It's All Bellows: You're FIRED: Stoking an Overheated Economy in America Fans European Heatwave.

               
                 Dragon's Breath: Giving a new meaning to the term The Roaring Twenties.

Planned Incineration: When obsolescence just isn't fast enough.

The Trump is quite literally Setting the world on fire, stoking the already energy-intensive US economy by exploiting the Final Frontier of America's fossil fools as a lever to fuel economic growth at any cost.

As the US accelerates its export of accelerants and the world gets its chestnuts roasted on dozens of open fires, the burning of energy to dig up energy flares to new highs. The rig count continues to climb. As do profits (Shell-game tripled theirs and is using those profits to buy back $25bln in its own shares, while BP's profits rose in the second quarter by fourfold, they then announced a $10.5 billion acquisition of BHP’s shale assets, whereas Chevron merely doubled its earnings).

Permian output already exceeds that of three-fourths of OPEC members. Sounds good, huh? That output has a new customer, too. While Tillerson was Secretary of State and everyone pretended that the abrogation of the Iran Treaty was sour grapes-Obama-bashing, because that's what the Donald plays to, The ex-CEO (Oh, is that like ex-CON-man?) of Exxon, who retains millions of shares of the company, was penning a deal with India to replace their contracts for Iranian oil with contracts for Permian-produced faux-oil. Why? Exxon has pretty much bought up the Permian, since the original frackers did what most frackers do: went bankrupt trying to service loans the price of oil couldn't support.

After the implosion of the global economy caused by the unraveling of the greatest con in modern history of the MBS/CDO "products" built from sub-prime mortgages stamped with AAA ratings by bought ratings agencies (all of which are still in the business of rating "securities" to this day: no prosecutions, no wrong-doing; unabashedly admitting that this is just the way the system is designed to work: give cover to con-men and rip-off artists for a fee, all with government sanction, because it is the government that coerces pension plans such as CALPERS to buy only "AAA"-rated securities) the FED went to work, using the same playbook, simply moving from housing to energy resource depletion, and fed the resulting funny money to the fracking industry via Goldman Sachs (spread the graft around, by all means, by any means). Halliburton then providing the well-worn path it trod during the Bush years of fraud and embezzlement of public funds. The brazen deployment of the self-same strategy of providing "Capital" (If you look up Capital, you'll see that in an actual capitalistic economy it is a subset of wealth: that portion of wealth put at risk to generate more wealth. Funny money, whisked into being by electronic legerdemain, is not Wealth, hence it can't be rightly called Capital: it is never at risk, as no one owns it, and its source need never worry about whether its's paid back, as it never existed in the first place) to an industry that had nary a hope of becoming profitable. Just a continuation of the pump and dump defalcations of the housing imbroglio. This would leave (just as the housing scam left the banks able to buy up for pennies on the dollar well-placed properties purposely sold to millions of mortgagees who would never be able to afford them ... fooll me once ....) scores of fracking companies to go bankrupt allowing the oil majors, such as Exxon in the Permian, to scoop up THose assets for pennies on the dollar, while the liabilities of $4$trillion dollars in Fed-generated liabilities, remain on their books, burdening the rest of the economy while the guaranteed PRofits of the fossil fuel producers, now not even taxed at the rate of a grocery clerk, thanks to Risk-Free "Enterprise" Republicans, take the cash and run.

What they leave out is that, whereas OPEC members can sell most of their output, Permian  producers must burn a much larger proportion of theirs to keep the rig count up, ie they must burn a far larger share of their output in order to generate more output. It is comparable to what happened to one-time oil exporters Egypt and Indonesia. As their populations modernized, which always means they exponentially increased their use of energy resources, that part of production left over for export increasingly diminished until they arrived at the point they are at now where they not only can no longer export, but can no longer produce enough for their own population, which means they now must IMport.

Remember, DEcline Rate isn't the same as depletion. Decline means if  you pour more cash into the hole, you can retrieve more oil. Whereas Depletion means, well, you know, depletion.

So as the US continues to export more and more of its fossil fuels reserves, reserves that, given the drastic measures needed to make their extraction possible, from blowing off mountain tops to get Coal, frantically scrambling to build $rig$ after $rig$ after $rig$ to keep up the production numbers for Oil, to assembling LNG terminals, equipment, and specialized ships to carry its Natural Gas overseas, each and every one of its fossil fuel "products" requires an ever larger amount of those very same fossil fuels to be burned just to first get at and produce them, and then to deliver them to their markets. Trump's tenure will leave the ever-energy-hungry US bereft of its own energy resources, just when its debt-fueled overheating bill comes due, making the Bush-era criminal enterprise look beneficent. Because whereas they left Obama with no choice but to pour Fed-created magic money into the fracking industry, the Trump era will leave the US a worn husk squeezed dry of ALL its fossil fuels, even as the pace of global warming heats up.

One of the consequences of this is the production of an increasingly thick veil of methane from leaking production and capped facilities, the most illustrative being that in the four corners region of the US West where satellite data reveals the increase in methane while simultaneous earthly temperature readings pinpoint it as a region of anomalous temperature rise. Roasting in triple degree temperatures.

But thanks to the Wonderful nature of US-style Cowboy Capitalism, none of those externalities of production need put the slightest dent in any of those astronomically rising Corporate profits. Whereas you as a business man, or a citizen, must deduct from your earnings expenses you incur, if a business, or just eat those expenses, if you're a citizen (such as the necessity of burning fossil fuels to get to and from your place of employment. That's an externality in and of itself that no business need concern itself with: that's its employees' problem, and by problem I mean both monetary and energy expenditure), the Fossil fuel producers, along with a host of other corporate entities, such as WarMart that need never concern themselves with the climate-change enhancing costs of ships burning the dirtiest, least regulated fuel anywhere to ship its Chinese production to get it on American shelves, has no need to take that as a hit to earnings: they are simply not held accountable for their very real expenses, which must be borne by mankind instead.

