of coal-fired power plants to the tune of one a week all during the Bush era to pump even more CO2 into the air, all while doubling the weight of the vehicle the average American drags around with them (not a single drop of ethanol would have been needed had we simply not doubled the weight of passenger vehicles ... do we sue the oil companies for that too?) and producing so much fracked oil it has rapidly, in less than a decade, almost doubled the ppb's of methane, a greenhouse gas far more powerful than CO2, being released. These are all immediate negative feedbacks from the Progressive idea of "doing something" whereas had we done nothing, the amount of CO2 being exhausted into the atmosphere, would still have those natural carbon sinks to take it up again, wouldn't need the CCS (Carbon Capture and Sequestration) technology the Shell Plan is proposing ... technology that burns more fuel and increases, once again, the profits of the oil Companies while burning through the world's store of fossil fuel even faster: CCS has been done by Nature since at least the beginning of oxygen-using lifeforms, it still brings down the CO2 ppm every year, as it will again this summer, the particles reaching a maximum around May 10, (as a result of the reduced photosynthesis during the northern hemisphere's winters).

It's really quite simple. CCS translates, as ethanol from corn or sugar and bio-diesel from palm oil, into Profits.

 As should be no surprise to anyone, Corporate  profits and energy usage are directly correlated. ANy plan, but even more so, one being proposed by a Shell company already known for cooking its books in oil, all require huge upfront investments that, following the same template used for military build-up, are done, not with investment capital that would then require a business plan that demonstrates a path to profitability, are laid out like the Shell Game: there is no profitability without enormous piracy of public funds, Halliburton's business plan for the technologies they developed would have been disastrous but for the trillions Bernanke created to further them, and the Wars Their CEO embroiled us in to create the shortage and manipulate the increase in oil prices to close to $150.bbl. But to get us to go along with the plan without complaining, they do what the Reagan administration showed them how: borrow the funds needed and paint a rosy scenario, which the beholden Corporate MSM (Corporate profits, Corporate collusion ... the same people who have no problem believing their own government planned the Twin Tower debacle never even conceive that the Corporations that actually profited from it ever conspire with one another ... how lame is that?) will dutifully fawn over, to give us that happy happy feeling, and they will gleefully follow you down the road to their own ruin, praising you all the way, and shouting down anyone who has the effrontery to suggest that maybe these major Corporations aren't really interested in your future, they're only interested in what is their fiduciary responsibility to be interested in: their stockholders and their share price. Why then, would/do we believe these dangerous, self-serving schemes from Corporations that offer nothing but dangerous self-serving scenarios? And not only accept them, but like Kristine, praise them, as though anything Shell would ever come up with would have anything but there own survival in mind? Why are we like this? There seems to be no way forward, so the Corporations, and the politicians they own come up with one for us. What are we to do? Oh, that's right. We'll sue. Great. That'll help. That'll teach 'em.



















Monday, March 26, 2018

As the World Burns Freedom Fries to a Cinder.


The "Post Industrial" world somehow pours more
CO2 into the air than the Industrial World ever manged to.
Here on the wonderful intertubes we communicate by Artful Linkletters, we put up our dukes of Url and they connect us to the Googlopoly of data, Our Brave New World of Googledegook, all interconnected and vibrant precisely because of that interconnectivity, without which the net would be of no use. I'd be hammering away on this keyboard to no avail, which translates into, I wouldn't be hammering yammering on this keyboard at all. Now, whereas that'd probably be a good thing, why I bring it up is that we deliberately pretend that our natural world isn't already interconnected with the World Made by Man.

Instead, we've Balkanized our thinking so that each issue we face everyday is as though it sprang up newly hatched from a magically-laid egg, another pod-problem that was dropped to earth by aliens to wreak havoc by befuddling our senses and beclouding our judgement. Just as we refuse to make any connection between our position in the world as preeminent arms dealer and avatar of the "arm-everyone-to-the-teeth-to-maintain-the-peace" theory of the post WW2 World Order and the incidents of mass murder in our own country, by virtue of the same mentality: the NRA merely brings home for domestic consumption our international stance vis-a-vis the arms industry, along with its attendant predictable mayhem.

And just as we refuse to admit there could be any connection between the mayhem we wreak on a worldwide basis and the mayhem we engender in our own country thereby enabling us to pretend that, whether one believes the NRA to be a terrorist organization or not, the fact remains they have a very real agenda and that agenda has very real consequences, one of which is that it causes death and mutilation on an ongoing, simply-just-accept-it-and-shut up, basis, than any foreign entity that is inimical to the interests of the USA, via a quite nonsensical, mad even, interpretation of an amendment that specifically states a militia has the right to bear arms: not collect them, not amass them, not to lug them into one's hotel room by the truckload, it extends not even to the right to procure the requisite ammunition, we also refuse to see any connection between the triple E's of Economy Energy and the Ecosystem/Environment.

And much for the same reason, to do so would be to admit that we have (despite years, decades even, of economic stardom in the international firmament, our stock market soaring to dizzying heights), trammelled down the wages and benefits that the most profitable Corporations in the world offer to its workers. They have never been lower, while the costs for both the US government on all levels, State, Federal and Municipal. as well as the costs to the niggardly Corporations, caused by escalating healthcare costs that suck out every dollar of increase in Corporate wage compensation costs,  allocating them to Health Insurance premiums, resulting in wage declines even as outlay per employee escalates, those increases never reaching the workers' paychecks.

 And on top of thsoe Healthcare Insurance Premiums, to cover healthcare cost taht continue to inflate at 5x's the official inflatino rate, the amounts society needs to outlay to rear, educate, and drive those workers to the Corporate POW (Place of Work) camps has never been higher, the drag to national prosperity, never more telling. Yet the security of those workers has never been more tenuous, their future prospects, never more stark.