And those aren't supposed costs, they are very real and are being borne even now, in real time, as the atmosphere heats up and the AC bills across four continents skyrocket, reflecting the additional fossil fuels that must be burned in order to run their air-conditioners and those BTU's (That "T" stands for THERMAL: creating more heat to be trapped in order to keep cool from all the heat that's being trapped: in other words, it isn't only heat from trapped solar radiation that is making the planet hotter, every time a fossil fuel is burned, it produces heat as a byproduct, even if the entire reason it's being burned in the first place is to produce cold, the byproduct of producing that cold is radiant heat,heat which can no more escape than solar-gnerated radiant heat can) increase the need for that oil production to increase even further, such that now, while we are in summer, the season that used to require so much less energy than the oil-burning winter did in order to stay warm, has now caught up, with nary a comment made to that fact, such that more oil is burned to cool the planet we are heating up by burning what we need to stop burning if we wish for it to cool down. Eventually, there will be none left to burn to keep warm in the winter, because we burnt it to keep cool in the summer in places so hot we never should have moved to them in the first place.

Just think, in only two years, by which time, the ice-free arctic should provide us with more carbon-releasing furnaceiture, we'll be toasting like marshmallows on a spit held over a campfire during what history will call The Roaring Twenties:

MAGA magma: Masking Americans' Gas-stoked Arson.

I hope you're feeling properly Stoked!

2020 Vision: Exporting America's Energy.

AS solar panels in England melt into the roofs of the houses they're sitting on and wind farms take on an eerie stillness as that windless heat dome sits over western Europe; while hydroelectric dams either collapse onto villages, wiping them out and killing hundreds (for whom not an ion of current would have gone to) or stop functioning for lack of water, the US continues its mad spree of renewable energy build-out even as its use of fossil fuel grows as inexorably as before the financial crisis.

Yet, as the media sounds off with all Trumpet all the time, nary a mention is made of the central role in the US of energy. Not a whisper about the fact that America holds but 6% of the world's population, yet consumes in excess of 20% of its energy, even though its government is the most indebted in the world; IE the polity, which owes more than any other country in credit card, auto, student loan and mortgage debt) maintains the largest trade deficit, as percentage of GDP, of any  country in the world. What that reflects is that although we import vast amounts of energy resources, instead of leveraging those supplies to manufacture goods other countries would wish to buy, we squander it.

What the US now leverages instead of energy is debt. Leveraging debt (which is a fancy-pants term used by the Keptocracy to convince the proles that a liability is an asset) instead of energy resources has the predictable result that the money made in doing so goes to a mere elite few in that Keptocracy while the rest of us are held hostage to it. The onus of repayment falls onto the backs of the citizens, while the fees, interest charges and embezzlement proceeds have already gone into the bank accounts and tax havens of the well-connected world wide web of financiers, Lords and Peers.

None of this is news, of course, but it brings up the energy usage as a way of pointing out the utter depravity of the MSM, otherwise called mainstream media, even as it is anything but, and is the reason that at least partially explains the ability of the harpy we call President to screech "Fake News" at anything he finds contradicts his own version of the "Reality Show" his tenure in the White House is.

The U.S. Congress, at the head of the Deep State's behest, is looking at legislation to accelerate LNG exports. (Like he needs any lousy legislation to authorize the export of "Vast amounts of LNG", which any actual journalist would point out means vast amounts of America's energy legacy).

The rig count in the US fracking industry just keeps going up, as the volume of fake oil pumped from the US continues to increase and the methane leaking from its wells grows year after year, accumulating in the atmosphere at a frightening pace.

Sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration, "Petroleum and Other Liquids, Exports" website. Accessed February 22, 2018. 2017 data from the Petroleum Supply Monthly, February 2018, Table 50.

LNG exports are expected to make up a growing share of natural gas exports and to surpass pipeline exports of natural gas by 2020.

 U.S. exports to Mexico have doubled since 2009 and are projected to continue rising through at least 2020 as pipeline projects currently under construction are completed.

 Increasing amounts of natural gas from the Marcellus and Utica basins in the Northeast and Midwest regions of the United States are to flow to eastern Canadian provinces.

The United States becomes a net exporter of natural gas by pipeline to Canada by 2030.

Those projected exports have nothing to do with  decline in US consumption of Natural Gas, though, those are expected to climb as well, as they replace the coal-fired plants with solar/wind/natgas plants.

Meanwhile, as the Green Machine extols the US for its switch to "renewables", don't assume that any less coal is being burned:

The U.S. exported 97.0 million tons of coal in 2017, a 61 percent increase from the 2016 level. Exports to Asia more than doubled from 15.7 million tons in 2016 to 32.8 million tons in 2017, although Europe continues to be the largest recipient of U.S. coal exports:



... it becomes increasingly clear that the only benefit, as US energy usage continues apace, is to the urban masses who can now breathe freely while we export our way to cleaner air and guilt-free energy-squandering. Guilt-free for the simple-minded reason that it's not being burned here.

Japan, India, So Korea; as the demand for electricity continues its inexorable climb, and dams are built to produce it hydroelectrically to (as was predicted) only collapse onto villages that were there for centuries, wiping them out in seconds, while killing hundreds of their citizens, CO2 from US fossil fuels are burped into the atmosphere at an ever-increasing rate as they get combusted all over the globe instead of in the continental US. If there were no such thing as "Green Energy" (which of course, there isn't), the US citizenry wouldn't be so easily duped into sending their own fuel supplies all over the planet to fire growth in other countries' economies while less and less  is invested in their own.

And as we export the means of producing electricity for the emergency situations that must arise more and more frequently as the world's temperature rises more and more exponentially (all those BTU's needed to run the AC units cooling down the inhabitants of Phoenix, LA, and Vegas will have been consumed in cooling down Japan and So Korea instead) are silently, stealthily being shipped to sweltering countries in both Europe and Asia, such that, just as in the 1970's, when the Oil Shock shook the very foundations of America's Empire out of its doldrums, the 2020 vision looks to be shaping up to be when it'll hit the US polity that, having learned nothing, they let the GOP-led drive to export ALL its energy resources go unchallenged; unnoticed, even.

While rivers of ink are dedicated to slamming the Elephant in the room that we elected President, no one has yet seen fit to ask why the Republican Party, the new Red Menace, is so hell bent on emptying the country of all its resources to lands where, as in the case of the Nord Stream 2, there are plentiful resources available from other, cheaper, less energy-intensive sources (As in LNG burns up approximately half of the usable energy it could provide just in converting, freezing it, constucting the specialized vehicles necessary for its transport, building LNG terminals in both the importing and exporting countries, and then in changing it back to a usable form ... all of which you should realize, adds to not only the fiscal, but the energy, overhead: ie INcreases, for the same amount of usable energy, the carbon footprint of all the countries involved in its production, transport and combustion).

But don't look to the corporate media, owned by the same interests that are exporting your legacy overseas, while the stopgap measure the renewables represent in all but rhetoric, are ballyhooed as Progressive, even as the Midwest corn crops, the ones those same progressives were hoodwinked into believing would make us "Energy Independent" by being processed (magically ... the string of Coal-fired power plants needed to perform our ethanol miracle being somehow left out of the equation) into fuel, (burning the dirtiest fuel to make "clean" fuel), wilts in a brutal heatwave.

Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice ... I'm a moron.

 To paraphrase Upton Sinclair,  “It is difficult to get anyone to understand something when their privileged lifestyle depends on them not understanding it.”

All We Need is Love: WahWahWarsanaphrodisiac.

All We Need is Love.

The US is accelerating its International Arms sales.

Love of War
Love is War
War is Love

There's nothing you can build that
can't be bombed

No Arab spring that won't be
sprung

Bullets you can spray as you learn how to play the game
It's easy

There's no gun made not made to kill
No one you can save from snipers' skill

Nothing you can do but you can learn how all war is crime
It's easy
All you need is Love,
Love of war is Love

 All you need is love, Love
Love of war you need
(Love, War, Love)

(Love of War)
(War of Love)
All you need is love
Abiding love of war

All you need is love, Love
Love of war is all you heed

There's plenty you can know that isn't known

Plenty you can see that isn't shown

(Love war, Love)
(War, Love, war)
All you need is love
All you love is war

There's nowhere you can see that isn't an arms manufactory
No more DMZ
All you love is war
All you love is war

All you love is war, Love
War is all you love
All you need is war, fight each other now
All you need is War, everybody kill
All you love is war, war
Love is war you need
War's all the love you need
Love is war you need
War's all the love you need

The Shallow Nature of the Deep State's Plans.

The Whirled Cup

The neocons will not stop wanting not just a preemptive strike against Iran, but a US preemptive strike against Iran; they've welcomed and cashed in on the fresh opportunity this new administration's base base has afforded them to push their case for regime change. 

The theocons are just as anxiously awaiting the overturn of Roe v. Wade as well as other assaults on the Warren-era decision on criminal and civil procedure the appointment of the next federal Supreme court judge will hand to them.

And although the radical anti-taxation zealots, who supposedly find the federal government too large, its regulations too onerous, its income and capital gains taxes too high, their hatred of social security unquenched, the important question of how this Republican president, who has promised to fulfill their most fervent desires, governs (basically as he wishes, even going so far as to abase himself in front of the nation's most outspoken and slyest foe), matters to them not a whit. And he knows it. The rest can bloviate 'til their as Red in the face as the GOP is in its politics, but there is no reason to expect that Trump will defy his base, nor that those few Republicans, outside the faction that put him in office, will abandon him now simply because he has abandoned his country: neither he nor they believe the country in its current form is their country anyway; it's certainly not their government.

 As the central, one might even say single, accomplishment of the Obama legacy remains his passive relinquishment of executive power to the Deep State that the Bush Regime had left holding all the reins of power he'd held until it ripped them out of his hands, imposing Austerity by sabotaging the global financial system they weren't about to let fall into the hands of the Democratic President they knew the feckless reign of Bush had made inevitable, was the overt, yet barely noticed, manipulation of the Federal Treasury via the defalcations of the Fed, in order to funnel enormous, as in unprecedented Central Government-created trillions of dollars, directly into energy production in the form of fracking, with the result that the USA once again became an Oil Power. An Energy State. A Fossil Fooled Empire. The legacy Halliburton's Cheney planned for Bush's Republican successor, but that fell instead into the hands of Obama, who felt he had no recourse but to let it ride.

This is so assiduously ignored for the same reason everything is, to avoid the public's following the money trail and asking the question, "Since these were Federally-created dollars, why are the returns from their investment and the risk rewards going to such a paltry number of already-rich "investors", while the rest of the polity is left with SNAP, and bereft, quite intentionally, of even Health insurance?"

The Oiligarchs know why, and so should you. Having lost the ability to control the price of oil, OPEC is even now being derided as NOPEC (whatever that's supposed to mean) and the new CARtel, consisting of Russia, the US, and Saudi Arabia, have already replaced it in everything but name.

Together these three countries alone produce more than a third of total global oil supply (far more than OPEC ever did), each one ponying up to the table with an excess of 10 million bbl's each (the world burns through `85 mln/day), and can now control the pricing, and, 'A Lot of Money Can be Made if Russia, US Work Together to fix oil Price at a profitable level." Which is precisely what they intend to do; have done already actually.

Everything the Trump has done is consistent with his plan to do this. Everything else is distraction, clowning and derision: The world over a barrel, one filled with Oil, is the desire these three nations have in common and the shutting in of Iran's oil industry, following faithfully in Bush's similar move to shut in Iraq's (which was spectacularly successful), was a major achievement toward this goal.

Germany as a "captive" of Russia, just 24 hours before demonstrating a cringing display of the US as a far more willing captive, had more to do with NORD Stream 2 than with NATO, which is grounded, useless without the requisite Oil from the three Petro States to power not only their moribund economies, but their firm grip around the throat of the rest of the globalized economy.