The recent fad to blame and therefore sue, the US energy giants for providing fuel to satisfy our outsize and ever-growing demand for it, makes shameless use of this mental compartmentalization. The most shameful aspect being that it is the very people who call themselves "Progressive" that mount the most virulent attacks on those who disagree with their Eco-War-in-the-guise-of-Ecology agenda.

And as though to prove my point, the Scribbler's released yet another apologia for the  auto industry's Star International Criminal, (sic) that avatar of blackguardism, Volkswagon. Never mind that on the scale of production envisioned, merely to make the world habitable for yet another fleet of power-hungry speed machines (with the next generation already on the planning boards so that they need not even have drivers, but will basically be drones on wheels, who cares if the planet is thereby made Uninhabitable for humans and other roadkill as long as its suitable for machines?) will require an immediate outlay of such enormity that it could bankrupt the world.

We already knows how this works. It's been rendered in literature time and again, the similarity to the plot of Trollope's The Way we Live Now, being the most strikingly similar, as the generation between 1865-1895 (causing both the financial panic of 1893, and the coming depression of 1907) had their entire future mortgaged to the railroads, the US and the ROW is now being treated to the replay, this time in their future being mortgaged to the EV's Scribbler has become the self-appointed cheerleader for. It's so much easier when society, existing despite the cynical denial that it doesn't, sets racing down its clear-cut path of self-delusion, thinks of nothing else than dropping every thought of dealing with anything other than the single fraction called automobilization and its attendant highway system and fueling infrastructure . This relatively small part to the overall task of planning a future that entails the dramatic curtailment of CO2 poisoning being so big as to need the  energies of a generation and requiring all the new energy-sucking machinery that's been created - Banks newly formed to collect all the risk premiums while the citizens assume all the actual risk, Capital, much of which comes from government, yet the public that pays receiving only a kick in the teeth (not only when the government investment fails, but when it succeeds), mines, enslaving yet another generation of Africans, furnaces, shops, power-plants, computers, networks, technical knowledge, together with a steady remodeling of social attitudes and political habits, ideas and Corporations as well as other institutions, - all hijacked and dedicated to fit the new scale and suit the new conditions for this one aspect of life:  "the ramping race in mass electrical vehicle production", and the "Oh did I forget to mention?" rampant race in electrical generation and transmission requisite to accommodate them.

But the porn-like presentation of the new technology with the old values belies the green claims of the EV's, that boast, as Scribbler sites, they can push a car from 0-60 in 1.85 seconds while achieving a top speed of 258 miles per hour. What machine of any color need be designed to achieve such ridiculous metrics unless its marketed as a race car? When was the last time You drove at 258 mph? 158? 100?

But as Scribbler makes that clear by claiming the Roadster 2.0 is a hypercar (whatever that is) that’s starting at around 200,000 dollars. So producing cars for the rich 'll somehow help reduce the burgeoning carbon pollution from the poor.

And the ramping race to produce this magical vehicle, will be, like the fracking ramping race in the US has been, a wasteful ramp-up to overcapacity followed by a very loud car crash. That's how, in case you've been remiss in observing, wasteful Kapitalism works. Huge financial shenanigans as the rich position themselves to suck every dollar out of alternative solutions, such as hydrogen cells, so that the by the time the first vehicle, be it Tesla or Nissan turning over a new Leaf, or VW having concocted yet another scam to rip-off the very market it craves entry into, is marketed, the commitment of investment, all of it financed in our modern mania of not using real money, so that the real risks can be hidden, but using borrowed funds from sources not even aware their funds are being used nor what purposes they've been put to, making their success a foregone conclusion, as their failure doesn't just mean we've lost money, it means we've lost money we didn't even have, yet are stuck paying for the products, with interest, that never get made.  So, come hell or high water, or, in this case, both, they Will get made! (Following the same trajectory as our Wehrmacht: the engines of destruction, having already robbed us of our ability to support our selves, educate our progeny, or provide for the medical needs of our citizens, must get deployed! 'Cause we'll be stuck paying the bill for them for the next twenty years, and , anyway, "What's the point of paying through the nose for this superb military you're always bragging about, if we don't use it?").

The entire EV project rejects any need for any rethink of our techno-bedazzled child-like faith in science to solve problems the misuse of science by unaccountable, criminal Corporations created,  which the same author is ballyhooing the lawsuit against. Without oil, coal and natgas, there would Be no Tesla, or any other EV. Perhaps he already knows that and he's secretly planning to sue the EV manufactures over, and, like The Donald, who pre-warns his cohorts before announcing, supposedly just off the top of his head, tariffs on steel from China, whereas his cronies, having been told in advance about his "impetuous" announcement, are set up in advance to steal from China, he is pre-positioned for the out-of-court settlement said lawsuit would result in.

Such kowtowing to the Corporate agenda is of no help to struggling humanity which it leaves, to paraphrase Matthew Arnold,

Motoring between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere left to rest one's head,
The earth, now paved, is all forlorn.
Our fate, Corporations will decide--
We'll just accept, all for a ride.
In which we'll sleep, our metallic bed,
Which shall our coffin be, when dead!












Monday, March 19, 2018

Hawking in your Face: Lies of an Ex-Terminator.