And the Fed. Making the dollar stronger while its energy exports are increasing, increases the price overseas, not only creating dollar surpluses to flow back to the States, but makes oil, which is priced in dollars, comparatively cheaper domestically. What's a little inflation when you can drive? ... even if it is to nowhere.

Which is important because, although some people find the production of  92,000 EV's in 2017 as "a clean energy production surge" (lol, it has absolutely nothing to do with "clean energy" as the EV's could all be recharged via electricity from coal-fired power plants ... in fact, considering the dearth of renewable energy power plants, it's an impossibility that most of them won't be recharged using fossil-fuel-derived electricity), the number of ICE machines put on the road in that same time frame is an overwhelming 81.6 million vehicles: an exponential advantage of almost 1000 ICE machines rolling off the assembly line for every one EV: It'll take a little more than a production "surge" to even approach that level of output. A level that has exactly doubled since the decade in which the Kyoto protocols were signed. And if you were to include EV's, that number would increase to total Auto sales of 81.7 ... barely a blip. and this is closing in on the end of the 2'nd decade of the 21'st Century, so most of those vehicles could still  be operable by mid-century (Although the failure of a match-up in proven reserves and  three decades of ~ 31billion/yr, times 10= 310 billion bblls/decade, which times 3 = almost a thousand,so that puts us into the trillion bbls range, begs the question of what they'll be running on).

Then there's Venezuela. Libya. Nigeria. Iraq (still a wild card).

But the one thing you can depend on the car-addled, Capitalist-mesmerized American public to have nary a clue, nor a care, about is the price of oil on the world market nor its supplies. As though gasoline were made by magic or created by fairy dust, conjured by the Goldilocks economy to be just the right amount as they buy bigger homes to heat/cool, and mostly bigger transportation modules, the lightest, being close to three tons, the heaviest approximately double that. So in terms of energy usage, it is close to silly to refer to the passenger in the vehicle at all, as the vast majority of fuel is burned to move the vehicle, as it weighs some twenty times more than its (almost always) lone passenger. A 150 pound driver piloting a 3 ton vehicle is transporting 40X's their weight ... not counting themselves, which in terms of energy usage, becomes a mere rounding factor.

Do you see why EV's are a moronic "solution"? No matter what the energy source, the driver is performing the same physical feat of moving a vehicle through space that is several orders of magnitude heavier than the actual weight of the cargo they desire to move. Their own puny self. It's like UPS drivers using a big rig to make their deliveries, a pizza delivery man pulling up in a Mack Truck: the equation just doesn't work. They would go out of business. And it doesn't work for us either. And that's why so many of us are going out of business. It's why we can't afford health insurance: we spend everything we earn to get to and from work. And it's not just individual businesses or drivers: the nation as a whole relies on this untenable physics conundrum as its transportation system. Every single driver is forced to subsidize their employer who would give them not a red cent to get them to the office (And then once the behemoth on wheels gets there, it's then their problem as to what to do with it).

Everything else is a distraction from this impossible fact. That's what the "stupid", to his oh-so-smart detractors, Trump knows full well. Oil well even. So as Trump finishes the job the now "low-energy" Bushes started, while everyone laughs at him and calls him names, since that worked so well in the election (ie they learned NOTHING), Trump and his Deep State buddies are positioning the US, and their personal investments, to reflect that advantage they will enjoy as a member of the new Cartel .... (Oprah'll announce, "A new CARtel! Everyone gets a NEW CARtel!"), to be in the early 21'st Century what Standard Oil was in the first half of the 20'th ... until the US reached peak oil in the seventies ... the controller of the price of oil . Because the basic formula that avatar of Deep State Realpolitik, Henry Kissinger, worked out: "Whoever controls the oil  controls the world", has not changed. Only the public's inexplicably complete unawareness of that fact, even as their lives become more and more constrained by it, has changed: they believe it has nothing to do with their life.

But it has everything to do with it ... even unto survival itself.

North Atlantic Terrorist Organisation.

George burns while without grace 'e slouches.

If, "an attack on one is an attack on all", then an attack BY one is an attack BY all. So the decisions of the USA to attack Iraq, wage War in Afghanistan, to invade Libya, to devastate Syria, send "boots on the ground" to stomp heads into the ground in Somalia, while providing chemical weapons to the Saudis with which to attack the poorest nation in the world, are all done with the connivance of our allies who depend on US aid to provide the umbrella under which their citizens cower, safe to provide their citizens benefits Americans must all do without.

It has been suggested to me, just recently, that a good picture of the current POTbelliedUS would be as one of the Killer Clowns from Outer Space. Okaaaay. I get that. But clowns are used, especially if you consider the job of a Rodeo clown, as a distraction. They are seldom if ever, even in the Circus, used as the main attraction. So the depiction of the president as such, should inform those enamored of said image that focusing on the actions of the POTUS instead of the milieu in which he takes those actions falls right into the trap set by those who inflicted him on us in the first place, and nowhere else is that more obvious than in the current brouhaha about NATO and his mistreatment of this alliance.

However, many of those who object to his manners say nothing (despite the fact that they would pose no argument against characterizing the US as the World's #1 supporter of Terrorism around the globe) about the culpability of these Allies in our Global War of Terror.  All these countries that Trump is maligning, or insulting, have all sat back in their comfy chairs and quietly gone along with the US program of Worldwide Terrorist Activity, not a one has threatened to leave the organisation, nor has a single country, never mind a bloc of countries, brought a single UN action against those of its most important ally, they go about their business as if the actions of their Ally bears no reflection on themselves.

And once again the actions of a clown takes all the headlines, is the subject of endless bloviating and gets oceans of ink criticizing his cluelessness ... as though any of it is either new or surprising. ANYthing else other than talk about the real issue of having allies who depend on US to bully whoever we/they want, yet take no action when that bullying takes the shape of illegal drone attacks, invasions, or abrogation of treaties signed in good faith.