Every Ex-Terminator should have a warning label.
Robert Fanny never met a Greenwash he didn't like. Hiding behind the name of Scribbler, Fanny came to my attention with his description years back of Dr. Jennifer Francis' theory of how the changing Jet Stream and its meanderings were impacting the hydrological cycle and thereby, the weather, and how it would not only give rise to more intense hurricanes, but how it would increase drought and torrential rainfall at the same time, phenomena one would ordinarily think are in direct contradiction to one another. In other words, she had the prescience to devise and the audacity to publicize, her theories and Scribbler was astute enough to use them to do what no one else was doing at the time: get alarmist, fer chrissakes, 'cause what's happening is fuckin' alarming! While the scientists were tripping over each other to dial back the need for immediate action because of some e-mails causing a furor that was cynically dubbed Climategate.

Years later the author of a site called Seemorerocks, Robin Westenra from New Zealand, was bashing Scribbler online because he didn't subscribe to Guy McPherson's insistence that NTE, otherwise known as Near Term Extinction, was, as the name implies, upon us. He excoriated him for daring to have an opinion about the future, as though NTE were a surety, and Scribbler either delusional or a liar for not seeing as clear a picture in his own crystal balls.

So it's interesting to see that in one of his latest post, the Greenwash King, avid devotee of Elon Muck and his magical misery tour-de-force, The Tesla, the manufacture of which will push the globe into a much nearer NTE than even regular automobile manufacture, as its deployment of the high capacity transmission lines necessary to deliver electricity to charge the millions and millions of batteries envisioned, we have already seen the future of: uncontrollable California wildfires, sparked by a climate-change-denying Republican President such that utilities such as PG&E, need make no provision, nor plan for a power outage of those lines, as denying greater incidence of forest fires is  consistent with denial of Climate Change itself. Instead, as we saw last fall in both Northern and Southern California, as fires sprung up simultaneously over a large swath of geography, caused by one transmission line's transformer blowing up, producing sparks that ignited fires in the bone dry California hinterlands, that put extra strain on the remaining transmission lines, that resulted in concatenating failures that caused transformers to blow up in one location after the other, following much the same dynamic as the failure that caused the blackout in New York City in 2003. 

But now, Scribbler's latest Greenwash article extolling the lawsuit that the Ex-Terminator governor of California, Arnold the Pig, Shwarzenegger, has brought against the "oil giants",



claiming, "The oil companies knew from 1959 on, they did their own study that there would be global warming happening because of fossil fuels",  a form of fuel that is not confined to the oil giants by any stretch of the imagination, yet for some reason he excludes the Coal and Natgas Corporations from, one can only imagine, so that he can then sue them in the future?

Secondly, the entire world knew after 1989, following Hansen's address to the UN, that the burning of fossil fuel was causing the global temperature to rise, but preferred to take the ostrich approach and continue along its reckless path of increasing that rate o f combustion by a steady 1.5%/annum.

But most importantly, Arnold the Pig's ascendancy to the Governorship of the 2'nd largest producer of fossil fuel in the form of oil was brought about by the then President's most ardent supporter, Kenneth Lay, while running  ENron into the ground, by systematically and deliberately targeting California's electricity  production's manipulation, with the help of FERC, which Cheney explicitly kept from reining in the collusion taking place, in order to gouge its users, mount a recall campaign to disgorge its then Democratic Governor, Grey Davis, and install in the Governor's mansion a GOP candidate who would be completely dependent on Washington, kowtowing to their every demand, because without them he would have had not a sliver of a chance in the gubernatorial race.




That candidate, you will not be surprised to hear, was none other than Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger (Republicans never being happier than when a candidate actually has the word War right in his name). The same man who a mere three years after Hansen's UN speech was the first civilian to purchase a gas-guzzling military vehicle, the Humvee, for his own personal use. A vehicle of which he was so enamored that he lobbied its manufacturer to produce a street-legal, civilian version, which they did in 1992, with the consequence that they are still lumbering along the nation's highways today; 1992 was the same year the nations of the world designed the Climate Change Hoax of the century otherwise known as the Kyoto Protocols, a template for pretending to do something by staging a Grand Event and then proceeding on with business as usual.

 Scribbler goes on to quote SchWARzenegger, as he admits,


“If you walk into a room and you know you’re going to kill someone, it’s first degree murder; I think it’s the same thing with the oil companies.”


Do you? I think it's the same with Governors who issue permits to sell their carbon pollution as though their stock certificates, as the Bush-era carbon-trading boondoggle, which used Arnold the Pig as its biggest salesman, signing the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, when California was the second largest producer of Oil in the United States. No matter what restrictions you place on your own State's carbon emissions, it doesn't help at all when you merely export all the oil you produce and import the electricity you use from neighboring states that you know full well have none of those carbon caps. Like the Kyoto Protocols, it was what our current version of Arnold, the orange one, calls "Showboating", implementing so-called "solutions" while filling State's coffers, and thereby ensuring your own re-election, with proceeds from exploiting the very problem the solution was purportedly meant to address. As he himself stated, Arnold the Pig was 


“knowingly killing people all over the world” by playing a part in triggering and exacerbating global warming.

... decades after everyone and their mother knew that California's oil production, no less than any oil Company's oil production, was killing people all over the world

The only way that a 2015 agreement can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy.’”

as Robert Scribbler points out:



“…we’ve already released enough greenhouse gasses to at least return Earth to climates not seen in 3.6 million years. In this respect, the Baffin Island study adds to research conducted at Lake El’gygytgyn showing that levels of CO2 comparable to those seen today resulted in Arctic temperatures 8 degrees Celsius hotter during the deep past…
But if there's a solution, that solution would entail producing less humans, and then encouraging those humans to consume less resources, but that idea's spat upon , by none more than Scribblers' popery-inspired anti-abortionist, anti-birth control, pro-automobile rhetoric and propaganda. Because that is all this piece on Arnold the Pig is: propaganda. As Ahnold has been hired by a solar company to push their product, and this is the means by which he is garnishing the requisite publicity, piggybacking onto equally ridiculous New York lawsuit making the same crybaby complaint: that we as ignorant, dependent citizens knew nothing about the dangers facing us, as if we all bought into Hawking's specious assertion that  "Science wins because it works". Oh. You mean like colonization?

 It wins because it is the handmaiden of Power; it works because it empowers the minority's ability to crush the majority. It works because it keeps its real costs hidden behind a cloak of invisibility while it raises its nuclear umbrella of invincibility against all of mankind. Selling its secrets to the highest bidder, which are always States, and science is always a whore, with Military Power its most profligate John.

 "Science wins because it works" ... to poison the atmosphere so completely that it has changed, and continues to change, the climate; it wins by threatening to wipe out life as we know it from this planet, as it wiped out/enslaved two entire continents' indigenous peoples; it wins by blackmailing the Nations of the world by threats of total economic collapse, which it has ensured will come to pass by enabling the overproduction of human beings in order to goose their destruction in the most profitable way possible: War and the militarization of every country in the world by the latest wonders of Science, for there is no greater attraction for investment dollars than pure profit, the source of which is not the moral obligation of the investors who so greedily siphon their dividends into their offshore taxhavens.  If those investments were the cause of Wars in theaters all over the globe, or the enabling of Government and Corporations to spy on everyone, the cosseting of entire economies in unsustainable infrastructure that requires an escalating combustion of ALL fossil fuels, although none so much as Natural Gas, the one being burnt by the newest generation of power plants, condemning us to at least another twenty years of increasingly robust concentrations of atmospheric methane as it spews out in ever-greater quantities from Porter Ranch, Four Corners, The Bakken, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, all from fracking sites leaking enormous amounts, unburned, into the troposphere. But none of that is any of their concern. And that's only a few of the man-made sources, it is leaking in measurably disturbing quantities from the Gulf of Mexico, off the Siberian Coast, off the coast of Washington, bubbling up all along the Atlantic Coast, screaming out of the Arctic Ocean, cratering the Russian tundra, spewing from the Alaskan peat bogs, but Everything has been monetized so money is all that matters. Why Does Ahnold not call the Bankers Murderers? Why is the Stock Market that boldly brags that nothing could happen without it, not being raked across the coals for being an accessory after the facts?  Because it is all Nonsense, a jeremiad to generate publicity, and Scribbler fell for it with all the naivety of a 12-year-old.

Religion (in argument against which Hawkings made the statement quoted) may be wrapped in ignorance, but it at least doesn't threaten to burn the planet to a cinder, and it holds people responsible for their actions, as well as for their inactions. Science is, however, amoral and like the Gun lobby, refuses to acknowledge that the uses its findings are put to are any of its responsibility, such that Hawkings can make such a statement with what we can only assume is a straight face.

 Besides which, the manner in which it's talked about by its current, Science-can-do-no-wrong advocates, such as Neil must've-smoked-too-much-of-deGrasse Tyson, Science has become more and more like religion in that it keeps many secrets hidden behind the curtain for fear its draconian measures (like enslaving most of Chad to mine cobalt for those EV (Electric Vehicle) batteries) would not be sanctioned despite the benefits it brings, if they were known (Facebook being only the latest example. Would people have so naively rushed to put all their most personal data onto a forum anyone anywhere in the world could stalk them from if they hadn't been blind-sided by its friendly facade even as their entire life was put up for sale to the highest bidder, their entries fodder for the NSA to use against them?).

So when the former governor goes so far as to say that ignoring the impacts of extracting and profiting from fossil fuels, both deeds of which he is demonstrably guilty, is comparable to first degree murder,  Robert Scribbler should be calling for Ahnold's arrest and prosecution for Crimes against Humanity instead of providing him free advertising for whatever solar company he's shilling for.



Wednesday, March 14, 2018

We Don't have the LUXury of Time


In Praise of Folly

According to Mandeville, in The Fable of the Bees: What is laid to the charge of luxury besides, is, that it increases Avarice and Rapine; and when They are the reigning vices, Offices of the greatest trust are bought and sold; the Ministers that should serve the public, both great and small, corrupted, and the country is every moment in danger of being betrayed to the highest bidders. Thus none of the famous States and Empires the world has thus far witnessed ever came to ruin without that destruction being principally owing to the bad politics, neglect, or mismanagement by the rulers.

I found that interesting, as what it suggest is exactly the same dynamic as the Wiemar Republic, wherein Von Hindenburg was accused of doing exactly that by none of other then Hitler. Remember him? Assassination attempts against his life were considered to be treasonous. A monster who was rolling over an entire continent with tanks and whose pilots were strafing defenseless women and children with his Brave Luftwaffe.

So what is treasonous when the government that's been voted in by a minority of voters is intent on debauching their own population? Is it not then treasonous to support them, traitorous not to rebel? When the winner of the Presidential election not only admits, but brags that the elections were rigged, is there really any need for the circus of the Russian investigations? The man they are investigating exclaims outright that his election was rigged. If it were the Russians that tried to rig it, it doesn't exactly matter, especially as we had initiated sanctions against them, and sanctions imposed by one regime against another sovereign State is an act of War. So Russians meddling in the election should have been simply taken for granted, the lack of precautions against such encroachment by a candidate who was to become Commander-in-Chief, a good reason not to elect them.