When I was bullied as a child, my mother would admonish me not to, "Stoop to their level." I'm still not exactly sure what it was I was supposed to do instead, but it sure seems that whatever it was, it wasn't falling into line to be led by the nose by the cowards who picked on me because I was weaker than them. Somehow I had to set the agenda myself is what she seemed to mean. (How, I have no idea).

That this odious man was presented by the Republican Party as an acceptable leader is so revolting that myriad voices are raised saying we should be revolting as well. It is, however, approaching two years since his electoral victory, and during the same time frame in which his Republican predecessor, GW Bush, held the office, we had been attacked by a ragtag group of Muslims led by the member of a Saudi family his own family was so buddy-buddy with that he grounded all flights except those that whisked them out of danger, after having given the government that harbored our attackers $43 million in taxpayer funds not six months earlier. That group, an asset of the CIA while his Father was its Director, bombed New York and Washington. So Bush embroiled us in two unnecessary Wars, then jerry-rigged the economic system into a financial embezzlement machine and conned the world into buying our useless paper. His cronies at the Carlyle Group, on whose board his father sat, marketed these toxic "securities" to the world and then used their perception of "moneyness" to manipulate the price of oil via speculation to $150/bbl bringing the world's financial system to its knees, and using that calamity to hold the savings of the entire public hostage, blackmailing us to hand them over, or else.

 Although that last was to come later, at this point in his presidency Bush had already aided and abetted the up-to-then, criminal enterprise known as Enron, whose director, Ken Lay, was such a fervent supporter (since Governor GW Bush had allowed his defalcations to go on unchallenged, so hey, You pad my bank account, I'll pad yours) he considered it his due to be awarded a cabinet position along with the rest of the Texas Mafia. Bush demurred, so Lay's Enron used the opportunity afforded him by having one of this own running FERC to manipulate the California electric grid and defraud the state, with the administration's blessing, of millions. When it imploded, Enron became the template they would use in GW's second term to con the ROW to pay for not only his wars but also the tax cuts to the rich Americans that put him in office.

Be, all that you can be.

Now this man, the instigator and defender of "enhanced interrogation", is feted on the talk shows, gladhanded like an ambassador of peace, and celebrated as an "author" and "artist", with all forgiven; as though, "What's a few million lives destroyed between friends?"

Yet time and again I hear that Trump is worse than Bush. Sorry, I just don't see it. He's more repulsive, okay. He's more abrasive, alright. He's actively enriching himself and his cronies at a level the Bushies only dreamed about (although, like the CDO's and MBS's of the Bush era, that gets exactly zero coverage), I have no doubts.

But Yemen, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Korea, were not problems he initiated. He has not yet, and I'm not saying this won't change, however, I think we should deal with facts, and he has not yet turned  the world into a Crescent of Violence in the Middle East, formed alliances among our enemies that didn't exist before, as Bush's "Axis of Evil" did, nor affected the lives of the middle class to anything close to the world-changing (never to be recovered from) nature the arBUSTo regime's ravaging of it did.

I will bite no more, Forever.

And why should he care if he does? Any second thoughts he may have about doing so are quickly assuaged by witnessing how easily a War criminal president can seamlessly segue into a late-night talk show celebrity. Destroy the world as we know it? Oh well. We'll paper over that in Harold and Kumar movies and everyone'll love you for the pot-smoking loser you always seemed to be at heart.

Trump Tarrific may be stoking xenophobia so he can raise the cost of living of his most ardent followers while getting them to cheer him on as he does so, but I can't see how that's any different than Bush administration's doing the same thing for home values, and then using the resultant nosebleed asset values (when does an asset become a liability? At the end of any two-term Republican Presidency) to shanghai the savings of an entire generation, while the oh-so-somnambulant and self-satisfied middle-class sat in smug satisfaction even as it watched its own children lose any hope of ever achieving the American Dream. Bush did such a good job that there isn't a large enough middle class left to raze, so like the banks with their payday loans, Trump's opted to skewer his own base. Why not? They'll love him the more for it.

 ... until they don't.

And that day, the day when they finally see it's because of Trump's policies, instead of despite them, that their lives are being sabotaged, will never come as long as the dishonesty and sheer hypocrisy that I see bandied on the left to pander to their base continues so recklessly. Because it plays right into his hands: it's obstruction of his policies that is to blame, not the policies themselves. He's already  used that rostrum and will continue to do so as long as his opponents Resist in the same manner that Occupy Wall St., or Obama's much ballyhooed Change blandishment did: with no cogent arguments, no agenda, nothing on offer to suggest what change they have in mind besides the same kind Trump deigns to fling in the dirt from his Royal Carriage to entertain himself by watching us fight over it: Chump Change.

The Green Revolution that Spawned the Green Revolution.

The Trim Reaper.

As everything with a Green label is mindlessly supported, such as Robert Scribbler's acolyte devotion of Enron Musk (get a room, fer crissakes) that is so blind he considers EV production as Green, despite the ravages any car production wreaks via not only its manufacture, but the subsequent demands it places on not just resources, but the living environment itself, we might want to consider the ramifications of the first Green Revolution.

Making the obvious connection between the original Green Revolution and its outsize contribution to Climate Change has been as studiously avoided as the equally a parent (or two) connection between our border being overrun by unwanted children from Catholic countries where birth control is illegal and the fact that the first act of our POTbelliedUS was to sign an executive order reinstating the “Mexico City Policy” banning government funding of foreign pro-abortion groups like the International Planned Parenthood Federation. But just as forcing women to carry to term babies they can ill-afford to bear, begets the problem of their countries' economies not producing the requisite growth rate that such rapid babyfication would require, results in such an overabundance of mouths to feed that it necessitates their fleeing to somewhere that can (or at least that boasts it can) ... even if that country is Protestant, bypassing all the Catholic countries on its way, precisely because those other Catholic countries have the exact same problem: population so out of whack with the economic output of the nation that millions upon millions live in utter destitution, mankind's answer to which was to force the earth itself to overproduce by pouring fossil fuels into it, which is essentially what the so-called GREEN Revolution did, such that now every morsel that passes your lips requires ten calories of energy be burned in the form of fossil fuels so you can burn one calorie, was not only not green, it was so not green that it would be more appropriate if we were to call it the Black Revolution (but such a term would send shivers down the spine (if they had one) of the White Ruling Class), so large a contributing factor to it was Oil and its byproducts.