And that the FBI should be monitoring the activity of a treasonous presidential candidate, one who repeatedly, without a shred of evidence, accused the Commander-in-Chief of the US armed forces during WARTIME of creating the force he was sending our troops to die fighting, is treasonous. As one of Putin's comrades stated, "Well, you couldn't expect Putin not to do anything when a citizen is accusing him of being a War Criminal". Yet, apparently, Obama and our intelligence services were expected to sit back and simply accept these traitorous accusations during a time of a hot war from a candidate who was to take up the reins to win that war should he be elected; of accusations that the Commander-in-Chief of the US armed forces was a War Criminal, which the accusation that "Obama created ISIS", repeated by Trump over and over again during the campaign, amounts to, with
complete Sangfroid. This from the same man who has the stupidity to accuse members of Congress of Treason simply for not giving him a standing ovation for spouting lies and half-truths.

Even Nixon never sank so low as to accuse LBJ of creating the Viet Cong; can you imagine Reagan accusing Carter of fomenting the Iranian uprising (yet not a soul chastises Reagan for what he did purposely do: created the mujaheddin, just as Bush, as in GW, funded the Taliban, and enjoyed the best relations with the Bin Ladens, his father having bought said friendship by pouring billions in oil and arms deals into the coffers of rich Saudis for more than twelve years). (BTW ... Trump, as I'm sure it comes as no surprise, has close to zero imagination. Everything he slimes the airwaves with is picked up somewhere else and used to his benefit. From reading The Saker, and other Russian sites during the election, it was quite clear to me, before any mention of the Russians was made in the media (around February 2016, picking up in vitriolic content as either Obama or Hillary Clinton came up ... Killary is THEIR invention, for example, the Trumplestitltskins just did what comes naturally to them: they simply stole it)). The FBI would have been remiss if it were NOT investigating any candidate with known ties to the oligarchs of Russia (they are oligarchs by virtue of being the elite rich in an oligarchy. In an oligarchy, there are no private oligarchs who aren't in cahoots with the government (otherwise, it wouldn't be an Oligarchy), else they'd be where several of them landed after Putin's ascension to power: in Jail)).

And why were they thrown in jail? For treasonous activities against the State. But when treasonous activities are more often than not pursued by politicians and other government officials and employees who are already being paid higher salaries than workers in the private sector, with pensions guaranteed (which none of them are in the private sector), and healthcare bestowed with no cost to the recipients, who expect, and therefore legislate, that those in the private sector who the same politicians have striven mightily to make sure they deny benefits to, are stuck with the bill for theirs, then to whom is one's loyalty owed?

Looking at all the legislation and policies pushed by the current administration, it is  hard to account for the continued loyalty of its core constituents. However, what isn't hard to notice is that every policy actually enacted is a direct attack on them. And by direct attack, I don't mean casting aspersions. I mean deadly attacks. Attacks, such as stripping them of health insurance, just as you promised, that results in real casualties. Especially when simultaneously one is gutting environmental protections, funding and encouraging the stripping of America's energy assets, but not to enable the so-called US Energy Independence Sarah what's-her-name was screeching about not very long ago, but to ship US vital resources to the rest of the world, as though we're Nigeria or Saudi Arabia, with no other choice but to sell our seed corn to the highest bidder and hope we can somehow come up with a scheme to enable us to buy some of the resultant bounty derived therefrom. The upshot of which will be the same as it was from shipping US oil to the rest of the world: Depletion. Leaving the country unable to pay via its industry for all the imports we now need from the ROW in the form of finished goods (much of which is pure junk, discarded as thoughtlessly as a State Dept. employee).

But depriving his constituents of health insurance wasn't enough. Poisoning them with gasses from industry and half a billion internal combustion engines, whose fuel efficiency standards his administration has gutted, isn't enough either. He must strap onto their backs the enormous debt incurred to ensure his offspring and his cronies access to America's public-financed but privately-run business' reins while paying nothing but pennies for it. The Jeffrey Sachs economic model for Russia now being used to the same purpose domestically. Because the Business of America is the business of international war-mongering. And war-mongering sucks up energy resources as greedily as private enterprise sucks on the government teat. That's why as we ship out US energy resources from one port, we must even more frantically import them at another, as the US, similar to all major energy exporters except two (can you guess which two?) cannot produce the requisite energy to drive its economy, so it must IMport those hydrocarbons.

If one looks at the warnings about the looming debt crisis from pre-2008, that this dependency on
energy imports was mushrooming out of control (since the main one, Oil, was priced at $149/bbl, yet not earning enough in exports to even come close to paying off the debt thus accrued) the figures were daunting. Presented as catastrophic by many of the same parties who have just voted to increase that debt for no believable reason except to decrease the tax liabilities for the only entities who have the wherewithal to actually pay for the same, are the same parties who refused to create a nickel of stimulus when the economy was in actual need of it, preferring instead as his No. 1 priority (remember that, Mitch McConnell actually Stated it), being to make Obama a one-term president (speaking of treason, is this not treasonous? Though you'll hear not a whisper from that dreaded FAke News outlet of CNN, McConnell literally and purposely created the conditions that led to the "Horrible" state of the economy pre-Trumplestiltskin, yet in none of the debates in which Trump trashed the unemployment and growth rates, does Clinton say a peep about McConnell's outrageous statement ... so outrageous, that I, a mere denizen, remember, yet, Clinton, a Presidential candidate for more than a decade, failed to point out (... so really, Rachel Madcow ...  Her loss is the Russians' fault?)).