As the Democrats wonder why they have been reviled of late, could it be because their MSNBC mouthpieces are absolutely silent on these issues? For they have made neither the connection between the first Green Revolution spawning the current one nor the deliberate withholding of Planned Parenthood funding to the overproduction of offspring, it being perceived as being as much in their own self-interest as the President's to fan the flames of discontent into a red hot fever.

Has any of the hand-wringing and tears evolved into signs that read :

"Thank you @POTUS for reinstating the #MexicoCityPolicy! No more foreign aid for Int'l @PPact. This is only the beginning of #defundPP!"

That's what anti-abortion groups hailed the above-mentioned POTUS executive-order-signing with, and yet not a single article, MSM TV program, or politician has seen fit to throw this back in their collective faces, or place it on a placard next to children in cages, making the obvious connection between the Religious right's heartless support of this freakasaurus and the placing of children in detention camps and cages because, like it  or not, the world hasn't the resources to take care of the ongoing, but uncommented-on  second, and far louder, currently engineered Baby Boom. (Russia recently awarded a mother of ten (children, not years-old) a medal, personally signed by his majesty Tsar-Tsar the bore, Putin). And this Boom is working off a much larger base of 7 billion  people, not the mere 3.5 billion souls the 60's baby boom bloomed from.

Instead the Democrats seem to follow Paul Ryan's lead, as, like so many delinquent schoolboys, they cower before Trump as though he's also their leader; ashamed, put to confusion, unable to find their tongues, or their balls, bleating nary a protest to the new order of things where the statesman has disappeared, having been suborned by the politician; honesty , rectitude and integrity giving way to the devious maneuvering, the evil communication, the rotten expediency of a corrupted bankrupt. What can explain this silence from even our female representatives Nancy Pelosi and Senator Dianne Feinstein? (or even Maxine Waters, but she's lo IQ, so we have to give her a break).

When policies so ballyhooed by the POTUS bring such easily connected dramatic repercussions that necessitate the spending of additional billions in tax dollars to confiscate, house, and care for the offspring flowing over the border with the momentum of a river in spate, and all they can do is point out his heartless treatment of them yet never utter a single syllable about the well-known and Cheered policy of forcing these women to have babies they can't afford and then foisting the cost of these  Unaccompanied Children's  upbringing onto his MAGA morons, when the one language they have shown themselves quite capable of  understanding is the language of being Forced (as in the much-reviled Obamacare Forced payment of insurance premiums) into paying for something they haven't signed up for.

Yet have you, maybe I missed it, heard one peep from the the Left that might inform the Trump supporters they would prefer to dismiss as non-humans that their big great croMAGAman, who has kept his promise to deprive them of health insurance, has, as replacement, strapped onto their backs the far more onerous costs of warehousing and providing healthcare for, alien babies and adolescents, since doing so enriches his buddies who he pre-informed of his intentions, so that they had the necessary supplies and structures to sequester them in internment camps far from the border? Nope. Not Rachel's demographic. So she and her MSNBC cohorts haven't said a word. Too busy vilifying Russia, I guess. It plays well to their audience and most importantly, their sponsors.

And just as silent are they on the huge negative impacts that that first Green Revolution has had on the overall heating of the planet. Although sites such as Treehugger make such observations as: "Widespread industrial agricultural practices will continue to be terribly detrimental for the climate", they always fail to make the connection between what is now benignly referred to as industrial agriculture and the fact that it was called a Green Revolution when those practices were first implemented. Those practices are now responsible not only for the devastation to the natural environment so well documented in Rachel Carson's, The Silent Spring, but for the proliferation of Dead Zones in our oceans brought on by the washing off into our rivers and thence the seas of industrial fertilizers, those same fertilizers so extolled as contributing to the miracle of the Green Revolution, ironically living up to its name by turning the sea and many lakes and ponds green (albeit to a sickeningly ghastly green) with algal growth that chokes off the oxygen so completely as to make existence impossible for marine life.

The U.S. food system contributes nearly 20 percent of the nation's carbon dioxide emissions; on a global scale, figures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), say that agricultural land use contributes 12 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. And those emission s are accumulative: 12% of our current CO2 atmospheric concentration of 410ppm is a good deal larger than the 12% of 250ppm they were previous to the industrial revolution.

But we must further consider some of the embodied energy required for industrial ag, so it gets worse. According to Will Allen, green farmer extraordinaire, when we include all the "manufacture and use of pesticides and fertilizers, fuel and oil for tractors, equipment, trucking and shipping, electricity for lighting, cooling, and heating, and emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other green house gases" it bumps the impact up to between 25 and 30 percent of the U.S.'s collective carbon footprint. And that 's what we called a Green Revolution. Advancing a form of agriculture that changes the climate as much as all other forms of industrial production in the US combined. And that was before we started growing food to burn up as fuel for cars ... another concept hailed as Green.

And what all these processes that were collectively hailed as a Green Revolution have brought us is to this point where we can feed the world only by destroying it. And yet we allow ourselves to be moronically led by such 'visionaries' as Enron Musk, lauded by such 'journalists' as Robert Scribbler (who adopted this pseudonym in favor of his real name, Robert Fanny, so we wouldn't know what an ass he is), to usher in yet another Green Revolution, this one in energy! of all things, one that'll have even more dire effects than the first one, as we now have an additional 3.5 billion people on the planet that these two bimbos think can all have their own little personal EV's and that will, to marry a Rachel Madcow emphasis to a Paul Krugman inanity, "really really really,  'Save The Planet'".

Instead what it IS doing, following exactly the template laid down by the first Green Revolution, is exacerbating, only now in real time, the accumulation of CO2, with a heavy dose of methane to boot, in the atmosphere. By real time, I mean that in the sixties, seventies and eighties, the natural environment had yet to collapse into the dysfunctional state we've since driven it to, so that the CO2 could be absorbed and sequestered via the vast rainforests of Indochina, the Amazon, and even the boreal rainforests of the American Northwest. 

But that is no longer true. It is in fact, SO not true, that those regions have been so devastated as to be turned from net carbon sinks into net carbon emitters, all for the same reason: to make what they like to refer to as Renewables, as  in Green, fuels: biodiesel  manufactured by burning down rainforests to replace with palm oil plantations in Indochina, vast sugar plantations made by turning huge swaths of the Amazon rainforest to ash in order to make ethanol in Brazil, and devastating forest fires that funneled centuries-worth of sequestered carbon right into the Arctic, sparked by the horrendously dirty, energy-intensive, earth-scarring Canadian tar sands of the Athabasca region of Alberta. 

All this to power our EV's, the manufacture of which, as per the Scribbler, we are supposed to be delighted have jumped 75%. But this current Green Revolution is already having an even more devastating impact on world climate than the last one had. And this one leaves us with no options, as its advocates insist that they are Progressive. Never mind that it is precisely human progress that has brought us to this global calamity in the first place, making our individual lives oh so much better, but reaping a whirlwind that these so-called Progressives are in as much denial about as any of the Trump supporters they revile so sanctimoniously are in about Climate Change.

So the next time you hear someone refer to a  policy, process, or infrastructure as Green, you should be aware that the only green they mean is the color of the Dollars that run this Capitalist War Machine. For that is the entire reason for the monetization of everything under the sun: no tax dollars from the monetization of even wiping your ass (that TP ain't free), no way to support the vast military enterprise the United States of America has turned itself into, possibly resulting in the outcome the world fears most, as it has no means of handling it: a mass exodus from the States themselves.

The Force of You Lie.

The sense and significance of the enigma of growth is utterly ignored, yet it seems to me to touch upon the very explanation of existence, why there is something instead of nothing. For growth has in its kernel the inevitability of Force.

Humans are nothings, animalcules, our time here, as measured in geological time, a mere ephemera, a slight fluttering of a butterfly's wings that beat, fall off, and are forgotten as dawn makes its way toward dusk.

Men are naught, life is naught, only FORCE exists. Force that brought life to flourish and mankind into the world, Force that will crowd them out of it, and Force to make way for the succeeding generation and its next, non-human, representation of its ascendancy. That is the lesson of Capitalism,  which, despite its democratic trappings and humanitarian pretensions, is mankind's ultimate expression of that Force, overriding humanity, ridiculing compassion, and ultimately resulting in the deliberate annihilation of even the possibility of existence itself. Like War, which is its Twin Tower, it exists for itself, and itself alone. And like War, we holeheartedly (sic) embrace it, not in spite of its negative aspects, just one of many lies we tell ourselves, but precisely because of them. Everything else becomes subservient to it and serves its ends as they have no escape from its all-encompassing reach, its suction-cupped tentacles that grasp and cling and wring the very life out of those in its embrace, flinging them aside as if it were a sated Vampire thoughtlessly disposing of the corpses it creates once their lifeblood's been sucked dry.

Yet here we are celebrating an Independence Day (The Nation's ID) that rings hollow, not only for minorities and the vast horde of mankind stomped underfoot by the Empire's jackboots on the ground, but the very people who most benefited from that Declaration written centuries ago by a slaveholder who had absolutely no intention of giving up his own property for a mere chimera. For Thomas Jefferson had worked out that at the rate of reproduction of a good 4.5% of his human property (which is why we have the phrase "The pursuit of Happiness" in said Declaration, because the Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property, which his own State of Virginia's Declaration (which he also wrote, using "Property" as what we would now call a dogwhistle to northern slaveowners that their human Property would not be in jeopardy. But the northerners who were against slavery were attuned to that frequency as well, which fact necessitated his changing it to the phrase we are all so familiar with now of the "Pursuit of Happiness"; just one of the founding father's many lies), and that property gave him a better return @ 4.5%, and a more secure foundation to build his fortune on than agriculture ever could, and therefore based  his fortune on the slavetrade instead. All men being created equal and all. (This is why Southerners were forced to refer to black people as beasts, they were obviously not equal, so black people must be other than human; which attitude carries down the  years to the current day, explaining why any form of sexual congress they disapprove of being shouted down as 'bestiality". Because the Southerners, including TJ, practiced bestiality on  a scale previously unknown in civilized nations. You can't categorize an entire population of people as Beasts, and still have sex with them, and give your own children to their women to breastfeed, without practicing, at least by your own definition, bestiality. This explains why they care not a jot for "reason", it shows them up for the hypocrites they insist is their divine right to be).

Soon, with the rallying cry of Manifist Destiny, America flung its Forces against the prosperous indigent population; into the quiet community of farmers and gatherers, it sent its engine of Capitalist destruction roaring down upon them like a galloping monster, inciting Terror, bursting apart their lives, shooting up the horizon and flinging the echoes of their chemical weapons of mass destruction onto the defenseless tribes of an entire continent, leaving blood and destruction and tragic homelessness in its path. Declaring their independence for them: independent of Law, independent of Justice, independent of any human compassion, the US Capitalist monster flung them aside brutally, tore their families to ribbons, confiscated their lands and then started practicing the same brutality on the earth itself as it girded it with bands of iron, ripping huge holes in its flesh to drag out the chunks of anthracite it needed to power the iron monsters that would soon bestride it in a never-ending black smoke-belching stream of steam, steel, and metal wheel.

All the while chanting the same mantra: Life (ours) Liberty (just not for you) and pursuit of Happiness (no matter what it costs ... you). 

The modern version has changed not a jot, all the fetters put upon it to keep it from destroying us utterly torn off and flung aside by the Reagan "Revolution" (Proving the maxim that what goes around comes around ... that's why it's called one revolution). Only now the victims are the descendants of the perpetrators. WE are the native Americans, and the government cares not a jot for us either (you can fire crackers but the new crew'll screw you too), which should come as no surprise, but has instead apparently taken us completely unawares. 