The reason being that so many baby boomers were destined to retire in the coming decade. That coming decade is here, and all the gov't-stoked demand created by the economic stimulus of Social Security checks going out is providing exactly that stimulus to the economy the GOP tax-break-for-the-rich is carping about its needing. Yet not One economist, including the self-satisfied Paulyanna Krugman, countered GOP contentions for a need of a stimulus only a tax-break for the Aristocracy would provide, by pointing out that the Federal Gov't borrowing they insist is needed to goose the economy is being added year after year by the steady increase in the very Social Security outlays they claimed not 10 years ago would bring down the economic system by overburdening it with debt. How then is it even remotely possible to save that system by the onerous burden of yet MORE debt? And whereas SocSec checks get spent locally, flowing into the economy, Taxcuts to the those already shoveling dollars out of the economy as soon as they flow into their bank accounts only removes dollars from the US economic system and siphons them nowhere so much as into the Communist
economy of China. The last avatar of an economic system that the US citizenry was squeezed for decades in order to extinguish, its upper class is now using that same citizenry's dollars to enrich itself and an intractable Communist Regime while impoverishing the rest of their countrymen. (I do not blame the Red Party, the GOP, our own homegrown Red Menace, for this, it is the Democrats who pretend they are for the working people, yet whenever Republicans pull yet another heist, the most simple, obvious rebuttals that their public fiscal penury at home, is in stark contrast to their private fiscal liberality overseas, is never brought up).

In all this, the most alarming failure of all our institutions is Journalism, the first one (having destroyed Public Television and morphed it into Corporate television) that was completely privatized, the only owners of it, Corporations; the only revenue it produces, sourced from other Corporations. Yet even as we're treated (via Big Pharm's ads, for example) to a daily bombardment of the horrific side-effects of the products they shamelessly peddle, the far more grim side-effects of running a global economy that's geared toward fulfilling the needs of an ever-shrinking minority never gets an airing. The siphoning of labor's output into the design, manufacture and procurement of weapons of mass destruction on a monumental scale, one never before attained in the history of the world, while drugging the population to such an outrageously careless extent that deaths from opiate overdoses exceed those from automobile and gun accidents combined, never discussed. The two most deadly economic entities, that had been vying for first place in accidental deaths for more than a decade, were overtaken by deaths from doctor-prescribed medications in a time span of but a few years (and lest we forget, the entire purported reason for mandating a prescription in the first place was to "protect" us from exactly what the AMA has inflicted on us instead; what good does it do for the FDA to assure that a drug is safe and effective when those responsible for prescribing it are more concerned about their livelihoods then their patients' lives?).

But far from taking the dark shadow cast over truth by the privatization of every News outlet in the country, pretending that "social Media" will fill the void left by elimination of the public press and professional journalism, every other public responsibility goes on being privatized, as though it went off so splendidly, why not do it everywhere? Such that the only thing left public is the responsibility to clean up the mess left by those despoiling everything in sight (and much that isn't, such as the very air we breathe, which in time, actually beComes visible, as in Beijing. That's the advantage of harnessing yourself to a Communist regime: their citizens can just choke on your fumes, and the Communist Party, the only Party allowed, will make sure that anyone complaining about it will be swiftly swept into a "Re-education" camp and silenced. Thirty millions dying from respiratory illnesses? So what? That's no big deal. If there's one thing the minions can be counted on for, it's that they'll dutifully reproduce, educate, and rear 30 millions more and hand them right over to you, no questions asked, no compensation demanded).

And yet, were Mandeville, author of The Fable of the Bees, whose quote opened this post, to be taken seriously, things are not perhaps so bad as they seem. He flatters himself at the end of his Fable with the assertion that he has demonstrated that "neither the friendly qualities and kind affections that are natural to Man, nor the real virtues of which we are capable of acquiring by reason and self-denial, are the foundation of Society, what we call Evil in this world is the grand principle that makes us sociable creatures, the solid basis, the life and support of all trades and employments without exception. It is there we must look for the true origin of all Arts and Sciences, for the moment Evil ceases, the Society must be spoiled if not totally dissolved, resulting in the seeming paradox that private vices by the dexterous  management of a skillful politician may be turned into Public Benefits."

The problem with this being:

1) The skillful politicians have been routed because hysteria has become the only acceptable means of discourse, so that

2) There are no Private vices, as they have all been made public by a media that has degenerated to the level of The National Enquirer, therefore

3) The politicians that rise to prominence are those best at manipulating the media and whose vices are not turned into Public Benefits, because the public they should benefit are so besotted with their Evangelical mission of eliminating vice in others that their leaders can boast that they could stand in the middle of Fifth Ave and open fire on his own constituents and those not shot dead would dutifully scurry off to the polls to vote for the murderer, even knowing it would result in the elimination of even something so basic as Healthcare coverage for themselves and their own family.

Yet this is what the 21'st century ushered in with its promise for "Compassionate Conservatism", elevating "Good" to the oval office, intent on destroying everything that makes life worth living, raising the Cult of Death to pre-eminence, decrying to all dissenters that they are either with them or against them. Let the bombs fall where they may.










Friday, March 9, 2018

Capitalism IS Bullying.


 The road to nowhere is already paved.

In a moronic piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, the writer opined that, "The hard work of ridding our culture of sexual harassment begins". But, you see, sexual harassment is a form of bullying, and a militaristic Capitalist hegemonic culture is in fact Based on bullying: exercising Power backed by Force over those weaker than you. It's part and parcel of the package. Profits are only the pretext to Market Domination. A Target set for the specific and only purpose of then allowing a Corporation to bully the very customer base it depends on to pay whatever that market will bear. So-called Price discovery a thing of the past. There is none, the market mechanism by which it's decided having been eliminated along with the competition.