The spectacle at the border is fodder for the media, the same media that has for decades ignored the families being torn apart at home by many indirect Forces (such as rigging home appreciation to such a nosebleed level that children are left with no choice but to move far away from their parents to somewhere they can afford the price of living), with the DEA's Forceful practices against marijuana smokers being the most obvious (nowhere more mercilessly practiced than in that same State of Texas where all the cameras are lined up to document the plight of the undocumented, having ignored for decades that of the millions of US citizens Forcefully ripped from their families and sent to prison for an excess of 25 years by the Lie of labeling MJ a narcotic), the untrammeled Force of Greed and 'creative' Destruction at the heart of the Capitalist beast,  leveraged by the unrepentant tools provided by science, will consume everything until there is nothing left: no home ... no family ...  no world. 

Now that's Independence.

From the Welfare to the Waif Heir State.

Waif Airing: Profiting from the plight of boys Wayfaring North.

One would think I would have noticed. The clamor at the border, the crocodile tears on the news, the  Corporate tax bonanza that allows the most powerful "citizens" of the United States to wreak havoc via financial rape of down-trodden economies with impunity, must all have informed my decision, and perhaps did, but I was caught unawares, I see the why, but not the how.

As I opened to the first pages of Hannah Tinti's novel, The Good Thief, I shouldn't have been surprised that it was about a foundling, a parent-less orphan, a Waif.

I had only recently finished reading George Sand's, The Country Waif, and was on my way home from visiting a friend in hospital, so had been riding MUNI on a daily basis, which means I've been reading more than usual, so just had to drop into my local branch of  La Bibliothèque and see what I could see. But it was almost closing time. "Five Minutes!", the attendant warned as I scurried into the back to raid the stacks. The selection has been getting more and more diluted from one comprised of mostly literature to one replete with Mystery and Romance novels, graphic novels, Chinese and Russian language (not in the same book, of course) texts, and large print books taking up more and more shelf space as avid readers have lost interest in using libraries' services, starting to push any good choices off the shelf and back to the main branch. So when I glimpsed The Good Thief, amongst the detritus, I grabbed it, quickly scanned the synopsis on the jacket and whisked it up to the checkout desk, before scurrying out the door with my new-found treasure.

So when I discovered, upon digging into Ms. Tinti's tale of a one-handed boy and his adventures in what was most decidedly not Wonderland, that this was yet another story centered around a waif (a term, btw, I've learned is unfamiliar to most people ... Huh? I am soooo out of the mainstream), I started to wonder, to take stock, because that night I was being most unexpectedly taken to the opera. And not to just any opera, but one of Wagner's Ring operas; namely Siegfried.

There are four operas in Wagner's Ring cycle. Any one of them could've been chosen by my friend who had the tickets bestowed on him through the unfortunate timing of a patient hospitalized at precisely that point in time when he and his wife were to attend the performances, so rather than see the BOX SEAT (!) tickets (at like $450/per) go to waste, offered them to him ... at no charge, no less.

And he chose Siegfried. The only one of the four opera's making up the cycle he had yet to see. I'd seen the entire cycle several times, yet it only occurred to me as I was watching the Opera, that this particular one related the story of Siegfried's life, after explaining how Siegmund and Sieglinde, his parents, had both died. Meaning that, as you've already surmised, he was a waif ... a male waif. But

that wasn't enough. As I watched the actor playing Siegfried, he seemed familiar. His big protruding belly and small waif-like arms and red hair were reminding  me of someone, but I couldn't quite grasp who, until the end of Act 1. That's when it struck me that the reason I couldn't quite put my finger on it was that it wasn't an actor the same age as Siegfried. No. Who this Siegfried made me conceptualize was what the kid in The Bad Santa, my favorite anti-hero, would look like as a grownup:

... and like Siegfried himself, the boy in The Bad Santa is essentially a waif: he supposedly has parents, but we never see them; he is basically all alone, with only his TV-addled grandmother as  company; the only adult in his life all but catatonic. And like Siegfried, he was a 'nilla,  but not a thin, waif'er.

All of this waif airing occurred in the same week. I'm still reading The Good Thief.

Why I chose to share this is because it occurs to me how strong the Zeitgiest of the moment can be. Did someone request The Good Thief? I imagine it languishing in storage until it was requested, and then, upon its return, instead of being put back on ice, ended up on that shelf where I scooped it up from. The interest in fictional waifs being sparked by the influx from the actual waifer factory at the border, where wayfarers were being systematically and deliberately turned into waif heirs.

As they stuff the deserted War-Mart on the border with chocolate waif-ers, it seems to have stuffed my own life with the literary variety. The question for me being, as I can't simply dismiss as easily as you (Since you can always decide I've contrived the whole thing in my own brain, but I have the evidence right there, I can't pretend it was conscious, but you can think it was somehow contrived)  what I can only describe as a phenomena, an unconscious clustering of material to go with the actual
clustering of this same type of character, in the same heart-wrenching plight of all the fictional ones I'm all of a sudden been surrounded by. Ah, The Curiosity shops for whom the kNell Toils.

That's all. I have no comment on it, I just had to share it, well, blog it really, as every now and then I remember that that's all a blog is: a Web log. A diary of sorts one decides to edit and share, but keep as close to the truth as possible. So that's what I decided to do. Because I'm sure in a week or a month or so, I'll have forgotten how this rather strange confluence of events, or really, fictional events, clustered in such an unlikely timeframe to dovetail with the sad, pitiable event playing out at our border, and the even more dire events that necessitated the journey of all those wayfaring waif farers to seek a better life in our land. Little dreamers never dreaming that they would be left, bereft of counsel, to plead their own case and hope against hope that the welfare of the wayfaring waifs airing on the nightly news would weigh fairly heavily on the collective conscience of the richest country in the world. And perhaps then they'd not turn such a tin ear to how stark is the difference between what it thinks makes it "Great", and those things that actually make others refer to it as such:

" ... remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.”