No editor wanted to put his name to this piece, so it was written by the "Editorial Board", I guess that means it's a plank, although it sounds more like a prank:

"Such talk (what talk, I'll get to later) distracts us from the work we must do to create a society that respects the individual, uplifts our communities, supports our values, and establishes a new cultural order to ensure our future prosperity."

What are they talking about? America has been the Sole Superpower for more than a generation now, and on every one of those metrics the US has worked hand-in-glove with American Corporations to do exactly the opposite: to deny there even IS a society; to denigrate the individual; crush communities; destroy our most cherished values; while establishing a cultural order that, far from ensuring our future prosperity, ensures we will instead have no future at all.

Where do you see evidence that this country is making the least attempt to "create a society that respects the individual?" The one that throws those individuals out into the streets for buying a house the Fed took pains to encourage them to risk everything to purchase? Or is it the one that uses the onerous burden of student loans to create a revenue stream into Federal coffers and pump up the salaries of teachers, administrators, and especially Presidents, of universities to such gross figures that if every worker in this economy got those kind of wages, it would be inflation, not deflation we'd be worried about.

Or maybe it's those individuals who are snapping up all those 3-ton SUV's from the showroom floor with 7-year-term loans who are unaware that the pace of Climate derangement is so torrid, their vehicle will be undriveable by 2020; not because of the fines levied on drivers of SUV's but because the current oil boom is built on such a foundation of vapor that it'll have blown away by then, as fleeting as the NatGas surplus they have been busily building the infrastructure to ship overseas (while simultaneously garnering your support for destructive fracking by promising "Energy Independence" ... which is true, US Corporations will have sold off all the country's energy resources, so, in a sense, it will in fact be Energy Independent), following the well-known, but never mentioned, Republican strategy of driving energy prices into the stratosphere by fanning yet another get-rich-quick speculative fever that will again make filling up at the pump a burden that will prove unsustainable. The polity will then be forced to sell their living room on wheels, and find that the price they can get for it is far less than what is needed to pay off the balance of the note they took out, and it is extremely difficult to drive an underwater vehicle sans fuel.

Or maybe it's the individual who is sitting in the waiting room of a major City Hospital waiting for someone to sew up her work-place injury and the fear they harbor of the $9899 bill they know they can expect to receive, but have no ability to pay, since their employer, in its effort to "uplift our communities, supports our values, and establishes a new cultural order to ensure our future prosperity", grants them no sick days, the fact that they injured themselves on-the-job being considered irrelevant, and will fire them. After all that's how our beloved leader became famous: Turning the act of Firing workers into a bloodsport for your entertainment. One you cheered callously between episodes of Punked and Breaking Bad.

Is the extortion of monies from individuals via Payday Loans and foisting VW portable gas chambers on them the method we're to use to "uplifts our communities"?

The answer to that, of course, is "Yes". Ask your local police department as they confiscate anything not nailed down whenever they arrest someone on trumped-up charges of drug possession. And they know just where you have it hidden: they planted it there.

Having kicked out the local enterprises that actually pay taxes, and freeing the Useless Rich from the onus of taxation, confiscation's all that's left. The Corporations now demand so many tax breaks and other easements (corporatese for "let the hoi polloi pay!") to either locate/stay in a given location that  it costs to have them in your community. They create jobs, and the jobbed pay taxes, so the municipality can afford to pay the land use, clean-up, and other costs associated with having a business in your community. It's more like what having a military base used to be like (something far fewer Americans are familiar with nowadays, since the vast majority of our military bases are located, along with the economic stimulus they provide, overseas, thanks to the first Bush president's "Peace Dividend" that was nothing more than a pretext before yet another military build-up).

But the real kicker is "supports our values". What values do you suppose they mean? Our National Values, or our local ones? Our national values are currently represented by  this:


The avatar of bullying, a braggart, liar and scam-artist, a serial bankrupt, who nevertheless lords it over everyone in The Presence like he's some gift from god. See this picture?


The humble trappings, the simple fare (and not a plastic bottle of water in sight, how do they do it? Such privation!) the body language of the participants as they (as we would insist on terming it in the West) HAMmer out an agreement, which of course, they don't do, but Americans must have their beloved violent imagery infesting everything.

Now interject the picture of Trump into this conference, and you see the affect it would have to place this smug, "I'm the King around here", autocratic (or as some of Putin's supporters would have it, he's "authoritative", not "authoritarian", which in Putin's case may be correct, he has decades of political experience and international dealings from which he can derive his authoritative stance. Trump has none of these. His is an authoritarian personality, as there is nothing backing it up but raw Power) and unyielding, he literally brings nothing to the table but his cans of Diet coke and insufferable condescension.

In the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, the story-line revolves around one Hannah Baker's attempt, via tapes she recorded while contemplating her self-prescribed demise, to blame everyone other than herself for the decision she made to end her life. Arguments abound online as to whether it is ultimately her own or others' fault for her suicide, but they never discuss the underlying metaphor, the one making the the connection between her life and that of the town she lives in and the  high school she goes to and the economic milieu in which they're acting their personal little dramas in is, although we're practically hit over the head with it during the series, never mentioned, debated or analyzed: The Bullying, as the saying go, rolls downhill:

The Bakers own a pharmacy in a sunny California town that's the story's setting; they are Hannah 's parents; Hannah being the bright beautiful girl who takes her own life. They have only recently moved to town, having fled the suffocating milieu of their previous existence from which Wal-Plex, has played a part in forcing them out. In their new hometown, they'd opened and had been running a successful Drugstore, until, guess who, none other than Wal-Plex, moves in and starts undercutting their prices and staying open all night, doing what all monopolies do: Dominate and drive the smaller entities out of business by using profits from hundreds of other stores elsewhere, in different markets, to sustains the losses from the new store until all competitors are either bought out or fail, then raising prices to levels higher than what the Mom and Pops were charging before they were systematically eliminated.

It is no accident that the bullying from the Corporate monster is on a parallel track with the bullying experienced by the teenage girls at the hands of, not only the jocks, whose abuse is physical, their reaction to objections raised about the liberties they take, dismissive, if not downright thuggish, but of the brainy bunch as well, who, left  to simply ooh and aah at the pretty creatures they dare not approach, must of necessity yearn after them from the sidelines. From where they stalk them, betray them, harass and exploit them.

Because High School better reflects the society in which it exists and mirrors the economic system that in no way respects the individual, and does its best to undermine our communities, and far from supporting our values, debases them to force their own down our throat.

So why are we are left wondering how come our schools are the epicenter for bullying and harassment of those weaker by the those stronger, never looking at our own attitudes toward the violence we export, the arms industry we live off, making us all Merchants of Death, the terror (or if you prefer, the Shock and Awe) we deliver around the globe so that we can drive ourselves nowhere so much as insane, in vehicles that sap the very essence out of our lives, our economy, and our children's future. A Mad Max future we gladly accept for the pure adrenaline rush of speed derived from controlled internal combustion-enabled explosions so we can fly by the seat of our pants in our magic car pets, whose maintenance and upkeep we unquestioningly invest more money in than our own offspring. Because, when it comes right down to it, the offspring we can live without, the automobile? Not so much. As in NEVER! You may deny this, insisting you cherish your children, but what individuals hold to be true is belied by the aggregate effect of their individual actions: Environmetnl destruction on a worldwide scale, acidification of the oceans and alteration of the relative concentration  of the gasses in the atmosphere so extreme it means the next generation has no lifeboat to escape the ship of fools spaceship earth has become (Elon Musk idiocy notwithstanding).

NRA opponents  have made the, "Not from my cold dead hands", their rallying cry, oblivious that they have the same emotional attachment to their own weapon of mass destruction, in the form of the family motorized vehicle. And whereas a gun is used relatively rarely, even in gun-toting, shoot-em-up-just for the pure pleasure of it America, the WMD SUV is used every day for hours and hours, spewing poisonous gasses into the atmosphere for the entirety of its existence, from the moment the metal it is made from is forged until the first door panel is attached until the day it's smashed to wreckage in the car compactor after which yet more fuel is then burned to carry it off to somewhere where more fuel will be burned to re-use its precious metal.

 Of course, parents will decry such accusations, NRA opponents insist that a car is not a weapon. The same people that you see at the Women's march, or a Bernie rally, all arriving in their own vehicles, all knowingly poisoning the air, even unto our own extinction ... but give me free Healthcare, its MY right! So what if it has to be paid for by bestriding the globe like an international dictator and despoiling every tract of land under which oil is sequestered. Not my concern. And not, unlike the President, denying that the very vehicles they drove there are the self-same entities that are destroying the very atmosphere needed to sustain life. THEY DON'T CARE. That is why the Deplorables aren't . They at least adMIT they don't care, they have no need for the Donald's Climate Change is a Hoax nonsense. They know it's not a hoax, they simply don't care. But those who say they DO care are the real culprits here, because they are liars every bit as much as The Doonald is. They only care insofar as you or industry or farting cows can be blamed, and therefore have their self-righteous opprobrium heaped on your head.


But the economic system necessary to build the factories to manufacture that vehicle, the one that  delivers it to your driveway, the system needed to provide the fuel to power it and the system required to pave the trillion miles of keratin-soaked roadways necessary to allow the automobile to soar at such speeds across the landscape, is exactly that system we have: One with the necessary Nuclear-bombed-backed Bullying might to wring out the profits necessary to buy the ruling class in all the nations that harbor those resources necessary to run an entire economy to meet the needs of machines. Guns, Motor vehicles, and computers, are all of far more importance to the economy than the humans whose well-being they were originally designed to abet.  Fossil fuel-derived energy-enabled power to leverage our own human power, has been turned on its head, so that now human power is being used to leverage the machines' ability to crush humanity beneath its AI-enabled Robocop Jackboot.



To paraphrase that favorite of the gun lobby, that Guns don't kill, people do, Cars don't pollute, people do; cars don't run people down like dogs, people do; cars don't spew so much CO2 into the troposphere that it's endangering life itself, people do. And jocks in high school aren't acting out of character when they bully those in their thrall, they are acting exactly as a society that is based on  destruction has taught them to. Instead it's as though they're parents of Nazi youth and are shocked, SHOCKED!, when their kids turn out to be nasty self-centered little monsters. It's certainty not anything THey did. And without self-awareness, the only people with the power to change this trajectory, the Women's Movement, will remain a sham. Their complaints about their own harassment at the hands of the avatars of this heartless system completely undermined by their unwavering support for The American Way of Life. You know, the one that snuffs out life as thoughtlessly as a candle. The way of life that insists you'll have to pry the steering wheel from my cold dead hands. It's most profitable GSE's those that design ever more sinister death machines. Who knew the sadistic, murderous aspects of the AK-47 until it was used in domestic terrorist attacks? And more to the point, who cared? We get to watch the mayhem we inflict from the comfort of the driver's seat, the despoiled environment but a blur, something to be sped through, not seen, far less enjoyed. Crushing beneath our ATV wheels not only present life, but the very ability of life itself to exist on this planet in any recognizable form, simply to satisfy our driving ambition: to drive our children away; to drive species into extinction; to drive cultures based on age-old traditions into the ground; and to drive our own economies into stagflation, depression, and collapse.

As James Kunstler would say, "Happy Motoring".